The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction (Routledge Literature Handbooks) [1 ed.] 1032069902, 9781032069906

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEATRE-FICTION

Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity. Graham Wolfe is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the National University of Singapore. His monograph, Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, was published by Routledge in 2020, and his articles have appeared in journals including Modern Drama, Mosaic, Adaptation, and Performance Research.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE HANDBOOKS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LITERATURE AND SPACE Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CONTEMPORARY JEWISH CULTURES Edited by Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND MEMORY Edited by Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE Edited by Jen Boyle and Helen J. Burgess THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK TO THE GHOST STORY Edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL BEAT LITERATURE Edited by A. Robert Lee THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND GLOBAL APPROPRIATION Edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND ANIMALS Edited by Karen Raber and Holly Dugan THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF VIOLENCE IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Edited by Pablo Baisotti THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEATRE-FICTION Edited by Graham Wolfe For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-LiteratureHandbooks/book-series/RLHB

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEATRE-FICTION

Edited by Graham Wolfe

Designed cover image: © Siri Stafford/Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Graham Wolfe; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Graham Wolfe to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Wolfe, Graham, 1973- editor. Title: The Routledge companion to theatre-fiction / edited by Graham Wolfe. Other titles: Companion to theatre-fiction. Description: New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge literature handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023014675 (print) | LCCN 2023014676 (ebook) | Subjects: LCSH: Theater in literature. | Fiction--History and criticism. | Performing arts in literature. Classification: LCC PN3352.T45 R68 2024 (print) | LCC PN3352.T45 (ebook) | DDC 809.3/ 9357--dc23/eng/20230706 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014675 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014676 ISBN: 978-1-032-06990-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-56213-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20488-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003204886 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Contributors

ix x

Introduction: When Novels Turn to Theatre Graham Wolfe Curtain Raiser: The Comic Romance of Theatre and Novel Graham Wolfe

1 14

PART I

Theatre-Fictional Histories and Hauntings

27

1 Theatre-Fiction-History: The Personal and Professional Industry of Theatre in Rojas’s El viaje entretenido Lisa Jackson-Schebetta

29

2 “The Archive in the Fiction”: A Look into the Interiority of Classical Theatre Odai Johnson

42

3 Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo Stefano Boselli

54

4 Ghosting in James’s The Tragic Muse: The Haunted Body and the Haunted House Sophie Stringfellow

67

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5 The Stage Properties of Willa Cather’s Theatre-Fiction Kevin Riordan 6 Spectral Effects: Dual Roles, Doubling, and Invisibility in Robertson Davies’s World of Wonders Katrina Dunn

80

89

PART II

Theatre-Fiction, Form, and Style

101

7 Mishima Yukio’s “Onnagata” as a Shingeki Theatre-Fiction: “Amalgamation” of the Theatrical and the Literary in a Kabuki-World Tale Maki Isaka

103

8 Elegy for a Lost World: Reading Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Mayamridanga as Theatre-Fiction Tamalika Roy

116

9 “What Does it Matter—the Plot?”: “Sapphic” and Theatrical Reading Strategies in Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory, Inclinations, and Caprice John R. Severn

130

10 Theatre-Fiction in the Present Tense: Reflections on Temporality and the Other in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal Alexandra Ksenofontova

146

11 Method Acting, the Narrator, and the Figure of the Doppelganger in The Confessions of Edward Day Roweena Yip

160

12 “No Curtains”: Generic Divides and Ethical Connections in Ian McEwan’s Atonement Cara Hersh

171

13 Making a Scene: The Craft of Writing Theatre-Fiction A Dialogue Between Mona Awad and Jessica Riley

184

PART III

Performing Selfhood and Authorship through Theatre-Fiction

193

14 Dorothy Leighton’s Disillusion and New Woman Experimentation Renata Kobetts Miller

195

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15 “I Sniff at a Red Artificial Geranium”: Theatre, the Senses and the Self in Colette’s novel The Vagabond William McEvoy

205

16 “A Real Actress”: Theatre and Selfhood in Antonia White’s Frost in May Quartet Frances Babbage

214

17 “Does it Have to be a Play?” Autofiction as Theatrical Failure in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? Chloe R. Green

230

18 Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow: Getting First-Personal with Stanislavski Graham Wolfe

243

PART IV

Theatre-Fiction and Young People

261

19 Playing and Scripting the Past while Imagining Futures in Charlotte Yonge’s 1864 Historical Dramas Heather Fitzsimmons Frey

263

20 “A Few Scenes of Humble Life”: Theatre-making in the Novels of Louisa May Alcott Karen Quigley

280

21 “Closer to Being Grown Up than Ever Before”: Theatre as a Site of Passage in Children’s Fiction Stephanie Tillotson

290

22 “A Theatre, that’s No Drawing Room, nor is it a House on a Raft”: Discovering Theatre in Moominsummer Madness Deniz Başar

304

23 The Bildungsroman Goes to Acting School Chris Hay

313

24 Stage Struck: Theatre as Vocation in Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s Sheila Rabillard

325

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Contents PART V

Theatre-Fiction, Asymmetries, and Antitheatricalities

337

25 Theatre-Stories in Early Modern China Mei Chun

339

26 Against Anti-Theatricality: The Stage as Respectable Profession in Florence Marryat’s Theatre-Novels Catherine Quirk

350

27 Affect in the Theatre-Novel: Performing Shame(lessness) in Wilkie Collins’s No Name Anja Hartl

363

28 “Waiting in the Wings”: The Economics and Ethereality of Theatrical Space in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus Rachael Newberry

377

29 Spectatorship and Myth: Zola’s Theatre Episodes in The Kill and Nana Juliana Starr

390

30 Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theatre-Fiction Graham Wolfe

403

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

418

Index

427

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Work on this collection was conducted in the midst of Covid-19, and the contributors are to be given special thanks for their persistence and commitment to the project during difficult times. Thanks also to Associate Professors Anne Thell and John W. P. Phillips at the National University of Singapore for their advice on preliminary drafts, and to Professor Frances Babbage at the University of Sheffield for guidance along the way. Chapter 30, “Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theatre-fiction,” first appeared as an article in Dickens Quarterly, Volume 35, Number 4, December 2018. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © 2018 Dickens Society.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Mona Awad is the author of five novels, most recently Rouge (Simon & Schuster 2023). Her work of theatre-fiction, All’s Well (Simon & Schuster 2021), was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, Bunny (Viking 2019), was named a best book of the year by TIME, Vogue, The New York Public Library, Quill & Quire and the CBC. Her first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (Penguin 2016), won the Amazon.ca Best Novel Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. Frances Babbage is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Sheffield. Her research explores intersections of theatre and literature, with a focus on practices of adaptation and rewriting. Her books include Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature (Bloomsbury Methuen 2018) and Re-Visioning Myth: Modern and Contemporary Drama by Women (Manchester University Press 2011), as well as articles on the theatrical dimensions of literature by Austen, the Brontës, Henry James and Angela Carter. Frances’s research is also practice-based, recently with Beware the Cat: this collaborative cross-art performance adapts William Baldwin’s satirical sixteenthcentury novel and is the focus of a special issue of Textual Practice (37: 7, 2023). Deniz Başar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker, and two-time national award-winning playwright from Türkiye. Parts of her research are included in anthologies like Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations by Routledge (2019), Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2021), and Creative Activism: Research, Pedagogy and Practice by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2022), and Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine (2023). She completed her PhD in Concordia University’s Humanities Department in 2021 with her work on contemporary Turkish theatre. Currently, she is an FRQSC post-doctoral fellow, and continuing her research projects in Istanbul. Stefano Boselli is a theatre and performance scholar, stage director, and dramaturg. In his monograph Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentines of Paris (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), he illustrates how the study of theatre history can be enriched through the lens of actor-network and assemblage theories, focusing on Argentine artists who moved to France and dominated the Parisian scene between the 1980s and 90s. He received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from the Graduate

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Contributors

Center, CUNY, and is now Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramaturgy and Resident Dramaturg for the Nevada Conservatory Theatre at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. Website: https://stebos.net Mei Chun (PhD 2005, Washington University in Saint Louis) is a specialist in late imperial Chinese fiction and theater. She is the author of The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China (Brill 2011) and a number of articles in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Asia Major, and Renditions. An independent scholar based in Greenville, South Carolina, USA, she served an assistant professor of Chinese at Central Washington University from 2006 to 2010. Katrina Dunn is an Associate Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media where she teaches in the Theatre Program. Her scholarly work explores the spatial manifestations of theatre as well as ecocritical theatre. In 2022, she was awarded the Richard Plant Award for the best long form English-language article on a Canadian theatre or performance topic by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Katrina’s long career as a stage director and producer has had considerable impact on the performing arts in western Canada and has been recognized with numerous awards. Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is an Associate Professor of Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University in Edmonton, and holds a PhD in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto. Using archives, qualitative research methods, performance-based historiography, and practice-based creative methodologies, her research focuses on the arts and cultural sector and young people, in both historical and contemporary contexts. Conducting research for her award-winning dissertation Victorian Girls and At-Home Theatricals: Performing and Playing with Possible Futures introduced her to Charlotte Yonge. Some other historically-focused research is published in Girlhood Studies, Jeunesse, Journal of Childhood Studies, and Performance Research. Chloe R. Green is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She completed her PhD in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne, and her thesis examined the role of affective contagion in contemporary women’s illness narratives. She has articles published in a/b: Autobiography Studies and Woolf Studies Miscellany, and in 2018 she was a scholar in residence at the SenseLab, Concordia University. Anja Hartl is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is the author Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today (Bloomsbury 2021). She is currently working on a postdoctoral project in which she explores “Textures of Shame in the Victorian Novel.” Her essay “Experiencing Textures: the Materiality of Illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s No Name” appeared in a special issue on Victorian Materialisms in the European Journal of English Studies in 2022. She has published on contemporary British theatre, Shakespeare, and adaptation, and co-edits the Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Agitations series. Chris Hay is Professor of Drama at Flinders University, where he is also the academic lead of AusStage: the Australian Live Performance Database. He is an Australian theatre and cultural historian, whose research focusses in part on the origins of formalised theatre training in Australia between 1949 and 1975. He is also an Associate Editor of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, for whom he guest edited a special issue on Performer Training in Australia (12.3, 2021) and has published widely on actor training and failure in creative arts learning and teaching.

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Contributors

Cara Hersh is an assistant provost of Scholarly Engagement and Career Readiness and an associate professor of English at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon where she works on medieval and early modern literature. She completed this piece with the help of an undergraduate research assistant, Siena di Sera. Maki Isaka teaches performing arts and literature in Japan as well as gender studies at the University of Minnesota. Author of Secrecy in Japanese Arts: “Secret Transmission” as a Mode of Knowledge (2005) and Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater (2016), Isaka has also published articles on shingeki-theater, gender and gendering, and body grammar. Isaka’s current project explores the performance and theoretical implications of female musicians of gidayû: the audio component of the four-century-old “puppet theater, called bunraku today. Her work on gidayû is forthcoming in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta is Chair and Associate Professor of Theater at Skidmore College. She is the author of Traveler, there is no road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas (Iowa 2016). She has published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and multiple edited collections. Odai Johnson is Professor in theatre history at the University of Washington. He took his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His articles have appeared in journals including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, New England Theatre Journal, and Theatre Symposium. His books include Rehearsing the Revolution (University of Delaware 1999), The Colonial American Stage: A Documentary Calendar (AUP 2001), Absence and Memory on the Colonial American Stage (Palgrave 2005), London in a Box (Iowa 2017), a finalist for the Theatre Library Association Freedly Award, and Ruins: Classical Theatre and Broken Memory (Michigan 2018). Alexandra Ksenofontova is a postdoctoral researcher at the EXC “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” with a project on present-tense fiction. She holds a PhD in literature from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her award-winning first book The Modernist Screenplay: Experimental Writing for Silent Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores the conjunctions between literary modernism and the screenwriting of the European avant-gardes. She is the cofounder of the German screenwriting research network Drehbuchforschung and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Screenwriting. Her most recent articles appeared in Film History and in KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time. William McEvoy is Senior Lecturer and Joint Head of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex, UK. He has published widely on contemporary and twentieth-century British, Irish and French theatre, focusing on playwriting, directing, and representations of space, place, and identity. He is currently working on a monograph about grief and mourning in theatre and fiction. Renata Kobetts Miller is professor of English and dean of Humanities and the Arts at the City College of New York. She is the author of The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage (Edinburgh University Press 2018) and of a book on reinterpretations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as of essays on Victorian theater, the novel, adaptation, and interdisciplinarity. Her work on Dorothy Leighton is part of a book that she is writing on the Independent Theatre Society and finde-siècle culture.

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Contributors

Rachael Newberry is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her teaching and research interests range from theatre history, Shakespeare studies, and post-war British theatre to environmental theatre and performance. Her work is published in The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (Palgrave 2118), and In Yer Face Theatre: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution (2020). Karen Quigley is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at University of York, UK. Her research has been published in European Drama and Performance Studies, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English and Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, and in edited collections on ethnography, critical concepts in television, and radical Irish performance-makers. Her first monograph, Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure was published by Bloomsbury in February 2020. Catherine Quirk (she/her) is a Lecturer in Drama at Edge Hill University. She completed her PhD at McGill University in 2020, where her dissertation focused on the intersections between the nineteenthcentury theatre and the novel. Her current research focuses on women’s performance practices from the nineteenth century through to the present and their incorporation into narrative, particularly the memoir and the novel. In her artistic practice, she is currently investigating the affordances of social media and other digital platforms for performance. She has published essays in Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, Theatre Notebook, Victorians, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and other venues. Sheila Rabillard is Associate professor of English, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada. She has published on modern and contemporary drama of Canada, the US and the UK, including articles on Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Tomson Highway and Marie Clements and an edited collection on the plays of Caryl Churchill. She is currently co-editing Rethinking Motherhood in the 21st Century: Perspectives on Canadian Theatre. Jessica Riley is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg. Her research and teaching focus on theatre history and historiography, dramaturgy, and Canadian drama. Her work has been published in the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Performing the Intercultural City, Anglistik International Journal of English Studies, Outerspeares: Adaptations of Shakespeare, Canadian Performance Histories and Historiographies, Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance, Theatre Research in Canada, and Canadian Theatre Review. Jessica is the editor of A Man of Letters: The Selected Dramaturgical Correspondence of Urjo Kareda. Kevin Riordan is Senior Lecturer at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His research interests include modernism, world literature, and theatre, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Modernism/ modernity, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and American Studies. He is the author of Modernist Circumnavigations: Around the World in Jules Verne’s Wake (Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and the editor of Tales of an Eastern Port: The Singapore Novellas of Joseph Conrad (NUS Press 2023). Tamalika Roy is a PhD Scholar in Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is a Senior Research Fellow under the University Grants Commission of India. She completed her M.Phil in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. Her doctoral research focuses on the interface of theatre and the public sphere, and how popular culture around theatre developed in colonial Bengal. She has also worked on the history and politics of theatre playbills in Bengal. She has presented at several national conferences and contributed to Post-Colonial Praxis: Ramifications and Intricacies (Notion Press, India).

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Contributors

John R. Severn teaches in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Culture at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical (Routledge 2019), and co-editor of Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond (Routledge 2020) with Ulrike Garde, and Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres (Springer, 2021) with James Phillips. His journal articles explore how international operatic and musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have engaged with community inclusion from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Juliana Starr is President of the AIZEN (Association Internationale Zola et Naturalisme) and CoEditor-in-Chief of Excavatio, the journal of the AIZEN. A Professor of French and member of the Women’s Studies faculty at the University of New Orleans, she has authored an array of reviews, chapters and articles in Women in French Studies, French Studies Bulletin and elsewhere, treating primarily representations of women in French literature of the nineteenth century. One of her current projects is an English translation of Judith Gautier’s first novel, Le Dragon impérial. Sophie Stringfellow is a lecturer in Drama at the University of the West of England and holds a PhD from the University of Manchester on “Theatre, Temporality and the Haunted House in the Works of Henry James.” She is the reviewer of Drama criticism pre-1950 for The Year’s Work in English Studies. Stephanie Tillotson worked for many years as a performer, director, writer and teacher before embarking on a PhD at the University of Warwick, writing on the twenty-first century theatre practice of women playing traditionally male roles in Shakespeare. She holds a teaching qualification from the University of Cambridge, has led Theatre-in-Education companies, taught in youth theatres and education institutions including the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystwyth University. She has recently contributed a chapter on all-female Shakespeare to Analysing Gender in Performance and is currently working with a group of Turkish-speaking actors on a practice-as-research project, “Migrant Shakespeare.” Graham Wolfe is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the National University of Singapore. His monograph, Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, was published by Routledge in 2020, and his articles have appeared in journals including Modern Drama, Mosaic, Adaptation, and Performance Research. Roweena Yip is a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Theatre Studies from NUS, submitting a thesis titled “The Performativity of Gender in Asian Shakespeares: Towards Intercultural Feminisms(s).” Her research interests include gender studies, Asian Shakespeares, and trauma studies. Her work has been published in Asian Theatre Journal, Research in Drama Education, and Gender Forum.

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INTRODUCTION When Novels Turn to Theatre Graham Wolfe

When she is on her own, Eily, the young protagonist of Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians (2016), delights in reading a novel called Black Snow, lent to her by a 38-year-old actor with whom she is falling in love. “It’ll make you laugh,” he tells her, “and, by all accounts, where you’re studying, you’re going to need that” (52). Where Eily is studying is a London drama school in the 1990s. Black Snow, written in the 1930s by Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (unidentified in The Lesser Bohemians), is likewise a novel about first experiences in the world of theatre. Eily doesn’t tell us exactly what she gleans from the tragicomic struggles of fictional playwright Maxudov, or how her own training compares with what he witnesses at the Independent Theatre (modelled on Bulgakov’s own experiences at the Moscow Art Theatre). But McBride’s subtle reference evokes a conversation between two novels participating in a vibrant if relatively unacknowledged tradition. Something similar occurs in American novelist Valerie Martin’s 2009 The Confessions of Edward Day (discussed in this Companion by Roweena Yip). Martin’s narrator-protagonist recalls the theatre industry and world of method acting in 1970s New York. Midway through the story, when Edward is invited to the apartment of an older actor and mentor Marlene, he notices a novel on her table and reads its title: World of Wonders (115). This 1975 book by Canadian novelist and playwright Robertson Davies (discussed in this volume by Katrina Dunn) is itself about theatrical training and performance. Professional magician Magnus Eisengrim tells the story of how he learned to be a performer through several theatrical gigs, including working as an assistant stage-manager and double for a famous actormanager in 1930s London. Like The Lesser Bohemians, Edward Day is about developing as an actor and living amidst theatre, and both books subtly register their influences through embedded novels owned by actor-mentors. Central to Eisengrim’s own development in World of Wonders is his work on a production of a play adapted from another popular novel about theatre and actors: “Scaramouche. From the novel by Rafael Sabatini” (162). Set during the French Revolution, this 1921 novel follows lawyer AndreLouis Moreau who, to disguise himself from enemies, takes up with a travelling company of players and learns the form of commedia dell’arte. The title refers to the masked character Moreau plays and reconceives. While the revolutionary context is new, Sabatini’s story is in turn clearly indebted to a nineteenth-century French novel, Théophile Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), whose protagonist—in this case a member of the aristocracy during the reign of Louis XIII—likewise takes up with a band of players. Capitaine Fracasse is the comic character behind whose mask the Baron de Sigognac conceals himself. Gautier’s writings were extensive, and among them we can find a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-1

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Graham Wolfe

brief biography of seventeenth-century French author Paul Scarron, most famous for his Roman comique (1651, 1657), which relays in its second part a memorable performance by a band of strolling players at the castle of a Baron de Sigognac. With its focus on the lives and practices of actors, the Roman comique (also a noted influence on Bulgakov) may itself have been broadly inspired by a 1603 Spanish work, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando’s El Viaje Entretenido (The Entertaining Journey, discussed in this volume by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta), which, based on Rojas’s own experiences as an actor, follows four players on their travels through Spain.1 From the difficulties of mounting a French tragedy on a tennis-court stage with only three performers, to the bureaucratic and collaborative challenges of getting a first play produced by a prestigious theatre company, to the emotional journey of developing a psychologically realistic character, these novels re-imagine theatre and its worlds, discovering stories within them. Prose fiction crosses paths with theatre, entering into its companies, spaces, and practices, casting its people as central characters. A series of what Ludwig Wittgenstein might call “family resemblances” (xcv) arises along the way.2 Themes of training, learning parts, and mastering forms en route to becoming an artist are central to World of Wonders and Edward Day, if comparatively subdued in the Roman comique. Motifs of disguise and mistaken identity, of losing yourself and finding yourself in roles, abound in Gautier, Sabatini, and Davies but are less central in Bulgakov. Class distinctions and theatre’s association with the disreputable or shameful are foregrounded in Gautier, questioned in Scarron, and recalled obliquely in McBride’s title, while Martin’s novel derives some of its attraction from the theatreworld’s sexualized underside. Written in times and places where theatre’s relationship with society differed, and in which theatrical forms and novels enjoyed differing levels of popularity and prestige, these works are also linked by formal and stylistic challenges, tensions, and opportunities. What kind of art arises when prose fiction (a two-dimensional and comparatively permanent medium) intersects with theatre’s aural, material, corporeal, and evanescent artforms? How to put theatre’s practices and performances on pages, and what are the affordances of doing so, for both theatre and novels? This mosaic of texts suggests the scope, complexity, and appeal of what this study is calling theatrefiction. A remarkable array of authors from many parts of the world have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, and The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction convenes an international community of scholars interested in exploring this comparatively understudied phenomenon. Some of history’s most influential and revered novelists, from J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these wellknown figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their theatre-fiction into conversation with a vital field. This introduction sketches the Companion’s contours, considering some of the challenges and questions that arise in positing theatrefiction as a kind of genre, while also mapping the study’s relations and contributions to existing areas of study. In a “Curtain Raiser,” I then work more closely with one of the novels mentioned above, Scarron’s Roman comique, rehearsing some of the medial differences between theatre and prose fiction while laying groundwork for further discussion of theatre-fiction’s intermedial exchanges.

Theatre-Fiction as a Genre? In his Dreaming of Heroes, Michael Oriard sets out to establish the parameters and significance of a particular kind of fiction. He discerns a “body of sports fiction” that has grown over time to such an extent that it can be thought of as a genre, in the same way as political fiction, martial fiction, or sea fiction (6). He proposes quite a succinct definition, itself drawing on previous structures: “In imitation of Irving Howe’s definition of the political novel, I define the sports novel simply as one in which sport plays a dominant role or in which the sport milieu is the dominant setting.” Oriard clarifies that

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Introduction

the level of engagement with sports must be quite substantial: “A great many fine writers have obviously written briefly about sport, but the main focus of this study is sports novels” (9), in which sports are far more than passing references. What the present Companion is calling theatre-fiction could be broadly delineated in comparable ways. An even more substantial body of work can be identified (see the “Selected List” at the end of this volume), and a similarly succinct initial definition can be offered: theatre-fiction refers to novels and stories in which theatre plays a dominant role or in which a theatre milieu is the dominant setting. This comparison may provide a handy framework. If sports fiction focuses on characters such as athletes, coaches, fans, referees, agents, and team owners, theatre-fiction does the same with actors, directors, stage-hands, playwrights, spectators, or theatre managers. If sports fiction engages with training and practice, representing the experiences of big games, qualifying heats, or agonizing defeats, theatre-fiction is frequently concerned with rehearsing, casting, and the tribulations of becoming a theatre artist, and it often represents the intricacies of backstage operations, the excitement of opening nights, or the anguish of a flop. We might indeed say of theatre-making, as Garry Whannel says of sport, that it lends itself readily to fiction because of its own “implicit narrative structure[s]” and “potential narrativity” (197). Those who’ve participated in theatrical events will know (perhaps all too well) that the drama, the suspense, or the tragicomedy of preparing for and performing a show may often rival that of the show’s own content. Will a production come together in the nick of time? Will a young actor ultimately triumph in a difficult part? Will a cast of egotistical competitors finally learn to work as an ensemble? Often, theatre-fiction is itself quite conscious of the structures and patterns into which theatre-making may implicitly fall. As retired actor-director Charles Arrowby observes in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978): Of course the theatre is essentially a place of hopes and disappointments and in its cyclical life one lives out in a more vivid way the cyclical patterns of the ordinary world. The thrill of a new play, the shock of a flop, the weariness of a long run, the homeless feeling when it ends: perpetual construction followed by perpetual destruction. It is to do with endings, with partings, with packings up and dismantlings and the disbanding of family groups. (36) We might add that theatre-fiction, as Bruce Babington observes of sports narratives, is very “open to hybridity,” “attach[ing] itself to different modes and sub-generic categories” (12). Edward Day takes a dark memoir form; Scaramouche is a historical adventure-romance; The Lesser Bohemians has been referred to, among other things, as autofiction. Émile Zola’s Nana (1881), explored in this volume by Juliana Starr, is associated with naturalism; Pamela Brown’s Blue Door Theatre novels (1941–56), explored by Stephanie Tillotson, are children’s fiction; while Mona Awad’s recent All’s Well (2021), discussed by its author in a dialogue with Jessica Riley, trespasses into the fantastic and the surreal.3 But as the history of scholarship on sports fiction reveals, positing a kind of fiction is never a straightforward thing to do. Glenn Cummins observes, “Virtually every scholar who has attempted to define sports fiction has been faced with a myriad of highly problematic questions” (200). This introduction assumes that theatre-fiction is likewise susceptible to definitional debate, and a good place to start is by asking what some of its own problematic questions might be. While I make suggestions about what theatre-fiction is and isn’t, and while I lay out some parameters guiding the selection of chapters, I don’t propose a definitive taxonomy here. Following the lead of critical thinkers such as John Frow, we might do better, throughout, to think of theatre-fiction as an apt site for considering genre itself as performance. To regard particular works “as performances of genre rather than reproductions of a class to which they belong” (Frow 3) is to stress relationships of “productive elaboration rather than of derivation or determination” (25).

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An initial question concerns scope. Oriard proposes that sports fiction comprises books about “any of a number” of sports, from “baseball, football, boxing, or basketball” to “golf, tennis, track and field, swimming, and so on” (6), but some scholars have felt compelled to narrow the field. Lee McGowan’s recent Football in Fiction concerns literature specifically about that sport rather than boxing or golf or ice hockey, which are, after all, vastly different and may give rise to different themes, stylistic tendencies, or representational challenges for novelists. Further subdivision is an option for theatre-fiction too, and excellent studies such as Cormac Newark’s Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (2011) do exist of novel encounters with distinctive theatrical forms. But investigations of different kinds of theatre in novels may have much to learn from one another, and working with a broad array of theatrical forms need not mean that we lose sight of differences between them, especially since theatre-fiction itself is so often concerned with their intricacies. World of Wonders is as meticulous and loving in its consideration of highly stylized melodrama as Capitaine Fracasse is in its rendering of travelling commedia. Besides, many theatre-novels don’t limit themselves to a single theatrical form, juxtaposing or combining several, or indeed actively participating in historical debates about what does and doesn’t “count” as theatre. Works from Colette’s La Vagabonde (1910; discussed by William McEvoy) to Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991) take conventional oppositions between “respectable” theatre and Vaudeville or Music Hall as key concerns. Starting with a relatively open understanding of theatre may be important in approaching a kind of fiction that itself often asks what theatre really is, how its forms may intersect, and how it may defy conventional understandings. This Companion explores novels and stories about forms as varied as domestic children’s theatre, Japanese Onnagata performances, or multi-media prison performances of Shakespeare. For sports fiction, concerns about unwieldiness extend to the potential dilution or overmetaphorization of the genre’s key term. Oriard suggests caution about stretching notions of sport into life more generally: “I must define sport much more narrowly than Johan Huizinga’s concept of ‘play,’ which is the basis for all culture, and more narrowly than Roger Caillois’ definition of ‘game,’ which includes gambling, mimicry, and vertigo as well as competition” (5). Sports fiction loses heuristic value if so much of human culture and behaviour is regarded as a sport or game (Dostoevsky’s The Gambler as a sports novel?). The matter may be even trickier for theatre-fiction. If all the world’s a stage, then all the novels in it could be theatre-novels. In specifying a focus on theatre as artistic practice(s) and industry, the present Companion never denies the interest of the myriad forms that performance may take and the ways it may infuse the lives and occupations of those who are not technically actors or directors. After all, even within novels that are expressly about theatrical practices, theatre has a way of spilling off the stages, as it does in Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1859; discussed by Anja Hartl), whose heroine not only seeks to become a professional actress but puts on numerous acts along the way to retrieving her family fortune, including dressing up as a maid. Parallels and metaphorical resonances between theatre and other aspects of life may indeed be among theatre-fiction’s compelling family resemblances. But just as novels about pugilistic business practices, or lovers who treat romance as a kind of competitive game, wouldn’t form the focus of a study of sports fiction, so the present one is not primarily concerned with books whose “theatre” pertains to politicians who stage-manage their election campaigns or defendants who put on acts during trials. This specificity may be important insofar as engagement with theatre’s performances, practices, and people has often been overlooked in novel studies, or more particularly, upstaged by emphasis on broader or more metaphorical understandings of performance. The comparative precision of this Companion’s spotlight—on fiction about “actual” theatre and its people—is in part a response to the irony that what we’re calling theatre-fiction has often been relegated to the wings, understudied in favour of a wider-ranging attraction to the “theatricality” of novels. When, in her analysis of Vladimir Nabokov, Siggy Frank speaks of “the integration of theatricality into his fiction” (3), she has in mind a lot more than stories like “Lik” (1964) that are expressly about theatre-makers. Theatricality, in the

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case of Nabokov, may refer to everything from characters’ attachment to “haunting and alluring illusions” (Frank 1), to dynamics “of exile and transition” (2), to characters like Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1935–6) who perceive their “real” world as a gaudy stage show, a “theatrical reality” (2). Frank’s study is also one of several in recent years to examine the numerous and fascinating ways in which novels may reflect theatre and drama on formal and stylistic levels, even when they have nothing to do with actors or theatre industries. In these senses, “theatrical” may refer to things like the self-revealing artifice of fiction (14), the “theatrical shape” of novels (3), or “the explicitly visual quality of Nabokov’s novels as a stage-like feature” (14).4 On one hand, this Companion’s primary focus is simply more specific. Theatre-fiction doesn’t refer to any and all ways in which novels can be “theatrical”; it doesn’t designate the whole range of novels that echo tropes and character-types from plays, that incorporate scripted dialogue, that exhibit the five-act structure of Renaissance tragedy, that rely on a deus ex machina, or that employ a narrative voice with a showy, stagey quality. But while theatre-fiction is always fiction about theatre, it may also play with the myriad parallels, exchanges, and theatricalities suggested above, and its intersecting of form, style, theme, and content may be part of what makes it so interesting to study. As many of our chapters show, investigations of theatre-fiction can also learn much from the recent models that scholars like Frank offer for approaching central interdisciplinary questions: how to talk about theatre and prose fiction together; how can theory from different domains be productively combined; how might a novelist’s own theatrical pursuits, preoccupations, or resistances be understood to affect novelwriting? Theatre-fiction often vividly reflects, or plays a compelling role in, the transformative processes of exchange, negotiation, collaboration, and rivalry between theatre and novel that have attracted much attention from scholars such as Ros Ballaster, Renata Kobetts Miller, Marcie Frank, and Mei Chun. Inversely, the broader field of what we might call theatre/novel intersections can itself benefit from the sustained engagements modelled in this Companion, which spotlight what often receives only cursory treatment elsewhere.5 But what does it really mean for theatre to play a “dominant role” or to constitute a “dominant setting” in a novel? Works like Somerset Maugham’s Theatre (1937) or Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936) traffic so consistently with actors, directors, and theatre milieus that there seems little room for doubt. Clemence Dane’s 1931 Broome Stages keeps the focus on a dynasty of actors across more than two centuries and 700 pages. But what about Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), which, along with April Wheeler, abandons the Laurel Players after an opening chapter about their amateur staging of Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest—a play which, however, anticipates the Wheelers’ own crises, and to which the narrative often harkens back? Is Philip Roth’s The Humbling (2009) theatre-fiction, even though its ageing protagonist has retired from the stage, and even though the text focuses on his relationship with a friend’s daughter (rather than, for instance, his challenges in working with a director)? As Cummins writes of sports fiction, “the definition of what constitutes an ‘integral part’ is clearly open to interpretation and is sure to result in numerous discrepancies among scholars and critics” (200). Then again, it would be hard to find a genre where such questions don’t arise (how long does a novel have to be at sea before it’s sea fiction?). On one hand, as John Rieder notes, “Pigeonholing texts as members or nonmembers of this or that genre is intellectually frivolous” (18); on the other, debate about definitions and parameters has often led to a deepening of discourse, catalyzing levels of scholarly discussion from which theatre-fiction has yet to benefit. While numerous novels can be found in which theatre is virtually always in the spotlight, many stage briefer but highly memorable and significant encounters. To call Tolstoy’s 1,200-page War and Peace (1869) a theatre-novel on the basis of Natasha Rostov’s trip to the opera in book eight would seem absurd, yet numerous critics have argued for this chapter as crucial to the novel, and the way in which Tolstoy evokes this theatrical experience (discussed in chapter 18 of this Companion) has been the subject of important theoretical analyses. The same could be said of the parts in Dickens’s Great

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Expectations (1860; discussed in chapter 30) when Pip goes to a production of Hamlet or to a pantomime, both starring his townsman Wopsle, or the chapters in Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837) in which Lucien de Rubempré is taken behind the scenes of a “good old-fashioned melodrama entitled Bertram” (143). Newark’s discussion of the “eventfulness” of “operatic outings” in novels (4)—which he presents as “so common in the nineteenth-century French novel as to constitute something approaching a sub-genre all their own” (5)—might be extended to other kinds of theatrical events, around which writers may build “scenes, chapters and … the structural turning points of entire novels” (4). They are a reliable source of plot-energy: interweaving, at various levels, their stories with those of the works on stage; foregrounding the agency of characters who are themselves master-plotters, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; or merely juxtaposing different velocities and trajectories through different kinds of time, measured and unmeasured. (Newark 4–5) Some of this Companion’s contributors are interested in more specific encounters of this kind, novelistic trips to theatre or shorter-lived attempts to create theatre or penetrate the industry, vital to a novel even when they occupy only a portion of its chapters. Theatre may be revealed as a thread running through a novel or even a multi-volume work. Frances Babbage’s chapter on Antonia White’s Frost in May quartet or Karen Quigley’s on Louisa May Alcott’s March family trilogy might not want to frame these books as full-fledged theatre-novels, but they see value in discussing them “from the perspective of theatre-fiction” (Babbage 227). While adhering to an understanding of theatre-fiction as engaging in substantial and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice or industry, this study thus resists over-specification when it comes to questions of theatre’s dominance in a text. An academic Companion indeed opens opportunity not only to foreground those works that most conspicuously fit the bill but to follow critics like Frow (who follows Derrida) in recognizing “the importance of edges and margins” (3). While many of the novels such as Henry James’s The Tragic Muse (1889–90; discussed by Sophie Stringfellow) seem naturally suited to the part, others like Ian McEwan’s Atonement (discussed by Cara Hersh) may at first appear a little miscast (“Why did they get the call instead of Patrick Hamilton’s Twopence Coloured or Noel Streatfeild’s Curtain Up?”). But as Lee Clark Mitchell puts it, “impure outliers that help reshape [a] genre in new ways” may sometimes be even more interesting than “‘pure’ examples” (238). To posit genre is also to raise questions of sociohistorical specificity. Oriard conceives sports fiction within quite a confined period: “The fiction dealing with these sports is largely a product of the twentieth century, although its origins are in the nineteenth” (6). Many scholars of science fiction agree that it doesn’t coalesce or become identifiable as a genre until the early twentieth century, through concrete publishing developments. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus may exhibit features of what would one day be called detective fiction, but only in the later 1800s does that genre become one, and not until after World War I—amidst particular sociocultural developments and anxieties—does a Golden Age arise. We could, on more modest scales, discern eras in which various social factors, including the popularity or contentiousness of theatre, or developments and tensions within theatre itself, contributed to a proliferation of novels and stories. Lauren Chattman has observed that a number of “essentially domestic novels of the Victorian period, enough to form a respectable sub-genre, feature actress heroines” (72), and she cites books from Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half-Sisters (1848) to William Black’s In Silk Attire (1869). In Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, I identified a period of pronounced development in fin-de-siècle Europe, during which theatre increasingly moves from minor to major roles in novels and in which we find novelists like Florence Marryat (discussed in this Companion by Catherine Quirk) publishing a succession of novels about

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theatre. An abundance (or a paucity) of theatre-fiction may reflect something important about theatre and its relations with novel-forms in a particular society or historical moment. The present Companion, in spreading itself across broader histories and regions, hopes to spotlight specific contexts while also imparting the scope and variety of novelistic engagement with theatre over time. A relevant reference here may be Carl Freedman’s discussion in Critical Theory and Science Fiction of the difference between “narrow and broad” understandings of that genre (13). The former is correlative to a body of work “that grows directly out of the American pulp tradition established in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories” (14)—genre as a self-conscious publishing category. The “broad” understanding comprises a wider-ranging history: “from Lucian to Rabelais, Cyrano, and beyond” as well as “a tradition of work not actually marketed as science fiction, from Kafka and even Joyce to Samuel Beckett” (15), or indeed, “a great many other texts that do not arrive in the bookshop with the rubric of ‘science fiction’ printed on the dust jackets” (16). Freedman acknowledges the need for a certain clarity of definition while also valuing broadness. A comparable combination is valued for this Companion. In this respect, there may be certain merit to regarding theatre-fiction, in its historical developments, as a kind of “invisible” genre, a term which, undertheorized itself, has been used to refer not only to genres that aren’t widely discussed in critical circles but also to the advantages of “non-canonic and consequently relatively unregulated status” (Polezzi 143). While suggesting certain recurring configurations or topoi, an “invisible” genre, as Loredana Polezzi suggests, may offer “the possibility of escaping the constraints which a more codified ‘literary’ type often imposes.” Ernst Bloch may have had similar dynamics in mind when analyzing the “novel of the artist,” a kind of fiction which, precisely because it lacks the “unmistakable form” associated with genres like detective fiction (263), has escaped the more pejorative connotations of genre (i.e., generic, formulaic, inclined to mass-production).6

Theatre-Fiction and Intermediality? “One of the most common points of departure in terms of genre,” writes Danny Gronmaier, “is a narrative content-related one, often supplemented by a statement about dominance” (29). Acknowledging that this “surely is a good starting point to get a grip” on a body of texts, Gronmaier suggests that an approach focused “primarily on thematic reproducibility and textual implementation, resemblance and recognition” may remain limited, arguing for “an understanding of genre that goes beyond a poetics of narrative rules, conventions and topics” (28). One way of pursuing this for theatre-fiction, I’d suggest, is through engagement with what we might risk terming its intermedial dimensions. Can theatre-fiction be considered an intermedial form? Irina Rajewsky, a key figure in intermediality studies, discusses what she and other theorists have referred to as “intermedial reference” or “intermedial representation”: “Rather than combining different medial forms of articulation, the given media-product thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another, conventionally distinct medium through the use of its own media-specific means” (“Intermediality” 53). Rajewsky’s own examples are about literature referencing film and painting, but it is not difficult to see how theatre-fiction could be similarly considered: “The given product thus constitutes itself partly or wholly in relation to the work, system, or subsystem to which it refers.”7 In hopes of looking beyond what Rajewsky terms “mere thematization” (“Intermediality” 54), I’ve suggested previously that theatre-fiction is “never simply about theatre” in the same way that novels may be about war, sex, or life at sea (5). [E]ven theatre-novels that focus resolutely on a single form of theatre will inevitably enact another set of relations and differences: between theatrical performance and literary representation, between reading and spectatorial experience. The pages of a novel are never simply an “empty

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space” upon which theatre can be brought to life—the very term “theatre-novel” implies juxtapositions, collisions, interactions, and intersections between media that operate, as [David] Kurnick observes, “according to distinct protocols of storytelling and consumption” (Empty 9). (Theatre-Fiction 5) If we associate intermediality with contemporary multi-medial artworks, or if we’re thinking of the kind of “Intermedial Theatre” discussed in Mark Crossley’s collection by that name, then intermedial reference or representation (in which, by definition, there is “just one medium—the referencing medium (as opposed to the medium referred to)—that is materially present” [Rajewsky, “Intermediality” 53]) may seem a debatable kind. In fact, as Madita Oeming explains, it is “often overlooked or even explicitly denied as being an intermedial phenomenon,” or at least characterized (in Yvonne Spielmann’s terms) as a “light-version” of intermediality (69). But several scholars including Rajewsky have identified important benefits to considering these kinds of phenomena through intermedial lenses. As Jens Schröter points out, in addition to the fact that, when a novel refers to another artform “we are already dealing with a relation between two media” (5), a complex conversation and interplay may arise: One medium refers to another and thereby it can comment on the represented medium, which would allow making interesting inferences to the “self-conception” of the representing medium. And it can also represent the represented medium in such a way that its everyday, “normal” states of being are defamiliarized or, as it were, transformed. (5) Within intermediality studies, the dynamics that Schröter is gesturing to have been considered more commonly apropos of topics like the ekphrasis of visual art, but many chapters in this Companion explore the ways in which theatre-fiction can likewise be understood as defamiliarizing or indeed transforming theatre, and how something critical to novel forms’ own “self-conception” may be at play in these intersections.8 Theatre-fiction may be linked not only by recurring themes and topoi but also by the formal and stylistic challenges, tensions, and opportunities arising when writers engage through written prose with elements and attributes of another medial system. More than a taxonomic matter, to consider theatre-fiction as intermedial may be to ask questions about how theatre emerges differently through encounters with the medium and forms in which it is referenced and represented, and vice versa. In fact, one of theatre-fiction’s paradoxes is that it may enable us to see something more in theatre through the irregular viewpoints it offers. Throughout this study, we keep in mind and often return to a basic question: why would someone want to write this paradoxical kind of fiction, working with theatre through a novel form rather than, for instance, writing a play, devising a performance, acting in or directing a show? What kind of writer turns to theatre-fiction, why, and when? Some authors who put much theatre into their novels (such as Valerie Martin or John Irving) evince little desire to make it, and certainly (as novelists from Gaston Leroux to Doris Lessing attest), one need not be a successful theatre-maker in order to write good theatre-fiction. But involvement in the world of theatre may often appear a catalyst. Rojas was an actor himself and McBride went to drama school like her protagonist Eily. Bulgakov, Davies, Scarron, and Gautier were playwrights, and numerous other writers explored in this collection were deeply involved in the theatre-worlds of their times. Li Yu (discussed by Mei Chun) was a playwright in seventeenth-century China before writing stories about actors and stages. Finnish writer Tove Jansson (discussed by Deniz Başar) was a theatre painter before writing children’s theatre-fiction like Moominsummer Madness (1954). As Kevin Riordan mentions in his chapter, some of Willa Cather’s descriptions of theatre in My Ántonia (1918) closely resemble her own previous writing as a theatre critic. Works like Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), Davies’s Tempest-Tost (1951), or Sheila

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Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010; discussed by Chloe Green) may indeed have emerged from attempts to write plays. Theatre-fiction is a kind of literature on printed pages, but it may be productively considered as something emerging from within theatre, in dialogue with it, and capable of changing our understanding of it. If the thirty chapters in this collection are about prose fiction, they will also interest scholars and students of theatre and performance, as well as theatre-lovers more generally.

How this Companion is Structured This introduction is followed by a “Curtain Raiser,” which, focusing on Scarron’s Roman comique, rehearses some of the practical, conventional, and medial differences between making theatre and writing prose fiction, and between attending performances and reading stories. Consideration of how Scarron himself foregrounds, plays with, and complicates these tensions and relationships will help open a discussion of theatre-fiction’s intermedial qualities. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction is then structured into five main sections determined not by time-period or geographical region but by recurring issues and family resemblances among the works discussed. Other groupings would have been possible, and chapters in one section may have plentiful points of contact with chapters in another. Endnotes in individual chapters are also used to suggest specific cross-references. The first section, “Theatre-Fictional Histories and Hauntings,” includes chapters that consider the affordances and paradoxes of engaging with evanescent theatrical artforms through the comparably permanent medium of prose fiction. Does theatre-fiction offer access to elusive theatre histories? In representing, re-imagining, or eulogizing theatre-worlds, what kind of history are novels performing, and what role does this act of recollection play for present and future theatre-worlds? Lisa JacksonSchebetta considers such questions with respect to Rojas’s El viaje entretenido (1603); Odai Johnson looks to the Second Sophistic period (120–230 CE) and authors such as Heliodorus, Alciphron, and Athenaeus; while Stefano Boselli explores twentieth-century works like Vicente Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca (1924) and Edgardo Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo (1984). If ephemerality distinguishes theatre from prose fiction, Sophie Stringfellow’s chapter also reminds us that theatre is itself a ghosted artform, haunted by vanished performances and past traditions; and as Kevin Riordan accentuates, it is also an artform that leaves material traces and remnants. From Madame Carré’s “theatrical museum” in Henry James’s The Tragic Muse to the theatrical scrapbooks of Willa Cather’s characters in My Ántonia, theatre-fiction is often highly attracted to theatre’s ghosts, echoes, and remainders, and its peculiar modes of engaging with theatre’s pasts may be among its own most memorable affordances. These topics are also of concern in Katrina Dunn’s analysis of Robertson Davies, a theatre-novelist who was also an avid collector of theatre histories, prompt books, photos, and memorabilia from stages past. How does an improvisational form of folk theatre like Alkaap influence the style and narrative structure of a novel about it, asks Tamalika Roy in her discussion of Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Mayamridanga (1972)? How, asks Maki Isaka, does the kind of Kabuki theatre depicted in Mishima Yukio’s “Onnagata” (1957) combine with and complicate the story’s often realistic reportage style? Questions of how novelistic and theatrical forms and media can intersect, how theatre-fiction may engage with their tensions, challenge their divisions, and provoke unusually multimodal reading experiences, are at the forefront of the chapters in section II (“Theatre-Fiction, Form, and Style”). For John Severn, the peculiarly difficult style of Ronald Firbank’s theatre-fiction in novels like Caprice (1917) indeed trains readers in unique “theatrical reading strategies,” while for Alexandra Ksenofontova, the present-tense narration of recent theatre-novels such as Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008) and Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) may undermine apparent oppositions between theatre’s immediacy and novels’ retrospective modes of telling. Roweena Yip’s examination of Valerie Martin’s The Confessions

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of Edward Day considers how the actor-narrator’s performance integrates elements of the method acting in which Edward is trained. In exploring form and style, these chapters also work toward arguments about the potentialities of theatre-fiction. For Cara Hersh, Ian McEwan’s deconstruction of ostensible divisions between theatre and prose fiction through engagement with Shakespeare and playwriting in Atonement (2001) is a critical part of that novel’s ethical thrust. The section concludes with a dialogue on the art of writing theatre-fiction, staged between Jessica Riley and Mona Awad, author of the recent All’s Well. The novels discussed in section III, “Performing Selfhood and Authorship through TheatreFiction,” could be considered with respect to strongly autobiographical elements. More specifically, these chapters explore the potentials of theatre-fiction in working out relationships with theatre, in negotiating, through writing and performance, understandings of self and role within theatre’s sensuous, corporeal, collaborative worlds and professional economies. Theatre-fiction may indeed emerge as a paradoxical supplement to playwriting and performing. Renata Kobetts Miller considers Dorothy Leighton’s Disillusion (1894) in contiguity with her work as a New Woman playwright and her role as co-manager of the Independent Theatre Society in 1890s London. William McEvoy explores Colette’s symbiosis of professional writing and vaudeville performance in La Vagabonde. Frances Babbage shows how a theatre lens on Antonia White’s Frost in May quartet complicates its marginalization by critics as “autobiographical fiction,” revealing a complex negotiation of theatre’s disturbingly antithetical elements as well as the potentials of what White referred to as its “language of the body.” For Chloe Green, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? not only transforms struggles with playwriting into a successful novel but also, through engagement with theatre, complicates assumptions of solipsism connected to autofiction. If Bulgakov’s Black Snow is well-known as an autobiographical satire of Stanislavski and his methods, Graham Wolfe is interested in how its first-person perspective enables the playwright-novelist to reassert aspects of his own theatrical vision that were suppressed in his collaborations with the Moscow Art Theatre. The fourth section concerns “Theatre-Fiction and Young People.” Charlotte Yonge’s 1864 Historical Dramas, discussed by Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, not only focuses on children who create theatre in their home but also incorporates working drafts of the playscripts they devise. Though Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women trilogy is not exclusively for young readers, Karen Quigley’s chapter examines the importance within it of domestic theatre production, featuring young actors, playwrights, and directors. As chapters by Stephanie Tillotson and Deniz Başar explore, from the Blue Door Theatre novels of British writer Pamela Brown to the Moomins novels of Finnish writer Tove Jansson, a considerable range of twentieth-century theatre-fiction has been created for young readers, drawing on theatre’s varied potentials as a site of passage, development, and role-play. Recent novels about teenage actors like Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (2019), Catton’s The Rehearsal, and McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians may be far from children’s fiction, but Chris Hay considers how the lessons of acting school and the processes of literary character-building intersect as young protagonists learn to represent others and themselves. Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s (1982), another memorable novel about a school for young actors, is the focus of Sheila Rabillard’s chapter, which examines Fitzgerald’s literary exploration of theatre as a calling in 1960s Britain. The chapters in section V (“Theatre-Fiction, Asymmetries, and Antitheatricalities”) discuss novels and stories that engage with theatre as a realm of potential inequities and divisions: where the labour of some is the leisure of others, where performing bodies are offered up to desirous gazes, where the cost of creating art and entertainment may be social opprobrium, and where a favoured few may enjoy the spotlight while many are relegated to the wings. Theatre-fiction emerges as well-positioned to examine, respond to, or reconfigure aspects of theatre that are sometimes more difficult to recognize from a seat in the audience. Mei Chun’s discussion of Li Yu’s and Langxian’s vernacular theatre-stories considers their engagement with actor-audience relationships and social distinctions between scholars

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Introduction

and theatre-people in early-modern China, including the irony that male actors were prohibited from becoming the scholar-officials they may have portrayed on stage. Catherine Quirk considers the role of theatre-fiction in transforming antitheatrical attitudes, working with three novels by Florence Marryat that shift the critical gaze to other dimensions of Victorian society. Through Wilkie Collins’s No Name, Anja Hartl engages with a similar time-period, exploring how Collins’s “drama narrated” provokes an affectively charged intermedial encounter that, in simulating theatre’s effects, enacts critique of Victorian norms. Rachael Newberry brings Foucault and Baudrillard into conversation with Angela Carter, who explores spectatorial enjoyment and the commodification of performance in works including Nights at the Circus (1984), while Juliana Starr examines the productive thrust of Émile Zola’s engagement with theatrical spectatorship in Nana (1880) and The Kill (1871). Graham Wolfe reads John Irving’s theatrefiction in conversation with Charles Dickens’s own theatre excursions in order to explore how novels may both interrogate theatre’s asymmetrical distributions and draw on its democratizing thrusts.

Notes 1 Among others, Ethel Vaughan has discussed evidence for the influence of El Viage Entretenido on Le Roman Comique. 2 Paul Kincaid’s article “On the Origins of Genre” draws on Wittgenstein to conceive genres in terms of family resemblances among texts rather than sets of immutable features. 3 On a technical note, I recognize that terms like “sports fiction” or “detective fiction” are generally unhyphenated (though “sci-fi” normally uses one). We’ve hyphenated “theatre-fiction” in this Companion for several reasons, most importantly to help distinguish it from the broader idea of fictions that theatre itself conveys (as in this sentence from Jean Alter: “But spectators, involved in the reception of theatre fiction, must be motivated by other reasons than those of its producers” [222]). 4 Investigations of theatre-fiction can draw from excellent studies such as Joseph Litvak’s Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English, but this Companion begins with a somewhat more circumscribed focus. As Litvak himself acknowledges, “theatricality” is unbound to “actual” theatre and may be found almost anywhere: “in its most generalized form theatricality … is present everywhere though visible nowhere” (5). More recently, scholars such as David Kurnick have advocated a demetaphorizing of theatre in studies of the novel (1). Focusing on “an abstraction called ‘theatricality’ may obscure the most interesting aspects of [a novel’s investment] in the question of the theater” (30). 5 The past twenty-five years have seen increasing scholarly interest in what I’ve loosely called the field of theatre/ novel intersections. See for instance Alan Ackerman’s The Portable Theatre: American Literature and the NineteenthCentury Stage, Emily Allen’s Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Mei Chun’s The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China, Julia Jarcho’s Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama, Ros Ballaster’s Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Renata Kobetts Miller’s The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage, and Marcie Frank’s The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen. 6 With Bloch in mind, theatre-fiction might also be understood in relation to a broader field of novels and stories about art and artists. As Pooler notes, one of the first usages of the term Künstlerroman can be found in Friedrich Schlegel’s seminal essay on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, whose central character leaves home to pursue theatre. Other novels directly influenced by Goethe’s, including James’s The Tragic Muse, have been described as “us[ing] the Künstlerroman model” (Pooler 81). There is certainly merit in recognizing parallels and shared concerns between novels that engage with theatre and those engaging with other artistic practices, especially since many theatre-novels also explore other artforms. The Künstlerroman is, however, both too broad and too narrow to easily subsume theatre-fiction. Scholars have posited a comparatively precise set of features, including a focus on the formative years of special individuals whose unique artistic calling may put them at odds with society (reflective of the Künstlerroman’s strong ties to German Romanticism). This is not to say that novels about theatre couldn’t be productively explored as Künstlerromans; indeed, Chris Hay’s chapter proposes ways of understanding particular works of theatre-fiction as variations. But myriad novels and stories about theatre simply don’t adhere to Künstlerroman models. We might also keep in mind Bloch’s acknowledgement that the “novel of the artist” has its own fair share of “trashy” participants (265). By no means do all theatre-novelists aspire to high literature. And as many since

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Graham Wolfe Ngaio Marsh have shown, theatre-fiction often collaborates very effectively with genres like detective fiction. See my discussion of Marsh’s Enter a Murderer (1935) in chapter 5 of Theatre-Fiction in Britain. 7 The question of whether theatre should be considered “a medium” has given rise to much debate. The fact that theatre may combine many different media, including painting, music, and (in more recent times) video, has provoked theorists to refer to it as plurimedial. These complexities, on top of the fact that media are themselves constructed and historically variable, prompt Rajewsky to remind us that “any reference to ‘individual media’ should indeed be handled with care” (“Borders” 53), and her use of the term “medial system” (58) seems a response to these considerations. She nonetheless asserts that “theatre is still conventionally conceived—and has been perceived for centuries—as a distinct individual medium” with “medially based as well as conventionally drawn borders (which are obviously subject to historic transformation and must in part be seen as fluid)” (53). 8 An illuminating comparison, in this respect, is Laura Sava’s recent Theatre Through the Camera Eye: The Poetics of an Intermedial Encounter, which explores a different intermedial relationship—between theatre and film. The case studies in her book “often straddle the divide between thematisation, partial quotation, evocation and formal imitation” (14), but her focus is unabashedly on “films that feature theatre performances, rehearsals or monologues,” and on particular “problems of representation” including “the embedding of theatre in film and modes of spectatorial address in filmic representations of theatre” (11).

Works Cited Ackerman, Alan. The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2004. Alter, Jean. A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre. U of Pennsylvania P, 1990. Babington, Bruce. The Sports Film: Games People Play. Wallflower, 2014. Ballaster, Ros. Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Boydell Press, 2020. Balzac, Honoré de. Lost Illusions. 1837–1843. Translated by Ellen Marriage, Gebbie, 1899. Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated byJack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, MIT P, 1988. Chattman, Lauren. “Actresses at Home and on Stage: Spectacular Domesticity and the Victorian Theatrical Novel.” NOVEL, vol. 28, no. 1, Fall 1994, pp. 72–88. Crossley, Mark, ed. Intermedial Theatre: Principles and Practice. Red Globe, 2019. Cummins, R. Glenn. “Sports Fiction: Critical and Empirical Perspectives.” Handbook of Sports and Media, edited by Arthur A. Raney and Bryant L. Jennings, Erlbaum Associates, 2006, pp. 198–218. Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders. 1975. Penguin, 1983. Frank, Marcie. The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen. Rutgers UP, 2020. Frank, Siggy. Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2012. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2000. Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2015. Gronmaier, Danny. The US Sports Film: A Genre of American Dream Time. DeGruyter, 2022. Jarcho, Julia. Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama. Cambridge UP, 2017. Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Extrapolation, vol. 44, no. 4, 2003, pp. 409–420. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. U of California P, 1992. McBride, Eimear. The Lesser Bohemians. Faber & Faber, 2016. McGowan, Lee. Football in Fiction: A History. Routledge, 2020. Mei, Chun. The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China. Brill, 2011. Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Edinburgh UP, 2020. Mitchell, Lee Clark. Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre. U of Nebraska P, 2018. Murdoch, Iris. The Sea, The Sea. Vintage, 2019. Newark, Cormac. Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust. Cambridge UP, 2011. Oeming, Madita. “Vietnam Goes Intermedia—Reconsidering Media Boundaries in Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” “Deepe Things Out of Darkenesse”: English and American Representations of Conflict, edited by Frauke Reitemeier, Göttingen UP, 2013, pp. 59–92. Oriard, Michael. Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980. Nelson-Hall, 1982. Polezzi, Loredana. Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation. Routledge, 2017. Pooler, Mhairi. Writing Life: Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero. Liverpool UP, 2015.

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Introduction Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intérmedialités, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 43–64. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008. Sava, Laura. Theatre through the Camera Eye: The Poetics of an Intermedial Encounter. Edinburgh UP, 2019. Schröter, Jens. “Discourses and Models of Intermediality.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, Sept 2011, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss3/3. Vaughan, Ethel. “El Viage Entretenido by Agustin de Rojas: A Possible Source of Le Roman Comique by Paul Scarron.” Northwestern University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1929. Whannel, Garry. “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films.” Sport in Society, vol. 11, no. 2/3, 2008, pp. 195–208. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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CURTAIN RAISER The Comic Romance of Theatre and Novel Graham Wolfe

The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction was developed during a time when theatres throughout the world were often closed for long periods, and when theatre-makers, audiences, and scholars were compelled to seek different means of creating, enjoying, or engaging with theatrical performance. The circumstances of Covid-19 may not only have given many people time and cause to read more theatre-fiction; they may also have provoked high consciousness of what Erika FischerLichte calls the mediality or “medial conditions” (18) of theatrical performance, involving corporeal copresence, collaborative energies, and collective experience—elements lacking when one sits alone with a novel. Historically, there have been other circumstances where theatre-fiction has enabled writers and readers to engage with inaccessible theatre. Mikhail Bulgakov was writing Black Snow (1930–7) during a period in Soviet Russia when his plays were banned and he was repeatedly deprived of involvement in a theatre-world. As Maki Isaka discusses in this collection, the phenomenon of “kabuki as a literary experience” (including if not limited to theatre-fiction) was an important part of that theatrical form’s own development for years before Mishima Yukio wrote the story “Onnagata” (1957), offering modes of contact with kabuki to fans who, for financial or other practical reasons, couldn’t attend actual performances. Robertson Davies similarly conceived novels about theatre (such as Cothburn O’Neal’s The Dark Lady [1954]) as a way for people in rural regions to experience something of theatre’s power “without having to wait for a visit to [a major theatrical centre], or the rare chance of a touring company” (A Voice 150). At the same time, to cast theatre-fiction, in Davies’s terms, as “Making the Best of Second Best” (147), would be to risk doing it a grave disservice. Theatre-fiction rarely seeks simply to reproduce a theatrical performance on pages or to substitute for it. Indeed, theatre-novelists themselves are often highly conscious of and eager to play with the different conditions and affordances of theatre and novel, as well as the tensions between them. Rehearsing some of these may be valuable at this point of the study, keeping in mind that medial differences may themselves be conventional, varying across time and place. Exploring these differences through the peculiar lenses provided by theatre-fiction itself may also suggest ways of thinking further about it as an intermedial form. In chapter 8 of Paul Scarron’s Roman comique (often translated as The Comic Romance, published in two parts in 1651 and 1657), the diminutive lawyer Ragotin, who not only yearns for the actresses who have arrived in Le Mans but harbours theatrical ambitions of his own, seeks to regale the present company (including the band of travelling players and their plentiful admirers) with a

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story called “The Tale of the Invisible Mistress.” “I’m going to tell you a story taken from a Spanish book sent to me from Paris that I want to adapt to the stage” (25). After the story has been conveyed by Scarron’s narrator, the roman returns to Ragotin’s theatrical aspirations. The lawyer informs the actors, “as if he were promising them something rare, that he wanted to turn his story into a play and that, given the manner in which he would go about it, he was sure to reach in a single bound heights that other authors had only achieved gradually” (43). This proposition sparks a debate about whether the story just expressed in the Roman comique does indeed lend itself to the stage, and what issues might arise in adapting it. Ragotin, though not without some amateur experience of his own (“I once played Toby’s dog, and I played it so well the audience was delighted” [44]), is pitted against a seasoned theatre-maker in the professional actor Destiny (Le Destin), who, while acknowledging that the story “was entertaining,” asserts it isn’t “any good for the theatre” (43). At times the debate is complicated by Destiny’s fellow actor Grudge (La Rancune), who facetiously encourages Ragotin.1 Reflecting the pervasive influence of the Académie française—which, under Cardinal Richelieu, had famously set forward rules for playwriting—some of Destiny’s objections to the proposed adaptation are on grounds of decorum and verisimilitude: the tale “cannot be made into a play without breaking the rules of propriety and sound judgement” (43). But as a working professional, the actor’s main resistances are practical. Ragotin’s key argument for staging “The Invisible Mistress” is that it offers opportunities for impressive scenes such as “a great ball at the Viceroy’s,” not to mention the elaborate coach that transports the protagonist Don Carlos: “What a novelty that would be in a play!” (44). “‘Wouldn’t you consider it,’ he added, ‘both a new and magnificent thing to see a great church portal in the centre of a theatre, in front of which twenty gentlemen, at least, with an equal number of damsels, made gallant conversation: it would delight everyone’” (43). Scarron’s readers are invited to imagine being shown in performance what they’ve just engaged with on the page, but they are also positioned, along with Destiny, to evaluate the proposition’s feasibility. The novel’s opening chapter has introduced us to the sheer weight of theatre, describing the slow progress of the travelling troupe as they arrive in Le Mans, their cart “piled high with trunks, chests and big bolts of painted canvas” (5) while they individually lug other properties like the huge “bass viol” (6). On top of the materials required for church portals and coaches—which surely would struggle to fit on the tenniscourt stage where the actors have recently performed Tristan L’Hermite’s La Marianne (1636)—the lawyer’s adaptation calls for an immense cast. Unless, as Grudge sarcastically proposes, a company is willing to use cardboard cut-outs, how could they find and costume enough actors to represent “so many gentlemen and so many ladies” (43)? Ragotin’s reference to a production at his former La Flèche School, where he claims to have “acted in the rout of Ponts-de-Cé,” proves that such a thing can theoretically be done: “more than a hundred soldiers from the Queen Mother’s side appeared on stage, not counting those from the King’s army, who were even more numerous.” But Destiny’s company has “only seven or eight in their troupe when it [is] at full strength” (44), and readers have recently followed them trying to perform a tragedy with a depleted cast of only three. As Naomi Phelps notes, it was often financially necessary for already small travelling troupes to split into two in order to accept multiple engagements at a time (154). The proposition of staging the inset story (which, in physical form, fits handily into Ragotin’s pocket) thus brings into relief some of the freedoms of prose fiction, including the comparative ease with which it may construct its settings or conjure and clothe its characters. With a few flicks of the pen, and without having to shell out for salaries, a novelist can bring to life what could cost theatremakers much physical effort and money, or indeed prove practically prohibitive. Scarron often conspicuously partakes of these freedoms, flaunting, for instance, the novelist’s licence to incorporate an array of characters at will. Referring to Grudge as “one of the major heroes of our novel (who are not lacking in this book … ),” he celebrates the novelist’s capacity to spread the focus: “a half-dozen

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heroes or so-called heroes will do more honour to mine than a single hero, who might turn out to be the one people talk about least” (14). This may be a matter of structure and time as well as salaries and resources, since, while a novel may theoretically go on indefinitely, a playwright must prune a drama to fit the endurance of an audience. Scarron makes this point comically through Ragotin himself, who has committed the dreadful error of drawing out a play to novel-length. Relaying “The Invisible Mistress” is a concession he makes after offering “a play he had written entitled The Life and Times of Charlemagne in Forty-Eight Acts. This scared the assembly so that everyone’s hair stood on end” (25). The Roman comique itself stretches over forty-three chapters (and remained unfinished after two volumes), but a playwright who wants to be performed is not free to write at similar length. Though he pokes fun at the protracted seven-volume romans héroïque of his day, Scarron plays with the capacity of prose fiction to digress and meander, to “do as those who place the bridle on their horse’s neck and let it wander wherever it will” (49). In short, though conventions may differ among eras and places, playwrights (who aim to be performed) must keep in mind spatial, financial, practical, and temporal considerations from which novelists often enjoy comparative freedom.2 At stake in Scarron’s debate is not only whether the scenes that Ragotin envisions can be staged but also the aesthetic differences between imagining scenes conjured by prose and beholding physicalcorporeal scenes. As a visual and aural artform, theatre is able directly to present things that a novel or short-story can only describe, including living human beings. Indeed, as theorist Bert States puts it, theatre’s signs “achieve their vitality … not simply by signifying the world but by being of it” (20). This may be a source of theatre’s power and (erotic) attraction for many of the Roman comique’s spectators, who, from Ragotin to the ageing Madame Bouvillon, spend the novel lusting after actors and pursuing them offstage—a common occurrence in theatre-fiction. But reading may hold attractions of other kinds, and “The Invisible Lady” is a provocative choice in this regard. If not directly concerned with theatre, this inset story is about imagining someone who cannot be seen; it juxtaposes the evoked and the directly beheld. The title refers to a veiled lady whom Don Carlos meets after a day of jousting, who talks to him from behind a grated window, and who takes on for him a vivid imaginative life, all the more forceful for his inability to see her. This “invisible” lady enters ironic competition with a second whom Don Carlos meets at a fancy ball and who will be fully present, splendidly garbed, surrounded by spectacular environments. She contrasts with something that has only been evoked for Don Carlos, what he’s needed to imagine—but what has therefore assumed a different intensity of life in the mind. To draw on Ros Ballaster’s terms, the proposition of staging “The Invisible Mistress” provokes readers to consider and imaginatively play with the different kinds of presence-effects proffered by theatre and prose fiction (3). If theatre as a material-corporeal artform is most commonly associated with presence—and if the experience of being there is part of what can make it so powerful—Ballaster draws attention to the ironic ways in which its medial conditions can “also impede the aesthetic experience of presence” (9). Paradoxically, “the presence of the ‘real’ paraphernalia of the stage, such as props, flats, lights,” other spectators, and above all “the presence of the actor,” may “risk undermining the spectator’s immersion in the fictional ‘real’” (9). While novels lack the visual and auditory substance of theatre, print makes a “promise of plenitude and presence, a life in the mind of its reader to which that reader can punctually return and which the reader can reinhabit” (8). The imagination is solicited precisely in the absence of the materials that compose and support theatre: “the novel manufactures being without making visible its workings—the pulleys, the thunder run, the tired costumes, the creak of the sliding flat, so familiar to a knowing theatre audience” (10). Scarron’s travelling companies have barely enough scenery to creak, but his descriptions of their performances emphasize theatre’s factitiousness. When, at the end of chapter 2, a dirty sheet rises on La Marianne, the audience behold a Herod lying on a mattress borrowed from a neighbouring hotel,

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on his head a small basket substituting for a crown, and on his face a bandage “cover[ing] one eye and half of his cheek” (5) (we later learn that Destiny has been trying to disguise himself from enemies—this disguise had overlapped with his Herod). But even well-accoutred productions at privileged schools like Ragotin’s are inescapably tied to the stuff of the real world. The expensive refinery adorning the more than 200 members of the army had been accentuated in its factitiousness by “a downpour which interrupted the show” (43–4), and what is most remembered is not the play’s messages or dramatic poetry: “it was said that all the feathers of the local gentry, which had been borrowed for the occasion, would never recover” (44). Gesturing to other practical considerations, this instance also accentuates the aesthetic complexities of theatre’s reliance on objects and resources that exceed its fictions, audience awareness of which is heightened when they are at risk or recognized as the property of flesh-and-blood persons. As Harris and Korda put it, “theatrical objects have a habit of drawing attention to themselves as things with material lives surplus to the ‘fictive worlds’ into which they have been enlisted … punctur[ing] dramatic illusion by pointing to alternate social dramas of economic production, exchange, and ownership” (14–15). Again, this may be fresh in mind for both Destiny and readers of the Roman comique, whose adventures begin with a puncturing of theatrical fiction by the all-too real properties that support it. La Marianne had been derailed in the opening chapters by the arrival of two tennis players whose street clothes, left in the changing-room while they played on an adjacent court, had been given to the actors and integrated into the performance. “The Play’s Deplorable Outcome” (the title of chapter 3; 9) results from theatre’s overingestion of real-world stuff: the tennis players, upon seeing their garb as part of the theatrical world, had furiously breached it. These aesthetic differences—between imagining scenes evoked by words and beholding physicalcorporeal representations—are not, of course, strictly medial differences between novels and theatre, since theatre itself so often describes or otherwise conjures unseen things and events rather than directly representing them. Indeed, the question of whether theatre should rely on such techniques was a compelling issue in Scarron’s own context. On one hand, Ragotin’s advocacy of spectacle might accentuate his lack of literary judgement. Reliance on spectacle was criticized by the Académie française, since (in Georges de Scudéry’s terms) “People who judge with their eyes, allow themselves to be deceived by that sense which is, of all the senses, the easiest to fool,” whereas an understanding of drama’s “principles and rules” will lead to a deeper assessment of merit (qtd. in Turnovsky 39). Indeed, neoclassical theatre, in order to abide by the unities of time and place (confining its action to a day and a single main location), frequently resorted to exposition, while injunctions of verisimilitude compelled it to describe what might beggar belief if shown (like the attack on Hippolyte’s chariot by a sea monster in Racine’s Phèdre). Theatre’s reliance on such telling, however, is also debated in the Roman comique when a wise young counsellor asserts that it is “more enjoyable to see actions take place on stage than to hear descriptions of them” (119)—a reason for abandoning Académie rules. Theatrefiction is here a direct participant in the theatre-world of its day, not only insofar as its characters pronounce opinions on theatrical questions. The form and structure of Scarron’s novel itself provoke consideration of the differing aesthetics of showing and telling. Beyond the arguments explicitly raised in the debate, the question of whether “The Invisible Mistress” should be adapted for performance is further complicated by the circumstances of its own delivery and framing within the Roman comique. Ragotin is attempting to regale a boisterous crowd, restless in awaiting dinner and more preoccupied with flirtations than concerned to contemplate a meaningful work. Even though he has downscaled his ambitions from a longer dramatic piece, his audience still “tr[y] to change the subject three or four times to avoid having to listen” and he must force them to do so “by dint of starting his story over from the beginning each time he was interrupted” (25). We can only imagine how frequently Ragotin might have been jeered by this crowd and how he might have needed to raise his voice to get his story over. We also have little

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reason to trust his abilities as raconteur. Though he assures Destiny’s troupe that he is “bound soon to become the greatest actor in France” (148–9), the novel presents him as a deplorable performer whose ludicrous ego and conspicuous self-interest would surely detract from his effect as storyteller. But the Roman comique itself need rely neither on the crowd’s good graces nor on this star-struck amateur’s dubious stage-presence. The reader’s own experience is not sullied by them, since Scarron’s narrator abruptly extracts “The Invisible Mistress” from both the social situation of its telling and the mouth of its inferior teller, relaying it “in the next chapter” and in his own voice: “So Ragotin isn’t the one who is speaking; I am” (26). Audiences vanish and author-narrator takes over the show. Simply put, to adapt “The Invisible Mistress” for the stage would be to wrest it from the control that Scarron pointedly exercises as novelist, putting it in the hands of potentially even more contestable performers and rendering it vulnerable to the contingencies and sources of derailment that afflict virtually all performances in the Roman comique, a novel which, while about theatre, is also “about interruption” (Parish 102). La Marianne’s violent derailment in the opening chapters is a prologue to a medley of other disturbed shows including an opulent production of Garnier’s Roger et Bradamante at a baron’s estate in chapter 3 of Part 2. Mademoiselle Cave (La Caverne) tells the story of an obtuse page who’d flubbed his one simple speech in such an asinine way that another actor, playing an angry old man, had lost concentration and burst out laughing, provoking more laughter among the spectators, including, after a moment, the melancholy baron himself, whose unexpected reaction had brought down the rest of the house. An even more tumultuous disturbance derails a performance of Scarron’s own play in chapter 17. His fictional players’ production of his comedy Dom Japhet d’Arménie is entirely upstaged by an audience disturbance, triggered in this case by Ragotin himself. Seated behind an exceptionally tall man with a hat, the small lawyer curses his monolithic obstructer until other spectators begin to perceive this conflict as a more compelling show than the one on stage. When a scuffle breaks out and the tall man falls backward, the audience topple upon each other like dominoes until Ragotin, crushed beneath them, is driven down into the tennis-court drain. It would be hard to imagine a more vivid demonstration of the bodily copresence that characterizes theatrical spectatorship, in contrast with the novel-reader’s normally private, solitary, unobstructed experience. Audiences and the circumstances of collective reception are a common fascination in theatrefiction, as are other vulnerabilities to which theatrical performance is subject: collaborative tensions, contingencies, breakdowns, all of which distinguish theatre as an artform reliant on many, subject to human volatilities and fallible performers like the Baron’s page. Such mishaps and debacles are understandable sources of comedy or narrative charge. Like sea fiction, theatre-fiction may derive suspense from the realization that the ship could sink at any moment or the crew could mutiny. But in theatre-fiction these tensions are interwoven with medial difference. The artwork in a reader’s hands is not susceptible to breakdown and contingencies like theatre’s art (a phone call may interrupt my reading but it’s not going to make the novel’s characters flub their lines). Theatrefictional breakdowns may indeed be moments when, as Rajewsky puts it, “the medial difference between the referencing medium and the medium referred to … becomes apparent in quite an obvious way” (“Border” 59). Mademoiselle Cave, in sole command of her narrative, relays the story of the page’s flub to the younger actress Mademoiselle Star (L’Étoile) in intimate private circumstances; a tale of theatrical volatility and audience tumult is itself expressed in conditions we may associate with novel-reading—a quiet room, the individual recipient lying in bed.3 The upstaging and derailment of Scarron’s own Dom Japhet d’Arménie—testimony to playwrights’ lack of control over what becomes of their work in performance—is itself rendered by this playwrightnovelist with consummate dramaturgical skill and comic timing, in a novel that draws attention to its author’s own technical virtuosity.

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Romancing Theatre But if Scarron conspicuously indulges in the affordances of prose fiction, appearing at times to privilege the conditions and prerogatives of novel-writing and reading, the Roman comique is far from simply distancing itself from theatre, mocking theatre, or casting theatre as a foil for its own novelistic practices and self-conception. A more nuanced analysis might consider how the roman indeed complicates what David Kurnick has called “the antagonistic model of generic evolution that has shaped critical accounts of theater and the novel” (Empty 6): Perhaps inspired by [Mikhail] Bakhtin’s claim that the novel “gets on poorly with other genres,” critics have tended to assume the novel’s expansionist ambition, its desire to absorb or otherwise neutralize the generic antagonist represented by the theater. A guiding hypothesis of much of this criticism has been that when the novel engages theater, it does so homeopathically—to expel it, punish it, or marginalize it. (Empty 6) For all the ways in which theatre and novel have been rivals in differing historical contexts, they have also collaborated, drawn from or emulated one another, catalyzed changes and developments in one another—and theatre-fiction is often a site where this interplay is centre-stage. It would certainly be hard to accuse Scarron of the kind of moral foiling of theatre that, for a scholar like Emily Allen, becomes critical to the self-conception of Victorian novel forms. Allen shows how the figuration of theatre helps establish the moral superiority of their modes of communication by accentuating the private and the interior above theatre’s (mercenary, morally dubious) implication with publics, with externality, and with the body. But actors and theatre in the Roman comique aren’t associated with duplicity, immodesty, or disturbing mutability in the ways they might be in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) or George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Scarron indeed assertively exonerates them: Nowadays justice has, in a fashion, been done to their profession and they are more valued than they used to be. It is also a fact that the theatre is a most innocent form of entertainment that can, at the same time, entertain and instruct the people. Today it has been purged, at least in Paris, of everything that was licentious about it. (177) As Jacques Truchet points out, Scarron’s roman was written in the wake of pro-theatrical works like Pierre Corneille’s Illusion comique (1636), and its second part coincides with the abbé d’Aubignac’s Projet pour le rétablissement du théâtre français (1657). It could be considered both a celebration of theatre’s purification over the preceding fifty years and a participant in its further refinement. Any suggestions that actors are miscreants (Grudge, for instance, contemplates a few schemes and certainly plays some tricks on Ragotin) are offset by the other players’ virtue and nobility, and obscured by the more substantial offences of members of Le Mans society. Actors also emerge in Scarron as interesting characters who lead lives and have perspectives on the world worth writing about. The Roman comique may also present a vivid contrast with the kinds of Georgian and Victorian novels that Ballaster refers to in arguing that theatre, with its materiality and corporeality, is often “called upon as a negative example of a vulgar species of presence that the novel’s aesthetic diplomatically evades” (10). While returning frequently to theatre’s creaky factitiousness, Scarron’s roman does not frame it as an aesthetic deal-breaker or as something to be escaped through novelistic respite. The performance of La Marianne in the opening chapters, for all its makeshift economy, seems to be going well, with no indication of disappointment from the “honourable company presided over by the Sieur de La Rappinière” (9) or of disapprobation from the narrator. The partial and ill-costumed

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troupe seems wondrously able to convey “Marianne’s death and Herod’s despair” with the limited resources at hand. Scarron evokes the practical challenges of theatrical performance (including the doubling or quadrupling of roles) not simply to disparage the artform but to draw more attention to his performers’ skill. Rather than foiling theatre in this respect, the novel might in fact be seen to align with it. If, as Ballaster suggests, a primary affordance of novel-writing in centuries to come is its ability, vis-à-vis theatre, to “manufacture being without making visible its workings” (10), Scarron “never allows the reader to forget that he is pulling the strings” (DeJean 90), emulating rather than simply deriding the factitiousness of the performances his roman refers to. To draw on Allen’s reasoning in Theater Figures, intermedial reference and representation may play important parts in novels’ self-conception not simply by distinguishing novelistic from theatrical codes of representation (thereby elevating novels over their rival) but in demarcating shifts and generic trends among novels themselves. For Scarron, this may entail establishing contrasts with the dominant roman héroïque of his day, known for distancing itself from the stuff of everyday life. From the opening chapter, the Roman comique, in its bid for a new kind of realism, fosters associations with theatre in its very weight and materiality, determinedly bringing the novel-form itself down to earth.4 These aspirations to realism may also be signalled by the contemporaneity of the theatrical conditions and the plays Scarron engages with, which, as DeJean notes, “have a life beyond the printed page of the novel, and Scarron’s readers could have seen them performed by other, ‘real’ actors” (91). More than affirmations of literariness, they are “openings into the realm of personal experience, rude encounters with the outside world” (91). Gillian Russell has similarly observed how such references to real plays and playgoing experiences, in a different (Georgian) context, may be used “to enhance the reality effect” (519) of novels themselves. Scarron’s roman acknowledges that collective reception makes theatre vulnerable to negative elements—the “crooks” and “other human refuse that the ease of stealing coats attracts to the theatre even more than the base humour of the farces used to” (177). But these elements, we are reassured, have been almost entirely cleaned away in France, and they are heavily outweighed by the roman’s celebration of theatre as communal event. The theatrical troupe’s visit to Le Mans, as Truchet emphasizes, “seize[s] the whole town,” creating “a privileged occasion and opportunity for exchanges amidst mundane life” (my translation; 265). “It is not simply a case, for this public, of passively attending theatrical representations”—theatre is extolled as a source of “cultural and social mobilization.” Even audience disruptions and theatrical breakdown aren’t always a bad thing in Scarron—Mademoiselle Cave doesn’t present the derailment of Roger et Bradamante as a strictly deplorable event. Even this production for a refined audience had never really sought a strict illusionism. As Cave explains, though a consummate actor, she “was sticking [her] head out through the opening in the backdrop in order to see and be seen” when the page had flubbed his lines, and she too had “thought [she] would fall down laughing” (153). In fact, “all the actors” were laughing and enjoying this moment, and the event seems to have drawn life from this, as though bonding the performers and their audience more forcefully. The evening of theatre became a memorable success: “Our play was applauded by the entire audience … The Baron de Sigognac and the gentlemen who were his neighbours enjoyed it so much they wanted us to perform again” (154). What might seem a falling-apart actually engenders a positive spirit that transforms spectators: “the servants … often told us they were indebted to us for the good mood of their master, who seemed to them a changed man since he had been humanized by the theatre” (154). Rigorously maintaining the illusion of Roger et Bradamante’s fictional world seems less important than the shared experiences that theatre can offer, even in its moments of collapse. In fact, far from simply enjoying its distance from theatre’s copresence and contingency, the narrative may expressly lament its comparative limitations as prose. Cave interrupts her story of theatre to express regret that it has not reproduced the performance event’s own vibrant comedy and

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conviviality: “I fear … that I’ve done like those who say: I’m going to tell you a story that will have you holding your sides, and then don’t keep their word” (153). Mademoiselle Star, an audience of one who seems not to have been laughing at all, offers a consoling explanation of medial differences: “It is true that it may have seemed funnier to those who witnessed it than to those who hear it narrated; the page’s flub contributes a lot to making it so. Also, the time, the place and the natural inclination we have to join in with other people’s laughter may have given it advantages it can no longer enjoy.” (154) Though able intellectually to appreciate the humour of the described situation, Star basically acknowledges that “you had to be there.” The material and social circumstances, the bodily copresence, the vulnerability of performance to contingency—all of these aspects make the event being narrated so different from Star’s own experience of the narrative. With appropriate comic irony, even in invoking theatre’s capacity to grandiosely flub, Scarron appears to insert an acknowledgement of, indeed an apology for, something lost when performance is narrated rather than experienced (“advantages it can no longer enjoy”). As many chapters in this volume explore, for all the ways in which difficulties or discontent with conditions of theatre-making are both topics within and catalysts for the writing of theatre-fiction, novels often look longingly toward theatre. And for all the ways in which theatre’s reliance on collaborative production and collective reception seem to set it apart from the novel, many novelists appear to yearn for this manyness in their prose.

Theatre-Fiction à Haute Voix But looking back to this seventeenth-century roman can also provoke us to think more complexly about medial differences themselves. Critics of intermediality have sometimes argued that the term risks implying the existence of entirely distinct media, between which an “inter” can occur, and that this mode of thinking runs the risk of essentializing—as though, in our case, “theatre” and “novel” were stable and singular entities, categorically divided. Rajewsky’s assertion that not all specificities and differences between media-systems are strictly conventional (“Borders” 62) may be supported by the Roman comique itself, which, as we have seen, often puts the spotlight on what Rajewsky might call “intermedial gaps” (“Intermediality” 52). But Scarron’s theatre-novel also helps show that some of the value of intermedial thinking consists in productively contesting boundaries. “Intermedial strategies … can indeed be the means through which commonplace ideas of a given medium as well as conventionally drawn borders between, and delimitations of, different media can be apprehended, critically reflected upon, and even displaced and undermined” (Rajewsky, “Border” 63). After all, the Roman comique presents a social culture in which contemporary distinctions between silent, private reading and public, collectively received performance do not decisively hold. Like “The Invisible Mistress,” subsequent inset stories are delivered aloud to assembled groups. In particular, the eleventh chapter evokes a common practice of the time, an elaborate salon at the home of “an honnête homme, one of the most respected in the area” (118). Destiny and the others join erudite discussions about Aristotle, Don Quixote, “plays and those who write them,” and contemporary French literature, before Doña Inezilla presents another of the novel’s stories to an audience. “Everyone took a seat around her, and she began …” (120). What we read on the page (“Every Rogue has his Match”) is also experienced aurally by a group, reliant for its effects on aspects of delivery (in this case, Inezilla’s “marvelous elegance and charm” [138]). Not only were salons common sites for experiencing prose fiction in mid-1600s France. As scholars such as Geoffrey Turnovsky have argued, these occasions for presentation may have been cast as even more crucial ends than subsequent publication, which was, if surprisingly to a contemporary mindset,

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downplayed. The salons and courts were where an author’s most esteemed recipients and respondents could be found, and the support of these groups may have been perceived as more meaningful than having printed pages disseminated to all and sundry. In fact, amidst a culture of “authorial modesty,” the very permanence of published prose could be a social risk for an honnête homme: “in having their works printed, writers who aspired to elite social standing ran the risk of projecting not their intelligence or their ennobling esprit, but an arrogant belief in the enduring value of their self-expression such that it deserved the permanence of ink” (Turnovsky 50). Such an ethos is reflected in the widespread tendency for authors to derogate their published work in prefaces, as illustrated by Scarron himself in his Recueil de quelques vers burlesques (1643), which commences by likening the contained verses to miserable worms (“Aux Vermisseaux”), admonishing them for wanting to be printed at all (“De vouloir que l’on vous imprime” [4]). If there is an indubitable element of performance in such self-effacement (after all, authors including Scarron were often eager for publication because, among other things, they needed the money), this ethos could infuse and affect texts themselves in deeper ways. Turnovsky suggests a range of “established strategies” (51) through which authors would refer back to and elevate the initially oral, copresent event, for instance by root[ing] the work’s publication in the oral social practices of the court and the salon—or more exactly in a representation of those oral practices that conceived the printed work as derivative of and a prop to the urbane culture of conversations and group readings “à haute voix,” and writing as the image of speech. (51) In these respects, Scarron scholarship might benefit from closer consideration of the fact that, before it became a book, the Roman comique likewise was performed à haute voix—by Scarron himself. We might approach his theatre-fiction not simply as printed material but as part of a unique collective and aural event, in which an audience’s bodily copresence with the corporeal reader-performer of his own developing roman would have been an important part of the experience. The Roman comique’s initial audience was not a solitary and silent recipient lying in bed at night, like Mademoiselle Star. The salons that Scarron hosted with his young wife Françoise d’Aubigné (who famously, after his death at fifty, became Madame de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV) were vibrant and interesting enough in themselves to become the subject of literature two centuries later, depicted in Alexandre Dumas’s Twenty Years After (1845). They attracted the most famous figures and “some of the better critics of France” (F. Moore 47). Biographer Paul Morillot conjures the convivial and responsive atmosphere: “The guests would drink, they’d eat even more, but they’d chat more still, and Scarron’s latest poem or the latest chapter from Roman comique would be read” (my translation; 86). Part of what made this “one of the most coveted invitations in Paris” (Houis 278) was the reputedly remarkable delivery of an otherwise unseen and inaccessible celebrity. “This author that one saw neither in the street, the gardens, the theatre, nor anywhere that one met his colleagues, but whose illness confined him always to his home, in his eternal chair, had become the most popular poet in Paris” (my translation; Morillot 55). Morillot is referring to the disease that by the late 1640s had weakened and twisted Scarron’s spine to such an extent that he was contorted and virtually paralyzed. Afflicted with what contemporary scholars believe to have been a kind of rheumatoid arthritis, “the seductive abbé of old had become a miserable being, the body of which inspired as much repulsion as pity.” Tales of the source of this illness (dating back to 1638) indeed rival the escapades Scarron invented for his Roman comique (according to one, after covering himself in chicken feathers for a Le Mans carnival, and having been chased by a mob intent to pluck them away and reveal his nakedness, he’d taken refuge in the River Sarthe and had contracted the disease from its cold waters [Armas 24]). One way or another, this condition played into the writer’s fame. “Scarron was an unheard-of celebrity on account of his malady almost as

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much as his poetry and writings” (my translation; Morillot 55). “The fact that he was seen so little lent him to all the most absurd suppositions,” encouraged, we might add, by the author’s own burlesque poetry on the topic. It is easy to suppose that writing about theatre’s mobility and transformability would have afforded particular imaginative pleasure to someone confined to a bed or chair. But Scarron not only created fictional stages and spectators but also became a performer in a different sense. On one hand, his salons could be considered a kind of workshop for the text, the responses of a live audience contributing to the Roman comique’s development by enabling its author to gauge and modulate its effects, “to determine if the right comic cords had been struck” (F. Moore 48). But with Turnovsky’s arguments in mind, the salon performances may have amounted to more for Scarron than just rehearsals for publication. It is understandable that he might have sought a script suited to the occasion, one that allowed him to make the most of his performance abilities and the unique scene of that performance. Several formal and stylistic features of the novel, including the preponderance of what DeJean calls “burla scenes” (78)—“tiny theatrical enclaves” or “mini-plays” (79)—may suggest writing conscious of an initial performance context. Scarron’s audiences were not likely so recalcitrant as Ragotin’s, but he was still wise to apportion his fiction into manageable and internally well-structured segments for live delivery. Aspects of this delivery—à haute voix—may in fact be recalled by the style of the text, whose author-narrator, in Jolene Vos-Camy’s words, “put[s] himself on the narrative stage as a type of spectacle,” “assum[ing] a theatrical aspect by taking the stage, so to speak, with an expectation of audience reaction” (57). While telling of the performance practices and conditions of Destiny’s theatre troupe, the roman may also be conjuring those of its own delivery, perhaps especially through a sense of spontaneity and immediacy that critics such as Elizabeth Theobald have likened to a kind of “improvisational theatre” (30). Theobald refers to what David Charles calls “improvisatory time”: an illusion of taking place “in real time: the seconds ticking on a spectator’s wristwatch are completely synonymous with those on the performer’s” (qtd. in Theobald 30; emphasis in original), as they are in both theatre and salons. Features that critics may describe generally as contributing to the “theatricality” of Scarron’s writing might be understood in relation to actual and more specific performance contexts. And what has often been theorized as a self-conscious, obtrusive mode of narration might be further explored as a complex intermedial instance of what Ballaster calls the author’s “unconcealment and withdrawal” (6): “the author is a ‘presence-effect’ whose effectiveness rests on necessary withdrawal from ‘full’ visibility or total presence (such as is offered in the moment of heightened sense afforded by the actor or character)” (6).5 “The invalid’s room,” writes Morillot, “had become, inconceivably, a popular salon” (my translation; 86), and within this setting, Frederick Moore encourages us to conceive Scarron himself as an actor: not the type of actor who could step on the tréteau himself and declaim, but nonetheless [one] of no mean histrionic ability in his own right, within the restricted and inimitable sphere of the little chair to which he was confined. Perhaps he was not able to make all the necessary gestures, but he had an uncanny sense as to how they should be made because of the tremendous amount of his previous training in stagecraft. (47) Moore is using his imagination here, but it is tempting to join him in envisioning the Roman comique as performed, and as enhanced and complicated by elements of its delivery—the social environment, the performer’s unique persona, the audience’s awareness of his difficulties as well as his enjoyment in relaying these fictions, the disparities between the tragic dimensions of the performer’s condition and the comedy and often joyful tone of described events. Similar imaginative dimensions may in fact have been part of the Roman comique’s experience for seventeenth-century French readers. The fame of

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Scarron and his salons (“jamais auteur ne fut plus connu de ses lecteurs” [Morillot 55]), the widespread enigma of his corporeal condition, combined with paratextual, stylistic, and formal features of the text itself, may well have provoked the image and feeling of an initially copresent performance, even for those experiencing the book in private. Neither the performers nor the audiences of works like the Roman comique are present with us in the ways that they would be in a theatre space or other performance setting. This tangible absence may itself be an ironically defining element of theatre-fiction, a paradoxical form which engages through a two-dimensional, permanent, written medium with aural, material, corporeal, and evanescent elements of theatre’s artforms and medial conditions. Like Don Carlos’s Invisible Mistress, however, what is evoked rather than directly presented may take on a complex and forceful life in the mind—and ironically, there are ways in which his unseen interlocutor discloses even more of herself through this unusual discourse. Of course, what Don Carlos most desires, believing himself in love with two different people, is not to have to choose between them, to somehow have the two in the one—an ambition that Scarron’s inset tale will fantastically realize. We might consider theatre-fiction itself as a kind of comic romance circulating around, and animated by, this seemingly impossible ambition.

Notes 1 Keeping in mind that Scarron himself adapted Spanish works for the stage (his play Dom Japhet d’Arménie, for instance, is based on Castillo Solórzano’s El Marqués del Cigarral [Sorkin 32]), it is not impossible that the Roman comique’s author had also contemplated adapting “The Invisible Mistress” before second-guessing the idea, only to turn this questioning itself to fictional purpose. Umbilical links of this kind abound in theatre-fiction. 2 These considerations are often expressly foregrounded in theatre-fiction itself: “What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains?” asks Gabriel Nash in Henry James’s The Tragic Muse: “What crudity compared with what the novelist does!” (51). 3 As David Kurnick puts it, “Published literary prose, of course, by definition addresses itself to a multitudinous audience. But the fantasy that it addresses each member of this unthinkably large audience singly is part of the effect of private reading” (“Stages” 99–100). 4 One of the peculiar features of Scarron’s text is its integration of and oscillation between different modes and styles. For Truchet, it operates in three quite distinctive registers: the burlesque, the realist, and the roman héroïque (259). For Steven Moore, it is “not so much a repudiation” of the roman héroïque “as a successful attempt to streamline and modernize it, to modulate from fanciful romance to realistic novel” (218). 5 It is worth emphasizing that these kinds of dynamics both do and do not make the Roman comique “like theatre.” After all, characteristic of much theatre in Scarron’s time is that it is not under the sway of a narratorial consciousness like novels may be. What Peter Szondi calls “absolute Drama,” marked by the “absolute dominance of dialogue” (8) (and arising par excellence in seventeenth-century France), is defined by the freedom from anything resembling Scarron’s intrusive voice and overt string-pulling tendencies: “The dramatist is absent from the Drama. He does not speak; he institutes discussion … . All the lines spoken in the Drama are dis-closures. They are spoken in context and remain there. They should in no way be perceived as coming from the author” (8). David Kurnick’s contention that “theatrical writing is by definition committed to the absence of a narrative voice” (Empty 2) may seem contestable in light of the many plays (referred to by Kathleen George as “winter’s tales”) that integrate novelistic narration and firstperson perspectives. But ironically, several of the features that critics of the Roman comique have described as “theatrical”—including an author-narrator’s obtrusive presence—are things it conspicuously doesn’t share with Scarron’s actual plays or with the neoclassical drama; and inversely, some features most associated with playwriting, like dialogue, are peculiarly lacking or subordinated in the Roman comique, whose narrator tends (to borrow Kurnick’s phrase) to “own the telling” (“Stages” 97), speaking on behalf of his characters rather than giving the stage over to them. Here again, close consideration of formal and medial specificities may deepen the analysis. We might consider, for instance, how theatre-fiction enables novelists to engage differently with theatre than they could do through a play.

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Works Cited Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2004. Armas, Frederick A. de. Paul Scarron. Twayne, 1972. Ballaster, Ros. Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Boydell, 2020. Davies, Robertson. A Voice from the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading. Rosetta Books, 1960. DeJean, Joan E. Scarron’s Roman comique: A Comedy of the Novel, a Novel of Comedy. Peter Lang, 1977. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. Translated by Minou Arjomand, edited by Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse, Routledge, 2014. George, Kathleen. Winter’s Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage. U of Delaware P, 2005. Harris, Jonathan Gil, and Natasha Korda. “Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties.” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 1–32. Houis, Jacques. “Paul Scarron’s Life and Works.” The Comic Romance, by Paul Scarron, translated by Jacques Houis, Alma Classics, 2012, pp. 273–281. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. 1890. Penguin Books, 1978. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. Kurnick, David. “Stages: Theatre and the Politics of Style in Great Expectations.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 1, 2013, pp. 94–111. Moore, Frederick W. The Drama of Paul Scarron. Yale University, PhD Dissertation, 1956. Moore, Steven. The Novel: An Alternative History. Bloomsbury, 2013. Morillot, Paul. Scarron: Étude biographique et littéraire. H. Lecène et H. Oudin, 1888. Parish, Richard. Scarron: Le Roman comique. Grant & Cutler, 1999. Phelps, Naomi. The Queen’s Invalid: A Biography of Paul Scarron. Johns Hopkins P, 1951. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality.” Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Ellström, Palgrave, 2010, pp. 51–68. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intérmedialités, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 43–64. Russell, Gillian. “The Novel and the Stage.” Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 2, English and British Fiction 1750–1820, edited by Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 513–529. Scarron, Paul. The Comic Romance. Translated by Jacques Houis, Alma Classics, 2012. Scarron, Paul. Recueil de quelques vers burlesques. T. Quinet, 1643. Sorkin, Max. Paul Scarron’s Adaptations of the Comedia. New York UP, 1938. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. U of California P, 1985. Szondi, Peter. Theory of the Modern Drama. Translated by Michael Hays, Polity Press, 1987. Theobald, Anne L. Theatrical Characteristics in Sorel’s Histoires Comiques. University of Wisconsin-Madison, PhD Dissertation, 2011. Truchet, Jacques. “Le ‘Roman comique’ de Scarron et L’Univers Théatral.” Dramaturgie et Société: Rapports entre l’œuvre théâtrale, son interprétation et son public aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, edited by Jean Jacquot, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1967, pp. 259–266. Turnovsky, Geoffrey. The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime. U of Pennsylvania P, 2011. Vos-Camy, Jolene E. The Art of the Novel through Theatrical Lenses: Paul Scarron’s Roman Comique. Indiana University, PhD Dissertation, 2000.

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PART I

Theatre-Fictional Histories and Hauntings

1 THEATRE-FICTION-HISTORY The Personal and Professional Industry of Theatre in Rojas’s El viaje entretenido1 Lisa Jackson-Schebetta

Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, actor and aspiring playwright-author, began his career in the Spanish theatre in 1595.2 Like so many of his generation, Rojas had been a soldier and a war captive before pursuing the life of a farándula.3 By 1598, he had held at least three year-long contracts with three separate companies, those of Angulo el Malo, an autor known as Gómez, and the renowned Nicolás de los Ríos (Ressot 15). In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theatre history, these are the kinds of traces actors leave: contracts with companies or autores (many of whom we know only by partial, contradictory, or inconclusive names), incomplete records of accounts and monies paid or owed, and perhaps a mention in print by a celebrated playwright, even Lope de Vega or Calderón de la Barca. Rojas’s career and its documentary record would be of little note, were it not for the fact that he took an authorial turn, penning not plays but rather a 700-page book entitled El viaje entretenido, in which three of the four main characters were based on some of the most well-known actors (including Ríos) of his time. Neither Lope nor Calderón may have ever mentioned Rojas, but Lope’s friends wrote dedications in the book, and dozens of theatre artists (from famous actresses to dance masters to props artisans) made their appearance in its pages. The book enjoyed multiple reprints. Its success, it seems, prompted Rojas to leave the theatre for a career as a writer. Both the content and form of El viaje present difficulties for the theatre historian. The book switches between first-person account, dialogue, and recitation. At least half of the considerable tome is taken up by Rojas’s original loas and another quarter by Rojas’s nearly verbatim re-printing of well-known published accounts and stories of Spanish history and classical myth.4 As such, the book alternates between verse and prose, narrative and script, and copied and original text with hardly, as El viaje scholar Jean-Pierre Ressot points out, any organizing structure at all (24). Most vexing is how difficult it is to parse the stories of theatre life as either fact or fiction. Some details can be verified, some are clearly invented, and many are unknowable either way. Yet El viaje is also quite enticing to the theatre historian: a documentary record runs through the entire piece. That is, in addition to the four actors who serve as main characters, El viaje contains a litany of references to theatre practitioners contemporary to Rojas. This archive of names, integrated into the work with little comment from Rojas, is rife with figures unknown to contemporary historians but certainly familiar to Rojas’s readers: a kind of daily stew of people in the theatre and a rare accounting of the work-a-day practitioners of the stage. Limited scholarly engagement with El viaje stems at least in part from its mongrel form unfit even for the category of “miscellany.”5 When El viaje is considered as a documentary, drama, or novel (and let us recall that in 1603 the idea of “a novel” was newly emerging), the work continually slips away

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-4

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from the historian, for it is none and all of these things at once. I propose that El viaje might be more productively approached by the theatre historian as a work of theatre-fiction. Graham Wolfe has described theatre-fiction as an intermedial genre, working across and between theatre practice and fiction writing, while also “emerging from amidst theatre” and “engag[ing] in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry” (2). Situating El viaje as theatre-fiction refigures the work away from the circuitous and iterative evaluations of its literary and documentary merits. Considered as theatre-fiction, El viaje offers glimpses of how Rojas and his colleagues engaged with both the professional and interpersonal industry (or, business) of theatre. The three men Rojas travels alongside in the book were well-known both to a theatre-going public and to a public newly hungry for printed theatrical material. They were also Rojas’s professional colleagues and his personal friends as well. The book provided readers with an intimacy in print that they could not obtain from the stage but nevertheless desired.6 As such, El viaje offers evidence for the most elusive of theatre histories in the period: those of the actors, their daily lives, and the ways both might have circulated in the public’s imagination. Positioning El viaje as theatre-fiction expands the utility of the category of theatre-fiction itself to times, places, and forms further afield than have yet been considered. Late eminent theatre historian Thomas Postlewait asserts that every historical study “represents a dialogue between documents and historian, between past discourses and present ones” (254). In the following pages, I model a dialogue with both the documentary record contained within El viaje and its fictionalized accounts of actors in order to illuminate actor-actor and actor-public interactions off the stage, and outside of the theatre performance. In particular, I am interested in traces of actor friendships, as well as public tastes for off-stage information about actors. I will offer an overview of the book and the circumstances of its first printing before turning to a brief discussion of the ways in which El viaje has served historians of Spanish Golden Age theatre. I will then explore some additional specifics of the book, illuminating how El viaje, when considered as theatre-fiction, provides new insight into actors’ lives, both on and offstage. Through my dialogue with El viaje, I engage with theatre-fiction’s potential as an intermedial cipher operating between and across not only theatre and fiction, but history as well.

Madrid, October 1603: Publics and Personas (I) Though scholars generally hold that it is difficult to confirm exactly when the first professional actors emerged in Spain, Lope de Rueda is a key figure in that history. By the early 1540s, Rueda was well known as a dramatist and an actor and his company performed regularly for pay for nearly three decades. After his death, and as the professional theatre grew, Rueda was “remembered for the pleasure that his performances had given, and as the first professional actor-manager in Spain,” a kind of origin point for dramatists and autores alike, including Miguel de Cervantes, who claimed to have seen Rueda perform (Shergold 162). The aesthetics and repertoire of Rueda’s company, as described by Juan Rufo (1596), Rojas (1603, in El Viaje), and Cervantes (1615), seem to have been simple and crude, lacking a wide variety of plays and players, and without the benefit of dedicated theatre spaces. By the 1560s, however, playwrights, companies, and actors had multiplied, as had audiences. Companies often hired private courtyards and built temporary stages in order to create gathering spaces for their work and their audiences. In Madrid, the cofradías, charitable organizations associated with hospitals, began to sponsor plays in order to raise funds for their work. The arrangement provided benefits for charities, theatre-makers, and audiences alike, and resulted in the first purpose-built theatre in Madrid in 1579, the Corral de la Cruz. Additional corrales in Madrid and in other major cities followed, coinciding with a flourishing of literature, drama, art, and poetry; increased wealth, stability, and political prowess for the nation; growing cities and burgeoning demand for leisure activities and entertainment; and a rapidly developing market economy.

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Thus, when Rojas embarked on his theatre career, the public theatre season in Spain was robust, running annually from Easter to Lent. Most major cities, including the seat of the court at Valladolid, boasted active corrales and enthusiastic theatre-going publics. During Lent, no plays were performed. The corrales hosted “puppets, acrobats, and conjurers,” and theatre workers prepared for the coming season (Shergold 543). The majority of practitioners in Spain traveled to Madrid to conduct business. Actors made contracts with directors, playwrights sold comedías to companies, and directors jockeyed for the coveted Corpus Christi contracts.7 At Easter, the new season of theatre began and ran until the Corpus Christi period, when performances were curated or curtailed per contracts made during Lent. At the end of the Corpus Christi performances, the corrales opened broadly again. By summer, the most popular companies left Madrid for engagements in more temperate climates in other parts of Spain (and some traveled abroad). The season continued through Carnival (Shergold 541–3). Concurrent to the public theatre season, companies favored by the king could be summoned to give performances—ranging from private affairs to large-scale diplomatic events—at court. By 1600, dozens of theatre companies operated throughout Spain. That year, Rojas held a contract with a company run by Villegas before returning to the company of Ríos in 1601, a sound career choice and opportunity, given that Ríos was among the most celebrated autores in Spain at the time, favored in corral and court alike. In 1602, Rojas joined the company of Miguel Ramírez (former Ríos actor) for the season. In 1603, the Council of Castile ordered that a mere eight companies would be granted permission to perform in the lucrative corrales of major cities, and Ríos’s company was among those chosen for a license. This would seem bad luck for Rojas, given that he had left the Ríos company the year before, except for the fact that Rojas had by 1603 committed to other ventures. Francisco de Robles, among the most respected printers in Madrid, published El viaje entretenido in October 1603, in the middle of the public theatre season, just in time for the licensed compañías—having left the city during the torrid summer months—to return to eager audiences. El viaje entretenido featured none other than Ríos, along with Rojas, Ramírez, and Agustín Solano (another former Ríos company member), as main characters. What a delight it must have been for theatre-going publics to access Ríos through both his public performances in the corrales of their city and in print. The four sections of El viaje depict Rojas, Ríos, Solano, and Ramírez as a travelling theatre troupe, making their way from Sevilla to Valladolid, via Granada, Toledo and Segovia. The four men had worked together in multiple iterations since at least 1599, but it is unlikely they ever traveled together in the manner depicted in El viaje, either in terms of geography or as a four-person company. By 1601, Ríos’s company was far better established than the itinerant and picaresque band represented in El viaje. Similarly, though the four main characters were incarnations of real-life actors, El viaje remains a mix of genre, subject and form, threaded through with both facts from real life and fictional experiences. Rojas acknowledged the hybridity of the book in his own introductions to both “el vulgo/the public” (63) and “el lector/the reader” (71), noting as well the reflection of his own winding path, from picaro, to soldier to religious devotee to actor. That is, though Rojas included what we know are factual accounts of theatre life, he also invented exchanges between the men, crafted fictitious performances, and concocted exaggerated (as well as false) stories of the men’s lives. Early on in the book, Ramírez complains that the journey is going to be long, and they must trade stories to pass the time (Rojas 80). While clearly a clever conceit through which Rojas is able to justify the disparate elements (histories, plays, recitations) of his unwieldy tome, Ramírez’s exhortation and the dialogic exchange that follows invites the reader to consider these interactions as real conversations that happened, or could have happened. Rojas includes dialogue between the four men, in which they comment on fellow actors, as well as activities, itineraries, and cities. Solano at one point declares that “the past Saturday” he spent at the Alhambra was among the most pleasing experiences he has ever had (Rojas 189). Such comments are peppered throughout the men’s dialogues and used to launch

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into historical discourse rather than details of personal antics. Yet, the hint of the actor’s predilections and preferences nonetheless remain, despite an absence of details about what happened at the Alhambra. At times, the men collectively consider which material to perform, for which audiences, in which cities, and at which events. Or, they evaluate with one another the efficacy of one of their choices, or the choices of a fellow company. In these instances, the reader most likely experiences Rojas’s own opinions and tastes rather than verbatim conversations—yet, the information is communicated through the voices of Ramírez, Ríos, and Solano, inviting the reader to imagine that the conversation may have indeed happened, or could have, and could serve as an example of the ways these four men relate to one another, a glimpse into private friendships underpinning professional associations. More enticing still, Rojas includes highly comic stories involving the famous actors. Ríos and Solano, for example, recount a long, winding series of comic antics borne of their experience as vagabond players, before their company employment. When this would have taken place, if it occurred at all (which seems dubious, at best), Rojas does not disclose, but the characters of Ríos and Solano recount how they employed disguises and trickery, endured narrow escapes (including the use of ropes made from stolen bed sheets), and fell into ridiculous situations of mistaken identities. The story also lampoons theatre life. At one point in the recounted adventure, Ríos forgets his prop knife and has to use his beard to enact a play’s climatic murder scene. At another point, Solano (playing Lazarus, a part given to him by a proper company), fails to make his entrance at “Arise, Lazarus!” because he has stolen away with his costume, leaving the tomb empty (Rojas 132–7).8 Shergold justifies this story as one of El Viaje’s picaresque attributes (“low life, squalor, thieving, and sharpness of wits” [511]), and wonders at what Ríos and Solano might have thought of the story, whether they were “flattered” or considered it an “advertisement of their name and fame” (512). I ask an additional question: how might the reading public have received the information? The interactions, anecdotes and discussions throughout El viaje are all subject to a kind of authorial sleight of hand in which Rojas refuses to name, and it remains impossible to know, which interactions and anecdotes are fact and which are fiction, an element of El viaje that may well have contributed to its success. Rojas’s readers would have known the men, but not the veracity of the journey. Did they feel they were obtaining truth, gossip, or something in between?9 That is, whether the prop knife story of Ríos is true or not, would it not have been delightful to consider, whether enacted by Ríos or another actor, as a possible event? And, were its veracity firmly in doubt, does the anecdote not invite the reader to laugh alongside Ríos, in a kind of amiable and intimate familiarity, distinct from onstage performances, a kind of undoing of the aura of celebrity that makes the figure of Ríos all the more available?

El Viaje and its Histories Rojas’s brief career in the theatre would be unremarkable, and Rojas himself negligible, his scant biographical details indistinct from dozens of other actors of the time, were it not for the small yet significant position El viaje has secured among scholars of the Spanish Golden Age Theatre. Scholars have turned to El viaje for three main reasons: to puzzle over its quality as a piece of literature, to make reference to Rojas’s account of Lope de Rueda’s theatre, or to draw on Rojas’s description (spoken by Solano) of the kinds of theatre companies working in early seventeenth-century Spain. For literary scholars, the book presents myriad difficulties. Given not only its combination of fact and fiction, but also its imbalanced mix of form and genre, El viaje has generally been roundly dismissed as a work of quality, paling in comparison to the outpouring of authors in the period. Despite its commercial success, Rojas’s El viaje has not lent itself to either extended literary analysis nor translations into other languages. Historians of the Spanish stage, in contrast, turn to El viaje consistently, but mainly for two reasons: for Rojas’s description of Rueda and Solano’s catalogue of companies.

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In book one of El viaje, Rojas prints a loa of his own authorship detailing his version of the history of the Spanish stage. It is within this loa that Rojas’s description of Rueda resides, and it is considered by scholars, as Shergold details, to be one of the three most important references to Rueda from the period, the other two contributed by Cervantes and Rufo, as noted. All three men’s descriptions share certain aspects. All three remark on the comparatively simple style and aesthetics of Rueda’s time and all three credit Rueda with establishing structural conventions of the comedía. Rojas includes two particular details. First, he says that Rueda always performed with a guitar, “mal templada y sin cuerdas” (“poorly tuned and missing strings”; my trans.; 151). Rojas also claims that each performance of Rueda and his company ended with a dance by the “bobo” (“fool”; my trans.; 151). These two details remain uncorroborated in the other accounts of Rueda. Rufo and Cervantes both remark on the inadequacy of Rueda’s instruments, but Rufo claims Rueda used only a “lute and a vihuela” while Cervantes claims there was no guitar to accompany the ballads. Shergold points out that all three men are likely wrong, as accounts show that Rueda paid a skilled musician, and paid him well (Shergold 165–6). Rojas’s details may possibly jest at the theatre of Rueda, extolling Rueda’s great contributions while also situating him with the comic business of sub-par musical accompaniment and the low-brow antics of a clown. The historian is left to ponder whether these details represent another site of Rojas’s mezcla of fact and fiction, or a historical detail to which only he had access. The same kind of unknowability attends the second most cited passage from El viaje: that of the eight companies, also included in book one. The character of Solano details in the course of about a thousand words the number of actors (and their genders and ages), performance materials, number of costumes, and general regard for each of eight kinds of companies, from the single strolling player to the full, licensed compañía (Rojas 159–62). The catalogue is the single most comprehensive description of theatre companies in existence from the time period. As such, it has been consistently cited and utilized by the earliest Spanish and English language histories of the Spanish Golden Age stage (Cotarelo y Mori, Rennert), the most well-known/authoritative (Shergold, Varey, and Díez Borque), and the more recent (Delgado, Gies, McKendrick). The catalogue of companies, though amply parsed by scholars, remains historiographically fraught. The exact details, including the names of the types of companies, cannot be corroborated in additional sources in their entirety, but other aspects of El viaje’s descriptions of actor lives (such as rehearsal schedules and performance seasons) have been echoed in additional primary sources.10 As such, and given that Rojas was himself an actor, the catalogue is generally agreed upon as probable in its veracity (as opposed to the less reliable categories of plausible or possible) by historians. But there is yet more to ask of these passages. If we consider them as residing within a work of theatre-fiction, and in close relationship to the text as a whole, what else might they reveal about the history of the Spanish stage, and, in particular, its actors? And, if theatre-fiction is informed and contoured by the business of theatre, does it not, in turn, play a part in the business of theatre? In the field of theatre history, documentary records are sparse at best.11 The ephemeral, live event of theatre leaves precious little, and always already partial, documentation behind. There may be a script, but a script is only a blueprint of (or for) a performance. There may be ledgers of budgets and expenses, perhaps a special prop or costume piece (presuming it is not repurposed), or playbills (but playbills did not exist in Spain until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and what we know as theatre reviews came much, much later). From a design perspective, we may have sketches. For the former, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scenic and costume elements were designed for the court performances primarily, not the public theatres. Throughout Spain, public theatres hosted multiple companies, and the companies, playing on bare stages, had to travel with their own stock costumes and props. Always there are audience members, each person carrying a distinct impression, experience, and memory; often we have edicts, laws, prohibitions, lawsuits, marriage licenses, wills,

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etc., that point to broad cultural, political, and social contexts, as well as personal lives, but even these are not only what they seem, nor reliably legible. Historians of any field must contend with and account for absences in the archive. The theatre historian lives and breathes absence, for it is an enduring trait of theatre practice itself, acutely so in relation to actors.12 Neither El viaje’s documentary record of theatre practitioners, nor its fictional accounts of real actors, has been mined in earnest for historical insights. Though Ressot, in his definitive, annotated version of El viaje, thoroughly glosses the references to living and working comediantes throughout the text, he offers little interpretation of the documentary record on its own or in relation to El viaje.13 Shergold raises curiosities about the response Ríos might have had to one of Rojas’s more compromising (and presumably?) fictionalized accounts of Ríos, but offers no conjecture in response to his own query. Ressot concludes that parsing either the literary value or the factual veracity of El viaje is to miss the value of the book itself. The book, Ressot contends, is stolidly of the middle class, a kind of low brow, or pulp, entertainment tome, distinct from and over-shadowed by the well-established great works of the early sixteenth century (Cervantes’s Don Quixote was published first in 1605), but valuable nonetheless for the insight it provides into the tastes of low-middle brow consumers in Spain in the early 1600s (36). Adding to Ressot’s line of thinking, El viaje—as theatre-fiction—allows the historian to embrace the work as Ressot suggests, while simultaneously adding to our understanding of the “practice and industry” of theatre, including actor relationships and theatre’s intersections with both its public and the printing press. El viaje’s form attests to the appetite of not only a public, but, specifically, a theatre-going public whose burgeoning desire for plays in print was accompanied by an appetite for factual and fictionalized accounts of the actors of their day. Considering El viaje from this point of view lends an additional perspective to the famous passage, spoken by Solano, describing the eight kinds of Spanish theatre companies, all different in terms of players, costumes, repertoire and compensation: bululú, ñaque, gangarilla, cambaleo, garnacha, bojiganga, farándula y compañia. On the details of this passage, widely quoted by historians, I will not here spend much time. I will, rather, offer brief conjecture of additional meanings we might glean from the passage. The eighth type of troupe, per Solano, is the compañia: the largest, best paid, and with the most comedías. This information carries a different veneer in 1603, as compañía had taken on a new meaning: licenses had just been granted and, as noted above, Ríos held one. Solano pokes fun at the compañia, noting that they work harder than any other, as they attempt to meet the demands of their audiences, a fact (per Solano) that Ríos and Ramírez “saben harto” (“know all too well”; my trans.; Rojas 162). We see once again the ways in which an actor teases his compatriots—an action-affect that is extended later in El viaje when Solano offers the aforementioned account of the comic (and nigh scandalous) antics of him and Ríos in their early career, as a ñaque, or company of two male actors. Might the public have missed Ríos, Ramirez, and Solano—a formidable trio they would have been!—on stage with one another, from seasons past? Or, might the public have missed their actors performing provocative material on stage? In 1600, upon the reopening of the theatres after a brief closure from 1598 to 1599, the crown prohibited material of a religious nature on stage (Shergold 517). Solano’s story offers a vision of Ríos performing a lampoon of Christ rising from the tomb, banned from the corrales, but not from the pages of theatre-fiction. The tastes of El viaje’s readership, it seems, could be quite layered. El viaje’s first edition would have been in circulation in Madrid throughout the Fall of 1603, the height of the return of the most popular companies to Madrid as well as the latter half of the theatre season. The audience for the book may have been eager to see their favorite companies return to the stage, or may have been eager for new theatrical material—and not necessarily in play or performance form. El viaje provides both: popular companies and novel entertainment. Through

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the pages of El viaje, a reader could interact with, laugh at, and even imagine themselves traveling alongside some of the greatest actors of their time. Rojas’s fictionalized accounts of these players, mixed with factual narrative about theatre more broadly, made Ríos, Ramírez, and Solano both more familiar and new.14

Madrid 1603: Personas and Publics (II) From its dedicatory pages, to its main characters, and through three of its four parts, El viaje is saturated with the industry of theatre (its business and practice). First, in terms of the introductory material, two friends of Lope de Vega’s write lauds for Rojas’s work. We know from sources other than El viaje that Ríos premiered a number of works by Lope, and that Lope extolled Ríos’s skills as an actor in multiple writings. It seems possible, thus, that Rojas knew these men, as well, and moved in more famous circles than his brief career may indicate; or, perhaps, Ríos prevailed upon his friends, or friends of friends, to supply the dedications. We may not know for certain, but the possible constellation of relationships provides clues as to the ways in which these men moved through one another’s lives. Rojas was not working with Ríos in the 1602–3 season. In 1602, as noted, Ramírez left the Ríos company, formed his own company, and hired Rojas likely for the season, from February 1602 through Shrovetide 1603. As noted above, Ríos was granted one of only eight compañía licenses in 1603, and neither Ramírez nor Rojas held contracts with Ríos, as far as we can tell. This information might invite the historian to consider the possibility of resentment or disagreement between Rojas and Ríos, and the comic stories of Ríos (recall how he used his costume beard in place of a weapon) in El viaje written with a whiff of vitriol—yet we know from legal records that both Rojas and Ramírez stood as two of the three witnesses at Ríos’s wedding in April 1603. Thus, we see the “business of theatre” and its relationships extend again to personal matters. Further, Rojas did not re-contract with any company in 1603. It is likely he was shopping his manuscript to publishers, as he was cleared to do so by the censor in May of that year. In addition to dedications from Lope de Vega’s colleagues, the introductory material to the manuscript also contains lauds from multiple poets and writers, as well as from Juana Vázquez and María de los Ángeles, celebrated actrices of the moment, the first of whom Rojas describes as a member of the Ríos company in book three of El viaje.15 Again, we see a constellation of relationships. Introductory accolades were common at the time, but did Vázquez and Ángeles write their dedications to help themselves, to aid Rojas, or because of some obligation to Ríos, Solano or Ramírez? We may not ever know the exact sequence of events. As Postlewait reminds us, “We may not be able to enter an agent’s mind, but we can enter the discourse in which (and with which) the agent thinks” (237). Through El viaje’s discourses and practices, we can ascertain some sense of how actor relationships extended beyond theatre careers and into personal lives, through career transitions, and with what we might term sustained affection. The reader in 1603 Spain would have experienced El viaje through the lens of its introductory material as legal (printed with permission from the court and its censor), worthwhile or legitimate (thanks to the notable testimonies), and entertaining (according to Rojas’s introduction to the public, in which he promises a mix of fact and fiction, but—notably—does not promise to tell which is which). I have situated the introductory material as part and parcel of the business of theatre, both professional and interpersonal. Continuing in that vein, I, as reader-historian, cannot but experience the book, its author, and its characters and their real-life counterparts in active constellation with a complex milieu of theatre practitioners, a milieu referenced in the book itself. Book one of El viaje contains an extensive register of theatre-practitioners. The ways in which the theatre-makers are discussed vary widely. For example, the character of Rojas at times claims he heard loas from other companies and offers his opinions on the quality of the loas and the skills of the

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companies (79). The men offer their take on authors, discussing for example how “Navarro” of Toledo is forgotten but played an important part in “inventing” the theatre as the four men know it (158). At still other moments, Rojas makes exclamations in his loas such as Quien duda a Monzón, que tantas veces llamastes salga Monzón, Monzón salga. (Who can question [the skill] of Monzón, how many times have you called out we want Monzón, Monzón come out. [my trans.; 107]) These textual callouts offer information about Rojas’s fellow theatre-makers, while simultaneously hailing the reading public into a shared imaginary of theatre-going and, often, a kind of theatre fandom. In book one of El viaje Rojas mentions fifty-one theatre practitioners, in addition to himself, Ríos, Ramírez, and Solano. Many of these references are from Rojas’s “Loa de La Comedía,” his version of the history of the Spanish theatre—but also a snapshot of his contemporary theatre world. 1 Company of Gómez, referenced and described as a company “muy humilde (“very humble”; my trans.); no other notice or record of company exists (79) 2 Alonso de Cisneros, director of his own company in 1578 successful in Seville and Madrid through the early 1600s (80) 3 Bartolomé Calvo de Arce, worked with Ríos from 1601 to 1609 (81) 4 Melchior de León, managed his own company from 1586 (81) 5 Fabián de Ribera, actor with the company Jerónimo Velázquez, 1584–90 (82) 6 Gaspar por los Reyes, part of the Compañía Español with Diego de Rojas and Pedro Rodriguez, in 1602 (83) 7 Herrera, perhaps Melchior de Herrera who had his own company in 1561 in Toledo (83) 8 Juan de Vergara de Getafa, autor y director of his own company in 1600 (105) 9 Ana Muñoz, successful actress, wife of Antonio de Villegas, directed his company after his death in 1613 (107) 10 Luis de Monzón, dance master for Corpus Christi celebrations in Madrid in 1603, 1606, 1608–12; had his own company in 1614 (107) 11 Melchior de San Miguel, about whom we have no other information (108) 12 Cristóbal, a known galán/leading man of the period, actor with the company Antonio del Prado (108) 13 “Juanico”—untraceable but mentioned with Cristóbal, above (108) 14 “Honrada compañía de Martinazos,” no other reference survives (151) 15 Diego Berrio, or Gonzalo Mateo de Berrio (152) 16 Diego de Vera—either an actor, autor, or the owner of the Seville corral, Huerta de la Alcoba (156) 17 Juan de Grajales, who Rojas claims is an autor but whose surviving archive notes him as an actor, only (157) 18 Baltasar de Mesa, no additional information (157)

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19 “Castro,” which could refer to an actor who belonged to the Rodrigo Osorio company, from 1588 onwards, with his wife (157) 20 Baltasar de Carvajal, no additional information (158) 21 Andés de Claramonte y Corroy, actor and autor (158) 22 Cosme de Oviedo, who Rennert notes participated in Corpus Christi in Seville in 1561 and 1582. Ríos, in El Viaje, credits Oviedo as being the first to use playbills, but this has not been verified in additional sources (158)16 In addition to the twenty-two theatre practitioners listed above, all contemporary or near contemporary to himself, Rojas references twenty-nine authors of comedías, some of whom we know through mentions made by Cervantes and Lope, others through their small or considerable publication record, and still others about whom no information has survived (Rojas 152–8). In book two of El viaje, the men make reference to and/or discuss ten more contemporary theatre practitioners, in addition to the re-appearance of Bautista, Herrera, Navarro, Cisneros, and Angulo (Rojas 284). Rojas references the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Juan Correa, actor, no additional information (284) Jerónimo Velázquez, celebrated company director, whose career began in 1568 (284) Tomás de la Fuente, author (284) Juan de Alcocer, actor with Ríos and Rojas, and later director of his own company (284) Gabriel de la Torre, director and later involved in supplying actors with accesoríos/props (284) Nobles, actor, referenced only in El Viaje (284) Navarrico, actor, referenced only in El Viaje (284) Bartolomé López de Quirós, company director (284) Miguel Ruiz, actor with Velázquez, with his first wife, Ana (1590). Later, he joined the company of Gaspar de Porres (1604, 1605) with his second wife, the famous Baltasara de los Reyes (284) 10 Marcos Ramírez, only noted in El Viaje (285) The men catalogue many of these theatre-makers based on where they are from, with Ríos insisting that the best actors and writers come from Toledo (284). The who’s who of the 1603 theatre world is remarkable for its breadth, both in terms of numbers of referenced theatre practitioners and in terms of diversity. Thinking as a present-day theatre-maker and historian, I would expect actors and authors, along with company directors, but Rojas also includes dance masters, props makers, and corral owners. For a number of the people Rojas names, no other information survives, a reminder to the historian of the always complex world of theatre and the ever-absent individuals in the archival records.17 Rather than eschew or dismiss this list for the paltry information that has survived within it, I suggest (thinking again with theatre-fiction) that we see this list as key to the work, bespeaking what we cannot know but what Rojas’s readers likely knew well: a much wider net of theatre practitioners than the most famous that have come down to us. Whether these secondary and tertiary players in the book were well known or not is difficult to ascertain and demands the historian attenuate the very definition of “well-known” to a seasonal, theatre-going crowd. That is, we know that Ríos enjoyed fame because of his long career and noted accomplishments. But the documentary record of actors in the Spanish Golden Age Theatre is rife with anomalies, gaps, and contradictory documentation. Details concerning the lives and successes of the secondary players of Rojas’s viaje may not have survived, but that does not mean these people were not well known for a season, because of their previous successes, and/or their associations with established artists or companies.

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Theatre-Fiction and its Histories Surviving archival evidence tells us that, of El viaje’s four characters, Ríos was particularly successful and well known, both in the public theatres and at court. Ríos managed his own company with Antonio Vargas beginning in the 1580s and enjoyed consistent fame and success into the 1600s. In the 1580s and 1590s, Ríos secured Corpus contracts in Toledo, Madrid and Seville, and by the early 1600s Ríos’s company was giving performances for the King and court, in Madrid, Valladolid, Burgos, and Toledo. In 1601, King Philip III banned Ríos from Madrid and revoked his license to perform because, it seems, a play given by the company offended the King’s guest, the ambassador of France. Ríos’s banishment lasted only a matter of months, however. By September 1601, Ríos had secured permission to bring his company back to public theatres in Madrid. He resumed performances for the court quickly, as well, performing throughout 1602 and 1603 for the King, the Queen, and the Duke of Lerma, and giving the Corpus autos at Valladolid in 1602 and 1605—a testament, perhaps, to the good grace with which the King regarded him. Ríos likewise enjoyed popularity with the public and with playwrights alike. He was entrusted by Lope de Vega with the premier of a number of Lope’s comedías. Further, in 1603, when royal decree limited the number of companies that could perform in major cities to a mere eight, Ríos was granted one of the licenses. All other troupes (including that of his colleague Ramírez) had to perform a league or further from the cities (Shergold 516). Though Ríos may have been the most famous of the four men in El viaje, both Ramírez and Solano enjoyed success and recognition as well. Ramírez was known as an autor and actor as early as 1579. He worked with the company of Cisneros in 1595, and with Ríos from 1597 to 1602. In 1602, as noted, he formed his own company and hired Rojas. Solano was a member of the company of the prosperous Gaspar de Porres from 1595 to 1600, and at some point during the same time period he also held a contract with Ríos. As Ressot explains, Lope de Vega made several references to Solano, admiring him for his manners, bearing, and appearance (Rojas 74n29). From what we know of Rojas, his aspirations seem to have taken a turn away from acting and into publishing, or, perhaps he had always been a frustrated author who took to publishing to disseminate his plays. Either could be true. What we know is he left the theatre, published a second book (not about theatre), and lived comfortably thereafter. Rojas may have hoped El viaje would curry favor with theatre people in some way. But it seems unlikely that Rojas, sans acting contract but close to the most celebrated actors and autores of 1603, would have used El viaje only to advance an acting career. Rojas’s work was not just published for an audience of theatre practitioners, but for a public with a developing appetite for printed theatrical matter, an appetite that included a taste for experiencing not only plays, but actors, through print. Examining Lope de Vega’s evolving (and begrudging) attitude toward publishing, Alejandro García-Reidy reminds us that printing presses “were established in several cities in Spain at roughly the same time as theatre started to develop in the peninsula” (“From Stage to Page” 51). In key ways, the relationship between printed material, live performance, and public consumption took shape in Spain together. In the first half of the fifteenth century, “poets who wrote plays” for “amateur performers” used publication to promote their work and court patrons (“From Stage to Page” 51). By the sixteenth century, theatre had grown into a profession and a commercial business. Companies needed to renew their repertoire on a consistent basis. Directors purchased plays directly from autores. Once purchased, the plays, and all rights to them, rested with that company. Initially, the director and company had no desire to print and sell the plays; they wanted to sell tickets to performances and keep the comedías exclusively in the corrales. And yet, as García-Reidy details, the public’s taste for owning copies of plays grew. The theatre season in Spain, we know, was long, and as the business of theatre expanded—in terms of the number of companies, corrales, and performances—companies began to find by the early 1600s that there was a kind of performance shelf life to any given play. The audience

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would attend the same comedías over a period of five to ten years, García-Reidy argues, before clamoring for new material. Directors, in turn, found themselves with a new stream of revenue: they could publish the plays their company owned for profit (“From Stage to Page” 53).18 In publishing El viaje, Rojas may well have been capitalizing on an early and growing trend, but with a couple of twists. Rojas was granted his license to publish El viaje in May 1603. Francisco de Robles, one of the most well-respected and successful printing houses of the era, bought the manuscript and published the more than 700-page book in October 1603, and again in 1604. The book continued to circulate, with two additional editions in 1611 and reprints in 1615, 1624, and 1625 (Ressot 35–8). In his introduction to El viaje, Rojas tells the reader that he published the book in order to circulate his loas (64). He may have been betting on the possibility that published loas could make their way to performance, rather than the other way around. This, it seems, did not happen for him, and yet his book was quite successful, as evidenced by its rapid reprinting. If the loas did not drive public consumption, what did? Rojas’s rehashed histories, widely available, would not warrant multiple printings. It could be that the story of “Camila and Leonardo,” of a piece with the growing genre of the pastoral in literature, prompted sales. And yet, no version of that story, on its own or in any expanded version, attracted publishers. El viaje, that is, was reprinted in its entirety. The book’s unwieldy resonance with the picaro genre may have earned El viaje its success, but I suggest that such a conclusion can be nuanced yet further. If the public clutched at El viaje for its picaro-ness, it was because of the way Rojas presented the picaro: through the fictionalized bodies and voices of well-known actors.19 Consider how in book three, Rojas presents his loa, “Presentación de la compañía de Ríos,” not only as script, but as a re-enactment of a performance by the Ríos company. Rojas states that he and the “great Juana Vázquez” (343) recited the loa together, and the first verse of the loa is given to Vázquez, as if she is there with the men, speaking her lines. Subsequent verses are spoken by Ramirez, Ríos, and Solano with additional members of the company, including Bartolomé de Torres, Callenueva, Arce, Juan Batista Rosales, and an Antonio, who may or may not be the actor Marco Antonio (345–7). Rojas also interjects into the verse of the loa conversational exchanges amongst the company members, as if they had been all travelling together all the time (348). Did Rojas print the loa this way to make himself more legitimate, putting his words (either factually or fictionally) in the mouths of one of the eight licensed compañías? Perhaps, but regardless of the professional motives of Rojas, his readers are interpolated not only into a performance, but into a conversation among the actors. Considering the extraordinary outpouring of drama, literature, and poetry of the period (recall that Don Quixote was published in 1605 and Lope de Vega was at the height of his career), it is not difficult to understand how El viaje might have disappeared into the shadows altogether—were it not for its descriptions of Rueda and the companies. These two pieces of evidence, so very valuable to theatre history, remind us that El viaje is, crucially, of the theatre, written by a theatre practitioner, about the theatre, and, as I have argued, for the particular tastes of theatre publics. Following Wolfe’s premise that theatre-fiction is an intermedial genre (5), El viaje’s pages are not “an ‘empty space’ upon which theatre can be brought to life.” Rather, El viaje, as theatre fiction, reveals itself as operating through “juxtapositions, collisions, interactions, and intersections between media.”20 El viaje may be understood as participating in the intermedial genre of theatre-fiction, but it might also be figured as an intermediated source, as characterized by Postlewait. Intermediated sources lie “between the event and us, contingent markers or clues that must be interpreted. Their documentary value depends upon our ability to distinguish between them and the actual, missing event” (102). Though Postlewait is writing specifically about media records (film etc.), El viaje figures similarly: a contingent marker of the life and interactions of the actors it both documents and fictionalizes, and their publics. El viaje thus lives at the intersections and borders of not two but three fields: theatre, fiction, and history.

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Notes 1 For Tom—mentor, teacher, advocate, and friend. May we continue, as you taught us, to enjoy the conundrums and pleasures of history. 2 Throughout this chapter, I use the Spanish “autor” or, at times, “director,” to refer to the head, or director, of a theatre company. “Director” can translate roughly to the English actor-manager, though the documentary records suggest the role in Spain was much less formalized. In Spain, the director, or autor, might also be a playwright. To refer to actors, I use actor or comediante (representante can also be used). To denote a group of actors working together I use the English term company, or, less frequently, troupe. After the Decree of 1603, the number of compañías that could perform a regular season in cities was limited to eight. Those companies without a license were not known as licensed compañías, but rather as companies de la legua. Hence, throughout this chapter when I use the English term company, I am referring to a group of comediantes that may or may not be a post-1603 licensed compañía, as this distinction is both new and important in 1603. I note when the company is a licensed compañía. 3 The translation of farándula to “strolling player” evokes nineteenth-century British theatre conventions. In Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, all companies moved from theatre to theater, but there existed hierarchies between them. 4 Loas are short plays, widely performed as accompaniments to full length comedías. 5 See Bradbury. 6 García-Reidy details how powerful the public became, by the 1630s. Their tastes “elevated a performer based on novelty or a whim and not on merit,” at times to the chagrin of established writers (“Celebrities,” 165). 7 Major cities throughout Spain gave Corpus Christi contracts. Though Madrid may have been amongst the most coveted, other city contracts remained highly desired. 8 An extensive English translation of this passage can be found in Shergold (511–2). 9 The journey Rojas constructs in El Viaje, as Ressot notes, comprises both fictional events as well as composites, or reconstitutions, of multiple past factual events (293). In book three, the men describe a performance in Toledo that probably could not have happened, as it would have coincided with Ríos’s brief ban from the court. At other moments, Rojas recounts himself as part of performances of the Ríos company during the years he was contracted elsewhere. 10 See Díez Borque. 11 As Postlewait notes, “Large national theatres in modern times do a reasonable job of preserving records, but most theatre companies through the centuries, always short on funds, often fail to maintain sufficient records. And traveling players, from the commedia dell’arte troupes to the touring companies of the railroad era, seldom even attempted to preserve records” (247). 12 “The acute historian must be prepared to construct the past events out of absences, to credit and allow for what is unknown” (Postlewait 240). 13 Ressot uses the record to point out the ways in which the journey Rojas recounts is in and of itself a fiction, correcting earlier historians—Rennert, in particular—who believed the journey of the novel to represent an actual trip made by the four men. 14 We also know of the appearance of theatre and performance in other novels of the time: Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Alcalá Yáñez’s El donado hablador. For more information, see Shergold (513–4). 15 See Rojas 343–51. For dedicatory material, see Rojas, 48–57. 16 The biographical information I cite comes from both Rojas and from the footnote glosses provided by Ressot, which I have cross referenced (as did Ressot) with Rennert and Cotarelo y Mori. Ressot constructs his glosses from additional authors, including Cristobál Pérez Pastor, Rennert, Menéndez y Pelayo, and Claramonte. 17 Tracking the actor in the Spanish Golden Age brings a series of challenges, some shared with other periods and places and some distinct to Spain. See Ferrer Valls, et al. 18 García-Reidy details how Lope de Vega became famous and sought-after through performances in the playhouses, and was vehemently opposed to publishing his plays. He conceptualized the content of his plays as for the stage, not print and, indeed, filed lawsuits against companies and directors who published his plays. His lawsuits, by early 1600s, proved fruitless. He was so popular, and the public so eager to buy his plays as well as attend his performance, that he eventually resorted to publishing his own plays, noting with some umbrage that he did so to save himself from the errors and damage of directors and editors (“From Stage to Page” 53–7). 19 As Wolfe writes, “A key attraction of the genre may, for instance, be its affordance of private access to elements of a public, collectively received medium, and inversely, much of the power of a theatre-novel may derive from its infusion of a solitary mode of reception with a sense of multitudinous spectatorship” (7).

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Theatre-Fiction-History 20 I am expanding Wolfe’s category of the theatre-novel, here. “The pages of a novel are never simply an ‘empty space’ upon which theatre can be brought to life—the very term ‘theatre-novel’ implies juxtapositions, collisions, interactions, and intersections between media” (5).

Works Cited Bradbury, Jonathan David. The Miscellany of the Spanish Golden Age: A Literature of Fragments. Routledge, 2016. Cotarelo y Mori, Emilio. Estudios de Historia Literaria de España. La Revista Española, 1901. Delgado, Maria and David T. Gies, editors. A History of the Theater in Spain. Cambridge UP, 2012. Díez Borque, José María, editor. Actor y Técnica de Representación del Teatro Clásico Español. Támesis, 1989. Ferrer Valles, Teresa, et al. Diccionario biográfico de actores del teatro clásico español (DICAT). Edition Reichenberger, 2008. García-Reidy, Alejandro. “Celebrities and the Stage: Theatrical Stardom in Early Modern Spain.” Renaissance Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2018, pp. 165–182. García-Reidy, Alejandro. “From Stage to Page: Editorial History and Literary Promotion in Lope de Vega’s partes de comedias.” A Companion to Lope de Vega, edited by Jonathan Thacker and Alexander Samson, Támesis, 2008, pp. 51–60. McKendrick, Melveena. Theatre in Spain 1490–1700. Cambridge UP, 1989. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge UP, 2009. Rennert, Hugo Albert. The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega. Hispanic Society of America, 1909. Ressot, Jean Pierre. “Introducción Biográfica y Crítica.” El viaje entretenido, by Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Clásicos Castalia, 1972, pp. 7–37. Rojas Villandrando, Agustín de. El viaje entretenido. 1603. Edited by Jean Pierre Ressot, Clásicos Castalia, 1972. Shergold, N.D. A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times until the End of the Seventeenth Century. Clarendon Press, 1967. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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2 “THE ARCHIVE IN THE FICTION” A Look into the Interiority of Classical Theatre Odai Johnson

Archives in the Fiction In Marvelous Protestantism, Julia Crawford re-sifts Reformation tabloids to mine from the fiction an archive of fear, of what seemed a great eclipse of their world, and all the blustering inrush of anxiety in that unprecedented theological, political, cosmic crisis that marked the sudden upending. There were, for her, “archives in the fiction.” The broader question of the volume—how fiction accounts for the world—is useful precisely because fiction exposes the subterranean cargo of a culture, the vast dark interiority of the past: not what crisis happened, but how it felt, the dreadful, fanciful shape of its imagining—the stuff that is at once both true and not true—as an accounting of their world, in their words, an accounting that can include patently impossible events—miracles, monsters—but an accounting that doesn’t find a voice in the more rational historical register. Witches may be fiction in a post-Reformation social disorder, but witch trials were very real, and the force of fiction allowed the fire to take. Fiction allows the erupted fissure to speak of the unsaid, the outward elegance of the inward mess, Dr. Frankenstein’s walking metaphor, and such horrific imaginings are at their most useful when they are at their most estranged. Even imagination, it turns out, is culture-bound, hence fiction—particularly older, period fiction—allows us to overhear, as it were, conversations in small rooms we can no longer enter. Fiction, history’s subaltern—for whom the murdered heart still beats in the floorboards, ghosts of dead babies still crawl up the stairs at night—fiction still passes legible notes across the porous border of the true and the not true, and that accounting of lives and their attitudes is so deeply webbed in its own culture that it resists our own historical imagination. Their attitudes will often be unimaginably different from our own, and as such, essential to entering that small private room that is their time. Here is one such moment in one such room from Isak Dinesen’s novella, “The Supper at Elsinore,” in which a fading aristocratic family (the De Conincks, two sisters and their adventurer brother) are re-united after many decades. And lest we are encouraged to consider the tale a memoir, as Dinesen’s more famous Out of Africa, the brother is a ghost who had been hung in Cuba as a pirate. He re-appears briefly, as ghosts do in Elsinore, to share his confession with his sisters. He had been a state-sponsored privateer for Denmark, but he turned pirate instead, until he lost his ship, then his crew, and he settled in the Caribbean, married, owned a plantation in Cuba, and lost that as well:

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“I spent too much money. I lived beyond my means, something which Papa had always warned me against. I had to clear out of it.” He sat silent for a little while. “I had to sell my slaves,” he said. (263) And here follows a long pause in which our attitudes and De Connicks of the novella openly depart. Dinesen resumes: The two women sat pale and rigid with him, in deep silence. It was as if the breath of the hoarfrost had dimmed three windows. They had no word of comfort for their brother in this situation. For no De Connick had ever parted with a servant. It was a code to them that whoever entered their service must remain there and be looked after by them forever. (263–4) His career as a pirate, his conviction as a criminal, his death by hanging was not more shocking, more shameful to his sisters than his parting with his “servants.” Not a cheerful attitude to embrace, and not, I suspect, ours; nonetheless, it is real for the early nineteenth-century aristocratic culture who survived the age of the French Revolution and clung desperately to the nostalgia of their classed past, the codes and trappings of its former status, including that elision between old-world servant and newworld slave that afforded the practice to continue. That dialogue that passes in the chilling silence of his sisters, when the hoarfrost dims the windows—the excavation of the unsaid of a period’s meaning, the secrets disclosed in the ghost rooms—that is what fiction can offer, its affordance, and this is a unique and vital addition to the archive of performance.

Affordance Affordance is the very useful term suggested by Caroline Levine, who asks in her work Forms, what do certain literary structures afford (6): the shape and closure of genre, the rhyme of couplets, the matrimonial promise of comedy, the fixed enclosures that govern the experience and outcome of what in the world the sonnet or tragedy or epistolary novel may contain, how forms resolve the problems they expose.1 If we ask of fiction, what does it afford the historian of performance, consider a few of the insights it offers. The more curious, even alien attitudes of a past culture that would not be openly expressed can be found in the fiction of any decade. What cannot be said can be said precisely because the form is not true. Its private anxiety about social standing, insecurities about reading the codes of place, its fear of science, its gothic nightmares, its attention to the display of manners, and acute awareness of the proper performance of manners, even in the public sphere, all the deep anxiety of class and status behind, under, below the visible; its habits of thinking, the structuring of experience into recognizable genres, that suddenly afford access to the codes of a culture quite alien to our own, even its revenge on life in the thinly disguised novel, its regrets played out in the revisions of living, the habituations of moving experience into the unfamiliar and then, the improbable turn, and the restoration of its unique sense of social and mental order. Eighteenth-century English novels—Fielding, Burney, Richardson—are chapbooks on the interiority of English culture, with their nervous fretting over class and appearances, the rigidity of urban social codes and the fragility of perforating them, and at no place do these become more transparent than those scenes set in the London theatre. One of the common types, both on stage and in novels who sojourn into theatres, is the fop who uses the theatre solely as a preserve for socializing. The various fops like Frances Burney’s Mr. Lovel, who boast of paying the actors no mind at all: “‘I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out one’s acquaintance, that really one has no time to mind the stage. Pray,’—(most affectedly fixing his eyes

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upon a diamond-ring on his little finger) ‘pray—what was the play tonight?’” (Evelina 83–4). This he asks after the curtain has closed on it. The fiction captures nicely the notion that the performance in our performance history is sometimes utterly ignored and the subject is those who ignore performance. “What was the play tonight?” invites us to turn our attention to look elsewhere, not to the sets of Philip de Loutherbourg, the plays of Sheridan, the acting of Garrick or Sarah Siddons—all dominating optics in that 1770s London theatre culture, but rather to look away, to look, for example, at the honorific waste of looking away, that glance at the little but very displayed diamond, that pastiche of solipsistic interiority that also reflects part of the culture of English theatre-going. Consider two moments, both from eighteenth-century English playwrights and novelists, whose novels, at one point or another, carry their heroes and heroines into the London theatre for some very revealing glimpses into the interiority of theatre culture that our preserved, more historical bodies of evidence—from prompt books to portraiture to reviews—do not approximate. The first moment comes to us from Burney’s epistolary novel, Evelina, in which the author imagines the very private confusion of a family—the proverbial country cousins—trying to sort themselves at the door of the Haymarket Opera House and thoroughly unaccustomed to such an urbane arena of social codes. The humour of the scene lives exactly in the metaphorical admission into the interior of an otherwise excessively exclusive process: how to sort one’s self in the rigid social structure of the Opera house, the arena of impenetrable elitism of London urbanity, for the provincial tourist who does not know the codes of the play-space, the dress, the manners expected, the price structure, the conventions of performance, the conventions of spectatorship. Those who know the codes have no need to speak of them, and those who do not, dare not. Except the novelist, who can with comic delight capture the not-saying of the one class and the not-knowing of the other. The novelist enters the entering, as the large party pauses outside, disoriented by the many doors of this impenetrable space: “If I had not been too much chagrined to laugh, I should have been extremely diverted at their ignorance of whatever belongs to an opera. At the first place, they could not tell at what door we ought to enter, and we wandered about for some time, without knowing which way to turn” (94). After some length the party finds a door-keeper, presents their guinea and is promptly shocked to receive only two tickets: “Sir, how many will they admit?” [asks the leader of the party]. “The usual, Sir, one person each.” “But one person for half a guinea!—why I only want to sit in the pit, friend.” (95) They are directed to the gallery, where the same ridicule ensues over the same ignorance of pricing there, followed by the surprise at the great height of the upper stalls, and then, of course, their shock when the opera begins with the Castrato: “It’s my belief,” pronounces Mr. Branghton, “that that fellow’s going to sing another song!—why, there’s nothing but singing!—I wonder when they’ll speak” (99). What the scene reveals is exactly what fiction can do really nicely: admit us into the strangeness of it all. The country son is absolutely correct when he exclaims what no insider could concede: “How unnatural their action is!” (97). There is nothing natural about opera, and less than nothing about castrati opera, sung in Italian in London. The convention of overlooking the strangeness and cooing rapturously at the affectation of it all is as much a social as an aesthetic one, a concession those invested on the inside were loath to make in a more accredited historical record. Hence the need for the novel’s imagining out loud what few else would say, including the disappointment of the young son in not getting to “raise a riot” that he might “get his money again” (100). The quiet desire to pick a few pockets for fop watches, without the event of it all, that is what fiction

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can afford, and the novelist functions here like the ciceroni to Grand Tourists: we allow them their tall tales because they take us inside. The second moment also carries us into the interior of the London play-going experience with a more indirect and intimate testimony of something the historic record fulsomely documents. But it is the how of the novel’s concurrence that is most useful as testimony. Nothing, to my mind, in all the bountiful testimony to the enormous talent of David Garrick, quite captures his abilities like Henry Fielding’s fictitious account of his performance of Hamlet at which the country parson Partridge who cannot by faith believe in ghosts finds himself utterly terrified watching the young Hamlet because Garrick believes in the ghost. (Tom Jones, XVI 5). Partridge confesses he knows the ghost to be “only a Man in a strange Dress: But when I saw the little Man [Garrick] so frightned himself, it was that which took Hold of me” (854). And when the ghost makes his next appearance, again the fear possesses him: “There, Sir, now; what say you now? Is he frightned now or no? … I would not be in so bad a Condition as what’s his Name, Squire Hamlet, is there, for all the World” (855). The detailed description of the effect of Garrick’s fear in producing the cynical spectator’s fear ably documents both the disbelief and the physical abduction of fear operating on the preacher’s body, the assault of Garrick’s fright on his own central nervous system, in spite of his reasoned disbelief, and of the two, it is the body that doesn’t lie and therein is the truth of fiction. The question becomes less about can we use fiction, but rather how do we use it. What does fiction archive for the theatre historian? In the case of Fielding and Burney, a great deal of the interiority of performance culture—from the nervousness of insecure spectatorship to the fraud of prologue writing (confessed by a writer) to the enjoyment of a good riot—can be gleaned from the inward bent of novels. Mapping how theatres were used is another very revealing affordance, not their documented civic use, but how they were engaged in the social-psyche of those who entered them. What did theatre look like from the inside of a character looking out? With that question in mind, I turn to an earlier period, to a body of very early novels, Greek Romances of the second and third centuries CE, whose marvelous tales swept across the Mediterranean, from Athens to Egypt, and intersect with performance culture on so many levels. What makes these cases so rich is that, like most of the writers of the Second Sophistic, they were already deeply invested in fictive thinking, nostalgically looking back to an imagined Golden Age Athens, including a densely imagined performance culture of Bacchic frenzy, festivals, dramatic competitions, rigid genres of tragedy and comedy, tragic pathos, New Comedy types, even the machinery of the stage. The Romances of Heliodorus, Longus, Lucian, Xenophon of Ephesus, and Dio Chrysostom are sprinkled with allusions to theatre-thinking, entrapments in the codes derived from the stage, as are many novels in many centuries, but in this case, we are in a period that has left next to no historic records of the theatre. If we sliced into the evidentiary record, say, the year 200 CE, we would find Roman theatres by the hundreds across the circum-Mediterranean world, from Roman Britain to North Africa, but we know next to nothing about what actually happened in all these purpose-built spaces.2 Beyond the rough assumption of a vaguely “Roman” theatre (some homogenous performance practice that extended from Plautus to Procopius), we know little about this theatre with any precision for whole centuries, and the 200s is one of those centuries. We have no plays, no playwrights, no formal descriptions. We have a few funerary stones of a few mimes, but we don’t even know exactly what a mime did in the year 200. They had trade unions, festival circuits, a dozen subcategories of dance, genres of drama, spoken, sung, solo, companies, but what performance looked like in the year 200 remains an assumption based in earlier, broad descriptions of banished mimes under Nero, centuries removed, or later broad descriptions (patristic writers censoring the lascivious performances of mimes) centuries removed, but such reductions are a historic practice that

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never delivers much.3 What actually happened in Roman theatres, week in and week out, for several hundred years, is largely a matter of historical silence. In an era that has left little direct evidence of performance, the intersections that Greek romance novels of the Second Sophistic offer may be the best story we have. At no point are these novels more strange than when the scenes of their stories set in theatres are not doing theatre.

Romans Doing Something Else in Theatres Three second-century novels/novellas—Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Romance, Dio Chrysostom’s The Hunters of Euboea, and Lucian’s The Ass—all contain scenes set in provincial theatres, all with rigid expectations of public performance and reception. They are not plays, however, but trials—impromptu courts assembled in theatres to dispense frontier justice, where the rules of engagement for these jurors/ spectators in these shared spaces were not codes of law, but codes of performance. Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Romance offers one of the best endorsements of Aristotle’s prescriptive redaction of tragedy as “promoting pity,” when a grieving father, Charicles, in pursuit of his abducted daughter, finds himself in a theatre/assembly and pleads his case for the city’s help: The magistrates proclaimed a special meeting of the assembly and published their proclamation to the city by trumpet blasts. The populace assembled at once and the theater was transformed into a night council. Charicles stepped forward, and the mere sight of him moved the multitude to sighs and groans. Swathed in a black robe and with his face and head covered with dust, he spoke … (106) His reception is immediately theatrical. He begins his tale dressed appropriately as a tragic figure, and a woeful tale it is. He speaks of the misfortunes of his daughter, a virgin engaged to be married, kidnapped by Thessalian brigands, and all the indignities and injustices visited upon her, pleading for the city’s help. And it is working. The index of pity rises in his favour among the auditors as he relates the loss of his daughter, Charicleia, his wife, who was “extinguished along with her marriage torches … the fresh grief ravished away her mother” (106). The tragic sympathy is flowing, rather too freely, which is to say, the auditors are behaving as habits of tragedy have conditioned them to behave, when he is interrupted by the magistrate, in a fit of Verfremdung: “While he was still speaking and wholly dissolved in lamentation, the magistrate Hegesias interrupted and stopped him short and addressed the assembly: ‘… If we sit here expressing pity, or rather being women, our delay will give them an even longer head start …’” (107). What Hegesias acknowledges is that the indulgence in tragic pity has debilitated the auditors, prohibited direct social engagement—the old Brechtian objection—pathos that numbs—and in doing so the theatre hijacks the assembly of the theatre space. The lamentable narrative of Charicles is so tragic in its circumstance and performance, is received so admirably that the excess of grief that had long before been gendered “feminine” is first embraced and then interrupted, and that calculus—how much lamentation is tragic and permissible in public, and where the excess of pity risks immobilizing (“dissolving”) citizens—that calculus is older than Aeschylus.4 Tragedy, as had been astutely observed by Aristotle, has a sweet spot between empathy and excessive wailing. The tale of Charicles is thriving in that tragic zone that pleases spectators as good theatre does when the magistrate moves the goal posts, shames the auditors for receiving it as an indulgence in tragic pity, and his Verfremdungseffekt re-animates them into direct action. In one objection he shatters the consumption of tragedy and the “re-assembled” citizenry in the theatre form themselves into a posse, and “the whole populace, as if moved by a single impulse, poured forth in pursuit” (108).

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The intervention imagined here both documents and dismantles the classical formation of tragedy that was at some level still accessible. Theatres were places with affective expectations, habits of receptions, habits of exhibition, and as such, they were archives of behaviour. Where the production of pathos was concerned, there were rules of engagement, and to convert them into impromptu forums of justice, implied justice had some relationship to the prior cargo of tragic pity. Action—purposeful, immediate extra-theatrical action—required consuming and dismantling that production of pathos, and that implies a long, sustained function of tragic theatre in centuries without a great deal of historic evidence of that tragic theatre. The novel imagining that intervention is not just the only evidence remaining, it is the best evidence of the endurance of tragic pity, tragic shame. Ghost rooms. Dio Chrysostom also has a scene of civic justice inside a theatre, and it too is constructed upon codes of reception firmly in place, but as his narrator has never seen a theatre before, his description of encountering a Roman theatre and its spectators for the first time is particularly emotional. In the long process of conquest and re-culturation (called variously Romanizing, or Creolizing), that moment of first encounter is not rendered historically quite so vividly as the one imagined in the novella. And here, too, the world is not so easily accessed by modern readers. It is a world set in Greece, but speaking of Rome, surrounded by the Roman Empire, and yet, untouched by it, a pre-Roman pocket of frontier culture, in which a deer-hunter who lives in a cabin of his own making first encounters the wider Roman world, and is penalized for not paying rent or taxes to a state he does not know he belongs to. He is summoned and brought to the regional city, and describes his horrifying first experience of a theatre not doing theatre: This is what I saw. It is a great crowd of people shut into the same place and a frightening roar and shouting. I thought they were all fighting with one another. Well, this man brought me before certain magistrates and said with a laugh, “this is the fellow you sent me for. He has nothing but his long hair and a hut of very strong timbers.” The magistrates strode to the theatre, and I with them. The theatre is a sort of hollow valley, not, however straight up and down, but half round. It is not a natural formation, but built of stones. You are probably laughing at me for explaining what you know perfectly well. (133) Because this stranger has never been in a theatre before, he is ignorant of the conventions expected, his humble attire is accused of being a shabby-chic costume, and when they bring outlandish charges against him—that he has been squatting on state land, profiteering at the public expense—he laughs in disbelief, “but the crowd did not laugh as before; now they raised a tumult” (133). What Dio Chrysostom describes is the same moment those eighteenth-century novels so enjoy: the urbane laughter at the provincial mis-performing the codes of theatre. But this is not London, and the outcome of not “speaking theatre” here could be a death sentence, decided in a public theatre, by the performance of a single non-Roman who knows nothing about the conventions of Roman performance. Apart from the allegations of profiteering from shipwrecks, grazing on public lands, not paying taxes or rent, the question of his citizenship is also up for instant determination, that is, how to sort him in this new society he is not a part of. He has, in short, met The State, and his laughter at the assumptions nearly dooms him. He states his case as only he can, simply, that he has lived simply, far from the commerce of cities, made his own clothes, eaten his own food, game mostly, had little, but would share what he had. The crowd remained hostile: They kept shouting, sometimes amiably and with good temper, when they wished to applaud, but sometimes angrily and in bad temper. Their angry fits were awful. The people they shouted at were terrified; some of them ran around begging mercy and others flung their

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cloaks off for fear. Once I myself was almost knocked over by the shouting: it was as if a tidal wave or clap of thunder had broken over me. (133) The deer-hunter’s case could go either way, but for one citizen in the theatre who has been shipwrecked some years back and whom the deer-hunter had saved and restored, who recognizes him, rises and testifies to the man’s kindness, and the deer-hunter is rewarded with the city’s thanks, a gift of a new tunic and cloak, and granted the “free use of his farm” (133). The public spectacle of frontier justice, that too was a part of Roman theatres, and accounting for it doesn’t just, as we might politely say, “expand our historic sense of theatres,” but rather prompts us to re-consider how the dual applications of theatres functioned in the social psyche of an empire expanding faster than the conquered could assimilate, and what strange contaminations burbled up by co-habiting functions? What hovered behind that association, the long-time elision of spectatorship and juries, agons and assemblies, and what happened when those optic bled across? One final moment comes from Lucian, the satirist, whose tale The Ass bleads rapidly between the two optics. His novella also concludes in a theatre that begins as a site of brutal entertainment and quickly pivots to a forum of civic justice. If Heliodurus could imagine theatres as nostalgic spaces wherein a father of a kidnapped daughter could generate tragic pity, Lucian’s contemporary theatre is a place where a woman condemned to death by wild beasts would be displayed on a couch first, having sex with a donkey. The ass, the narrator of the tale, being first a young man who fell under a witch’s spell, naturally can drink wine, dance, nod to questions, and once his skills and comic tricks are known, he is displayed for profit, including an occasion in the amphitheater when he is cast into service in some mythical re-enactment, à la Pasiphaë, where, “in front of everybody,” he is to “mount” one of the condemned women, complete with a set, costumes, eccyclema and all: “They put us on a mechanical conveyor, and, rolling us out into the amphitheater, they set us out in the center and the people yelled out loudly, and there was applause for me from every hand” (616). They stage a private setting in the midst of the amphitheater; delicate foods, sweet wine in golden chalices are served up by “handsome young wine waiters,” flowers are strewn on their bed, including exactly the sort of roses the donkey needs to eat to break the spell that transformed him in the first place. He gobbles up the roses and, as only in novels, the miraculous happens: “the bestial form fell away from me and was erased, and the old ass vanished, and Lucius himself, inside my own skin, stood there naked.” But now the young man is standing naked in the middle of an amphitheater where such people were routinely condemned to death. In that extraordinary moment when the ass’s form suddenly falls away, the cry of witchcraft goes up and in an instant, a second metamorphosis modulates him from “cast” to “condemned,” as the audience calls for his execution, by burning, because that is also what happened in such spaces. That moment, of suddenly staring back, fearful at the murderous intent of a cavea, that instant pivot reminds us that the space ultimately governed the optic, and in such arenas, execution ghosted behind performance, and that too was part of Roman theatre-going. Fortunately, in this story, the provincial governor recognizes the young man, knows his family, his father, intervenes, and the young man is carried out of the theatre and to the governor’s house. What happens to the condemned woman we are not told.

Menander Fan-Fiction “What would Athens be without Menander? And what would Menander be without Glycera?” (Alciphron 135). So asks an imagined Glycera in an imagined exchange of fictive letters by another writer of the Second Sophistic, Alciphron. If Lucian reveals the interiority of terror in the space, Alciphron’s fantasies idolize the theatre.

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Like many other writers of the Second Sophistic, Alciphron too was smitten with an acute nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age of Greece. They peopled and re-animated an antiquity of their own invention—which is a sort of historic fiction-making in its own right—but why and what that longing spoke to was never spoken of. (Did their fabrication of an “Athenian Golden Age” speak to their own Roman imperial moment?). One finds expressions of this resurrecting and re-inhabiting of an imagined past in many genres, but the next case study—Alciphron’s epistolary fiction—affords us some disclosure on the depth of that desire: Athens-envy, and five-hundred-year-old fan fiction. Like Burney with Evelina, Alciphron composed epistolary fiction, four books of fictional letters, one of which, Letters of the Courtesans, closes with an exchange between the most popular playwright of the ancient world, Menander, and his mistress, the sometime-actress Glycera.5 What makes this imagining valuable is not just the enduring celebrity the letters reveal some five centuries from Menander’s lifetime, but how he was positioned in the culture’s memory: the commodity of his fame, the metonymic and material value of that celebrity. Menander was, for Alciphron, all that was admirable about Athens—its festivals, its religion, its archons and Areopagus, its democracy, its freedom and standing in the world; in short, Alciphron’s “Menander” stands in for a constellation of noble civic values, and that fantasy speaks to a unique cultural interiority: the Second Sophistic project that constructed a mythic, Greek “classical” past, and the celebrated place that theatre occupied within it. It is difficult to reinhabit the enormous popularity and broad appeal of Menander in the classical world with so few of his works extant, and perhaps more unreconcilable, what is preserved of his fulsome canon (perhaps extending to 108 or more plays) is not very flattering. But Menander’s reputation in the classical world rivaled Shakespeare’s today. He was that ubiquitous, for that long. We have, for example, more images of Menander still surviving than any Roman emperor.6 In statues, busts, bass relief, tesserae, Menander’s face, his calm demeanor, his shaved cheeks (a practice initiated by Alexander of Macedonia, which prompts the curious to consider if Menander’s plays were also part of that Hellenistic colonial project?), he sits, in the midst of composing, text on the table, masks in hand, the muse of Comedy nearby, sometimes Glycera standing behind him, the memory of Menander is found all across the Mediterranean. Scenes from his plays were worked as mosaics on the floors of dining rooms in Roman villas as far from Athens as the Euphrates river. His plays were so common they could be used as scrap paper. But only fragments of his plays survive now, one, Dyskolos, nearly complete. And whereas Roman comic playwrights, Terence, Plautus, enjoyed some post-antiquity textual stamina—with manuscript copies of both writers circulating into the fifteen century and the age of print, and the early Humanists—Menander remained on the bench, largely unrediscovered well into the twentieth century. What Alciphron adds is how he was remembered. In his brief narrative, all the Mediterranean world knows and admires this immortal couple, Menander for his plays, Glycera for her love. “Menander who is known everywhere because of his fame and lies in my arms night and day” (135). That story, as told across the letters, takes us into the interiority of that fame, the currency of it, the commodity and liability of celebrity. Fame, we learn, is not a static trans-historical state, but unique to its own cultural—imagined—moment. To be famous, in this classical world, had its own dialect, its values, risks and rewards, and how that fame was imagined five centuries later, is a construction squared. And it is apparent from the very opening letter in which Glycera is pleading privacy to another courtesan. Both women, whose profession is, so we say, deeply private, are transparently public figures. Menander is invited to the Corinthian games and Glycera fears a rival, and because of their fame, fears that rivalry will be sported in public. “I will have to endure being bitterly ridiculed on the stage by some Chremes or Pheidylus. But if he comes back to me the same as he went away, I’ll be very grateful to you,” writes Glycera to Bacchis (67). The private letters of a private profession imagine their lives as public property, the theatre as media, rival playwrights as paparazzi, and the private comings and doings of the (twice imagined) philandering Menander a fair-game use of celebrity

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slander. Like later day fan-fiction, say, Shakespeare in Love, the myth-making speaks more about the consumer’s desire. The landscape of that fame elongates when a letter arrives from the King of Egypt, inviting the playwright to reside as his court guest at the newly inaugurated festival of Dionysus.7 Both festival and playwright remind us of the cultural cache of Athens, and the acquisition of Menander a trophy for this client king. Menander forwards the invitation to Glycera, and here begin the deliberations of going or not going to Egypt. He is flattered, but cites the dangers of sea travel—pirates, storms, his long absence from her; she, in turn, vows to travel with him and protect him. The king will pay, Glycera shares with her family, vast sums to entice the playwright, including the curious addendum of grain to compensate Athens for the public loss. He would be, in essence, purchased from the city, even as Glycera was purchased by Harpalus, on the Indian campaign with Alexander, with a thousand bushels of grain to the city, in the midst of a grain crisis.8 This notion of a playwright, or a mistress, with real public worth—celebrity as a civic commodity—allows Athens to barter its culture-capital, including people, for bread, and that, too, is part of the imagined afterlife of Menander’s reputation completely lost to the post-classical world. What happens to celebrity if we align fame with famine? If he declined to travel to Egypt, he would deprive Athenians of their grain. “Don’t let the Athenians hate me,” urges Glycera, “on account of this when they are already measuring up the bushels of corn the king is going to send them on your account” (137). This is where the letters are at their most useful, when they are most estranged. The letters imagine a pair of famous lovers, citizens whose celebrity is of great material value to the city, and that celebrity is for sale. The second curiosity of this brand of fame, is the metonymic elision of Menander and Athens. He is, in the letters’ conception, “the very wealth” of the city (139). In the reply letter, from Glycera to Menander, she recounts how the king wants, in her estimation, “Athens to come to him. For what would Athens be without Menander? And,” folding herself into that concentration, “what would Menander be without Glycera?” (135). He is, in this imagining, all that is great about Athens. Athens’ imagined bromance with Menander is requited with Menander’s imagined adulation of Athens. In pondering the travel to Egypt, he confesses: “Where will I find a democratic crowd with so much freedom? … Where will I find junior archons wreathed with ivy in their sacred hair? What roped enclosure will I find? What election? What pot-feast, Ceramicus, market place, jury courts, lovely Acropolis, honored Goddesses, Mysteries, neighboring Salamis, the Narrows, Pysttalia, Marathon, all Greece in Athens, all Ionia, all the Cycladic Islands?” (129). This Athens is the Second Sophistic at its nostalgic best, a land of institutions of free citizens, democratic crowds, monuments, and festivals, and that memory lived on long after the historical Athens was reduced to a Roman province. These letters capture the great uplift of imagination that carried Athens out of the Roman imperium and into that mythic place of the undying classical past. The dialectic imagined is one of residency: the famous couple could be either auctioned as goods for grain, or swept up into the mythosphere of the immortal and classical Athens, a land of heroes and democracy and utterly outside of time. In the end, Menander chooses to remain in the always of Athens. May I always be crowned with Attic Ivy, King Ptolemy. May I have a mound and a grave in my own country, and every year sing in honor of Dionysus at the hearth, perform the rites of the Mysteries, and put up a new play at the annual stage-performances, laughing, rejoicing, contending, fearing defeat, and winning. (131) Alciphron’s letters are “letters of transit” that do not convey this pair to Egypt, but grant them the passport out of history, into that Athens of their own invention. What the fiction of the Second Sophistic affords is an imagining in period, in large structures and small. For the second century, that was a lot of nostalgia for classical Athens, a sort of fandom fantasy

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re-enacted by a host of writers who all in some way imagine their way back to a mythic past. Such epistolary etudes were common. The “Letters of Themistocles,” penned to a variety of early fifth century Athenians, included one letter to Aeschylus, about the ostracism and exile of Themistocles. The letters of Chion, also epistolary fiction, build to the plotted murder of the tyrant Clearchus in the theatre at the Festival of Dionysus, no less (Rosenmeyer 82–96). Aelian’s Letters from Farmers go so far as to give voice to characters borrowed directly from Menander’s plays, like Menander’s curmudgeonly Attic farmer, Knemon, from the Dyskolos, still grumbling in his epistolary afterlife, a sort of literary drift, from page to stage to page again, reminding us, as Falkner said of the Old South, Athens was not dead, it was not even the past. That may be our finest expression of the “classical,” that which was both “once was” and “always is.”9

The Dinner Party that Never Was: Border Thinking Antiquity The historic record for classical theatre is notoriously finite. We are not likely to recover more primary sources of consequence (the last new fragment of a play—from Menander no less—proved to be a duplicate!). So if the field is to grow at all, we must look to other genres, we must think back across the borders of forms. We do this with modern playwrights, whose fiction enlarged their plays, like Chekhov’s short stories, with their bankrupt aristocrats who drink away their estates, captured so nicely in A Visit to Friends. Or consider the entrapment in the imagination of a Pirandello play as rehearsed in his novellas, The Oil Jar, and A Character’s Tragedy, in which an author has a waiting room full of characters, whom he sees like a doctor his patients. Can we accord the same treatment to a Second Sophistic theatre scholar who wrote a serious treatise on music and plays, and then modulated to something of a wonder-cabinet of a work, a border-crosser that lives in that rich riparian zone between history and fiction? It is, without exception, the most theatre-rich piece of theatre fan-fiction of the Second Sophistic: an imagined dinner-party, conceived in the tradition of symposium literature. For a measurement of all that has not survived of theatre in the late classical, no source is more poignant than the fictive symposium called The Deipnosophisthai by Athenaeus composed somewhere around 200–20 CE. In the hands of more serious thinkers—Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch—the symposium genre assembled thinkers to debate ideas: Socrates, usually, doing the asking. Athenaeus assembles drinkers, and in lieu of heady discussions on the nature of the cosmos, these dinner guests—physicians, grammarians, jurists, and gourmands all—debate the best fig sauce. They are settling nothing so consequential as the proper pairing of fish, music and Chian wine, and to credential their argument, they cite and quote from a vast, lost collection of plays, mostly New Comedy. The work is fiction; the quotations are not, and so this gourmand’s symposium became the unwitting anthology of antiquity’s lost plays. Perhaps because Athenaeus was himself a performance scholar (albeit minor), plays are the sine qua non of the evening; the collected guests are all very acquainted with plays and playwrights that have not survived. Indeed, they claim to have carried their libraries with them in their bedrolls; and over the course of that protracted dinner party, the guests quote from 1,100 plays, more than 1,080 of which we no longer have. They quote lavishly from lost texts and missing commentaries, including Juba’s History of the Theatre, and some fifty of Aristophanes’ lost plays, including The Rehearsal, and The Third-Rate Actor, lost tragedies, lost histories, hundreds of lost comedies. The setting is a fictitious occasion, the guests assembled are a mix of invention and historic figures, like the physician Galen, the jurist Ulpian of Tyre, and that storehouse of memory seems vital if only to note how popular these plays remained, five hundred years after their composition, and how much has been lost. The culture of music, dancing, choruses, famous actors, mimes, all have no counterpart in the historic archive, but come to us only from this imagined occasion.

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One of the 1,100 plays quoted in Athenaeus is the only preserved fragment of both play and playwright, quite small, but confirming a function of fourth-century theatre we have only seen in Alciphron’s letters: celebrity slander. The playwright Python of Catana traveled with Alexander’s army into Asia and when Alexander established the Dionysus festival on the Jhelum River in western India, Python presented a short satyr play titled Agen in which Harpalus and Glycera are ridiculed on stage for having revolted from Macedonia first and secured a vote of citizenship with Athens by sending grain. Python renders that trade of grain for Glycera as “not merely a whore’s earnest money” (213), but a death warrant for the city that granted Harpalus citizenship. Now, the thousand bushels of grain that compensated the city for the loss of a famous courtesan implicated the city of Athens in the revolt against Macedonia, aligning Athens against Alexander, and we learn this (theatre as media, playwrights as paparazzi) from the fragment of a lost play, of a lost playwright, whose theatre was part of a military campaign to establish Greek culture, and this nugget was quoted five centuries later at a fictive dinner, about wine and fig sauce and a dangerous piece of celebrity slander performed on a stage in India. What else don’t we know? In the end, these shattered little shards of voices preserved in the fictional setting of Athenaeus and his generation are the torn notes of border crossers, coyotes slipping between genres. Their broken messages seem somehow urgent because they are broken, cell signals cut-off in mid-sentence, faint cries from under the rubble—that is all that is left of plays that are lost and all that has been lost with them. Why would we choose not to listen?

Notes 1 Levine begins with the evocative probing of “what is a walled enclosure or a rhyming couplet capable of doing?” (6). 2 For the theatres, see Frank Sear’s magisterial study Roman Theatres: An Architectural Study. 3 One revealing study on how much we do not know of mimes is John Starks’s dissertation, Actresses in the Roman World, which teases out many details of their lives from funerary inscriptions. 4 For a discussion of the shaping of tragic pity, see David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (59) and Norman Sandridge’s “Feeling Vulnerable, but Not Too Vulnerable: Pity in Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus, Ajax, and Philoctetes”. For the gendering of lamentation, see Helene Foley, “The Politics of Tragic Lamentation”. 5 On the appearance of this form in Philostratus, Alciphron, and Aelian, and a discussion on its position in the Second Sophistic, see Patrik Granholm’s Introduction to Alciphron’s Letters of the Courtesans (15–18). 6 I am here summarizing a more expansive treatment of Menander’s afterlife in Odai Johnson, Ruins: Classical Theatre and Broken Memory (93–5). 7 The translation of the text is from Patrik Granholm, Letters of the Courtesans, 2012, undertaken in fulfillment of a dissertation, Uppsala University. A short compilation for general readership is Patricia Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Greek Literary Letters, particularly section three, “Letters and Prose Fiction of the Second Sophistic.” 8 Buying Athenian citizenship was a practice most visible in times of food shortage and famine. See Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World (144–9). 9 For a useful construction of the “Classical” as a concept of abstraction and idealism, see James Porter’s superb introduction to Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome.

Works Cited Alciphron. Letters of the Courtesans. Edited and translated by Patrik Granholm. Uppsala University, PhD Dissertation, 2012. Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Translated by C. B. Gulick, W. Heinemann, 1937. Burney, Frances. Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World. Thomas Harrison, 1854. Crawford, Julie. Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Denisen, Isak. “The Supper at Elsinore.” Seven Gothic Tales. Vintage, 1934. Dio, Chrysostom. “The Hunters of Euboea.” Translated by Moses Hadas, Three Greek Romances, edited by Moses Hadas, Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1953, pp. 129–142.

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“The Archive in the Fiction” Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. Vol. 2, edited by F. Bowers and M. C. Battestin, The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, Oxford UP, 1974. Foley, Helene. “The Politics of Tragic Lamentation.” Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, edited by A. H. Sommerstein et al., Levante, 1993, pp. 101–143. Garnsey, Peter. Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World. Cambridge UP, 1988. Granholm, Patrik. “Introduction.” Letters of the Courtesans. Uppsala University, PhD Dissertation, 2012. Heliodorus. An Ethiopian Romance. Translated by Moses Hadas, U of Pennsylvania P, 1957. Johnson, Odai. Ruins: Classical Theatre and Broken Memory. U of Michigan P, 2018. Konstan, David. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. U of Toronto P, 2006. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Lucian. “The Ass.” Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited byB. P. Reardon, U of California P, 2008, pp. 592–618. Porter, James. “Introduction: What is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?” Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, edited by James Porter, Princeton UP, 2006, pp. 1–68. Rosenmeyer, Patricia. Ancient Greek Literary Letters. Routledge, 2006. Sandridge, Norman. “Feeling Vulnerable, but Not Too Vulnerable: Pity in Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus, Ajax, and Philoctetes.” Classical Journal, vol. 103, no. 4, pp. 433–448. Sear, Frank. Roman Theatres: An Architectural Study. Oxford UP, 2006. Starks, John. Actresses in the Roman World. U of North Carolina, PhD Dissertation, 2004.

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3 ECHOES OF THEATRE PAST Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo Stefano Boselli

Typically, a theatre performance entails the highly localized emergence of an intricate network of human and non-human agencies that converge to offer its audience a communal, sensual experience. This immediate stimulation through voices, bodies, lights, music, costumes, set pieces, and media is arguably unmatched by any work that relies exclusively on printed words. And yet, while and after watching a performance, the spectator is generally left with little detail as to how that production came together, who the performers really are, or what led them to appear in that particular venue, all genealogical elements that crucially influenced the final result. Indeed, a work of art is not separate from life but intimately connected to it like two sides of the same coin. Philosopher Jacques Derrida, for instance, reflects on the notion of parergon: “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work” (9). Similarly, performance and visual arts scholar Shannon Jackson observes how “performance both activates and depends upon a relational system, … exposing the dependencies of convivial and expressive spheres” (30). Since theatre tends to give more weight to the expressive sphere, often deliberately obscuring the real lives and troubles of the artists involved, one of the roles of theatre-fiction is to provide access not just to a backstage dimension that may chronologically overlap with the creative process or the performance itself but also to a broader historical awareness that embraces the multitude of agents, from living beings to material entities, that contribute to what is shown in front of the audience. To show the potential of theatre-fiction to illuminate this consequential past, in this chapter I examine the novella El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor, 1924) by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867–1928) and El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp, 1984), the first novel by Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky (b. 1939).1 For reasons of space, I concentrate exclusively on these two works as theatre-fiction without engaging with the biographical phases or the rather large prose production of these authors. However, it is worth underscoring at least two elements they have in common. The first is a prominent transatlantic component: Blasco travelled from Spain to Argentina as author, lecturer, and businessman, wrote for Argentine publications such as Caras y Caretas and La Nación, and maintained a tight relationship with Paris and its Argentine émigré circles (San Martín Molina); Cozarinsky—of Ukrainian heritage but born in Buenos Aires—emigrated to the French capital in 1974 and became himself a member of the so-called Argentines of Paris (Weiss 183; Bloch-Morhange 87–106), before beginning to spend more time in Buenos Aires after 1985 (Rossi 336).

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-6

Echoes of Theatre Past

The second element is a rather peripheral relation to theatre, at least compared to the bulk of their oeuvre in other media. Blasco wrote one play only, El juez (The Judge), likely because of the unfortunate coincidence of its premiere and the death of his mother on 12 May 1894, although he then remained open to others’ adaptations of his prose works (Smith); he also held a series of lucrative conferences at the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires (San Martín Molina 106) in the context of cultural tours organized by theatre impresario Faustino de Rosa in 1909, while Argentina planned celebrations for the first centenary of its independence the following year (Montaldo 19). In turn, in 2005 Cozarinsky was involved with Argentine theatre director and organizer Vivi Tellas on her Biodrama project aimed at giving a theatrical form to the lives of people living in Argentina, acting in her Cozarinsky y su médico (Cozarinsky and His Doctor) and writing Squash: Escenas de la vida de un actor (Squash: Scenes from an Actor’s Life) (Hernández 25); in the same year, he wrote the mini-opera Raptos (Raptures) and later adapted El rufián moldavo for the libretto of Ultramarina, an opera by Marcelo Lombardero with music by Pablo Mainetti (2014).2 Granted the chronological gap separating these authors, their works’ chronotopes are in much closer dialogue with each other because the performances of the eponymous play El rufián moldavo in 1927–8 occur just a few years after the publication of El comediante Fonseca, and both novel and novella are initially set in Buenos Aires, a multicultural city and ideal point of contact between Europe and Latin America. More importantly, in terms of theatre-fiction, there are some striking similarities in approach to the genealogies of theatre beyond the artistic sphere, i.e., to how the ergon is entangled with the parergon over time. As the narrators interrogate human and non-human witnesses who are either on the threshold of disappearance or already reduced to posthumous traces, of the theatre performances resuscitated by these stories we receive distant echoes that would otherwise dissipate without such intentional interventions. Juan José Sebreli noted how “the decadent side of Cozarinsky makes him like ruins, … what is destined to dissolve into nothingness, something that is fading, and will soon disappear, or has already disappeared, leaving only an echo, a reflection, a trace, a shadow” (215–16), a taste for the “almost out of reach” that Blasco seems to share. In El comediante Fonseca, a doctor hears about a mediocre Spanish actor’s waning career in Latin America before and after his death; in El rufián moldavo, a researcher relies on scarce printed materials and second-hand witnesses to gather information on theatre in a disappearing language with distant roots in the Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. A major structural difference is that while Blasco follows the life and career of a single character across shifting personal, political, and material circumstances, Cozarinsky proceeds instead from a single show outwards, an “eccentric perspective” (López Vicuña 1) that rhizomatically pursues multiple directions corresponding to the interwoven lives of characters not always tightly related to the theatre.3 As a consequence, the former work remains firmly anchored to theatre matters all along, whereas the latter ends up veering off more extensively into territories beyond the expressive sphere.

Vicente Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca This novella is one of two with a South American setting published in Novelas de la Costa Azul (Novellas of the French Riviera, 1924), included under this title with the excuse that they were conceived and written in the South of France (Blasco, “Al lector”).4 Overall, it follows the arc of an artist whose drive is to perform on stage despite all odds, marital betrayals, and perils encountered. Cardwell, among others, has remarked on the author’s distance from naturalism: “above the sombre picture of man bound to ineluctable forces, Blasco also conceived a more heroic vision for some of his characters. In these men heroism, self-sufficiency, resolution of will, rejection of modern progress and law, even of education itself, and nostalgia for what seemed a better, happier past … is evident” (382). Fonseca sounds just like one of these characters, although in a somewhat more humorous key, as I show later on.

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In the first three sections, the actor speaks to a mostly silent but observant man of science, Doctor Olmedilla, whose external gaze lends a degree of objectivity and irony to the long monologues by the performer; the fourth section is a brief posthumous account of Fonseca’s early and last days. Despite its relative brevity, this 39-page theatre-fiction work is remarkable because of its vast geographic scope, which ranges from Mexico to Argentina to Spain, and a chronology that spans several decades between the nineteenth and the twentieth century.5 By relating the challenges he faced, Fonseca highlights several facets of the parergon, from personal family concerns to the larger political and international situation, in the context of competing forms of entertainment and shifting aesthetic trends. The first chat between the actor and his friend takes place at a café on Avenida de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, a gathering place for Spanish émigré musicians and performers. Here, a middle-aged Fonseca with overly dyed dark hair still views himself above his peers because of his past celebrity, even as he acknowledges his current decline and marginality: This Buenos Aires, where I had huge successes, is no longer for me. It’s grown too fast, and tastes change. Now the public only wants lavish companies with many scantily clad girls and lots of music. Nobody likes works in verse anymore, and there are few of us left who know how to declaim as in another era. (El comediante Fonseca 146) Thus, he is now limited to gigs on weekends in towns outside the capital. This actor-based, traditional theatre in verse spanning from the Spanish Golden Age to Romanticism is the type Fonseca stubbornly clings to throughout his career, despite seismic cultural and taste changes.6 A main topic of this first section is Fonseca’s love-hate relationship with his homeland: despite having to leave Spain in his early twenties because “the audiences there were unjust” (147), in Latin America he felt empowered as an ambassador of Spanish culture, at a time when the political relationships between the new republics and the motherland were still rocky after the relatively recent wars of independence (ca. 1808–26).7 And Fonseca found appreciative audiences, especially in cities of the interior, where the spectators were so intimately familiar with the Spanish classics they could whisper their verses from memory during the performance. Evidence of these past glories are “dozens of crowns, silver or bronze plates with engraved dedications, and … many verses,” including those of a young poet elevating him to the level of Cervantes among the famous sons of Spain (149). Always moved by “a wandering spirit and inclined to adventure, like that of the ancient conquistadores,” Fonseca prides himself on having toured Latin America eight times, from the extreme South of Chile to the border with the United States, performing at any theatre he found, good or bad, even “in places that had been waiting for the arrival of an actor since the beginning of the planet” (151). Throughout, his voice remains oblivious to any negative connotations of Spain’s times of conquest, exploitation, violence, or racism: “I thought many times that we were not a company of actors; rather a caravan of officials, sent by the King of Spain and his Indies, who had just landed,” he will say in section two (163).8 Instead, he repeatedly characterizes the early conquistadores as models, heroic and fearless in the face of danger across those uncharted territories. Being identified as a colonizer rather than a cultural envoy could be hazardous, however. Spanish performers found themselves between a rock and a hard place when they were obligated to sing a new republic’s national anthem, which often contained “an aggressive or retaliatory little stanza dedicated to ancient Spain”; with a portion of the audience demanding such public demonstration of patriotism and another of direct Spanish heritage opposed to it, there were “general scandal, insults, beatings, and many times gunshots” (148). Another risk was the pronounced political instability, since making theatre was contingent on the local politicians’ whims. Reminiscing about his times as a young lead alongside the great Rengifo, an older actor who had crossed the Atlantic after a successful career in Spain, Fonseca recalls an anecdote he heard from him. One day, during the intervals of a single very

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successful performance, Rengifo had been congratulated first by one and then by another President of the Republic: “Ah, no! … The joke is pointless”—Rengifo protested—“The President of the Republic was just here. He is a man with a beard, dressed in tails, and you have a moustache and a general’s uniform.” “What you don’t know is that between the second and the third act there was a revolution,” the new President had replied (153). A counterpart to these “heroic” recollections, the second chat with Olmedilla repeatedly verges on Pirandellian umorismo, mixing the pathetic and the comical,9 because Fonseca reveals how he accepted deeply humiliating personal compromises so he could keep together his troupe, which included his wife Rosalba and her father, a Spaniard who had landed in Buenos Aires thirty years before him. Conjugal life was complicated by the fact that the beautiful but capricious Rosalba felt superior to her entire family because of her birth in Buenos Aires, openly flirted with the spectators, and frequently ran off with them, be they “a doctor, general, or simple journalist” (156). Besieged by potential temptations for his wife, Fonseca had to be guarded on two fronts, both against the unpredictable moods of rulers, who could hamper their work by denying them venues and ticket sales, and against the too affable governors infatuated with the attractive prima donna. Demonstrating the inextricable weave of ergon and parergon, Fonseca always compromised: I could be angry with my wife, but I couldn’t fire the female lead. Without her we wouldn’t have been able to continue our performances … and sometimes … I went to ask her to come back, on behalf of her family and also of the other artists, who, without her collaboration, were going to be broke. (155) Amid these serious concerns, what sounds comical is Fonseca’s firm belief that Rosalba must have remained physically faithful, even in obviously compromising circumstances, because she swore on their daughter Pepita’s head.10 In reality, just like her husband, Rosalba privileged her art over everything else. When pregnant, she tightened her corset to conceal “her maternal deformity” as long as possible, since it undermined her roles as the feudal lady loved by a troubadour or the romantic maiden with modest eyes; then, after giving birth, she “could not exactly fulfil her contradictory duties as mother and artist at the same time,” suckling Pepita only between the acts of her performances (158). Therefore, the child ate when and what she could: breastfed by Indio and black women, she then drank milk from cows, mares, goats, and even llamas, an extravagant “international and geographical” diet to which Fonseca attributes his daughter’s peculiar and intractable character (159). Fonseca then describes the elation and hazards experienced as impresario of his traveling troupe, at a time when Rosalba was still alive and Pepita started to set foot on stage. Their tours on the Pacific side of South America ranged from the populous cities on the coast to those of the interior at two or three thousand meters on the Andes Mountains. To reach them without railroads, they climbed to dizzying heights along narrow paths, precipices, and snow-covered peaks, advancing for six to eight days “like a line of red ants … in that immensity” (162). Because they could not bank on local resources—in certain towns the theatre was a simple corral with an elevated platform—the troupe had to carry everything they needed, from costumes to props and decorations. In another moment of unwitting humour, Fonseca relates his struggles with the local fauna: the “wilful mules, which it was prudent to let loose, at the mercy of their instinct” (161) but also the stubborn llamas, who refused to be overburdened and forced him to employ between two and three hundred of them for what he felt were relatively light paper and cloth materials. Other situations were genuinely dangerous, such as when, riding on rafts, the troubled waters of a river caused the loss of a lot of luggage or when a train in Ecuador derailed on a very daring route on the Andes, which resulted in many wounded and dead. This last episode is the only time Fonseca speaks of an indigenous performance tradition, although the encounter is coloured by his own preconceptions. Because of the train incident, the noise had

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attracted some locals who arrived staggered, first just one and then a group. From his standpoint, they resembled demons more horrible in that solitude than what I had seen in pictures and theatres … They wore grotesque, crazy, shabby costumes; but these garments seemed to give them a more horrifying aspect. The infernal horde, advancing half hidden … stood up and marched boldly … I confess that I was afraid to see how many devils, red and green, with their faces black with soot, were coming towards me. Suddenly I remembered that it was Sunday and Carnival. The demons became Indios, nearby hut-dwellers … who had disguised themselves for the festival, abandoning their dances when they learned of the catastrophe. (164) Yet, for the most part, Fonseca yearns for a colonial past that combines European rulers (“blancos”), traditional mores, and astonishing luxury, to the point that it is cheaper to use silver to make plates, jugs, and—again comically—“even a certain nightly utensil deposited next to the bed,” rather than risk bringing fragile earthenware on the back of a mule along the dicey paths of the Andes (167). On one occasion, for instance, a long-forgotten city on the coast of Peru, founded by Pizarro and rich in silver ore, offered a unique experience. “Imagine the excitement of a thousand isolated men on this forgotten piece of coastline, earning a lot of money and not knowing what to make of it” (166). In the end, the silver coins earned were so heavy that the company had to use a wheelbarrow to carry them in baskets. These places rarely visited by theatre troupes were also where Fonseca found his ideal spectators. Their naïve audiences of both “Europeans and mestizos,” for example, very much enjoyed cloak and dagger plays and their duels, even demanding that Fonseca fight and kill the traitor of the story twice in the same scene. What felt particularly satisfying, however, was not just that the performer received the most “sincere and resounding ovations” on stage (166), but that his success seeped into real life. Feeling respected even by men who had several murders on their conscience, for once Fonseca experienced an invigorating synergy, rather than interference, between ergon and parergon. Evidently, it felt like an achievement to attain a level of admiration similar to his mentor, who—once attacked by some famously violent bandits in Mexico—had looked them in the face from his stagecoach and said, arrogantly: “‘I am Rengifo.’ … They stopped pointing their rifles at him and jumped to the ground to shake his hand. ‘We respect the brave, mate.’ They all had seen him at the theatre” (168). Eight to ten years later, the doctor meets his friend once again at a nursing home in northern Spain. His hair still abundant but all white, Fonseca now looks as if a whole century weighed over him, “with his shoulders bent, toothless, and a face scrunched up like a winter fruit” (170). During his last years in Buenos Aires, he had fallen into poverty, but had his trip back to Europe funded by a group of Spaniards of Buenos Aires who had applauded him in other times. In this third section, the actor concentrates on the latest tours with his daughter through Chile and other states of the Pacific coast, proceeding from South to North, at a time when Fonseca’s brand of theatre was no longer appreciated in the cities. Unable to compete with the more affluent companies and their spectacles, the risk of starving to death made his troupe look for almost unknown towns, where they improvised in the corrals of inns, public squares, “even in the tents of half-civilized Indios” (176), and sourced missing items for their shows from the local grocery store. In an ode to the power of poor theatre to move the audience through the simplest of devices, a sort of “jungle decoration,” the actor recalls “using in Don Juan Tenorio, as a statue of Doña Inés, an advertising poster made in the United States that represented a good-looking life-size girl riding a bicycle” (176). And yet, even that degree of resourcefulness had to contend with silent cinema, a “ferocious enemy that harassed us incessantly and each year seemed to multiply a hundredfold. We felt it advancing behind us” (176). Once movie theatres became more widespread, everyone seemed to realize the poverty of Fonseca and his troupe’s “grotesque improvisations” (177).11 An added inconvenience was the spirited independence of his daughter,

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nicknamed “the warrior virgin” (174). If in the past he had griped about his wife’s indiscretions, he now laments that Pepita, despite her rare beauty and talent, not only had a “harsh and monotonous voice, which only softened when expressing anger or revenge on stage” (174), she also fiercely rebuffed the spectators’ attentions: “That promptness of hand to respond with a slap to the smallest daring! … In some towns we were whistled at because of her violence; in others we had to leave in a hurry because the girl had beaten the son of the most powerful person” (175). Not surprisingly in Fonseca’s regressive trajectory away from modern civilization, his career concluded in a remote region of Venezuela, reachable only after several days of travel through the pristine tropical jungle, “living and sleeping in canoes that slid through a tangle of streams and rivers” (178). The secluded town they eventually reached, a sort of anachronistic colonial environment made possible by the isolation of the region, offered the perfect setting for Fonseca’s brand. The governor—a man named Urdaneta who acted as absolute ruler—was a patron of the arts, saw the arrival of the troupe as a kind of political triumph, and made sure that his subjects attended their “learned and moralizing” performances as a civic duty (180). He also cherished poetry and recited sentimental verses from memory at the banquets for the troupe he offered at his house. Notwithstanding an awareness of Urdaneta’s political executions and wary of the cadre of “other characters with a dark complexion, diabolical eyes, and honeyed words” who surrounded him (180), Fonseca found the ruler likeable after all, since he owed to his protection the last triumphs of his artistic life. What is more, even Pepita was perceived by the spectators as “a miraculous deity who could intercede on their behalf, making their existence more tolerable” (181). The wrinkle in that idyllic situation was that once Pepita had become Urdaneta’s lover, the jealous ruler could no longer separate art from life. First, he became intolerant of the troupe’s men and ended up compensating them handsomely to leave; then, he likewise dismissed Fonseca, suspecting him of being “a dangerous good-natured man, ready to make friends with anyone who talked … about theatrical things: a kind of open door through which his enemies could reach him” (184). Resuming his peregrinations, this time from north to south, the actor ended up again in Buenos Aires and eventually heard that Pepita had died, valiantly defending Urdaneta during an uprising. “After this, I believe that no one will dare to say that in the life of actors everything is a lie and pretence, and that in reality dramas more tremendous than those that we represent on stage do not occur” (186), he comments to Olmedilla, arguing for the theatricality of the parergon over the ergon itself. Now, with his career fully over, he just yearns for some tobacco to smoke, but—again with a twist of umorismo—the deceased founder of the charitable nursing home, a Spaniard who had made money in Argentina making cigarettes, forgot to allocate funds to that last little pleasure for its occupants. The fourth and final section wraps up some loose ends in Madrid, where Olmedilla and the former nursing home director talk about Fonseca’s early and last days in Spain. Beginning his career in Madrid with an unflattering real surname—Cerón, i.e., the residue of wax cells—he had repeatedly been booed and had become the epitome of an awful actor, to the point he felt compelled to flee his homeland and its stages. Toward the end of his life, however, he had gone out in style by requesting that an inheritance unexpectedly received from his brother be invested entirely in tobacco for his fellow nursing home residents. Fonseca’s trajectory thus comes full circle, a life that was wholly devoted to a theatrical career at all costs. Blasco does expand his circle of attention to the actor’s family and varying socio-political and geographic contexts, but only inasmuch as they assist or interfere with the productions staged by Fonseca’s troupe. Although the Buenos Aires milieu remains a strong presence for moments of reflection, the performer’s active career ranges broadly from Mexico to the Southern Cone, from the coasts to the interior, from the Andes’ heights to pathways hidden under thick tropical vegetation. Along the way, the author shows how, between the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a once dominant performance mode—the spoken-word classic Spanish verse drama between

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the Golden Age and the Romantic period—gradually loses its grip in favour of more popular forms of spectacle based on music and dance and the budding cinema. In the end, it can only exist in a Venezuelan enclave that still seems to operate like an original Spanish colony. Instead of adjusting his acting style or staging techniques, Fonseca changes his environs, progressively moving to the outermost margins until there is no place left for his art. Indeed, he ends up with a fixation on tobacco: once he leaves the theatre and his artistic flame is quenched, his life can only go up in smoke.

Edgardo Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo In contrast to Blasco’s performer who eagerly narrates his adventures tête-à-tête with his friend, Cozarinsky’s human and non-human witnesses are often more indirect so that the truth of the story or its protagonists’ motives can never be fully grasped. Hence, if in Blasco’s novella the scientific observer can take a back seat to Fonseca’s voice, Cozarinsky’s nameless half-Jewish 25-year-old doctoral student must be more active in pursuit of “the archaeology of the recent past” (The Moldavian Pimp 12).12 For one, his sceptical dissertation supervisor stresses the marginality of the topic: “the Yiddish theatre died out, and now not even the Jews are interested in what used to be” (12). Then, the narrator’s first interlocutor, Sami Warschauer, a former actor of Lithuanian descent living in Buenos Aires, dies at the very beginning of the book. As a result, throughout the novel’s three parts, the narrator sets out to track and disentangle several threads of interconnected stories, like a detective with a particular obsession for “old scraps of paper announcing performances no longer being put on, in theatres that no longer existed, with actors who had been dead for decades” (8). Luckily for him, the deceased actor left behind a box of theatre programmes containing not leaflets, but small posters. Long and narrow, at the top they had the name of the theatre—the Soleil, the Excelsior, or the Ombú—occasionally a photograph of the famous star on tour … then their name and the title of the play in big Hebrew and Latin characters. In smaller letters, but still in both languages, were two columns with the details of the cast, the days and times of performances, the price of tickets. (9) What initially catches the narrator’s attention is the poster for the Victory Revue, a celebration of the defeat of Nazism in 1945, with photos of the young Sami—a “halo of light behind his head as was the fashion with professional photography of those days”—alongside actress Perla Ritz, with her “peroxide-blonde hair and the eyebrows plucked to form two perfect arcs” (10). A few days later, researching the same revue at the Theatre History Institute in the basement of the Teatro Cervantes, he realizes that the 120-page typescript archived in the corresponding folder is in fact another work, El rufián moldavo, not even in Yiddish but in a Spanish translation. It is a musical play originally performed in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Ombú and then for two seasons on Calle Corrientes in the years 1927–8. On his first reading the narrator feels excitement in the company of those ghosts of theatre past: “I gradually left behind that reading room, … to float for two hours in a world of brightly coloured silhouettes, as changing as the fleeting shapes seen through a kaleidoscope, and to be stirred by real passion” (13). This show will provide an access point to a much larger network, just like “the opening of a portal into another universe” (Solomon, “Fictions” 219). What follows is a rather detailed synopsis of the three acts of El rufián moldavo, complete with short quotes from the script and original song titles. In the first act, the festive gathering of a group of Jewish women in Moldovia is interrupted by “a goodlooking young man, tall, with black hair and sad eyes” (14), who is leaving for America. Playing a freilach on his violin, he convinces several girls to follow him on his journey despite the older women’s resistance. Once the transatlantic ship nears its destination with no Statue of Liberty in sight, the young

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man, now playing a bandoneon, cheers up the disappointed girls by enthusiastically spurring them to “discover a different America, the one in the South, and … its music” (15). The scene concludes with other men stepping in and teaching them an exciting new dance. However, the girls are in for a harsh awakening in the following scene, where the same men, in fact procurers for the shady Zwi Migdal organization, now treat them as merchandise in the darkness of a night club. Honing in on the protagonist, Taube (“Dove”), one of them gets up, goes over to the platform and lifts the girl’s shift to get a good look at what’s underneath. Another man opens her mouth with one hand to examine her teeth. All at once, she starts sobbing: the music swells up and her sobs turn into a song” (16), an acknowledgement of her transformation into a prostitute: “I’m a flower in the mud, anybody’s woman. (17) In the second act, the unfortunate but recalcitrant girl is forced to progressively shabbier establishments farther away from the capital until she decides to go back to Buenos Aires and try to kill “the sordid madame who runs the new house she finds herself in” (18). In the third act, her pimp, Mendele, selflessly assumes the blame for the failed murder and regains the audience’s sympathy by reporting the Zwi Migdal’s operations to the authorities. Safe from other jailed pimps’ attempts at his life, he enjoys the visits of several girls who bring him comfort gifts. The show concludes with Taube’s last song “Listen to your heart/if you’re feeling lost/its voice will show the path/leading to redemption” (18) and a sensual tango with Mendele, while the cell walls disappear and the entire company joins in the dance. Puzzled by the libretto and wondering about “the time when a work like that could be accepted without embarrassment” (17), the narrator takes advantage of the Library of Congress’s night hours. There he finds—perhaps too serendipitously?—a chatty old fellow, Ariel Nisenson, who has been reading archives of the Idishe Tseitung newspaper, happens to be an expert of Yiddish theatre, and even attended the performance of El rufián moldavo at the time, secretly from his parents. He knows about the libretto’s author, a certain Theo Auer who worked as a professional matchmaker into the fifties, but provides no definitive clarity as to the playwright’s motives or attitude toward prostitution. These doubts remain even after, on Nisenson’s suggestion, the narrator reaches out to the playwright’s daughter, Natalia. She dismisses the quality of those Yiddish theatre productions as amateur and alerts him that her father, whose real name was Teófilo Auerbach, “wasn’t a man of the theatre, and towards the end of the life he used to get very annoyed if anyone mentioned this play to him … He wasn’t bothered about success, but he was put out that The Moldavian Pimp created confusion” (27). Underwhelmed by the scarcity of evidence thus gathered, but compelled to dig deeper, the researcher only knows for sure that he has stumbled upon “something [ … ] which quickly took on a life of its own” (31), involving a “shadowy organization” (32) that was fought by the Jewish community but could count on the collusion of the Argentine police and legal system. After exhausting the available sources of information, the narrator shifts from the more essayistic tone of the researcher to a fictional recreation of the lives somehow related to El rufián moldavo and the later Victory Revue.13 In part two he recounts how Sami, who had opted for the bandoneon of tango instead of the violin and had been thrown out by his father,14 gradually built a successful career as a musician while involved with two former prostitutes. Once the Jewish girl he loved passionately and had rescued from a brothel withered away due to tuberculosis, he began a relationship with Perl Rust from Ukraine, a performer who could sing in both Yiddish and Spanish. Moving from the Southern province of Bahía Blanca, they were then hired by Rubén, the impresario of the Soleil and Excelsior theatres in Buenos Aires, who suggested they debut with the revue company (and Perla Ritz as a less ethnic stage name

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for her). A tacit part of the agreement, which would have had Fonseca on hot coals, left Sami cool and even calculating: Perl Would go out “to do the shopping” at around eleven and spend some time in Rubén’s office …, which meant they avoided paying rent: it is possible that in secret it flattered his vanity as a man who had lived the tango for so long to have a woman who was no longer young but could still earn her keep. (63) But since their performances, although popular, remained limited to an all-Yiddish repertoire and the poorest Jewish families of the Abasto and Villa Crespo neighbourhoods, The Victory Revue was meant to attract a larger audience and even compete with cinema screens. A collection of songs and sketches, it exploited the excitement of the 1945 liberation of Europe by piggybacking on the word “victory” that appeared everywhere in department stores’ publicity. Among the cast, was a twomonth-old Maxi, Sami’s son, waving “a tiny British flag in his mother Perl’s arms, while she sang a rough approximation of ‘Tipperary’ in Yiddish” (69). At the end of the second part, we find Maxi in Paris in the 1980s, an emcee at a “run-down café-concert in the Les Halles area, whose name conjured up images of Buenos Aires in a vague way” (72). Maxi will then get involved with the murder of a procurer in defence of a young prostitute, which may reflect Auerbach’s similar action and possible inspiration for El rufián moldavo, as the narrator suggests later on: it is a thread of this complex rhizome that can only be mentioned here as it takes us far from the theatre sphere, but is remarkable exactly because it shows the most oblique, tenuous relationship between lives mediated by a play, only an echo that reverberates through the network of connections. Back to Maxi’s father, Sami’s life experience and love for former prostitutes sheds light on his interest in El rufián moldavo and why he would reach out to its author a few years later. Part three finally brings together the playwright’s and the actor’s threads through another document, found at the bottom of Sami’s box. It is his handwritten account of a meeting with Auerbach at the Café Leon in Buenos Aires in 1949, when he had sought permission to stage El rufián moldavo. In spite of Teófilo’s unwillingness to revive his work, he had offered a glimpse of the play’s earlier success: “Two hundred performances … An unheard-of hit for Yiddish theatre” (91), during a golden age that entailed “romance, music, emotion, intrigue” (92). Indeed, the musical play offered the type of large-cast performance full of spectacular elements that would have sent Fonseca’s company packing. However, as for its potential role as a link between the Jewish community and the “sinister organisation of procurers,” the playwright’s daughter argues that “the link is completely coincidental. It has no deeper significance” (96). On the one hand, she explains, there was the context of antisemitism during a period of social unrest, the Tragic Week of 1919: “when nationalist groups went out to kill Jews in the streets of Once and Almagro districts … to keep the image of Argentine Jewry spotless,” the community “wanted nothing to do with communists who were attempting to repeat the Russian revolution on the banks of the River Plate, or with procurers” (102). That was the reason why there had been protests against the play. On the other hand, its action reflected actual events in her parents’ lives: it had been her own mother—a political activist— who, after listening to a lengthy explanation about why it was impossible for the wife to initiate divorce proceedings according to Jewish law, had killed a Zwi Migdal rabbi as an act of protest on behalf of all wronged Jewish women. But, once she was “declared insane and sent to a village in Santa Fe province … , a cover-up was orchestrated so that the activities of the ‘pimps’ synagogue’ would never become public knowledge. Auerbach only spent two years in jail. It was the members of the Zwi Migdal themselves who arranged his release as a reward for keeping silent” (103).15

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Still unsatisfied with the playwright’s motives and doubting Natalia’s version of the facts, the narrator suspects that the connection between work and life could have been much more intimate. Indeed, in his continued search for clues, he finds—in a Jewish cemetery in the Santa Fe province—the tomb of Rebeca Durán, a Sephardic Jew known as a cabaret singer in Warsaw and Sami’s wife, in addition to information that puts both on the same steamship of immigrants from Europe. In other words, El rufián moldavo could have been a thinly veiled reflection of the lives of an actual pimp and a prostitute. Even so, assailed by fundamental doubts about possible alternative explanations for such scarce evidence, in the end the detective-narrator grows weary of looking for a truth that remains elusive: I was no longer interested in whether Rebeca Durán … had killed the fake rabbi … I did not want to know if Auerbach had tried to exorcise his shameful previous existence by means of a theatre play, only to live its success as a humiliation, or if the daughter … had decided to rewrite that obscure past that would never become a historical event. They were too much for me, these lives I had no way of redeeming. I preferred to keep their secret … I do not want to use their lives to write a novel. I prefer to respect silence, to prepare for oblivion. The oblivion awaiting us all. (121–2) The narrator’s decision obviously contradicts what Cozarinsky has been doing all along, which is exactly the opposite, i.e., gently blowing on the nearly extinguished embers of theatres past, to rekindle them, at least for a little while longer. And they too receive a mention towards the end: “I also thought of those humble theatres that had offered a fleeting, illusory communion to so many lonely people, to the guardians of a language that was on the point of vanishing” (132–3). It is an example not so much of nostalgia, “something sticky that doesn’t let you move forward, that keeps you in the fetishism of a falsified past,” but of the author’s fondness for melancholy, “a noble feeling, the ‘memento mori’ with which we live” (Sabogal). Thus, the author seems to suggest, such awareness of how everything is on the verge of disappearing should result in a fuller appreciation of every instant in life, not just the glories of the stage, but also all the minuscule steps that brought people together to perform or watch.

Conclusions: Listening to the Echoes An intense fascination with a past nearing oblivion pervades these theatre-fiction works: in Blasco’s 1924 novella, the great Rengifo’s anecdotes hark back to early- to mid-nineteenth century Latin American milieus; in Cozarinsky’s 1984 novel, an implied point of reference is Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s 1891 purchase of land from the Argentine government to facilitate immigration of persecuted Jews of Europe, which eventually attracted not only laborers and craftsmen but also actors and prostitutes (Manguel 135). However, this is not the past of famous actors and musicians but of decidedly marginal ones, whose lives emerge only through an effort to illuminate little events and contexts normally left out of history books. Cozarinsky often commented on his preference for aspects of microhistory, from gossip to the anecdote.16 For instance, speaking about his collection of short stories Vudú urbano (Urban Voodoo) he declared: “I was very interested in everything that history evacuated and left out in order to constitute itself, that is: the anecdote … but the idea of truth mattered less to me than the fact that it was forgotten, postponed. I was always interested in going to those margins” (qtd. in Orecchia 99). As we have seen, Blasco seems equally fascinated by anecdotes, gossip, and the margins. An actor in disgrace in his homeland, Fonseca had to emigrate overseas so he could match his mediocre skills to a less demanding audience; in spite of some success in the New World, we meet him at a time of decadence, before and after his further movement to irrelevance, first from the

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cities of the coast to the jungle, then from the jungle to a nursing home. Similarly, Cozarinsky’s researcher starts with a musician turned actor and an amateur playwright of a minor ethnic theatre in Argentina, thinly connected by El rufián moldavo, and ends up investigating multiple leads further away from that already peripheral point. Of course, while Blasco’s Doctor Olmedilla can afford the luxury to assess Fonseca’s entire artistic life and never doubts his interlocutors, Cozarinsky’s narrator is unable to ever attain full closure because he can only count on unreliable witnesses or posthumous testimony. At least one thing is certain: these recollections underscore the multitude of decisions, challenges, biases, hopes, even humiliations that led those performance artists from one show to another, i.e., the intertwined genealogies of ergon and parergon otherwise invisible to the audience. Unrestrained by the immediacy of a staged performance, theatre-fiction can afford to broaden the chronotopic scope to whole lives (and beyond) and, consequently, diverse locales: not only do both Blasco and Cozarinsky jump freely between the present and the past, but they also evoke a variety of places on both sides of the Atlantic that span from the city of Buenos Aires to the Argentine provinces, from the tropical forest of Venezuela to the steppes of Eastern Europe. It is through this bird’s eye view that the observers, Dr Olmedilla or the 25-year-old researcher, can listen to the feeble echoes of theatres past and amplify them, doing for the theatre what drama and staged spectacle can no longer accomplish.

Notes 1 Except for El rufián moldavo’s English text, all translations from Spanish in this chapter are my own. 2 A potential dissonance between these authors lies in Blasco’s initial political antisemitism (for later efforts to overcome it after the famous Dreyfus case and Émile Zola’s J’accuse, see Balboa) and Cozarinsky’s Jewish origins, although in his case, “neither [of his parents’ family] was religious, and neither was concerned with preserving Jewish traditions” (Kaminsky 124); the author himself seems to consider being Jewish as just one of the many intersections he participates in ( López Vicuña 1–2). 3 A rhizomatic, nomadic approach is frequent in Cozarinsky, who stated: “I always felt that all life is made of the intersection with other lives. Identities are labile, shaped and changed by incessant contact with others” (Sabogal). Claire Solomon has already pointed out how El rufián moldavo is a rhizome: “What begins as a certain set of points, … becomes an assemblage that pulls us along with each of the characters, from point to point in all directions until there are no more points and only lines: lines of flight that are part of the rhizome … None of the fragments … is reunited into a totality by the end of the novel, and yet they all seem to be connected by tenuous webs of relationships” (“Fictions” 208–9). 4 Towards the end of his life, Blasco was living in a villa in Menton, France. The other novella, not about theatre topics, is La familia del doctor Pedraza (Doctor Pedraza’s Family), about an Argentine doctor living in Paris. 5 Unlike Cozarinsky, Blasco provides no precise dates apart from a jump of “eight or ten years” between sections two and three (169). Based on the date of publication of the novella, I assume that a couple of secondhand anecdotes related by Fonseca hark back to sometime between 1825–55, the period of highest political instability for the early Latin American republics. 6 For a detailed history of Buenos Aires theatre during the period referenced by Blasco (and partially by Cozarinsky), see for example the collection edited by Pellettieri (2002). The volume details the cultural emancipation of the Argentine theatre from European models between 1884 and 1930, when Spanish companies were gradually substituted with national ones that staged local authors and a variety of commercial popular forms, such as the sainete or the revista criolla. 7 A substantial rapprochement between Spain and the former colonies started with the 1892 celebrations of the fourth anniversary of the discovery of America, followed by those of each country’s independence, thus facilitating the birth of “a transatlantic collaborative movement called Hispanism,” that hinged on the common language and culture while aiming to counter the United States’ expansionism ( San Martín Molina 95–6). 8 At times, Fonseca sounds like an alter ego of Blasco, at least in his cultural role as “one of the main intellectual exports of Spain in the first quarter of the … twentieth century” (Mariátegui 128), at a crucial time in Hispano-American relations. Blasco also attempted to establish two colonies of immigrants, Nueva Valencia in Corrientes and Cervantes in Río Negro, an endeavour that eventually failed ( Lluch-Pratz 256; 265).

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Echoes of Theatre Past 9 In his essay On Humour (1908), Luigi Pirandello defines umorismo as the perception of the opposite, when our laughter is tempered by the awareness of the human struggles of the person who inspires derision first, then sympathy and compassion. 10 When he appears to admit the possibility of physical betrayal, he surmises that it must have been by force and by an indigenous ruler of an unstable republic, as opposed to one ruled by Europeans. Given his wife’s whimsical behaviour, one wonders about Pepita’s paternity as well. 11 This competition with film is a concern in much theatre-fiction of the first half of the twentieth century, e.g., in J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions, Clemence Danes’s Broome Stages, D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, or later, reflectively, in works like Angela Carter’s Wise Children. 12 Just like in Blasco, there are significant resonances between the main character and the author. For instance, Cozarinsky similarly prefers the recent past, not yet subject to the contemporary bombardment of visual stimuli: “I would be incapable of writing anything about the present. And I try to search for a time before television, which interests me above all because of the scarcity of images” (qtd. in Orecchia 100). It is a very similar situation to his narrator, who can count on only a few posters and his own imagination. 13 Cozarinsky proclaimed his loathing for purity as opposed to contamination (García), and a genre-defying porosity between document and fiction is one of the characteristic traits of his works. For Jason Weiss, “Both in his films and in his written narratives, the imaginative process readily blurs the distinction between fiction, essay, document” (183). Mauricio Alonso argues that Cozarinsky’s “is a fundamentally essayistic work … The essay is Cozarinsky’s preferred form for the expressive freedom that this form provides him, to the point where fiction itself can become a pertinent intrusion” (50). 14 The author stated that he was always interested in the tango because “it’s not folklore, it’s of the city, it comes from the low life; it was only accepted after 1913, when it became fashionable in Europe,” thus overcoming the prejudice that it was music of immigrants (Diario Alfil). 15 Trying to make explicit what remains unsaid in the novel, Solomon argues that “this idea—the Jew who murders the pimp in a highly un-Jewish ‘honor killing’—was Auer’s revenge for Jewish betrayal (the prevalence of trafficking, of the tmeim, Jewish complicity and silence)” but, at the same time, his revenge also meant “Auer’s betrayal of the Jewish community—giving voice to the dirty secret” (“Fictions” 186). 16 One of his books, Nuevo museo del chisme (New Museum of Gossip), is a collection of gossip episodes from history and the arts.

Works Cited Alonso, Mauricio. “Cozarinsky: El extranjero.” Quimera: Revista de literatura, nos. 296–297, 2008, pp. 49–57. Balboa, Orfeo. “Vicente Blasco Ibáñez: antisemitismo entre naranjos.” Debats: Revista de cultura, poder y sociedad, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 153–167. Blasco Ibañez, Vicente. “Al lector.” Novelas de la Costa Azul, Prometeo, 1924, p. 7. Blasco Ibañez, Vicente. “El comediante Fonseca.” Novelas de la Costa Azul, Prometeo, 1924, pp. 145–191. Bloch-Morhange, Lise, and David Alper. Artiste et métèque à Paris. Éditions Buchet/Castel, 1980. Cardwell, Richard. “Review of Thomas Di Salvo, El arte cuentistico de Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Madrid: Pliegos, 1988.” BHS, vol. LXX, 1993, pp. 381–382. Cozarinsky, Edgardo. El rufián moldavo. La bestia equilátera, 2015. Cozarinsky, Edgardo. The Moldavian Pimp. Translated by Nick Caistor, Harvill Secker, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. U of Chicago P, 1987. Diario Alfil. “Reeditan ‘El rufián moldavo’ de Edgardo Cozarinsky.” 22 June 2015. García, Eugenia. “‘Me gusta descubrir los fantasmas de Buenos Aires.’” Página 12, 27 June 2004. Hernández, Paola S. Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives. Northwestern UP, 2021. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. Routledge, 2011. Kaminsky, Amy K. The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation. State U of New York P, 2021. LLuch-Prats, Javier. “La antesala del triunfo de un editor y escritor profesional: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez en Argentina (1909–1914).” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, no. 46, 2012, pp. 247–268. López Vicuña, Ignacio. “La perspectiva excéntrica de Cozarinsky: cosmopolitismo y globalización en ‘Tres fronteras.’ Revista Hispánica Moderna, vol. 66, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–11. Manguel, Alberto. “Afterword.” The Moldavian Pimp, by Edgardo Cozarinsky, Harvill Secker, 2006, pp. 134–138. Mariátegui, José Carlos. “Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.” Signos y obras. Lima: Amauta, 1959.

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Stefano Boselli Montaldo, Graciela. “Tango: la ficción y la Argentina portátil.” Catedral Tomada Revista literaria latinoamericana / Journal of Latin American Literary Criticism, vol. 4, no. 7, 2016, pp. 13–32. Orecchia, Teresa. “Entrevista a Edgardo Cozarinsky.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, vol. 621, 2002, pp. 97–112. Pellettieri, Osvaldo, ed. Historia del teatro argentino en Buenos Aires: La emancipación cultural (1884–1930), Vol. II. Galerna, 2002. Pirandello, Luigi. “On Humor.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 10, no. 3, 1966, pp. 46–59. Rossi, Ana María. “Edgardo Cozarinsky: topografías del exilio.” Gramma, vol. 1, no. extra 3, 2010, pp. 336–342. Sabogal, Winston Manrique. “Edgardo Cozarinsky: ‘Siempre se entra en el amor como en territorio desconocido.’” WMagazín 10 February 2021. San Martín Molina, Alicia. “El viaje de Vicente Blasco Ibá ñ ez a la Argentina: Negocio y cultura.” Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, no. 20, 2020, pp. 93–114. Sebreli, Juan José. “Cozarinsky: sobre exilios y ruinas.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, nos. 613–614, 2001, pp. 213–216. Smith, Paul. “Blasco Ibá ñ ez and Drama.” Hispanófila, no. 46, 1972, pp. 35–40. Solomon, Claire. “Reconsidering Anti-Semitism and White Slavery in Contemporary Historical Fiction about Argentina.” Comparative Literature, vol. 63, no. 3, 2011, pp. 307–327. Solomon, Claire. “Fictions of the ‘Bad Life’: The Discourse of Prostitution in Argentine Literature and Culture.” 2007. Yale University, PhD dissertation. Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. Routledge, 2003.

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4 GHOSTING IN JAMES’S THE TRAGIC MUSE The Haunted Body and the Haunted House Sophie Stringfellow

This chapter explores Anglo-American writer Henry James’s novel, The Tragic Muse (1890), through the theatrical framework of ghosting, looking at the ways in which the form of theatre-fiction allowed him to invest in future possibilities for theatre and performance beyond the constraints of the present. James’s canonical status is firmly linked to his psychological novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903). Alongside his literary career, however, he maintained a conflicted passion for theatre, which waxed and waned throughout his life. For several years he actively worked towards the goal of becoming a popular playwright, but his plays were received either with ambivalence or hostility, and in many cases their production was indefinitely deferred. His main attempt at conquering the London stage culminated in the disastrous premiere of his historical drama Guy Domville (1895), where he was booed by large sections of the audience during his curtain-call. Biographer Leon Edel’s well-known formulation characterizes the dominant understanding of his playwriting legacy: “James was in reality a dramatist who could not write plays. He accordingly made himself into a dramatist of the novel” (1). I argue that The Tragic Muse, written just before the period of his career that Edel terms “The Dramatic Years,” and thus before the full impact of his dramatic experimentation on his novels, had a more specifically theatrical purpose for James, enabling him to frame his aspirations for the future of English theatre through his esteem for France’s historic national stage. Although James never achieved a hit on the West End stage, scholars since the mid-twentieth century have demonstrated the ways in which stylistic principles taken from drama came to shape his innovative literary style. Percy Lubbock (1921) was the first to identify his famed “scenic method,” arguing that the novels he wrote after his major playwriting phase resembled dramatic texts, due to the dominance of dialogue and the scenic exposure of characters’ inner landscapes. Mid-century critics such as Lubbock, Edel, F. R. Leavis, and F. O. Matthiessen worked to strengthen his literary reputation at a time when English Literature was becoming entrenched as a serious scholarly discipline, but one consequence of this was that his “failure” as a playwright was converted into a stable narrative of literary success. David Kurnick has noted the familiar teleological reading of his career through which the plays are reduced to “regrettable detours on the road to aesthetic integration” (5). The movement to claim James for the literary canon has thus led to the absorption of his theatre work within an overly polarized narrative of theatrical failure (shame) and success as a novelist (redemption). Recent studies have begun to re-evaluate the substance of his dramatic writing and his engagement with the stage beyond its contribution to the scenic method. In Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-7

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beyond Drama, for instance, Julia Jarcho explores James’s representation of temporality in his short story “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) and his novel The Ambassadors, arguing that his constant syntactical disruption of the present tense “simulates the distracting multidimensionality of theatrical space” (35). Although Jarcho continues the existing trope of interpreting James’s fiction through the lens of theatricality, she foregrounds to a much greater extent his sensory understanding of theatre as a medium with “the potential for overload” (34). Kurnick similarly makes a case for his experimental approach to both theatre and the novel through an analysis of two strikingly “un-novelistic novels” written in the wake of Guy Domville: The Other House (1896) and The Awkward Age (1899) (110). He resists the dominant narrative of James’s humiliated retreat from the stage, where theatre is driven into the private space of the novel and “remade as metaphor” (1). Instead, he advocates a “reliteralization” (5) of the many theatrical reference points in the novels, such as the representation of performance space and the dynamics of actor and spectator. For Kurnick, The Other House and The Awkward Age are discomfiting in their generic indeterminacy, because instead of converting the experience of theatrical failure into the evolution of the modern novel, James infused these texts with failure itself, allowing him to trouble the boundaries of both theatre and fiction. In this chapter I further complicate the relationship of contingency established within the Jamesean canon, which insists that his dramatic experimentation served solely as fuel for the literary masterwork. In my reading of The Tragic Muse, I identify the theatre-novel as a space in which he tested his priorities for theatre, generated through a wealth of theatre-going experiences, before attempting to channel them in his subsequent plays. My approach is informed by Graham Wolfe’s conception of theatre-fiction as “an intermedial genre … understood in its broadest sense as referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry” (2). In accordance with Kurnick’s efforts to “reliteralize” and Wolfe’s call to “demetaphorize” (5) the theatrical specificities of James’s work, I argue that The Tragic Muse directly communicates his conception of theatrical temporality and materiality, as he searched for a compromise between the dissatisfying reality of the theatre industry at the fin de siècle and a utopian vision of what the artform could become. The theatrical concept of ghosting, outlined by Marvin Carlson in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, provides a valuable tool for analyzing a theatre-novel which is integrally engaged with the question of theatre’s past, present, and future. According to Carlson, theatre is an inherently haunted medium, because each spectator’s reception of a performance is formed through a collision of memories, such as recognition of an actor from their previous roles, knowledge of the dramatic work being performed, and collective memories layered upon the performance space. For the individuals in the audience, “[t]he present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recollection” (2). This is a reciprocal process, where the past, present, and future of theatre have the potential to interact and disrupt one another. In The Tragic Muse, James demonstrates sensitivity to the two forms of ghosting that Carlson groups under the headings “the haunted body” (the actor) and “the haunted house” (the theatre space). My analysis of the novel focuses on the figure of the retired actress, Madame Carré, as the epitome of the haunted body, who cultivates her own haunted theatre space to foster a tangible link with tradition, and her young protégée, Miriam Rooth, who is haunted by the future of theatre’s potentiality. To provide a contextual framework for this reading, I will first identify some of James’s priorities for theatre, as expressed in his works of criticism, before tracing these concepts in The Tragic Muse.

Henry James’s Theatre Criticism: The Actor as Temporal Mediator James began building his literary profile from the 1860s, following his decision to abandon the study of law, contributing short stories, travel sketches, and reviews on art and literature to

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high-profile American periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation. The popular success of his novella Daisy Miller (1878) helped to secure his literary standing on both sides of the Atlantic. He was also an avid theatregoer during this period, and his first visit to the French national stage in 1870 was of great significance in setting the primary standard by which he would judge all theatrical performance. During his European travels of the 1870s and 1880s, he regularly wrote play reviews and theatre essays, reflecting particularly on the art of acting and the distinction between theatre cultures in England, the United States, and France. His article “Coquelin,” originally published in American magazine The Century, exemplifies his position on the French stage, which he perceived as “the richest theatrical tradition in the world” (407). The Théâtre Français is the world’s longest established national theatre, with a state-sponsored administrative system and a teaching tradition founded on the transmission of knowledge from retired actor to student. According to the 1883 manual of the Conservatoire, prospective actors of the Comédie Française would be trained in “how to enunciate, how to act, how to bear themselves on stage,” with a focus on studying “the classical masterpieces, the dynamism of each scene, the characters as they have been transmitted to us by past masters” (Hemmings 176). The tradition of the company constantly renewed itself through performance of the classics by playwrights such as Molière and Racine, as well as the careful selection of new work by writers such as Émile Augier and Alfred de Musset. Celebrated actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin joined the Comédie Française in 1860 after a year of training at the Conservatoire, before departing in 1886 to tour Europe and the United States. James’s article is written in a retrospective style, as he recalls watching Coquelin perform “nearly seventeen years ago” (407) when he was first introduced to the Théâtre Français. As well as reaching nostalgically back into his personal past as a spectator, he also expresses optimism for the future of the American theatre scene and for the career of Coquelin, who seeks “the lighter, fresher air of a stage of his own” (407). He shares his hope that the actor’s US tour will shape the taste of American spectators in a similar way to his own “initiation” into Coquelin’s art in the 1870s: “[If] the American public learns, or even shows an aptitude for learning, the lesson conveyed in [Coquelin’s] finest creations, the lesson that acting is an art and that art is style, the gain will have been something more than the sensation of the moment—it will have been an added perception” (407). As the representative of a noble tradition originating in the seventeenth century, Coquelin’s acting, according to James, has the potential to reveal artistic truths that are beyond current theatrical trends. Terms such as “style,” “authority,” and “largeness” regularly appear throughout his play reviews, as well as in The Tragic Muse, to convey the legitimizing stamp of an actor who has a relationship with the theatrical past and who can mediate this to an audience. For James, this mediation occurs primarily through the classically trained actor’s declamatory style, which is the “product of the most determined study” (410) and has been passed down through generations of highly skilled actors. The critical emphasis in “Coquelin” is on the distinctive appeal of the actor’s voice, because according to James, “to enjoy the refinement of M. Coquelin’s acting the ear must be as open as the eye, must even be beforehand with it” (407). Although Coquelin “offers no bribe” in terms of visual appearance, James assures us that “[g]reat singers speak or rather sing for themselves” (407). Analyzing his delivery of an exceptionally long speech in the final act of Alexandre Dumas fils’ Denise (1885), James tells us that against all odds, Coquelin managed to give it “life, light, color, movement, variety, interest, even excitement” (410). This success is presented as “the highest triumph of the actor’s art” and according to James, such emotionally affecting diction constitutes “the most human part” (410) of theatrical performance. On this point he aligns himself firmly with the French theatrical tradition, as he notes that an “English or an American audience would have sunk into a settled gloom by the time the long rhythm of the thing had declared itself” (410).

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In his theatre criticism, James frequently returns to the idea that the demand for visual spectacle over vocal expressiveness constitutes a stumbling block to artistic progress on the English and American stage. Whilst the impact of Coquelin’s vocal performance may offer “something more than the sensation of the moment,” James argues that in England and the US, “to say things is out of fashion … To do them, with a great reënforcement of chairs and tables, of traps and panoramas and other devices, is the most that our Anglo-Saxon star, of either sex, aspires to” (410). Michael R. Booth identifies the period from 1850 to 1910 as representing “the full flow of theatrical spectacle” on the Victorian stage, when advances in stage technology, such as lighting innovations, facilitated increasingly extravagant and visually realistic forms of scenic illusion (2). The popular form of sensational melodrama, for instance, “was preoccupied with diegetic realism … which involved both efforts at verisimilar mise-en-scène and the use of real objects on stage—real horses, real fire engines, real pile drivers, real water, etc.” (Singer 50). Actor-managers Squire and Effie Bancroft popularized the form of cup and saucer realism, with its emphasis on the visually precise mounting of a drawing-room setting, whilst the pictorial style of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry’s partnership at the Lyceum allowed the theatre to flourish as a “Temple of Art” (Meisel 402). The latter star actors consistently received James’s harshest critiques in his theatre reviews because of the ways in which they appeared to feed the public enthusiasm for visual spectacle on the London stage. In his 1879 article “The London Theatres,” for example, he tells us that Irving is “the principal ‘actuality’ of the London stage” (121) and Terry is “greatly the fashion at present,” but that their theatrical approach is deeply flawed in prioritizing the “picturesque” over “the art of finished and beautiful utterance—the art of speaking, of saying, of diction, as the French call it” (122). Although James’s critical attitude towards the popular verges on snobbery, his dissatisfaction with English theatre trends stems from a yearning for theatrical experiences that open up a line of communication between past, present, and future, rather than binding spectators within a closed present tense. James argues that in France, theatre “is something at once more and less than the fashion, and something more respectable and permanent, and a part of the national life” (120). The Théâtre Français represents an unbroken link to the theatrical past, whilst its central position in French culture ensures that its productions continue to resonate with spectators. As James puts it, when discussing new works performed on the French national stage, “the terms of the Théâtre Français’s magnificent contract with the State are that she shall increase her inheritance and think of the future as well as the past” (“Parisian Stage” 49). In his 1876 article “The Théâtre Français,” James’s description of his time spent at the historic theatre at the Rue de Richelieu emphasizes his sense of the past enriching the present, as he focuses on the haunted nature of the performance space, where the “traditions … form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment” (72): It used to please me, when I had squeezed into my stall—the stalls at the Français are extremely uncomfortable—to remember of how great a history the large, dim salle around me could boast … how the air was thick with associations. Even if I had never seen Rachel, it was something of a consolation to think that those very footlights had illumined her finest moments and that the echoes of her mighty voice were sleeping in that dingy dome. (75) James’s visit to the Théâtre Français was haunted by the past performances of the great tragedienne Rachel Félix who, four decades earlier, had “reawakened the public’s appreciation of the classics” through the “melodic clarity of her voice, which infused the seventeenth-century rhetoric with emotional truth” (Berthold 239). The physical discomfort of the ancient space strengthens his connection to an earlier time when the power of Rachel’s vocal delivery had similarly reinvigorated a sense of noble tradition for French audiences. When James watches Coquelin perform, he bears witness to the actor’s continuation of this vocal lineage in a space still reverberating with the performances of the past:

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If M. Coquelin’s voice is not sweet, it is extraordinarily clear, firm, and ringing, and it has an unsurpassable distinctness, a peculiar power to carry. As I write I seem to hear it ascend like a rocket to the great hushed dome of the theater of the Rue de Richelieu. It vibrates, it lashes the air, it seems to proceed from some mechanism still more scientific than the human throat. (“Coquelin” 410) James’s two main priorities for theatrical performance are combined here: the distinctive, almost supernatural vocal reach of a classically trained actor and a haunted theatre space “which has echoed to so many thrilling sounds” (408). In his view, it is not the “stage-carpenter and the dress-maker” (410) who are essential parts of a production, but rather the dialogue facilitated between generations of performers and spectators in the historical space, where tradition continues to impact the present through the mediation of the actor.

The Haunted Body of the Actress in the Haunted House In The Tragic Muse, James adopted the form of theatre-fiction to project a vision of the haunted stage for England at a time when he was preparing to immerse himself fully in the London theatre industry. Despite the often sceptical tone of his theatre reviews, where English theatre is described as having a “musty tradition” (“London Theatres: 1880” 134) and London is viewed as “a place in which the drama cannot … have a vigorous life” (“London Theatres: 1877” 96), the framework of the theatrenovel enables him to imaginatively experiment with the temporal dynamic that, for him, enlivened the French national stage. The novel depicts a variety of characters and scenarios from the “contemporary social salad” (9), as James puts it in his Preface, such as politician Nick Dormer who dreams of being an artist, his ambitious lover Julia Dallow whose engagement to him is contingent on his political career, and the Wildean aesthete Gabriel Nash. The plot that I focus on here concerns actresses Honorine Carré and Miriam Rooth, and the latter’s relationship with diplomat and theatrelover Peter Sherringham, who supports her theatrical ambitions until he falls in love with her and wishes her to leave the stage. The novel begins in Paris, where Nash has arranged for Rooth, accompanied by her mother, to give a recital in front of “the great celebrity” (50) Madame Carré, who will assess the young actress’s potential. Although Carré has retired from the Comédie Française, Sherringham tells his companions that “she has been so good as to come and ‘say’ things—which she does sometimes still dans le monde as no one else can—in my rooms” (50). We learn of her reputation for “incomparable” (50) vocal delivery, which, as we have seen, James views as the foundation of theatrical performance. Before we meet Rooth or Carré, the dialogic emphasis of his theatre-novel allows him to mobilize some of the different perspectives on the theatre of the fin de siècle which appear throughout his criticism of the previous two decades. Nash questions the artistic and intellectual significance of theatre in the current capitalist marketplace, where its primary value is for the “managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money,” reducing it to “a commercial and social convenience” for the self-absorbed or bored multitude (53). Sherringham, on the other hand, views theatre as a “rich and various” artform (53). Wolfe points out the similarity of their discourse to James’s dialogue essay “After the Play” (1889), which presents opinions that “both do and don’t represent the views of their author, whose own essays and letters on theatre reflect considerable oscillation on similar topics” (30). In this initial conversation on theatre in The Tragic Muse, the debate refuses to settle on any single perspective, suggesting that for James, the future direction of the stage was yet to be decided. One point on which Nash and Sherringham agree is the superlative vocal talent of Carré, as Nash shares that “I couldn’t rest till I had told her how I hung upon her lips” and Sherringham admits, “That’s just what I told her” (53). This metaphor of the physical dynamic between performer and

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spectator prepares us for the representation of the actress as a mouthpiece for tradition, who mediates for the ghosts of past performers. The retired actress is presented as an icon of French theatrical tradition, whose body and the environment in which she lives are shaped by the phenomenon Carlson names ghosting. In his chapter on the haunted body, Carlson examines the relationship between actor and character type in traditional theatre contexts, including the Théâtre Français and the English stock system of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Actors would typically play similar roles for the duration of their careers and, over time, they would become strongly associated with their established character type. The reception of the performance would be formed according to each audience member’s familiarity with the performer’s legacy, as well as the expectations attached to the role. Mlle Mars, for instance, “the leading lady of the Comédie Française at the beginning of the nineteenth century, [was] still playing romantic heroines until the end of her lengthy career,” because through decades of repetition, her body had become permanently linked with the part of the young heroine (Carlson 57). Carlson also refers to the earlier example, provided by Joseph Roach, of leading Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, whose popularity as a young hero continued into his advanced years. The public, according to Roach, looked beyond physical infirmities to Betterton’s other body, the one that existed outside itself in the fact of his performance of it. Transcending the body of flesh and blood, this other body consisted of actions, gestures, intonations, vocal colors, mannerisms, expressions, customs, protocols, inherited routines, authenticated traditions … [T]he actions of this theatrical body could not be invalidated by age or decrepitude. (Roach, qtd. in Carlson 58) This “other” or “theatrical” body is a temporal effect, generated through the repeated performances of the experienced actor, as well as through what he has inherited from his predecessors. In the case of celebrated performers who honed their art over several decades, the layering of cultural memory could be so potent as to negate any contradiction between the form of the actor and the part being played. As Carlson puts it, “the ghost had a greater performative visibility than the body it haunted” (58). The effect generated through the spectator’s encounter with the haunted body is reinforced by the site at which the performance takes place. According to Carlson, “theatre spaces, like dramatic texts and acting bodies, are deeply involved with the preservation and configuration of cultural memory, and so they also are almost invariably haunted in one way or another” (131–2). This phenomenon is so well established that “the theatre building has often been viewed as a domain of ghosts,” with many older European theatres believed to have at least one resident spirit (141–2). Carlson explores the haunted nature of the state theatres of France, the first of which was established in 1680. The regulation of the state-sponsored theatre system increased in complexity in the early-nineteenth century, when eight buildings were officially recognized as major and minor national theatres, and each given the monopoly over particular genres. These permanently established theatres also had their own companies and production staff, creating a cluster of associations around actor, character, style, and genre, all housed within the same haunted space. Carlson notes that “these long-established national theatres became increasingly conscious of and proud of their cultural inheritance,” and that they began to build visual signifiers of the past into their architecture through portraits and busts of renowned performers (147). Ghosting is intentionally foregrounded in these historical theatres in recognition of its powerful impact upon spectators’ experience. When we first meet Madame Carré, we see that her physical form is etched with her performance history, centred on “a mouth which was visibly a rare instrument, a pair of lips whose curves and fine corners spoke of a lifetime of ‘points’ unerringly made and verse exquisitely spoken” (Tragic 85). When she speaks to her guests, Nash immediately hears the echoes of one of her most famous parts, as

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he “exclaimed endearingly ‘Ah la voix de Célimène!’ [‘the voice of Célimène’]” (85). To look closely at her face and to hear her voice is to be reminded of her fine speeches and thus her participation in a classical tradition that emphasizes the value of good diction. We are told that her appearance gives “the look of long service,” as though she were “some valuable old timepiece which might have quivered and rumbled but could be trusted to strike the hour” (85). The clock simile signals her role in keeping the time of the French stage, as she transmits the lessons of her rich theatrical history to future generations of actresses; however, the quivering and rumbling of the clock suggest the precarity of this past as it continues reverberating in the present. According to John Stokes, the prototype for Carré, in James’s “quasi-historical scheme” (83), was the actress Madame Arnould Plessy, memories of whom were “so deeply embedded in his consciousness that she came to stand for the passing of time itself” (86). Plessy is one of the classical performers who, because of their close connection to the ghosts of the past, James refers to in terms of “style” and “what the French call … authority” (“Parisian Stage” 50). He witnessed her final performance with the Comédie in 1876 before she retired, leaving him with the fear that “her place will probably never be filled, for she was the last depositary of certain traditions which can never … be renewed” (“Notes from Paris” 63). Plessy was “comedy’s answer to Rachel’s triumph in tragedy,” but her grand style of performance was beginning to fall out of public favour by the 1870s, when James first attended the Théâtre Français (Stokes 83). His comment that the younger actresses of the Comédie are only capable of creating “small art; Madame Plessy’s was great art” (“Notes from Paris” 63) reflects this contemporary shift in acting methods. For Stokes, “The Tragic Muse records an extended period of change,” as James bears witness to the departure of the grande coquette (the courtly flirt figure of the mid-century French stage), with her artificiality of manner and elocution, and the emergence of a new phase of the “natural” (85–6). In The Tragic Muse, the intersection of the haunted body with the haunted house reveals James’s attempt to get to grips with this transitional passage in theatre history. Chapter 7 of the novel is set in Carré’s private drawing-room, where she has agreed to give an interview to Rooth. Carré’s arrival is postponed, so we first witness her room through the eyes of the characters who have come to watch the recitation. We find Nash, who has arranged this gathering, looking around at: “the votive offerings which converted the little panelled box, decorated in sallow white and gold, into a theatrical museum: the presents, the portraits, the wreaths, the diadems, the letters, framed and glazed, the trophies and tributes and relics collected by Madame Carré during half a century of renown” (83). Through her display of historically resonant objects, Carré has consciously turned her drawing-room into a haunted theatre space, an extension of the Théâtre Français which, as we have seen, proudly showcases its history. In the absence of the actress herself, however, this haunted space projects a sense of loss. The plethora of theatrical memorabilia exposes “the confession of something missed, something hushed, which seemed to rise from it all and make it melancholy, like a reference to clappings which, in the nature of things, could now only be present as a silence” (83). Sherringham finds a mixed form of consolation for this absence in the presence of the haunted body of Carré. Her physical form offers at least partial contact with the past: “her duration, her survival, cheated him agreeably and helped him a little to guess” the things he had missed (83). Her continued vitality is viewed by Sherringham as a “miracle,” yet it provokes a jealous awareness that “his extraordinary old friend had seen things he should never, never see” (83). The brush with the past produced through an encounter with Carré is inadequate compensation for a man whose “appreciation of the actor’s art was so systemic that it had an antiquarian side” and who “had as yet hardly known a keener regret for anything than for the loss of that antecedent world” (83). Sherringham’s longing centres on a particular comédienne, “the light of the French stage in the early years of the century, of whose example and instruction Madame Carré had had the inestimable benefit” (84). Stokes traces this example to the esteemed actress Mlle Mars, who coached Plessy in the role of Célimène

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in Molière’s comedy of manners, The Misanthrope, and whom we have seen epitomizes the haunted body for Carlson (83). The teaching tradition of the Comédie means that Carré is ghosted by this actress from the previous generation, “from whose hands she had received her most celebrated parts and of whom her own manner was often a religious imitation” (James, Tragic 84). When reminiscing on her “rare predecessor” with Sherringham, however, we learn that “her descriptions troubled him more than they consoled, only confirming his theory, to which so much of his observation had already ministered, that the actor’s art in general was going down and down, … after having reached its perfection, more than fifty years ago, in the talent of the lady in question” (83–4). When Carré channels the ghost of the older actress, Sherringham feels more strongly what is missing from the present, rather than witnessing a complete revival of the past. Carlson uses Roach’s concept of surrogation, outlined in Cities of the Dead, to explore the process by which an actor attempts to intervene in a historically and culturally rich acting tradition: Surrogation, suggests Roach, occurs when “survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates” into “the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure”. The fit, of course, can never be exact. “The intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus.” (Carlson 79) In other words, surrogation does not involve the substitution of a perfect historical replica, but rather refers to the process by which acting tradition is shaped through time. An actor’s performance may suffer by comparison with an earlier example, emphasizing the continued superiority of the past, or could offer a new perspective on the role, thus revising the line of descent. Through Sherringham’s ambivalent response to Carré as a surrogate, James is exploring the “deficit” caused by her failure to sufficiently fill the gap produced by the loss of her predecessor. As Stokes puts it, “even if the past can occasionally be ventriloquised, usually inadequately, it can never be fully re-embodied” (84). On the other side of the surrogation process, James depicts a “surplus” on the horizon through the character of Miriam Rooth and the development of her art. Carré’s first impression of the untrained young actress is that she is “loud and coarse,” lacking “a single nuance, a single inflexion or intention” (94). At a private recital hosted after this initial meeting by Sherringham, Rooth performs instinctively in a manner that becomes “more spasmodic and more explosive,” startling the surrounding circle of “femmes du monde” (100). The guests are impressed by the originality of her talent, but Sherringham is relieved that Carré had not been there to witness it, as “she would have judged the exhibition, with its badness, its impudence, the absence of criticism, wholly indecent” (100). James’s description of Rooth’s early attempts at performing is reminiscent of his critical perspective on the “rough” acting method of Ellen Terry, who was regarded by the English theatre-going public as “an actress of exquisite genius” (“London Theatres: 1880” 142). For James, however, Terry “has happy impulses; but this seems to us to be the limit of it. She has nothing of the style, nothing of what the French call the authority, of the genuine comédienne” (143). Through the framework of the theatre-novel, James creates a situation in which the “remarkable charm” and “sympathetic spontaneity” of a naturally gifted English actress like Terry could be refined into the kind of “finish” (142) acquired by the French national theatre company. After a couple of lessons with Carré, we learn that Rooth has begun to intrigue the retired actress. Her initial approach to her study is “to reproduce with a crude fidelity, but in extraordinary detail, the intonations, the personal quavers and cadences of her model” (128). She attempts to re-perform the grand manner of a classical actress, allowing her body to become a conduit for performance history in a way that is comparable to the teaching methods of the Conservatoire. There remains a roughness of touch in her “close, rude, audacious mimicry,” but when Carré criticizes her, she does so with “neither

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indifference nor simple contempt,” acknowledging “a mystifying shade of reality in the jeune Anglaise [young English woman] and even a shade of importance” (128). Carré’s response of wonder towards her protégée, given her wealth of experience, suggests to Sherringham that Rooth “was perhaps indeed rare, a new type” (127). Through coaching and personal study, Rooth expands her art beyond her own natural talents, but she also possesses a unique realistic quality that is specific to her own national identity, suggesting fresh possibilities for the English stage. It is when Rooth performs in the context of the haunted house that we gain a greater impression of her originality and potential. After a period of study, she becomes determined to visit the foyer des artistes at the Théâtre Français, “so convinced that her eyes would be opened in the holy of holies” (222). The foyer, “a square spacious saloon covered with pictures and relics and draped in official green velvet” (225), is haunted by the noble spirit of the theatre, as “the genius loci seemed to be ‘at home’ in the quiet lamplight” (225). While a few spectators circulate calmly around the room, looking at the portraits, the space has an air of anticipation, resembling “a ball-room, cleared for the dance, before the guests or the music had arrived” (225). When Rooth responds to this historically charged environment, however, she fills the room with her own theatrical energy: “Oh it’s enough to see this; it makes my heart beat … It’s full of the vanished past, it makes me cry. I feel them here, all, the great artists I shall never see. Think of Rachel—look at her grand portrait there!—and how she stood on these very boards and trailed over them the robes of Hermione and Phèdre.” The girl broke out theatrically, as on the spot was right, not a bit afraid of her voice as soon as it rolled through the room. (225) Once inside the haunted space, she, like James during his own visit to the Théâtre Français, senses the physical presence of the great Rachel and the major roles through which she forged her legacy. The experience of ghosting prompts Rooth to express herself in a theatrical manner, gaining possession of her vocal powers, just as Carré had suggested she must do on their first meeting: “if you find your voice it may carry you far” (95). Her emotive outburst prompts some of the other people in the room to “turn round to stare at so unusual a specimen of the English miss … and her mother, scandalized, begged her to lower her tone” (225). Rooth is evidently aware of her performative impact, as she reassures her mother that “[i]t’s all right. I produce an effect, … it shan’t be said that I too haven’t had my little success in the maison de Molière” (225). On a microcosmic level, she has begun to intervene in the tradition of the Comédie, promoting the theatre’s celebrated ghosts, whilst causing a sensation through her individual style. Rooth’s potential to build upon existing theatrical tradition is most clearly evidenced when Sherringham watches her perform the lead role at a London theatre. Her career began to gain momentum when Basil Dashwood, a gentlemanly young actor with whom she had struck up a professional partnership, obtained an opportunity for them to perform in the capital. Despite having witnessed her rehearsing with increasing levels of artistic skill, Sherringham realizes that “he had never seen her till he saw her in her conditions” (306). He is unsatisfied with the standard of staging at this theatre—“inferior, inadequate, obstructive, as compared with the right full finished setting of such a talent”—but nonetheless gains a sense of how “the uplifted stage and the listening house transformed her” (306). In the haunted foyer of the Théâtre Français, the architecture had prompted Rooth to act as the mouthpiece for the nobility of its history. In these incomplete conditions, however, she is able to make “still larger claims for an art which could so triumphantly, so exquisitely render life” (306). Rooth’s performance indicates the promise of theatrical surplus, because as well as giving Sherringham the satisfaction of watching the “perfectly done,” he is also struck with her future potential to “give us something new and large and of the first order!” (306). In Carré’s drawing-room, Sherringham was preoccupied with the deficit produced by the lost performances of the past, overcome with the belief that

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theatre as an artform was past its prime. In this London theatre, he is still aware of what is missing from the present, but Rooth’s acting directs his attention towards hope for the future, as opposed to mourning for the past. James introduces this distinction earlier in the novel when Sherringham compares the fineness of the two actresses’ faces as “instruments” for expression, noting “that the girl’s was fresh and strong and had a future in it, while poor Madame Carré’s was worn and weary and had only a past” (127). If Carré is ghosted by her experience within the sacred historical atmosphere of the Théâtre Français, James encourages us to view Rooth as equally haunted by the potentiality of the English stage. The power of Rooth’s performance as a newly trained actress on the public stage provokes in Sherringham “an intense vision … of the conditions still absent, the great and complete ones, those which would give the girl’s talent a superior, a discussable stage” (306). James provides us with a clear outline of this ideal context: a great academic artistic theatre, subsidized and unburdened with money-getting, rich in its repertory, rich in the high quality and the wide array of its servants, rich above all in the authority of an impossible administrator—a manager personally disinterested, not an actor with an eye to the main chance; pouring forth a continuity of tradition, striving for perfection, laying a splendid literature under contribution. (306–7) This theatre sounds markedly similar to the state-sponsored Théâtre Français, with its trusted administrator, its strict entrance policy for new actors, and its openness to new dramatic literature alongside respect for the classics. At the centre of Sherringham’s vision, however, is a diversely talented “heroine of a hundred ‘situations’” who is specifically capable of communicating a convincing picture of “English life” (307). He imagines this actress “shining out in the high relief of some great moment, an image as fresh as an unveiled statue” (307). Although he is sceptical about whether his other conditions could ever be met for a transformed English theatre, he is confident in the belief that Miriam Rooth, “the incarnation of the serious drama, would be a new and vivifying force” (307).

Theatre-Fiction as a Map of Utopia James uses the form of theatre-fiction, therefore, to test a future scenario for the English stage, where the haunting echoes of artistic perfection reverberating from the French theatre of the past are carried forward by an actress who exceeds what has gone before her. In his theatre criticism, James mourns the loss of “the largeness of style and robustness of art” epitomized by actresses of the grand manner, such as Madame Plessy (“Théâtre Français” 90). After her retirement, he feared that “the void produced by this event is irreparable. There is not only no prospect, but there is no hope of filling it up” (90). Through the framework of his theatre-novel, however, he is able to explore how that vacancy may be filled at a time when he was placing his hopes in the West End as the setting for his own future career. After receiving training from an icon who is ghosted by theatrical history, Rooth’s natural instincts have been refined into an “extraordinarily quiet,” “eminently temperate and modern” (James, Tragic 268) performance style, and thus we see the possibility of the contemporary stage “with its relish for small, realistic effects” (“Notes from Paris” 56) being elevated to the level of surplus rather than deficit. More than a literary representation for James, this constitutes the public statement of a playwright’s faith in the modern actress to take theatre to the next phase in its development. I suggest that in The Tragic Muse, James offers a map of utopia, with directions for a possible route to a reinvigorated English stage. The utopian impulse of the novel is particularly clear when Rooth’s development as an actress is described in terms that point outside of space and time, rather than being positioned on a linear trajectory into the future. In a conversation with Sherringham, Dashwood, and Carré, Rooth debates the possible paths she could take in her career, and whilst she insists “I want to

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do the modern … I want to do le drame, with intense realistic effects” (220), Carré positions her future firmly within grand theatrical tradition: “You’re pure tragedy, with de grandes éclats de voix in the great style, or you’re nothing” (220). Sherringham, on the other hand, mediates between the historical and the modern by asking her to “[b]e beautiful—be only that, … something that one may turn to for a glimpse of perfection, to lift one out of all the vulgarities of the day” (220). When he eventually sees her perform on stage, she appears to have achieved such a feat, as we learn that she transported him “from the vulgar hour and the ugly fact; drew him to something that had no warrant but its sweetness, no name nor place save as the pure, the remote, the antique” (319). Rooth is able to bring to the stage the utopian “no place” signalled in the Greek ou-topos, removed from the inadequacies of the present and offering a glimpse of noble antiquity, as well as hope for the future. This experience is distinct from the sense of deficit occasionally produced when theatre history bleeds into the present, as in Carré’s drawing-room. In The Tragic Muse, James suggests that the modern actress has the potential to become a figure of redemption, offering a vision of utopia, a place which is not yet here. The utopian dimension of her performance corresponds with José Esteban Muñ oz’s construction of queer utopia: “as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). In this conception of queer futurity, utopian ideals can be mined from the past and used as inspiration for a future beyond the limitations of the present. This is at the crux of James’s ideal conception of the art of acting. As Rooth’s performance transports Sherringham from the “vulgar hour” to the “antique,” she models the temporal structure of futurity in communicating with the past to imagine and work towards something beyond the present. According to Esteban Muñ oz, “[w]e must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there”—a fluid traffic between the past and future in recognition of the fact “that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1). As a spectator, Sherringham senses Rooth’s connection to the “universal values” (319) she has gained through her training, but Carré has labelled her and Sherringham “all too queer together” (220) to fit within the French theatre of the present. The young actress has instead taken elements that can be repurposed from the past and begun to carve a space for herself in the uncertain territory of a nascent theatre tradition, rather than one that is in extremis. James’s temporal ideal for theatrical performance, as experienced by Sherringham, recurs within his theatre work as one of the primary signs of its ambition and experimentation. His ideal stage simultaneously reaches back to the past and forwards to the future as a way of both interrogating, and providing respite from, the relentless march of the present. Through the conditional nature of Sherringham’s romantic interest in Rooth, however, James cautions against a vision of utopia that is unable to cohere with the material conditions of the present. Once Sherringham’s passion for theatre is surpassed by his passion for the actress, he pleads with her to abandon her artistic ambitions, marry him, and perform in society as “a great diplomatist’s wife” (385). He offers himself to her as “an expensive modern watch with a wonderful escapement—therefore you’ll smash me if you can” (229), suggesting a life lived firmly in the present, rather than one spent preserving Carré’s “valuable old timepiece” (85) through her work on the stage. He is unable to imagine himself as the husband of an actress, indicating that his perfect vision of the artistic theatre of the future cannot be married to reality. Whilst Sherringham demonstrates disdain for theatre as an industry, James represents his love rival, the dashing actor-manager Basil Dashwood, as content to immerse himself in the practical demands of theatre work in the here and now. We learn that Dashwood affects Sherringham “as a chunk of wood tied to his ankle,” because he knows that while Rooth “carried his imagination off into infinite spaces, … she carried Dashwood’s only into the boxoffice” (319). He has to remind himself not to be surprised, therefore, that Rooth is happy “talking shop by the hour” with her “bland playmate,” not finding material concerns such as “receipts and

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salaries and expenses and newspaper articles … vulgar and boring but the natural air of her life and the essence of her profession” (308). Ernst Bloch’s essay “A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist” provides a pertinent way to conclude our exploration of James’s novel of the actress, which posits a utopian vision of the artform whilst remaining compatible with the material conditions of the present. Bloch observes that the emergence of the novel of the artist coincided with early capitalism, when public interest began to turn to “the creative person who brings out something new instead of something past” (267). This new type of novel which focussed on the figure of the artist made “a more visible, particular precedence … out of the workday and the future” (267), looking at both the process of creative industry and the drive to innovate. Bloch refers to the story Schwere Stunde [Difficult Hour] by Thomas Mann, which depicts Schiller’s struggle to write Wallenstein, observing that “[s]uch a story is a report about effort, not about licking honey on the hills of Mymettos” (266). The novel of the artist is utopian in the sense that it represents “the voices of the not-yet, which sound in the creation of an art work in their own unique way” (276), yet this exploration of the future sits alongside the practical demands of production. According to Bloch, “the concern of that which is thematized in the novel of the artist as its partiality belongs to the general task: not to neglect the producing factor in favor of the product, not to neglect the anticipatory factor either” (275–6). In The Tragic Muse, the practical labour of Dashwood and Rooth is presented as the necessary “producing factor” that leads to the product’s translation into reality, whilst Rooth’s ability to transcend time and place in performance constitutes the “anticipatory factor,” as her art points to the theatre of the future. Sherringham, who prioritizes the utopian “voices of the not-yet” to the exclusion of theatrical materiality, cherishes a solipsistic vision of theatre’s past and future, and once his ideal seems likely to transfer into the present, it can no longer be maintained as his ideal. Through the marriage of Dashwood and Rooth, James offers the possibility of mediation between the ghosts of theatrical tradition, the utopian future of the artform, and the commercial demands of the theatre industry at the fin de siècle. He confirms their union in the final moments of the novel, but the news is syntactically marginal to the continued promise of Rooth’s future, whose “remarkable career is even yet only in its early prime”: “Basil Dashwood has got his theatre, and his wife—people know now she is his wife—has added three or four parts to her repertory; but every one is agreed that both in public and in private she has a great deal more to show” (492). In this distinctly unromantic revelation of the marriage of a canny actor-manager to the country’s greatest hope for a theatrical renaissance, James signals the possibility of theatrical ideals transferring into reality, without the need to sacrifice too much of their utopian energy. The business-like nature of Dashwood and Rooth’s partnership is signified by the possessive pronouns identifying “his theatre” and “his wife,” yet we do not dwell too long in the present, before Rooth’s futurity interrupts the structure of the sentence. James’s fear for the English stage was that it would remain bound within a commercially motivated present tense, with no line of communication between the past, present, and future. Throughout The Tragic Muse and in his theatre criticism, James celebrates the haunted nature of the traditional French stage as an antidote to such a state of temporal restriction, but by the end of the novel, we are left haunted by what the future may hold for the artform on the cusp of the 1890s.

Works Cited Berthold, Margot. The History of World Theater: From the English Restoration to the Present. Continuum, 1999. Bloch, Ernst. “A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist.” The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated byJack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, MIT Press, 1988, pp. 265–277. Booth, Michael R. Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910. Routledge, 2016. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. U of Michigan P, 2003.

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Ghosting in James’s The Tragic Muse Edel, Leon, editor. The Complete Plays of Henry James. Oxford UP, 1990. Esteban Muñoz, José . Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009. Hemmings, F. W. J. The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge UP, 1993. James, Henry. “Coquelin.” The Century, vol. 33, no. 3, Jan 1887, pp. 407–414. Archive.org, https://archive.org/ details/sim_century-illustrated-monthly-magazine_1887-01_33_3 James, Henry. “The London Theatres: 1877.” The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade, Rutgers UP, 1948, pp. 93–112. James, Henry. “The London Theatres: 1879.” The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade, Rutgers UP, 1948, pp. 119–124. James, Henry. “The London Theatres: 1880.” The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade, Rutgers UP, 1948, pp. 133–161. James, Henry. “Notes from Paris: 1876.” The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade, Rutgers UP, 1948, pp. 51–67. James, Henry. “The Parisian Stage: 1875–1876.” The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade, Rutgers UP, 1948, pp. 44–50. James, Henry. “The Théâtre Français: 1876.” The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade, Rutgers UP, 1948, pp. 68–92. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. Penguin, 1995. Jarcho, Julia. Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama. Cambridge UP, 2017. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. U of Princeton P, 2012. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. Jonathan Cape, 1921. Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton UP, 1983. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. Columbia UP, 2001. Stokes, John. “Memories of Plessy: Henry James Re-Stages the Past.” Women, Theatre and Performance, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 81–101. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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5 THE STAGE PROPERTIES OF WILLA CATHER’S THEATRE-FICTION Kevin Riordan

The American novelist Willa Cather was involved in the theatre throughout her life and career. As a child, she performed in amateur productions, playing the parts of Hiawatha and of the father in Beauty and the Beast (Stout 101). She became a precocious and prolific theatre critic while a student at the University of Nebraska, her reviews earning her a “reputation for zest, intelligence and ferocity” (Lee 40). After graduation, Cather moved to Pittsburgh to be a journalist and then on to New York City in 1906. On that largest of American stages, she transitioned to her primary career as a novelist. She still could be found, however, “haunting the back stages of theaters,” like the main character in her story, “Paul’s Case” (Goldberg 89–90). Cather joined her characters in assuming many different theatrical roles during her lifetime: on stage, backstage, in the house, and beyond. Scholars comment on Cather’s theatre involvement in two principal ways: first, by tracking the prominent performers in her fiction; and secondly, in adapting theatrical language to narrate Cather’s own biography. Surveying the many theatre connections, Janis P. Stout catalogues thirteen short stories about performing artists of various kinds. The Song of the Lark from 1915 is Cather’s most sustained portrait of the artist. Modelled on the life of her contemporary, the opera singer Olive Fremstad, this novel inevitably casts sidelight on Cather’s own “intellectual and spiritual development” (Song of the Lark 429). Biographers and critics adapt and extend Cather’s theatre interests to describe the various roles she played “on the stage of her own life” (Stout 102). Stout suggests that Cather exhibited “virtuosity in performing a personal identity” (103). Such rhetoric rightly emphasizes the author’s special interest in performance, but its generality—that everything is theatre—obscures some of Cather’s more distinctive engagements and convictions. In her typically retrospective novels, Cather documents an American theatre culture that thrived outside of major cities and beyond formal stages. She writes of the late nineteenth century’s stars and landmark performances, but she also memorializes a set of paratheatrical practices particular to his milieu. Before the twentieth-century arrival of more literary playwrights and before Broadway’s golden age, American theatre was dispersive, eclectic, and rough around the edges. It relied on foreign imports, touring companies, and sensational impresarios. It mixed high- and lowbrow forms and privileged spectacle and entertainment over literary pretence. This era’s theatre was anchored in New York and other major cities, but it also was a travelling phenomenon. Audiences across the expanding United States—including Cather and her Midwestern characters—participated in theatre keenly, though sporadically and often remotely. These enthusiasts followed distant productions and personalities in new illustrated periodicals, they collected new forms of ephemera, and they made their own amateur work.

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Alan Ackerman covers this same period of performance history in his 1999 The Portable Theatre. In his study, he shows how this American theatre travelled beyond stage performances through adjacent forms of literature. Ackerman borrows his phrase, “portable theatre,” from an 1895 William Dean Howells column about the actor Joseph Jefferson (whom the characters in Cather’s My Ántonia see perform). Howells proposes that, aside from this one actor’s impressive work, the “real drama is in our novels mostly” (436). He fashions the printed book as a “portable theatre,” with its reader enjoying “privileges impossible in the stationary theatre.” Howells leaves the stationary—the actual—theatre behind in pursuit of an idea. He celebrates theatre’s metaphysical adaptability while slighting it as a physical place and an artistic practice. Howells’s position is part of a longstanding anti-theatrical bias. From Plato to the present, many thinkers have been suspicious of theatre, taking a stand “against the expressive, the imitative, the deceptive, the spectacular and the subject that arouses, or even acknowledges, an audience” (Ackerman and Puchner 2). According to this way of thinking, theatre is powerful but its material conditions sully or muddy the work of the serious artist or writer. The best theatre is a bookish one, a closet drama. Primarily a novelist herself, Willa Cather is in a sense a producer of such portable theatres, and her novels acknowledge their explicit relationships to drama and theatre. My Ántonia (1918) opens with a kind of curtain-speech prologue: an unnamed narrator suggests that “To speak [Ántonia’s] name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain” (5). The story that follows, in the reader’s hands, becomes this silent drama. Yet this early scene is staged in a train compartment and the drama is instigated by embodied speech, by a person speaking a name. Cather keeps real bodies, speech, and objects stubbornly in view in her theatre of the mind. If nineteenthcentury fiction largely subsumes theatre in its pages, as critics such as Joseph Litvak argue, Cather’s modernist theatre-fiction makes theatre itself present again, even conspicuous. Her novels are distinguished by their insistence on and unstinting praise for performance’s material conditions, that is, for “the sheer messiness of embodied theater” (Sofer 19). For Howells and others, such appurtenances are the compromised means for achieving—and hence a distraction from—the “real drama” of the novel. For her part, Cather inverts the presumed hierarchy between performance and print literature from within the novel form itself. Through her keen emphasis on real bodies and props, she consecrates the tangible things found in “stationary theatres” and extends their effects and affects into prose fiction and beyond. Cather rehearses these principles in her novels of the 1910s, before formally articulating them in an essay on modern fiction in 1922. In this chapter, I examine Cather’s My Ántonia as a work of theatre-fiction, looking first to its depiction of a broad theatrical milieu before closely examining its most sustained set-piece performance. Starting with an impromptu concert early in the novel, Cather documents the period’s moving and syncretic performance culture. For Jim Burden, the primary narrator, theatre is an important and ongoing part of social and cultural life. It is not a vocation—he is a lawyer and an amateur storyteller—nor is it a rhetorical metaphor. Theatre is something to do and see, to admire, and participate in. In a small town, with intermittent exposure to touring shows, Jim and his peers anticipate and mythologize the performances they see as well as others they do not. Like other American theatre enthusiasts of the era, they clip newspaper stories, collect studio photographs, and send souvenir postcards. Their engagements are sustained by these materials and practices, and occasionally their interest is rewarded by the chance to see a major performer or performance in person. Near the novel’s centre, Cather devotes a fifteen-hundred-word chapter to Jim’s seeing Clara Morris play Marguerite Gautier in Camille. “We had neither of us read the play,” Jim confesses, but no matter (205). For him and his friend Lena, the dramatic work—the play—is not the thing. They instead marvel at Morris’s performance, animating the kinds of fugitive theatrical details that exist beyond a dramatic literature. Jim’s account in the novel corresponds with Cather’s 1893 published review of the same performance, and it corroborates some of the author’s own convictions about

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theatre and fiction. To convey this performance to a reader, Jim and Cather both strategically isolate the actor’s body, they describe the physical stage set, and they focus on the props that condense and carry the players’ passions. These props, in the actor’s and narrator’s hands, communicate the memory while also insisting on their own presence, their own ontological autonomy. As theatre theorists have shown, props are special objects, often assuming lives of their own in and beyond performance. Here, they also spur in Jim an acute self-awareness of his own artistic process, influencing how he describes physical objects elsewhere in this novel. A few years later, Cather wrote more explicitly about the role of props and objects in the novel. “The Novel Démeublé” (1922) is an essay about fictional realism, though since the 1980s it more often has been discussed regarding Cather’s gender and sexuality. Cather wrote in The New Republic that a novelist, describing what is physically present, aspires to express the unsaid and the unseen: “It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it … that gives high quality to the novel or the drama” (6). This “thing not named” has captivated Cather scholars, representing both an artistic credo and a sign of personal and emotional concealment (O’Brien 577). In this chapter’s conclusion, I follow an alternate route to that same sentence’s end, to that tenuous conjunction between “the novel or the drama.” In “The Novel Démeublé,” among other things, Cather explains and advocates for the theatre-fiction she pioneered in My Ántonia. Characters in Cather’s novels are rarely satisfied by mere private reading. Cather comments on the relative limitations of Howells’s “portable theatres” from inside her books. In the 1905 short story “Paul’s Case,” for example, this young man’s teachers believe that “his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all” (74). What inspired (or perverted) Paul’s imagination, the reader learns, was theatre—and not its dramatic stories or polished spectacles, but its materials, its rituals, and its communities. Paul moonlights as an usher in a Pittsburgh concert hall, “as though it were his greatest pleasure in life” (75). He spends other free evenings backstage at a downtown theatre. When he devises a brief, alternate life for himself in New York, he meticulously arranges the scene as a stage manager would, the “mere stage properties were all he contended for” (81). One of Cather’s most memorable characters, Paul does everything “in a conscious, theatrical sort of way” (74). In My Ántonia, Jim Burden is more studious than Paul, though he too shrugs off books. As a child, Jim reads Swiss Family Robinson aloud to his grandmother, but feels “that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an adventurous life” (54). Old books cannot compete with the first-hand adventure of a frontier childhood. When he moves into the town of Black Hawk, he again prefers the people, stories, and settings from outside of his reading. In the summer, a trio of Italian musicians set up a dance tent which becomes the centre of social and artistic life. In colder months, Jim keeps an eye on the train station, the hotel, and the main street’s second-floor opera house for new diversions. Jim’s early reminiscences in the novel largely align with the events in Cather’s own childhood, and it was in Red Cloud’s opera house where Cather first appeared on stage. Cather’s displaced autobiography in My Ántonia is a basic form of anachronistic role-playing: Red Cloud becomes Black Hawk, Jim Burden plays young Willa, and Ántonia Shimerda stands in for the real-life Anna Pavelka. Touring musicians and larger theatre ensembles stopped over in towns like these along the regional and national railway lines. They played in tents, public halls, and other incidental spaces. Eager audiences welcomed “Shakespeare one week, comic opera the next, and living statuary after that” (Senelick 163). As Laurence Senelick reflects, there were few distinctions among forms or between the high- and lowbrow: “it all counted as theatre.” My Ántonia’s first vivid description of performance happens in a hotel parlour, when Jim sees a famous African American pianist play. The character Blind d’Arnault was a composite of the popular performers Blind Boone, Blind Tom, and Blind Noah; Cather saw at least the first two of these musicians herself (Stout 115). In My Ántonia, Cather situates

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the eventual performance, the embedded artwork, in a broader, textured scene. The hotel proprietor is out of town, and there is “an unusual freedom about the house” (My Ántonia 143). The teenage Jim slips in as the older men drink and smoke cigars. An Irish travelling salesman plays musical comedy tunes on the piano; he is an impromptu opening act. When d’Arnault appears, he chats with the audience and coaxes them to sing along. Jim studies the pianist as he works through waltzes and Stephen Foster ballads; on one of d’Arnault’s fingers is a topaz ring given to him by a Russian nobleman in New Orleans. Blind d’Arnault proves even more observant than Jim in reading the surrounding scene; he hears footfalls and is the first to realize that some young women are dancing in an adjacent room (147). Performances like Blind d’Arnault’s were part of a wider performance culture in the late-nineteenth century, and they were special occasions in a town like Black Hawk; Jim retells this memory some twenty-five years later. Months, seasons, and years could be condensed and crystalized by a single memorable performance. Between these punctuating events, the erstwhile audience members played and sang the same songs, if less expertly, from the emergent American repertoire. Sheet music circulated alongside performers’ photographs and other ephemera; the newspapers contained nearly daily reports from distant metropolitan stages. In Cather’s previous novel, The Song of the Lark, Tillie Kronberg is discovered “reading the dramatic news in a Denver Sunday paper. Tillie kept a scrapbook in which she pasted clippings about actors and actresses” (219). This character later would keep several scrapbooks devoted to her niece’s career, with “half-tone cuts, snap-shots of her on land and sea, and photographs of her in all her parts” (437). This type of theatrical scrapbook, Sharon Marcus demonstrates, is an invaluable resource for theatre history, allowing us to better understand audiences through the period’s material practices. Tillie, Jim, and Cather herself kept up with the stage traffic in Denver, New York, and London. When Blind d’Arnault played Black Hawk, Jim relates that the hotel’s owner was away in Omaha seeing an Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett Shakespeare production. In that hotel parlour, the men speak of “actors and actresses,” and Jim learns that “Mary Anderson was having a great success in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ in London” (My Ántonia 143). Cather effectively consults her own scrapbook clippings and re-cites them in My Ántonia’s pages. These preserved references commemorate the era’s most important theatrical figures, and they site the novel historically. Mary Anderson’s London success, for example, timestamps this hotel scene as happening around 1887. Theatre citation helps frame Cather’s fiction as real life. When Jim heads off to university in Lincoln—where Cather began writing her own reviews for others to clip—he comments again on print literature’s limited appeal next to live theatre’s. He tries to study the classics, but in his room his attention drifts to the photograph of a Roman theatre above his bookcase as well as further out, to this new town’s attractions, more vibrant than Black Hawk’s. Jim opens Book III of My Ántonia with admiration for his teacher Gaston Cleric, who draws “the drama out of antique life” (197). It is Cleric’s dramatic realization that attracts Jim to an otherwise dormant antique world. By the close of that first Lincoln chapter, however, he realizes that his teacher’s enthusiasms were not his own: “I knew that I would never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long in impersonal things” (198). Two short chapters later, Jim dramatizes the world in which he could lose himself. It is an art form in which things feel more personal. The best shows arrived in Nebraska late in the season when the “good companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in New York and Chicago” (205). Jim and his childhood friend Lena watch the papers and the billboards for the chance to catch the marquee acts of their generation. They recently had seen, Jim boasts, James O’Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo and Joseph Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle. Jim follows the conventions of promotional posters of the time, on which lead actors’ names were billed ahead of the play and on which there usually was little reference to the playwright. The two plays Jim name-checks were both famous as non-dramatic fiction, that is, as bona fide “portable theatre.” In their theatrical billing, however, Alexandre Dumas père and Washington

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Irving play minor parts or exit the scene entirely—along with the translators and adaptors responsible for the stage versions. In this period, audiences were more invested in star performers than playwrights. Stories for the stage were often imported, recycled, or cribbed. In Katherine Biers and Sharon Marcus’s estimation, “Dramatic authorship was weak”; plays were mere premises for something more important, something more vital (7). The mid- to late-nineteenth century, that is, “was the age of the actor” (Ackerman 16), and Cather and Jim both reflect that zeitgeist in their theatre writing. The Lincoln performance of Camille—adapted from Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias—is anchored by Clara Morris. Jim begins this novel’s theatre showcase in anticipation, long before the curtains’ rise. He had spotted the billboard on which “two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name ‘Camille’” (205). Jim reads the qualities of the lettering—the blue Gothic—in addition to the message it bears. Cather omits the performer’s name throughout this chapter, but Jim recalls sufficient details from Morris’s career to confirm the casting; Morris was famous for playing Marguerite Gautier since the early 1870s. Moreover, the novel’s embedded description dovetails with Cather’s own 1893 review from the Nebraska State Journal, an important piece of her early journalism and “a touchstone of Cather’s writerly aesthetic” (Downs 13). In My Ántonia, Jim watches Camille with earnest enthusiasm, though he at times slides into the author’s more evaluative review style. Cather “loved to be moved” by the theatre, Hermione Lee observes, while also scrutinizing “how the effect was being produced” (50). This acknowledgedly doubled way of watching is a signature feature of theatre spectatorship, and one related to common anti-theatrical suspicions. The moving illusion cannot be separated from the often-conspicuous means of representation. Jim watches with what Bert States calls theatre’s “binocular vision” (8). He sees at once the “ravaged countenance” of a nearly-fifty-year-old Clara Morris and the play’s Marguerite Gautier, who is “young, ardent, restless,” and “avid of pleasure” (My Ántonia 207). Jim’s experience becomes profound when those two overlapping images merge, when Morris’s “uncompromising” performance prompts Jim to declare his faith: “I believed in her power … in her dazzling loveliness” (207). Morris produces Marguerite for the audience, and Jim reproduces that performed synthesis in his pages. These deliberate impersonations, these intermedial transformations, are a trademark of Cather’s theatre-fiction. To summon that historical performance and to simulate its liveness, Cather animates the materials that surround Morris on stage, as well as those around Jim and Lena on the evening. While they had not read the play, Jim reads the programme while Lena watches other audience members arrive. From the programme—theatre’s incidental reading material—Jim learns that the orchestra’s melodies were from La Traviata, adapted from the same Dumas story. At intermission, Jim walks out the doors for a smoke, while Lena stares in “tearful contemplation of the ceiling” (207). But it is the onstage furnishings, the objects within Morris’s immediate orbit, that are most responsible for producing the play’s “emotional aura” (“The Novel Démeublé” 6). Cather’s privileging of the concrete object in this novel rhymes with the convictions of American modernist poets, with William Carlos Williams’s “No ideas/but in things” or Wallace Stevens’s focus on the “thing itself.” To access the real actor and the real memory through the layers of her fiction, that is, Cather reaches into the prop room. Old props can conjure new theatrical worlds, and they seem to carry the human stories with which they come in contact. Jim catalogues the many things on this stage: the “linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses” (206). Like Cather the reviewer, he parenthetically comments on how the impressions are produced: these objects were “(arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings).” Theatre theorist Alice Rayner reflects on the power of “a prop list,” that practical information in an acting edition that can “speak of a world” (73). Jim reverse-engineers Camille’s prop list from his memory, and the assembled things speak of the French 1840s on a stage in Nebraska in the 1890s. A single prop resides in multiple time zones and accrues

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different meanings. To gather several props together then proliferates those associations: a sword and a crown propel one set of stories, a guitar and samovar produce another. Repurposed objects call a new or a renewed place into being. Jim’s keen appreciation of the mise-en-scène documents this moment in theatre history as well. Camille and Morris are emissaries from a slightly earlier generation. The updated staging, meanwhile, appeals to Jim for its more contemporary naturalism. The richly rendered domestic interiors are of the moment, replacing the preceding era’s flatter pictorialism. As an amateur enthusiast, Jim carbon-dates the play, pointing out the anachronisms he sees in some of the physical materials. The men’s costuming appears to match the drama’s period, he notes, while the women’s does not. The actor opposite Morris, however, appears to be significantly younger than she is, as if to counterbalance their clothes (206). Morris herself was a leading light of a fading era, and Cather’s 1893 review took the form of a tribute to a career the young author arrived too late to properly experience. These various temporal relationships are scored in the print record and recalled in the performance’s materials, though some of props on stage exhibit a more elusive sense of timing. Stage properties are untimely objects. They are even, as Andrew Sofer calls them in The Stage Life of Props, “time machines” (3). In any moment, props are poised between their previous and future lives, constituting “both an archive of past performances and a promise of new ones” (Rayner 75). In My Ántonia, Jim discerns his own storytelling’s time signature through his encounter with theatrical objects. When he names the props in Camille—silver dishes, glittering glass—he becomes unusually aware of the tension between theatre’s liveness and his own reconstruction of events. “I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables,” Jim remarks (206), and “chandeliers hung from the ceiling, I remember” (208). Qualifications like these are elsewhere taken for granted in the retrospective work, but these objects stubbornly mark themselves in and as memory. In sentences like these, Jim’s later scene of writing in the 1910s is overlaid with the earlier, unfolding performance. The singular theatre event—on 22 November 1893—joins the disparate moments. By the performance’s end, Jim’s sense of time is stretched further back. In the 1910s he recalls walking home among 1890s puddles and lilacs, “sighing with the spirit of 1840 … which had reached me only that night, across long years and several languages, through the person of an infirm old actress” (209). The 1910s and 1840s meet in the middle, as it were, in the theatre. The old actress’s performing body is the guide for this theatrical time travel, and the props serve as mementos, certifying artefacts. As if learning from this scene, Jim relies on objects elsewhere in My Ántonia to extend and preserve complex temporal relationships. Multiple moments are held in a bag of dried mushrooms from Bohemia; in a violin played across three generations; and in the remnants found in a dead man’s pockets. Richard Millington isolates the “resonant inconsequence” of those mysterious pocketed objects as the key indication of Cather’s modernism in spite of her manifest nostalgia for the nineteenth century (51). Objects, in novels and plays, resonate powerfully while maintaining independent senses of time and consequence. Theatrical props draw attention to the more general uncanny life of things, and theatre-fiction underscores how any novel’s objects are rarely inert or merely decorative. Stored in a prop room or used in real life, props are not (only) metaphors for other things. They remain themselves; they retain their thingness. A teacup in a novel may suggest a Victorian garden party, but on stage it can help quench a real thirst; a gun transforms an actor into a soldier, but it also can wound or kill. Roland Barthes argues, in a different sense, that a novel’s incidental objects perform beyond their representational functions. Seemingly extraneous details such as “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door,” he writes, “finally say nothing but this: we are the real” (148). Furnishings like these may matter little for plot or character, that is, but they become “the very signifier of realism”; through their presence the “reality effect is produced.” Barthes’s emphatic italics make these words look like stage directions, as if they too are calling for action. Even the objects in Barthes’s example agitate for their own performance.

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The gilded chairs and chandelier produce Camille as a real, historical stage production, and yet Cather goes further in arguing for theatre’s autonomy and even its primacy. She insists that the objects inside the theatrical frame (and within Jim’s narrative frame) remain distinct from their (double) representation. In Lincoln, theatre becomes the original for which both fiction and the world outside are copies. “I had never seen champagne bottles opened on the stage before—,” Jim reflects, “indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere” (206). Theatre does not imitate life more or less accurately for Jim; this bottle pop on stage is the original from which all subsequent repetitions will derive. Countering the antitheatrical bias—associating the stage with imitation and fakery—Cather insists on theatre’s generative originality. In “Paul’s Case,” the narrator writes that “a certain element of artificiality seemed to [Paul] necessary in beauty,” and Cather maintains that a theatrical artificiality is necessary for fictional truth in her novels (78). Complementing this line of thought, the actors in My Ántonia are more real than the book’s characters, and they are the ones who drink real champagne. James O’Neill and Clara Morris have an extraliterary status that Jim Burden and Lena Lingard do not. Theatre acts as a kind of ontological double negative within this novel: a person or object distanced by two frames of representation—within the play and within the novel—becomes the most immediately real for the reader. In 1922, Cather retrospectively glossed the principles of her own theatre-fiction. In “The Novel Démeublé,” she praises the new modernist writers who “present their scene by suggestion rather than enumeration” (6). She cautions authors about relying too heavily on ornate description in the service of realism. Her argument here resembles Virginia Woolf’s in “Modern Fiction” (1919), where Woolf criticizes her “materialist” peers who spend “immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (210). Cather’s “Démeublé” essay—the French word meaning roughly “unfurnished”—pursues a similar tack, but she stages the discussion in more theatrical terms. The essay begins by introducing a figurative “property-man” (5), who has been kept “so busy” in the pages of novels; it ends with Dumas père’s call for theatrical simplicity, that all one needs is “one passion, and four walls” (6). This theatrical frame provides for what Graham Wolfe calls theatre-fiction’s “intermedial anamorphosis,” an estranged and therefore more revealing vantage point on a familiar subject (7). Here, a theatrical vocabulary lends more precision for observing the “material investiture” of the novel. It helps distinguish among the form’s equivalents of a set, costumes, objects, and props (Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” 6). Cather reaches back into the nineteenth century for her essay’s examples, comparing the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Leo Tolstoy. Balzac is the cautionary tale. For Cather, he “tried out the value of literalness in the novel … to the utmost,” and even the most sympathetic reader’s eye now “glides” over the stale details of the author’s “crumbling” city (6). Tolstoy’s more restrained stagemanagement, by contrast, is “perfectly synthesized.” The materials of his world, “the clothes, the dishes, the moving, haunting interiors of those old Moscow houses,” are fused within “the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves.” Cather’s critical distinction here is based in part on the sheer quantity of description, but Tolstoy also relies on what could be considered props rather than mere objects. The difference is about contact and connection in that emotional penumbra. Objects in the theatre are largely inert while props move or are manipulated by characters in performance. A prop, according to Sofer, is “an object that goes on a journey … [tracing] spatial trajectories and [creating] temporal narratives” (2). A prop is a moving thing that produces stories in collaboration with the performers, stagehands, and audience members. Jim’s Lincoln chapter rehearses some of these principles that Cather recommends to fellow novelists in “The Novel Démeublé.” It emphasizes her commitment to theatre as a messy and physical form. The named objects in Camille are not simple accoutrements but props, poised to perform in the play’s most dramatic moments. In the fourth act, Marguerite descends the stairs and Cather concatenates the physical—the theatrical—force of her entrance: “such a cloak, such a fan, such

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jewels—her face!” (My Ántonia 208). Jim’s narrative eye darts from Morris’s costume, to what she holds, to the jewellery that touches her skin, and finally: her face. From memory, he knows what is to come but still sequences its unfolding: “When Armand, with the terrible words ‘Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!’ flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.” Armand casts at Marguerite words and props, and they bear an allied emotional charge. Marguerite half-swoons, and that feeling extends to Lena in the house. Jim earlier had been comparatively stoic, but near the play’s end “nothing could be too much now. I wept unrestrainedly” (208–9). As if participating in the stage craft, Jim displaces his own feeling to an object at hand: “Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through” (209). Jim’s handkerchief was part of his costume, but it becomes a prop when it moves in performance. A prop in the theatre-fiction, the handkerchief gathers emotional attachments. The feelings generated in the 1893 performance are conducted from the performers to their props (through Armand’s thrown gold), between the actors and the audience (between Morris and Lena), and between the audience and their own seemingly ordinary objects (Jim and his handkerchief). Through the chain of physical associations, theatre-fiction’s reality effects are transferred to one final object at hand, the reader’s book. The “real drama,” to revise Howells, resides in the objects we hold on to, and the objects that hold us. In “The Novel Démeublé,” Cather defines the art of the novelist as producing something with words that is independent of them: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created” (6). It is tempting to read this line as describing a playwright’s work, scripting as-yet-unrealized events. Cather proceeds to describe this “inexplicable presence of the thing not named.” This phrase has become a refrain in Cather criticism. Given the 1922 essay’s larger argument and its dramatized actions, however, that “over-tone divined” and that “emotional aura” are not only metaphysical or metaphorical; they too bear physical attachments arranged by a property man. In the essay’s conclusion, Cather breaks down the set herself, claiming that it would be wonderful to “throw all the furniture out of the window … and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre.” Even in arguing for a suggestive minimalism, that is, Cather relies on things—the cast-off furniture and the frame of a nearby window—to make her point. Her essay, like her novels, relies on theatrical materials, and it demonstrates the stationary theatre’s power to move.

Works Cited Ackerman, Alan. The Portable Theatre: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Ackerman, Alan and Martin Puchner. “Introduction: Modernism and Anti-Theatricality.” Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 1–17. Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1989 Biers, Katherine and Sharon Marcus. “Introduction: World Literature and Global Performance.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 41, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1–12. Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Penguin, 1994. Cather, Willa. “The Novel Démeublé.” The New Republic, vol. 30, 12 Apr. 1922, pp. 5–6. Cather, Willa. “Paul’s Case.” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 25, 1904, pp. 74–83. Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. Penguin, 2018. Downs, M. Catherine. Becoming Modern: Willa Cather’s Journalism. Susquehanna UP, 1999. Goldberg, Jonathan. “Willa Cather and Sexuality.” The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, edited by Marilee Lindemann, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 86–100. Howells, W. D. “Life and Letters.” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 39, 1895, p. 436. Lee, Hermione. Willa Cather: Double Lives. Oxford UP, 2017. Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. U of California P, 1992.

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Kevin Riordan Marcus, Sharon. “The Theatrical Scrapbook.” Theatre Survey, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 283–307. Millington, Richard H. “Willa Cather’s American Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, edited by Marilee Lindemann, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 51–65. O’Brien, Sharon. “‘The Thing Not Named’: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer.” Signs, vol. 9, no. 4, 1984, pp. 576–599. Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Senelick, Laurence, editor. The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner. Library of America, 2010. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. U of Michigan P, 2010. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. U of California P, 1987. Stevens, Wallace. “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: The Corrected Edition, edited by Chris Beyers and John N. Serio, Vintage, 2015, pp. 565–566. Stout, Janis P. “Willa Cather and the Performing Arts.” The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, edited by Marilee Lindemann, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 101–115. Williams, William Carlos. “A Sort of a Song.” The William Carlos Williams Reader, edited by M. L. Rosenthal. New Directions, 1966, pp. 46–47. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925, pp. 207–218.

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6 SPECTRAL EFFECTS Dual Roles, Doubling, and Invisibility in Robertson Davies’s World of Wonders Katrina Dunn

For Canadian author Robertson Davies, theatre in the material form of a book was a lifelong fascination. He expressed this in detail in a 1988 essay in which he described his collection of theatre books as “a mirror of my mind, or a large part of it” (Happy 371). From a young age he had established the confines of his collection: “it would contain anything I could find that related to the theatre between 1660, when the Puritan ban on the playhouses was lifted by the restored King, Charles II, and the age in which I was living. I was especially attracted to the nineteenth century” (375). Embedded in this broader subject was a focus on one actor as a singular point of interest: Sir John Martin-Harvey (1863–944). By Davies’s death in 1995, his collection was reported to contain over four thousand volumes (Maes 30), including Victorian playscripts, histories, books on theatrical production, prompt books, playbills, and actors’ photos from the day, many of them supporting his obsession with Martin-Harvey. In his 1975 novel World of Wonders Davies migrated his extensive knowledge of this actor and his theatrical milieu into novel form in the book’s second section, “Merlin’s Laugh,” to produce a haunting double of a disappeared era of the stage that he believed possessed a direct pathway into the human unconscious. For much of the narrative, World of Wonders’s main character survives through invisibility. Born Paul Dempster, he is abducted at age ten by a pedophile carnival magician, Willard the Wizard, and spends a good deal of his adolescence in the 1920s unseen working the mechanical innards of a sideshow deception titled, with orientalist guile, Abdullah. As he later recounts, “when I was in Abdullah, I was Nobody … As Paul Dempster I did not exist. I had found my place in life, and it was as Nobody” (51). Dempster’s invisibility in the novel enacts an erasure of the identity gifted him from Deptford, the small Ontario town of his birth, and this erasure continues apace through the novel, cemented by a series of name changes. The first renames him Cass Fletcher, after a passing advertisement for the laxative Fletcher’s Castoria, sarcastically bestowed on him by the “arse-bandit” Willard (57). His next name, Faustus LeGrand, is self-styled in recognition of his servitude to the magician devil that he will eventually supersede. Having graduated from the North American carnival and vaudeville circuit and his long association with Willard and the Wanless World of Wonders, Faustus LeGrand lands in London, England and is busking beside a statue of the great romantic actor Sir Henry Irving when he is spotted by a member of a London theatrical troupe. His various circus skills will prove useful to their brand of theatrical spectacle, but it is his startling resemblance to their actor-manager Sir John Tresize that is his chief currency, and he spends the next phase of his life anonymously doubling Sir John in the dual roles that have made him famous.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-9

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Graham Wolfe has pointed to the “peculiar sorceries”, inherent in examples of theatre-fiction such as Davies created in World of Wonders, “that may begin to act when we engage with theatre from the oblique angles they offer” (1). This chapter offers an added angle by engaging in a “spectral reading” (Sofer 5) of Davies’s rendering of the theatre in “Merlin’s Laugh.” Using Andrew Sofer’s term as a beacon, my approach adds to the myriad explorations of the spectral turn,1 which Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeran describe as helping to decipher “encounters with disturbing forms of otherness” (3). I suggest that dual roles, doubling and invisibility in World of Wonders are spectral effects,2 alternately mesmerizing and troubling, that point to startling forms of otherness in both the characters and the author of the novel. Much has been made of Davies’s “persistent use of doubling techniques at the structural, semantic and discursive levels in his nine novels from Tempest-Tost (1951) to The Lyre of Orpheus (1988)” (Coulas iv), but here I will focus on doubling in its uniquely theatrical sense: double perceptions that result from the performative recycling of texts and the mutability of actors’ bodies. In The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson asserts that “the recycled dramatic text has its parallels in every aspect of the theatre experience” (51). He then draws attention to the “recycled body and persona of the actor” (53) and the “audience’s parallel awareness of illusion and reality, of the character and the actor” (86). Building on Joseph Roach’s description of characters on stage as “effigies fashioned from flesh” (16), Carlson understands great performances as instances when an effigy attains “greater performative visibility than the body it haunted” (58). In the craft of the stage, doubling refers to a single actor playing more than one character in a performance, sometimes for purely logistical or financial reasons, sometimes for the intriguing semiotic overlays that can be created, and in the case of Tresize, for the display of actorly virtuosity it allows. In each case, this recycling of the performer results in a double vision or double feeling, magically generating two from one. And so, in the “Merlin’s Laugh” section of World of Wonders, stepping in as an uncredited double in Tresize’s company in order to support the great actor’s feats of multi-character embodiment, Faustus is renamed Mungo Fetch by the troupe, a “fetch” being a shadow or uncanny creature in the mysterium of the stage manager’s Scottish boyhood (181). Using the tools of theatre studies and theatre craft (younger brother of magic3—also a major focus in World of Wonders) I explore, in six sections, how the spectral effects of dual roles, doubling, and invisibility reverberate in Davies’s novel and Davies’s life. First, I look at Davies’s complex relationship to the real-life master of the dual role, Sir John Martin-Harvey. I connect this primary thread to the intermedial stories containing dual roles that Davies has embedded in “Merlin’s Laugh,” that buoy and amplify the relationship’s qualities. I then explore Davies’s disappointing theatre career as a launchpad for his success as a novelist, and his use of subtext and the Jungian subconscious as tools to control the performative storytelling of World of Wonders. I explore acting technique as a material manifestation of the drive to become other, and, finally, I look at the cost, both personal and professional of Davies’s doubling.

The Master and the Apprentice In the portrayal of Mungo Fetch’s apprenticeship, set in London in the early 1930s, Robertson Davies recycles some of his own fascination with Sir John-Martin Harvey’s theatrical world as well as his own early immersion in theatrical process in roughly the same time period. Backstage life as a double for the world onstage is thoroughly explored as Fetch learns the technical workings of theatres much grander than the decrepit North American vaudeville houses he is used to. He graduates from moving chairs in rehearsal, to making up call-lists and props lists, to handing actors props from offstage, and even indulges in voicing a flock of hens from the wings with another crew member. The advancing of rehearsal towards opening brings constant “astonishment at the complex business of getting a play on the stage, which presented me with some new marvel everyday” (182). While generally at ease with

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the backstage world, the most difficult challenge for Fetch is translating the gaudy showmanship of his prior performance experience into the refined craft of romantic acting. Fetch enters into the mysteries of this practice with no map to guide him: “Nobody explained anything. You were supposed to know” (152). The rehearsal process for Scaramouche, from which he is almost fired, is the crucible that molds him into a true company member. In this stage adaptation of Sabatini’s theatre-novel, Sir John plays a young Frenchman in revolutionary times hiding from the authorities by joining a group of Commedia dell’Arte actors. While playing Scaramouche, he follows his juggling act with a speech to the assembled crowd denouncing the aristocracy and then escapes by walking a tightrope while thumbing his nose at the pursuing authorities. Through slight of staging, Fetch doubles Sir John for the juggling and tightrope, but angers him in early rehearsals with the crassness of his performance: “I was doing everything too bloody fast and slick and cheap” (163). Instead, Sir John instructs him to thumb his nose with “a Rabelaisian splendour of contempt linked with a Callotesque elegance of grotesquerie” (174). It is this added layer of representation that is hard for Fetch to grasp at first. Gradually he understands that it is not the flashy skill that is on display (thumbing your nose while walking a slackwire), as it was in the circus, but rather an illusion of a person and a way of being far from his own experience: “it was romance that he was after, not realism” (173). Once he has grasped the fundamentals of using himself to be other, lessons follow that include the application of stage make-up, the working of costumes, and even the showing off of his legs to the audience. His epiphany comes when he realizes the totalizing extent of the theatrical transformation that is required: “I must be born again” (175). Mark Silverberg has pointed to the “autobiographical duplicity” (107–8) of World of Wonders, in which its primary narrative arc (Paul Dempster’s unfolding autobiography) is understood as quite possibly a falsified construction, the result of “life seen and understood backwards” (Davies, World 53). I extend Silverberg’s concept to suggest that, in the text, there is another autobiographical duplicity or doubling that mirrors Davies’s life, and that World of Wonders features a dual memoir that is both Davies and Fetch, authentic and invented, devastating and transformative. Davies joins the ranks of other theatre-fiction writers who “conjure their own presence in their works,” as Rosalind Ballaster has detailed (19). Much like the stone-in-the-snowball inciting incident4 of World of Wonders (and indeed the entire Deptford Trilogy) which Davies later described as “only in part an accident” and more akin to the Jungian concept of synchronicity (“Deptford” 10), a chance meeting with Martin-Harvey when he was just fifteen powerfully influenced Davies’s life and became a permanent fixture in his personal mythology. Timothy Findley sets the scene: “Robertson Davies saw Martin-Harvey perform. But more importantly, he saw him walk down the street. It was winter. There was snow. A figure of majestic proportions strode towards the young boy …” (qtd. in Ross 32). Playing Kingston in 1928, Martin-Harvey asked directions from a boy standing in front of his family home. The knighted actor was, “like Tresize, a protégé of Sir Henry Irving (1838–905) and had a long career (c. 1880–939) in the provincial theatres of England, usually including an annual season in London. He was the last major exponent of the nineteenth-century romantic and melodramatic tradition in the English theatre” and he brought his company to Canada seven times between May 1914 and May 1932 (Lawrence 114). This brush with an extraordinary figure set Davies on a career as a theatrical diarist as he rushed inside to record the event (Grant 130), and also offered him a form on which to hang a new identity. While still in high school, with thoughts of acting in England, he listened to recordings of great British actors “to eliminate his Ontario accent” (Grant 115) and took to wearing a cape and monocle. Erasing rural Canada from his demeanor, he became Nothing in order to become something, and elements of this constructed persona would stay with him for the rest of his life. He honed it in student theatricals at Oxford and then in a burgeoning professional career in London before World War II brought him dejectedly back home. As a Canadian man of letters, he launched a nom de plume doppelgänger in Samuel Marchbanks, and the public image he projected with its “hint of gaslight” was

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“among the most caricatured in the Canadian press” (Peterman 14–15). In his book and ephemera collection,5 Davies shadowed his mentor, and he interrogated this very personal need to become a double in Mungo Fetch’s journey through “Merlin’s Laugh.” Through Martin-Harvey, Davies formed a deep attachment to the theatrical form of melodrama as codified on the Victorian stage, and it is these works that Tresize and his troupe (including Fetch) bring to Canada for their 1932–3 tour. Closely mimicking Martin-Harvey’s last Canadian tour, these “tattered remnants of the 19th century repertoire” (Graham n.p.), were already sliding into oblivion even as the troupe continued to champion them in what might be perceived as a “fight to maintain a nineteenthcentury idea of theatre in the twentieth century” (Davies, World 168). Davies shared his idol’s defiance of twentieth-century theatre, especially in its realist forms: “Realism is a form of Puritanism, a rejection of illusion as a cheat, unworthy of serious artists” (Happy 5). Defending Romantic era theatre, he proposed that its purpose “was to explore the inner world of the psyche where the unfinished business of life is to be found” (“Playwrights” 265). Attending to traditional criticisms of melodramatic conventions, he suggested that, “[b]ehind these superficially ludicrous plots rises a world of fairytale and myth from which people have long drawn strength. The Victorian theater held the mirror up to nature, by reflecting not external realities, but rather those inner desires which such realism snubs and thwarts” (Voice 176). For Davies, melodrama was the “style selected by the unconscious” (“Playwrights” 265) and a way of exploring poetic justice by dreaming collectively with an audience. Marvin Carlson confirms this affinity of theatre and dreaming: “Both recycle past perceptions and experience in imaginary configurations that, although different, are powerfully haunted by a sense of repetition and involve the whole range of human activity and its context” (3). For Davies, the high rhetoric and bombast of melodramatic form was simply the proper language of the Jungian dream world (One 190), and the feelings evoked by its emotional style superior to the thought world and teaching manner of the modern stage. Where so many saw formula and escapism, Davies fiercely committed to what he perceived to be a universal tool of truth and insight: “whereas few of us are so happy as to live our lives in terms of comedy, and fewer still move in the terrible world of tragedy, most of us live out our existence in that combination of cheerfulness, despair, coincidence, poetry, low comedy, and slapdash improvisation that is the shimmering fabric of melodrama” (Merry 16).

Dual Stories Davies’s letters make it clear that his desire to explore the conflict between thought and feeling in the theatre and pay homage to an era of stage that was beloved to him was the original impulse for the writing of World of Wonders. The character that became Roland Ingestree was to be central: The young man is very Post-War, very new, very much taken up with Freud and Aldous Huxley and the Bloomsbury Group … The young man has come along not primarily as an actor but to carpenter a new play for the old man with one of these dual roles in it, and their struggle of ideas confronts Raw Freud with Old Cunning. (Discoveries 265) This material survives in the novel in Ingestree’s struggle to update the Tresize company with an experimental stage version of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which, “[n]ot only would Jekyll and Hyde wear masks, but the whole company would wear them, and sometimes there would be eight or ten Jekylls on the stage” (198). It wasn’t until Davies met with the swell of positive response to The Manticore that he changed his mind about not making that book and Fifth Business two parts of a trilogy. Newly committed to the trilogy idea, he knit his theatre-based ideas for World of Wonders into the epic of Deptford’s fateful snowball in order to tell the story of the great magician Magnus Eisengrim (the final moniker of the character that begins as Paul Dempster), thereby shifting Ingestree to a secondary character.6

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Stevenson’s gothic novella is not the only work of fiction to get a stage adaptation in World of Wonders: Tresize’s repertoire is full of them, as was Martin-Harvey’s. They include The Corsican Brothers (1852 play by Dion Boucicault, based on the 1844 novella by Alexandre Dumas), Scaramouche (play by Rafael Sabatini based on his 1921 novel) and The Master of Ballantrae (based on the 1889 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson). Despite the seemingly central role of fiction in this repertoire, Davies insists that this theatrical era was actually “a time of gradual eclipse of the literary element in drama: by 1880 sensation, music, handsome scenes and dresses, and a special quality pertaining to melodrama had begun to crowd the theatre-poet off the stage, replacing him with a skilled writer who was but one among a group of theatre-artificers” (“Playwrights” 148–9). Novels and novellas served as mere raw material for a tradition where the actor counted as much as the play and rapid advancements in every element of technical theatre inspired a theatre of spectacle and special effects. Plays were not valued for their literary quality—in World of Wonders, Ingestree calls Tresize’s adaptations of nineteenth century novels “butcheries” (192)—and were often written and liberally rewritten to suit changing tastes and ensembles. Carlson explains this somewhat parasitic relationship of the two mediums by suggesting that, where the theatre has been more concerned with the retelling of stories already known to the public, the novel aspired to newness in storytelling (17) and thus is the source of repurposing. Theatre and the novel shadow and haunt each other throughout World of Wonders, and it is fitting that Davies brings back to the novel a figure (Martin-Harvey) that had pilfered the novel so thoroughly to generate his success. However, for Davies it was always clear which medium was primary: “the theatre was already old when what we generally call literature was still unheard of. The theatre is as old as Prophecy and the Epic, and to look upon it as the bastard sibling of such Johnny-come-latelies in the arts as the Novel or Lyric Poetry is to do it a grave injustice” (One 172). Thus, the theatre world depicted in “Merlin’s Laugh” recycles fiction, but does not serve it. Davies uses The Master of Ballantrae as a stand-in for The Only Way, Sir John Martin-Harvey’s massively popular adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities. Hesketh Pearson, writing in 1950, called The Only Way “the most prosperous stage adaptation of a literary masterpiece on record” (50). Martin-Harvey first performed it in 1899, and after that over five thousand times until its last performance in 1939 (Lawrence 117), when both the theatre and the world outside it had radically transformed. Davies leaves it out because the play does not contain a dual role such as the ones that are so thematically central to World of Wonders. In The Master of Ballantrae (the only play of these never performed by Martin-Harvey) Tresize plays both the dashing but crooked Master and his good-hearted younger brother Mr. Henry, Scottish noblemen set at odds by the Jacobite uprising of 1745. With a tortured love interest and a double death at the end, the play reportedly “compelled belief and shook you up pretty good” (Davies, World 194). Tresize also plays both Lesurques and Dubosc in The Lyons Mail, based on a real mail-coach robbery and murder in France in 1796, when honest citizen Lesurques was accused because of his extraordinary resemblance to murderer and robber Dubosc. Lesurques is brought to the guillotine but freed at the last moment (in the play but not the real event) and the criminal is brought to justice. However, according to some, it was in “The Corsican Brothers the doppelgänger theme achieved its apotheosis” (Butler 151). Twins Louis and Fabien dei Franchi have a telepathic rapport that warns the other whenever one of them is in danger. When Louis is slain in a duel in Paris, Fabien sees his ghost in Corsica, and sets out to avenge his brother. Davies described this play as hosting “a ‘dual role’ in which the two principal characters are subtly differentiated, instead of being plainly hero and villain” (“Playwrights” 243), as well as a thrilling ghost effect requiring a complex trap door that transformed Victorian stage floors (88–9). Bill Graham, who witnessed Martin-Harvey perform a number of these dual roles on his final Canadian tours, could attest to their power: “We gasped, ‘How does he do it’? each time he made his unbelievable entrances while, to all intents, he was still on stage in the other character” (n.pag.). Augmenting the backstage brilliance, a surrogate actor was required for a few fleeting moments of perfect illusion—one bearing a striking

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resemblance to the lead actor but denied any credit in the cast list lest such crediting detract from the great actor’s mystique of genius. In World of Wonders, Fetch/Eisengrim says of his time as Tresize’s double: “I was anonymous and at the same time conspicuous” (180).

Theatrical Hopes Deferred This conflation of conspicuousness and lack of acknowledgement might also describe Davies’s disappointing career as a playwright, which gradually gave way to a dual role for the author that saw him appearing alternately as a bright light of literary fiction and a sidelined sage of the theatre. “I yearn, burn and churn to be a playwright” he would write while in the throes of his early dramatic efforts (Discoveries 53). His pre-war time with the Old Vic theatre in London had augmented his dramatic passion with a professional skill base and a formidable network of theatre luminaries. His early plays Hope Deferred (1945), Overlaid (1946), Fortune, My Foe (1949), and At My Heart’s Core (1950), spoke to Canada’s cultural poverty and met with some recognition at the main event of the country’s thriving amateur scene—the Dominion Drama Festival. Yet, he remained “deeply frustrated by his failure to make waves with the CBC’s drama department, or with Dora Mavor Moore’s New Play Society, or with his influential English theatre acquaintances such as John Geilgud and Sybil Thorndike” (Peterman 25). In 1949, the Dominion Drama Festival chose his play Eros at Breakfast as the Canadian submission to the Edinburgh Festival but it failed to attract any attention there (Maes 68). It was shortly after that blow that he began his first novel, Tempest-Tost, using notes for a proposed play and finding that they transformed into a novel swiftly and with little effort (Grant 326–7). While David Kurnick’s ideas on theatre/novel relationships trouble the notion that “the modern novel is born from theatrical failure” (1), he also argues that these disappointments can inflect subsequent novels with a longing for the public nature of the stage, and produce a blending of narrative and dramatic devices with a “genetic relation to their failed theatrical experiments” (18). Indeed, a similar idea seems to have intrigued Davies, enough to have made it into his personal assemblage of theatre books: “I could tell you about my collection of failed plays written by great writers who proved to have no talent for the theatre; some very great names are in that group—Dickens, Browning, Henry James, and many more” (Happy 384). While he may have had great company in his library, the rift between Davies and the growing professional theatre in Canada would only deepen as his acclaim as a novelist grew. By most reports, Davies abandoned playwriting as his primary artistic output as a rejection of what Wolfe calls “theatre’s collaborative manyness” (7). In the productions he did find, he felt that his scripts were taken out of his hands and messed with by artists of questionable skill and brought before audiences with questionable taste. With the novel, he “could direct, set the scene, light the action and costume the cast himself” (Grant 333). In truth, Davies’s lifelong bond with the aesthetic of theatre set him at odds with most of the theatre practitioners and audience members of the mid-twentieth century. His playwrighting career spanned a period of rapid change in Canadian theatre that included gradual professionalization and increased opportunity, but Davies’s plays rarely found a home in these new spaces: “Unlike his theatrical contemporary, Gratien Gélinas … and unlike the creators of the later alternative theatre, Davies did not cultivate elements of realism or populism in his drama, preferring instead to convey his cultural polemic in romantic and satirical modes, usually with a strong literary tone” (Sherlow 82). At a time when Canadian theatre was breaking free from international influence, Davies shunned the wave of Canadian cultural nationalism that came to define a generation. Additionally, his plays were “overburdened with moralizing messages” and took pride in “resisting late-modern dramatic forms on the grounds that they are … either nihilistic or propagandist” (Sherlow 83). This allegiance to his nineteenth-century theatrical double came at a high cost for Davies and clearly fueled the repurposing of his creativity into fiction. When British director Tyrone Guthrie,

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Davies’s close friend and “father in the theatre” (Stone-Blackburn 393), demanded many rewrites and then walked dismissively away from the failed 1960 New York premiere of Love and Libel (the theatrical adaptation of Davies’s novel Leaven of Malice), Davies was crushed (394–5). That same year he began the first book of The Deptford Trilogy.

Subterranean Rivers The framing device of the Trilogy’s final book, World of Wonders, sheds some light on why Davies succeeded at fiction when his dramatic efforts failed to thrive. The book introduces us to characters who are making a film about a great magician of the past, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, starring his greatest living counterpart, Magnus Eisengrim. Robert-Houdin’s life story suffers from autobiographical duplicity—it is highly fabricated and whitewashed, and the film team urges Eisengrim to reveal how he came to be a magician in order to generate a subtext that might have been concealed behind the conventional public mask of Robert-Houdin. As explained to Eisengrim, for whom this psychological acting term is foreign, subtext is “a term modern theatre people are very fond of. It’s what a character thinks and knows, as opposed to what the playwright makes him say” (15), a “reality running like a subterranean river under the surface; an enriching, but not necessarily edifying, background to what is seen” (12), and, quoting St. Paul, “the evidence of things not seen” (147). Eisengrim submits to the team’s wishes and his life-as-subtext becomes the intradiegetic text of Davies’s book, moving Paul Dempster through his various identities, including doubling Tresize in “Merlin’s Laugh.” Kurnick says that the “thinness of the play text is a form of ghostly prompting” or “ontological neediness” (22) that invites collaborators to layer in subtext to create moments of greatly condensed meaning onstage. Davies’s inclination to prescribe subtext in a playscript accounted for the “moralizing” tone of his plays, but fully crafting the subtext in a novel allowed him to explore the unconscious, invisible, and unspoken life normally left to other artists in the theatre. “The narrative Eisengrim’s audience hears is his performance of his past experience in an attempt to re-create or double that past reality” (Coulas 133), and it is a performance over which Davies has much more artistic control than he did with his plays. In the subtext-made-visible of the novel, Davies was able to give free reign to his dualist tendencies. According to Coulas, “Davies’s self-identification as a Nestorian, believing in the dual nature of man, human and divine, and a Manichee, believing in the co-existence of the opposing forces of good and evil” (2), drove much of his creative output. In 1958, Jungian psychology began to obsess him, especially the theory of the archetypes, which gave him a new way of looking at theatre and some insight into why certain kinds of characters and stories had been so significant in his life. The dual roles that had haunted and enchanted him since his youth, constantly putting opposites into dynamic encounter, were studies of good and evil in a single being, with “the self objectified as other to externalize a hidden or buried self” (Coulas 42). In a play steeped in realism these opposites might be seen as the layers of a single psychologically rich character, but the stringent character typology of melodrama would not allow such complexity. Instead, they are hived off as twins and antagonists to enhance stakes and conflict, and to enact in melodrama’s inevitable triumph of good over evil the integration of dark or forbidden forces in ways that are more universally accessible. As Silverberg suggests, “Paul’s encounters with Willard and Sir John are instances of self-meeting” (109). In Jungian terms, the persona subdues unacceptable impulses and functions as a public mask to encourage others to perceive us in a desirable light. To go beyond the persona, one must incorporate the shadow self, the disowned subpersonality, to attain renewed strength and independence. At first, it appears that it is Tresize’s work to incorporate the fetch that has crossed his path: And when the double comes—and such a double that you can’t deny him—he’s a seedy little carnie, with the shifty eyes of a pickpocket … and every time you look at him you heave. He looks like everything inside yourself that you’ve choked off and shut out in order to be what you are now. (165)

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Yet as their relationship grows and Fetch incorporates more and more of Tresize into his being, it is clear the transference is going in the other direction as well. When he forgets to cover his face with his mask during his tightrope walk in Scaramouche, the episode gifts Fetch with the first taste of personal power in his wretched life: “when Sir John and I were on equal terms—dressed and wigged alike … and lifted into the high sweet air of Romance—his friends had been deceived by the likeness. That was a stupefying drink for Paul Dempster” (187). Tresize is a light that brings much of Dempster/ Fetch’s inner potential out the shadows.

Doubling the Star While the metaphoric uses of theatre in “Merlin’s Laugh” are deep and many, literal explications of theatrical craft also go into great detail. Davies’s intricate knowledge of Victorian scenic painting and the lighting and sound conventions of early twentieth century theatre wonderfully accent the work, but the real technical focus is on the craft of acting. Fetch is learning not the acting of his time (by the 1930s, the psychological approach of Stanislavsky emphasized interiority and ensemble work) but the techniques of romantic acting, with a focus on the star actor and his star parts. Thus, in doubling Tresize, he is not just learning his roles, but instead learning to be him—the star actor. Tresize’s wife, known to all as “Milady,” is adept at coaching him: “They will quite happily accept you as him, if you can get the right rhythm” (161); “You must catch his walk, and his turn of the head, and his gestures and all of that … Make yourself like a marvelously sensitive telegraph wire that takes messages from him” (162). This physical approach to character, with its focus on rhythm and “catching” Tresize like some kind of flu, initially reminds Fetch of an earlier trauma—“Try to get inside Sir John! Was this to be another Abdullah?” (166)—but eventually he develops the physical discipline required to approach to the problem: “I spent hours capering about in quiet places offstage” (175). Milady is pivotal in managing the shift in class necessary to move Fetch out of his carnival past in scenes reminiscent of Davies’s youthful efforts to de-Canada his voice: “she helped me to place my voice differently, breathe better, and choose words and expressions that did not immediately mark me as an underling” (235). Eisengrim later reminisces critically, “It was acting of a high order, but it was out of time” (254). Fetch’s unique theatrical training adds another, mystifying layer to what Kurnick has called, “the actor’s professional duplicity” (11), the object of the audience’s parallel awareness of the character and the actor that Carlson describes. In the case of Fetch, the actor signifies a character while being mistaken for another actor. Inside the rehearsal process for Scaramouche, Fetch is awash with the confusion of identities inherent in this complex illusion: “I was supposed to be imitating a great actor who was imitating an eighteenth-century gentleman who was imitating a Commedia dell’ Arte comedian” (163). Once he masters some of his technique and successfully doubles Tresize, it is clear that his time as a doppleganger has larger implications in the arc of Paul Dempster on his way to becoming Magnus Eisengrim. Anthony Stevens, glossing Jung, writes that “so much Self potential and instinctive energy is locked away in the shadow and therefore unavailable to the total personality” (Stevens 67). In doubling Tresize, Fetch was unlocking his own potential and crafting a persona that was energized by acknowledging various streams of personal darkness, thus serving and creating his higher self. This darkness erupts in World of Wonders at regular intervals through a chilling laugh, a trait of Willard in his demonic grittiness which then lives on in Eisengrim, a souvenir of his horrid enslavement and eventual supplanting of the magician. First introduced as a “glorious command over lesser humanity” (29), this wizard’s laugh speaks to a relationship with an audience of “rubes” that is there to be hoodwinked, controlled, and robbed. The power to construct and sell an illusion is linked throughout the narrative to the power to devour and destroy. In “Merlin’s Laugh” we begin to understand that the endgame of Mungo Fetch’s doubling is a gradual destruction of Tresize in order to secure his own identity. A witness to this process, Ingestree is liberal with his

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condemnation: “You ate poor old Sir John. You ate him down to the core. We could see it happening, right from the beginning of that tour” (205), “you sucked the pith out of that poor old ham, and gobbled it up and made it part of yourself … A terrible, vampire-like feeding on his personality and spirit” (206). As Tresize declines, Fetch ascends, and his uncanny likeness becomes so profound that, graveside, those gathered to honour the great actor take his surrogate for “some sort of ghost from the past, and very probably an illegitimate son” (263). Cecelia Coulas maintains that, in Davies’s oeuvre, “this novel is the only case in which the double destroys the opposing character in the process of integrating his personal evil” (68). In taking the name of the wolf in ancient fables, “Eisengrim” acknowledges the wolfishness of his doubling. The nineteenth-century stage techniques and elegancies of manner and carriage robbed from his mentor serve him well as he masters ever-more rubes as a world-famous magician. Theatrical technique is thus revealed to play a dual role, both as a window to wonder and a power over others that can be “cruel, cruel, cruel … undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless” (281).

Dying Colonialism Davies was also inclined to apply a Jungian critique to his national identity, maintaining that Canada’s defining characteristic was its “want of spiritual self-recognition” (“Deptford” 11). In “Merlin’s Laugh,” Eisengrim suggests that it is this felt absence and aching emptiness that accounts for the appeal of Tresize’s outdated repertoire to colonial audiences: “Canadians knew themselves to be strangers in their own land, without being at home anywhere else” (254). In Davies’s mind, Martin-Harvey’s tours were an unrecognized part of the Canadian unconscious that, if integrated—perhaps through his novel—could populate some of that absence. The tours were for him, “one of the things that gave the country, at that time, some semblance of cultural unity … In our present atmosphere of super-heated and factitious nationalism we are sometimes reluctant to admit that not very long ago we were culturally a colony” (“Deptford” 10). Theatre can be a forceful tool in maintaining colonial attitudes and bolstering imperial power by doubling the mores of the motherland, and this was exactly the intent of the railway magnates that managed details for English touring companies traversing Canada in the first three decades of the twentieth century.7 According to Eisengrim, they “wanted to encourage English theatre companies to visit Canada, partly because they wanted to stem what they felt was a too heavy American influence, partly in the hope that they might make a little money” (221), and their cultural campaign had an impact until the Depression and motion pictures put an end to the profitability of theatrical touring circuits. The comforting link with the Old Country that the MartinHarvey/Tresize repertoire provided was a fabrication, however, in that the England it represented never fully existed and the parts of it that had, had long since faded away. Ingestree calls the plays “Soothing syrup in aid of a dying colonialism” (227), but M.G. Vassanji, in his Introduction to World of Wonders, has a kinder take on Davies’s “Anglo and Euro cultural nostalgia” (xiv). He describes it as an example of wider “cultural multiplicities” and “remarkably contemporary, joining the company of many a writer who arrives at new shores (often from a colony) to dissect the life and place he or she has left behind” (xiv). There is surely merit in Vassanji’s rehabilitation of what others perceived to be stuffy Anglophilia, but Davies was actually born in Canada and spent long chunks of his life in small Ontario towns. While the visionaries of Canadian theatre in the early 1970s were reclaiming their rural identities and producing plays about farm life in barns,8 Davies has Mungo Fetch, near the end of the Tresize Canadian tour, touch down briefly in Deptford (the stone-in-the-snowball town Davies created to stand in for his childhood home of Thamesville). With his newly constructed knightly identity in place to brace him, Fetch seals his departure with his past by spitting on the ground of his former home town (255). The visible part of Davies’s obsession with Sir John Martin-Harvey was his large collection of books and memorabilia. Lurking hidden beneath this mountain of reverence is the painful sense that,

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where Fetch makes off with a persona that leads him down the path of fame and mastery, devotion to his double left Davies with a lofty social identity and outdated convictions (both aesthetic and political) that crushed his theatrical aspirations. This chapter offers a reading of the spectral effects of World of Wonders to reveal an autobiographical duplicity in the novel whereby Davies repurposed his disappointment and brought into full view the felt absence of the theatre he loved and aspired to, and that he believed Canada needed to remember and own. The world of Victorian theatre becomes a conduit to explore hidden and dual dimensions of consciousness in both the characters and the author. Specifically, the thrilling process by which one magically becomes two is interrogated for both its wondrous elements and its shadow side. The success of The Deptford Trilogy skyrocketed Davies to a new level of fame as a novelist, but when Canada’s Stratford Festival premiered its stage adaptation in 1992,9 abandoning his dual role, Davies chose not to write the script: “what I have written once, in a particular form, I cannot change into something else” (Merry 266). Perhaps with his Love and Libel experience in mind, Davies chose not to double his book with a play. After a lifetime of grappling with doubles and staring down shadows, Davies opted to stay with the safety and control of the novel. For him, one would no longer magically become two.

Notes 1 Towards the end of the twentieth century, initiated, at least in part, by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), haunting and spectrality become powerful conceptual metaphors that usher in the “spectral turn” and proliferate across disciplines as shared tools of analysis in the humanities. 2 This notion of spectral effects is somewhat influenced by Rosalind Ballaster’s notion of “presence-effects” (18) from her book Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Countering “meaningeffects”, “presence-effects” occupy the senses rather than the mind and exist in space rather than time. My spectral effects also engage the senses, but with an added experience of haunting, the uncanny, or other forms of mysterious doubling. 3 The younger brother metaphor is a gesture to Indigenous theatre artist and scholar Floyd Favel’s influential article, “Theatre: Younger Brother of Tradition.” By gesturing to Favel’s sibling link between tradition and theatre, I am suggesting a similar link between magic and theatre (as Davies does in World of Wonders) and also a possible link between tradition (as defined in Indigenous circles) and magic. 4 The stories of The Deptford Trilogy’s three novels, Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975) emerge from a single precipitating event. A young boy throws a snowball at another boy that has a stone hidden inside. It hits a pregnant woman instead, leaving her impaired for life, and forcing her to give birth, prematurely, to Paul Dempster. The trilogy explores the long-term effects of these events on numerous characters, especially the two boys and Paul, over the course of their diverse and intertwined lives. 5 Davies’s collection has been preserved in its entirety as The Robertson Davies Collection, held at the Queen’s University Library: https://library.queensu.ca/locations/print-collections/robertson-davies-collection. In a kind of spectral reconstruction of Davies’s psychic and literary space, items are shelved according to room order in which they were kept at Windhover, Davies’ country home in Caledon Hills. 6 See material describing and supporting this change in the focus of World of Wonders in Davies, Discoveries 307, Davies, “Deptford” 10, and Butler 197. 7 For more background on the two primary British Canadian Theatrical Organization and the Trans-Canada Theatre Society and the complex cultural politics of the North American touring circuit in the latter years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century, see Patrick B. O’Neill’s “The British Canadian Theatrical Organization Society and the Trans-Canada Theatre Society.” 8 In 1972, Paul Thompson, then Artistic Director of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, led a group of actors and playwright Ted Johns in a process to collectively create a play about farming life in Clinton, Ontario using interviews and hands on experience of farm work. The result, The Farm Show, premiered in a barn, was hugely successful and influential, and was only one of a number of collective creations of that era that explored elements of small-town Canadian life. 9 The stage adaptation was written by Elliot Hayes, who maintained a dialogue with Davies throughout, and the well-received production was directed by Richard Rose. See the Toronto Star review from 3 June 1992, and the finished script, held by the Canadian Play Outlet: https://www.canadianplayoutlet.com/products/world-ofwonders.

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Works Cited Ballaster, Rosalind. Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Boydell Press, 2020. Butler, Nicholas. John Martin-Harvey: The Biography of an Actor-Manager. Nicholas Butler, 1997. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. U of Michigan P, 2002. Coulas, Cecelia Antonette. “Doubles and Doubling in the Novels of Robertson Davies.” 1990. York University, PhD Dissertation. Davies, Robertson. “The Deptford Trilogy in Retrospect.” Studies in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, edited by Samuel L. Macey and Robert G. Lawrence, English Literary Studies, vol. 20, 1980, pp. 7–12. Davies, Robertson. Discoveries: Early Letters 1938–1975. Edited byJudith Skelton Grant, McClelland & Stewart, 2002. Davies, Robertson. Happy Alchemy: Writings on the Theatre and Other Lively Arts. Edited by Jennifer Surridge and Brenda Davis, McClelland & Stewart, 1997. Davies, Robertson. The Merry Heart: Selections 1980–1995. McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Davies, Robertson. One Half of Robertson Davies. Rosetta Books, 2019. Davies, Robertson. “Playwrights and Plays.” The Revels History of Drama in English. Volume VI 1750–1880, edited by Clifford Leech and T. W. Craik, Methuen & Co., 1975. Davies, Robertson. A Voice from the Attic. McClelland & Stewart, 1972. Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders. Penguin Group, 2015. del Pilar Blanco, Maria, and Esther Peeren. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. Favel, Floyd. “Theatre: Younger Brother of Tradition.” Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History, edited by Birgit Dä wes, State U of New York P, 2013, pp. 115–122. Graham, Bill. “Sir John Martin-Harvey: The Last Imperial Envoy.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 14, no. 1, 1993. Grant, Judith Skelton. Robertson Davies: Man of Myth. Viking, 1994. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. Lawrence, Robert G. “Canadian Theatre in Robertson Davies’ World of Wonders.” Studies in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, edited by Samuel L. Macey and Robert G. Lawrence, English Literary Studies, vol. 20, University of Victoria, 1980, pp. 114–123. Maes, Nicholas. Robertson Davies: Magician of Words. Dundurn Press, 2009. O’Neill, Patrick B. “The British Canadian Theatrical Organization Society and the Trans-Canada Theatre Society.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 1980, pp. 56–67. Pearson, Hesketh. The Last Actor-Managers. Methuen, 1950. Peterman, Michael. “The Concert of His Life: Perspectives on the Masks of Robertson Davies.” Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarities, edited by Camille R. La Bossière and Linda M. Morra, U of Ottawa P, 2001, pp. 13–32. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996. Ross, Val. Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic. McClelland & Stewart, 2008. Sherlow, Lois. “Metadrama and Melodrama: Postmodern Elements in the Plays of Robertson Davies.” Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarities, edited by Camille R. La Bossière and Linda M. Morra, U of Ottawa P, 2001, pp. 81–97. Silverberg, Mark. “‘Where there’s a Will, There Are Always Two Ways’: Doubling in World of Wonders.” Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarities, edited by Camille R. La Bossière and Linda M. Morra, U of Ottawa P, 2001, pp. 99–110. Sofer, Andrew. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance. U of Michigan P, 2013. Stevens, Anthony. Jung: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 1994. Stone-Blackburn, Susan. Robertson Davies, Playwright: A Search for Self on the Canadian Stage. UBC Press, 1985. Vassanji, M.G. “Introduction.” World of Wonders, Penguin, 2015, pp. vii–xiv. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. U of Wisconsin P, 2004. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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PART II

Theatre-Fiction, Form, and Style

7 MISHIMA YUKIO’S “ONNAGATA” AS A SHINGEKI THEATRE-FICTION “Amalgamation” of the Theatrical and the Literary in a Kabuki-World Tale Maki Isaka “Onnagata,” a 1957 short story by Mishima Yukio (1925–70) centering around a fictional contemporary onnagata of kabuki theatre, is a deceivingly simple work. The story must have been special to Mishima, even if it is generally not treated as his magnum opus, for after its initial publication in the periodical Sekai (January 1957), it was later incorporated into a short-story anthology handpicked by the author himself: “as for the post WWII pieces, I unreservedly selected … only what I think are good” (Mishima, “Kaisetsu” 258).1 As a literary piece, it appears rather straightforward, presenting a fictional reportage of a new kabuki-play in-the-making along with what could be called the offstage love-hate dynamics among three men engaged in the production. Onnagata are actors playing women’s roles in the four-century-old, allegedly “all-male” kabuki theatre,2 and the title role of the story is supposedly modeled upon a renowned epochal onnagata contemporaneous with Mishima, Nakamura Utaemon VI (1917–2001), for whom Mishima’s passionate admiration was quite well known. In fact, not only did Mishima write some plays for Utaemon, kabuki or otherwise, but he also left other writings, such as essays, lavishly praising the onnagata. Together with his idolization of the real-life onnagata actor, Mishima’s vast knowledge of kabuki theatre helps build “Onnagata,” which gives an impression of realism no matter how fictional it is. “It may not be a true story in the exact sense,” so the text seems to whisper in the ear of readers, “but it’s based on true stories, you know.” On closer examination, however, one cannot help but notice countless twists—sometimes even diametrical alterations—of what presents itself as realistic. With its meticulously reconstructed composition adeptly hiding such twists, the story helps us contemplate some intriguing possibilities of how the literary and the theatrical interact with one another, and the potentially thought-provoking outcomes of such “amalgamation.”

Mise-en-Scène of the Short Story: Compartmentalization “Onnagata” raises the curtain with a blunt sentence plainly showing the epicentre of what is about to unfold in the short story, literally up to the last sentence: “Masuyama ardently adores the art of Sanogawa Mangiku” (162). Mangiku is the Utaemon-inspired fictional onnagata, and Masuyama another main character out of the three. Immediately following this first sentence, the narrative commences explaining at length Mangiku’s performance style, the nature of his art, and how his performing career has progressed to date, by using substantial “descriptions” of quite a few kabuki plays

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-11

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the actor has been performing.3 The story is told from the viewpoint of Masuyama, a college graduate who, having majored in Japanese literature, is working in a world (the kabuki playhouse) where learning with no accompanying skills is seen as merely fruitless (168). He had chosen the occupation nevertheless “because he was attracted by Mangiku’s performance on stage” (162) and “by the charm of Mangiku [himself]” (165), a sentiment that he keeps to himself, albeit rather unsuccessfully. Whenever he approaches Mangiku to take care of some business, “Masuyama would always set his mind to excuse himself as soon as what needs to be done is done,” without lingering to chat, but “Mangiku was well aware, so felt Masuyama, that he adores Mangiku” (171). Presented through Masuyama’s perspective, the portrayals of the kabuki plays and Mangiku’s performances in them are, accordingly, explicitly steeped in Masuyama’s personal and subjective impressions and ideas. Highly visualized accounts of dramas and acting are not only abundant but also significant to the core of this story, the main text of which is twenty-five pages long. “Onnagata” presents depictions of nine kabuki works: seven that exist in actuality (162–5, 169–70, 174)4 and two fictional pieces, including an unnamed “new dance-theatre piece” that Mangiku is scheduled to be featured in the following month (170–1) and a new play to be staged the month after that, the making of which will give rise to the love-hate dynamics involving Masuyama, Mangiku, and the young director of the new production named Kawasaki (171–83). Theatre descriptions are copious with reason, as they function to shape the characters and move the story. If the fictional new play, titled The Wishing-ThemExchanged Tale (Torikaebaya Monogatari—the namesake of an actual classical tale), is to show the three men’s dynamic psychological interaction beneath the seemingly mundane routine of a theatreproduction process, then the seven existing opuses help readers vividly imagine Mangiku’s appearance and personality, the type of his performance, along with Masuyama’s forcefully subdued, even concealed, worship, which must always face the onnagata’s serene but cruel indifference, gracefully evinced despite his total awareness of Masuyama’s affection. The descriptions of the seven existing plays—mostly from eighteenth-century major kabuki repertoires—deserve our special attention here. While certainly serving to gradually build up the mise-en-scène for the love-hate dynamics to come, the earlier portions dedicated to these existing plays (162–5, 169–70, 174) cannot be simply reduced to such preliminary functions but may play a critical part in how we think of Mishima’s theatre-fiction. Of the seven works, “Onnagata” mentions the following four pieces very briefly, in order of appearance: Lion the Offering: New-Year Amusement (Shunkyô Kagami-jishi; 1893), ABC of the Ebb and Flow of the Heikes and the Genjis (Hirakana Seisuiki; 1739), Dôjôji-temple (Dôjôji; 1750), and Book of Aoto, the Flowery Woodblock Print (Aoto-zôshi Hana no Nishiki-e; 1862). Although each description is quite short, taken together they help readers visualize the actor Mangiku in a concrete manner. For example, when he was a youngster, Mangiku’s acting was “decent and demure,” as demonstrated when playing minor roles—such as “the butterfly spirit in Lion the Offering and the lady’s maid Chidori in ABC of the Ebb and Flow”—and “nobody predicted that he would later become such a successful maestro as he is today. But even back then Masuyama already recognized in the performance of the handsome youth some kind of icy flame, … fire emerging beneath snow” (162). Another example is the story’s description of an occasional “magical moment” in Mangiku’s stage performance, a powerfully effective gaze from his beautiful eyes, “a single use of which could invoke hallucination among the full-house audiences as if the scenery were totally changed at once” (164). This happens, for instance, when “he stares at the main stage, from the hanamachi [a catwalk-like extension], or stares at the hanamachi from the main stage, or when in Dôjôji-temple [at the moment when Hanako’s jealousy has transformed her into a snake], he looks up the temple bell” (164). Meanwhile, in the upcoming new play, The Wishing-Them-Exchanged Tale, Mangiku is scheduled to play the role of an elder brother raised in the place of his younger sister. The text explains the role by contrasting it with another crossdressing kabuki character from an actual kabuki play: Benten the Kid (Benten Kozô) in Book of Aoto, a

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member of a bandit quintet whose specialty is to impersonate—across gender and class—an innocent, fragile daughter of a well-to-do household. “Onnagata” says that the new brother-role Mangiku is to perform is a complicated character, alluding to the complex naissance of onnagata itself, as opposed to the “simple and plain” (tanjun) cross-gender performance expected of an actor playing Benten the Kid (174). In short, though each reference is extremely brief, the remarks about Mangiku in relation to these four kabuki pieces are effective in providing readers with images of his acting. In contrast, “Onnagata” recounts some parts of the remaining three plays quite eloquently; they are, in order of appearance, Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival (Gion Sairei Shinkô-ki; 1757), Household Teachings for Women at the Valley of the Sibling Mountains (Imoseyama Onna Teikin; 1771), and Eightfold-Deployment: Protection of the Main Castle (Hachijin Shugo no Honjô; 1807). Though similarly eloquent, the short story’s articulations of these kabuki-plays are not monolithic. Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival (163–4) and Household Teachings for Women (164–5) are introduced as meticulous stage-production accounts, with lines of characters and narrations cited, sometimes at length.5 Arguably, each of them could well be an individual theatre-fiction piece in its own right, which will be discussed in the next section. Unlike the first two, the portion of the story dedicated to Eightfold-Deployment (169–70), which appears immediately before the making of The Wishing-Them-Exchanged Tale, is not so much a theatrical account of the drama onstage as an impressionist verbal drawing of Mangiku’s emotion in his greenroom, when he is harboring within him Hinaginu, a young samurai’s newlywed wife who chooses to kill herself due to a feud between her and her husband’s households, a role in EightfoldDeployment which Mangiku has just finished performing onstage. Mangiku is in front of the mirror, removing the makeup, with Masuyama behind him. The two men are talking, facing each other in the mirror, because, at Mangiku’s bidding, Masuyama is to act as messenger to a certain composer whose work Mangiku will perform the following month: “Mangiku, however, isn’t looking at Masuyama’s [image] in the mirror. His eyes are watching his own face straight,” where he sees Hinaginu, “the daughter of Mori Sanzaemon Yoshinari, the bride of young Satô Kazusanosuke,” whose complicated circumstances made it inevitable for her to commit suicide: “That face Mangiku is watching in the mirror”—the face of a spirit that, “he knows, will leave his body soon, as the fervent emotion of the role calms down” (169–70). One possible reading of the function of Eightfold-Deployment in “Onnagata” is that such a literal portrayal of Mangiku’s emotion is the other side of the coin, that is, the inverse of the earlier part describing Masuyama’s emotion upon witnessing Mangiku in his greenroom right after playing important characters: Masuyama liked Mangiku at the moment when he returns from stage, after performing big roles … The emotion of the character, of the important character that is, still fills the entire body of Mangiku. Just like a glowing sunset, or just like the moon at dawn. Grandiose emotion of classical drama, emotion that is nothing to do with our everyday life, [which can be found in] the world where the throne is battled over[.] (166–7) Such an intriguing correspondence might richly complicate what I called previously Mangiku’s graceful but cruel indifference toward Masuyama’s covert affection, of which Mangiku seems to be aware all too well. Another possible reading of the Eightfold-Deployment portion is that it might bridge a certain gap between the preparatory first half of “Onnagata,” presenting the accounts of the existing kabuki plays and Mangiku’s performance in them, and the ensuing half where readers are invited to witness psychological interaction—or the lack thereof—among the trio, as they deal with the making of The Wishing-Them-Exchanged Tale. These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive; they might well work hand in hand.

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The Matrix of Kabuki Theatre-Fiction in “Onnagata”: Elements and History The passages from “Onnagata” on “Kinkakuji-temple”—a part of Act Four of Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival—and on “Palace” (Goten)—a part of Act Four of Household Teachings for Women—are more concrete and detailed stage-production accounts (163–4 and 164–5 respectively). Considering how short the entire story is, they occupy substantial space, possibly even disproportionally so, describing what you would hear and see on stage, and in particular, what of Mangiku’s performance you would behold. Fortuitously or otherwise, the two plays share a lot. In terms of kabuki-play taxonomy, both belong to the category called maruhon-mono or gidayû kyôgen (“complete-script things”), that is, those kabuki plays adopted from the puppet theatre (see also notes 4 and 5). In addition, they have been considered two of the most important and highly respected masterpieces of the theatre in its entirety, and the major female roles in them are two of the most highly valued and critical for an onnagata career. For instance, Princess Yuki in Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival has been designated as one of “three princesses” (sanhime), the three most significant costume-play princesses in the rank-conscious kabuki theatre, presumably since the early nineteenth century. “Onnagata” begins telling about “Kinkakuji-temple” by quoting the script’s descriptive opening narration. If this narration is to provide theatregoers with a bird’s-eye view of the venue where a looming drama would take place (namely, Kinkakuji-temple in Kyoto, Japan), from which spectators then zoom in on several characters who make up the drama there, before eventually focusing on Princess Yuki, then “Onnagata” is doing the same for readers here. The ensuing verbal explanations about stage setting, its grandiosity, and how it is used for this character or for that prop, all eventually converge on Princess Yuki’s dazzling but classy costume expected of any high-ranking princess (163). Here, the princess is being captured by her household enemy and tied to a cherry tree, with her both hands strapped up at her back; the only saving grace is that her grandfather was a maestro painter, and she inherited artistic talent from him. This flow of attention, navigated by “Onnagata” in a way that imitates how the narration in the theatre navigates its spectators’ gaze, necessitates one more step to complete its journey: not only from the site to the onstage characters to the main character but also to the actor’s performance of that main character. And, we recall, these descriptions are narrated through Masuyama’s perspective and thus are explicitly subjective: In particular, Masuyama loved the “tiptoe mouse” sequence, where the princess—tied firmly to the cherry tree, with her hands and arms unmovable—recalls a certain legend of her grandfather and paints a mouse herself. That is, she gathers fallen cherry flowers on the ground and draws a mouse on them, all by her feet at that. Then the mouse is suddenly vivified and bites off the rope. Needless to say, Mangiku would never dare to use the puppet-gesture technique. The binding rope makes Mangiku’s posture all the more beautiful than usual. For the delicate carriage of this onnagata … is pathetic for mundane, everyday [use], but that [same] bearing becomes wondrously vivid when bound by ropes. (163–4) To sum up, “Onnagata” retells the Kinkakuji-temple sequence from Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival by reconstructing the matrix of the drama (e.g., venue, story, etc.), the characters in the drama, and the main character featured in the scene. Mishima’s readers are taken along the same route set up by the kabuki-play’s own dramaturgy. The accounts of Household Teachings for Women are presented to readers in a comparable manner, except that now it is characters’ lines and not an opening narration that “Onnagata” quotes. To be exact, the short story’s omission of the opening narration from the original script results in the absence of any bird’s-eye pre/view of the venue where the ongoing drama is taking place (a palace at Mt. Mikasa, Nara, Japan), and thus the readers will immediately face a common maiden named O-Miwa—performed by

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Mangiku—who has just arrived at the palace in question, a place totally unknown to her, where she is now doomed to experience an instantaneous supernatural transformation and to die. She has been led to this ill-fated venue by a certain folk-religion charm believed to grant one’s love wish. At the palace, certainly, is her love, a mysterious noble youth in disguise for whom she has been suffering one-sided love, but it is his wedding ceremony that is being held there. The common girl is instantaneously found out by servants of the household. “Onnagata” tells us how O-Miwa is being teased, ridiculed, bullied, and eventually chased away by ladies-in-waiting of the bride-to-be, Princess Tachibana: “Nearly deranged from anger and jealousy, O-Miwa is about to exit the stage via the hanamachi” (164). The gradual process of O-Miwa’s humiliation is of great moment for the drama, for it pushes O-Miwa to the brink, and when she reaches the ultimate stage her face will physically demonstrate the “appearance of obsession” (gichaku no sô), a rare and distinctive mark that signifies a supernatural transformation of her blood, by which the nemesis of the groom’s family can be defeated. She reaches that magical stage when she hears from afar “the ladies-in-waiting say ‘Here comes the best groom in all three countries. Clap, clap, clap. All the best wishes.’ The narration goes, ‘O-Miwa looks back [from the hanamichi] and stares [at the main stage].’ Looking back, O-Miwa says, ‘Now I hear that’” (164). This is the moment her facial expression demonstrates the “appearance of obsession.” A loyal retainer of the groom’s household recognizes this crucial sign of the blood transformation, and he is to take her life and obtain the magical blood while she is still alive, if only barely so. “Every time he sees the scene [of transformation], Masuyama would always feel a shudder” (164), for Mangiku, so the text implies, is extremely good at materializing the totally possessed O-Miwa, due to his intense and forceful gaze that can arouse hallucination, as in other pieces such as Dôjôji-temple mentioned earlier (164). “Onnagata” then details the transformation by visualizing Mangiku’s performance, followed by O-Miwa’s murder by the retainer for the sake of the magical power of her living blood (ikichi) (164–5). In short, “Onnagata” presents this dramatic scene from Household Teachings for Women in a way that is similar to—if not identical with—its previous presentation of Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival. In parallel fashion, both of them show readers detailed images of the respective sequences. Although each passage is describing what would be an extremely short sequence when physically acted on stage, each becomes a small kabuki theatre-fiction in its own right. This becomes especially interesting when we recognize the ways in which kabuki itself has long been associated with kinds of theatre-fiction. The resemblances discussed above (how the descriptions in Mishima’s story parallel the dramaturgical structuring of a theatrical text) are not limited to the passages from “Onnagata” on Household Teachings for Women and Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival. Rather, those features shown in the two kabuki-play accounts in Mishima’s short story have appeared in countless kabuki-related texts written, published, and consumed for a long time. During major parts of its history, spanning at least four hundred years, kabuki theatre has been characterized by its reliance on a wide-ranging and hybrid publication culture. The phenomenon of kabuki as a literary experience was firmly established already in premodern times (through 1867) and has long been a nearly-indispensable component of kabuki as a whole.6 An 1829 book by Kimura Mokurô, titled Theatre under the Microscope (Gekijô ikkan mushimegane; theatre being a synonym for kabuki in this context),7 even states that “There are so many theatre-lovers in the world these days but very few theatregoers” (311), and one of chief target audiences of the book was those theatre-lovers with no access to actual theatre. There were several reasons for the limited size of actual kabuki audiences in premodern times, that is, approximately the first few centuries in the history of kabuki that overlapped with the last samuraigovernment regime, the Edo era (1600–1867): (1) various regulations on theatre production (e.g., when, where, how to stage kabuki plays, and who could stage them) as well as on the structure and usage of playhouses imposed by samurai authorities, (2) the absence of electricity that further contributed to a smaller size of playhouses, (3) the relatively expensive cost of theatre-going that the poor

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could not afford, and (4) societal stigma associated with kabuki that deterred people with social standing, e.g., the samurai class, including the shogun household. To accommodate those who could not go to kabuki playhouses, there were various alternative forms of theatre-going, such as voice mimicry, audio-only “shadow theatre” (voice mimicry plus sound effects), unlicensed “little theatre,” and private performances (kabuki productions at one’s own residence by hiring actors, etc. on a constant basis), and last but not least, publications, which typically contained both pictures and linguistic information (Isaka, Onnagata 68–9, 114). These alternative means, opulent or inexpensive, were instrumental in making possible and sustaining a fandom that was much larger than the actual audiences that playhouses could physically accommodate. It was also more socially diversified than the limited cohort who could afford such pecuniary luxury and, to some degree, tolerate the social dubiousness that theatre-going entailed. It is among these various alternatives that we can situate the phenomenon of reading as quasi- or surrogate theatre-going. The weight and variety of these publications cannot be overstated. One important observation here is that this “literary experience of kabuki” did not mean the reading of kabuki scripts in and of themselves, not necessarily because drama texts were subordinate to performance in this actorcentered theatre, but, more importantly, because they did not “exist” to begin with, until quite a later moment in kabuki history (i.e., the late nineteenth century).8 I refer instead to far broader publications on kabuki, including actor-critique booklets (performance-review periodicals), playbills, and other miscellaneous texts called gekisho (theatre-books), the last of which included—but were never limited to—items comparable to theatre-fiction in one way or another (Isaka, Onnagata 67–9). The phenomenon of “kabuki as a literary experience” might sound incongruous with another defining feature of the theatre: its centering around actors’ actual, singular (non-repeatable), and real-time performances on stage. Certainly, kabuki has definitely been an actor-centered theatre heavily relying on their physically enunciated song (ka), dance (bu), and acting (ki), to the point where texts (plays) are perceived as subordinate to performance, and yet the kabuki culture in the Edo era tightly integrated theatre circles and publication industry, the latter continuously expanding its purview as it was adjacent to rental library businesses. Considering the significance of actual performance as well as the surrogate nature—at least partially—of publications, one may reasonably speculate that, even if kabuki scripts had already existed since the early days of kabuki, and even if such texts had been available to the fandom, those texts alone might not have satisfied their appetite for the theatre. That demand was met by the aforementioned wide-ranging publications, providing so many theatre-lovers in the world (some of who were without any realistic chance of seeing kabuki in person) not only with the drama itself (plot, story, etc.) but also with a powerful sense of how it was being performed in both visual and auditory senses. Eventually, the popularity of such literary surrogates that could enable readers to somehow experience kabuki even resulted in the birth and consolidation of a few literary clusters, categories if not genres, some of which remained active even in the early part of modern times: for instance, ômuseki (“Parrot-Stones”) and shibai mitamama (“Theatre-Seen-As-Is”), just to name a few. If a closet drama puts the dramaturgical structures of theatre into a literary medium, ômuseki and shibai mitamama, as literary tools for “virtual” theatre-going, take the form of literature while their “substance” is theatrical performance. In short, while usually and accurately called an actors’ theatre, with drama scripts occupying an inferior locus, kabuki has long been an ekphrastic entity, in which literary and theatrical arts were equally indispensable. In this sense, the term “amalgation” used in the title and introduction of this chapter might well necessitate caution, as the word can tacitly presuppose pre-existing entities that are to be amalgamated later. In any case, the way in which Mishima’s “Onnagata” allows readers to have a glimpse of Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival and Household Teachings for Women, with stunning onnagata Mangiku performing on stage, is analogous to how the premodern predecessors provided kabuki fandom with quasi-theatre-going experiences.

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Importantly, although this phenomenon of collaboration between kabuki circles and the publication industry carried substantial weight in premodern times, it did not disappear in modern times. Surely, some of the aforementioned conditions that severely capped the number of actual theatregoers ceased to matter due to, for example, the change in governments and the use of electricity, but this did not translate into the erasure of kabuki as a literary experience. Illustratively, one of the popular literary categories mentioned above, shibai mitamama (“Theatre-Seen-As-Is”), was born in the early twentieth century as a frequently published series in one of the major theatre journals Engei Gahô (Entertainment Illustrated Magazine; see for instance the November 1907 issue). That said, it is also imperative that we pay attention to the fact that the development of technology has gradually but definitely expanded the range of alternative media through which people can enjoy theatre in one way or another. Even within the context of publication, woodblock printing and typesetting differ significantly in terms of the ease of mass printing and circulation. Development took place beyond printed texts as well, the change being not only quantitative but also qualitative. Added to the expansion of publication was an ever-growing list of media made possible by further technological advances: photographs, sound recording, audio-visual recording, moving pictures, television, and countless computer-related technologies including SNS. As a result, kabuki theatre has been dealt with not only by publications such as books and periodicals, consisting of pictorial and linguistic information, but also by movies, TV programs, CDs, DVDs, anime, manga, videogames, and so on. In this sense, the space that the literary had occupied in its collaboration with kabuki theatre in premodern times has been considerably shrunken. The pie is now to be shared by an incomparably wider range of media, but on the other hand, there is now also a realistic possibility that the further diversified media help contribute to kabuki-lovers’ quantitative growth; the pie itself is getting enlarged because of the diversification, each component of which can technically recruit new fans for kabuki. Considering these two sides, it is not so surprising that theatre’s strategies for competition have often been diverse: asserting ephemerality, co-presence, etc. as its antithetical raison d’être, what makes it decidedly different from other media, while also collaborating with them. Of course, now that there are abundant audio-visual materials able to present kabuki productions such as YouTube and DVDs, fans unable to go see it at a kabuki playhouse no longer need to rely on shibai mitamama or other “substitutes” such as voice mimicry, shadow theatre, little theatre, and the like. In fact, new technological possibilities including Deepfake and Vocaloid keep emerging. But two more factors are worth mentioning here. For one, since its early days kabuki has been a theatre of people whose collective “box-office” support has kept it alive (vis-à-vis elite samurai’s patronage), as well as a “queer” theatre, the etymology evident in the nominalized form of the verb kabuku (to lean; to act and/or dress in a peculiar and queer manner). This theatre does not hesitate at any amalgamation should it help attract audiences. For that matter, the theatre was born four hundred years ago as a hybrid entertainment consisting of existing performing arts of song, dance, and acting. We recall that the two plays introduced at length in “Onnagata,” Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival and Household Teachings for Women, were adopted from the puppet theatre, and they have been regarded as two of the most highly respected masterpieces of kabuki as a whole (163–5). Collaboration with any art is nearly second nature for kabuki, and thus its recent association with contemporary media should not be surprising at all. Good examples are the anime/mangare-adaptation of Naruto and the onstage collaboration with Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku, just to name a few. (What further complicates the situation is the fact that Naruto had heavily relied on the kabuki play The Tale of Jiraiya the Gallant (Jiraiya Gôketsu Monogatari: 1852) and its derivative plays, as is obvious from its namesake in Naruto, Jiraiya, who visibly shows off kabuki-like hairdo, makeup, and body movement. Kabuki’s re-adaptation thus concludes one cycle of export/import.) For another, it is noteworthy that the phenomenon of reading as quasi- or surrogate-theatre-going has potentially come to carry very specific and enormous implications lately, with the Covid-19

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pandemic turning people’s lives upside down worldwide. Covid-19 brought a sudden and overarching closure of activities involving face-to-face, physical interaction, while also escalating a tendency for theatre to collaborate with technology. Illustratively, many practitioners engaged in physical activities—be they actors, dancers, or musicians—started their own audio-visual outlets such as YouTube channels. That said, it is also noteworthy that this latest era is characterized not only by viruses and thus an everlasting possibility of pandemic but also by political instability, in which cyberattacks seem realistic. We are then reminded of both the indispensable nature of technologies and the merit of diversity as a strategic advantage for survival. If so, such a low-tech alternative as bookreading might well be reevaluated not just in historical settings but in this very contemporary setting. It is in this environment that theatre-fiction is now located.

The Matrix of Internal Complexity: Twists and What They Do We have seen, in its passages on Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival and Household Teachings for Women (163–5), that Mishima’s “Onnagata” is capable of conjuring a spectatorial experience of two famous kabuki-theatre pieces featuring Mangiku, and that this element of the literary work is in line with a kabuki tradition in which the literary and the theatrical work hand-in-hand in various ways, including, but not limited to, what may be called kabuki theatre-fiction. It is another question, however, whether the same can be said of “Onnagata” as a whole. To jump to a conclusion, the answer is yes and no. “Onnagata” does promote a theatre-viewing effect, but it conjures it up in another theatrical genre that is not only differentiated from kabuki but also antagonistic toward it. In other words, “Onnagata” hides two nemeses inside and makes them work together; accordingly, the encounter staged in this work is not just between the literary and the theatrical. The discrepancy in question, apparent from the very start, becomes more obvious once readers proceed into the latter half, which, in its tendency toward reportage as it narrates the ongoing production process of The Wishing-Them-Exchanged Tale (171–83), is reminiscent of shingeki, a theatrical genre specific to modern times whose relationship with kabuki is highly convoluted. Before exploring what shingeki signifies in the context of “Onnagata,” we should undertake a similar task for kabuki, because the matter lies in their relationship. Earlier I said that kabuki was an allegedly-all-male actor-centered theatre of song (ka), dance (bu), and acting (ki), prioritizing performance over script. Added to those basic characteristics is another fundamental feature: it is seemingly a chaotic fantasy theatre.9 In order to conjure up whatever it wants to present to audiences, kabuki hardly hesitates at anything, for instance, distorting spatio-temporal parameters, mixing up various entities not to mention species, and excessively intensifying kinesthetics and somatic features of actors, just to name a few. Furthermore, when any of this happens, the theatre does not even find it necessary to justify it. For instance, if the story necessitates a larger space for characters absorbed in conversation, the inanimate building structures such as entrance doors or walls will do the moving while the characters keep talking. As a result, kabuki can include locomotion and elocution exaggerated to the nth degree, unbelievably flamboyant costumes and makeup, and unrealistic stories filled with ghosts, men who can transform themselves into toads or rats, women who actually are foxes, cats, birds, flowers, or wooden dolls, and so on. With the aid of wires, actors playing magical foxes, supernatural samurai, or ghostly ladies-in-waiting have been literally flying through the air in kabuki playhouses since premodern times, that is, even before electricity became available. While Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival and Household Teachings for Women are both highly respected, serious dramas, they have no problem at all with a living mouse being born out of fallen cherry petals or with a magical power of “living blood” taken from a dying, jealous woman. In short, kabuki appears amorphous, seemingly freed from any rationality or coherent logic. (With the last section in mind, we might add that this tendency toward chaotic fantasy is enriched by kabuki’s hybrid nature and attraction to amalgamation.)

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These three points—the alleged all-male composition, the superiority of performance over scripts, and the seemingly irrational nature—are among the most important, basic characteristics of this theatre. Shingeki is a sheer contrast to kabuki, demonstrating antitheses of all those basic features. In fact, shingeki virtually started by defining itself as that which was not kabuki, declaring itself a “drama” (geki) of the “new” (shin), as opposed to what it thought to be obsolete. Having always been a contemporary theatre, kabuki, for the first time in its history, came to be dubbed as “old theatre” (kyûgeki) and “old faction/school” (kyûha) (see Isaka, “Yearning for the ‘West’“ and Secrecy 101–36). If the particular parts of Mishima’s story that address such kabuki plays as Chronicled Faith and the Gion Festival and Household Teachings for Women present to readers images of Mangiku performing in the two plays, they do so in a quite authentic manner compared to traditional kabuki-theatre literature; and if “Onnagata” also presents its readers with Mangiku in a shingeki play, then it is like a Matryoshka doll, with two conflicting components. Shingeki was initiated and established during the first modern era, the Meiji (1868–912). Immediately after the Edo era (that is, the last era under feudal samurai authorities incapable of handling situations when Western colonial powers were looming), the Meiji era was characterized by the new government’s modernization- and westernization-policy. Comprehensive and profound changes not only in politics but also in social and cultural realms were inevitable, resulting in drastic alterations in existing theatres (e.g., kabuki), and, no less importantly, in the ebb and flow of many types of new theatre. Among them was shingeki, which is said to have originated in the 1906 foundation of the Literary Society (Bundei Kyôkai) by Tsubouchi Shôyô, and that of the Free Theatre (Jiyû Gekijô) by Osanai Kaoru three years later. Osanai, whose famous epithet was the father of shingeki, even openly called kabuki “theatrical poison” (“Jiyû Gekijô no Keikaku” 103), aggressively pushing shingeki as that which is not kabuki.10 The aforementioned three basic characteristics of kabuki help make the contrast strikingly visible. While the “all-male” characteristic is so important for kabuki’s identity as defined by both insiders (kabuki circles) and outsiders (audiences, critics, researchers, etc.)—so much so that kabuki was still delineated as an “all-male” theatre regardless of covered female presence at least until 2012 (see note 3)—shingeki had no problem accepting those females interested in performing. One of the most renowned actresses in modern Japan, Matsui Sumako, was the star of the Art Theatre (Geijutsu-za), another shingeki troupe of importance established in 1913 by one of Shôyô’s disciples, Shimamura Hôgetsu. Prior to her short but successful career at the Art Theatre, Matsui was among the first cohort of fifteen students entering the school (est. 1909) affiliated to Shôyô’s Literary Society. She was thus a shingeki actress through and through, as opposed to those who had previously been trained in existing performing arts, such as kabuki. The supremacy of scripts as drama texts, and not as secondary support for actors’ song (ka), dance (bu), and acting (ki), is one of the most significant concepts for shingeki. If kabuki presupposes a dancing body well-trained in a particular dance style, new theatrical enterprises in Meiji Japan necessitated a body that neither dances nor sings, a more “natural” body that would not alienate a new type of audiences’ sense of reality. Three critical points here are as follows. First, the denial of one grammar does not mean the absence of any grammar. Illustratively, for training actors in the Tsukiji Little Theatre, Osanai used the Dalcroze method of eurhythmics, an educational system of harmonious bodily movements initiated by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss music teacher roughly contemporary to Osanai. Arguably, therefore, what was aimed at was merely another kind of dancing body, the dancing quality of which simply became “naturalized” and “invisible” to shingeki practitioners (and presumably many people in Japan at the time of a rapid and radical epistemological transformation). Second, the idea of changing people’s body grammar was never a rare and formidable challenge limited to theatre, but was, in fact, utilized in military training of Meiji Japan as well as its physical education (i.e., gymnastic exercises) at elementary schools, both of which aimed at transforming the major way of

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walking at that time (i.e., from the parallel gait—when the right leg moves forward, the right arm moves forward at the same time—to the diagonal gait [see Isaka, Onnagata 87–111 and “Commentary”]). Third, effects of “correction” such as these did not simply stop at the external change but involved improvement of people’s mind. Most importantly for our present discussion, these ideas about external/internal relationships are applicable also to texts. Just as the parallel gait could astonish people who had internalized the diagonal gait, as if it were dancing, the use of a particular parlance could appear unnatural and dramatic to those used to something else. This is particularly visible in the context of theatrical performance. We might think here of kabuki’s so-called “irrationality,” relative to shingeki’s quest for “rationality” as part of a broader society-wide imperative of modernization and westernization, an urgent task imposed by the fledgling Meiji government. Crucial for the current discussion on “Onnagata” is why X seems rational to these particular people while Y does not. Moreover, when Y itself is naturalized and internalized, it is made invisible, no longer alienating or foreign. The supremacy of scripts in shingeki extended to an insistence that they be left unaltered and allowed to speak for themselves. Three years prior to the launch of the Free Theatre, Osanai, who also knew kabuki theatre and kabuki circles very well, declared: “A troupe leader in the future … should have a good eye for a good play. You dare not to harm a playwright’s effort in the interest of ‘profit.’ Never feel a pride in ‘[changing] an original play.’ Take a pride in ‘perform[ing] an original play as is’” (“Nihon Shôrai no Geki” 255; emphasis added). He planned his own troupe, the Free Theatre, according to this idea: “All the actors already scheduled to be engaged in this movement are ready to become the puppets of a script. I will admit newcomers only when they agree with this. To follow a script absolutely is a means of expressing one’s own technique absolutely. No actors can help this movement unless they are conscious of this” (“Jiyû Gekijô no Keikaku” 104–5; emphasis added). Indeed, Osanai kept his word. In November 1909, the Free Theatre was launched with Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1896), of which Osanai was proud because of the very criteria he had set for shingeki: “Our actors were honest to the end. [They] had absolute respect for a script. There was no one who took a single word or phrase lightly. However poor and immature, our direction did not desecrate the original author even for once” (“Shingeki Fukkô no Tameni” 55; emphasis added). Nearly everything other than drama texts was initially marginalized.11 For example, since the expense issue is critical for theatre production, “I even think about not using any stage setting” (Osanai, “Jiyû Gekijô no Keikaku” 101). These ideas about the supremacy of “original” drama texts, including translations, were not Osanai’s idiosyncratic thinking. After the premiere of the Free Theatre in 1909, author and translator Morita Sôhei wrote: When seeing this play, I hardly took notice of the actors. I felt as if I had directly faced Ibsen. It seemed as if my emotions had been controlled by the strings Ibsen pulled … I heard some audiences complain about the actors, saying, they were weak, or devoid of this or that, or something like that. That didn’t bother me at all … Actors are nothing in the first place. To all intents and purposes, a script is all that matters for theater. (158–9; emphasis in original) In short, the supremacy of scripts is of great moment for shingeki. But if the highest achievement of theatre should be found in spectators being directly controlled by the strings that playwrights pull, then a “play as is” in these discussions presupposes immediacy between drama (script) and reception, bypassing performance (actors’ acting), which needless to say is unimaginable in the context of kabuki’s modus operandi. By extension, shingeki sees no merit in such a literary category as shibai mitamama, which is not so much surrogate drama texts as literarily reconstructed stage performance. Ultimately, when shingeki necessitates literary texts, it is simply and exclusively drama texts (scripts).

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I previously suggested the possibility of reading “Onnagata” as a theatre-fiction where two opposite theatrical genres meet and cohabit. The short story, however, does not seem to provide readers with a quantitatively balanced or comparable presentation of kabuki theatre-fiction and shingeki theatre-fiction. On the surface, what stands out is kabuki, with hardly any shingeki aspects demanding our attention by the short story’s handling of language. (To use a metaphor from above, the kabukiplay passages walk in the parallel gait, and the rest the diagonal one.) In terms of the language use, the reportage-like part on the making of The Wishing-Them-Exchanged Tale (171–83) flows seamlessly from the first half of “Onnagata” with the exception of the passages on kabuki plays Mangiku has performed, which I have argued are in line with a certain kabuki-related publication tradition spanning several centuries. To be precise, even within the portions on the kabuki plays that Mangiku acts in, one does recognize some modern elements, when Mishima is detailing Masuyama’s inward psychology in response to Mangiku and his performance. I stated earlier that the personal and subjective nature of comments on acting was congruous with the way in which kabuki productions and performance were reviewed in some kabuki publications starting in premodern times, but the psychological emphases bring a modern flavor that alters the authentic appearance of writing that otherwise seems acclimated to a centuries-old literary tradition. The other side of the coin is that, however, this addition also helps the kabuki-play passages connect to the rest of the short story, in a way similar to the impressionist verbal drawing of Mangiku’s emotion after performing the role of Hinaginu in Eightfold-Deployment (169–70). As discussed above, the accounts of Mangiku’s emotion help fill a textual gap between portions of the story, and the addition of modern-sounding psychology to the kabuki passages performs a similar role. Importantly, the differentiated degrees of naturalization (or foreignization) between the kabuki and shingeki passages in “Onnagata” are fundamentally controlled by the fact that shingeki and “Onnagata” share a mid-twentieth-century literary context. Certainly, that context may appear quite ancient today, especially after the influence of postmodernism, but it is not yet totally nullified as of now, making the shingeki mode in “Onnagata” comparatively less foreign to many readers even today. Its coexistence and tensions with kabuki modes contribute to the complexity of a story that stages many intersections: between the natural and foreign, the visible and invisible, the literary and theatrical.

Conclusion In conclusion, I have tried to show how “Onnagata” contains multiple pairs of contradicting oppositions and uses them to expand what the encounter of the literary and the theatrical can do. It is particularly interesting that this relatively straightforward short story does not seem to perform any acrobatic feats or tours de force to handle such conflicting materials, nor does it demonstrate any explicit attempts to do so. The apparent smoothness of “Onnagata” was no doubt supported by the fact that Mishima was extremely well-versed in kabuki and that the title role and one of its main characters, Mangiku, was modeled upon the actual onnagata-actor whom the author knew quite well, Utaemon VI, an equal match to Mangiku in terms of both his artistry and position in kabuki circles. To be exact, “Onnagata” does not always rely on the “correct” information about Utaemon VI alone. For example, the short story uses an eighteenth-century onnagata treatise called “The Words of Ayame” at length in order to prove that Mangiku was a graceful and consummate onnagata who is wholeheartedly following the teaching laid out in the historically important treatise (“Onnagata” 165–7). “The Words of Ayame” is certainly considered to have defined the artistry of onnagata, the influence of which is still valid today, but Utaemon VI did not necessarily agree with all points made in the treatise, adapting his approach to the times (Isaka, Onnagata 60). That said, there are numerous pieces of information about the virtuoso onnagata that are faithfully used in “Onnagata.” Fiction, of course, is not obliged to reconstruct its models accurately. But such shifts between faithful copying and bold

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editing in “Onnagata” might have well generated invisible cracks and footholds that enable the short story’s smooth oscillation between the two nemeses, kabuki and shingeki. At any rate, as stated by one of the most significant playwrights in the history of performing arts in Japan, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–724), theatrical arts reside in the ambiguous space between the real and the false (Hozumi 358), and such playful seesawing is certainly central to the effect of “Onnagata.”

Notes 1 In this chapter, all citations are taken from the anthology version: Mishima Yukio, “Onnagata”, in Hanazakari no mori, Yûkoku: Jisen tanpenshû (“The forest in full bloom” and “Patriotism”: Short stories selected by the author). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Japanese are mine. Japanese names are given in the Japanese order: surname first, followed by the given name. In subsequent references, a single element is used: the family name for those in modern times (1868 onward), or the given name for those who lived before that. Exceptions are well-known pennames (e.g. Shôyô). In addition, a specific rule is used for the names of kabuki actors: their first names in the second appearances onward, whether before or after 1868. 2 Derivatively, the term onnagata has come to be used in other theatrical genres beyond kabuki theatre, and, as time goes by, even beyond performing arts. I put “allegedly all-male” since female kabuki performers have existed on kabuki stages, and the meaning of their presence and performance is of great moment theoretically (see Isaka, Onnagata 112–38). 3 Quotation marks for the word descriptions are to call attention to the dubious nature of this term, pretending as if it simply and objectively “describes” what it is, hiding its power to name. On the contrary, “Onnagata” clearly defines who Mangiku is and what his art is by such depictions. For the sake of readability, quotation marks will be dropped in what follows, but the same caution should be used. 4 This chapter uses the wording “kabuki pieces/works” in the broadest manner to indicate any piece that is staged as kabuki theatre. This caveat is necessary, for the term is more often than not used to distinguish kabuki plays originally written for the theatre from those pieces adopted from other, senior theatres, such as medieval noh and kyôgen theatres as well as kabuki’s contemporaneous puppet theatre known today as bunraku-puppet theatre. The importance of the puppet theatre in kabuki cannot be too emphasized. Both theatres emerged in the early seventeenth century and share many features including repertoires, body usage (elocution, locomotion, etc.), underlying philosophy, etc. It is therefore quite natural that the seven existing plays that “Onnagata” uses include two dance pieces inspired by respective noh opuses as well as four dramas related to the puppet theatre. Except when this chapter’s discussion necessitates distinguishing between the two play groups, it uses “kabuki pieces/works” to signify all pieces staged as kabuki theatre. 5 Kabuki-proper dramas seldom use a narrator, while plays adopted from the puppet theatre always do, for the presence of narration, voiced by a chanter covering both “first-person” characters’ lines and “third-person” narration, is integral to the puppet theatre. 6 Although sometimes taken as “early modern,” the Edo era (1600–867)—a politically stable peacetime during which a single samurai household, the Tokugawas, managed to rule as successive fifteen shoguns—is usually considered the last premodern time in the context of Japan, immediately preceding the first modern era, the Meiji (1868–912), the government of which urgently promoted modernization and westernization as its state policy to deal with Western colonial powers drastically threatening many countries worldwide. 7 Kabuki was, in effect, the single-most important theatre for many people for a long time—definitely in premodern times, but even well into modern times (1868 onward)—and accordingly, the term “theatre” in this context is virtually a synonym for kabuki. 8 Gondô Yoshikazu states that one of the earliest kabuki-play publications was a collection by Kawatake Mokuami (1816–93) published in 1888 (3). Until such publication, neither actors nor audiences had access to a drama text in its entirety for a long time. Each actor was merely given an “extract” (kakinuki), which only contained their part. The status of a script changed somewhat in the Meiji era, when kabuki found itself needing to shift its survival strategy from dealing with samurai authorities (avoiding their wrath while appealing to fandom) to dealing with rapidly changing societal imperatives and modernized, westernized, and scientific world views. Kabuki had long been a naughty, hedonistic theatre of the people, subject to constant surveillance by the shogunate, who equated it with prostitution. Indeed, kabuki went through many changes at that time (see Isaka, Onnagata 87–111, 112–38, 141–58), and those changes were not unrelated to the publication of kabuki scripts, a process that transformed a flexible form (subject to constant revisions) to more stable, fixed products (Isaka, Onnagata 67), helping “upgrade” kabuki plays to literary pieces.

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Mishima Yukio’s “Onnagata” as a Shingeki Theatre-Fiction 9 How a theatre appears to its audience heavily depends on each cultural milieu. Kabuki itself alters, both across time and across regions, resulting in dynamic and multiple modi operandi. 10 Another important figure in the history of shingeki, Shôyô, approached traditions in a more nuanced manner than Osanai. For example, in 1884, Shôyô published the Japanese translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, titled Strange Tale of Caesar: Blade of Freedom, Wistful Sharpness [Shîzaru Kidan: Jiyû no Tachi, Nagori no Kireaji]. While it was the first unabridged Japanese translation of a Shakespearean play, Strange Tale of Caesar appears unmistakably traditional, observing many expectations of gidayû texts (i.e., scripts of the puppet theatre), e.g., the traditional seven-and-five syllable meter. Shôyô also authored historical dramas played as kabuki, a genre that had not existed in this fantasy theatre. Ultimately, Shôyô wished to create a national theatre by combining “the blood and flesh of kabuki and the bones of Shakespeare” (Ôzasa 38–9). 11 Osanai later moves the category of “director/direction” from the second tier (acting stage setting, wigs, etc.) to the first tier along with drama texts.

Works Cited Hozumi, Ikan. “Chikamatsu no Gensetsu: Naniwa Miyage Hottan Shô” [Discourse of Chikamatsu: Excerpt from the introduction to The Souvenirs from Naniwa]. Edited by Shuzui Kenji and Ôkubo Tadakuni,Chikamatsu Jôrurishû Ge [Collection of jôruri by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, part 2], edited by Shuzui Kenji et al., Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei [Collected Japanese classical literature], vol. 50, 1959, pp. 355–359. Isaka, Maki. “Commentary on the Text: Takechi Tetsuji, the Nanba Gait, and Japanese Performing Arts.” Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, Routledge, 2019, pp. 88–91. Isaka, Maki. Onnagata: A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater. U of Washington P, 2016. Isaka, Maki. Secrecy in Japanese Arts: “Secret Transmission” as a Mode of Knowledge. Palgrave, 2005. Isaka, Maki. “Yearning for the ‘West’: Osanai Kaoru and the Concept of Stand-alone Dramas in Modern Japan.” 1920 to Early Twenty-First Century, edited by B. Venkat Mani and Ken Seigneurie, A Companion to World Literature, edited by Ken Seigneurie, Wiley-Blackwell, 2020, pp. 3379–3389. Kimura, Mokurô. Gekijô Ikkan Mushimegane [Theatre under the microscope]. Edited by Munemasa Isoo, Kabuki, edited by Gondô Yoshikazu et al., Nihon Shomin Bunka Shiryô Shûsei [Collected historical documents of Japanese popular culture], vol. 6, edited by Geinôshi Kenkyûka, San’ichi Shobô, 1973, pp. 309–338. Mishima, Yukio. “Kaisetsu” [Commentary]. Hanazakari no Mori, Yûkoku: Jisen Tanpenshû [“The forest in full bloom” and “Patriotism”: Short stories selected by the author], Shinchôsha, 1968, pp. 257–261. Mishima, Yukio. “Onnagata”. Hanazakari no Mori, Yûkoku: Jisen Tanpenshû [“The forest in full bloom” and “Patriotism”: Short stories selected by the author]. Shinchôsha, 1968 [1957], pp. 161–186. Morita, Sôhei. “Haiyû Muyô-ron” [On actors as deadwood]. In Jiyû Gekijô [The Free Theatre], edited by Osanai Kaoru and Ichikawa Sadanji, Ikubundô, 1912, pp. 158–159. Osanai, Kaoru. “Jiyû Gekijô no Keikaku” [Plan of the Free Theatre]. Osanai Kaoru Engekiron Zenshû [The complete writings on theatre theory of Osanai Kaoru], vol. 1, edited by Sugai Yukio, Miraisha, 1964, pp. 101–109. Osanai, Kaoru. “Nihon Shôrai no Geki” [Theatre of Japan in the Future]. Osanai Kaoru Engekiron Zenshû [The complete writings on theatre theory of Osanai Kaoru], vol. 1, edited by Sugai Yukio, Miraisha, 1964, pp. 255–257. Osanai, Kaoru. “Shingeki Fukkô no Tameni” [In the Interest of the Renaissance of the New Theatre]. Osanai Kaoru Engekiron Zenshû [The complete writings on theatre theory of Osanai Kaoru], vol. 1, edited by Sugai Yukiod, Miraisha, 1964, pp. 35–65. Ôzasa, Yoshio. Nihon Gendai Engekishi: Meiji Taishô-hen [History of Japanese contemporary theatre: The Meiji and Taishô eras]. Hakusuisha, 1985. Yamamoto, Yasue. Aruite Kita Michi [The path I’ve walked on]. Chûôkôronsha, 1994. Yoshikazu, Gondô. “Gaisetsu 1: Kabuki no Kenkyû to sono Shiryô” [Overview, part 1: Research on kabuki and its materials]. Kabuki, edited by Gondô Yoshikazu, Munemasa Isoo, and Moriya Takeshi, Nihon Shomin Bunka Shiryô Shûsei [Collected historical documents of Japanese popular culture], vol. 6, edited by Geinôshi Kenkyûkai, San’ichi Shobô, 1973, pp. 1–7.

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8 ELEGY FOR A LOST WORLD Reading Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Mayamridanga as Theatre-Fiction Tamalika Roy

Syed Mustafa Siraj’s novel Mayamridanga (1972) deals with Alkaap—an almost extinct rural folk theatre form popular in the districts of Malda, Birbhum, and Murshidabad of West Bengal in India. As a former Alkaap performer from Murshidabad himself, Siraj’s exploration of Alkaap resonates with his personal experience, and with his other writings which deal with either rural Bengal or performance. Mayamridanga delves into the lives of two groups (or dals in Bengali) of itinerant Alkaap performers from different regions of West Bengal, one led by the famous ustaad (meaning expert/leader in Bengali) Jhanksa of Dhanpatnagar, and the other by Sanatan Master. The two groups occasionally face each other in competition in their travels along rural West Bengal and eventually their lives become interconnected through their love and obsession with Alkaap. The performers live mostly a nomadic life, travelling from one place to another in groups, seldom returning home. Composed of poetry, dance, and song, Alkaap is an improvisational form of performance. The origin of the word Alkaap can be divided in two parts—kaap is a colloquial distortion of the Sanskrit word kavya or poetry, or of the Sanskrit word kapatya or satirical plays, and al means sharp sting. The Arabian origin of al can also mean “the”. So the word Alkaap can be roughly interpreted as poetry that criticizes, suggesting its roots in social satire. A group of Alkaap performers on average consists of ten to twelve people. A narrator called the sarkar or guru, who strings together the performance, is generally the ustaad—the leader as well as the creative composer and teacher of the group. There are also two gayens or singers, and a dohar—a group of musicians playing instruments such as harmonium, tabla, and khartal. Among many of its specialties, Alkaap also features a chhokra, a young man who impersonates the female characters. In Mayamridanga, Siraj explores Alkaap as an art form and the intertwined lives of the Alkaap performers of the two all-male groups, keeping at its locus the complex queer relationship between the chhokras and the ustaads—Jhanksu Ustaad and his chhokra Shanti, and Sanatan Master and his chhokra Subarna. They are irresistibly drawn together but simultaneously puzzled, often ashamed of this phenomenon where the female impersonator by inhabiting the liminal space between gendered bodies, evokes queer desire. Being Alkaap performers, they suffer abject poverty and social ostracization, but cannot leave this life behind. Perhaps that is why Siraj writes: “There is nothing in this world which is as bad and vile. Alkaap is a dangerous fire, ustaad—hell, hell! It burns people slowly and torturously. They can neither give up this addiction, nor live in it with peace” (111; my translation).1 As theatre interacts with life so delicately when the female impersonator of the Alkaap troupe becomes a lover, so does theatre interact with fiction in Mayamridanga. Reading Mayamridanga as a site

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where theatre and fiction blend offers a unique opportunity to uncover how one medium’s own semiotic system has influenced the language of another. Theatre-fiction can be defined as novels/ stories that focus on theatre and the individuals involved in it such as actors and playwrights, not only metaphorically but as a way to explore the industry and artistic practices of theatre itself (Wolfe 5). While theatre-fiction has mostly been explored in Western literary and theatrical contexts, a novel like Mayamridanga opens up new possibilities of theorizing its formal, linguistic, and thematic elements with specific respect to folk theatre. The first section of this chapter locates Siraj’s novel in a long line of Bengali novels that focus on rural Bengal and the lives of marginal communities while interrogating the construction of the “folk” itself in literary or theatre culture. The second section investigates the novel to see how Siraj’s exploration of Alkaap both aesthetically and socially influences the form, language, theme, characterization, and plot structure of the novel. Building on that, the next section explores Alkaap’s and, in a broader sense, theatre’s interrelationship with body, sexuality, and performativity and their representation in the novel. The final section of the chapter deals with the representation of Alkaap’s audience and the inherent anxieties of representing a folk theatre form, with its very different set of modalities through the printed text.

Theatre and Novel in Bengali Literature: Defining the “Folk” Modern Indian theatre emerged in response to colonial encounters, influenced by the Western proscenium style. In Bengal, there was a simultaneous erasure of the pre-existing so-called lower cultures from the public sphere in order for other forms like theatre and the novel to claim modernity and become the symbols of appropriate, refined culture for the bhadralok—literally, “respectable people.” This entailed the marginalization of a nineteenth-century folk culture. Sumanta Banerjee writes, “The novel and the theatre were new cultural forms introduced in mid-nineteenth century Bengali literature. The traditional form of lyrical verses also underwent a transformation in the hands of the educated bhadralok, both in style and content” (167). It would be reductive to assume that erasure meant a complete disappearance of these other folk cultures, as culture is always more resilient, but English education changed the cultural and literary fabric of Bengal by introducing a clear hierarchy of cultural expressions. Therefore, theatre and the novel’s close association in the context of Bengal is nothing surprising as they functioned hand in hand to define and represent the emerging middle class’s culture and aspirations. Both forms emerged as vibrant grounds for discourse in the colonial public sphere and have since then majorly shaped the Bengali cultural imagination. Yet there were numerous other forms of cultural practices besides the urban proscenium theatre that could not be brought into the fold of what counted as modernity or even theatre. Even within folk cultures, some forms always remained less respectable than the others. Then the question arises: how does a novel like Mayamridanga, in dealing with a form of folk theatre outside the reach of colonial modernity through a genre characteristic of colonial modernity, subvert modes of representation? Though largely marginalized since the nineteenth century and relegated to (or even equated with) the rural sphere, forms of folk theatre in India began to garner intellectual interest around the 1950s and 1960s. They began to be documented, and appeals for government grants were made to sustain them. This renewed interest owed much to a sense of post-independence nationalism. These forms represented for the urban intelligentsia their roots and their culture—emblematic of the newly emerged Indian nation-state. But this rediscovery of folk theatres only heightened the urban–rural dichotomy (Hansen 78). The category of folk drama or folk theatre was first officially used in the Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi of India in 1956. Reflecting on the discussions, Rustom Bharucha critiques the participants—eminent theatre personalities of contemporary India—for their unproblematic acceptance of “folk drama” as an ahistorical category representing Indian culture and tradition (199). Tracing the morphology of the term “folk,” Bharucha points out

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the popular usage of the word in theatre during the IPTA or Indian Peoples Theatre Association movement, where the idea of the “folk” was also inevitably connected to the “rural” and especially the people—where the “folk” was celebrated to counter the previous prejudices in the early colonial era around folk cultural forms (200). In the seminar, however, the primary question was how to intervene and “save” these folk forms presumed to be in a state of decay. Another parallel approach demonstrated in the debate was to accept the inherent socio-cultural distance between the urban and the folk. But both these approaches are discerningly elitist and have turned folk theatre into an urban construction: “the ‘folk’ has been disembodied from the needs of the ‘people.’ Quite literally, it has become a nomenclature for a wide range of supposedly non-urban performance traditions that are primarily enjoyed by urban audiences” (Bharucha 200). In literature, rural Bengal had been the subject of literary writings by city intellectuals for a long time—since the nineteenth century. The urban gentry of colonial Calcutta who were the producers of these texts were primarily landowners living off their lands in the countryside and thereby directly complicit in the oppression of the peasants. Rural Bengal held an appeal for the city intellectuals as an escape from the drudgery of city life. Writers like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Bibhutibhusan Bhattacharya explored the beauty of rural Bengal as well as the abject conditions of poverty of the rural people in their writings. From the 1930s onwards, under the influence of Marxist ideology, Bengali literature moved towards the depiction of the lives of marginal communities through writings of novelists like Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Samaresh Basu, and others. Siraj’s novel, set in the post-independence rural Bengal, depicting the lives of Alkaap performers living in absolute states of poverty as well as social marginalization, places him in the tradition of the intellectuals’ representation of the rural Bengal for a city audience, yet his writing is imbued with an artistic focus on Alkaap, which at the same time sets it apart from this lineage because of his adoption of a different narrative code. It is my argument that this difference is a result of the encounter between literary representation and the practices of a theatrical form. As theatre-fiction, Mayamridanga brings out the gaps and tensions in representing an oral tradition through the epitome of print culture—the novel.

Alkaap in the Structure of the Novel As a folk theatre form heavily dependent on music and dance, Alkaap is primarily an improvisational and thereby, oral form of theatre. The performers only have a vague storyline and much like the commedia dell’arte, everything else is improvisation. Though the form itself has gone through many changes in its many years, the true spirit of Alkaap was presenting social issues, current events, mythological tales, and popular romances to the audience in accompaniment with dance, music, and bawdy comedy primarily through a lens of humour and sarcasm which aimed at critiquing social structures. Alkaap was mostly performed overnight in village fairs, in makeshift performance spaces called asar or sabha (both terms denote the scene of the performance, encompassing the idea of the performers, the space, and the audience as a whole) which involved competitive performances between two or three Alkaap dals. Alkaap is also orally transmitted. Thus, the form of Alkaap is quite fluid, the ustaad always composing spontaneous songs, changing the narrative by incorporating audience feedback or depending on their moods, or for the purpose of mocking or responding to the earlier Alkaap dal’s ridicule. Therefore, adapting such a fluid form into the finality of writing, transforming an oral culture into the certainties, as it were, of print, has several difficulties. Siraj handles them by adapting the fluidity of performance into a fluidity of narrative form. The novel does not follow a chronological progression of events. Neither is it divided into chapters nor does the narrative have a strict sense of teleological progress. The narrative seamlessly moves between narration and dialogue. Instead of conventional inverted commas to demarcate first person speech from third person narration, the novel uses ellipses

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and blurs the lines between the author’s narration and a speech by a character. It also blurs the lines between the reader’s full comprehension of what is actually spoken out loud and what remains an internal monologue, between what is the description of a real Alkaap asar and what is imagined. The Rahimpur dal never takes any contracts in competitions in the asar. They say Alkaap is oldfashioned. In this age, we have turned Alkaap into loknatya [folk theatre]. Arshad Ustaad does not rest at loknatya, he calls it nabanatya [new theatre]. Jhanksa laughs … you have made the village boy don urban clothes—marvellous! You have taught him words like parrots. You might be the gurus [the teachers], but I am not going on that path. We deal with the common village households. What fits the guru, doesn’t fit the shishya [student]; I walk on my own path. But, I will however learn—whenever I can, from you, because Rahimpur is the native birthplace of Alkaap. The first guru Bona kana—the blind Banamali Das; the one-eyed barber who gave birth to Alkaap. That is a history—itihas … . (Siraj 13; ellipses in original) Following his predecessors Manik Bandyopadhyay or Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay who had already used colloquial language in novels to depict rural ways of life, Siraj blends colloquial idioms of the local people of Rarh region of West Bengal and at least two or three dialects besides the conventional language used in a novel. Along with examples of the Bengali verses used in Alkaap, he also makes frequent use of the khottai tongue, used by the performers among themselves, especially when they get emotional. “Now the dialect of Baghri region appears in Fazal’s mouth. Whenever they get intimate, they change their dialect like that—they don’t know why. Perhaps they get the most pleasure in pouring their heart out in their mother tongue” (Siraj 40). This fluent transition between dialects captures the essence of Alkaap’s orality. As mentioned before, Alkaap is also sexually very explicit; one of its main attractions for the audience is the sexually explicit jokes, on account of which the performers frequently indulge in obscenities on the stage. Siraj transfers this immediacy of the spoken language to the page by using obscenities profusely in the normal speech of almost every character. Though the language is very different from bhadralok language, unfit for the refined elite sensibilities, his use of obscenities in between this refined language transposes the world of Alkaap onto the page for readers. The physicality of Alkaap is explored through the Alkaap performers’ bawdy behaviours in public places. “They walk singing, swaying their hips, they speak in the language of the kaapseven on the streets … Their humour does not care for the legal dictates of propriety” (Siraj 23; ellipsis in original). Alkaap has depended on the deep love of its performers, who have adapted it as a way of life even at the cost of suffering social ostracization, and this deep sense of identification also forms the affective structure of the novel. The very beginning of the novel charts out its path. It starts in medias res when the protagonist Jhanksa Ustaad discovers something horrific—one of his wives, Gangamoni, caught in the arms of Shanti, the chhokra of his Alkaap dal. Ganga, being unable to accept her husband’s obsession with his chhokra—another man—confronts Shanti when he goes to bathe in the water. Though she shames him for dressing up as woman, she stares at his body enviously, desperate to uncover of the mystery of his charm, and later out of curiosity puts his masculinity to test by seducing him. While describing Jhanksa’s emotions when he accidentally witnesses what appeared to him their sexual union, Siraj eloquently blends his thoughts with a scene of his Alkaap asar. The novel begins with an extended metaphor of Alkaap and slowly unravels the scene before him through different images and metaphors. A few feet away lies the quiet river at the end of Magh—in the geography of the district the river is called Bhagirathi. People call it Ganga. Patita Pavani, KalushaVinashini, Sureshwari Janani Janhabi. He is an ustaad. When he is in the sabha, composing a verse to introduce himself, he says: “I am a son of her lap, people. I live on the banks of freedom. When I close my eyes and step my

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feet forward I will touch bottomless peace …” But the next moment, he smiles emphatically, and says, “But, as you know, beside rest, lies unrest, beside purity, all kinds of impurity. Like there is burning beside water—so is the crematorium beside the Ganga. Life and death are bound together in an endless bond …” This metaphor does not want to stop. People clap. The doharkis [musicians] cheer in the name of the ustaad. Bagha Khalifa [the master tabla player] takes this opportunity to land a loud beat on his bayatabla [left tabla]—dudum! But till now it was only a metaphor. Matching of dhwanis [sound] in every pada [verse]— payar [name of a meter], matching rhymes. Kalpana [imagination]. The people of the Alkaap dal call it kavikalpana [imagination of the poet]. Today what he saw was not his imagination. He had said—unrest beside rest, impurity beside purity. Today, at the edge of fifty—it has materialized. What was in thought has become reality. Ustaad Jhanksa—the famous Alkaap ustaad of Dhanpatnagar, Sri Dhananjay Sarkar—is shocked and spellbound. (Siraj 9; ellipsis in original) As evident above, Jhanksa’s thoughts upon discovering this betrayal take the form of an Alkaap performance. As Siraj explores his psyche, it is irretrievably interwoven with his identity as an Alkaap performer. Even the possible reactions he imagines to the scene in front of him—roaring like a tiger, beating his chest in despair, jumping into the middle, or creeping away stealthily—all correspond to a character’s behaviour in a dramatic performance. His thoughts are pervaded with metaphors and images from the Alkaap verses he has composed. In fact, Alkaap forms the basis not only of Jhanksa Ustaad but also of all the other characters: Sanatan Master, Subarna, Shanti, Fazal, and all the minor characters. The inner world of each character is influenced deeply by the conventions and structure of Alkaap. The narration shifts between describing present situations and scenes, or possible scenes from Alkaap asar—thereby effectively destabilizing the sense of time. French structuralist Gérard Genette, in his theorization of time in narrative, differentiates between story-time and discourse-time, the former being the temporal order of events in the narrative, and the latter being the time taken to actually narrate or read it. Among the four ways Genette conceptualizes this relationship, one is the idea of “duration”—the gap between how much time has passed between an event actually happening and its time of narration. In the above example, discourse-time is longer than narrative time. The scene is momentary, but its narration takes up important space in the novel, and similar scenes occur frequently. Siraj fills the discourse-time of the narrative with his exploration of Alkaap as a way to articulate the interiority of his characters. Time is also used in a fluid sense—the novel blends past and present, creating a poetic idiom that works as a metaphor for evoking Alkaap, a form that relies heavily on poetry. Even as it is bound in the structure of the novel, the poetic language used by Siraj serves the purpose of fictionalizing this improvisational, oral style of performance. The asar stops. The sabha becomes empty. They roll away the shamiyana [canopy]. Switch off the lights. Subarna and the others take off their make-up. But the asar inside the mind hasn’t stopped, the sabha hasn’t become empty yet, there beneath the black shamiyana rows of lights are still lit. The Subarnas are dancing. The ustaads are singing a heartfelt pada. The khartal is making its sweet sound—jhamarjham. The table is playing the karfataal [beat]—dhegenakenake tin, dhegenakenake tin. The fingers are dancing over the harmonium, waves of melody rising—the doharkis are singing a tune in druttaal, quick rhythm, the ghungur[anklet] is making a sound—jhum, jhum … the Subarnas are dancing. They have been dancing since forever … . (76; ellipses in original) Mayamridanga not only renders the artistic elements of Alkaap formally—it explores the performers in their socio-economic context, showing the scenes before or after a performance, delineating the

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performers’ preparations, and the makeshift greenrooms. Scenes of their preparation for performance, especially the chhokra’s make-up, are emphasized to highlight the transformative process. Often in their daily interactions, caste identity becomes an issue in conversation, juxtaposed with the casual disruption of caste codes in the space of the performance. Overwhelmed by Jhanksa Ustaad’s intense tatwakatha (philosophical concepts) and its effects on the audience in the asar, Sanatan touches his feet out of respect; but after the performance when Jhanksa and his dal socialize with Sanatan’s dal, their obscene slang and Jhanksu’s sexual jokes with Subarna disturb Sanatan and he questions his earlier impulse to bow before a lower caste man, forgetting his Brahmin identity (Siraj 82). Siraj’s portrayal of their cohabitation and mundane activities like sitting together, cooking, eating, drinking, smoking, and even sleeping refocuses on the material body of the performers as social beings. In one scene he describes: On a mat on the open field, Jhanksu’s dal is basking in the afternoon sun. The dhingi chhokra [an immodest, tomboyish girl, in this case meant to symbolize the more masculine appearance of the chhokra] is lying down on his back with his head on someone’s thigh. The man is running his fingers through his hair. The old tabalchi [tabla player] or the khalifa is sitting with his legs outstretched, head down, dozing comfortably. Some fans are wandering around hoping to get a chance to talk to Bhanu. (Siraj 47) Similar scenes with the second Alkaap dal, where people in the village flock near the group to see the chhokra ahead of the performance and gaze at the performers’ curious ways, capture the vibrant culture that existed around Alkaap. Though others perceive them as geneder jaat, a caste of the gene or singers, who expected to lie outside of social norms, within the groups they are aware of their own caste or religious divisions, although not always abiding by them—being both rooted in society as well as identifying as outcastes. From depictions of brawls over money with the organizers to everyday activities before the performances, Siraj’s use of the novel format firmly situates Alkaap in its immediate social context. From the beginning of the novel the characters’ identities are conflated with their roles in the Alkaap. In fact, it is this duality of their existence in the “real” world and their roles in the Alkaap dal that creates the central conflict. In the world of the asar, the Alkaap ustaad plays kings and heroes, but the reality of his situation is underlined by his acute poverty. “The man of the asar, and the man of the world are not the same” (Siraj 39). The source of his pride is his self-identification as the ustaad of the Alkaap, always considered to be a learned man well-versed in philosophical teachings. The hierarchy within the dal is reflected in the interrelations of characters in real life as well. While Jhanksa, as the ustaad, composer, and leader of the dal, is revered among all members, Fazal, being a sangal or the comedian, is the subject of everyone’s ridicule. Similar to his body being used on the stage to tease the audience, in offstage life too he has no shame in nudity. Just as their real life is impacted by Alkaap, so is their performance in Alkaap an extension of their life. “That is the beauty of Alkaap! You can speak your mind so easily” (Siraj 72), says Sanatan as he transforms his spontaneous thoughts into his speech in the asar. In many instances, Jhanksa Ustaad’s mood determines his choice of the kaap (play) for the night. For example, when he is disturbed by discovering Shanti and Ganga in an embrace, he says to Fazal: “Listen Fazal. I’ll give a new kaap in today’s asar. I have conceived it just now—the pala [story in the form of a play] of an unfaithful woman” (Siraj 26). Therefore, this simultaneous disparity as well as intense connection between the performers’ offstage life and the world of Alkaap sets the narrative basis of the novel. Siraj’s writing invariably highlights the gaps between his characters living in the world, in real society, and their existence within a different kind of sociability within the Alkaap dal. This different sociability is simultaneously desirable and detestable for them—nevertheless they have an inseparable connection with Alkaap in their very thoughts, actions,

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expressions, and ways of being. This gives the readers a peek into the life of the Alkaap performers and while doing so, creates a play between modes of performance and modes of being.

The Chhokra: Performativity and Sexuality in Mayamridanga The most vivid example of this identity intersection is the chhokra, the young man in Alkaap who impersonates women. Every Alkaap dal usually has one chhokra—a good-looking young boy trained from a young age to embody feminine traits, sing in a feminine voice, dance, and act. The chhokra usually possesses some features which are conventionally deemed feminine such as a curvaceous body, softer voice, and graceful gait, which are then developed further for performing. The chhokra is also required to keep long hair for a more “naturally” feminine look. The beauty and expertise of the chhokra in any Alkaap dal are quite essential to the audiences’ attraction to that particular dal. Despite being aware of the chhokra being biologically male, not only the audience but even the fellow Alkaap members often find themselves attracted to the chhokra. Both Jhanksa and Sanatan, the ustaads of their own Alkaap dals, form physical as well as emotional relationships with their chhokras, Shanti and Subarna, respectively. Theatre in Siraj thus offers ways of considering gender and subsequently queer desire. Theories of performance and performativity can cast light on Siraj’s depiction of the chhokra. As Judith Butler writes: Gender reality is performative, which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed … . If gender attributes … are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal. The distinction between expression and performativeness is quite crucial, for if gender attributes and acts, the various ways a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, … there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender. (528) The culturally performative nature of gender is explored in the chhokra both verbally, through the dialogue of the several female roles they play on stage, and non-verbally, by adopting various physical gestures and markers of femininity in the body. He [Shanti] looked like a natural girl with very little makeup. When his two soft arms swayed with the rhythm of his dance, a nagarinati [a seductive actress]2 was born. On his chest, instead of kachuli [lingerie], he stuffed two balls of rags. His figure was suitable for dance anyway with his thin waist, heavy hips and well-built upper body. It’s as if it were God’s mistake that he was born as a man. (Siraj 33) Butler believes that “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts” (521), and the basic idea of performativity suggests that contrary to individuals’ innate identity giving rise to speech acts, it is through these verbal or non-verbal acts that identity and reality are defined. Seeing it in the context of actual theatre, specifically Alkaap, in embodying the cultural signs of femininity to perform the female roles, individual actors constitute their identity on the stage and even beyond that, their identity in life. Yet, there may be a contradiction between the biological male body and the embodied female persona, which makes the chhokra neither a man nor a woman—but an inhabitant of a space in-between. In many ways, the binaries of man and woman still exist firmly in the world of Mayamridanga, but the chhokra straddles both worlds, and it is the chhokra’s difference that is perceived as desirable.

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The chhokra is termed differently at different times in the novel—as a mohini (a woman who evokes moha—a hypnotizing spell) or kinnar (a mythical, otherworldly being who is neither a man nor a woman); sometimes the chhokra is also referred to as “not a man, a woman—yet not a woman,” or: “even if a man, a man of memory—passive; if a woman—an elusive woman, visible yet illusory” (Siraj 12). Kaustav Bakshi has explored the figure of the chhokra in detail, situating him within rural society and queer discourses. As Bakshi explains, The gender fluidity of the chhokras … is seen as an aberration, a departure as it were, from the two essential categories of man and woman … Although there is constant awareness of the chhokra being different from the two dominant categories of man and woman, the chhokra, within the Alkaap dal, is accepted as inhabiting a fluidity that is beyond rationalization. (9) Therefore, the chhokra’s role in Alkaap is not only a performance; it holds significant subversive performative potential. As mentioned, Alkaap performers existed in a different kind of sociability than the outer world—many were polygamous, like Jhanksa Ustaad, and casual sexual intimacy between members as well as attraction towards the chhokra were common. In Siraj’s depiction, it is almost an accepted law within the dal that the chhokra should give everybody equal attention. “Subarna gets tired of keeping everybody pleased. If he laughs or flirts with one, another’s face darkens. Ugh! How troublesome it is to be a chhokra!” (58). After being discovered by Jhanksu Ustaad in a compromising position with his wife, Shanti flees, and Bhanu, a slightly older man, becomes Shanti’s replacement. Walking seductively upto Jhanksu, Bhanu coyly asks him, “Do you not find me attractive ustaadji?” (23). The other members of the group also flirt with him. “Fazal walks holding his [Bhanu’s] hand. It’s not Shanti’s—but a chhokra’s hand still. On the wintry roads, this is the only warmth for the Alkaapwallahs” (23). Fazal also jokes with Subarna with sexual innuendos and even touches his chest, to the scandalized stares of Sanatan and his manager Anis (81). Members of both the dals desire, even compete, to sleep beside their chhokra. There are many such examples of homoeroticism in the dal’s daily cohabitation. Yet, they are unable to define this inescapable desire which becomes the source of disgust, shame, and self-loathing in Jhanksa Ustaad as well as Sanatan. Siraj uses the concept of maya, referred to in the title, as the explanation behind this puzzling phenomenon of desire. In Hindu philosophy, according to the Advaita Vedanta or the non-dualist school, “The Vedanta system is supposed to be an acosmic pantheism, holding that the Absolute called Brahman alone is real and the finite manifestations are illusory … The term Maya signifies the illusory character of the finite world” (Radhakrishnan 431). Therefore, the idea of “maya” encapsulates the fundamental basis of the world, suggesting that everything we perceive as our reality is ultimately ephemeral and illusory. Decoding the title of the novel, Kaustav Bakshi writes: Mridanga is a musical instrument, a clay tabor, that accompanies musical and dance performances in Alkaap; but Siraj codes the word with a deeper meaning. Mridanga is a compound word, which splits into mrit (clay or earth) and anga (a limb, a body part or the body itself). Literally, mridanga connotes a “body of clay.” A lump of clay can be moulded into any shape the artisan wishes to; but, the object created has a limited life. It is fragile, vulnerable, and transient. So, is the chhokra. He is moulded into a woman, literally constructed as one, the artisan being the ustaad. The chhokra’s artistic life as female impersonator demands of him to suppress his masculinity almost to the extent of forgetting he was once a man[.] (5) Therefore, Siraj uses the complex notion of maya to explain the male chhokra’s embodiment of a woman and the subsequent arousal of desire in others. While Bakshi locates sexuality and genderqueerness in the metaphysical realm of maya, I intend to extend his argument in the context of theatrefiction. Bakshi analyzes maya as an essential condition for gender-queerness in Siraj, I want to explore

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what other implications maya holds when explored from the point of view of theatre/novel intersections. While Bakshi agrees that art and fiction both enable gender-queerness, I wish to emphasize that in the context of the novel, maya is not only philosophical; it is inextricably connected to theatre as well as fiction. I want to focus on the embodied presence, decoding the process of performance and imagination through which the performers train their body and mind, constructing and altering their reality. Maya, with its never-ending significations, is where fiction enters theatre, and where the theatrical process engenders the central conflict of the novel. While a philosophical-cosmological concept, maya can also define art forms. Troy Organ interprets the philosophical maya with reference to Indian arts and aesthetics in three ways—first, Maya as a way to create things; second, Maya in the Platonic sense, being inferior to the reality, i.e., the one, the Brahman; and third, Maya as the necessary manifestations of the One: “Maya is the divine art which expresses the Real in infinitely varied modes” (Organ 21). However, in all of them, the underlying assumption is that maya has the ability to create something out of nothing. Maya is illusory but also real, since it does constitute reality for those perceiving it. Theatrical performance may then become the gateway to this queer desire. It is because of and through the performance that the man impersonates the woman and this gender fluidity and queer desire are normalized. The process of performance is seen as the source of queer desire. Sanatan Master muses: When in the duet song he sings … you are going to fetch water, o proud one! But your hair is open and Subarna as a woman replies, … move from my path, you shameless man, where is your home—they consider each other man and woman. They are sworn to do that in the asar, the asar also considers that—there is no hesitation about it. Sanatan knows Subarna is a man—a teenage boy. And Subarna knows Sanatan is a man—a young man. Still, Sanatan imagines Subarna to be a woman, Subarna himself does too— and behaves accordingly. This considering, the imagination is the real fun. The imagination, from a habit, perhaps becomes the truth in their blood, their interiority. Because otherwise … . (76; ellipses in original) The process of performance spills over into everyday life as the significations of femininity adorned for Alkaap are also carried forward into the post-performance space. Siraj depicts Bhanu’s process of undressing after the performance: [A]fter his song he has entered the dressing room with the same [like Shanti] slow gait, swaying his hips, taken off his saree and blouse in the same casual carefree manner, has ordered for a bucket of water. With water on his palm, he has washed off his face paint in the same manner. Then he has gone to Chandramohan’s room prancing on his feet. He has joked around, … while coming back, has even struck him playfully on the chin—saying “dhut, minshe” [an endearing colloquial term used by women for one’s partner]. (Siraj 42) The whole scene describes Bhanu’s actions and interactions with others as erotically charged, as he seems to retain his femininity and desirability even after the performance. As the chhokras get older, they reach a phase when their faces, voices, or bodies can no longer stay very feminine. It is a transitional phase when they have to cut their hair and break their bangles—they can no longer be a chhokra. Subarna feels anxious about this approaching time when his body will not be desirable anymore. The example of Kalachand, a chhokra long ago, but an emaciated old man of the Saotapara Alkaap dal now, is evident: What if, one night—in an asar full of thousands of people—pushing through the bewitched crowd, Yamraj, the God of Death comes for him and says—Come, child! I have come to take

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you? With what sorcery will he drive him away? … Look, the boy who is dancing before the frenzied crowd, wearing a jang (anklets) on his foot—do you know him? No—his name is not Subarna, it is Kalachand. (Siraj 127) The fact that Kalachand had to “cut his hair, throw away his silver bangle,” and become a “man”—hardened and firm—after his age no longer permits him being a chhokra is evidence that without the performance or the maya, he could not remain a woman anymore, and the queer desire has to give way to either living a heterosexual life or a life of destitution. It is never spelt out clearly whether this desire would have existed at all without them being Alkaap performers, without the external push to behave in a different way and to live as outcastes in the eyes of society. Kalachand had embraced his femininity but when his time as a chhokra ends, he has to re-adopt the codes of masculinity, become a man in society—destitute, lonely, without a woman to marry and settle down with. In the happy ending of the novel, where Sanatan and Subarna run away together to join Ustaad Jhanksa’s Alkaap dal and finally embrace their desire, their union, though optimistic, is perceived under the rubric of the philosophical notion of maya. Suddenly overwhelmed, they embrace each other. Touch one’s lips to another. Sona Ustaad does not feel hatred anymore. This passion, love, the enchantment of the body—everything is dedicated to that woman named Maya. The woman who is an actress—whose shadow is now upon the body of an adolescent boy, the shadow which dances all day. All we can play with is this shadow. All our songs, joys, sorrows and love are for it. … But beware Sona Ustaad. Don’t look for anything beyond the shadow. There lies the danger. Sin. Debasement. Inside the idol there is only dried wood, hay and dirt. Beware. There is danger if you try to capture in flesh and blood what should remain elusive. (Siraj 138) Therefore, in Mayamridanga, Siraj locates the very notion of sexuality and desire in performativity itself. It is a realm that is perceived intuitively and eludes intellectualization. It is also located inherently in theatrical performance itself. When his wife Ganga asks him why Alkaap does not recruit women to play the female parts, Jhanksa replies that it cannot manifest maya in the same way—“The flesh and blood ends in flesh and blood, maya has no end” (16). The acts of performance constitute reality. Alkaap has formed such an integral part of their identities that the modes of performance have become a way of being—and not being able to reconcile these two worlds becomes the primary cause of conflict and anguish. There is no hint of any essential identity of the characters beyond their way of life—their identities are intrinsically connected to Alkaap. Beyond the idea of maya, their queer desire is a sin and debasement in the eyes of society. Only within the sociability of the Alkaap dal does it have any legitimacy. Outside the circle of maya, without being manifested through performance, queer desire cannot exist very comfortably. Sanatan and Subarna run away, but they can be together, consummate their queer desire only in another Alkaap dal, in this case a more acceptable one like Jhanksa’s. Therefore, maya as not merely philosophical—the effect of maya engendered through performance— also sustains real relationships beyond the space of theatre. By bringing to light these real relationships that the world of theatre and the processes of theatre constitute, Siraj successfully blends theatre with fiction on a deeper level. Siraj translates this philosophical and theatrical notion of maya into the fictional plot of the novel—the queer desire engendered by performance is explored through his fiction. Through the lives of Jhanksu, Shanti, Sanatan, and Subarna, Siraj is also addressing the real-life rumours concerning homosexuality regarding Alkaap in bhadralok circles. The narrative is constructed around the gender-queerness of the chhokra and the “puzzling” queer desire he arouses. Bakshi’s use of “puzzle” (in the title of his article) is quite significant since the desire perplexes those experiencing it and the narrative is structured around this

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puzzle. It branches into plotlines of how their relationships develop and how their love transforms. It explores Sanatan coming to terms with his sexual attraction towards Subarna as well as the people in their lives who are affected by it. Ganga, Jhanksu’s wife, commits suicide, and Sudha, Sanatan’s old love, is raped and dies because, after planning to run away with her, Sanatan abandons her in a field. The central conflict of the novel then seems to be this desire for the male body impersonating a female, which, while normalized within the Alkaap dal, is not so in society. They struggle with accepting this desire and it wreaks havoc in the people surrounding them, especially women. Queer desire within the codes of Alkaap clashes with the outside world leading to a lot of destruction and devastation, but ultimately Siraj grants Sanatan and Subarna a happy ending in contrast to the other chhokras in the novel. Thus, through narratives of queer desire, jealousy, and identity crisis, the fictional embraces the theatrical. By theatrical, my meaning is not only the metaphorical significance of maya or illusion, but also maya as art form—theatre or fiction. The fictional helps explore the literal meaning of theatrical (acting, mounting, and experiencing shows, etc.); and in the process it engages with the role of imagination in embodiment and the crucial intersections between performance and everyday life. Every day comes. The artists change their costume. The mohini nati (the enchanting actress) becomes a man again. I thrash around. I am stuck in the bondage of this net—unable to free myself. What I tried to accept as truth in the asar, while deluding people—has now become the truth by way of habit. If you lie again and again to yourself, gradually it starts sounding like the truth—then eventually it becomes the truth. (Siraj 76) Alkaap is merged with their identity in an inseparable way so that the word “Alkepe”—someone belonging to Alkaap—becomes an adjective, a way of being. Alkaap then becomes a condition for their existence. The potential of the chhokra’s gender fluidity in performance is fictionalized by Siraj, and it is here that theatre and novel intersect most revealingly. Siraj posits performativity as a way of being through a novel; queer sexuality is both embodied and narrativized. In this case, the theatrical process engenders the fiction around it, and their intersection offers legitimization of queer desire, if not within social reality, at least within the different codes of reality in art.

The Representation of Alkaap’s Audience One of the crucial aspects of the lived experience of theatre is the audience. What happens when the collective experience of watching a performance is transformed into reading about it? The audience participation so vital to Alkaap as a spontaneous art form is missing no matter how lively Siraj’s description of the Alkaap asar may be. The novel, while mimicking or evoking Alkaap in its literary representational structure, also reveals certain contradictions inherent in this intermedial fusion. While Alkaap as a collaborative practice is unable to function properly without the presence of all the conventional roles, the act of reading is (normally) solitary. When Siraj presents scenes of Alkaap asar or sabha in great detail, the whole—consisting of both the performers and the audience—is experienced by the reader in isolation. Even for his characters, the inherent anxiety persistent in the Alkaap dal regarding members leaving them for another dal is represented in the monologic ruminations of Siraj’s main characters. An insight into their fragmented, isolated minds is set in contrast with the collective process of the Alkaap performance as well as the exuberant cohabitation of the group. Another visible contradiction is the generic shift—while Alkaap evokes primarily sarcastic humour in its audience, the novel takes the form of a poetic elegy to the Alkaap performers’ way of life. Delving deep into the characters’ fears and insecurities, through novelistic exploration of its characters, Mayamridanga as theatre-fiction constantly negotiates these often contradictory generic expectations.

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In Siraj’s depiction of an Alkaap asar or sabha, his urban refined readers are clearly distinct from the rural audience, yet positioned on the same ground as them. As the audience watch the performance unfold before their eyes, so do the readers find detailed scenes from the asar, including thorough description of the performance and textual examples of the poems and songs sung. Still, literary rendering can never fully encompass the theatrical mise-en-scene. Freddie Rokem argues that theatrical practices can be seen as a point of convergence or union for differently constituted energies, which are generally conceived of as belonging to completely different ontological spheres (190). Each aspect of the theatrical mise-en-scene itself—text, acting, costume, scenography—contributes its own energy. While the actor attempts to generate one kind of theatrical energy, the spectators create the meanings of a performance by activating different psychological and social energies (Rokem 192). Since Alkaap contains a lot of sexually implicit jokes, innuendos, and gestures, the visibility of the bodies is essential to the circulation of such theatrical energies. The gestures, costumes, and expressions along with the text create an effect which is constantly modified by the presence and responses of the audience. In the written word, Siraj attempts to recreate this physicality and translate the theatrical energies, but what a reader experiences is mediated by language; the raw impact of the visual significations in the aesthetic process of the performance is filtered. The crudity of the body expressed through costumes, gestures, expressions, and figurations on the stage is presented from a safe distance, making it palatable enough for consumption by a “well-mannered” urban reader. This brings to the forefront the crucial class distinction in Alkaap and Bengali folk theatres in general as discussed in the second section of this chapter. A reader might consume an Alkaap performance like an audience, but for most of Siraj’s readers Alkaap would be unknown, whereas the Alkaap audience would be quite well-versed in the formal structures. Still, the hierarchy between the two could not be more evident. As mentioned before, Alkaap was performed primarily in rural areas and its audiences were the rural working class, peasants, and labourers, consisting mostly of men seeking entertainment after a hard day’s work. Therefore, its association with lower-class viewership as well as the highly sexualized, perverse content of the kaaps kept Alkaap at a distance from the bhadralok—not only the urban intelligentsia, but even the upper class educated rural populace. When invited by Sanatan to watch his dal’s performance, Sudha, Sanatan’s old flame, says that it will not be allowed by her in-laws since Alkaap is not seen as fit for the wife of a respectable household. Other folk performances like jatra and kirtan were still considered to be respectable and were even stylistically implemented in the bhadralok’s entertainments, such as the theatre. This inherent tension is fictionalized by Siraj through the character of Sanatan Master. Sanatan, being an educated man and representing the bourgeois, does not belong in Alkaap. When he had left his village to go to Bombay, people had expected that he would become popular, if not a film star—but his return to join Alkaap disappointed everyone. Disgusted by the vulgarity of the members of Jhanksa Ustaad’s dal, Sanatan also feels “very angry towards himself” (89): He feels so inferior, scattered … . He has nothing—no one. Wherever he looks, there are only peasants, base and low-bred people around him. At the slightest show of skill, they clap. Seeing his rough, plain body under the daylight, they shout—a prince! A prince! When he sings anything in a filmy style, they say—chhinemachhinema … . [T]his is what Ustaad Jhanksa is proud of? My foot! (Siraj 89) Sanatan’s own thoughts make this class distinction evident when he feels anger towards having only low-bred audiences who expect nothing but vulgarity. He is even indignant at their praise of him, as he does not consider them worthy of understanding any higher art form. Their praise in his mind automatically equates him with a lower brand of artist. He calls himself “Harishchandra chandal,” a casteist slur, significant when his upper-caste Brahmin identity is taken into account. Sanatan is known for incorporating songs from films into Alkaap, and in several instances, when the audience gets excited

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about something in the kaaps, their praise is to liken it with film. Here Sanatan uses the distorted form of the word cinema in his low-bred audiences’ tongue—chhinema—which signifies their lack of education and the resultant class position. It also shows that by interrogating the audience’s capability, the status of Alkaap itself is questioned—whether it is indeed a highly skilled art form that requires any training/ specialization. Sanatan’s anger is not only towards the viewers who enjoy Alkaap; it is also towards his fellow Alkaap performers, belonging mostly to lower castes, illiterate, and prone to vulgarities. Sanatan, a representative of bourgeois values, is also like Siraj who, despite being an urban intellectual was once an “Alkepe” himself, embodies these anxieties. That is not to say that this distinction was external to Alkaap and issued only from the bourgeoisie. Even Jhanksa, who attempts to include philosophy in his Alkaap padas in order to elevate it beyond crude vulgarity, wonders if the audience can comprehend it, revealing the deep-rooted tensions regarding high and low art. Gopal’s dal has gripped the audience quite well. An obscene kind of excitement spreads through the asar. It seems quite ugly to Ustaad Jhanksa. They are still very old-fashioned. In every pada, they use obscenities. Such unrefined language! Such peasant-like vulgarity. But it is strange that people are still not protesting, not saying, Ustaad! Tell us something good, something that increases our knowledge, educates us. (Siraj 31) Ustaad Jhanksa also wishes to spread Alkaap within the bhadralok culture of the Rarh region, where it was known as chhyachor (a term for lower class). Whenever Jhanksa goes there, he includes tatwa, deep philosophical ruminations, in the asar instead of obscenities and mentions that whatever they are singing about is adhunik or modern, deliberately referring to the bhadraloks in the audience (49). Therefore, Mayamridanga also traces the transformations Alkaap itself went through over a long period of time spanning the different regions of West Bengal as well as its interrelations with other forms of entertainment that co-existed in the cultural sphere.

Conclusion Mayamridanga is an example of theatre-fiction engaging with theatre aesthetically, formally, thematically, socially, but most importantly, emotionally. The central plot’s emphasis on queer love and desire stems from a deep shared love for Alkaap, and philosophically, the novel alignsingment the ephemerality of performance and life itself with the idea of maya. In the Bengali language, apart from the discursive philosophical connotation, another meaning of the word maya is a deep feeling of love and fondness—often a foolish love for something despite knowing its mortality. This is the kind of love the Alkaap performers feel for their art form, having their subjectivities completely merged with it. This maya is also the deep love between Jhanksa and Shanti and between Sanatan and Subarna, which originates from their lives lived so closely within codes of performance. They cannot abandon it or imagine a different life even if it has negatively impacted almost everyone in their lives; Alkaap, like madness, engulfs them even more. It is this foolish love or maya that keeps them together, driving them towards embracing Alkaap despite all its hardships. It is a tale of love—intensely emotional and poetic. Siraj brings a marginal form such as Alkaap to his urban readers with a great deal of love, care, and empathy without foregoing its complex cultural positioning. Any traditional art form goes through many changes, often under external influences, but the performative and cultural context of these changes remain mostly undocumented. Theatrefiction like Mayamridanga can help to fictionalize, dramatize, and in a way document these issues around folk theatres which the folk performance alone cannot address. Disseminating knowledge about a marginal theatre form, Mayamridanga opens possibilities of a broader understanding of theatre-fiction in South Asia, with its multitudes of folk art.

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Notes 1 All the quotations from Mayamridanga are my own translation. 2 The word nati has several cultural significations in Bengali. It primarily means “actress” or “female dancer,” the sense in which I have translated the word here; but nati also has underlying connotations of a public woman, a prostitute, since the early actresses on the Bengali stage came from red light areas. The usage of nati by Siraj highlights the implicit eroticism at play in the figure of the chhokra.

Works Cited Bakshi, Kaustuv. “The gujhyotatwa or Deep Philosophy of Sex, Gender and the Body: Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Maya Mridanga and the ‘Puzzle’ of Queerness.” South Asian History and Culture, vol. 12, no. 4, 2021, pp. 424–435. Banerjee, Sumanta. The Parlour and the Street: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta. Seagull Books, 1989. Bharucha, Rustam. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell UP, 1980. Hansen, Kathryn. “Indian Folk Traditions and the Modern Theatre.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 1983, pp. 77–89. Organ, Troy. “Indian Aesthetics: Its Techniques and Assumptions.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 9, no. 1, 1975, pp. 11–27. Radhakrishnan, S. “The Vedanta Philosophy and the Doctrine of Maya.” International Journal of Ethics, vol. 24, no. 4, 1914, pp. 431–451. Rokem, Freddie. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. U of Iowa P, 2000. Siraj, Syed Mustafa. Mayamridanga. 1972. Dey’s Publishing, 2004. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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9 “WHAT DOES IT MATTER— THE PLOT?” “Sapphic” and Theatrical Reading Strategies in Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory, Inclinations, and Caprice John R. Severn The English writer Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) is not easy to place in terms of literary movements. Dating from between 1915 and 1926, his major works—eight short novels and one play—are too late to be straightforwardly classed as Decadent, despite parallels between his writings and those of Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans; too apparently frivolous to be grouped easily with the Modernists, despite his ongoing commitment to experimental writing; too demanding in terms of style and form to be popular.1 If this means that he has never been widely read or taught, his works have nonetheless maintained a cult following, with writers as diverse as E.M. Foster, W.H. Auden, Carl van Vechten, Evelyn Waugh, Brigid Brophy, Angela Carter, and Alan Hollinghurst among his more high-profile admirers. The question of how to read Firbank’s idiosyncratic novels has troubled many who attempt to engage with them. As Alan Hollinghurst puts it, “Firbank has been revered and reviled, but he has never quite been ‘caught’” (1). Firbank’s short novels are neither easy nor quick reads. Hollinghurst notes that “from the start Firbank’s novels, so witty in tone and confidently languid in tempo, nonetheless required total concentration from their readers; in the earlier novels in particular there are passages of heady difficulty, and unannounced transitions that require a kind of intuitive alertness to be properly followed” (4). One issue for Firbank’s readers is that his novels do not follow novelistic conventions, and are therefore not well suited to reading strategies developed to engage with these conventions. Don Adams writes: We have traditionally looked for a novel’s argument in its narrative progress, character development, and authorial exposition. Firbank’s narratives progress in an almost arbitrary manner, in which reliance on plot is reduced to a minimum; his characters are “finished” at conception, and although they are continually striking psychologically revealing poses, they do not analyze themselves or seek to make of the reader a “confessor” … Firbank’s refusal to struggle with the material in his fiction and to implicate the reader in that struggle make him an iconoclastic Modernist and may account for the tendency of earlier literary critics to dismiss his work as marginal or to react to that work in a hostile manner. (121) While Adams correctly identifies how Firbank’s writing flouts novelistic convention, I want to argue that Firbank does invite readers to implicate themselves in an engagement, if not a struggle, with the material. If, as Adams puts it, “Firbank as author … avoid[s] nearly all commentary on the material he is presenting” (121), it is not the case that he “invite[s] none from the reader, who is consequently forced to swallow Firbank’s novels ‘whole’ or not at all” (121). Indeed, I would argue that Firbank

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invites his readers to create their own commentary on the material he presents, and to fill in the gaps in these fragmentary works in order to bring them to life. Firbank thus reconfigures the division of labour in the implied contract between writers and readers of more conventional fiction, and in doing so grants his readers considerable creative agency. As Hollinghurst’s comment suggests, there are particular difficulties with Firbank’s first three major novels, all published during World War 1: Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916), and Caprice (1917).2 Firbank’s writing from Valmouth (1919) onwards makes concessions to novelistic conventions, such as descriptions of settings, reported speech, adverbial dialogue tags for direct speech, and a general sense of authorial guidance. His three wartime novels, however, display a heavy reliance on dialogue, often without overt statements as to who is speaking, where, to whom, or how, beyond the tic of “murmuring” shared by many Firbankian characters. These novels also share thematic concerns with theatrical life and with the ancient Greek poet Sappho, both in terms of the fragmentary remains of her lyric poetry, famously still being recovered by archaeologists and papyrologists as Firbank was writing, and of her reputed lesbianism. In this chapter I want to argue that Sappho and theatre are not only themes in Firbank’s wartime novels, but that their thematic and symbolic prominence also invites interlinked reading strategies—strategies we might call “Sapphic” and theatrical—that provide some solutions to the difficulties of Firbank’s writing, and provoke further thinking about what theatre-fiction might be. On one hand, a “Sapphic” reading strategy focuses on the materiality of the fragmented text, finding enjoyment in its fragmentariness, and invites pleasurable speculation on meaning tempered by an awareness of that speculation’s status as conjecture. On another, a theatrical reading strategy invites readers to create their own scenes from Firbank’s pared-back writing, taking on the roles of theatrical stakeholders such as editors, designers, directors, and performers. A combination of “Sapphic” and theatrical reading strategies permits Firbank’s novels to retain their identity as novels designed for solitary consumption, not as playtexts manqués. Here Firbank’s approach appears as almost the mirror image of the Modernist anti-theatricality that Martin Puchner identifies in Modernist closet dramas, which he sees as “seeking to de-imagine, de-visualize, and de-theatricalize the act of reading drama” (26). If much theatre-fiction can be characterized by stage-to-page intermediality, Firbank’s theatre-fiction trains its readers in the mechanics of page-to-stage theatrical work. Vainglory introduces Sappho and theatre as already entwined: chapter II concerns a party held to mark Professor Inglepin’s revelation of a fragment of a (fictional) hitherto lost poem of Sappho, a party attended by former and current actresses, a theatrical producer, and a playwright, at which conversation concerns theatrical matters as much as it does archaeology and classical literature. Sappho and theatre are entwined even in Professor Inglepin himself, who designs stage costumes for a Coliseum production of Molière’s “Georges Dandin, with the music of Lully” (93). If Sappho and her poetry are overt themes, these novels also use the symbol of the violet almost obsessively, usually by verbal reference. Both the flower and colour are associated with Sappho through the invocations of the flower in her surviving poetry, and through the Ancient Greek description of her as ἰόπλοκ’ ἄγνα μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι [violet-haired, holy, sweetly-smiling Sappho] (Campbell 404). As a result, violets were also used in contemporary life to symbolize lesbianism, also a more or less obvious theme in the novels. While the balance of these concerns shifts from work to work, all three have several characters who are connected to the theatre and to Sappho—in both literary and lesbian terms—to the extent that they might all be categorized as “Sapphic” literature and as theatre-fiction. With its central engagement with the mounting and aftermath of a production of Romeo and Juliet, Caprice is the most obvious example of theatre-fiction among Firbank’s novels. While Vainglory and Inclinations are not dominated by a single production, they nonetheless often venture into theatre-fiction in their concern with the lives of theatre people, alongside arrangements for proposed theatre productions. In Vainglory, Miss Compostella, an actress whose Hamlet “was irresistible,” despite her stiffness in acting (17), has her own theatre in which she experiments “with some tableaux inspired by Holbein’s

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Dance of Death” (12), and is also a producer—although she has “never done anything so dreadful” as having a “hit” (16)—currently occupied with preparations for staging The Leg of Chicken, a (fictional) political satire about the eleventh-century Byzantine Greek Empress Irene Doukas and her historian daughter Anna Comnena. Other characters include Mrs Shamefoot (“‘But I’m not a public person,’ she said. ‘An actress. Although, of course, I do sell flowers’” [85]), whose drive to have herself immortalized in a cathedral’s stained-glass window is one of the central dramatic threads of the novel; Mrs Steeple (“One burning afternoon in July, with the thermometer at 90, the ridiculous women had played Rosmersholm in Camberwell. Nobody had seen her do it, but it was conceivable that she had been very fine” [14]); the novelist and playwright Claude Harvester, perhaps readable as a version of Firbank himself (“He had discovered the truth in writing plays. In style—he was often called obscure, although, in reality, he was as charming as the top of an apple-tree above a wall. As a novelist he was almost successful. His books were watched for … but without impatience” [11; ellipsis in original]); and the composer Winsome Brooks, currently writing an opera on the fifteenth-century serial killer Gilles de Rais. Among Inclination’s central characters, the star actress Miss Arne provides a turning point in the novel when she is killed while travelling in Greece to research Lysistrata “as a character-part” (200) (for a memorial, with typical Firbankian Sapphic symbolism, “they propose to plant a bed of violets, big white single ones, on the Acropolis, to the glory of the delicate and individual artiste, Arne—the ‘only’ Lady Teazle of our time—in the presence of the corps diplomatique and the king and queen” [248]). While Miss Arne might be celebrated at home for her role in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, on her Greek trip she speaks Greek and embodies Aristophanic comedy, whether quoting from The Frogs (228) or replicating the plot of Lysistrata. Prior to the all-female shooting party that culminates in her death, Miss Arne’s appraisal of the physical attributes of the athletic Australian Miss Dawkins and flirtatious recruitment of her for the part of Lampido in a proposed production of Lysistrata form a mise en abyme of Lysistrata’s appraisal and recruitment of the athletic Spartan woman Lampido for her sex strike in Aristophanes’ play. Firbank’s characters inhabit a curious world of fictional theatre spiced with fictional references to the real theatre world, sometimes with blithe disregard of the real wartime context. In Vainglory¸ for instance, Miss Compostella hopes “to get [real-life German actress Gertrud] Eysolt over to play with [her] in Maeterlinck” (16) and Mrs Henedge is compared to the French operetta star Jeanne Granier, while Caprice’s Sarah thrills to anecdotes about the Russian operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin and the Broadwaybased Polish actress Anna Held (316). The practices of theatrical life can provoke humour in Firbank’s theatre-fiction. In discussions around Vainglory’s The Leg of Chicken, for example, an apparently realist concern as to whether Anna Comnena had a maid (98) contrasts amusingly with an apparent lack of concern about an eleventh-century Byzantine empress and her daughter smoking cigarettes, and in Inclinations we are given the image of the actress Mrs Elstree “running about the green-room of the Garden Theatre in I should be afraid to say quite what …” (199; ellipsis in original). On one hand, Firbankian theatre, and especially opera, is a site for bringing to the surface topics not usually discussed in polite society: as well as Vainglory’s Gilles de Rais opera, of which “the sextet between Gilles and his youthful victims, bid fair, Mrs Henedge declared, to become the most moving thing in all opera” (138), Inclinations’ Miss O’Brookomore comments of some dance music that “it sounds like the Incest-music … to some new opera” (221). On another, some theatrical pieces sound like inconsequential fluff: for example, Caprice’s “Mlle Fanfette and Monsieur Coquelet de Chaussepierre of the Théâtre Sans Rancune in the comedietta, Sydney, or There’s No Resisting Him” (345), Noel Nice’s “light comedy … appelled Sweet Maggie Maguire,” whose author is unable to explain why Maggie is sweet (344), and Bashful Miss Barnadine, a play featuring the role of a governess which Sarah and Mrs Sixsmith feel is beneath Sarah’s (as yet untested) talents (335). From the wings we hear scraps of what appears to be an outrageously sentimental monologue delivered by Mrs Mary at her benefit performance in Caprice. Firbankian theatre life is to be taken seriously, in the sense of embracing its vital offstage human interest in the theatre and its world, even if some of his theatre pieces themselves are not.

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The Problem with Firbank In Caprice, Sarah Sinquier leaves home with some family heirlooms to make a career on the London stage. The acting teacher engaged to train her has died just before she arrives in the city. She stumbles into London’s theatrical milieu, sells the heirlooms, and hires a theatre on the proceeds. Having triumphed in her debut as Juliet, she dies in the theatre the following morning. Her London friend Mrs Sixsmith attends the funeral and is invited home by Sarah’s father. This much plot can be more or less discerned from a first reading of the novel as a novel. However, much remains opaque when Caprice is read in this way. Significant events are omitted, or at least occur off-page. Even the circumstances of Sarah’s death—which does not occur off-page—and what we should make of it are obscure. Firbank omits basic authorial guiding elements such as indications of who is speaking (and about what) in sometimes lengthy passages of dialogue. To add to a first-time reader’s sense of being unmoored, we have no guidance as to how to pronounce Sarah’s unusual surname until late in the book, when the actress Arthurine Smee refers to “this Miss Sin—, the new star with the naughty name” (346), suggesting that it should be pronounced “Sin-queer” (but, in Firbankian fashion, leaving it to the reader to infer this). This pronunciation is in keeping with Sarah’s attraction to the actor Harold Weathercock (apparently the boyfriend of Noel Nice, the pair described as “versatile young men” who run a laundry together when not theatrically employed [338]) whom she hires to play Romeo to her Juliet and with whom she is reported as sharing a fifteen-minute onstage kiss (370), alongside her kissing of and declaration of love for May Mant (351) (also known as Réné Iris), followed by their setting up “home” together in the theatre, and the observation by a theatre reporter that Sarah needs “a lover: a sort of husbandina, as it were …” (362; ellipsis in original). (Ernest Jones exaggerates only slightly when he claims that in Firbank “almost everyone turns out to be at least bisexual” [x]). A random example from Vainglory gives a sense of the challenges Firbank’s extended dialogue scenes sometimes present: “… too tired to make converts…” “… totter from party to party …” “How do you do?” “… sorry.” “If my father marries again it will be to some sweet soul to stir the fire.” “… does enjoy a rubber!” “The lanes round Dawn are so narrow. And Sir Sirly and Lady James … Well, there’s hardly room for us all …” “Only Miss Knowle and Mrs Lloyd!” “… sheet lightning?” (158; ellipses in original) In a novel that begins with a newly discovered fragment of Sappho, this and similar passages with their frequent ellipses resemble pages of a modern translation of the fragmentary papyri of Sappho’s poetry. Indeed, scenes that ostentatiously withhold indications of setting, details of which characters are present, or which tones of voice they use are a notable feature of Firbank’s theatre-fiction. I discuss a notorious example later in this chapter. Nor does Firbank’s lack of novelistic plot elements make room for literary descriptions. Vainglory, Inclinations, and Caprice are determinedly not ekphrastic novels. We have none of the extended

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set-piece descriptions of theatre scenes that are one of the pleasures of other forms of theatre-fiction, such as the narrator’s contrasting experiences of seeing the actress Berma playing Racine’s Phèdre in different productions in Marcel Proust’s In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower (13–24) and The Guermantes Way (34–55), or the eponymous character’s attendance at Romeo and Juliet in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (136–40). These scenes draw the reader in to the theatre event at hand before we even encounter the auditorium. In their inclusion of characters’ arrival at the theatre, they signal a theatre visit’s rupture of the everyday, its difference from surrounding events, by a heightened evocation of the senses, an increase in reference to sounds, smells, intensities of light and darkness, colour, temperature, and moods within the auditorium. They provide detailed descriptions of audience members’ clothing and behaviour, quote lines from the play performed, and discuss stage settings and actors’ costume, intonation, vocal registration, and gesture, and they thicken our sense of presence at the concrete event by contrasting characters’ expectations of performance with the performance actually encountered. Despite Firbank’s engagement with Wilde’s work, he gives us no authorial description of Sarah’s performance as Juliet in Caprice: we are wrenched from the call-boy’s “First act beginners” and Sarah’s prayer that the audience will love her (368) to a scene of Sarah’s awakening the following day. The performance itself takes place in the gap between the end of Chapter XV and the beginning of Chapter XVI, and we are left to piece together its qualities from isolated lines drawn from newspaper reviews (369–70).

Theatrical and “Sapphic” Reading Strategies for Firbank’s Theatre-Fiction To make sense of Firbank’s wartime novels, readers must repeatedly make decisions about place, time, actions, appearances, motivations, tones of voice, and relative positions in space, who is speaking, and to whom, information one might expect a novelist to supply. From one viewpoint, this means readers must undertake the labour normally expected of writers, while being denied the material that would allow them to carry out their expected task of interpreting the meaning of the events of the novel as they unfold. From another, however, these tasks can be configured as the work undertaken by various theatrical stakeholders as they move from reading a playtext to create a staging of that playtext— blocking, casting, mise-en-scène, preparing a role, even the editing required to establish scene settings in, for example, Shakespeare’s First Folio and Quarto editions (notably an issue with the texts of Romeo and Juliet, the play at the centre of Caprice), or to establish speech prefixes in the surviving papyrus texts of Ancient Greek theatre that Firbank engages with. Firbank does provide some oblique guidance to readers: for instance, names provide indications of character—among others, Vainglory’s Mrs Shamefoot, Mrs Pet, and Mrs Asp; Inclinations’ Count Oio Pastorelli (whom Miss O’Brookomore suspects is “not so pastoral as he sounds” [198]), whose first name can be read as ὀΐω, an Ancient Greek parenthetical qualifying interjection meaning “I think, I imagine, I guess,” a joke on his lack of commitment following his (presumed) marriage to Mabel; Caprice’s Sarah Sinquier, the versatile Harold Weathercock, Noel Nice, and Jack Whorwood. Edward Martin Potoker writes, “Full of double meaning and symbolism, these names also suggest Restoration drama, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, vaudeville, and comic strips” (30). That Firbank’s textual cues are often theatrical is itself a cue that the novels should be read theatrically. To approach Firbank’s work with a theatrical reading strategy is to be granted a freedom to create scenes unique to the reader. To use the example of unassigned dialogue from Vainglory above, a reader who adopts the role of dramatic editor is free to choose whether each line is delivered by a different “performer,” or, if not, which lines are delivered by which “performer,” by known characters, or by “extras.” A reader can choose to “stage” the scene with a focus on the aural, as a confused hubbub of voices, or can construct action to which the voices are a minor accompaniment. Nonetheless, not every passage of apparently unassigned dialogue offers such freedom. Firbank can indicate speakers and addressees obliquely by manipulating linguistic tics. Chapter VII of Caprice, for example, contains several passages of unassigned

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dialogue, but Sir Oliver’s stutter, Mrs Sixsmith’s habit of using French phrases, Sarah’s tic-free speech, and the mute presence of Mrs Sixsmith’s dog make it relatively clear who is speaking and to whom. David Malcolm writes of Firbank’s dialogue: The conversations that Firbank gives are often opaque in their reference and seemingly unfocussed, quite unlike the convention that shapes dialogue both in fiction and on the stage. Such a convention demands that dialogue reveal character, provide information about events and advance the action in some way. (144) However, this convention does not apply to all drama, especially not to Chekhov’s drama as mediated for early-twentieth-century British readers by George Calderon’s influential preface to his translation of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, published in 1912 by Firbank’s publisher, Grant Richards. Firbank’s engagement with Calderon is demonstrated by his suggestion that Richards send Calderon a copy of Vainglory (Benkowitz 140), and a reading of Firbank’s wartime theatrefiction in the light of Calderon’s preface clarifies how we might read Firbank theatrically. His theatre-fiction provides cues that increase in specificity: Russia and the Russian stage are referred to throughout the three novels, but Caprice’s Mrs Smee’s Russian enthusiasms in particular provide cues to potential Chekhovian reading strategies. Here she discusses her drunkard husband, playing Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence: “He’s more confused, dear, than violent”, Mrs Smee explained. “He seems to think we’re doing The Tempest; Romeo’s tanned breast he takes for Ferdinand’s. ‘Mind, Ferdy boy,’ I heard him say, ‘and keep the—out’. Whereupon, his mind wandered to the Russian plays I love, and he ran through some of Irina’s lines from The Three Sisters. ‘My soul,’ you know she says, ‘my soul is like an expensive piano which is locked and the key lost.’ Ah, there’s for you; Shakespeare never wrote that. He couldn’t. Even by making piano, spinet. O Russia! Russia! land of Tchekhov, land of Andrief, of Solugub, of Korelenko, of Artzibashef—Maria Capulet salutes thee!” (366) Calderon identifies Chekhov as a “pioneer” of “Group Emotions” (8–9), writing: In Tchekhof ’s plays many things are said and done which have no bearing on the action, but are directed only to creating the atmosphere. The players have to show, by difference of tone and gesture, when they are speaking to the action, which concerns them as individuals, and when they are speaking to the atmosphere, which concerns them as members of a group. The spectators have to distinguish what is painted in low tones and what stands sharply out, in order to grasp the central design. (9) We might therefore distinguish the passage from Vainglory above and the dialogue of Chapter VII of Caprice as examples of Calderon’s “atmosphere lines” and “action lines” (9) respectively: the reader has considerable freedom to “stage” the Vainglory lines since they primarily create an “atmosphere” rather than advance the plot. The distinct “voices” in Caprice’s “action lines” also suggest a Chekhovian approach that Calderon proposes as diverging from contemporary English acting in which as each actor opens his mouth to speak the rest fall petrified into an uncanny stillness, like the courtiers about the Sleeping Beauty … [Chekhov’s] disjunctive manner is defeated of its purpose unless the whole company keep continuously alive; each line is so unmistakably coloured with the character of its speaker that there is no need for the rest to hold their breath and “point” that we may know who utters it. (10)

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While not directly related to theatrical reading strategies, other aspects of Calderon’s mediation of Chekhov help clarify Firbank’s theatre-novels. These include Chekhov’s use of intangible symbols rather than symbolic onstage objects (“Except the seagull I can recall no other example in Tchekhof ’s plays of a symbol of the artless kind that can be stored in the property-room” [Calderon 20]) and Firbank’s repeated symbolic use of Sappho and mentions of violet as flower or colour to suggest widespread networks of lesbian life and knowledge that, like Proust’s homosexual Parisian networks, run from maids to aristocrats. Calderon’s analysis of Chekhov’s contrasts of moods, mixture of tragedy and comedy, and his lack of either villains or heroes (11–12, 13–14, 16–18) also resonates with Firbank’s project, in particular the complex morality of Firbank’s characters, from Sarah’s combination of ingénue and thief to Lady Castleyard and Mrs Shamefoot’s summoning of the devil to advance Mrs Shamefoot’s goal of selfmemorialization in cathedral stained glass, and the presence of death in all three novels—Sarah’s in Caprice, Miss Arne’s in Inclinations, and Vainglory’s spate of drowning suicides as an unforeseen consequence of “doctoring” (141) a river to prevent it oozing away. Calderon’s footnote to The Cherry Orchard in which he discusses Stanislavski’s production in which “the birds really did sing” (95) also gives context to the use of live birds and lizards in Caprice’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Further, Chekhov’s innovations in playwriting to reflect changes in rehearsal practice from solitary part-study to ensemble work mean that his plays must be read through before work on characterization or group dynamics can begin. The tensions between these older and newer styles of rehearsal and approach to playtexts, between a declamatory style of role preparation focused on the lines at hand without reference to the overall plot or other characters, and the careful preparation of a role by studying not only characters’ lines but their interaction with other characters, the subtexts to their spoken lines, and their overall plot trajectory is illustrated in Caprice when Mrs Mary, an acting star with a very long career behind her, asks Sarah to read over a scene cold: Miss Sinquier lodged a complaint. “How can I when I don’t know the plot?” “What does it matter—the plot?” (331) In Firbank’s theatre-fiction, the plot matters, even when indicated obliquely. His cues to character, his hints about location and time, when given at all, often occur well after they would be useful for a first novelistic reading: a theatrical reading strategy is only likely to be fully effective on second and subsequent readings. A different strategy—a “Sapphic” strategy focused on the text itself—is a more appropriate one for a first reading. Firbank’s novels are designed for solitary reading without access to a theatre. Despite their oddities, as theatre-fiction they remain novels. Reading strategies geared to obtaining literary pleasure from—rather than in spite of—the highly fragmented nature of the remains of Sappho’s poetry temper some of the frustration that can stem from reading Firbank’s fragmented writing when we employ reading strategies appropriate for more conventional novels. These include the pleasures of surface reading and of sound for sound’s sake, often arising from Firbank’s practice of using alliteration just when the text increases in fragmentariness. In fact, alliteration often serves as a cue that alerts readers to the omission of information. For twenty-first-century readers, it is easy to view Firbank’s almost obsessively repeated references to Sappho as relating to lesbianism, overlooking the early-twentieth-century significance of newly discovered fragments of her poetry, which represented a celebration of modern technology’s ability to reconstruct the past. That Professor Inglepin discovered his fragment at “Crocodileopolis Arsinoë” (22) makes Vainglory highly up to date in 1915. Although Firbank’s “Crocodileopolis Arsinoë” may

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sound fictional, it joins the Koine (Κροκοδειλόπολιϛ) and Byzantine Greek (Ἀρσινόη) names for the modern-day Egyptian city of Faiyum, the site of the discovery over the winter of 1914–15 of more than two thousand Greek and Demotic papyrus documents. As the first fragment of Sappho to be recovered in modern times was found in the Faiyum oasis in 1879, hopes for further recovery of her poetry in the new papyrus hoard were high. Although this hoard turned out not to contain fragments of Sappho, its discovery excited a similar level of public interest to the discovery of papyrus hoards at Oxyrhynchus in 1896 that were still being excavated, restored, translated, and published as Firbank wrote, and that brought to light hitherto lost specimens of Sappho’s poetry, albeit in highly fragmented formats (fragment 99, apparently referring to a dildo and sexual relations between women, and thus confirming ancient references to Sappho’s lesbianism, was not published until 1951). Indeed, the Times Literary Supplement for 22 June 1916 contains both a review of Inclinations and a review of Edwin Marion Cox’s Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English. Referring to the provisory nature of Cox’s work, the review ends with “the time is near when the latest Oxyrhynchus fragments, which are by no means inconsiderable, will have come under the purview of critics and commentators” (Times 298). Fragments of previously unknown poetry by Sappho are still emerging in the twenty-first century. Like playtexts, Sappho’s poetic remains invite the reader to fill in gaps. It is difficult to avoid reading potential contexts and meanings into these fragmentary texts, even when these contexts and meanings cannot as yet be substantiated. However, unlike the pleasures and challenges of the page-to-stage transition, of creating something new and ephemeral beyond the material text, these are pleasures and challenges in which the materiality of the text is central, an engagement with the as-yet-unreconstructed, accompanied by an awareness of the provisional nature of individual readings, readings that might be overturned by new discoveries and new technologies of recovery. Unlike the melancholy fragmentation of a modernist such as T.S. Eliot that reflects a no-longer-coherent world, recovered papyrus fragments offered optimistic evidence of the ability of the present to restore, painstakingly and partially, some coherence to the past. Vainglory provides a guide to these pleasures and challenges when Professor Inglepin reveals the text of his fragment of Sappho in alliterating translation (Firbank does not attempt his own Sapphic Greek verse): “In plain English,” the Professor said, with some reluctance, “it means: ‘Could not’ (he wagged a finger) ‘Could not, for the fury of her feet!’” “Do you mean she ran away?” “Apparently!” “O-h!” Mrs Thumbler seemed inclined to faint. The Professor riveted her with his curious nut-coloured eyes. “Could not …” she murmured helplessly, as though clinging to an alpenstock, and not quite sure of her guide. Below her, so to speak, were the roof-tops, pots and pans: Chamonix twinkling in the snow. “But no doubt there is a sous-entendu?” Monsignor Parr suspiciously inquired. “Indeed, no!” the Professor answered. “It is probable, indeed, that Sappho did not even mean to be caustic! Here is an adventurous line, separated (alas!) from its full context. Decorative, useless, as you will; a water-colour on silk!” “Just such a Sapphic piece,” Mrs Asp observed, with authority, “just such a Sapphic piece as the And down I set the cushion, or the Γέλλως παιδοφιλωτὲρα, or again the Foolish woman, pride thyself not on a ring.”

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“I don’t know why,” Lady Georgia confessed, “it thrills me, but it does!” “Do you suppose she refers to—” “Nothing of the kind!” the Professor interrupted. “As Mrs Asp explains, we have, at most, a broken piece, a rarity of phrase … as the poet’s With Golden Ankles, for instance, or Vines trailed on lofty poles, or With water dripped the napkin, or Scythian Wood … or the (I fear me, spurious), Carrying long rods, capped with the Pods of Poppies.” (22–3; ellipses and emphases in original) Here we have the pleasures of the text qua text, of the sounds and rhythms of the isolated phrase alongside the pleasures—or in Monsignor Parr’s case, the worries—of speculation, presumably about ancient evidence of same-sex love between women, pleasures replicated in Firbank’s text in that we ourselves have to read this meaning into the fragmented “Do you suppose she refers to—” and Monsignor Parr’s oblique “sous-entendu.” There is also humour available to those familiar with Sappho: while Mrs Asp refers to actual poetry by Sappho, the Professor is right to fear that “Carrying long rods …” is spurious: like the newly discovered fragment, this is Firbank’s fabrication. There is further humour, but with a seriousness of purpose, in the Professor’s interruption of the unnamed questioner, and his insistence upon the text as a fragment removed from its context. If speculation about Sappho’s poetry is provisional, subject to new discoveries, the Professor’s emphatic denial of the truncated question must also be provisional. The challenges of constructing character and context from scraps of evidence—whether by the reader from Firbank’s fragmentary theatre-fiction, or by the historian from painstakingly recovered and analyzed texts—are further illustrated by Firbank’s historian-biographers: the historical Anna Comnena, Vainglory’s Mrs Asp, and Inclinations’ Miss O’Brookomore.

Reading Strategies and Critical Responsibility If many have been demoralized when attempting to read Firbank’s wartime novels with reading strategies appropriate for conventional novels, commentators sympathetic to Firbank’s writing appear to employ the theatrical reading strategies discussed above, although they rarely acknowledge this. However, they usually do so without drawing on the tensions between theatrical and “Sapphic” reading strategies that keep the provisional nature of engaging with fragmentary text at a conscious and pleasurable level. An example from Inclinations demonstrates the problems posed both by Firbank’s extreme compression and by the ways critics have employed theatrical reading strategies to create personal “stagings” of scenes, subsequently discussing interpretations of these stagings that are passed off as more or less straightforward interpretations of Firbank’s novels themselves. Chapter XX of Part 1 of Inclinations (255) represents Firbank at his most notorious. The entire chapter reads as follows: Chapter XX “Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel!” In previous chapters, Geraldine O’Brookomore has become increasingly frustrated with the affair developing between Count Pastorelli and Mabel Collins, the not-yet-fifteen-year-old girl with whom Geraldine is travelling in Greece and for whom she nurtures a romantic obsession. The following chapter consists of a short, chatty note in which Mabel tells Geraldine that she has married Pastorelli in an Athens registry office.

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The position of the quotation marks indicates that Chapter XX consists of one character’s words, although whether enunciated or part of an internal monologue (or both at different points) is not clear (nonetheless, Brigid Brophy describes them as “Miss O’Brookomore’s agonised thought” [368]). The chapter gives us little else to work with beyond the repeated exclamation marks. Commentators confidently attribute the words of Chapter XX to Geraldine, framing these as representing some form of distress. I would do the same, partly because it allows the chapter to be read in Sapphic terms as a reference to Sappho’s surviving laments for the loss of a younger woman when the latter marries. However, this is not an inevitable attribution. Among other possibilities, a plausible case could be made for the voice being Pastorelli’s: might Mabel’s rhythmically repeated name invite a staging of the intimacies of the wedding night? Or pre-marriage intimacies on the promise of marriage? Or something else again? In a liberating sense, it does not much matter. Inclinations is not an instalment of the Choose Your Own Adventure series: there are no diverging plotlines that depend upon a reader’s choices in a particular scene. In Firbank, the overall plot does matter, and he is in charge of it. What is remarkable is the range of choices within scenes, the range of potential viewpoints on a particular situation, that are available for us to engage with imaginatively within the overall plotline. Whether we stage the scene as a homophobic mocking of Geraldine’s failed lesbian romance, as a tragic example of the difficulties of same-sex attraction, as a heterosexual sex comedy, or as a scene of male abuse of a young girl’s trust, Geraldine will still get Mabel’s letter and will still leave Mabel’s life, Mabel will still be stranded with a baby in England as Pastorelli fails to join her, Miss Dawkins will never play Lampido to Miss Arne’s Lysistrata, but she, Mabel, and others present at Miss Arne’s death will still be bound together beyond Greece. Firbank does not indicate how he views the scene or with which emotional colouring we should stage it. If Ernest Jones briefly summarizes this chapter as “comic and malicious” (xii), it is possible, to paraphrase Professor Inglepin, that Firbank “did not even mean to be caustic.” Nonetheless, in a chapter on what she describes as Firbank’s “microtextual cruelties,” Ingrid Hotz-Davies draws on Jones’s comment, treating Chapter XX as straightforwardly comic and expanding on its maliciousness: Instead of allowing Gerald the dignity of her own emotions, we are given a view from the outside as it might be observed by any other guest staying at the hotel, maybe a guest who has been following developments with some amusement for a while and who now knows exactly what’s happened as this ageing fellow lodger can be seen desperately running from place to place yelling for her beloved. But I would argue that this moment of authorial cruelty which exposes human suffering to derision and ridicule is also the moment which paradoxically registers a true anguish exactly to the same degree that it exposes Miss O’Brookomore to our contempt. For what is worse than private despair if not its exposure to unsympathetic eyes. It seems that the more we are willing to laugh at her plight, picturing her in our minds in risible disarray, imagining a voice for her (elsewhere in the novel she keeps calling for “M-A-B-E-L”, so we have some guidelines), putting flesh on the bare bones of Chapter XX’s misery, the more that unspoken emotion will be able to hit us. (69) Hotz-Davies demonstrates the creative decisions readers make when reading Firbank theatrically. She first makes an editorial choice in assigning the unattributed words to Geraldine. Her design choices include a general location (Geraldine’s hotel) and more specific locations (public spaces within the hotel), as well as details of Geraldine’s appearance (“ageing,” “in risible disarray”). She then makes a number of directorial choices: she assumes the absence of the addressee, Mabel; she provides for a non-speaking cast beyond Geraldine (at least one other hotel guest); a backstory for the guest(s) (having observed Geraldine and Mabel’s relationship); an attitude for the guest(s) (amusement at Geraldine and Mabel’s relationship, “unsympathetic eyes”); action for Geraldine (running from place to place); action for the guest(s) (observing Geraldine in distress without

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intervening); and details of Geraldine’s vocal delivery (yelling). Finally, she puts herself in the position of performer, “imagining a voice for her.” However, the only aspects of the scene as she describes it that she frames as the result of choices on her part are “picturing her in our minds in risible disarray, imagining a voice for her.” Nonetheless, Hotz-Davies then uses the scene she has created through her theatrical reading strategy as evidence of Firbank’s “narrative cruelty” (69), and of the apparent inevitability that readers in general will laugh at Geraldine’s distress (Hotz-Davies suggests that “it is precisely these cruelties which deepen our emotional responses once we’ve stopped laughing” [70]). A theory of Firbank’s writing and an interpretation of the novel are thus built on the unstable foundations of the results of a theatrical reading strategy. Hotz-Davies goes on immediately to discuss the passage about Sappho from Vainglory quoted above, claiming it as “a satire whose target is the pretentiousness of upper-class philistines who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to establish their credentials as aesthetes by worshipping any scrap of canonized text” (71). To do this, she must replace with editorial ellipses the lines in which Monsignor Parr reacts suspiciously to the fragment and in which Mrs Asp demonstrates her knowledge of Sappho’s poetry and ability to quote it in Greek, and must pass over in silence the subsequent disagreement over Mrs Steeple’s statement that “Sappho’s powers were decidedly in declension” (23) when she wrote the newly discovered fragment. It is certainly possible to “stage” the scene as Hotz-Davies does and for the result to be straightforwardly comic (writing of Mrs Thumbler, Hotz-Davies writes, “Of course, she is ridiculous, and for me this was one of those moments where laughter overcame me to such a degree that I was glad I wasn’t in a class” [71]). It is not, however, possible to do so without employing a theatrical reading strategy in which the role of the interventionist editor takes a large part: there is little straightforward evidence that those present are pretentious “upper-class philistines,” and evidence to the contrary that they “are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to establish their credentials as aesthetes by worshipping any scrap of canonized text.” Crucially, Hotz-Davies quotes but fails to acknowledge (and heed) Professor Inglepin’s warning about reading inferences beyond the material text. Sarah’s death in Caprice provokes similar approaches. Critics repeatedly state how Sarah dies, without explaining how they came to that conclusion. That Sarah dies in different ways depending on the critic suggests how much readers read theatrically, even as they present their commentary as objective description. Jocelyn Brook, for example, writes that “on the morning after the first performance (having slept in the greenroom), she falls into a well beneath the stage” (14). Alan Hollinghurst reports that Sarah “is killed by falling into a well beneath the stage in the theater where she is playing Juliet” (3). In contrast, Osbert Sitwell writes that Sarah “has to sleep on the stage after an enthusiastic first night, finally meeting her death by falling into a mousetrap that she had not observed in the darkness!” (quoted in Horder 80). Edmund Wilson finds Sarah “to be killed after the opening night as the result of catching her foot in a mousetrap and falling through a trapdoor in the stage” (quoted in Horder 206). Ifan Kyrle Fletcher is more tentative, suggesting that “it is presumed that she is killed in a mousetrap” (quoted in Horder 31), while Arthur Waley declines to deal with concrete detail, and writes that “we see Miss Sinquier shoot to fame amid a breathless glitter of excitement, only to vanish, meteorlike indeed, but somewhat pointlessly” (quoted in Horder 171). Waley is unusual in raising (if obliquely) the question of why Sarah died as a question. While Firbank does not frame the novel as in any conventional sense a literary mystery the answer to which is held by the author, the reasons for Sarah’s death—accident? manslaughter? murder?—are also available for investigation. Brigid Brophy in her eccentric biography of Firbank is characteristically both speculative and expansive, writing Living in the theatre, Miss Sinquier and Miss Mant fall into the habit of eating in the stage boxes. The consequent crumbs attract mice, to catch the mice Miss Mant sets traps, and it is in one of

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the traps that Miss Sinquier (whom Sir Oliver, Mrs Sixsmith’s shady associate, has prophetically called “his ‘little mouse’”), dancing in triumphant solitude on the stage after her first night as Juliet, is caught. There is a touch of “triste obscurity” about the exact manner of her end, but it seems likely that, trapped, she sinks through the stage into the well beneath; in which case, her solitary dance, like most solitary dances in Firbank, is probably Salome’s, the well beneath the stage is probably the well where John the Baptist is imprisoned in Wilde’s Salomé, and Sinquier is certainly to be pronounced sinker. (474) In fact, as I discussed above, it is by no means the case that “Sinquier is certainly to be pronounced sinker.” Here, again, we have apparent interpretations of Firbank’s writing and of other aspects of the novel that are in fact interpretations of a reader’s own “staging” choices.

How Did Sarah Die? “Sapphic” and Theatrical Strategies in Action Firbank’s description of Sarah’s death shortly after she has read the reviews of her successful performance as Juliet runs as follows: So … she sneezed, all was well! A success: undoubtedly. “O God! How quite … delicious!” she murmured, snatching up a cinquecento cope transformed to be a dressing gown, and faring forth for an airing upon the stage. At that hour there wasn’t a soul. The darkened auditorium looked wan and eerie, the boxes caves. The churchyard scene with its unassuming crosses, accentuating the regal sepulchre of the Capulets (and there for that), showed grimly. “Wisht!” she exclaimed, as a lizard ran over her foot. Frisking along the footlights, it disappeared down a dark trap-hole. Had Réné been setting more traps? Upon a mysterious mound by a jam jar full of flowers was a hunk of cheese. She stood a moment fascinated. Then bracing herself, head level, hands on hips, she executed a few athletic steps to shake off sleep. Suddenly there was a cry, a cry that was heard outside the theatre walls, blending halfharmoniously with the London streets. (370–1; ellipses in original) The chapter ends here. We have no straightforward “dancing in solitary triumph,” and while we have a trap-hole and a possible mousetrap, we are given no indication of their role (if any) in Sarah’s death. The “mysterious mound” is not explained further. We are, however, given plenty of alliteration (“fairing forth for,” “frisking along the footlights,” “disappeared down a dark,” “mysterious mound,” “jam jar full of flowers,” “herself, head level, hands on hips”) to alert us to the likelihood of missing information.

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The following, final, chapter includes a conversation between Sarah’s father and Mrs Sixsmith after the funeral: “We laid her, star-like, in the dress-circle—out on Juliet’s bier … Mr and Mrs Smee and her dresser watched … Berinthia … Sylvester … came. I cannot lose from mind how one of the scene-shifters said to me, ‘How bonny she looked on the bloody balcony.’” … “Had my daughter debts?” “Indeed she had … she owed me money. Much money. But I won’t refer to that … Sally owed me one thousand pounds.” “She owed you a thousand pounds?” “She was infinitely involved.” “Upon what could she spend so much?” “Her clothes,” Mrs Sixsmith replied with a nervous titter, “for one thing, were exquisite. All from the atelier of the divine Katinka King …” “King?” “She knew! Puss! The white mantilla for the balcony scene alone cost her close on three hundred pounds.” “And where, may I ask, is it now?” “It disappeared,” Mrs Sixsmith answered, a quick red shooting over her face, “in the general confusion. I hear,” she murmured with a little laugh, “they even filched the till!” “What of the little ingénue she took to live with her?” “May Mant? Her sister is sending her to school—if (that is) she can get her to go!” “It was her inadvertence, I take it, that caused my daughter’s death.” “Indeed, sir, yes. But for her—she had been setting traps! She and a girl called Tird! a charming couple!” “Oh?” “Your daughter and she used frequently to take their meals in the boxes, which made, of course, for mice. There was a well, you know, below the stage.” “So she wrote her mother.” (373–5; ellipses in original except the 4th) This passage raises further questions. Does “star-like” refer to the position of the limbs, or is it a reference to a laying-out worthy of a theatrical star? Does the scene-shifter’s reported comment “how bonny she looked on the bloody balcony” refer to Sarah’s performance as Juliet or does it refer to her corpse laid out in the dress-circle? Is “bloody” an expletive or a description that hints at the state of Sarah’s corpse? If Sarah died by falling into the well, why does Mrs Sixsmith feel she needs to tell Sarah’s father about its existence? As he already knows about it, why does he appear unperturbed at its mention? It seems likely therefore that the well was not the cause of Sarah’s death.

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Further clues might be gleaned from an earlier passage when Sarah has just woken up on the day of her death: Flinging back the bed-clothes, she discovered as she did so a note. “Sally,” she read, “should you be conscious before I return, I’m only gone to market, cordially yours R. Iris. Such mixed verdicts! I’ve arranged the early papers on your dressing-table. I could find no reference to me. This morning there were rat-marks again, and part of a mangled bat.” (369) Why is May Mant so coolly formal in her letter compared to her previous effusive declarations of love for Sarah? Who or what mangled and dismembered a bat? Sarah then finds the reviews, which are certainly readable as positive rather than mixed, with lines underlined in pencil, including the following: “… The Romeo kiss—you take your broadest fan.” “The kiss in Romeo takes only fifteen minutes … ‘Some’ kiss!” “The Romeo kiss will be the talk of the town.” […] “Kiss—” “The last word in kisses.” (370; 3rd ellipsis added) Is Miss Mant jealous of Sarah’s relationship with Harold Weathercock? If we can rely on Mrs Sixsmith’s account, Miss Tird, not part of the theatre company, was also in the theatre setting traps with Miss Mant, and Miss Tird and Miss Mant are now “a charming couple” so soon after Sarah’s death. Were Miss Mant and Miss Tird already in a relationship when setting traps in the theatre? Did they, or one of them, knowingly kill Sarah or set her up to be killed? Yet further clues might be seen further back in the novel. At a party at Harold Weathercock and Noel Nice’s laundry, Mrs Sixsmith’s estranged husband dresses as a fortune teller. Miss Mant has consulted him: “What have you been up to?” “Having my bumps examined.” “What!” “By the masked professor … Oh, the things he said; only fancy, he told me I’d cause the death of one both near and dear!” (363; ellipsis in original) Mrs Sixsmith, who has been “milking” Sarah for commissions for her introductions to London theatre society, has been feeling uneasy at Sarah’s ability to manage her own theatrical life. What are we to make of the following oblique lines?: “Mrs Sixsmith threw a sidelong probing glance in the direction of the door. Already in her heart she felt herself losing her hold. Had the time inevitably come to make out the score?” (367). Was it Mrs Sixsmith herself who “filched the till” and stole the mantilla? Did Sarah really owe Mrs Sixsmith £1000, for which there is no evidence beyond Mrs Sixsmith’s statement? Did Mrs Sixsmith kill Sarah, once she no longer represented a reliable source of income? If so, how? Are her comments about Miss Mant’s and Miss Tird’s trap-setting an attempt at framing? Were Mrs Sixsmith and her husband in league?

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A “Sapphic” reading strategy notes these potential clues pointing to different possible solutions, registers the absences as well as presences in the fragmentary account, and recognizes the impossibility of finding a definitive account of Sarah’s death. Unlike Sappho’s poetic corpus, there is no possibility of further textual discoveries to confirm our hypotheses. A theatrical reading strategy then builds on these hypotheses, aware of their provisional nature, not only to “stage” Sarah’s death, but, depending on the solution chosen, to create tones of voice, subtexts, and actions for characters throughout the novel, making sense of a plot. A critical account of Firbank’s text, in contrast, cannot responsibly interpret Sarah’s death—cannot interpret the plot—but can account for Firbank’s technique in leaving the plot open for further creative work by the reader. Theatrical reading strategies thus train the reader in the techniques of the page-to-stage transition, incorporating the reader into the theatre-fictional world of theatre people, their skills, preoccupations, and challenges. But it is the combination of “Sapphic” and theatrical reading strategies that brings to the surface of Firbank’s theatre-fiction the magic of live theatre in comparison to drama-as-literature, especially of productions of familiar works: its ephemeral, provisional nature, the wonder that arises from the results of collaborative creation, the thrills and frustrations of watching others’ interpretations of a playwright’s work, the fact that no production is ever a definitive performance, the differences in verbal meaning and the plot itself that arise from choices of intonation and gesture, and the awareness that a good playtext—like Firbank’s theatre-fiction—is almost infinitely fertile.

Notes 1 While almost all of Firbank’s works from Vainglory (published 1915) to Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (published 1926) were published reasonably shortly after writing was completed, his novel The Artificial Princess, written around and possibly prior to 1915, was only published posthumously in 1934. The very early Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament were published together in 1905 under the name Arthur Firbank, using Firbank’s first given name (Firbank’s full name was Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank). While the Maeterlinck-influenced Odette d’Antrevernes was republished by Grant Richards in 1916 as Odette d’Antrevernes: A Fairy Tale for Weary People under the name Ronald Firbank, this very early work, stylistically different from Firbank’s later work, is not usually classed as one of Firbank’s major works. Indeed, Braybrooke (40) notes that by the end of World War One Firbank “was declaring that Vainglory was his first book.” 2 Parenthetical page references in this chapter to Firbank’s Vainglory, Inclinations, and Caprice are to Richard Canning’s portmanteau edition of the three novels for Penguin Classics. Firbank was meticulous in his concern for his books as material objects, taking care over covers, layout, typography, punctuation, and capitalization. Quotations here therefore retain Firbank’s irregular punctuation and, where possible, layout.

Works Cited Adams, Don. “Ronald Firbank’s Radical Pastorals.” Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist 1886–1926, edited by Gill Davies, David Malcolm and John Simons, Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, pp. 1–31. Benkovitz, Miriam J. Ronald Firbank: A Biography. Knopf, 1969. Braybrooke, Neville. “Ronald Firbank, 1886–1926.” The Dalhousie Review, vol. 42, no.1, 1962, pp. 38–49. Brooke, Jocelyn. Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman. Longmans, 1962. Brophy, Brigid. Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank. Macmillan, 1973. Calderon, George. Two Plays by Tchekhof: The Seagull; The Cherry Orchard. Grant Richards, 1912. Campbell, David A., editor and translator. Greek Lyric. Vol. 1: Sappho; Alcaeus. Harvard UP, 1990. Firbank, Ronald. Vainglory with Inclinations and Caprice, edited by Richard Canning, Penguin Classics, 2012. Hollinghurst, Alan. “I Often Laugh When I’m Alone: The Novels of Ronald Firbank.” The Yale Review, vol. 89, no. 2, 2001, pp. 1–18. Horder, Mervyn, editor. Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques. Duckworth, 1977.

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“What Does it Matter—the Plot?” Hotz-Davies, Ingrid. “Microtextual Cruelties and the Subversive Imagination in Ronald Firbank’s Novels.” Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist 1886–1926, edited by Gill Davies, David Malcolm and John Simons, Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, pp. 61–79. Jones, Ernest. “Introduction.” 3 More Novels of Ronald Firbank: Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice, by Ronald Firbank, New Directions, 1981, pp. vii–xx. Malcolm, David. “Laying It Bare and Being Naughty with the Novel: Ronald Firbank and Henry Green.” Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist 1886–1926, edited byGill Davies, David Malcolm and John Simons, Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, pp. 133–144. Potoker, Edward Martin. Ronald Firbank. Columbia UP, 1969. Proust, Marcel. The Guermantes Way. Translated by Mark Treharne, Penguin Classics, 2002. Proust, Marcel. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Translated by James Grieve, Penguin Classics, 2003. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Times Literary Supplement. “New Books and Reprints.” Times Literary Supplement, vol. 22, June 1916, pp. 298–300. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose, Writings, and Poems. Everyman’s Library, 1991, pp. 67–54.

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10 THEATRE-FICTION IN THE PRESENT TENSE Reflections on Temporality and the Other in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal Alexandra Ksenofontova The last decades have seen a surge of novels narrating in large parts or even entirely in the present tense. This trend has touched both award-winning novels and popular fiction of disparate genres, from historical and thriller novels to fantasy and young adult fiction. Theatre-fiction isn’t an exception. The two novels I examine in this chapter, Hag-Seed (2016) by Margaret Atwood and The Rehearsal (2008) by Eleanor Catton, narrate in the present tense; so does some further theatre-fiction such as Ghost Light (2010) by Joseph O’Connor or the less recent Last Call (Hoogste Tijd, 1985) by Harry Mulisch. There have been several attempts to provide a rationale for this growing popularity of present-tense fiction (Miyahara, Huber, and Gebauer, to name only a few). Most researchers agree that the use of the present tense across different genres cannot be reduced to a single effect or meaning such as immediate, “cinematic,” or non-sequitur narration. The same is valid for the use of the present tense within one and the same novel: it is not necessarily bound to a single theme or idea, but can evoke different effects and associations at different points of the narrative (Fludernik 125–30). Nevertheless, the choice of the present tense hasn’t (yet?) become aesthetically “neutral”: it is a “fully-fledged narrative strategy” (Gebauer 10) and as such, it is pivotal to meaning production in narratives. The effects and contexts of continuous present-tense use are therefore worth exploring further. Without assuming a unity of the present-tense use across all of theatre-fiction, this paper singles out what seems to be a significant background for the present-tense narration in Hag-Seed and The Rehearsal, namely their views on the connections between theatre, alterity, and time. I argue that in each of the two novels, the present tense contributes to an unusual temporality, which reflects the novel’s respective notion of theatre. In Hag-Seed, theatre and trauma seem to feature a similar temporality insofar as both involve iterative re-enactments of events. However, theatre in Atwood’s novel also facilitates a working through of trauma and an overcoming of iterative traumatic temporality. The collaborative nature of theatre and the fellow actors as Others play a key role in this therapeutic potential. In Catton’s novel, repetition is also key to the novel’s idea of theatre, yet in a very different manner. For the characters of The Rehearsal, re-enacting each other’s conduct is a means of (re)constructing their sociocultural identities. The latter are chosen much like roles in theatre, and the characters measure their respective ideas of self against an imaginary Other—the audience. Both Hag-Seed and The Rehearsal thus conceive of theatre through the framework of alterity and non-linear temporality. The present-tense is used, among other things, to enhance the impression of arrested time and of the constant return of the same. In this context, the traditional past-tense narrative

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of the novel may seem to be merely a contrasting background for a present-tense narrative about theatre. However, both novels ultimately reject the dualisms of circular and linear time and of theatre and fiction. Hag-Seed explores the therapeutic potential of combining various media and their distinct temporalities, while The Rehearsal questions whether the binary oppositions can be sustained in the first place.

Tenses in Narrative Before I proceed to the discussion of the novels and their handling of time, alterity, and theatre, some preliminary remarks about tenses in narratives are in order. Why is the present tense an unusual narrative tense in the first place, and why is its use especially significant in theatre-fiction? In the most general terms, grammatical tense indicates the temporal perspective of the speaker on the events spoken about. Novels usually presume a spatiotemporal distance between the time of narration and the time of the narrated events. Hence the traditional use of the past tense in fiction. By contrast, in theatre the events are unfolding in front of an audience in real time; there is neither a speaker who produces the discourse nor a spatiotemporal distance between the events and their perception by the audience. The present tense of the stage directions in drama brings to mind this immediacy of theatre. This difference in the communicative situation—mediated for the novel and unmediated for theatre—has served as the main criterion for distinguishing between narrative and performance since Aristotle (Poetics 1448a). Considerable research has been dedicated to diegetic, epic, or novelistic elements in drama. At least since Manfred Pfister’s influential theory of drama (69–84), the chorus, prologues, epilogues, producer or stage manager characters, and other elements have been compared to the figure of narrator and the mediated nature of the novel. More recently, Jahn, Sommer, and George have developed Pfister’s point of view. As Irina O. Rajewsky (“Von Erzählern”) demonstrated, the discourse on novelistic elements in drama twists the understanding of theatre’s communicative situation in a significant way. Rather than speaking of an instance that mediates, that is, communicates and produces, the narrative as such, they speak of elements that mediate between the audience and the storyworld of the play. If, however, one maintains that a narratorial figure that produces the discourse is a constituent feature of the novel (or any verbal narrative), then drama and theatre can only approximate, but never actually use or reproduce novelistic elements such as narrator or the use of the past tense. Or, to use the vocabulary from Rajewsky’s other essay (“Intermediality” 55), theatre can only generate an illusion of novelistic elements, since the gap between the media and communicative situations of theatre and the novel “can only ever be bridged in the figurative mode of the ‘as if’.” Such evocation of novelistic elements in theatre, just like the imitation of theatrical elements in a novel, highlights precisely the specific possibilities and limitations of the different media. Theatre-fiction often playfully engages with these medial differences, just like it does with other, less general ideas about the distinctions between novels and theatre (see Wolfe, Theatre-Fiction 6–7).1 Assuming the narrator as constitutive for novelistic discourse is equally crucial for the discussion of tenses in fiction. Ever since Käte Hamburger coined the term “epic preterit” in 1957, a whole strand of literary research proceeded on the assumption that the past tense (in particular the preterit) in fiction does not refer to the spatiotemporal distance between the act of narration and the narrated events. Among others, Fludernik, Hennig and Avanessian, Huber, and Gebauer have followed Hamburger’s claim that tenses generally work in fiction in a different way than in everyday communication. According to these scholars, tenses in fiction usually fulfil some other functions than indicating the temporal perspective of the speaker on the events; for instance, the preterit signals the fictionality of the narrative, thus prompting the readers to ‘presentify’ the events by immersing themselves into the story.

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However, Hamburger’s theory and the theories derived from it only hold water if one assumes the possibility of an unmediated narrative—that is, of a narrative without a narrator (Zeman 248). Then, one could claim that in narratives where the readers perceive the storyworld ‘directly’ through the consciousness of a character,2 the preterit (or the present tense, for that matter) denotes the here-andnow of this character (e.g. Fludernik 123). If, however, we assume that any narrative is mediated by someone or something, then narratives with a covert narrator are no different than any other kind of narratives in regard to their use of tenses. Despite the illusion of immediacy and simultaneity of the narrative act and the narrated events, the past tense always reflects the fact that the two are separated by a spatiotemporal distance—though it can also perform other functions at the same time. From this perspective, present-tense fiction presents a curious case. The continuous use of the present tense appears as an inherent contradiction, as one cannot observe or experience the events and narrate about them in writing at the same time.3 As such, present-tense narration is at odds with how narration works in the empirical world. It therefore seems particularly suitable for conveying strange temporalities. Moreover, the present tense can evoke an illusion of simultaneity between the narrative act, the narrated events, and the act of reading. This is why the use of the present tense is an especially significant innovation in theatre-fiction: present-tense narration seems a perfect means of grappling with the medial gap between the novel and theatre, a means of enhancing the illusion of simultaneity between the unfolding of the story and its perception by the audience. In this light, the fact that neither of the novels I examine below uses the present tense to create an illusion of immediacy is especially significant. Both Hag-Seed and The Rehearsal are invested in undermining the crude opposition between theatre as an essentially immediate mode of communication and the novel as the privileged place of contemplating the past. Instead, through their use of the present tense, both Hag-Seed and The Rehearsal prompt the readers to reconsider their ideas of theatre. For Atwood and Catton, theatre is not about the immediacy of experience, but rather about an engagement with one’s identity and one’s past—a role traditionally reserved for the novel. Below I explore how both novels employ the temporal impossibility of present-tense narration to reflect their respective notions of theatre.

Hag-Seed: Towards Therapeutic Theatre-Fiction Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. As such, it is preoccupied with theatre on multiple levels. It tells the story of Felix Phillips, a once successful theatre director, who lost his wife to childbirth and his three-year-old daughter to meningitis and was ousted from his job shortly thereafter. The readers meet Felix twelve years after the tragic events, as he is producing The Tempest at a correctional facility with a cast of inmates. Through this production, Felix is eventually able to avenge the betrayal of his former colleagues and to find peace with the death of his daughter. The depiction of theatre in Hag-Seed is inextricably linked to the motives of trauma and healing. Felix’s excessive dedication to his job as theatre director incidentally causes the tragic death of his daughter and hence Felix’s trauma (Atwood 15). During the production at the Fletcher correctional, both Felix and the prisoner-actors have to grapple with their traumatic experiences while contemplating the traumas of the characters in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. To give just one example, when the inmates suggest using the photographs of their children in the production, Felix is immediately reminded of his loss. Careful, he tells himself. Hold it together. Prospero’s always in control. More or less … They’re not doing it go get at him. They can’t possibly know anything about him, him and his remorse, his self-castigation, his endless grief.

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Half blinded, choking, he blunders down to the fifties-period demonstration cell and collapses onto a bottom bunk … Lost at sea, drifting here, drifting there. In a rotten carcass the very rats have quit. (160) This passage also exemplifies the explicit parallels in Hag-Seed between the characters of The Tempest and those of the novel: Prospero and Felix, Ariel and Felix’s daughter, Miranda and the actress performing Miranda in Felix’s production, etc. (see Aldoory). These parallels work both ways: while providing intertextual sources for the characters of Hag-Seed, they are also key to the novel’s revisiting of The Tempest through the lens of trauma. Several researchers (e.g. Jayendran, Muñoz-Valdivieso, and Smith) have regarded Atwood’s depiction of trauma and healing in Hag-Seed in connection with the practice of adaptation; Paul Joseph Zajac’s analysis is especially insightful in this regard. Drawing upon Cathy Caruth’s influential theory of trauma, Zajac highlights repetition as the key characteristic and common feature of traumatic experience, of working through trauma, and of adaptation as a creative practice (324–6). Although many of Zajac’s observations are sound, I submit that the framework of adaptation requires further specification. Paying attention to the tenses in the novel spotlights the specific media of adaptation that Hag-Seed engages with—the theatre and the novel. Their distinct roles in the working through of trauma reveal that Atwood’s novel is not a tale of caution about the risks of adaptation as Zajac suggests (339), but rather a celebration of mixing and transgressing genres and media, and of theatrefiction in particular. Hag-Seed depicts trauma, to use Caruth’s formulation, as an “unwitting re-enactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (2), as a constant return to and reliving of the events and details that accompanied the traumatic experience. Throughout the novel, Felix has to relive the death of his daughter Miranda again and again “through the most innocuous but unavoidable of daily reminders: an item on a store shelf or the casual question of a stranger” (Zajac 333). Here is, for instance, how Felix experiences a visit to a toy store: “He takes a deep breath, plunges across the threshold into that world of damaged wishes, forlorn hopes. So bright, shining, so out of reach for him. There’s a fluttering in his chest, but he holds firm” (161–2). The present-tense narration in Hag-Seed and the novel’s temporal structure mirror the idea of traumatic temporality as a constant return to the moment of wounding. Felix’s story does not unfold in chronological order but rather in circles. The novel starts with a prologue—the beginning of The Tempest performed at the Fletcher Correctional—which takes place on “Wednesday, March 13, 2013” (3); this prologue is repeated word for word in chapter 34, thereby framing the entire story of the production. Inside this narrative frame, there is another one: the first chapter takes place on “Monday, January 7, 2013” and is followed by the flashback in the past tense, upon which the action returns to Monday, January 7, 2013 in chapter 9. Apart from this flashback, the novel narrates continuously in the present tense. So the past-tense flashback is placed inside two narrative frames or loops, both narrated in the present tense. In other words, Hag-Seed presents the past (tense) as literally enclosed by, and contained in the present (tense); Felix’s traumatic past is constantly present.4 The present tense highlights the fact that Felix is trapped in a circular, traumatic temporality, which is just as difficult to rationalize as present-tense narration. The novel additionally enhances the idea of traumatic loops by repeatedly alluding to the time as standing still. For instance, chapter 6, which depicts Felix’s withdrawal from society, is expressively entitled “Abysm of time” (36). The photo of his daughter that Felix keeps on his bedside is described as “the small girl on the swing, frozen in Time’s jelly” (109). Later in the novel, Felix thinks back to this photo with the words “That did preserve me” (160, emphasis in original), which Zajac convincingly interprets as the evidence of Felix being “in stasis, frozen in the condition of loss” (332). Prison as the main place of action is also significant in this context. As in other of her novels, in Hag-Seed “Atwood

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highlights how normal [or rather, normative] conceptions of time are distorted by imprisonment” (March and Palmer 24). The action at Fletcher Correctional is paced with the subtitle “The same day,” which is used for seven different chapters throughout the novel, enhancing the impression of frozen time and constant repetition. However, the idea of traumatic and “frozen” temporality does not exhaust the significance of the present tense in Hag-Seed. As mentioned above, present-tense narration is commonly expected to produce an illusion of theatrical immediacy, even more so in a novel that explicitly concerns itself with theatre. However, if we look at how Hag-Seed depicts theatre—or rather, Felix’s idea of theatre—it becomes clear that the theatrical temporality in the novel is not an immediate “here-and-now,” but it is circular, just like traumatic temporality. Going back to the outset of the novel, Felix attempts to cope with the loss of his daughter with the help of theatre: “Right after the funeral with its pathetically small coffin he’d plunged himself into The Tempest … it was to be a kind of reincarnation,” a performance through which “his Miranda would come back to life” (15–16). Yet the novel distances itself from the idea of theatre as a medium of reviving the past through a highly ironic description of Felix’s plans for his production of The Tempest: Felix had ordered some fake leaves and spray-painted gold flowers … to give his cape extra pizzazz and depth of meaning. He would wield a staff he’d found in an antique shop … It was a modest length for a wizard’s staff, but Felix liked to juxtapose extravagance with understatement. Such an octogenarian prop could play ironically at crucial moments. At the end of the play, he’d planned a sunset effect, with glitter confetti falling from above like snow. (17) There is an apparent gap between Felix’s focus on the special effects, props, and costumes and the effects he ascribes to them—depth of meaning, irony, and understatement. The ironic tone of the passage resulting from this gap indicates that Felix’s idea of theatre is somehow faulty. Further description of the intended production makes it even clearer: Felix expects it to be “like Taj Mahal, an ornate mausoleum raised in honour of a beloved shade, or a priceless jewelled casket containing ashes,” “a charmed bubble” in which “his Miranda would live again” (17). To rephrase, the novel pictures Felix’s planned production of The Tempest as a shiny but dead shell containing the ghost of the past. Felix’s notion of theatre can be seen as symptomatic of contemporary culture: after all, he is the exdirector of the Makeshiweg Festival, “a riff on the Stratford Festival in Ontario” (Zajac 326), which is one of the most prestigious Shakespeare festivals worldwide and among the most renowned arts festivals in Canada. I therefore submit that the novel’s ironic description of Felix’s theatre project elicits a general criticism of contemporary theatre, and perhaps of postmodern theatre in particular. Countless accounts of postmodernity are “preoccupied with the difficulty, if not impossibility, of continuous novelty, innovation or originality, and therefore often characteris[e] postmodern originality as mere repetition, recycling and recontextualising of past forms” (Currie 10). Through the ironic account of Felix’s intended production of The Tempest, Hag-Seed distances itself from the kind of theatre that re-contextualizes the past for the mere sake of ‘reviving’ it, setting it side by side with the constant return to the past trauma. The use of the present tense enhances the parallel between the circular temporality of Felix’s trauma and that of his theatre. When Felix is finally able to produce The Tempest at Fletcher Correctional, the account of the performance is given in the present tense just like the rest of the novel (apart from the flash-back at the very beginning). In this way, the present tense erases the border between the narrative of Felix’s life and the account of the play he produced, uniting both under the roof of circular temporality. Being another coil of traumatic repetition, this production brings Felix neither the healing nor the satisfaction of revenge he was hoping for, as his thoughts after the premiere demonstrate: “‘Anyway I succeeded,’ he tells himself. ‘Or at least I didn’t fail.’ Why does it feel like a

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letdown?” (239). By uniting the story of Felix’s life and the portrayal of his production of The Tempest, present-tense narration thus signals that contemporary theatre à la Felix is caught in the loop of recycling the past in the same way as Felix is caught in the loop of traumatic repetition. The novel’s criticism of re-contextualization in contemporary theatre further leads to the question of how Hag-Seed conceives of its own nature as a reimagining of Shakespeare’s play. It is logical to assume that on a metafictional level, the novel aspires to be something more than a mere re-contextualization of The Tempest. What, then? Until roughly the premiere of Felix’s production at Fletcher Correctional, Hag-Seed approximates the narrative structure of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, recreating its main events in the adapted contemporary setting (see Zajac 326–7). However, after the second loop of Felix’s failed redemption through theatre comes to an end, the events in the novel take a different turn. According to the summary of Shakespeare’s play placed at the end of Hag-Seed, in the finale of The Tempest “plans are made for the return to Italy and the impending wedding. Prospero will have his dukedom again. Miranda and Ferdinand will eventually be the Queen and King of Naples. Ariel will ensure calm seas for the voyage” (Atwood 289). Contrary to what the impersonal formulation “plans are made” may imply, only one person is actually making these plans—Prospero, the model for and double of Felix in Hag-Seed. Prospero’s monologue that outlines the said plans is the very last piece of The Tempest before the epilogue, in which he “tells the audience that … he must remain imprisoned on the island unless the audience pardons him, and sets him free by using its own magic to applaud the play” (Atwood 289). The last two parts of Hag-Seed radically depart from this ending of Shakespeare’s play in two regards. The entire part V of the novel pictures a post-premiere gathering of Felix and his actors, where the prisoner-actors present their versions of what they think happens to the characters of The Tempest after the end of the play. This part of the novel roughly corresponds to the episode of Shakespeare’s play in which Prospero makes plans for the future; however, in the novel it is not Felix who outlines the possible development of the narrative but the prisoner-actors. And instead of one version of how the story may develop, there are six, each suggested by a different group of actors. Even though Felix performed in his production as Prospero, he does not provide his own suggestions for what happens to the characters of The Tempest. Instead, he listens to the various versions suggested by others and accepts all of them as equally possible. In so doing, he gives up his power of shaping the story. In this, I agree with Eleanor March and Beth Palmer (32–3), who suggest that a key aspect of the production at Fletcher Correctional is that Felix has to share his storytelling authority with the prisoner-actors. Through the production of The Tempest outside of theatre, Felix is able to discover theatre anew: not as a site of powerful effects, immediacy of experience, and revival of the past, but as a tool of collaborative working through trauma. Theatre as an entertaining show, such as Felix practiced it as artistic director, is left in the past tense of the flashback; the present-tense narrative reveals the theatre as an instrument of healing. I suggest that Felix is able to leave the circle of traumatic repetitions precisely through this embracing of the voices and perspectives of Others. In this regard, it is important that the entire cast of The Tempest belongs to various disenfranchised groups. The actors’ imprisonment alone places them at the social margins; in addition, Felix’s cast list (Atwood 133–5) identifies most prisoner-actors as members of ethnic, racial, religious, or other minorities. Among them are, for example, actors with East Indian, Native-Canadian, Vietnamese, and African Canadian background; a Mennonite; a person suffering from a squint; etc. In contrast, Felix is a white, middle-aged, middle-class, male intellectual; what’s more, his official job designation at the Fletcher correctional is “teacher in the Literacy Through Literature high school level program” (48). Felix’s position is thus both privileged and a position of power. Consequently, the prisoner-actors don’t simply provide different perspectives on The Tempest; rather, their voices are the voices of Others. Only by taking these voices seriously, Felix gets a chance of regaining his self.

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Rather than remaining imprisoned inside his own play and being “forced to re-enact his feelings of revenge, over and over” like Prospero (Atwood 275), Felix is able to see his play and his life story from the outside and reflect on it: It comes over him in a wave: he’s been wrong about his Tempest, wrong for twelve years. The endgame of his obsession wasn’t to bring his Miranda back to life. The endgame was something quite different. He picks up the silver-framed photo of Miranda, laughing happily on her swing. There she is, three years old, lost in the past. But not so, for she’s also here … (283) In these final paragraphs of the novel, Felix is able to recognize the temporal distortion caused by his trauma. His daughter seemed to him “lost in the past,” which brought him on his quest for her revival through theatre; however, in reality, she has constantly been locked in his present, doomed to relive his trauma with him in the never-ending chain of repetitions. So the “endgame” of his theatre production was not ‘reviving’ his daughter but rather ending the game—that is, accepting the pastness of the past and letting go of it: “‘To the elements be free,’ he says to her [the ghost of Miranda]. / And, finally, she is” (Atwood 283). With these words, the novel and its present-tense narrative come to an end, indicating that the past can now be recognized and narrated as such; it is freed from the loop of eternal re-contextualizations and revivals. There are no more traumatic repetitions to be expected in Felix’s story. Unlike Prospero in The Tempest, Felix is not asking the audience to free him from the need to endlessly re-live his own play in the finale, as he already made the decisive steps towards ending the chain of repetitions himself. By embracing the voices of Others, he was able to recognize the past for what it is and envisage different futures—both for the characters of The Tempest and for himself. Moreover, Felix also puts some of these possible futures into action. At the end of the novel, he brings one of the ex-inmates/actors along on a ship cruise, hoping to provide a stepping stone for his future (282). This decision echoes the development the actors envisaged for the relationship between Prospero and Caliban from The Tempest. In so doing, Felix shares his storytelling authority with the other characters, acknowledging their power to shape his story. Such a perspective opens Hag-Seed to an allegorical reading. If Felix’s figure epitomises contemporary theatre, then the latter’s future according to the novel also depends on embracing the voices of Others, that is on diversity and inclusiveness. At the same time, the idea of sharing storytelling authority sheds a new light on Hag-Seed’s approach to adaptation. When a play is retold as a novel, it frees the characters from the need to reiterate their lines; instead, some of their lines can be spoken for them by the narrator. Rather than robbing the characters of their voice, such change opens new possibilities of thinking about the character’s identities and their personal stories. I suggest that such change in perspective is at the core of Atwood’s take on theatre-fiction. The specific genre of theatrefiction turns what could have been merely another retelling of Shakespeare into a repetition with a difference; moreover, it demonstrates that a chain of repetitions itself can form a story. Hag-Seed is not the only novel where Atwood uses the present tense to give a voice to a traumaridden person. This was also the case in her second novel, Surfacing (1972), and in her later Cat’s Eye (1988), where she lets the protagonist Elaine Risley reminisce in the present-tense about “the unbreakable, maddening bond between her and her bullying/bullied friend Cordelia” (Miyahara 251).5 In Hag-Seed, the present-tense narration additionally connects the repetitive and ‘frozen’ temporality of trauma and confinement to the temporality of theatre, showing how theatrical work can be used in the working through of trauma. In this, the novel evokes the tradition of drama therapy, psychodrama, and other healing-through-performance practices. However, to prevent the

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working through trauma in theatre from becoming another loop of traumatic repetition, the protagonist of Hag-Seed eventually has to step off the stage and let others help him make the final steps on the path to healing. In this sharing of the storytelling authority with the Other, the present-tense narration acquires an additional dimension: it is not only a narration that reflects the circular temporality of trauma, but also a “democratic” narration open to a multiplicity of voices (Miyahara 254). While in Hag-Seed, present-tense narration ultimately unites performance and narration into therapeutic theatre-fiction, Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal is devoid of this reconciling aspect. In The Rehearsal, the present tense also signals a dissolution of boundaries between theatre and fiction; yet the novel also seems to suggest that these boundaries are illusory in the first place.

The Rehearsal: Theatre, Fiction, and Other False Dualisms The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton features two storylines, which remain distinct for most of the book but gradually converge in the last chapters. One storyline, written in the past tense, follows a character named Stanley as he enters the Drama Institute and proceeds through his first year of studies while also working through personal issues such as a dysfunctional relationship with his father. Within each chapter, the action jumps between episodes from different months; each episode is titled according to the month when the action is taking place. For instance, chapter four jumps from “October” to “February,” then back to “October,” “November,” again to “February,” and so on. Although this structure creates a sense of fragmentation and repetitiveness, the jumps never exceed the span of five months, and the action progresses towards a clear goal. The storyline culminates in a theatre production that Stanley and his fellow students prepare as the result of their first year of studies. The temporality of Stanley’s storyline may not be linear, but it is distinctly teleological. The final production and generally the career in acting are decisive for Stanley’s identity: “I want to be seen,” he replies when asked why he wanted to be an actor, “Because if somebody’s watching, you know you’re worth something” (90). The idea of theatre as the awareness of being watched is key to the novel; even more so is the idea of one’s ‘worth’ as constituted through the gaze of the Other. The Lacanian roots of such conception of the self have been analyzed in detail by Wolfe (“Eleanor Catton”); for the purpose of my argument, it suffices to say that Stanley’s notion of theatre can also be described in terms of “the desire of the Other” (102). The other storyline of The Rehearsal seems to start exactly where Stanley is aiming to go, namely on a stage. The story is narrated in the present tense, and the readers seem to be present at a performance; I say “seem,” because this storyline is purposefully vague and confusing in several regards. The stage is (up until the very last moment) never mentioned as such; neither is the audience (if there even is one), or the theatre. The readers can guess that the action is a performance from the clues scattered at larger intervals throughout the novel. For instance, stage lights, costumes, decorations, and musical accompaniment are mentioned on several occasions. At other times, the novel briefly mentions the characters’ awareness of their own performance, as in the following scene: At five there is another knock. The saxophone teacher opens the door … She holds the door wide so Mrs Winter can scuttle in. It’s the same woman as before, just with a different costume—Winter not Henderson. Some other things are different too, because the woman is a professional and she has thought about the role for a long time. Mrs Winter smiles with only half her mouth, for example … They both politely pretend not to notice that it is the same woman as before. (9)

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The last sentence in this episode illustrates especially well the ambiguity of this storyline’s narrative perspective. Does this sentence assume the perspective of fictional actors, of fictional characters, or both? In any case, why do they “politely pretend not to notice”—if anything, they should know it is the same actress as before; and who are they being polite to? This ambiguity is characteristic of the entire storyline, which unfolds during the lessons of a saxophone teacher attended by girls from a school located nearby. Through the conversations between the saxophone teacher and her students, the readers follow the aftermath of a sex scandal that took place at the school—the uncovering of a relationship between the music teacher Mr. Saladin and one of the girls, Victoria (whether it was an abusive relationship or a consensual love affair remains unclear). The readers follow the lives of some of Victoria’s classmates and of Victoria’s younger sister Isolde, who also attends the same school. At the outset of the novel, the present tense is key to creating the impression that we are most likely reading an account of a performance. The present tense produces the illusion that the performance unfolds at the same time as we are reading a report about it, or rather as we are watching it. By contrast, the past tense of Stanley’s storyline seems to suggest that we are reading an account of events that happened prior to the act of narration. As a result, there seems to emerge a clear distinction between the narrative of (Stanley’s) life and the narrative of performance. Unlike the past-tense storyline, the present-tense storyline features neither a central character, nor a discernible goal, nor any clear spatiotemporal coordinates. The saxophone teacher, Isolde, and several further female characters (Bridget, Julia, Victoria) all play equally important roles within this narrative. The passing of time is difficult to measure, as the action is marked with weekdays rather than with months. For example, when the first chapter moves through Thursday, Friday, and Wednesday to Monday, we can only infer from the context whether the action is moving forwards or backwards in each case. Yet even the context is not always conclusive. In combination with continuous present-tense narration, such pacing creates what David Herman calls “fuzzy temporality” (211–20). The readers are never quite sure when the action is taking place; while some events clearly take place before or after other events, it is mostly difficult to say how much time elapsed in between, not to mention such specific information as to what month the events occurred. As we learn at the very end of the novel, the saxophone teacher’s students also participate in a yearly recital, just like the Drama Institute students stage their yearly production. However, the recital does not appear throughout the novel as the goal towards which the action is progressing. The “now” of the present-tense storyline is therefore markedly atemporal, cut off from the linear time with its precise measurements and its movement towards a resolution. We are dealing, then, with two storylines: one depicting a (beginning) actor, the other depicting, it seems, characters in a performance; one centred on a male, the other shared by multiple female characters; one narrated from a temporal distance, the other suspended in a kind of atemporal ‘now’; one progressing towards a clear goal, the other devoid of teleology; one written in the past tense, the other in the present. These contrasts seem to partially reproduce common clichés about ‘male’ and ‘female’ temporality, in which the former is understood as linear and teleological, and the latter as cyclic or atemporal (cf. Felski 18–22). The general impression that the novel is built on various dichotomies prevails in the first half or so of The Rehearsal. It is neatly summarized by one of the girls in the final chapter of the novel: We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult, pleasure and pain … Like in a theatre programme where you have the actors’ names on one side and the list of characters on the other—some neat division that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction—that there is always a distinction—between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned that there is no middle ground. (309, emphasis in original)

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Whereas roughly the first half of The Rehearsal outlines those dichotomies and their workings in the minds of the schoolgirls and the young students of the drama Institute, the further development of the story reveals that the novel is actually invested in deconstructing these binary oppositions. Through the development of romance between Stanley from the past-tense storyline and Isolde from the present-tense storyline, the readers are led to realize that the two storylines are actually happening at the same time. This undermines the distinction between the ‘now’ of the present-tense narrative and the ‘then’ of the past-tense narrative. The gradual convergence of the two storylines creates a strange temporality, which is oscillating between hindsight and an illusion of immediacy. The fuzziness of this temporal and other binary distinctions in the novel is further enhanced by the abundance of repetitions and re-enactments. In particular, it is gradually revealed that the characters in both storylines mirror or straightforwardly repeat each other’s actions. For instance, the couple Isolde/Stanley mirrors the couple Victoria/Mr. Saladin, insofar as Stanley eventually gets accused of sexual involvement with the underage Isolde. At the same time, the romantic feelings that emerge between Isolde and another girl from her school, Julia, mirror an earlier love affair between the saxophone teacher and her friend Patsy. These parallels are not limited to general resemblance; the characters sometimes literally repeat their own or each other’s words and actions. For instance, in the beginning of the novel we learn that Mr. Saladin must have called Victoria “my gypsy girl” as a pet name (13; 60), and in one of the last chapters Stanley lovingly addresses Isolde as “gypsy girl” (267–8). Similarly, Julia and Isolde re-enact what seems to be a scene from the saxophone teacher’s past by assuming the roles of the saxophone teacher and Patsy, respectively (295). Or, to take another example, Victoria’s father tells her in the aftermath of the sex scandal: “now we know about it, it won’t happen again” (15); yet when ‘it’ happens again to his younger daughter Isolde, he can only repeat, “now that we know about it, it won’t happen any more” (304). The repetitions in the novel can be seen, on the one hand, as reactions to traumatic and/or unfamiliar psychological experiences. In particular, the storyline focusing on the aftermath of the sex scandal pictures the girls’ attempts to make sense of the scandal by re-enacting it: they imagine themselves in the position of Victoria and even take her love affair as a model of their behaviour. As a result, a chain of repetitions is formed, in which the girls re-enact what they imagine to be the events that lead to the sex scandal. The most striking character in this regard is Victoria’s classmate Bridget, a quiet and lonely girl who “is always wanting to be somebody else” (Catton, Rehearsal 15). When encountering Mr. Saladin at the video store where she works at the weekends, Bridget tries to talk “like the beautiful girls at school talk …, tossing their hair over their shoulder and turning out their feet like show ponies” (148–9). In this, Bridget is the epitome of traumatic re-enactment, repeating the actions and gestures of those who victimize her at school and of Victoria, the victim of the sex scandal. Yet the repetitions in the novel point also, and even primarily, to the fact that the dichotomies outlined in the novel’s first half or so are, in fact, hardly sustainable. The younger characters—Stanley, Isolde, Julia, Bridget—not only repeat the actions and words of the adult characters, but also model their behaviour after each other. Bridget’s character is especially illustrative in this regard, but so is the character Julia, who is wondering if she should “behave like a boy, play the part of a boy” to get a chance at a romance with Isolde (198). The adults, too, are constantly re-enacting their performances in accordance with the chosen role, as exemplified by Victoria’s and Isolde’s father repeating one and the same line. In this way, the distinctions between child and adult, male and female, “good” and “evil” characters become fuzzy to the point of vanishing completely. The resolution—that is, the very last chapter of the novel—merits special attention in this context. In it, the two storylines merge completely. The chapter features episodes from Stanley’s storyline (including the first-year production), from the storyline of the saxophone teacher, Isolde et al.

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(including their musical recital), and some episodes shared by the characters from both storylines. Among the latter is a meeting between Isolde, Stanley, and their respective families, where they discuss the “inappropriate” affair between Isolde and Stanley. The episodes are titled alternatingly with either months or weekdays. Yet the two storylines do not simply converge on equal terms; a conspicuous disbalance in the mode of presentation can be observed in two regards. Firstly, the entire last chapter of The Rehearsal is narrated in the present tense; secondly, all episodes seem to be taking place on a stage—or rather, on various stages. The drama Institute’s production and the musical recital take place on two different stages in the storyworld; yet other episodes too, including the meeting between Stanley’s and Isolde’s families, unfold on some kind of stage. This mysterious stage of the present-tense storyline is—for the first time in the novel—explicitly named as such: Isolde and her parents are already on stage when the lights come up … Stanley and his father enter, through the frosted French doors in the middle of the false backdrop, preceded by Victoria who has her palm out like she is showing the way. “He’s here,” she says unnecessarily, making more of the line than she ought to, because it is her only one and she wants to be seen. (304) This time, it is a character from the present-tense storyline who identifies the desire to be seen as the main drive of performance, highlighting the common notion of theatre in both storylines. The clues exposing the story as a performance are conspicuously present in this quotation and in the other episodes of the last chapter. This performance of the novel’s events is constantly alternating with the two intradiegetic performances—the musical recital and the Drama Institute’s production. As a result, the border between artistic performing and the performing of life becomes blurry. In a piece of metafictional monologue, the saxophone teacher comments: … if you were looking very carefully, you might be able to see a role, a character, and also a person struggling to maintain that character, a person who decided in the first place that that particular character was who they were going to be. There are people who can only see the roles we play, and there are people who can only see the actors pretending. But it’s a very rare thing that a person has the power to see both at once: this kind of double vision is a gift. (301) In this monologue, the saxophone teacher uncovers the ambiguity of the present-tense storyline as the main principle of the entire novel. In The Rehearsal, everyone is at the same time an actor and a character, they are at the same time performing and actually living; the borders between the two are extremely fuzzy if at all existent. Moreover, this passage also provides an insight into how The Rehearsal conceives of performance in theatre—namely, as prototype and paradigm of sociocultural performance. In her interviews on The Rehearsal, Catton repeatedly states that when working on the novel she was particularly interested in the idea of performance as a daily act or a mode of behaviour (“Writers Block”; “Big Year interview”). Seen in this light, Catton’s novel explores the process of choosing, (re)constructing, and negotiating—in short, the process of rehearsing sociocultural identities. The age of the novel’s characters is of significance here, as the ‘rehearsal’ apparently takes place in adolescence. In stark contrast to the tradition of Bildungsroman, the coming of age in The Rehearsal is presented not as a

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linear process but as a chain of repetitions: both the repetition after role models and the repetition of the chosen role. Further, the novel highlights collective traumatic experiences as decisive moments in choosing a role, as such experiences—epitomized by the sex scandal—bring to light the role’s crucial constituents such as class, gender, and sexuality. Finally, the novel’s focus on the gaze of Others gains particular significance in this context. The awareness of being watched in a collective impels its members to assume specific roles. These roles, in turn, are products of the interaction with, and the desire of, the Other. The Other is thus both a pre-condition of acting and its ultimate goal. In drawing the parallel between theatre and sociocultural interaction, The Rehearsal takes up the sociological line of thinking famously initiated by Erving Goffmann. However, the novel also goes beyond Goffman’s distinction between the social roles people wear for show and the “backstage conduct.” Instead, The Rehearsal seems to suggest that there is no such thing as a backstage where people can act out of character and show their true selves. As the contrast between the past-tense and the present-tense narratives breaks down towards the end of the novel, so does the binary opposition between living and acting. First, the present-tense narrative switches from the perspectives of the saxophone teacher and her students to Stanley’s perspective, revealing that for him, too, performance is not only a profession but a mode of behaviour: “Stanley is waiting for Isolde after her lesson. […] He is nervous. He wishes he’d scripted something to say” (285, my emphasis). Then, conversely, the present-tense narrative slips into the past tense in a scene involving the characters of Patsy and her husband Brian. Even though they previously appeared only in the memories of the saxophone teacher, the tense switch underscores that these characters are just as much a part of the ‘real’ storyworld as the characters from the past-tense narrative (293). Finally, in the last chapter of the novel, present-tense narration completely overtakes the narration in the past tense, conveying the impression of a ubiquitous performance. The musical performance, the performance of the Drama Institute production, and the performance of “life” are all depicted in the present tense in the novel’s last chapter. As a result, the present tense reflects the universality of performance as a mode of social interaction. What is the difference between a genuine identity and the one chosen for show, because someone’s watching? The Rehearsal denies the possibility of a clear answer; its point is rather to raise doubts as to the binary categories the question implies. The genre of theatre-fiction is uniquely suitable for this task: it gives the readers, in the words of the saxophone teacher, “the power to see both at once”—the character and the person, and the fuzziness of the distinction between the two. ∗∗∗ Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal both explore what role theatre and performance play in the contemporary world with the help of the present tense and the contrasting past-tense narration. I have argued that the use of the present tense in these novels conveys two interconnected perceptions of time: time as an endless circle of repetitions, and a kind of atemporality, which can be broadly understood as time standing still, or the absence of time, or a timeless universality. Both novels characterize theatre through these temporalities. Hag-Seed hints at the uncanny parallel between traumatic temporality and the repetitive temporality of performance, but also presents theatre as a place and an instrument of a conscious return to the traumatic events with the purpose of healing. In The Rehearsal, theatre is the paradigm of identity construction, with repetitions being the primary mode of choosing and rehearsing specific sociocultural roles. I have also observed that the figure of the Other is key to the idea of theatre in both novels: sharing the Other’s perspective is crucial to theatre’s therapeutic potential in Hag-Seed, and the gaze of the Other drives both theatrical and social role-playing in The Rehearsal. Both novels thus characterize theatre through unusual temporalities and the interaction with the Other; as such, theatre is contrasted with the novel, which in both Hag-Seed and The Rehearsal seems

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to stand for a more traditional, linear notion of time. Yet in reality, both novels undermine a clear-cut opposition between theatre and fiction. In particular, Hag-Seed sees the ultimate therapeutic potential in a kind of theatre-fiction—a combination of performance and narrative reflection on the performance. Rather than exploring a productive merging of theatre and fiction, The Rehearsal questions their distinction in the first place. In the world of The Rehearsal, everyone is at the same time an actor and a character, a ‘real person’ and a constructed role; theatre-fiction provides a uniquely suitable mode of exploring these distinctions and undermining them at the same time. Ultimately, my aim was to demonstrate that the usage of tenses, particularly of the present tense, is of utmost significance in theatre-fiction. It is through tense use that theatre-fiction undermines the idea of fiction as confined to narrating the past, and the idea of theatre as bound to the immediate here-and-now of the audience.

Notes 1 The distinction between the novel and drama does not exclude the possibility of hybrid genre experiments such as the dialogue novel. Such playful genre interventions do not cancel out but rather highlight the specifics of the respective genres. 2 Franz K. Stanzel calls such narrative mode the “reflector” mode. 3 The absent distance between the narrative act and the narrated events is to a certain extent imaginable in metafiction, where “the plot of the novel or short story consists in the writing of this text and is therefore simultaneous with the act of narration” ( Fludernik 125). 4 Mark Currie (8–28) offers a fascinating analysis of the tautological relationship between the present (time) and presence (i.e. existence) in philosophy. 5 Novels where the present tense reflects the non-linear temporality of a traumatized character abound. To name just a few recent examples: The Room (2010) by Emma Donoghue (see Gebauer, 257–75); The Gathering (2007) by Anne Enright (see Huber, 41–3); and The Accidental (2005) by Ali Smith (64–5).

Works Cited Aldoory, Awfa Hussein. “Atwood’s Recreation of Shakespeare’s Miranda in The Tempest.” Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 14, no. 3, 2017, pp. 58–62. Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed. Hogarth, 2016. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Catton, Eleanor. The Rehearsal. Victoria UP, 2008. Catton, Eleanor. “Writers Block: Eleanor Catton.” Interview by Radio New Zealand, audio podcast, 6 July 2008, https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/artsonsunday/audio/1633663/writers-block-eleanor-catton. Catton, Eleanor. “Big Year interview—Eleanor Catton.” Interview by Radio New Zealand, audio podcast, 24 December 2013, https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2581032/big-yearinterview-eleanor-catton. Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh UP, 2007. Felski, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York UP, 2000. Fludernik, Monika. “Chronology, Time, Tense and Experientiality in Narrative.” Language and Literature, vol. 12, no. 2, 2003, pp. 117–134. Gebauer, Carolin. Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel. De Gruyter, 2021. George, Kathleen. Winter’s Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage. U of Delaware P, 2005. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, 1959. Hamburger, Käte. Die Logik der Dichtung. Klett, 1957. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. U of Nebraska P, 2002. Huber, Irmtraud. Present-Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction: A Narratological Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Jahn, Manfred. “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama.” New Literary History, no. 32, 2001, pp. 659–667. Jayendran, Nishevita. “Adaptation and/as Agency in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016).” The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2018: Official Conference Proceedings. Fearful Futures: Cultural Studies and the Question of Agency in the 21st Century, 2018, pp. 91–101. http://papers.iafor.org/wp-content/uploads/conference-proceedings/ ACCS/ACCS2018_proceedings.pdf

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Theatre-Fiction in the Present Tense Jayendran, Nishevita. “‘Set Me Free’: Spaces and the Politics of Creativity in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016).” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 67, no. 1, 2020, pp. 15–27. March, Eleanor, and Beth Palmer. “‘Unique incarceration events’: The Politics of Power in Margaret Atwood’s Prison Narratives.” Margaret Atwood Studies, no. 12, 2018, pp. 11–50. Miyahara, Kazunari. “Why Now, Why Then? Present-Tense Narration in Contemporary British and Commonwealth Novels.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 39, no. 2, 2009, pp. 241–268. Muñoz-Valdivieso, Sofía. “Shakespeare our contemporary in 2016: Margaret Atwood’s rewriting of The Tempest in Hag-Seed.” The Yearbook of Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (Sederi), no. 27, 2017, 105–128. Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge UP, 1988. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Medialität—Transmedialität—Narration. Perspektiven einer transgenerischen und transmedialen Narratologie.” Habilitation thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2015. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Von Erzählern, die (nichts) vermitteln. Überlegungen zu grundlegenden Annahmen der Dramentheorie im Kontext einer transmedialen Narratologie.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, vol. 117, no. 1, 2007, pp. 25–68. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités / Intermediality, no. 6, 2005, p. 43–64. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, De Gruyter, 2005, pp. 1–24. Smith, Philip. “Margaret Atwood’s Tempests: Critiques of Shakespearean Essentialism in Bodily Harm and HagSeed.” Margaret Atwood Studies, no. 11, 2017, pp. 29–40. Sommer, Roy. “Drama und Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Routledge, 2005, pp. 119–124. Stanzel, Franz K. Theorie des Erzählens. Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979. Wolfe, Graham. “Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal: Theatrical Fantasy and the Gaze.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 49, no. 3, 2016, pp. 91–108. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020. Zajac, Paul Joseph. “Prisoners of Shakespeare: Trauma and Adaptation in Atwood’s Hag-Seed.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 52, no. 3, 2020, pp. 324–343.

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11 METHOD ACTING, THE NARRATOR, AND THE FIGURE OF THE DOPPELGANGER IN THE CONFESSIONS OF EDWARD DAY Roweena Yip “When an actor has a part,” the eponymous narrator in Valerie Martin’s ninth novel The Confessions of Edward Day (2009) says, “he has a life, and a full one. When he doesn’t have a part, his life is looking for one” (62). As the sole narrative voice of his fictionalized memoir, in which he reflects on his early life and acting career, the actor-narrator Edward Day might have found his greatest part. The novel may be seen to participate in the theatre-fiction genre in its reference to and depiction of the zeitgeist and socio-cultural fabric of New York theatre in the 1970s: an early scene describes the cast of characters discussing “who was doing what plays where, who had the best deal on head shots, the relative merits of acting teachers and schools, the catch-22 of Actors’ Equity, the anxieties, perils, and hilarious adventures of those who had appeared nude on stage” (17–18). In the Introduction to Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, Graham Wolfe articulates his conceptualization of the genre of theatre-fiction as one that acknowledges the intermedial relationship between theatre and prose fiction and places both forms in relationship with one another (4). By situating works of prose fiction about theatre in relation to contemporaneous theatrical practices and milieus, Wolfe develops a new discursive framework and hermeneutic practice for engaging with the intersections between literary texts and theatre performance. Specifically, Wolfe explains that the genre refers to “novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry,” as novelists imaginatively represent and contextualize theatre practice(s) within the form and materiality of the novel (4). However, citing “intermedial reference,” one of Irina Rajewsky’s subcategories of intermediality, Wolfe also acknowledges that the kinds of intermediality that take place within the genre of theatrefiction extend beyond content and subject matter to encompass formal and stylistic negotiations: “the shared formal and stylistic challenges and opportunities that arise when engaging through one medium with elements and attributes of another” (6). These challenges and opportunities result when a particular medium—in this case, the novel—“thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another conventionally distinct medium through the use of its own media-specific means” (Rajewsky 53). Valerie Martin completed an M.F.A. degree in playwriting—which she credits for teaching her how to write dialogue—and wrote five plays before transitioning to prose fiction (Martin and Smith 11). Her novelistic negotiations with theatre practice in The Confessions take place firstly through the historicization of the setting, and secondly through the singular exploration of Edward’s interiority, as his method acting training spills into and suffuses his narrative voice. Hence, elements of theatre and

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the novel mutually inform and shape the formal and stylistic construction of The Confessions as a fictional memoir about the experiences of stage actors in 1970s New York. Building on Wolfe’s contributions, in this chapter I consider the ways in which situating The Confessions within the genre of theatre-fiction offers a critical framework for analyzing the intermedial interactions between theatre and prose fiction. In the first section of the chapter, I explore the ways in which the novel presents a particular portrayal of method actor training in the context of midtwentieth century American naturalism, as well as the extent to which method acting becomes a primary point of reference for the narrator’s conceptualization of himself, other characters, and their mutually constitutive relationships. Moving beyond a focus on the novel’s content, I shall consider in the second section how Edward’s subjectivity is established and developed through his role as the homodiegetic narrator. Specifically, Edward’s voice is that of the autodiegetic narrator, who in Gerard Genette’s unmistakably theatrical formulation “cannot be an ordinary walk-on in his narrative: he can be only the star” (245; emphasis mine). Through an exploration into the memoir form of the novel and the focalization of Edward’s narrative perspective, I argue that his narrative voice is a selfconscious performance on the part of the method actor-narrator—a dramatic performance that throws into relief the subjectivity of the performer whose articulation of his own narrative creates an intimate relationship with his audience of readers. The concluding section of the chapter, however, will reflect on the ways in which references to the figure of the Doppelganger—in the form of the character Guy Margate—offer potential disruption to Edward’s presentation of the self through his narrative voice and serve to foreground the uncanniness of method acting, which undergirds this novel’s construction of theatre-fiction.

Method Acting and the Historicization of Setting The Confessions offers a particular representation of the New York theatre ecosystem in the 1970s, with an emphasis on the significance and impact of method actor training on Edward’s selfconceptualization and perception of the world around him. Edward’s journey into acting is marked by a traumatic experience in his adolescence: his mother, who committed suicide together with her partner, had unsuccessfully attempted to contact him before taking her life. Edward’s pursuit of actor training is an attempt to constitute a new identity for himself and work through the traumatic memory of having been unavailable at the time of his mother’s death: I began to take an interest in my feelings as opposed to simply feeling them non-stop. My acting classes were particularly useful for this. As Stanislavski observed, “In the language of an actor to know is synonymous with to feel.” My studies offered access to the very knowledge I most required. Many actors are called to their profession by an insatiable confession to be seen, to be admired, and to be famous, but for me acting was an egress from unbearable sorrow and guilt. (10; emphasis in original) The theory and practice of method acting can be traced to the seminal Russian actor, director, and teacher Constantin Stanislavski, whose system of acting is based on “experiencing feelings that are analogous” to the role each time the actor “repeat[s] the process of creating it” (26). Edward’s intertextual reference to Stanislavski’s Creating a Role is the first instance in the novel in which he demonstrates his propensity to self-consciously invoke and cite leading figures of method acting as a means of elucidating his own motivations and actions to his audience of readers.1 The term “intertextuality” was developed by Julia Kristeva to account for the ways in which texts are not hermetically sealed and self-contained but rather intersect with other texts through processes including citation and repetition (37). Intermediality in the theatre-fiction genre extends the effects and implications of

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intertextuality in such ways as to foreground the rhizomatic qualities of the novel, as an assemblage constituted through heterogeneity as well as connections with other systems of representation— foremost of which is theatre (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 7). Edward and his love interest Madeleine Delavergne trained in “Sanford Meisner’s professional program at his studio on Fifty-sixth Street,” while their friend Teddy Winterbottom trained with “the great Stella Adler” (14). By situating her characters within the epoch of 1970s New York, Martin creates a fictional archive of American theatre history in which she offers readers a retroactive imaginative reconstruction of the theatre milieu of the period and inscribes her characters within this epoch. Shonni Enelow traces the ways in which prominent American practitioners and acting teachers including Meisner, Adler, and Lee Strasberg inherited and transmitted Stanislavski’s system: “All of these teachers had their own unique takes on Stanislavski and developed their own training exercises, rehearsal practices, and ideas about the work of the actor, sometimes described as ‘Method acting’” (9). Within the context of the novel, Teddy describes actors as “human chameleons, born with a natural ability to take on the coloration of the psychological and physical environment” (67). This depiction of the practice of acting, in which actors are able to express—and therefore create—the mood and tone of the psychological and physical environment on stage, follows the principles of method acting, which emphasize expressivity by way of the actor fully inhabiting the dramatic role he or she performs on stage. For example, in her treatise on her method training technique, Adler emphasizes three principles. The first is character action: “Acting and doing are the same. When you’re acting you’re doing something, but you have to learn not to do it differently when you act it” (71). Next, Adler stresses the importance of seeing “as clearly in [the] imagination” as in life—the imagination therefore offers greater possibilities for actors to extend their craft beyond the immediacy of their life experience (80–1). Linked to the emphasis on the imagination is a rejection of the actor’s personal experience, emotions, and frames of reference: “You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences now. I want you to be able to see and share what you see with an audience, not just get wrapped up in yourself” (Adler 104). Similarly, Meisner’s repetition exercises, as Kim Durham notes, “are intended as a tool for refocusing the actor’s attention away from a self-conscious regard and assertion of self towards an awareness of and responsiveness to the acting partner” (153). Hence, acting in the method tradition requires a suspension of the actor’s self and the creation of relationality between the actor and the dramatic role he or she enacts, as well as with other actors sharing the time and space of the live performance. How then does Edward establish a sense of relationality with other actors, not in terms of their performance on stage but in the context of their status as fellow fictional characters in Martin’s novel? Edward’s self-consciousness that all the world’s a stage not only shapes his craft as an actor, but constructs the terms upon which he establishes and represents relationships with his fellow actorcharacters in the novel as the protagonist and narrator. Edward’s two primary relationships in the novel are his romantic relationship with Madeleine and his enmity towards Guy. As the narrator, Edward appears able to depict these relationships only in terms of allusions to plays, films, and popular actors of the period, in key instances of intermedial reference. Reflecting on the prospect of being alone with Madeleine for the first time, Edward says “the famous still of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in a clutch on the beach in From Here to Eternity flashed before my eyes,” as he invokes an imagistic reference to idealize the depiction of his experience (18). Similarly, in describing his assignation with Madeleine, he makes a series of references that associatively link the setting within which the encounter takes place to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The sky was overcast now; the moon obscured by a moving curtain of clouds. The inconstant moon. Madeleine would make a stunning Juliet. O swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb. I blessed Shakespeare, ever apt to the moment, whether it be for

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passion or reflection, and always sensitive to bluster the petty human summons against the capricious cruelty of nature’s boundless dominion. (24) As the narrator of his own memoir, Edward displays an inability to explicitly inscribe his subjective experience of this intimate encounter with Madeleine. References to Shakespeare’s play and female protagonist facilitate a psychological and emotional dissociation on the part of Edward as the homodiegetic narrator, who sublimates his erotic desire for Madeleine into a meta-commentary about their encounter. In turn, this dissociation has the effect of rendering their encounter an abstraction and placing Madeleine at a remove, as the modality of the verb “would” suggests that Edward perceives her primarily in terms of her suitability for the role of Shakespeare’s Juliet rather than as a being with her own subjectivity (24). Edward’s antagonism towards his nemesis Guy stems from two causes: Edward’s interminable state of indebtedness to Guy for saving him from drowning, and their shared attraction to Madeleine. The conflict in their relationship is a dominant theme throughout the novel and culminates in Guy’s suicide during a live performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in which both Edward and Madeleine perform as co-stars. Initially in the novel, however, their emerging conflict manifests through Edward’s evaluation of Guy’s ostensibly inferior acting: I was thinking about Guy’s Latino impression, which had been so successful with Madeleine, and of how disarming is the ability to make people laugh. It’s a gift, mimicry, but it’s not acting; in a way it’s the opposite of acting, which is why comedians are seldom good actors. There’s an element of exaggeration in the imposture; the copy is the original painted with a broad brush and it can be grotesque, even cruel. (44) Edward’s criticism of Guy’s mimicry references Adler’s admonition regarding the inferiority of miming to acting, according to the method tradition and the terms established in Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares: So let us learn once and for all that the word “action” is not the same as “miming,” it is not anything the actor is pretending to present, not something external, but rather something internal, nonphysical, a spiritual activity … External action on the stage when not inspired, not justified, not called forth by inner activity, is entertaining only for the eyes and ears; it does not penetrate the heart, it has no significance in the life of a human spirit in a role. (Adler 90–1; my emphasis) From Edward’s point of view, Guy appears to merely copy and exaggerate in his performances on stage, in contrast to Edward’s own method approach, which informs his complex explorations into “every nuance of [his] emotions” as he ambles about “in search of the conjunction between the mental and the physical” (23). Edward’s sexual rivalry with Guy is therefore similarly mapped into a competition regarding their capabilities as actors. In an attempt to reassert himself to the other characters—and to readers—after the drowning incident, in which Guy emerges as the saviour, Edward uses references to theatre acting to suggest Guy’s inferiority as a competitor for acting roles and for Madeleine. Even when Guy achieves early success in his career and is cast in an Equity play, Edward is defiant: “There’s nothing going on underneath. If the guy’s [the character Guy performs] a dick, that’s fine, but there’s got to be something behind that. I mean, there’s a reason he’s a dick. It didn’t just happen; he wasn’t fucking born a dick” (71). In describing his relationships with both characters, Edward’s theatrical allusions and references have the effect of allowing his persona to recede from the reader’s close scrutiny, as his recursive citations of method-acting practitioners and theorists become a means through which his own subjectivity as the homodiegetic narrator is constructed when presenting scenes from his memory for the reader’s contemplation.

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Edward’s most transformative encounter with actor training in The Confessions takes place with Marlene Webern, a well-known stage and television actor who directed Edward in an improvisational exercise when he was still training under Meisner. Marlene later becomes his co-star in Tennessee Williams’s play Sweet Birds of Youth. Edward is sexually attracted to Marlene, but the erotic charge of their intimate encounter in her room is transmuted into a platonic experience between actors in which Marlene helps him access and confront his traumatic memory of his mother’s death and assimilate it within his craft as an actor: You’re a good actor and you could be a great actor, but only if you understand that your life must be given up to your art. You can have no other life. There can’t be an Ed having emotion on the stage and Ed having an emotion, a strong, pure, deep emotion here in this room and a curtain drawn between. You mustn’t sit here and try to push away a powerful emotion because it’s painful. As an actor you have no right to do that … Let go of your response to the emotion and study it. Study what it did to you, how it evolved in you, how it came about, Ed, dear, that I could see it and know it was real. Not faked. That it was real. You have to make use of yourself, of who you are. (120; emphasis in original) Extrapolating the principles expressed in method acting manuals, which distinguish between the impersonation of physical gestures and action that is “called forth by inner activity” on the part of the actor (Adler 90), Marlene’s advice allows Edward to unlock his repressed memory of his mother and integrate it within his performance, which was subsequently singled out for “hyperbolic praise” (122). In the following section, I explore the ways in which Edward’s narrative voice marks a convergence between Edward the actor and Edward the fictional protagonist beyond the stage, as his narrative voice becomes a self-conscious performance that addresses and anticipates an audience of readers.

Narrative Voice: The Performance of the Actor-Narrator and the Memoir Form The novel’s epigraph cites both Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (“Our ordinary type of attention is not sufficiently far-reaching to carry out the process of penetrating another person’s soul”) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“False face must hid what the false heart doth know”). From whose perspective has the epigraph been provided: from Martin’s in her role as the author of the novel? Or is Martin working through the narrative persona of Edward Day? In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Genette reminds us not to necessarily conclude “that it is always the author who claims to be the epigrapher … in the case of a homodiegetic narrative it is advisable to hold out at least the possibility of an epigraph put forward by the narrator-hero” (154). On the one hand, Genette acknowledges a seemingly fundamental feature of scholarship on prose fiction: “to attribute … to the author only what it is physically impossible to attribute to the narrator—granting that, in reality, everything comes down to the author, for he is also the author of the narrator” (154). On the other hand, Genette also recognizes the performative gaps and slippages between the voice of the author and that of the narrator as both a vessel and medium for the author by conceding to the possibility that the epigraph may also be attributed to the homodiegetic narrator (154). In my view, the epigraph in The Confessions serves three functions: first, to present the ambiguity of the epigrapher’s persona as part of the performativity of authorship. It is this ambiguity that prompts Laurie Winer, in her review of The Confessions for The New York Times, to compare Martin herself to “a great character actor who never calls attention to the flesh and blood behind the performance, whose art seems to require or at least contain a special kind of humility or perhaps even a desire to sidestep the limelight” (2009). In collapsing distinctions between the author and the narrator,

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therefore, Winer acknowledges the theatrical slippages that may take place in the process of writing a theatre-fiction novel. Secondly, the epigraph explicitly identifies theatre as a dominant motif and theme in the novel; and finally the epigraph not only “corroborat[es] novelists’ own readerly discernment and solid grounding in literary convention and practice” and “depict[s] their works as continuations of—rather than dangerous threats to—literary tradition” (Stokes 206–7; my emphases), but rather situates Martin’s own novelistic practice in The Confessions within canonical texts for the theory and practice of acting for the theatre: one citation having been taken from a text written by the foremost instructor of method acting, and the other from a canonical text in Western dramatic literature, the performance of which has historically cemented the careers of many actors in Anglo-American contexts. All three functions presuppose the presence of an audience of readers, whose responses Edward anticipates through frequent asides addressed to the second person singular pronoun. For instance, when Edward first learns about his mother’s suicide and her multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact him, he actively solicits the reader’s sympathy and validation of his emotions: “You can imagine my confusion. I was nineteen, an innocent, and my emotions were in an uproar” (9; my emphasis). Edward here positions his community of readers as already willing to imaginatively and affectively participate in response to events in his narrative. On the one hand, Wolfe rightly points out that “novel-readers are, of course, already alienated from a narrated performance by virtue of the fact that they are reading of it rather than experientially participating in it, and are thus less susceptible to effects of co-presence, collective response, and spectacle” (75). On the other hand, however, the psychological realism acquired from Edward’s method actor training inflects not only his self-conceptualization, but also his awareness of the reception of his narrative performance by an audience of readers who are co-present alongside his narrative voice in the live experience of reading the novel, especially given method acting’s implicit and inextricable consciousness of spectatorship and modes of reception. My emphasis on the theatricality of Edward’s performance as the narrator of The Confessions is a response to Wolfe’s wariness of the “figurative diffuseness” of the term “theatricality” when used as a metaphorical abstraction, which has often resulted in the “paradoxical effect of leaving novelistic engagement with theatre as art-form and industry undertheorized” (Wolfe 3). As a participant in the theatre-fiction genre, however, Martin’s novelistic engagement with theatre—vis-à-vis Edward’s narrative voice—is precisely constituted by the theatricality of his narrative style, which is expressed through a self-consciousness regarding his positionality as an actor in the narrative. In the following example, Edward reproduces his performance as a stage actor precisely by locating himself in the position of the audience, displaying a consciousness of the reciprocal and co-constitutive relationship between a method actor and his audience in his narrative: My emotions at that point were the strongest thing about me; they did battle with one another and I looked on, a helpless bystander. This, I realized, mirrored the position of the audience before the stage. I wanted to find a way to give an audience everything they needed to know about suffering, which is, after all, the subject of most drama … (10) Here, Edward’s narrative voice establishes two distinct but intersecting layers of intermedial reception. Even as he is able to inhabit the perspective of his theatre audience, he also self-referentially confides in the readers of his memoir regarding his intentions and motivations, disclosing the source of his internal suffering—the manifestations of which his theatre audiences witness through his performances on stage. In figuratively breaking the fourth wall by directly addressing his readers in a manner akin to a soliloquy, Edward’s departure from acting conventions that privilege psychological realism in his narrative has the effect of bringing readers closer to the affective experiences of actors playing their role, acting being a foundational aspect of Edward’s subjectivity as the narrator. Hence,

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the convergence of Edward-the-actor and Edward-the-narrator in turn produces a convergence in the layers of reception between audiences who receive Edward’s embodied performance in the form of theatre and audiences who receive Edward’s expressions of interiority in the form of the memoir. The self-consciousness that Edward’s narrative displays towards the presence of an audience of readers is made explicit by the formal and structural features of the memoir as a textual form. The memoir is characterized by the intertwining of two temporalities: the present moment of the reader in which the narrative unfolds, and the past moment of the event which is retroactively re-constituted through narrative representation. In the following lines, Edward offers a meta-commentary in which his present self belatedly acknowledges his urgent and irrepressible desire to become an actor when he was younger: What strikes me when I look back over these pages is not only my ignorance, which was prodigious, but my myopia. This is always the case with hindsight, when the inevitability of choices that seemed difficult and complex is revealed to have been obvious. I wanted to be an actor; I needed to act, to play a part; and I was driven by an ambition I scarcely understood. (83) In this moment of reflection, Edward draws attention to a kind of self-referentiality which performs the interpolation of the past into the present. This interpolation informs the presentation of his narrative voice as the subject of the fictional memoir. Writing about forms of autobiographical reflection, including the confessional and the memoir, Mark Freeman stresses that the concept of development in terms of plot and character “can only be predicted backward, in retrospect,” as the narrative voice attempts to reconstitute and represent the past in the present (9). On the one hand, the retrospective element of the memoir form distinguishes it from the liveness of theatrical performance, in which events conventionally unfold in the present moment of encounter between actors and audiences. On the other hand, theatre and the memoir—as a form of prose fiction—both offer possibilities for representing the coexistence of plural temporalities within a single moment of encounter. The coexistence of multiple temporalities allows Martin to experiment with the distinctions between the novelistic form of the fictional memoir and theatre by blurring boundaries between diegesis and mimesis. On one level, the present-tense interplay of voices through the dialogue between the characters mimetically enacts their roles as dramatis personae in Edward’s narrative, such that The Confessions may be considered an exemplification of Kathleen George’s formulation of “the stage of the novel,” where “novels play themselves out in the stages of our mind, flexible stages that allow for scene changes and passages of time the literal stage has often found bulky” (xv). However, dialogue and other forms of interactions between the characters, having taken place in Edward’s past, are framed within Edward’s diegetic process of representation as the narrator and implied author of the fictional memoir. Hence, as a form of theatre-fiction, The Confessions enacts the enmeshment of diegesis and mimesis in staging the narrative voice of the fictional memoir. Moreover, The Confessions is imbued with what George identifies as “past-tenseness,” which refers to “the strangeness of some stories, a kind of inexplicability that then has to be explained” even as the plot of the particular story moves forward in chronological time (8; emphasis in original). In the case of The Confessions, this “strangeness” refers not only to the inexplicability of Edward’s singular desire to perform as an actor, but also alludes to his potential estrangement from himself—an aspect that will be further developed in the following section. The final scene of the novel takes place twenty years after Guy’s suicide, and fittingly depicts an encounter that the older Edward has with an adoring fan. Edward is married to Madeleine and has become a successful theatre actor and administrator. Guy’s death proves so psychologically and emotionally traumatizing for Madeleine that she no longer takes an interest in theatre. One evening,

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while having dinner with Teddy, Edward is approached by a fan “in the manner of a supplicant” (282). The adulation that the fan publicly displays marks the culmination of Edward’s development as the protagonist whose career and public image as a veteran actor are affirmed and cemented within the fiction of the novel. However, this affirmative resolution belies the complex relationship that Edward shares with Guy Margate, whose status as the Doppelganger in the narrative reveals the precarity of Edward’s self-fashioning as a method actor and narrator and threatens to unsettle the narrative of personal and professional progress that Edward attempts to construct in the memoir.

On the Doppelganger and the Uncanny Martin’s invocation of the figure of the Doppelganger in the form of Guy Margate unsettles and disrupts the performance of Edward’s narrative voice and his journey of self-discovery, revealing the uncanniness that his narrative voice attempts to conceal and repress. My use of the term Doppelganger is not literal: I do not suggest that Guy is a material manifestation of Edward’s unconscious, as such a reading would contradict the realist impulse towards historicization that the novel attempts to construct. Instead, I invoke the term as one that is associative and allusive, constructing a dynamic of power between Edward as the narrative subject and Guy as his uncanny double. Reading the figure of Guy through the framework of the Doppelganger activates an examination of the novel that is attentive to what exceeds narrative representation on the part of Edward as the method actor-narrator. In this final section, I argue that the figure of the Doppelganger and its relationship to the narrative subject in The Confessions always threatens to disrupt the method actor’s self-representation, unsettling not only Edward’s reliability as a narrator but destabilizing the coherent sense of self he has attempted to represent through his narrative. In The Confessions, Guy’s rescue of Edward from drowning creates a relationality between them and precipitates the tension that constitutes much of Edward’s self-conceptualization as the narrative subject in the novel: I know what you’re thinking—what kind of ingrate is this? Here he’s encountering the man who saved his life not ten hours earlier and all he’s thinking about is who’s the better actor. Well, perhaps you’re right, but remember, Guy Margate has seen me at my most desperate. I had clung to him in panic, lost consciousness from exhaustion and fear; on the shore I had retched into the sand at his feet. Thanks to him it was understood by my friends, and especially by the woman I most desired, that my plight had largely been the result of my ignorance. (38) Here, Edward acknowledges that his attempt to reference theatre acting is merely a performative strategy in his discursive practice as a narrator to avoid confronting the moment at which Guy witnesses his abjection while being rescued. Edward’s physiological reactions and extreme emotional display of “panic,” “exhaustion,” and “fear” represent the antithesis of the total bodily control that is often expected of the method actor. Moreover, the drowning scene symbolically enacts Edward’s loss of control over the persona of the actor he had carefully cultivated, as well as the social performance he had hitherto constructed for the benefit of his fellow actor-friends and audience of readers. In The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature, Andrew J. Webber identifies several features of the Doppelganger, some (but not all) of which are useful for describing the relationship between Edward and Guy. One of these features is that the “Doppelgänger operates as a figure of displacement. It characteristically appears out of place, in order to displace its host” (Webber 4). Rather than being curative or restorative, Guy’s rescue of Edward paradoxically breeds resentment in Edward, and proves to be an unsettling emotional and psychological experience which spills over into

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his narrative: “As every actor knows, emotions succeed each other in sequences that are often inappropriate and counterintuitive—this is what polite society was created to conceal—but one sequence that rarely, if ever, obtains is for humiliation to be followed by gratitude” (38). Edward is unable to assimilate Guy within his subjective consciousness, and as a result, Guy is cast in the role of the uncanny double, the figure against whom Edward establishes his self-definition as an actor. The recursive relationship between the subject and the Doppelganger in turn produces a series of what Webber would call “rehearsals of a double role” (3) as Edward constantly modulates the construction of his identity in relation to Guy, whom Edward has cast in the role of the Doppelganger. Moreover, the near-drowning appears to be an experience out of time, troubling “the temporal schemes of narrative development” (Webber 3) and disrupting notions of linear plot development in the novel due to its recursiveness. This single encounter proves to be a driving factor in the development of the novel’s plot as well as a defining experience for Edward, influencing his relationships with other characters, especially Madeleine. The Doppelganger is also “a figure of visual compulsion”: the subject beholds himself via the Doppelganger, who in turn beholds the subject (Webber 3). This process of doubly seeing destabilizes the fixity of the ontological distinction between subject and object, and in turn, actor and spectator. In the novel, Edward and Guy are shown to bear striking physical resemblance to one another: “I don’t deny that, superficially at least, Guy looked a lot like me. We were both tall and lean, our eyes deep set, and our beakish noses jutted from the eyebrow line. We were a type; in a casting call, we were the handsome white guys” (37). Their physical similarity means that Edward and Guy compete for similar types of acting roles, and Edward’s ascendancy in his career is inversely connected to Guy’s inability to land significant roles later in their professional lives. A key difference in their physical features is the colour of their eyes: Guy’s are “a deep chocolate brown” while Edward’s are light blue, which gives him the ability to “turn the atmosphere on a stage to ice with a sudden glance” (37). Once again, emphasizing his superiority as an actor by virtue of his physical features seems to offer Edward a means of negotiating his profound discomfort at confronting his uncanny double. Later in the novel, Guy recreates Edward’s memory of the drowning, using his talent for mimicry to uncannily reproduce Edward’s reactions in ways that are both familiar and unfamiliar for Edward and the reader: He flashed his predator smile and then he did something profoundly unnerving: he flung his arms into the air and cried out in my voice “Help, help, don’t leave me.” It wasn’t just my voice, it was my inflection, my manner, my peculiar combination of actuated facial muscles, my eyes wide with terror, my mouth trembling with fatigue, it was me, drowning, but only for a moment, and then it was Guy again, chuckling at his own cleverness. (195) Guy’s talent for mimicry, which Edward had previously derided, now re-enacts Edward’s primal moment of crisis, in an act of return and repetition that evokes Freud’s unheimlich. The “unnerving” (Martin 195) and uncanny effect of the imitation is exacerbated by the physical resemblance between Edward and Guy, as the mimicry produces a representation that evokes Edward and is yet notEdward. As the Doppelganger, therefore, Guy plays a constitutive role in the plot structure of the memoir by compulsively returning to remind Edward—and the reader—of the event that could have marked the end of his life and existence. Finally, framing Edward and Guy’s relationship as between subject and Doppelganger respectively has the effect of creating ambiguity in Edward’s discursive construction of his sexuality by introducing the latent possibility of homoeroticism that potentially undergirds his sexual antagonism with Guy in their shared desire for Madeleine. Both Edward and Guy flirt with Madeleine, and she first enters into

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a relationship with Edward. They eventually separate when he moves from New York to Connecticut. Madeleine then marries Guy after becoming pregnant. However, she suffers an ectopic pregnancy and miscarries. Soon after this event, Edward has a dream in which he and Madeleine enter a bedroom “that looked a bit like a stage set” (203). After they share a kiss, Madeleine leaves the room and Edward starts to eat a turkey dish. Suddenly, Guy enters the room and begins to undress: “Naked, he fell to rearranging the pillows … Then he slipped under the covers and turned his back to me” (204). Madeleine re-enters the room and makes overtures to Guy, mistaking him for Edward. The scene concludes with both Edward and Guy laughing together at “poor Madeleine, who wept inconsolably” (205). Edward claims to have emerged from this dream feeling confused, and even dismisses it: “What a ridiculous dream. I didn’t even get to have sex with Madeleine; all I’d managed was a kiss” (205). However, he awakes with an “impressive erection” and acknowledges the “erotically charged atmosphere of the dream” (206). For Edward, the dream affirms Madeleine’s sexual desire for him and not Guy: “it was me Madeleine wanted. The sight of him [Guy] made her scream” (206). However, the narrative gaps in Edward’s account of the dream suggest the possibility that he might have been aroused by his voyeurism of Guy’s nakedness, a possibility that Edward does not consciously address in his narrative. Moreover, Edward and Guy demonstrate a shared scorn for Madeleine in the dream, which marks out her sexual difference from them and signifies her exclusion from the homoerotic dyad. Hence, the figure of the Doppelganger introduces an element of voyeurism in Edward’s narrative construction and representation of himself as a sexual subject. This possibility is belatedly affirmed by Teddy, who explains to Edward at the end of the novel that Teddy’s deceased partner Wayne believed that Edward and Guy were both in love with one another but “in denial” and that they “used Madeleine to get at each other” (276–7). Paradoxically, however, as Edward’s narrative depiction of Guy as an antagonist and foil figure becomes more emphatic, Guy’s own subjectivity and agency emerge more powerfully and independently from Edward’s characterization of him. During their confrontation at the end of the novel, which immediately precedes Guy’s suicide, Guy stares at Edward with eyes that “brimmed with hatred such as I have never seen before or since,” shocking and frightening Edward (243). Even as Edward attempts to encapsulate the sensations and effects of their final encounter, Guy’s humanity and suffering emerges powerfully and poignantly in the final moments of his life. Trapped by the failure of his career as well as Madeleine’s diminishing attraction to him, and restricted to functioning as a character in the advancement of Edward’s narrative in the fiction of the novel, Guy’s suicide marks his final exit from the stage as well as a departure from narrative representation in Edward’s memoir. In conclusion, Martin’s The Confessions serves to elucidate the contours of the theatre-fiction genre in its depiction of and fascination with the interiority of the actor-narrator Edward Day and in its historicized representation of the 1970s epoch of New York theatre. The novel also performs literary negotiations with theatre and the techniques and principles of method acting through the stylistic, structural, and formal features of Edward’s narrative voice, even as the Doppelganger—as a symbol of the uncanny—always threatens to exceed the representational frameworks constructed by Edward as the homodiegetic first-person narrator, offering a third point of reference that reveals the uncanniness undergirding the narrative representation of the method actor.

Note 1 A similar approach is taken by Claire Legendre in her fourth novel La Méthode Stanislavski (2006), in which references to major authors including Stanislavski have the effect of situating the novel “within the French history of life writing, the debates around its many manifestations (autobiography, autobiographical novels, autofiction), as well as claiming the legacy of some of their iconic authors” ( Schaal 26).

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Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987. Durham, Kim. “Acting On and Off: Sanford Meisner Reconsidered.” Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 23, no. 3, 2004, pp. 151–163. Enelow, Shonni. Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama. Northwestern UP, 2015. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. Routledge, 1993. Genette, Gerard. Paratexts. Cambridge UP, 1997. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell UP, 1980. George, Kathleen. Winter’s Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage. U of Delaware P, 2005. Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi, Columbia UP, 1986. Legendre, Claire. La Méthode Stanislavski. Grasset, 2006. Martin, Valerie. The Confessions of Edward Day. Vintage, 2009. Martin, Valerie, and Rob Smith. “An Interview with Valerie Martin.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 24 no.1, 1993, pp. 1–17. Rajewsky, Irina. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Inté rmedialité s, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 43–64. Schaal, Michèle A. “Claire Legendre’s Portrait of Hypermodern Society.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 37, no .1, 2013, pp. 26–50. Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating a Role. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, Routledge, 1961. Stokes, Claudia. “Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority.” American Literary History, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 201–221. Webber, Andrew J. The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature. Oxford UP, 1996. Winer, Laurie. “Wicked Stage.” The New York Times, 19 August 2019. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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12 “NO CURTAINS” Generic Divides and Ethical Connections in Ian McEwan’s Atonement Cara Hersh

Ian McEwan’s intricately plotted novel Atonement (2001) is filled with details that are subtly but persistently repeated throughout the text with references to windows, fingers, and trees, for example.1 It is striking, then, when a concept or image is introduced just once in this novel. The word “genre” constitutes one of these solitary references. McEwan introduces the term for the first and only time when the book’s main character, Briony Tallis, renounces the world of playwriting and embraces instead the genre of novels. Facing her sister, Cecilia, Briony states of her attempt to write drama, “The whole thing’s a mistake. It’s the wrong …” She snatched a breath and glanced away, a signal, Cecilia sensed, of a dictionary word about to have its first outing. “It’s the wrong genre!” She pronounced it, as she thought, in the French way, monosyllabically, but without quite getting her tongue round the r. “Jean? Cecilia called after her. What are you talking about?” (42; ellipsis in original) Invoking the spectre of a “wrong” genre, Briony suggests that different genres have relative and different values. Cecilia’s reference to a dictionary in relation to this term also invokes the question of how to define it. However, Briony’s mispronunciation of the word and Cecilia’s consequent miscomprehension suggests that such a definition might be hard to pin down. The novel’s sole reference to genres thus starts out by suggesting that they can be defined and differentially evaluated, but the term quickly ends up invoking confusion and misunderstanding; this isolated use of the word “genre” in Atonement tellingly works against the particularization and clarification the term usually denotes. Generic indeterminacy, in fact, appears to be an enduring characteristic of this novel and may be one of the reasons that the particularizing word is used only once, and why its sole appearance promotes confusion rather than classification in Atonement. Even from the beginning, Atonement frustrates the categorizing purpose of genre to differentiate and distinguish one group of texts from another. Generic distinctions continue to blur elsewhere in the novel. The difference between historical and fictional writing, for one, is invoked and ultimately obscured time and again in McEwan’s text. In the novel’s depiction of World War II, for example, McEwan raises the possibility that the genre of history is just as unreal and unreliable as the genre of fiction as the soldier Robbie muses, “Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history book? … No

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-16

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one would ever know what it was like to be here” (214). The novel supports this sense of generic proximity rather than distance between history and fiction throughout as its fictional, unreal characters consistently invoke real historical data. Details such as the historically focused Imperial War Museum, the enumerated history of a vase that plays a key role in the plot, and references to retrospective timelines such as a “halfhearted start on a family tree” (20), among others, reveal this novel’s investment in tracing various historical trajectories and make it harder to draw the line between the genres of history and fiction. This indeterminacy is heightened as McEwan intersperses details of his own father’s lived experiences as a soldier with made up elements of the plot and situates his characters in identifiable historical events such as the retreat from Dunkirk. McEwan’s engagement with history becomes self-reflexive and further imbricates literature and historical thinking as Atonement traces the transformations of the novel’s form throughout time. McEwan has been identified as “the heir apparent of a lineage of British moral novelists reaching back to Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, extending through the great realist writers of the nineteenth century to twentieth-century luminaries such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Iris Murdoch” (Wells 29). Moreover, he has been characterized by many critics as self-consciously reflecting on this historical genealogy in his writing and Atonement has been charged with “working out a literary historical legacy for the twenty-first century novelist” (Dancer 167). Metaphorically “haunted by a host of English novelists” (Cormack 70), this text imitates and alludes to a variety of texts from moments in British literary history, all of which have been categorized as participating in different generic subsets of the novel. Atonement has been identified as echoing, for example, classic realist Victorian novels such as Northanger Abbey (Cormack 79), modernist texts such as Woolf’s, and finally, with its epilogue’s metafictional turn, postmodernism (Finney 68–82). This pastiche of generic forms of the novel—all representing different literary periods—has garnered much attention from critics. Despite the relative paucity of direct references to genre within the pages of Atonement then, debates regarding the novel’s own generic standing constitute a large bulk of the critical conversation surrounding it. Scholars argue over which genre ultimately wins out. For instance, Brian Finney has argued that the ambiguity of postmodernism ultimately prevails (70). Meanwhile, Alistair Cormack claims that McEwan’s story “passes through modernism and postmodernism to return to the heart of the ‘Great Tradition’ of English novelists” and argues that McEwan’s text ultimately endorses the empiricism of realistic novels such as Jane Austen’s (79). These critics, then, while acknowledging the generic variety of Atonement, ultimately attempt to categorize it by identifying its most prevalent or enduring generic qualities. What if, however, the novel itself is working against generic classification in every way as Briony’s isolated and garbled reference to genre cited above suggests? And what do we do with the fact that Atonement’s one and only direct reference to genre differentiates between theatre and prose rather than the various sub-forms of the novel? The following chapter argues that McEwan’s text invokes generic categorizations and differences solely to deconstruct them. Moreover, much of this deconstructive work happens not between the nuanced and thus vulnerable boundaries of different types of novels but rather, and perhaps more ambitiously, upon the much greater divide that supposedly separates novels from theatre. Briony abandons her foray into playwriting once her script has been translated onto the stage and her renouncement thus appears to specifically target the embodied medium of theatre, which is ostensibly so different from the static status of written prose. Her denouncement of theatre in favor of prose naturally invites readers to contrast them and, like the critics who argue over which genre of novel predominates, choose one form over the other—is Atonement, like Briony, anti-theatrical? Or does it subversively value the modes of theatre more than those of the novel? McEwan’s brand of postmodern theatre-fiction eventually, however, puts more pressure on the “compare” side of compare and contrast, as it points out the overlapping connections between theatre and fiction. In doing so, it questions the very meaning of genre itself—and with it, the division and categorization inherent in this type of generic naming.

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Atonement promotes such questioning by intertextually crossing over the medial divide between novel and theatre and by repeatedly referencing Shakespearean plays in particular. This allusive turn to Shakespeare is telling and reinforces an ethos of generic similarity rather than difference since Shakespeare, too, played with the permeable boundaries of genres. Shakespeare’s plays appear to be generically different from the plays that preceded them and thus have been identified as radically unique; however, critics such as James Calderwood have demonstrated that what makes these plays different is how self-consciously Shakespeare acknowledges and reproduces the generic rules of his predecessors’ productions. Calderwood has also argued that this acknowledgement of similarity between forms of theatre extended to characters; he sees Shakespeare stressing the similarities that connect many of the humans who populate his plays. McEwan’s efforts to elucidate the resemblances, rather than the differences, between the genres of drama and novel, similarly participate in a larger ethical project; McEwan plays with and questions genre to suggest that people, like texts, are not fundamentally different but rather connected and similar. Ian McEwan’s engagement with and awareness of the connections forged between texts and people in Shakespeare’s plays helps him to argue that humans, like actors who can easily slip into and out of other people’s identities, are similarly marked by similarity.

No Curtains: Theatre as Presence in Atonement Atonement tells the story of Briony Tallis’s tragic misreading of the relationship between her sister Cecilia and the young Robbie Turner, and traces the implications of this misinterpretation through pre-war England, the Second World War, and up to the year 1999. McEwan’s novel initiates this long trajectory and its exploration of genre with its opening two words, “The play” (3). This striking reference to a play at the beginning of a novel asks readers to consider both the differences and connections between these two forms. At first, we seem to hear a stronger argument for difference between plays and novels as the literarily inclined Briony enthusiastically writes and plans an amateur production of her play The Trials of Arabella and then very quickly and vociferously becomes disenchanted with the medium. She considers drama’s degraded status in comparison to prose as she muses, The simplest way to have impressed Leon would have been to write him a story and put it in his hands herself, and watch as he read it. The title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages bound— in that word alone she felt the neat, limited and controllable form she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader—no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets, no seaside. No curtain. (35) Articulating what she sees as benefits of stories, their ability to be controlled, Briony clearly sets up a distinction between plays and prose. The tight control she has over her script-writing unravels when her cousins step in corporeally to perform The Trials Arabella; the twins’ delivery of their lines doesn’t comply with Briony’s original intent and Lola refuses to position her body according to Briony’s directions. When this uncontrollability of theatre comes to fruition, Briony abdicates her playwriting and directorial ambitions and instead embraces fiction-writing. Briony slips out of the room quietly at this moment in the novel and theatre is similarly rendered absent, ostensibly, from the bulk of what remains of Atonement. The main character in this novel articulates a clear preference for fiction over theatre early on, and invokes the question of whether Atonement supports this endorsement.

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Acknowledging the novel’s literary allusions suggests that it may indeed privilege prose over theatre. The epigraph, content, and style of the first section of Atonement align it with nineteenthcentury realistic novels such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Quarrie 194–5). Texts like Austen’s have been identified as decidedly anti-theatrical; critics such as Wolfe, Allen, and Barish, who have traced the history of theatre-fiction, identify literature of the Victorian period as often invested in distinguishing and privileging the putative privacy, constancy, and non-commodified attributes of novels over and against the opposing and therefore unappealing traits of theatre (Wolfe 10–12; Allen 29–65; Barish 299–349). It would appear, then, that Atonement is participating in this same anti-theatrical prejudice as it closely aligns itself with texts such as Austen’s, whose treatment of theatre contributed to the “rise of the novel” at the expense of the concurrent fall of its dramatic rival. Given this context, theatre could be invoked merely as a foil to prose in Atonement. Such anti-theatrical sentiment is also found, albeit more obliquely, when Cecilia catalogues Briony’s writing in the family library and places her sister’s work between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian on the library’s shelf (7). Briony notes that the action of placing a child’s writing in the library may be performatively enthusiastic and “a joke,” and chooses to ignore her sister’s shelving method. Readers who don’t ignore the joke will realize that this passing reference to Tertullian invokes an early Christian writer who penned a virulently anti-theatrical polemic. In De Spectaculis, Tertullian speaks out against the performance of sinful behavior on stage and inveighs against the malleability of identity in drama; in his detailed historiography of anti-theatrical sentiment, Barish identifies Tertullian as a key player in anti-theatrical lineage (49). Atonement appears, then, to invoke theatre in its opening chapters merely to denigrate this form. This pattern of anti-theatrical sentiment, inherited from the nineteenth-century novels Atonement intertextually invokes, ultimately seems to suggest that there are concrete differences that separate theatre from novels. What makes the physical placement of Briony’s writing in the library potentially “a joke,” however, is that on the other side from the theatre-averse Tertullian, Briony’s manuscript is shelved next to the writing of Rabindranath Tagore who, like the young Briony, was a cross-generic author who produced and embraced not only prose and poetry, but also theatre. Atonement’s epilogue eventually reveals, in a meta-fictional move, that the novel we are reading was actually written by the fictional Briony. The “joke” of this ambivalent cataloguing of her writing within the book—writing placed between opposing stances on theatre in the Tallis family library—thus becomes weightier as it invokes questions about where to generically situate the novel Atonement itself. The ostensibly vehement and clear denunciation of theatre at the beginning of the novel weakens. A close reading of Briony’s seemingly resolute disavowal of theatre similarly reveals a more nuanced stance on this form. Considering her conversion from writing drama to prose, Briony extols the unmediated characteristics of written prose as opposed to theatre by musing, “It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it” (35). If one does stop and wonder, however, this paean to prose starts to sound suspect and not quite so “obvious”: the “magical” process and “telepathy” that Briony invokes to describe the unmediated communication at play in prose are unreal, unscientific, and fanciful modes and thus not actually realizable. Moreover, Briony lauds the concrete and transparent nature of prose writing by stating, “Reading a sentence and understanding it were same thing … There was no gap between which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade …” (35). This assessment of fiction’s ability to clearly communicate is belied by imprecise and ephemeral words such as “some distance,” “bluish” and “smoke.” Her claim that no communicative gaps exist in prose is similarly contradicted by the many physical gaps that populate this prose description with words such as

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“distance,” “cobbled road twisting away,” and even the physicality of the drawn-out ellipses. Briony thus rejects theatre for suspect reasons, rendering the anti-theatrical prejudice of this novel and its move to differentiate itself from drama less concrete than it at first appears. Briony’s logic is also weakened with her insistence that prose is unmediated and avoids gaps between writer and reader. Her evidence for this claim takes the form of a paragraph packed with an intensely detailed description of this countryside scene, which paradoxically reminds readers that in theatre such a scene could be depicted in one unmediated instant with a backdrop and staging. The sometimes overwrought adjectives and details of Atonement’s opening section, which is highlighted in the above paragraph, thus reveal that unlike in a play, which directly presents people, actions, and objects, novels must rely on mediating and often frustratingly vague adjectives and adverbs because the writer is distant from the reader and can’t physically show their referents. In all, then, Atonement seems to participate in a pattern of anti-theatrical writing with Briony’s disavowal of drama and performance but complicates this renunciation with contradictory prose. The novel attempts to emphasize its difference from drama via negation—this character is not writing a play, it is the wrong genre, there are no curtains, etc.—but simultaneously prevaricates about its connection to drama. The equivocal positioning of Briony’s manuscript in the family library between two opposing views on theatre thus concretizes the novel’s ultimately paradoxical stance on the value of theatre within its pages. With this prevarication, Atonement thus embodies one of the most iconic theatrical lines ever uttered, “To be or not to be”, and the novel directly quotes this Shakespearean line (McEwan 57). This quotation from Hamlet, which brings together the most reductive form of opposites—being and not being—may also be one of the most scrutinized lines in literary history. In his 1983 book To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet, James Calderwood dissects Hamlet’s famous oration and focuses on the negative “not” in “not to be.” One of Calderwood’s main arguments is that statements of negation like Hamlet’s do not simply erase, but actually invoke an image. Concretizing this claim he explains, Even in a simple negative like “The castle does not exist” the logical explosiveness of “not,” which should blow the pretentious castle out of existence, is itself nullified in some degree by the fact that the castle is at least vaguely imaginable and the “not” is not. The negative cannot destroy without at the same time creating something to destroy. In doing so, it creates life to what it kills. (Calderwood 56–7) Strikingly, Calderwood’s analysis of how negation works in Shakespeare and other articulations invokes a castle similarly described by Briony in her celebration of prose writing. Applying this analysis of Shakespearean locution to Atonement invites us to consider that the novel, in a very Hamletian move, attempts to negate the presence of theatre by extolling its rival—prose—as better suited to describe buildings such as castles. However, like Hamlet, too, it ends up potentially invoking theatre’s presence even more; its articulated repudiation of theatre creates a latent spectre of theatre throughout this novel. Moreover, Calderwood provocatively suggests that statements of negation not only invoke the presence of disavowed entities, but also disturb the discreteness of things because they tend to connect what is and what is not (61). Atonement, too, I argue, ultimately breaches the divide between theatre and prose and connects these usually disparate forms. The negative treatment of theatre at the beginning of Atonement, then, rather than ensuring its absence, invokes a theatrical presence, which continues throughout the book; Briony’s renouncement of drama doesn’t quite hold and she “creates life to what [she] kills” (Calderwood 57). For example, resurrected from Briony’s trashbin, The Trials of Arabella reappears in the closing pages of Atonement as it is restaged for Briony’s seventy-seventh birthday. The play serves as a theatrical bookend to this novel, emphasizing its import. Moreover, the second run of this play is staged in the library where, as Briony notes, “all the books were gone … the only reading matter was the country magazines in racks

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by the fireplace” (346). It is telling that a text whose main character values books more than theatre ends with a play performed in the notable absence of novels. This suggests that despite Briony’s explicit rejection of theatre and the novel’s more subtle allusions to anti-theatrical sentiments, Atonement actually acknowledges a dependence on theatre that is revealed in its opening two-word invocation of theatre and then affirmed in its final pages. The anti-theatrical sentiments of the novel are invoked but ultimately contradicted beyond just the novel’s opening and closing pages; theatre is similarly denounced but also invoked throughout the novel. When first imagining her production of the Trials of Arabella, Briony envisions her brother, Leon, punching “the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of curtain” (4). This lack of a curtain factors into Briony’s later decision to leave theatre behind as she laments the need for material resources, like curtains, to realize theatrical visions and reminds herself that one of the failures of her production is that there are “No curtains” (35). She seems to suggest that the physicalities of theatre, including its necessary material accoutrements, are just too laborious to realize for a production such as hers. Here, the absence of a curtain appears to necessitate her abandonment of theatre. However, Atonement is actually full of curtains and, like the articulation of “no castle”, appears to invoke a presence by implying an absence. In fact, curtains appear consistently at least twelve more times in the novel throughout its three main sections, and serve as repeatedly extraneous, and therefore curiously provocative, details. Characters in the novel are constantly shifting, drawing, and interacting with curtains; among these many moments the book states, “Two rooms near Briony’s had been dusted down, new curtains had been hung and furniture carried in from other rooms” (8), and later describes a character hesitating, “Rather than risk drawing the curtains just yet” (67). Later another character begins to restore “order, remaking the beds, kicking off her high heels to mount a chair to fix the curtain” (94). In a novel that insists that details are important, these references suggest that a purported absence in the text is actually a muted but persistent presence and implies that theatre, with its associative symbols such as curtains, is more central to this novel than first appears. Despite these references and allusions to theatre and drama throughout Atonement, their presence in the novel has not yet garnered much critical attention. This scholarly gap mirrors a similar lacuna in general narrative analysis, which tends to overlook the role that drama plays in influencing modern narrative. The critic Brian Richardson bemoans this gap, stating, Modern narrative poetics rarely includes any extended analysis of drama; this is an unfortunate situation for two reasons. Prior to the eighteenth century, the most interesting narrative experiments were conducted on the stage. Also a close scrutiny of the drama can disclose some of the blind spots in narratologies centered around the modern novel. (Richardson 299) Richardson specifically identifies plays written before the eighteenth century as a helpful but overlooked site of narrative precursors. His claim that criticism has failed to look this far back holds true for analyses of Atonement as well. Despite their disagreements regarding the ultimate generic classification of Atonement, critics do seem to agree on the beginning and end points of the family tree upon which this novel grows as they generally situate its allusive style and concerns somewhere between the Victorian and postmodern eras. One exception to this trend in scholarship is articulated by Mary Behrman, who has turned the clock back to argue for the influence of medieval allusions in McEwan’s novel. Behrman suggests that the scholarly focus on the Victorian era and beyond when trying to categorize Atonement’s affiliations is due to a preoccupation with the novel form and that critics have maintained a narrow temporal focus due to their deeming anything other than a novel the “wrong genre” for a comparison (McEwan 42). Arguing against this presentist view, Behrman states, “Bringing works from other genres and, hence, other eras off the bench, however, enables critics to

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develop new ways in which to tackle McEwan’s dense tale” (454). Like Behrman and Richardson, I wish to bring other genres off the bench and attempt to fill a scholarly lacuna by exploring McEwan’s investigation of drama in Atonement. I also wish to bring in drama from an earlier era as I suggest that McEwan’s contribution to theatre-fiction extends back to an exploration of and reliance on early modern, and specifically Shakespearean drama. I argue that scholars who have traced a genealogy of literary history within the pages of this novel have not gone far enough back and are missing a key stage in Atonement’s enumeration of literary history. Like the purportedly absent but actually ubiquitous curtains, allusions to Shakespeare and his early modern plays appear persistently in this postmodern novel and extend beyond a single reference to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” The most obvious of these references occur when Shakespeare, his plays, or his characters are overtly referenced. McEwan inserts such allusions when enumerating the books piled on Cecilia’s table in her London flat and lists, “Gray’s Anatomy and a collected Shakespeare” (316). Similarly, when Briony’s twin cousins articulate their own anti-theatrical sentiments by pronouncing that they “hate plays and all that sort of thing” on the grounds that plays are just excuses for showing off, Briony counters with the question, “Do you think Shakespeare was just showing off?” (11). Hamlet, moreover, is specifically referenced in a conversation between Briony’s cousin, Lola, and the predatory Paul Marshall (57), and the character Robbie has various photos on his desk including one of “the cast of Twelfth Night on the college lawn, himself as Malvolio, crossgartered” (77). When the Trials of Arabella is finally performed at the end of the novel, Briony notes, “In memory, distorted by a child’s sense of time, it had always seemed the length of a Shakespeare play” (347). These intertextual references, and other allusions enumerated later, suggest a sustained interest in Shakespeare throughout Atonement.

Why Shakespeare? Atonement’s opening two words, its theatrically infused closing scene, and its allusions to theatre throughout, attest to McEwan’s interest in this form and specifically in Shakespeare. References to theatre repeatedly energize Atonement and situate it in the newly defined intermedial genre of theatrefiction. Theatre-fiction, the focus of this volume, encompasses novels and stories that “engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry” (Wolfe 2). Although itself a generic category that tries to define, differentiate, and categorize, the hyphenated status of this term nods to the permeability and overlap among genres. Atonement certainly participates in a sustained exploration of both theatre and fictional prose throughout its 351 pages, thus promoting generic connections, rather than boundaries, throughout. Atonement’s self-conscious generic affiliations have sometimes been identified as a shortcoming of the novel. James Wood, in an often-cited piece, praises all parts of the text other than its ending, complaining that the final pages render the book a “proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators.” Wood, like the critic Hermione Lee, who derogatively identifies the ending as a “familiar trick,” thus suggests that McEwan’s ending locates the novel concretely in the genre of postmodern, self-conscious fiction and suggests that this generic alignment devalues the novel as a whole in the pejorative sense of it being too generic, too familiar, too similar, to other books in the same category. This negative response to Atonement in academic criticism is mirrored in the popular press. A Washington Post list published in 2020 of the “Top 12 Most Disappointing Endings” in literature ranks Romeo and Juliet first and Atonement second (Charles). However, McEwan’s response to these negative responses is telling. Remarking on the Washington Post ranking he stated, “I was touched to be right next to Shakespeare” (qtd. in Kelly). McEwan’s proximity to Shakespeare extends beyond this enumerated list; he does to the genre of postmodern literature what Shakespeare did to the genre of

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revenge tragedy. One way that Shakespeare made his own writing unique is by mirroring what others had done before him but by enacting these echoes self-consciously, as I will unpack on the next pages. McEwan similarly establishes a connection with Shakespeare’s plays and with other postmodern novels in order to suggest that Atonement, like the Bard’s drama, rests on similarity in addition to innovation and uniqueness. Atonement’s brand of theatre-fiction, then, ultimately celebrates its similarity with other texts that critics such as Wood and Lee decry. Shakespeare, of course, has been lauded as a playwright who was able to innovate and usher in a completely new form of drama; his plays have long been identified as being fundamentally different from the drama that preceded him. However, James Calderwood unsettles this formulation. He acknowledges that Shakespeare does do something different in his plays but that this uniqueness is predicated on his ability to self-consciously reflect on the generic rules he is following. Calderwood argues that what paradoxically made Hamlet unique and different was its ability to identify how it was actually similar to the plays that came before. Calderwood makes this point in the final “yet” of the following statement: What has made Hamlet innovative as a revenge tragedy, a play uniquely itself within its genre, is its departure from the usual generic pattern in order to explore both the consciousness of its hero and the nature of its own form. By this means both play and hero distinguish themselves from their patronyms, the Ur-Hamlet and Old Hamlet, and name themselves as discrete entities. Yet as part of the paradox of the concrete universal, individual fulfillment may coincide with generic achievement: self and son may interpenetrate[.] (Calderwood 49) In other words, Calderwood argues that what makes Hamlet the play different is that it self-consciously advertises what makes it similar to the revenge plays it is imitating. Clarifying this point Calderwood writes, If self-exploration distinguishes Hamlet from other revengers, then form-exploration distinguishes Hamlet from other revenge tragedies … As such, they constitute an individualizing of the genre—perhaps even a subverting of the genre—in the very process of announcing its existence. (Calderwood 28) In this way, Calderwood suggests that Shakespeare doesn’t break free of his genre, but rather “revivifies” it (146). More specifically, Calderwood claims that Hamlet draws attention to the necessity of delay that characterizes the genre of revenge tragedy and it is the very spotlighting of this generic convention that both sets Hamlet apart from the other members of the genre and allows for it to participate in this generic grouping. Shakespeare’s self-conscious attention to the role of dramatic delay in the revenge tragedy genre to which he contributes is also a central conceit of Atonement, which connects this postmodern novel and the early modern plays it intertextually cites. This is evidenced, for example, in the oft-repeated phrase “Wait for me” in the novel. Having taught this novel for the past ten years, I can also attest to the fact that my students often complain that nothing really happens for the majority of the first part, which corroborates McEwan’s ability to delay action. The nuanced but persistent existence of curtains in the novel, despite Briony’s complaint that she has no curtain for her performance, also contributes to this sense of delay. Graham Wolfe explores the connection between curtains and desire in theatrical performances and quotes David Wiles who points out that “The curtain creates the spectre of a more profound truth behind it” (qtd. in Wolfe 161). The lowered curtain that precedes a theatrical production, the same curtains that populate Atonement, thus invoke the delay before such truths can be revealed at the start of a performance.

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One of the most prominent instances of delay, of course, is revealed at the end of the novel when Briony admits that the book we are reading is the novel she has written; this deferred signal of self-referentiality aligns Atonement with other postmodern novels and suggests its similarity to them. At the same time that McEwan complies with the self-referential characteristics of postmodernism, then, he also complies with the generic rules of Shakespearean tragedy by delaying the revelation of this characteristic; his move connects his novel to both other postmodern texts and the generic qualities of one of the most historically influential forms of theatre—revenge drama. By the end of his novel, McEwan connects his text to both postmodern novels and early modern theatre rather than establishing it as different and unique. Atonement’s engagement with and connection to Shakespearean drama—and thus its claim for generic similarity rather than division—extends everywhere, including to crucial plot lines. The tragic misunderstandings in Atonement, for instance, center on a letter that Robbie sends containing the word “cunt,” which Briony intercepts and misinterprets. This plot line is virtually ripped from the pages (or stages?) of the previously intertextually referenced Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s play, Malvolio similarly intercepts a letter purportedly not intended for him and famously remarks about its handwriting, “By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand” (2.5.77–80). This innocuous reference to the letter’s script actually spells out the word “cut,” which was slang for female genitalia in the early modern period. The articulated “and” also sounds like a “n,” which would have compounded this bawdy reading, as does the reference to “P,” or urine, in Malvolio’s speech. This purloined letter with its focus on a specific articulation of female genitalia in Shakespeare’s play is thus strikingly similar to the purloined letter in Atonement with its inclusion of the very same word. McEwan continues to reference Shakespeare’s plays elsewhere in the novel, albeit more subtly. For instance, when introducing Briony to readers, McEwan lists the treasures this girl has been collecting since her ninth birthday: “a mutant double acorn, fool’s good, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf” (5). All of these objects are, in some way, connected to Shakespearean props or material references. The Merchant of Venice’s statement, “All that glisters is not gold”, has been connected with fool’s gold, the rainmaking spell invokes Prospero’s opening incantatory storm in The Tempest, the skull has become an iconic stage prop of Hamlet, and the double acorn may be an oblique reference to Hamlet’s famous pronouncement, “O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not I have had bad dreams” (2.2.248–50). The connection between the acorn/nutshell reference and Shakespearean concerns is supported more fully by looking beyond the bounded pages of Atonement. McEwan’s 2016 novel, Nutshell, for example, retells the story of Hamlet from the perspective of an unborn child and reveals McEwan’s sustained interest in Shakespearean themes. And this is far from McEwan’s only demonstrated interest in the Bard and his world of theatre. Revealing his intense preoccupation with Shakespeare in a NYTimes interview McEwan responded to the question, “If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be?” with the answer, “I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man or any man of such warm intelligence” (“Ian McEwan: By the Book”). He echoes the influence that Shakespeare has had on his writing in another interview where he identifies the early modern dramatist as “more a resource, a liberation, than a shadow” (Guignery). Finally, although Atonement overtly references several Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet and Twelfth Night, as detailed previously, The Tempest is another integral play embedded within the lines. The title is repeated in the first sentence of the novel, albeit in a different context as Briony writes The Trials of Arabella “in a two-day tempest of composition” (3). The novel’s final sentence, too, ends with an echo of The Tempest as Briony signs off with “But now I must sleep” (351). In Prospero’s famous sign-off from his revels, he states, “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep”

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(4.1.156–8). From the beginning of Atonement to the end and everywhere in between then, McEwan connects his novel to a dramatist who self-consciously connected his plays to those of his predecessors.

The Ethics of Generic Similarity Just as Atonement explores the process of categorizing different texts into discrete genres so too does it explore the role of categorizing people into different “genres.” We see this in the many moments that the novel describes the struggle to understand others. For instance, Briony’s cousin does this work of categorization when she identifies Robbie as a “maniac.” The narrator lingers on this moment of naming with the statement, “Maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis. All these years she had known him and that was what he had been … Now his condition had been named she felt a certain consolation, though the mystery of the fountain episode deepened” (112). This act of classifying an individual, which mirrors the act of generically categorizing a text, provides consolation. This consolation is simultaneously rendered suspect, however. Briony feels “certain” consolation, which at once suggests solidified certainty but also could allude to an unknown and thus vague amount as in, “a certain number of things.” Moreover, rather than creating knowledge, this act of naming leads to more uncertainty as the mystery around Briony deepens. Just as the invocation of a delimiting word such as “genre” brings confusion in Atonement, so too does the putative naming of people. In this final section, I argue for a connection between the classifying of people and books in this novel and suggest that McEwan’s engagement with theatre-fiction is not a pedantic preoccupation with questions of literary genre, but rather a more pressing exploration of human relationships and ethics. Postmodern literature as a genre itself has been faulted for its solipsistic nature; scholarship sometimes suggests that postmodernism’s self-referential metafiction is solipsistic and uninterested in ethical issues. A reading of McEwan’s engagement with theatre as just an engagement with literature and its generic categorizations would, perhaps disappointingly, render it a book just about books and garner similar complaints. However, several critics have suggested that McEwan’s writing isn’t selfcentered and is actually outward looking. In his introduction to the recently published Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan, editor Dominic Head clearly and swiftly articulates the volume’s central claim by stating on its first page, “McEwan is at the forefront of a group of novelists who reinvigorated the ethical function of the novel” (1). My chapter on theatre-fiction in Atonement participates in this critical conversation by suggesting that McEwan’s sustained engagement with Shakespearean theatre contributes to his exploration of ethical concerns in his novels. In McEwan’s hands, theatre-fiction as a genre thus shows its potential for ethical engagement by linking the question of genre itself to the concept of alterity. McEwan’s engagement with ethics has been well documented in scholarship and reaches far beyond Dominic Head’s assertion. In reductive terms, the critics who analyze Atonement’s ethics often focus their attention on McEwan’s engagement with the concept of alterity (O’Hara 74–100; Houser 239–56; Finney 68–82). David K. O’Hara, for instance, posits the “uncertain relationship between selves and others” as the heart of Atonement and claims that one of the novel’s main concerns is to “manage otherness” (76). Such analyses are warranted given the novel’s investment in exploring how to exist in a world constituted by different experiences and perspectives. Briony, moreover, wants beyond all things to be different from others and expresses her overwhelming desire to be “unique” (72). Critics disagree, however, on how McEwan responds to this alterity. O’Hara and Finney, for instance, optimistically suggest that such alterity can be overcome via empathy while Houser argues that the novel questions the imperialism and efficacy of empathy. An exploration of the references to theatre in Atonement can contribute to this conversation and suggests, even more optimistically than O’Hara and Finney do, that Atonement minimizes alterity itself and may be pointing to the many connections and similarities we have to those who surround us.

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This is suggested in an important scene in the novel when Briony pauses to consider the possibility of uniqueness and in a series of questions asks herself just how different she really is from those who surround her by contemplating, did her sister matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with her finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? (35) Notably, Briony expresses these musings regarding the potential for everyone to be different and unique to themselves as questions rather than answers. She seems to end equally equivocally by stating in the conditional, “If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was” (34). Tellingly, the novel thus ends this philosophical exploration by considering the fact that everyone’s individual experience of uniqueness renders them similar in this experience. Although the novel appears to focus on the fact that everyone has different perspectives, it may ultimately suggest that the ubiquity of these different perspectives renders them similar rather than different. Shakespeare, too, considers and ultimately dismisses unquestioned individuality in Hamlet and suggests that this issue is equally important when considering questions of genre. Elucidating the connection between generic and human identity in Shakespeare, Calderwood points out that the title of Hamlet mirrors the name of its main character and thus suggests that literary form and human character are related: What applies in this regard to the hero applies also to his play. Having gone its own self-defining route, the play nevertheless honors its genetic and generic obligations at the end … Thus Hamlet the hero and Hamlet the play both achieve the independence of “being” attached to proper names and at the same time the breadth of “meaning” possessed by common nouns. (Calderwood 49–50) As Calderwood unpacks the overlapping topographies of names in Hamlet (Hamlet the play, Hamlet the father, and Hamlet the son), he suggests that prince Hamlet can never fully distinguish himself from his father: “Earning the name of ‘Hamlet’ for himself, invested with his own meaning, he has the more truly merited his father’s legacy. The singular name is now a symbol for the fusion of self and son wrought by a final act that is at once individual and generic, concrete and universal” (Calderwood 49). Just as Hamlet the play ultimately reveals itself to be the same as other revenge tragedies, just self-consciously, so too does Hamlet the character end up being the same as his father. This reading of the play thus works against the idea of difference alone and suggests universally shared attributes among humans. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Atonement also plays around with these overlapping names and identities and similarly suggests that we are more alike than we think. Several characters in the novel are so similar that they are indistinguishable—the twins Pierrot and Jackson for instance, and the soldiers in the hospital who “looked identical” (274). Other characters have subtle but striking physical overlays that connect them. Briony’s cousin, Lola, for instance, has a similar complexion to her friend Fiona, as both are ginger-haired and freckled. Characters also uncannily share physical attributes such as blisters on their feet. The third part of the novel in particular deconstructs individuality and Briony experiences a “stripping away of identity” as she works as a nurse (292). Her surname is replaced by the more generalized N. Tallis, thus making her indistinguishable from

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her sister and she is ultimately mistaken for a French woman by a delirious and dying soldier. For all its attention on different perspectives, then, Atonement subtly but persistently and optimistically reminds us of our shared experiences and the possibility to connect with one another. At one point, as Robbie suffers through the war he considers his desire to become a parent despite and because of all the suffering around him. The narrator remarks that this feeling is “Common, therefore human” (227). Just as it has stressed its commonality with other genres, this novel stresses the common and shared attributes among humans. Atonement additionally supports this sense of connection between humans by reminding readers of the communal aspects of theatre. Acting supports this idea of universality and connection as humans slip out of their own identities and into the identities of others. Atonement acknowledges this characteristic of theatre when Briony’s cousins are identified as potentially effective thespians; they can embody other personas despite physical differences as they “had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely resembled characters they were to play” (9). Moreover, in the final production of Trials of Arabella, Pierrot’s great-grandson playing a role magically conjures up both the play’s narrator and young Briony herself. As the young boy recites his lines Briony notes the actor’s ability to become someone else: “Suddenly she was right there before me, that busy, priggish conceited little girl” (346). And like Shakespeare, who self-reflectively commented on actors’ abilities to become other people by including multiple instances of disguise and dress-up within his plays, so too, does Atonement insert a similar meta-moment when The Trials of Arabella includes a “prince in disguise” (3), thus reminding us of actors’ abilities to metamorphize into others and celebrating the connections that make this personal translation possible. The novel also suggests this commonality by deconstructing the divide that typically identifies theatre as communal and reading as a private activity. Theatre is still presented as a group activity in Atonement; in both the preparations for and ultimate production of The Trials of Arabella, theatre is shown to involve multiple people. However, in a non-conventional move, reading is also described as involving more than just one solitary body ensconced with a book in hand. When Briony’s mother reads her daughter’s play she is physically connected to her daughter, “with the author’s arm around her shoulder the whole time” and Mrs. Tallis’s consumption of these written words prompt her to physically envelop “her daughter into her arms, onto her lap” (4). Later, when Briony imagines writing prose for her brother she envisions that she would put her book “in his hands herself, and watch as read it” (35). In this case, even silent reading in Atonement invokes an audience and suggests a more communal and shared experience. Despite their medial differences, both theatre and prose are rendered similar in this novel as they both invoke community and connection. Overall, then, Atonement promotes an ethos of similarity rather than difference and it does so, in part, by questioning the difference that genre establishes. The novel appears to emphasize its differences from theatre but this is belied by the rest of the text where theatre actually permeates. McEwan suggests that what looks like the difference is actually similar by intertwining theatre into his novel and by focusing on a form of theatre—Shakespeare’s—that specifically stresses similarity rather than just difference. And like Shakespeare, who connects the genre of his play with the identity of his characters (the identity of Hamlet is intertwined with the categorization of Hamlet), McEwan extrapolates this point so that it is not just a pedantic point about the genre, but one about people and their interdependence. At its core then, Atonement’s title, like Hamlet’s, blurs the differentiating function that names and titles usually confer by suggesting instead “at-one-ment” and supports this theme by breaking down generic differences throughout. McEwan’s novel thus encourages a reassessment of theatre-fiction and its potential for ethical engagement in literature. Invoking actors who can seamlessly slip into and out of others’ identities, this novel suggests that theatre is a rich medium to explore our similarities with others. Atonement celebrates the intermedial, hyphenated nature of

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theatre-fiction and suggests that this point of connection optimistically mirrors a similar connection among humans. At once filled with curtains and identified as lacking a curtain, Atonement plays with and ultimately questions the division that curtains embody and reminds us that they may ultimately rise to connect us with what lies behind them.

Note 1 Heartfelt thanks to Siena Di Sera, my undergraduate research assistant, who helped with researching and brainstorming this project and to the Provost’s Initiative Grant at the University of Portland for funding this undergraduate research experience.

Works Cited Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2003. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. U of California P, 1981. Behrman, Mary. “The Waiting Game: Medieval Allusions and the Lethal Nature of Passivity in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, pp. 453–470. Calderwood, James L. To Be And Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. Columbia UP, 1983. Charles, Ron. “Perspective | What Book Has The Most Disappointing Ending? Readers Have Many Opinions.” Washington Post, 19 October 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/worst-bookendings/2020/10/17/e9d8635a-0ee3-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html. Cormack, Alistair. “Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement.” Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Sebastian Gross, Bloomsbury, 2009. Dancer, Thom. “Limited Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan, edited by Dominic Head. Cambridge UP, 2019. Finney, Brian. “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 68–82. Guignery, Vanessa. “An Interview with Ian McEwan.” Études Britanniques Contemporaines, vol. 55, no. 55, 2018. Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan. Cambridge UP, 2019. Houser, Tammy A. “Reading Fiction with Levinas: Ian McEwan’s Novel Atonement.” Levinas and Literature: New Directions, edited by Michael Fagenblat and Arthur Cools, De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 239–256. “Ian McEwan: By the Book.” ProQuest, Dec 06, 2012, https://login.ezproxy-eres.up.edu/login?url=https:// www.proquest.com/blogs-podcasts-websites/ian-mcewan-book/docview/2215515813/se-2?accountid= 14703. Kelly, Hillary. “Why the End of Atonement Is a Triumph for Unreliable Narrators.” Vulture, 2021, https://www. vulture.com/article/atonement-twist-ending-ian-mcewan.html. Lee, Hermione. “If your memories serve you well …” The Guardian, 23 Sept 2001, http://www.theguardian. com/books/2001/sep/23/fiction.bookerprize2001. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. First Anchor Books, 2003. O’Hara, David K. “Briony’s being-for: Metafictional Narrative Ethics in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Critique, vol. 52, no. 1, 2011, pp. 74–100. Quarrie, Cynthia. “‘Before the Destruction Began’: Interrupting Post-Imperial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 47, no. 2, 2015, pp. 193–209. Richardson, Brian. “‘Time is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama.” Poetics Today, vol. 8, no. 2, 1987, pp. 299–309. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Constance Jordan, Pearson/Longman, 2005. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. Wells, Lynn. “Moral Dilemmas.” Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan, edited by Dominic Head, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 29–44. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing. Routledge, 2020. Wood, James. “The Trick of Truth.” The New Republic, 25 March 2002, https://newrepublic.com/article/ 63386/atonement-ian-mcewan-fiction.stylefix

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13 MAKING A SCENE The Craft of Writing Theatre-Fiction A Dialogue Between Mona Awad and Jessica Riley

A dimly-lit, dive-y Scottish pub. Dark red walls, worn wooden floors. A tower of bottles glowing golden behind the bar. A kilted BARMAN is polishing glasses with a red cloth. Judy Garland’s “Me and My Shadow” plays softly. The pub is empty but for a SHADOWY TRIO of figures at the far end of the bar. DR. JESS RILEY and DR. MONA AWAD, two elegant-if-slightly-dishevelled professors, enter together and somewhat hesitatingly survey the place. A spotlight faintly illuminates two barstools at centre stage. They glance at each other, take their seats, and silently accept their drinks—Golden Remedies—from the BARMAN, who pours with a sly grin. Once served, JESS and MONA raise their glasses, murmur a toast, and drink in unison. The spotlight intensifies as they turn to face the audience and smile. JESS:

Today, Mona and I will be having a conversation about her experience writing a work of theatre-fiction, the novel All’s Well, published in 2021. Set at a New England college, All’s Well tells the story of Miranda Fitch, a former actor turned untenured theatre professor who is suffering from chronic—and chronically mis-treated and disbelieved—pain. In her professional life, Miranda finds herself in a battle of wills with her students, who don’t agree with her choice for the annual Shakespeare production, All’s Well That Ends Well. Striking a bargain with dark forces, Miranda gets what she wants (and more), but must live out the strange, often terrifying—and theatrical—consequences offstage. Our interest today is to explore, through Mona’s experience as an author, what happens to novels when they spotlight theatre, with particular emphasis on the craft of writing in this provocatively intermedial genre, theatre-fiction.

Takes thoughtful sip. To begin, Mona, I wonder if you could briefly touch on the impetus for this book. Why write about theatre? MONA:

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(stirring her drink) Well, I’d had it in my mind to write about Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well for a while because when I initially read the play in grad school I had such a strong, negative reaction to the protagonist, Helen—her single-mindedness just really disturbed me. And that stayed with me. And then when I read it a year later I had a change of heart about the character. That’s when I had the idea to write a novel about a director, Miranda Fitch,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-17

Making a Scene

who’s just very irrationally attached not only to a particular play, All’s Well That Ends Well, but a particular reading of Helen: as a woman who is powerless within the world of the play when we first encounter her, but who claims a kind of agency to fulfil her heart’s desire. This particular reading of Helen reflects Miranda’s own sense of powerlessness back, as well as her own desire and longing for agency. And she pursues that vision for Helen and for the play come hell or high water. So, the single-mindedness that first disturbed me in Helen was a trait I explored in the novel, in the main character, Miranda. At the same time, my change of heart about Helen, my empathy for her pain and powerlessness, and my admiration for her enterprising nature informed Miranda’s interpretation of Helen. It was meant to be a disturbing comedy, which is how I see Shakespeare’s All’s Well. And then as I was writing I kept also thinking about Macbeth— A spotlight illuminates the SHADOWY TRIO, three suited men sitting with their backs to the audience, heads slightly inclined toward MONA and JESS. MONA glances over at them nervously. She takes another sip of her drink. —quite a lot, and I kept going back to … that play. And I think the reason had to do with my initial response to Helen and what disturbed me about her: that strategic, obsessive single-mindedness. They are obviously two very different plays but where they intersect for me is in the fact that Macbeth— A collective throat-clearing issues from the SHADOWY TRIO. A light flickers above. JESS and MONA lock eyes. —the fact that he, like Helen, circumvents the natural order of things in order to get what he desires. And in the case of Helen, you know, that just involves trickery—she gets what she wants and there’s no big price to pay, because it’s a comedy. But in the case of Macbeth— Lights flicker once again. The SHADOWY TRIO shift in their seats, clearing their throats more insistently. MONA takes a quick sip. —that circumvention takes him down a much darker path. I thought how interesting it would be to pursue both ways that doggedly, even unnaturally, pursuing a want or ambition might unfold—one going down the road of tragedy, one going down the road of comedy—and that’s when I thought: Okay, Miranda will want to direct her very specific, personally-inflected version of All’s Well, but the students will desperately want to put on Mac—(eyes darting to the SHADOWY TRIO)—The Scottish Play. So, there’s this one play—and this one life—that Miranda’s hell-bent on producing, and then there’s this other play—and this other life—that’s being thrust upon her. MONA takes a longer sip of her drink. JESS casts a wary glance at the SHADOWY TRIO, who appear contented for the moment. JESS:

That’s quite a challenging starting point for writing a novel: adapting not just one but two Shakespearean source texts, which are quite different from one another; inserting them into a narrative that is your own; and then also working to have these source texts talk to each other, to bring out the points of connection you’ve highlighted.

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JESS raises her glass and exuberantly toasts MONA’s accomplishment. They drink deeply. The SHADOWY TRIO, mimicking them, do the same. My next question, then, is how did writing theatre-fiction, specifically, facilitate this work? That is, in what ways did your choice to ground the novel explicitly in the world of theatre help you contend with the challenges of adaptation? MONA:

The biggest thing is that it gave me a lot of permission.

A collective snort from the SHADOWY TRIO. MONA and JESS exchange worried looks. MONA continues, nervously now, occasionally glancing over her shoulder at the door. It allowed me to manage both plays—I had one happening onstage, which was All’s Well That Ends Well. And then I had an immersive version of uh … The Scottish Play unfolding offstage. And then they inform each other throughout the novel. So All’s Well That Ends Well, which is being rehearsed by Miranda for the student production, represents a kind of controlled fantasy life that Miranda is very pigheadedly managing, and then Mac—Mackers finds its way into the offstage world in a way that is not contained; it’s omni-present, and she can’t control that world. But it threatens to come onstage early, it first arises as a result of the student mutiny: the play the students want is The Scottish Play. And following that scene— JESS: MONA:

The mutiny scene? Yes! That’s when Macbeth—

Lights flicker again. More throat-clearing from the SHADOWY TRIO. One of them begins to cough violently. —really bleeds into the offstage world of the novel, starting with the scene following the student mutiny, when Miranda goes to the pub, feeling sorry for herself, and she meets these three men who are the three witches. And the way that scene is written, I suggest that the stage in the previous chapter (the theatre space where Miranda rehearses her students) has extended, in a way, to the world of the bar. JESS and MONA look around at the bar, then at each other. A light flickers briefly over the SHADOWY TRIO. They are staring, smiling darkly as if in waiting. JESS and MONA draw closer to each other. JESS nods at MONA encouragingly. (nervously) And that continues. So, for example, when Miranda is at her physical therapy appointment she looks down at the carpet and notices it’s the same carpet they have in the theatre building. And that was really exciting to me—to extend the world of the stage into these other parts of the novel. Because it is uncontained, she can’t direct it. Like so many parts of her life, it’s unwanted and beyond her control. And that informs how fiendishly she’s trying to create, and control, her perfect All’s Well That Ends Well. JESS:

The permission, granted by theatre-fiction, to blur the line between the onstage world and the extra-theatrical world, makes me wonder how or to what extent this license also played out in your treatment of—or fidelity to—the source texts. Was there fluidity, or selectivity, that was made possible specifically because you were writing theatre-fiction?

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MONA:

JESS: MONA:

JESS: MONA:

Yes. I really wanted to focus on that point of intersection between Helen and um … Mackers—and then other elements of the plays I just borrowed freely and creatively, as needed. And other plays, too! The Tempest is definitely in there. And Richard III. And, beyond Shakespeare, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Yes! Absolutely, the “dark bargain” in the book is drawn from Doctor Faustus. At its heart, All’s Well is a careful what you wish for story. Richard III is directly quoted in the novel. Miranda invokes Richard when she refers to herself as a lump of foul deformity. And certainly, Richard’s charming monstrosity influenced my portrait of Miranda. Finally, Miranda gets her name from Prospero’s daughter in The Tempest. Both my Miranda and Shakespeare’s exist in a world of illusion that is also a kind of stage, manipulated by powerful forces. And a lot of those plays have magic in common. It was very fun to think about the use of magic in drama and theatre—and play with that in the novel. Extending the world of the stage into the extra-theatrical world, in the novel, allowed me to amplify the magical and supernatural elements—as well as the ambiguity around that: is this supernatural thing really happening to Miranda or is it a theatre trick, is it an illusion? I wonder: did you have other works of theatre-fiction in mind as you were writing? I was aware of—but purposely avoided, with one exception—the novels in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. This was because I didn’t want them to colour or limit my idea of what was narratively possible in a Shakespeare adaptation. Those novels take on one play, and I was drawing from two so it was a very different sort of prospect. The one Hogarth novel I did read (and draw creative strength from) was Hag-seed by Margaret Atwood.

At the mention of Atwood, a low hiss issues from the SHADOWY TRIO. I’ve always been a fan of Atwood’s genre-breaking style and I thought her adaptation of The Tempest was magical and brilliant. And actually, unlike others in the Hogarth series, Hag-seed isn’t just a Shakespeare adaptation but also a work of theatre-fiction—the story centres around a prison theatre production—so it was especially inspiring. JESS:

MONA:

JESS:

I’m curious to hear whether or how taking theatre as your subject and setting for All’s Well informed the craft of novel-writing. How did working specifically in the genre of theatrefiction inform things like characterization or structure? Well, definitely characterization. Miranda is a first-person narrator. This is the case in my earlier novels too—but with those narrators their internal thoughts are just that: internal. They’re not being addressed to anyone but themselves. Miranda is very different. Her voice is an outward-facing voice; it is, to varying degrees, imagining an audience. There are moments of direct address. And she’s trying to get the reader to sympathize with her. She often says, “Can you believe this?” when she’s in the midst of some sort of conflict. And that was really fun, to have this character who is both consciously and unconsciously trying to directly engage with the reader that way. She’s also reading everyone else “onstage”—since the stage extends to the whole world of the novel—so there are a lot of asides, where she shares with the reader what she really thinks about a person and what they’ve done or said. Normally, I wouldn’t do quite so much of that in a novel—that filling in? But because she’s a performer, because she’s a director, because we’re in that world, it felt right; it felt natural for her to have that impulse. It’s a source of so much pleasure for the reader too. In that great tradition of Shakespearean characters like Iago and Richard of Gloucester, who address the audience directly and

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foster in us a kind of complicity through their privileged positioning—their relative proximity to the audience, as well as their charisma— MONA and JESS grin at the audience, then toast. The SHADOWY TRIO groan. For the reader there is a pleasure, a kind of spell-binding, theatrical magic, in that dynamic—being both repulsed and seduced by a character who speaks to us so intimately, and so manipulatively—that is definitely going on with Miranda. BARMAN walks over to JESS and MONA. He smiles and they smile back. He looks down at their empty glasses, raises his eyebrows. They nod their heads. Yes. He pulls a bottle from beneath the bar and pours while they watch, a little mesmerized. Then he winks at them both and saunters away. JESS and MONA take a sip. Sticking with the topic of pleasure (pausing to follow the BARMAN with her eye), and charisma (they toast), I wanted to ask about the affective—and conspiratorial—power of Miranda’s relationship with the reader. The choice to narrate in the first person is definitely key here—and it has a peculiar effect, I think, that’s partly vicarious: we experience things—like her dizzying manic state once the pain is lifted—along with Miranda in a way that we might associate with traditional first-person narration. But at the same time, there is a paradoxical dynamic of distance and proximity that feels distinctly theatrical; like Iago or Richard of Gloucester, she draws us close with her direct addresses, but it is also these moments that disrupt the complete identification or immersion we might otherwise experience with our first-person narrator. I wanted to ask: in those moments when Miranda addresses us directly—when she says, for example, “Can you believe this?”—did you imagine the “you” as a solitary reader, or as a larger, communal audience? Who does Miranda imagine she is addressing? MONA:

JESS:

I think it’s both. She’s imagining an audience and so there is a performative, theatrical element to her delivery, to the nature of her confessions. But she is revealing something true, something vulnerable about herself too. She wants to convince, she wants complicity, she is asking for empathy. And in doing so, she is seeking an intimate, personal connection with the reader. And that’s where the intimacy of a solitary reader comes in. Ultimately, I think using first person, and playing with direct address, and doing so in a work of theatre-fiction, allowed me to engage both kinds of audiences: the imagined theatre audience and the solitary reader of the novel. Miranda’s pain is important to mention as well. Her real pain and her performance of pain, the way she is forced to perform it for so many people—the medical community, her colleagues and friends, and the reader, too. Often, and to varying degrees, this pain is met with disbelief by these “audiences.” And indeed, this is something you play around with very deliberately in your writing. The novel’s opening words are “I’m lying,” delivered there, as elsewhere, ostensibly as a physical description; it is Miranda-as-narrator conveying to the reader that she is lying on the floor. But because she’s an actor, because it’s theatre-fiction, this statement also evokes and is bound up in a distrust of actors dating back to Plato. And the novel takes place in the historically Puritanical setting of New England, which further inflects the novel—and Miranda’s pain—with anti-theatrical prejudice, with stigma against histrionics, and even the rhetorical or conceptual equation of actors with witches. Can you comment on these choices, and on the ways in which writing theatre-fiction facilitated your efforts to write about issues related to chronic pain— particularly how

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women’s pain is (mis)treated, disbelieved, and exacerbated by the medical community and the wider world? MONA leans forward, eager to answer this question, but is disrupted by a burst of angry table-banging from the SHADOWY TRIO. MONA:

I’ve lived with chronic pain myself, and one of the things that struck me profoundly about the experience of chronic pain, really any kind of pain that’s not visible, is communicating it to others not only for the purposes of relief, but to be understood, to feel less alone in it. In order to explain my pain, not only to doctors, but to friends and colleagues, I would find myself performing it a little. And that act of performing inherently causes you to second-guess yourself, which is so scary: the pain is a reality that you’re living but because of the performance element of sharing it, your reality immediately becomes suspect. I think ultimately that’s what led me to theatre-fiction, to choosing a former actress and theatre teacher as a main character, and to setting the story around a theatre production. I think there’s an inherent relationship between performance, pain, and belief. And, of course, gender plays a role in credibility too. Because Miranda is a woman and because she performs for a living, she always feels like she’s faking to others. Lying. In the novel, there’s a scene where the administrators of the college are confronting her and they tell her to sit down in this office chair. She knows if she sits down, she’ll be in so much agony but she can’t imagine telling these three men, her superiors, that she wants to stand and then towering over them. She’s afraid that they’ll think there’s the drama teacher up to her old tricks again. And she actually experiences this meeting, this performance, as a kind of witch hunt, where she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

The banging of the SHADOWY TRIO resumes, accompanied this time by a howling wind outside. The bar windows rattle. JESS and MONA look at each other like they might flee. They debate it with their eyes. But something is keeping them trapped here. JESS:

MONA:

JESS:

Continuing to think about the craft of novel-writing, I’m curious whether writing theatre-fiction, specifically, informed the structure of this novel. Did writing about theatre, and setting the story in the world of theatre, inform your structuring of All’s Well? Absolutely. In a few different ways. One thing that was so useful was having the school term to structure the story, because this is also a campus novel, and it’s a university theatre production. But it’s not just the school term that defines the structure; it’s the process of rehearsal. The book begins right after the table reading and ends following opening night. Just knowing that structure, I kind of knew where to build conflict, where to speed things up, where to slow things down, where to step outside of the core of this world, which is the mainstage at the school, and give the story some air with Miranda’s scenes elsewhere. It was also useful to look at the five-act structure when I was conceiving of Miranda’s escalating crimes, and her relationship with the witches. All of that informed the structure of the novel and was very useful. It occurs to me as well that the structural choice to set the novel over an academic term—specifically the choice of the second term—carries built-in, conventionalized expectations because, at least in North America, where the novel is set, we begin the second term in the cold, dark depths of winter and we move, inevitably, toward spring. That is, we know we’re progressing toward a pastoral world—the kind of world in which we might conventionally expect to find a happy, comedic outcome. At the same time, the reader is taken through what feels like a tragic trajectory in the plot that unfolds for Miranda. This fosters competing expectations for where we will end up, when the novel concludes. I wonder if you might speak about how you handled the ending, and perhaps how writing in the genre of theatre-fiction, specifically, informed the writing of it?

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MONA:

I actually wrote in two onstage endings that precede the final ending of the novel. There’s the play-within-the-play, the student production of All’s Well that Ends Well, that opens on the mainstage at the end of the book, happily, as befits a comedy. But for Miranda’s offstage arc—the twisted version of Macbeth—

Sounds of thunder. JESS and MONA look at each other. They sip, steel themselves. Sudden, heavy rainfall outside. (Loudly, over the storm)—we reach the climax of that offstage play at the same time. Indeed, the offstage play, the distorted version of Macbeth Miranda has been living out in her life, in the wider world, actually moves onstage at this point, into a second performance space in the theatre building. Miranda gets drawn, against her will— because it’s important that she is not a willing performer—into a black box theatre in the school building and is forced to perform for the three men who are the Witches. A low, collective hiss from the SHADOWY TRIO. MONA closes her eyes, as if recalling some past horror. And it’s awful. Tragic. But because this is one novel, one story, the two threads—the comic and the tragic parallel arcs—had to come back together again. So, following the awful nightmare of the black box performance and still deep, psychologically, in the character she performs in the black box, Miranda goes and crashes the mainstage. And that’s when the two arcs, the two genres, come together or collide. And then the subsequent, final ending of the novel presents a resolution for both “plays” or storylines. But I don’t think I could have done that –working away and coming back together—without the two stages in the ending, without the context of theatre as the scaffolding. JESS:

I love the way the climax of the novel plays out simultaneously on two stages, meeting our disparate generic expectations in such different ways, and then coming together to tie everything up in the denouement. It is an elegant structural choice (they toast).

JESS pauses. The SHADOWY TRIO have taken on a heightened sinister quality. When the lightning flashes, their shadows are exaggerated, reaching. There is an electric, urgent charge in the air. JESS and MONA shiver. There’s something else I have to ask you about. Earlier, we talked about how one of the permissions granted by writing a work of theatre-fiction, one of the creative potentials you explored as you crafted this novel, was the ability to extend the world of the stage into the extra-theatrical world, into the wider world of novel, and into Miranda’s life. You mentioned this allowed you to amplify the magical and supernatural elements and consequently to play with ambiguity: Is this really happening to Miranda, as you put it, or is it a theatre trick, an illusion? I have to ask: Do you see that ambiguity as unfettered, in the novel? Is anything certain? Did you have an idea of how you wanted your readers to respond to this ambiguity, where you wanted them to land with these questions? JESS holds MONA’s gaze. The light on the SHADOWY TRIO intensifies. MONA:

Do they have to land at all?

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An impatient chorus of throat clearings from the SHADOWY TRIO. An ominous thunderclap. MONA flinches. JESS’s lips involuntarily twitch. JESS:

Another way to put it, I think, might be to—(she fumbles in her shoulder bag, finds a notebook)—might be to quote … um, Graham Wolfe. You know his work on theatrefiction? Of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (finding the relevant note), Wolfe observes that although the book is “praised—and advertised—on the basis of [a] blankly postmodern agenda” it is (pausing for emphasis, then louder) “far from reducible to a postmodern ‘funhouse’” (94).

The SHADOWY TRIO grows quieter. Rain patters outside, more softly now. MONA:

(Taking a breath, gaining courage) I think one of the most challenging aspects of the fantastic is holding the reader in an ambiguous space, a space very like the stage, between the real and the illusion, where both possibilities remain open, neither ever closed. As a writer, when I enter this space, I have to relinquish certainty. I’m not necessarily in control. It’s a tricky space.

The SHADOWY TRIO breathes in unison. Their light grows softer. JESS: MONA:

Do you ever wonder, is it worth it? (pause) The trickiness. It is very tricky. But it’s the place I like to go. And I hope readers will go there with me.

The lights flicker on the SHADOWY TRIO. JESS and MONA smile at each other. Their drinks pulse with a light of their own. They sip.

Works Cited Wolfe, Graham. “Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal: Theatrical Fantasy and the Gaze.” Mosaic, vol. 49, no. 3, 2016, pp. 91–108.

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PART III

Performing Selfhood and Authorship through Theatre-Fiction

14 DOROTHY LEIGHTON’S DISILLUSION AND NEW WOMAN EXPERIMENTATION Renata Kobetts Miller

Theatre-fiction often takes as its subject the figure of the actress. Among the Victorian novels in which actresses either dominate or occupy a significant position in the plot are Charles Reade’s Peg Woffington (1853), Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862), and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). The actress’s engagement with public audiences differed from the domesticity that was typically associated with Victorian womanhood, and she therefore frequently stood for what Victorian writers for both page and stage saw, variously, as the theatre’s hallmark but also its weakness: the immediacy of its audience.1 Dorothy Leighton’s little-known three-volume novel Disillusion: A Story with a Preface (1894), however, focuses not on actresses, but on the figure of the playwright, as its opening paragraph indicates: “Yes, the play was a success, a distinct success. All the critics were agreed for once, except a little bilious person who reveled in melodrama and disliked realism. The applause was genuine and prolonged, and there were loud cries of ‘Author!’ ‘Author!’” (1: 1). As a character observes late in the novel, this play’s premier is the event that launches the novel’s entire plot, which explores how a latenineteenth-century realist playwright, the protagonist Mark Sergison, is situated at the intersection of the artistic and Society worlds. It is because of Mark’s collaborator Linda Grey and her political radicalism—she and Mark are socialists with advanced views about marriage and gender roles—that Disillusion is a New Woman novel as well as a work of theatre-fiction. It comes as no surprise that theatre figures in a novel that grapples with women’s expanding social roles. Linda contrasts starkly with the actress, however, as a figure for women’s participation in the public sphere. While actresses are alternately powerful and vulnerable because of their public exposure, Linda is the silent, unnamed co-author of Mark’s play. Because the character of Linda gestures towards women’s labour in the theatre that went unseen—labour that nonetheless could lead to theatrical innovation—she reveals how the theatrenovel, like the actress novel, was an important genre for women in the nineteenth century, as women writers grappled with their position as public figures. Disillusion’s author was herself a figure who tended to be obscured by the men in her life, and she remains little known today. Leighton was the professional name of Ethel Mary Forsyth, who became Mrs. G. C. Ashton Jonson upon her marriage to a musicologist in 1895.2 She was co-manager, with founder J. T. Grein, of the Independent Theatre Society, a London subscription society that was active from 1891 to 1897, and she took charge of the Society when Grein stepped away. As her husband described it in his article, “A London Theatre Libre,” in 1894 Grein

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-19

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associated with himself in the direction of the enterprise, Mrs. G. C. Ashton Jonson, who, under the nom-de-plume of Dorothy Leighton, had written two novels and a play called “Thyrza Fleming,” which had attracted his attention. The three of us then incorporated a small limited company called “The Independent Theatre, Limited,” and opened a season with “Thyrza Fleming.”3 (125) The Society sought financial independence from commercial mass audiences and creative independence from the government censor, and it championed literary drama and realist drama, including the plays of Ibsen. It is thus significant that the disagreeable critic in the opening lines of Disillusion preferred melodrama over realism: the drama at the core of Disillusion is the type of drama that Leighton herself championed. Writing about New Woman Drama, Sally Ledger notes that “There was considerable interplay between the New Woman fiction and drama of the period: some of the popular New Woman novelists turned to playwriting later in their careers” (51). Indeed, Thyrza Fleming revisits many themes and elements of Disillusion, and its title character is a famous actress who embodies a form of New Womanhood. But while Leighton’s Thyrza Fleming has received passing mention in work on New Woman drama, Disillusion remains neglected.4 Leighton and Disillusion, however, seemed to have greater prominence in the 1890s: a notice of its publication identified her as not only the future manager of the Independent Theatre but also as “quite a young lady, and well known as a novelist” after the publication of her first novel As a Man Is Able in 1893 (“The Stage,” Manchester Times, 7). Elaine Showalter names 1894 as “the very year that the term ‘New Woman’ made its debut” and Disillusion as one of a bevy of New Woman novels published in that year (12). Writing in 1995, Showalter observed that “virtually all [New Woman novelists] have disappeared from standard literary history. Despite the energetic feminist revivals of the past twenty years, almost none of their work is currently in print” (12). Even though an additional twenty-five years have passed since Showalter’s comment, during which time works by novelists such as Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner have become reasonably familiar to readers of Victorian fiction, Disillusion has never been recovered and remains unknown. Ledger examines Leighton, not as a novelist, but as one of “The New Woman playwrights of 1894—Janet Achurch, Constance Fletcher and Dorothy Leighton—[who] did not enjoy the popular success of the female New Woman novelists, but their plays dramatically stage the very same issues concerning gender and sexuality that the novelists of the period sought to address” (53). Ann L. Ardis, on the other hand, focuses on Leighton as New Woman novelist, asking: “And what happened to Ella Hepworth Dixon, Menie Muriel Dowie, Dorothy Leighton, and George Paston? If these writers published nothing after their New Woman novels, were their retreats from the literary marketplace ‘honorable’?” (166). Both Ledger and Ardis’s single-form approaches are symptomatic of a genre divide that exists in Victorian Studies. Jacky Bratton has explored how the subordinated place of theatre in Victorian Studies has been shaped by how it was treated by critics writing in the Victorian era, and Katherine Newey has traced how the “disappearance” of the “highly visible … and respected” professional woman playwright resulted from “the reorganization of capital and culture in the early nineteenth century,” which led to increasingly rigid gender ideologies and changes in the theatre, changes which even now contribute to the neglect of Victorian drama (34–5). Theatre-fiction was frequently used by Victorian novelists to reify this divide, as J. Jeffrey Franklin, Emily Allen, and I, among others have explored. But theatre-fiction can also work to erode these categories of form, as Graham Wolfe has examined. While it is possible to set Leighton’s novel and play side-by side in order to consider how these works reflect on matters of form and the particular affordances that the novel and the drama offer in considering the theatre, we can better understand Leighton’s career by adopting the intertextual approach that adaptation studies has developed, shifting the emphasis from contrast to

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comparison or contiguity, so that in addition to considering how each work participates in the history and conventions of its particular medium, we also observe how Leighton’s ideas develop across different forms.5 In so doing, this essay brings together a woman writer’s career that has never been considered as a coherent whole, as no one has understood that her various identities are portions of a unitary woman’s career.6 As we examine these works in relation to each other, we come to see Leighton as a woman who was seeking ways to engage with the world. Leighton was searching to find her voice and, in fact, both Disillusion and Thyrza Fleming represent experiments in New Womanhood in both their content—each explores different characters’ versions of feminism—and in the act of their writing and publication, production, and performance. After her father’s death Ethel Forsyth had published her father’s memoir, signing the preface, which briefly foregrounds her purpose and methods, even though the book’s title page only states, “edited by his daughter.” As Ethel Forsyth she was also mentioned in an advertisement in the Athenaeum on 30 July 1892 for a pamphlet titled “The ‘New Gospel of Interpretation’: being an Abstract of the Doctrine and a Statement of the Objects of the Esoteric Christian Union,” a theosophical organization founded in November 1891, for which she served as Honorary Secretary, listing her address at 37 Chelsea Gardens for Society correspondence, and for which Edward Maitland is identified as president-founder (175). In November 1894, however, Forsyth wrote from the same address to the Morning Post as Dorothy Leighton about her play Thyrza Fleming. Taking on the name Leighton seems indicative that she was experimenting with various ways to play a role in the public world. While a review of Disillusion in the Pall Mall Gazette suggests that Leighton was trying to find her milieu, it also reveals how social attitudes posed particular challenges to women addressing politics through fiction: When Mrs. Leighton can tear herself away from politics, a region in which she is a curious mixture of the remarkable views of the I. L. P. [Independent Labor Party] and ignorance, she is intelligent, and at times clever. Here and there we find passages vigorously conceived and well handled, and we feel that it is a pity that Mrs. Leighton’s undoubted talent should not have been employed in writing of men and women instead of impossible puppets. (4) The fault that the review finds with the novel’s characterization is secondary in sequence, and perhaps also causally related, to the review’s distaste for the novel’s political bent, which may have been objectionable because of the author’s gender. As Leighton attempts novel-writing to find her voice, Disillusion appears to respond explicitly to other theatre-novels. Henry James was a subscriber to the Independent Theatre Society, and Disillusion contains echoes of his theatre-novel The Tragic Muse (1889–90). Both The Tragic Muse and Disillusion incorporate the social lives of British diplomats as they examine the intersection of the worlds of theatre and Society, work and love. As he is celebrated for his successful play, Mark, in Disillusion, begins to move in Society circles, where he becomes romantically involved with Celia Adair. Celia’s father is a member of the diplomatic corps, and as Mark is torn between two women, Linda and Celia, Leighton employs a third-person omniscient narrator to detail the internal subjectivity of each as well as how they each appeal to Mark. The Tragic Muse represents the choices that Peter Sherringham and Nick Dormer face as they are each torn between the world of the arts on the one hand and diplomatic or political futures on the other. Their motivation derives from Miriam and Julia respectively, who are also the respective love interests of the two men. In contrast, in Disillusion the world of Society and diplomacy is, before the end of the first volume, devalued as it is shaken by scandal when Celia’s father commits suicide as a result of a sexual indiscretion. In Disillusion, it is art that offers meaningful work, while the Society woman offers neither respectability nor social stature.

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As a woman artist, the character of Linda Gray in Disillusion is a systematic consideration of New Womanhood as a mode of existence. Linda displays all the hallmarks of a New Woman: she lives alone in a rented flat in London, works as a typist, and is a member of the Spade Club, which started with a small number of eighteen women who enrolled themselves as members on the understanding that they were willing and ready to promote the advancement of humanity: not by platform-speaking, divided skirts, or glamour for the franchise, but by steadfast determination to strive to live up to their ideal of true womanhood. They believed that the Woman Question was but a step on the ladder of Universal Progress; that all measures which aimed exclusively at the emancipation of woman were inadequate, in that they ignored the man’s need for emancipation from his ideas about woman. They admitted the crying need for reform in the laws relating specially to women, but knew that the first stone in the erection of a perfected human structure must be laid by man. (1: 31–2) The partnership that Linda enjoys with Mark is marred by the arrival of Celia, who contrasts markedly with Linda’s austerity and seriousness. Celia is described in terms often associated with actresses. A room she has arranged in her father’s home is “a complete reflection of its owner’s mind, and was a combination of Art and Artificiality” (1: 59). She dresses with dramatic effect and uses the artifice of cosmetics: She was dressed in white unrelieved by color, and her complexion was the only brilliant thing about her. In this respect she called art to her aid, but was such an adept at it that even women were for the most part puzzled to know whether that exquisite pink colour was a fixed quantity or variable.7 (1: 59) Even as Linda considers Celia her complete opposite, and even as each woman views the other with antipathy, in some sense they are both forms of the New Woman. They were also both expressions of worlds known to Leighton, given not only her work as a writer but also as a member of a spiritualism society, and the fact that Leighton’s father, like Celia’s, was a member of the diplomatic corps. Celia chafes against the conventions of her world and longs for a less circumscribed, more adventurous life, and it is this that attracts her to Mark, who urges her to become familiar with “Bohemia,” “not the frivolous, superficial side of it” that she already knows and considers “vulgar,” but “the land of workers, toilers, bread-winners, the Democracy: they are the only people who really live, who are never bored, who enjoy keenly and suffer keenly” (1: 224). Celia has no such socialist leanings; she focuses on pleasure rather than work. Her yearning for societal change focuses on her freedom to pursue her own impulses, and she says, “It’s because I know the world, as you call it, of Mrs. Grundy so well that I am sick of it. I want to make a different world. I want to claim the right to be natural and spontaneous without being eternally thought ‘fast’; and if half-a-dozen society women would do the same, we might reform Society, and even convert Mrs. Grundy herself.” (1: 184–5) Further, she makes the New Woman statement: “I don’t pretend to be a philosopher; but it seems to me that if women are to be emancipated and enlightened, men must reform very quickly, otherwise it would be better that we should be shut up like the Indian women and not allowed to read or go about and learn things. It is impossible to know all and yet believe in goodness.” (2: 135)

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Just as Celia philosophizes about women’s rights, so too does Linda feel a desire to experience pleasure. Even as she tells Mark that “love … is [man’s] lowest fall,” whereas “Work, splendid, devoted, hard work, is man’s best gift, voluntarily chosen and performed gladly and joyfully” (1: 10), Linda herself chafes against the strict asceticism of the Spade Club, to which she and Mark belong. When another member propounds “That there is no Progress without Pain,” Linda rises to speak against it, saying: “I contend that every means for promoting happiness should be employed; that selfrenunciation is contrary to the law of owing a duty to oneself; and that the suffering in one human life produces suffering in many, and is therefore infinitely more harmful in its results” (1: 42–3). Love in contrast to pain, pleasure in contrast to work are the pulls that Celia and Linda represent but from which they each also oscillate. The crises that occur by the novel’s end result from the transitions that each woman makes between these poles. Linda ultimately but fleetingly indulges her love for Mark, only to be tragically rejected, while Celia, ill-suited for Mark, lapses back into the world of pleasure and succumbs to seduction by an old acquaintance, only to die in Mark’s arms in the end. Even as Celia’s seduction incorporates elements of melodrama, both Celia’s death and the novel’s depictions of prosaic working-class lodgings and the conditions of poverty, to which Linda sinks in the middle of the novel after Mark has married Celia, have much in common with the pioneering naturalism of another theatre-novel: George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885) traces a woman’s dissolution resulting from acting and alcoholism. It is reasonable to believe that this was another conscious rejoinder on Leighton’s part: Moore was a supporter of the Independent Theatre Society, and in 1893 the Society produced his The Strike at Arlingford. Consistent with Moore’s critical essay “Mummer-Worship,” in which he argued that the world of respectable society and the theatre should remain distinct, A Mummer’s Wife demonstrates the incompatibility of women’s public work as an actress and the domestic sphere, as his central character’s infanticide through neglect indicates that actresses lack the stable authenticity required of a mother.8 In Disillusion, an infant is endangered, not by an actress-mother, but by a Society woman’s marital infidelity. Thus, while George Moore’s novel provides a commentary on good and bad forms of literary representation—his protagonist Kate Ede falls prey to seduction because she is influenced by fantasy and romance literature, which contrasts with the naturalism of Moore’s own novel—Disillusion similarly represents how individual characters are influenced and shaped by literature. Leighton’s views of literature, however, and of women, are more nuanced than Moore’s. Just as Linda and Celia each represent a different form of New Woman, each also inspires a different form of New Drama. As critic William Archer described it, the Independent Theatre Society provided a venue for “progressive, experimental, unconventional drama” (665). Celia’s high-bred Society seducer is described by Celia in terms that include many things the Independent Theatre Society reacted against: “Your plays are all adapted; your Shakespeare is bowdlerized; your hours are artificial; your art is only imitation; your fashions are copied, and your manners and customs are ridiculous” (1: 122–3). In representing different dramatic works within the novel, as well as representing the conflict of the two women with which various dramas are associated, Leighton appears to be working through the different forms of plays that the Independent Theatre Society produced, weighing the relative merits of each. As Mark turns from Linda to Celia, the narrator tells us, “Linda gave him intellectual sympathy: Celia appealed to his senses” (1: 135), and these terms provide a useful framework to consider distinct threads of drama produced by the Independent Theatre Society. After his initial play, at a critical point in his courtship of Celia, Mark writes a two-part play to be acted by the two of them at a charity bazaar: an expression of a mediaeval serf’s fealty to his liege lady, inspired by Swinburne’s “The Leper.” This follows on his initial slighting of Celia’s taste for Swinburne’s poetry. Celia, holding that “Money and passion are all that people live for now” (1: 219), encourages Mark to capture an earlier time: “there’s no reason why in an early English romance you shouldn’t put some chivalry: it would be rather refreshing as a contrast to modern manners” (1: 219–20). It is this play

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that immediately precedes Celia’s father’s death by suicide, itself the result of a scandalous affair, and Celia and Mark’s subsequent marriage. But Celia is also associated with drama set in the present day. Prior to marrying Mark, Celia tells her straitlaced and conventional cousin, when challenging her to consider whether she would accept her former suitor even after he has married someone else: “I read everything, from Herbert Spencer to Zola” (2: 96). Moreover, as a sign of her modernity, she quotes Zola’s 1892 Débâcle in French to Mark (2: 105). These references serve as omens for what will come later, as Celia’s own plot will echo that of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a play that the Independent Theatre Society produced in 1891, about the seduction of a married woman. Celia thus aligns with certain types of plays produced by the Independent Theatre Society, including ones about transgression, but also, given the mediaeval romance, some of the Independent Theatre Society’s gestures toward archaic settings and themes: Theodore de Banville’s fairy-tale The Kiss and Browning’s The Blot in the ‘Scutcheon (produced by the Independent Theatre Society in 1892 and 1893, respectively). Indeed the narrator describes how Celia brings to mind for Mark a passage from Browning’s poem “A Face,” which references the Renaissance painter Correggio (2: 2). Linda’s intellectual asceticism and socialism, on the other hand, align with the Independent Theatre Society’s realistic explorations of gender relations or social class. The Society’s plays of earnest social criticism included Ibsen’s Ghosts (produced by the Society in 1891, 1893, and 1897); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell’s grimly industrial Alan’s Wife (produced in 1893); and Geo. Brandes’s A Visit (produced in 1892), which challenges the romanticized notion of a woman’s seduction, depicting it as rape, and explores the sexual double standard applied to men and women. The dichotomous models of New Womanhood offered by Celia and Linda also take the stage in Thyrza Fleming. Leighton’s play depicts a love triangle that includes two women who embody different forms of women’s independence. Twenty-year-old Pamela Rivers, on her honeymoon with her fortytwo-year-old husband Colonel Hugh Rivers, learns of his past relationship with the actress Thyrza Fleming and, standing on her principles of “purity—and—honor” (20), returns home to her aunt, Theophila Falkland, “a woman of about 30, close-cropped hair, manly attire, divided skirt” who supports Pamela in her moral standards (42). It is symbolically significant that Theophila and Thyrza share the same initials, because they represent two different forms of the New Woman. When Pamela arrives, Theophila has women waiting to see her, one of whom is a detective, part of “our new system … for marrying girls to proper husbands. Of course a certain percentage must marry, but we have instituted the most perfect system of enquiry into the antecedents of all the men who are eligible from our point of view” (43). Theophila tells Pamela that in leaving her husband on the grounds of morality she has become “the first woman out of fiction who has dared to put her principles into practice at the first test, and we are so proud of you that we are going to give you the freedom of the Club and make you an honorary Life-member!” (45). In contrast to Theophila, Thyrza, who cares for Hugh enough to save his marriage, confronts Pamela to convince her to return to him. Thyrza both explains her own relationship to Hugh and enjoins Pamela to become a better, more sympathetic, and more equal partner to him: Guilty love, you call it? By heaven! My love for Hugh Rivers is as pure as your own. Ashamed to confess it? No! Why should I be? I am a woman who has borne through much experience and seen many sides of life and I’ve learnt to know that a pure, strong love such as mine for him is the best thing a woman can give to a man. Ask him what my friendship has been to him all these years? Ask him where he would have been without my sympathy, my comprehension, and – (in a lower tone) my unrequited love. Can’t you understand I’ve been his friend, his best and most loving friend, all these years? And the greatest proof I can give you is that I am now willing to efface myself entirely, to break off the friendship which has been the one living thing in my lonely life of struggle and hard work, in order that he may be happy with and trusted by you his chosen love – his wife! (52)

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Thyrza describes a model for a relationship between men and women that is based on emotional and intellectual understanding. Ledger calls Thyrza Fleming “one of the most radical of the New Woman plays of the period in its exploration of the possibility of a new kind of relationship between man and woman, based on friendship and trust as well as sexual love” (56). The support that Hugh and Thyrza have offered each other has been mutual and based on principles of women’s emancipation: Hugh helped Thyrza to establish herself as an actress, a career that has made her self-sufficient and socially influential. Thyrza’s name underscores her financial self-sufficiency and the pleasure that her love provides. In contrast to Theophila, which means “beloved by God,” according to Charlotte Yonge’s History of Christian Names Tirza means “my delight,” and in the Hebrew scriptures, Tirza establishes women’s rights to inherit and, by extension, to own property (Yonge 38; Numbers 27: 1–11). Indeed the play frames the matter of Pamela’s missing mother at the outset with the plot device of Pamela’s deceased grandfather’s fortune, which Pamela will inherit if her long-vanished mother does not appear as the claimant. This fortune is critically important to preventing Hugh from having to earn his living by joining his regiment in India. While juxtaposing Thyrza and Pamela, the play, using a fallen woman plot that was familiar to theatregoers in plays such as Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), hinges on Thyrza being the first to realize that Pamela is the daughter that she abandoned when she sought independence from Pamela’s father. Another influence is that of the Ibsen plays that were central to the Independent Theatre. Ledger identifies the echo of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in this plot, and notes that Thyrza Fleming is in many respects the most Ibsenite of all the female-authored New Woman plays of the period: its detailed stage descriptions of a bourgeois milieu; its sequence of intensely personal dialogues between two people in a domestic setting; its close scrutiny of the nature of relationships— including sexual relationships—between men and women; and its dissection of the meaning of motherhood—all these closely ally it to the project of Ibsen’s middle-period drama. (57) Having convinced Pamela to return to Hugh, Thyrza attempts suicide to prevent Pamela from learning her identity, but Pamela, realizing that Thyrza is her mother, stays her hand. Thus the two women, initially in opposition to each other, are revealed to be in close relation to each other, and each learns from the other: Thyrza feels shame for abandoning her daughter while Pamela learns to be less judgemental and behave more generously towards others. The prominence of motherhood in both Disillusion and Thyrza Fleming bears out Ledger’s point that “an interrogation of the experience of motherhood is another feature common to New Woman drama and New Woman fiction at the end of the nineteenth century” (51), and Ledger emphasizes the importance of affect and of “the suffering endemic to motherhood” in New Woman drama (52). Ledger also, however, names Dorothy Leighton among a group of failed playwrights (59). If we move away from focusing on Leighton’s activity in a single cultural form, however, we can see that her career did not end, but rather took different directions. It then becomes apparent that Leighton proceeded to experiment with how she might contribute to the world, and those experiments included working towards a vision of motherhood that bridged some of the gaps between Linda and Celia, and between Pamela and Thyrza. Leighton had married stockbroker and musicologist G. C. Ashton Jonson on 30 November 1894, in a wedding that was written up in the Queen among “Fashionable Marriages” (1014). Beyond her work with the Independent Theatre Society, it is as Mrs. G. C. Ashton Jonson that her later public work is credited. She appears in the press in 1900 as the honorary treasurer of an organization hosting “holiday parties for working girls” (“Correspondence: A Holiday Hotel” 16). Current critical views name Thyrza Fleming as the only play of Forsyth/Leighton/Ashton Jonson ever staged, but this is

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because scholars have not traced the career of this woman writer to understand that these three identities represent phases of a single individual’s career. In actuality her four-act comedy “The Hedonists” was produced at Wyndham’s Theatre on 4 July 1902 “for the benefit of the Children’s Holiday Fund” (Gentlewoman 365). The play was one of the 400 sent in to the Playgoers’ Club for the competition that was won by Miss Syrett with “The Finding of Nancy.” Although second and third places were not formally allotted by the Reading Committee, Mrs. Ashton Jonson’s play practically took the second place; therefore it will be interesting to see whether the judgment of the Playgoers’ Committee is confirmed by the public.9 (365) This play also focuses on a love triangle, and it received scathing reviews despite what the Referee called a “large audience” (3). Later in her volunteerism, Ashton Jonson would attempt to realize a deliberate theory of motherhood as a form of public work, as she served as chairman and one of the founders of Sesame House Committee, an educational institution for young women and children. In this work, we can detect an attempt to reconcile Celia and Linda, Thyrza and Pamela. An article in Good Housekeeping, appearing among recipes and home management tips, described how this organization emerged from debates similar to those of Linda’s Spade Club: The practical spirit, beautified by idealism, runs throughout the motive of Sesame House as it does at the club which created it. The debates held in the famous club’s drawing room in Dover Street, for example, disclose that the members are modern, and vitally interested in the affairs of supreme importance to womanhood. Last year an event was devoted to discussion of the topic, “That most of us conduct our shopping on entirely wrong principles.” Yet the club, like Sesame House, also looks behind the veil of the visible and had devoted evenings to such topics as “That we live more by matter of fancy than by matter of fact.” Another debate was on the subject, “That a new aristocracy is needed,” and they listened to a lecture by the Reverend Canon Hensley Henson of Westminster Abbey, on “The Influence of the House of Lords on English Political Life.” (Bolce 298) But the work of the organization touches on Celia’s domestic aestheticism: At Sesame House they come in touch with reality. Human life and its relation to living things and laws is the theme, and quickening all the activities of the institution is the law of Love. The girl students and the children alike learn to love every form of beauty. From the institution they go back to perfect and beautify the homes from which they came. They go with the knowledge that life is beautiful and bountiful for the people who come under the influence of this school; life is no longer sordid and a depressing struggle. It is an opportunity, an opportunity to be of service … . The chief aim of Sesame House is to prepare girls to be wives and mothers and to lend a new meaning of life for them. The proportion of girls who take the course to prepare themselves for occupations is very small. (295) Thus we can see the commitment to love that Thyrza voices yoked to the purposeful social theories of Linda, and to the aesthetic home of Celia, but all in the service of motherhood. The article includes claims throughout to scientific principles: “love and laughter, progressive science and the sweetest feminism” (299). It also notes an opportunity for women’s career development: “The training is planned for gentlewomen and girls having for a first object their own development, whether they wish afterward to use the knowledge and experience thus acquired in their own homes,

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in parish and settlement work, or for the purpose of gaining a livelihood as lady nurses to children, kindergartners or nursery governesses” (297). This career development, however, does not embrace the careers of Thyrza or Linda as actress or playwright, but rather defines women’s work as motherly. Ashton Jonson herself, writing as Chairman of the Sesame House Committee and the Board of Direction about “The New York School of Mothercraft,” revealing her efforts at this stage in her life to be trans-Atlantic, emphasizes the public importance of preparing women for motherhood: What preparation are the women of today receiving to create the right environment, the best atmosphere for growth and development of the child, the future man? We hear much of the value of the woman’s brain in guiding the affairs of state, of her fitness to share in man’s work of government, her wisdom in shaping laws to regulate the lives of children, but are we not in danger of forgetting that legislation cannot of itself regenerate society, and that, after all, it is the first impressions which the child receives that mold his after life and plant the seeds of good or bad citizenship? (300) Ashton Jonson’s embrace of motherhood sounds sadly restrictive, and her conclusion that “the child is the counterpoint of all—the home, the community, the state” recalls not only the centrality of the mother–daughter bond in Thyrza Fleming but also the character trajectory of Linda, in Disillusion, who comes to desire romantic love with Mark and to care for Celia’s child (301). Both articles embrace eugenics in its broadest form of human improvement, although their focus is on education rather than genetics, as they address the measures that people—and women in particular—should take in the rearing of children in order to improve humanity. Ashton Jonson went on, in the 1910s, to serve in the role of vice president of the graduating class of the “Chatauqua Home Reading Circle who have completed a four-year course” (“Chatauqua’s Fortieth Anniversary” 246) and to lecturing at the Incorporated Phonographic Society (Pitman’s Journal and Magazine of Business 610). She died in 1943 (Bassett). Brief, extant critical assessments of her work focus on a single element—whether it is her novels or Thyrza Fleming—and therefore fail to capture the larger trajectory of Forsyth/Leighton/Ashton Jonson’s life. Her life does not fall into a triumphalist linear narrative of progress and increasing accomplishment. Rather, she was a seeker, and an experimenter, trying a wide array of modes with which to express her ideas and engage the world in order to find a place in society for herself as a woman, and in order to influence women’s place in society. That she wrote a theatre-novel in the midst of her experimentation is no accident, as Disillusion reveals how the thematics of the theatre-novel were well suited to exploring the questions of form, authorship, and the public world with which Leighton and other New Women were concerned.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I have explored this argument at length in my book The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Her married name is often alternatively spelled, both in primary and secondary documents, “Johnson.” The incorporation papers reveal that the limited liability company had a capitalization of £4500. See for example Sos Eltis’s “The Fallen Woman on Stage” 271, and Susan Carlson’s “Conflicted Politics and Circumspect Comedy” 230, for discussions of Thyrza Fleming. See Thomas Leitch’s The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies for an array of essays that explore intertextual approaches. Exceptionally, Troy Bassett’s At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction 1837-1901 successfully outlines Leighton’s major publications. For an analysis of the association of the actress with artifice and cosmetics, see The Victorian Actress 51–7. For a more detailed discussion of Moore’s theatre criticism and A Mummer’s Wife, see The Victorian Actress, chapter 4. For more about the contest, see Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain, 29–33.

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Works Cited Advertisement for “The ‘New Gospel of Interpretation.’” Athenaeum, 30 July 1892, p. 175. Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2003. “And Still They Come.” [Review of Dorothy Leighton’s Disillusion.] Pall Mall Gazette, vol. 18, September 1894, p. 4. Archer, William. “The Free Stage and the New Drama.” Fortnightly Review, vol. 50, 1891, pp. 663–672. Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Rutgers UP, 1990. Ashton Jonson, G. C. “A London Theatre Libre.” The Drama, February 1911, pp. 123–130. Google books. Ashton Jonson, Mrs. G. C. [Dorothy Leighton.] “The New York School of Mothercraft.” Good Housekeeping Magazine, vol. 55, no. 3, whole no. 407, September 1912, pp. 300–301. Bassett, Troy J. “Author: Dorothy Leighton.” At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901, 15 June 2022, http://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_author.php?aid=1589. Bolce, Harold. “Training for Motherhood: The Beautiful Work of Sesame House, in London, and the International Movement of Which It Is the Center.” Good Housekeeping Magazine, vol. 55, no. 3, whole no. 407, September 1912, pp. 292–300. Bratton, Jacky. New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge UP, 2003. Carlson, Susan. “Conflicted Politics and Circumspect Comedy: Women’s Comic Playwrighting in the 1890s.” Women and Playwrighting in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 256–276. “Chatauqua’s Fortieth Anniversary.” Independent, vol. 79, 17 August 1914, p. 246. “Correspondence: A Holiday Hotel for London Girls.” St James Gazette, 24 April 1900, p. 16. Eltis, Sos. “The Fallen Woman on Stage: Maidens, Magdelens, and the Emancipated Female.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 222–236. “Fashionable Marriages.” The Queen: The Ladies’ Newspaper, 8 December 1894, p. 1014. Forsyth, Ethel, ed. Autobiography and Reminiscences of Sir Douglas Forsyth. Richard Bentley and Son, 1887. Franklin, J. Jeffrey. Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Independent Theatre Society, Limited, Incorporation Records. National Archives [United Kingdom]. BT 31/ 5996/43211. Ledger, Sally. “New Woman Drama.” A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880–2005, edited by Mary Luckhurst, John Wiley & Sons, 2006, pp. 48–60. Leighton, Dorothy. [Ethel Forsyth.] Disillusion: A Story with a Preface. Henry & Co., 1894. Internet Archive. Leighton, Dorothy. “Letter about Thyrza Fleming.” Morning Post, 22 November 1894, p. 6. British Newspaper Archive. Leighton, Dorothy. Thyrza Fleming: A Drama in Four Acts. British Library. Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Add MS 53565 F. Leitch, Thomas, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford UP, 2017. Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on Stage. Edinburgh UP, 2019. Moore, George. “Mummer-Worship.” [1888]. Impressions and Opinions. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891. Moore, George. A Mummer’s Wife. Liveright, 1966 [1885]. Newey, Katherine. Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. “Notice regarding ‘The Hedonists.’” Gentlewoman, 21 June 1902, p. 365. “Notice regarding Incorporated Phonographic Society.” Pitman’s Journal and Magazine of Business, 22 Sept 1917, p. 610. “Review of Mrs. G. C. Ashton Jonson’s The Hedonists.” Referee, 6 July 1902, p. 3. Showalter, Elaine. “Smoking Room.” TLS, vol. 4811, 16 June 1995, p. 12. “The Stage.” [Notice of publication of Dorothy Leighton’s Disillusion.] Manchester Times, 2 November 1894, p. 7. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020. Yonge, Charlotte M. History of Christian Names. New ed. Revised, Macmillan and Co., 1884.

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15 “I SNIFF AT A RED ARTIFICIAL GERANIUM” Theatre, the Senses and the Self in Colette’s Novel The Vagabond William McEvoy Colette’s The Vagabond is a novel about theatre, but it is also about literature and the challenges of writing fiction, especially for a female author. This 1910 text, “a turning point in [Colette’s] literary career” (Appelbaum vii), strikes today’s reader with its frankness, combining detailed observation of theatrical music hall of the period with evocative writing about costumes and bodies, spaces and places, the seasons and the senses. As a text, the novel marks, if not a transition, then a nodal point between novelistic realism and techniques associated with literary modernism: it features stylistic hybridity, mixing the poetic and the prosaic; the epistolary form, most associated with the eighteenthcentury novel in English and French; and the fragmented images, heightened colours, and hyperbolical emotions of Expressionism and other avant-garde movements. At the heart of the novel’s genre-bending is the narrator and main character, Renée Néré, a thirty-three-year-old writer and actress modelled on Colette herself. By the time the book was written, Colette had already been a prolific writer, having published five of the Claudine novels, as well as two other minor novels, dialogues, and short stories. Her difficult marriage had broken down in 1906, and from 1905 onwards, she trained and worked for the professional stage, largely in pantomime and vaudeville, including a tour in 1909 that took her to thirty-two venues (see Appelbaum vi–vii). Though a work of fiction, The Vagabond draws heavily on Colette’s autobiographical experiences, which accounts for some of its immediacy and eye for detail. The novel does two main things that make it invaluable for reflecting on the relationship between theatre and fiction. First, Colette writes about theatre in a materially concrete way, documenting its viewing and performance conditions, without, for all that, adopting a theatrical structure or mode of writing in her text (e.g. using lots of dialogue). Indeed, as the novel progresses, it almost forgets theatre, focusing instead on the main character’s blossoming romance with a wealthy young man of leisure, Max Dufferein-Chautel. This pressure on Renée to give up work in order to marry and have children gives the novel a feminist perspective as we watch Renée nearly abandoning the raucous energy of vaudeville theatre for a life of domesticity. As Hope Christiansen says, “The novel’s very structure, with its alternating scenes in work and personal spaces, reflects this basic conflict” (39). The novel abandons theatre as theme and topic during its mid-section only for it to re-emerge later as the main conduit for Renée’s exit from the suffocating patriarchal institutions of heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Secondly, it charts an uneasy relationship between theatre and writing. Theatre is depicted as a profession requiring labour and financial savoir-faire, an activity associated with the lively spaces of music halls,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-20

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dressing rooms, and multi-city tours, while writing is a utopian space of escape and self-expression linked to the home, its objects and writing paraphernalia, and “that lazy spell in the hollow of the couch” (8). Theatre in The Vagabond is a physically demanding, clock-watching occupation, the antithesis of writing with its poetic reflections. Instead, theatre is represented as a space of lively performer–audience interactions, of illusion, makeup, artifice, and pretence. This fake world of music hall and vaudeville, in Colette’s depiction, turns out to be the most genuine space in the novel, allowing Renée to shed social and gender conventions to become the vagabond (in mind and spirit) of the title.1 The way in which working as a professional in the theatre world allows Renée Néré to claim authentic being is central to the novel’s modernity. In The Vagabond, Colette’s representation of female identity is distinctively shaped by concerns about beauty, ageing, the body, vanity, desirability, the romantic and the maternal, and at the same time, by the wish to write, perform, and earn a living outside gendered social norms. As Catherine Nesci suggests, the novel undoes a whole range of hierarchies such as “the gendered and classed separation of social spheres; the division of the senses into higher and lower faculties; the distinction between elite and popular cultural forms and languages; [and] the Parisian cultural dominance over the French provinces” (145). By the end, the autobiographical dimension of the text produces a textual merging of author and character as Colette writes the novel her character Renée would love to have the time and space to write herself.

Textual Pluralities The Vagabond is divided into three parts. Part one is dominated by scenes of theatre life, either backstage at music hall performances in Paris, or at Renée’s home near the Les Ternes district in a rather unglamorous part of the city. The writing in this part is sensual and gossipy by turns, focusing on the colourful characters of an early twentieth-century Paris theatrescape. Part two focuses on Renée’s new relationship with Max Dufferein-Chautel, an admirer captivated by her stage performance who turns up unannounced in her dressing room, sending her flowers and gifts. Renée initially treats him with scepticism and contempt before their romance begins. Part three covers a theatre tour Renée embarks on with her male co-performer, Brague, as they take their vaudeville pieces Dryad and Dominance to a number of French cities largely in the south, ranging from Marseille to Lyon, St Étienne, and others. Renée’s separation from the increasingly amorous Max allows her to evaluate their imminent marriage and the roles it will assign to her, as well as giving her space to perform, to earn a living, to be with other artists, and to make some key decisions about her future. The novel’s early parts, dominated by scenes from music hall life, are characterized by their vivid immediacy and engagement with the senses, especially the sense of smell. As Nesci puts it, “Far from abstract modernism, Colette writes La Vagabonde from the subjective viewpoint of the woman performer and object of spectacle” (142). It is a novel obsessed with surfaces, reflections, and mirrors, tropes for the multiple and fragmented self, grounding these allusions to subjectivity in a passion for physical description. We can almost visualize the vaudeville gymnasts in Renée’s account: soaring above us on three trapezes, exchanging shrill calls, cries like swallows … The nickelplated flashing of the metal trapezes, the squeaking of the rosined hands on the polished bars, all that outlay of elegant, supple strength all around me, that methodical contempt for danger excite me, and finally spur me into a contagious emulation … . (51; ellipses in original) The realist’s eye for sensory detail (the “rosined hands” and “polished bars”) is mixed with bravura imagery (“cries like swallows”) before the shift to the narrator’s inner thoughts, which often have an impulsive quality to them, “that methodical contempt for danger excite[s] me.”

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Take the novel’s opening, which plunges the reader almost directly into Renée’s thoughts, punctuated by references to the time: “Ten Thirty … ”; “Ten thirty-five … ” (1; ellipses in original). The deregulated tenses of this opening sequence tell us that the narrative is going to be purposefully disjunctive, shifting time around like pieces on a chess board. The temporal markers range from “now,” to the recent past, “three years of vaudeville” (1), to a speculative encounter with the narrator’s self in the mirror—“Is that really you there? There, all alone, in this cage with white walls [?]” (1)—and on to an anticipated future event: “Who will knock at the door of my dressing room? What face will come between me and that adviser in her makeup spying on me from out of the mirror?” (2). The narrative voice is located both in a specific time and place, and distributed across the spectrum of past, present, and future. Thus the novel starts out with a sense of conscious distraction, a cognitive vagabondage which is under threat by social and sexual conformity. For Aimée Boutin, the novel will eventually allow Renée “to conceptualise a new space-time as a fluid and non-linear phenomenon, where parallel lives and (dis) continuities between past and present open being to its full potential” (67; my translation). Colette’s writing about the theatre in the early parts of the novel luxuriates in the salacious and the intimate. We hear the crew complaining about the unreliability of their new young performer Jadin: “Like hell, she got the flu! What she did is tumble across a bed! Somebody’s applying a banknote as a compress!” (11). Alongside backstage repartee, Colette shows us Renée’s introspection: “Before me, in the mirror, in the mysterious reflected bedroom, I see the image of ‘a woman of letters who has gone to the dogs’” (8), the present and past intersecting in the moment of memory-writing. The book’s pace leaves no room for moralistic judgement about the characters’ lifestyles, offering instead a frankness about female sexuality and a knowing acceptance about what women have to do to survive in a maledominated milieu. Colette’s novel gives us an unvarnished world, at once seamy, sleazy, beautifully dirty, sensual, and erotic, a cornucopia of viewing pleasures. The novel’s changing cast of performers, its crowded sensations, feel like they are tumbling from the writer’s pen, confirming Boutin’s sense that, “like her contemporaries, Colette is interested in the experience of speed” (64; my translation).

Documenting Vaudeville Theatre The world of the music hall or vaudeville is a far cry from the elevated literary theatre of the Paris elite. This is popular theatre at its most heterogeneous, including variety acts, animals and humans performing together, Russian dancers alongside “Antoniev and his dogs” (2). As Renée tells us about an evening in the theatre, in another reference to how time structures her life, “my clock is infallible … Ten thirty-five, the comic singer Bouty. Ten forty-seven, the Russian dancers. And finally eleven ten: me!” (2). The book’s first section features several moments at which Colette recreates the experience of her character Renée being a spectator in the theatre. In a novel which does not consciously seek to stage events dramatically, these sequences insert spectatorial perspectives into the prose of the fictional text, intercalating episodes of theatrical viewing. They create the duality of the female spectator (narrator) also being a performer, the object of the gaze turning the narrative camera around to scan the world she is usually viewed in. In Renée’s words, “Leaning my elbow against the canvas balcony, I serenely observe the powdery layer—mud from shoes, dust, dog hairs, crushed rosin—that covers the boards on which in a little while I’ll be dragging my bare knees, and I sniff at a red artificial geranium” (3–4). Renée is part-spectator, part-voyeur, hidden within the theatrical space of the novel text, watching, thinking, narrating, and writing as her perspective merges with Colette’s. The actress, so often the object of the sexualizing male gaze, here turns the tables, the watched becoming the watcher, the sensory moment of theatrical viewing (the sniff, the colour red, the flower’s fakeness) transcribed in fictional writing. The early music hall scenes powerfully convey the exchange between audiences and performers. The heroine of these sequences is the unforgettable Jadin, a local urchin, hugely popular with

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audiences, a lascivious, self-aware young woman whose authenticity appeals to the spectators who treat her as one of their own. Colette’s characterization of Jadin crystallizes links between performance, sexuality, and sex work in the novel. Sex sells in this context, and sex might in fact be sold, as Renée surmises, “Jadin has found an admirer who’s not from this neighbourhood. A girl must live … And yet she has been living with this man, with that man, with everybody” (11; ellipsis in original). Renée’s fellow performer Bouty says of Jadin’s temporary absence from the show: “Jadin will be back: this is just an outing. She’s a girl with her own lifestyle, she’ll never be able to hold onto a sugar daddy” (12). The atmosphere at these entertainments, especially backstage, is celebratory, sensual, and convivial, a far cry from the behaviour and attitudes of audiences in those temples of art like the Comédie Française. After Part two, which is dominated by Renée’s relationship with Max, Part three takes us back to the theatre. Renée and co-performer Brague go on a forty-day tour of cities and towns around France, during which Renée veers between feelings of solitude and camaraderie. She describes a meal in one of the touring cities: “We’ve just had dinner at Berthoux’s, a restaurant for performers, Barally, Cavaillon, Brague, I and the Caveman [the nickname for another performer], whom I had invited. He doesn’t speak, his whole mind is set on eating. It was a real actors’ dinner, noisy and enlivened by a rather sham merriment” (151). Theatre is not only about earning a living; it is also an alternative lifestyle, giving Renée a pseudo-family outside the social norms of husband, wife, and children. This sense of a fly-on-the-wall insight into the life of the vaudeville actress in Paris and on tour comes through in the small details, such as how the performers negotiate their payments for tours. We are privy to the exchange between Renée, her co-performer Brague, and their agent Salomon at his “English-style desk … with its numerous pictures of foreign stars: ladies in half-length with plunging necklines and elaborate coiffures” (77). Renée tries to reduce the agent’s commission, saying to him “I can’t see myself making you fatter by six hundred francs! After all, ten percent [commission] is highway robbery!” (77). We learn about the performers paying for their own costumes, about their accommodation on tour, and the letters they use to communicate with family and friends. Colette’s own time as a vaudeville actress just before writing The Vagabond informs the novel’s sense of autobiographical veracity, as if the writer cannot sacrifice the details of her memory in the translation to the fictional. This jackdaw quality, pilfering from her own experience, creates a sense of material plenitude in the novel, as objects, props, spaces, and costumes accumulate. The novel acts as a spyhole into a lost world of theatre and performance at the start of the twentieth century. While touring a series of towns and cities—Nîmes, Montpellier, Carcassonne, Toulouse—Renée charts the daily routine of the touring actress and her assorted company: I arrive, I wash, I eat and I dance to the sound of musicians unsure of themselves and merely sight-reading. I go to bed (is it worth the trouble?) and I leave again. I get thin with fatigue and no one complains: pride above all! I change theaters, dressing rooms, hotels and hotel rooms, as unconcernedly as soldiers on maneuvers. My makeup case gets chipped, and its tin base shows. My costumes get threadbare, and cleaned hastily with gasoline before the show, give off a sour odour of rice powder and petroleum. (168) This is typical of the move in Colette’s prose between compression and dilation, numerous concrete details densely compacted, almost listed in note form, to indicate the hurrying aesthetic of the writing. Typical too is the juxtaposition of minute observations (the chipped tin makeup case) with a bold simile (“unconcernedly as soldiers on maneuvers”)—the relationship of the narrator’s actions to soldiers is tenuous, but it is the imaginative leap of the simile that attracts the reader’s attention.

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The Novel’s Modernity The year in which The Vagabond was published, 1910, is closely associated with the birth of literary modernism, partly because of Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion in her 1924 essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” (4). At first glance, Colette’s novel might seem conventional alongside new experiments in writing and stream of consciousness of the period. However, in addition to creating a modern female character, a professional actress and writer who rejects marriage in favour of work, the novel employs a range of innovative literary techniques that connect it with emerging avant-garde and modernist aesthetics. Cataloguing the world of vaudeville gives Colette scope for descriptions of the real which register the patina of age and use, a sensuous focus on surfaces, textures, and materials to show the trace of prolonged human engagement with them. The costumes Renée and the performers wear on tour are given striking visual descriptions: “I repaint with carmine the cracked red sandals I wear in Dominance, and my Dryad tunic is losing its acid shade of grasshopper and meadow green. Brague is splendid in his multicoloured filth: his embroidered leather Bulgarian breeches, stiff with the artificial blood that spatters it nightly …” (168). Costumes are depicted as tools of the trade, in need of maintenance, integral to the vivid artifice of the shows in which they feature. Colette smuggles other worlds into the trashy finery of the theatre, the “grasshopper and meadow green” (168) a kind of wilful excess transporting us into the countryside. Brague’s regalia, like so much else in The Vagabond, bears the traces of its repeated use. Again, Colette’s writing tears down any neat distinction between the essential and the contingent: costumes get as much airtime as the human performers who wear them. Likewise, the emphasis on colour gives the writing a painterly quality, as if the modifying adjectives are dabs of paint on a surface, creating iridescent patterns in language rather than neutrally denominating the real. As Aimée Boutin notes about one episode, “the colours … the smells … and the tactile sensations … produce an impressionistic description which emphasises the subjective more than the realist” (66; my translation). Colette’s writing bestows dignity on the lurid aesthetics, the powder, wigs, gaudy costumes, and vulgar entertainments of the music hall. The novel validates this most non-literary form of the theatrical, the vaudeville theatre where high art is absent, which self-consciously parades its amateur aesthetics and its joy in playing around with bodies, tricks, and trompe l’oeil. The songs, routines, sketches, and skits operate in the carnivalesque moment as pure entertainment, much of the atmosphere of which is generated by energetic, engaged audiences. Of all the senses at play in the novel, the olfactory is the most notable. Colette surprises the reader throughout with observations about smells and odours, condensing a time, a place, and a mood with real economy. This descriptive language aligns the mundane and the magical: “It’s the glacial December fog, all spangles of frost in suspension, which vibrates around the gas lamps in an iridescent halo, which melts on your lips with a taste of wood tar” (5). Even in depicting the dismal uniformity of the street Renée lives on, Colette cannot resist making the world deliciously edible: “Beneath the greenish gas, my street at this hour is a creamy mess of burnt almond, mocha brown, and caramel yellow, a dessert that has caved and melted, with the nougat of the building stones floating on top” (5). Smells crystallize spaces, as Renée observes about her apartment, “The radiator smells of strong disinfectant” (6). This kind of anchoring detail has the whiff of the autobiographical, a recollected sense-memory that transports the author back to a specific time and place. The carefully chosen object, the cleaning-fluid odour, marks Colette’s writing as modern in subject matter and style, informing us about the heating system, the fact that it needs to be cleaned with bleach, the strong odour that symbolizes the apartment on this particular December night. Both the gaudy glamour of theatre and the gritty details of the domestic attract Colette’s sensuous eye, and nose, for detail.

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Theatre and Female Identity The Vagabond is a novel about actors, dancers, variety acts, and trapeze artists, life’s flotsam and jetsam gathered together for the purposes of popular entertainment. At the same time, it folds in the everyday home lives of working-class women and girls. The sketches of the young women in Renée’s building are shorthand for female experiences outside middle-class domestic norms, such as that of the unforgettable party girl on the top floor with “empty bottles thrown out of the window” (6). Renée will give an account of herself in this context that is tinged with understatement and irony: Lastly, on the ground floor, there’s me. I never yell, I don’t play the piano, I seldom receive gentlemen, and ladies even less often … The little tart on the fifth floor makes too much noise and I don’t make enough; my concierge tells me straight to my face: “It’s odd. I never know if you’re in, I don’t hear you. No one would ever believe you were a performer!” (6; ellipsis in original) The book is about women whose identity is built on working professionally rather than in the context of the patriarchal institutions of marriage and the family. This collision between potential forms of female identity is embodied in Renée’s relationship with Max. Being a vagabond ultimately means being a travelling player rather than getting on the conveyor belt of marriage and children. Renée, whose name means “reborn,” veers emotionally between introspection and passionate optimism in the novel, her narrative voice mutable and unpredictable throughout. Unlike many literary and theatrical characters liberated from the structures of patriarchal oppression in the decades leading to 1910, such as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Renée does not go on a journey from constraint to freedom. Her trajectory is more complex, moving from one form of freedom, after her divorce, to a new, contradictory kind that involves rejecting wealth, marriage, and a life of leisure. Her experience of touring, with all its loneliness and uncertainty, offset by a sense of bonhomie and camaraderie, helps her sidestep this fate. Colette adopts numerous strategies to capture Renée’s contradictory emotions in the novel, ranging from direct first-person narration, extended mirror sequences, depictions of space and travel, and Renée’s philosophical ideas about love, marriage, theatre, and writing. The early sections of the novel see Renée addressing or describing herself in a mirror. She is critical of her makeup, the ageing process etched on her face. At the same time, these encounters with the mirrorself capture a sense of doubleness, the split between illusion and reality as familiar modernist tropes of dualistic subjectivity. In the first scene in her dressing room, Renée asks “What face will come between me and that adviser in her makeup spying on me from out of the mirror?” (2) and a few pages later, in her apartment, she observes that “[t]he tall mirror in my bedroom reflects only the grease-painted image of a vaudeville Gypsy; it reflects … only me” (6; ellipsis in original). The gypsy/me opposition is dissolved in this act of looking. Renee calls herself a “vaudeville Gypsy” in line with the novel’s overall theme of vagabondage, a term which etymologically means “wandering,” with negative connotations of vagrancy and possible criminality, associations often projected onto the word “gypsy” too. The scene is a confrontation between Renée and her solitary self: “So here I am, in my real shape! Alone, alone.” Here, as elsewhere, Renée betrays anxiety about getting old; still in her early thirties, and younger than her male suitor, Max, she is anxious about the physical and psychological impact of the ageing process, which is reinforced by those around her. Acting in vaudeville both allows Renée to escape from the ageing process, playing roles younger than her actual age, and makes her anxious about living up to theatre’s requirements of female sexual allure and desirability. Though we hear nothing of Renée’s direct family in the novel, Colette shows us how she has composed an alternative family network of her own, including co-performers, her abusive ex-husband’s estranged sister, Margot, and most oddly, her dog Fossette, who fits seamlessly into the novel’s cast of

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characters. Renée’s certainty about the dog’s thoughts, moods, and attitudes, the dog’s relationship with Max, and her general engagement with her pet pooch show the novelist’s prescient interest in animal consciousness and relationalities.2 Helen Southworth has noted the relation between Colette’s novel and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published eighteen years later, since both writers are interested in the material conditions of writing for women, long denied money, space, property, or freedom with which to produce literature. Colette embeds the material details of Renée’s finances in her text, noting that she is renting her apartment, that she calculates her salary in relation to her rental expenditure, and that she lives in a run down part of the city in order to be able to afford her rent. Her own space to think, to write, and to work, to prepare her costumes and learn her lines, is essential to Renée’s emancipation. The itinerancy of moving between hotel visits gives Renée a mobility that the static role of the wife and mother prohibits. Being away from home, in some sense wilfully and existentially homeless, allows Renée to recognize the constrictions that the male-dominated domestic sphere entails. She discovers not only the towns and cities around France, outside the familiarity of Paris, but also the beauties of the countryside, which prompt some of her most lyrical descriptions. To be a vagabond, to leave the city limits of Paris, is to discover the landscape of trees, flowers, and odours, to take pleasure in the transcription of the natural world into poetic fiction. Colette’s novel has Renée reflect throughout on what it means to be a writer. This self-reflexivity, usually associated with the questioning of aesthetic forms in the modernist avant-garde, occurs most eloquently in Part one. Renée exclaims “To write! To be able to write!” (9) before offering an account of the challenges of being a writer. We think there is an actress, a performer, at the heart of this errant novel, but that character is also a novelist, a double of Colette herself, plunging us into the world of theatre through her acts of writing. Theatre and fiction-writing operate symbiotically in the novel, theatre providing the money to pay for the leisure time writing novels requires, as well as the topics and characters to write about. Christiansen reminds us that reading Colette is often less about narrative and more about the sensual pleasure she takes in language (40). Colette has Renée think about the phenomenology of writing, where one is “hypnotized by the reflection of the window in the silver inkwell” (9). Writing for Renée has a physical effect, it is painful, exhausting, and pleasurable (9), and you become “the bearer of treasures that you slowly unload onto the virgin sheet of paper” (8). For a character who starts the novel with timestamps, measuring vaudeville routines to the minute until it is her turn to perform, “To write also means to forget what time is; it means that lazy spell in the hollow of the couch” (8). Writing in Colette’s novel is a compulsion but often a disappointment, as well as being full of contradictions: “I take up my pen anew to begin that dangerous, disappointing game, to seize and hold the iridescent, elusive, thrilling adjective with my flexible double nib” (9). There are many obstacles and interruptions to confront, “[t]he fragile story that I’m constructing crumbles when the tradesman rings, when the shoemaker presents his bill, when the attorney phones, or the trial lawyer, when the theatrical agent summons me to his office” (9). Colette writes about her own identity as author and actress via the proxy of her character Renée, the real author and textual character merging. The final lines of this early discussion of writing shift styles between first-person narration, a diary entry, or notes to oneself, written or verbal: “Tomorrow is Sunday: matinee and evening performances at the Empyrée-Clichy. It’s already two A.M.! … It’s time for bed, for a woman of letters who’s gone to the dogs” (9; ellipsis in original). Renée’s tone is self-deprecating, witty, and faux-cynical: she may be obsessed with her dog Fossette, but she knows she has not “gone to the dogs” quite yet. What is striking is the way the narrative voice seems to be confiding in us, thinking out loud to create the fluency and immediacy of a diary entry, without the formality of literary writing; a self-performance which captures speech patterns and rhythms, rather than the controlling precision of third-person

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narration. We as readers feel a sense of immediacy in the way the words record the mundane, a consciousness talking to itself. Self-knowledge and biting humour offset ideas of femininity elsewhere in the novel related to makeup, ageing, vanity, and self-performance, what Julie Solomon calls the “relentless logic of feminity” (24). Solomon suggests that while on tour “the correspondence with Max has reawakened [Renée’s] pleasure in writing” (28). In Max’s absence, she has forgotten him; her writing fills the gap.

Conclusion The final paragraphs of the novel are the culmination of Renée’s journey, via theatre, towards writing. “I’m escaping” (184), she says, referring to Max, her potential marriage, and the constraints of heteronormative domesticity. What follows is a sequence of metaphors evoking angels and fire, fragrances and music, fruits and ghosts, flowers, waves, stones, and brooks. Colette imagines her past selves, vagabond versions from different points in time: “In each place that my wandering desires lead me to, I leave behind a thousand, thousands ghosts that resemble me” (184). Becoming a vagabond, says Solomon, “means accepting the linearity of life, and the inevitability of ageing. Colette agrees with Ronsard that women’s beauty is fleeting, that passion accelerates its destruction, and that only a poet’s text can conserve it” (33). Renée has undergone a “shift from to-be-lookedat-ness to vagabondage, a term in itself suggestive of the mobilized gaze of the flâneur” (Mensch, qtd. in Nesci 143). More significantly perhaps, she has undone the opposition between the two, reclaiming the act of being-looked-at as a factor in a complex, contradictory femininity that has theatre and performance at its heart. The act of writing summons up the ghosts of past selves, reconstructs the theatre spaces of Paris and touring venues in France, and creates potent sketches of theatrical lives. The Vagabond brings the ephemerality of theatre, its chaos, and liveliness, into the more expansive verbal art form of the novel. It gives us in Renée a female character who is a worker and an artist, a performer and a writer, a theorist of fiction and of gender. The novel shows us the material conditions and challenges of making theatre, especially from the perspective of a young woman, and reconceptualizes fiction’s aesthetics by drawing on theatre’s speed and pleasure in the sensory. The novel revels in surfaces, textures, and patinas, in costumes, artificiality, and ephemera, in a way which reinvigorates both fiction-writing and the idea of vaudeville theatre for the reader.

Notes 1 Catherine Quirk’s chapter in this volume also deals with the question of theatre as a profession for women in the earlier novels of Florence Marryat. See Catherine Quirk, “Against Anti-Theatricality: The Stage as Respectable Profession in Florence Marryat’s Theatre-Novels.” 2 Animals have tantalized recent theorists of literature and theatre for the way they expand our anthropocentric understanding of the world and force us to think relationally and in an interspecies way. Colette in 1910 is already introducing us to a canine companion for Renée who is a living, breathing, thinking, animal-being in its own right.

Works Cited Appelbaum, Stanley. “Introduction.” The Vagabond, Dover, 2010, pp. v–xviii. Boutin, Aimée. “La fille du train: La vagabonde et Notes de tournées de Colette.” The French Review, vol. 91, no. 2, 2017, pp. 62–73. Christiansen, Hope. “‘L’Oiseau, le vent, la vague’: Baudelairian Resonances in Colette’s La Vagabonde.” Romance Notes, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 39–45.

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“I Sniff at a Red Artificial Geranium” Colette. The Vagabond. Translated by Stanley Appelbaum, Dover, 2010. Nesci, Catherine. “Sensual Re-Readings: Gender, Sensibility, and the Classes of Flânerie.” Dix-Neuf, vol. 16, no. 2, 2021, pp. 133–148. Solomon, Julie. “Feuille à feuille: The Coming of Spring in Colette’s La Vagabonde.” Nottingham French Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, pp. 24–33. Southworth, Helen. “Rooms of Their Own: How Colette Uses Physical and Textual Space to Question and Gendered Literary Tradition.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 20, no. 2, 2001, pp. 253–278. Woolf, Virginia. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. Hogarth Press, 1924.

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16 “A REAL ACTRESS” Theatre and Selfhood in Antonia White’s Frost in May Quartet Frances Babbage

Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933) is described by fellow author Elizabeth Bowen as both a “school story” and “a work of art” (7). The novel was widely admired, a success that eased White’s introduction into the literary and artistic circles of the day (Hutton 123). Yet Frost in May’s positive reception in the 1930s proved something of an impediment for its author: critics compared later novels unfavourably with the first, and White struggled all her life with crippling writer’s block, tinged with bitterness that she had not achieved the recognition she longed for. Her books fell out of fashion as the century progressed: the arguably self-absorbed anxieties of the privileged, and the predominantly realist frame through which these were explored, seemed to belong to another era and one that felt significantly less relevant after the passage of two world wars. However, White found a new audience and lease of life when Frost in May was selected by feminist publishing house Virago to launch their hugely important Modern Classics list, in 1978; The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House, and Beyond the Glass, continuing the heroine’s story, were reissued the following year. Virago’s intervention decisively asserted White’s importance as a writer, yet her work has still received relatively little critical attention. This disregard is partly explained by the degree to which the novels track the author’s life: their frequent designation as “autobiographical fiction” valuably signals qualities of fluidity and indeterminacy sometimes associated with women’s writing, but is a label that correspondingly risks undermining the status of her books as art.1 Scholarly analyses of White to date focus primarily on this autobiographical dimension, pursuing questions of sexual trauma, psychosis, and religious doubt across life and work (see for example Newton, Campbell, Moran, Valentine). No critical consideration has yet been given to the figure of theatre, prominent in the novels and deeply compelling for White herself. At the age of nineteen, and at this point still using her birth name of Eirene Botting, she entered London’s Academy of Dramatic Art (founded in 1904, later to become RADA) to train as an actress.2 White acted professionally in 1920, taking the ingénue part in a short-lived touring production of Charles Hawtrey’s farce The Private Secretary, but readily admitted she was a poor performer, “feeble of voice and constrained of gesture” (Dunn 59). Nonetheless, the theatre continued to fascinate her: “The stage was my first love and I believe will be my last” (White, Diaries 62–3); “it is odd how always I come back to hanging about the theatre …” (109); “[t]o write a play would satisfy all my ambitions” (159). Theatre as a thread runs variously through White’s quartet. Formal productions are mounted in two novels: in Frost in May, where the child protagonist, Nanda, participates in the convent school staging of The Vision of Dante; and in The Sugar House, by which point the heroine—renamed

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Clara—is employed as an actress, her experience closely based on White’s own (White, “The First Time I Went on Tour”). Both encounters are shown as profoundly unsettling: the first, in the apparent conflict between individual expression and the constraints of religious orthodoxy; the second, in the way that Clara’s immersion in theatre as institution crystallizes and exacerbates the jolting impressions of unreality and fakery by which she is persistently disturbed. Beyond these examples of theatre production, tropes of theatre recur in all four novels as a language that voices the protagonist’s troubled sense of herself as an inauthentic player in her own life. The daughter of a convert, Nanda becomes keenly aware that however much she is “washed and combed and baptised and confirmed,” her faith is perceivably, and in the end punishably, not “in the blood” (White, Frost in May 97). In The Lost Traveller, the teenage Clara’s confidence is consistently compromised by fear that she cannot “rise to” the role her father demands of her and will “disappoint him once again” (281). Her unhappy and unconsummated marriage to Archie in The Sugar House requires a different order of enactment, in the imperative to convince the world and each other that they are “a care-free modern couple” (155). Repeatedly, the novels adopt motifs of role play and costuming, a script plausibly or jarringly delivered, as well as a “spectatorial” assessment of one’s performance, sometimes metaphoric but frequently actualized as reflections in a mirror: in such moments, the layering of selves that theatre formalizes is perceived as a terrifying fragmentation, leading ultimately to mental breakdown in Beyond the Glass. This chapter demonstrates that theatre provides a particularly suggestive framework for reexamining White’s writing. First, close attention to the novels reveals it as a trope figuring powerfully in the narrative, not limited to specific episodes but implicitly shaping the protagonist’s entire journey. Second, since theatre both as metaphor and as concrete practice invites the flow of personal feeling or experience into the crafted artwork, it offers a useful model through which to revisit and reframe the undeniably autobiographical impulse in her writing. Third, White’s fiction (likewise, her diaries) charts an unceasing struggle between seemingly polarized states which can be mapped with striking closeness onto tropes of anti-theatricality. As White depicts it almost invariably, one is either authentically oneself, or an imposter; either “present” in the moment, or a chilly self-observer; and, as a writer, either spontaneously inspired—ideally, ecstatically transported—or cynically reliant on technique. The theatre inherently engages very similar positions but more positively, and in layered combination, thus troubling their supposed opposition: self and role intertwine in the actor’s performance; in theatre, the fictional or pretended coexists concurrently with the real; and while emotional affect may be generated to order, it is none the less “felt.” Theatre’s enduring fascination for White proves illuminating, therefore, in its capacity to synthesize qualities that she typically experienced as terrifyingly antithetical. Finally, while the principal aim of this chapter is to explore the potency of theatre in White’s writing, we will see that a reverse gaze is also constructive. White’s encounters with the stage reflect the changing face of British theatre in the early twentieth century: from conservatism to experiment, influenced by avant-garde practice on the Continent, and moving towards a more holistic model that strove to join realism and abstraction, creativity and technique, corporeality and the text.

Form and Feeling: Frost in May White’s first novel is set almost wholly at Lippington, the convent school Nanda attends between the ages of nine and fourteen. The fictional Convent of the Five Wounds was based closely on the Sacred Heart, Roehampton; White maintained that the novel accurately represented her experience as a pupil and that almost every incident was true (Dunn 39). At Lippington, the children’s lives are regimented through a demanding timetable of religious observance and the tireless surveillance of the nuns. Every behaviour is noted and evaluated, its assessment publicly marked through an arcane system of coloured

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ribbons, “Permissions” and “Exemptions,” privileges extended or denied: the efficacy of that system is evidenced in the readiness of pupils to submit to mortifications of their own devising, in punishment for “sins” perceived, or simply to the greater glory of God. Nanda begins her career there shakily, overwhelmed by the school’s alien formalities. On her first day, she bungles the sign of the cross, not through ignorance but rather the excess of nervous politeness that makes her afraid to withdraw her right hand from the Mother Superior’s clasp. The reproof is immediate: “‘Come Nanda,’ she said, ‘that’s not the way little Catholic children make the sign of the cross. It’s not reverent, dear.’ Nanda felt hot with shame” (White, Frost 17). This incident is characteristic of Nanda’s fragile status at Lippington: for her as a relative newcomer to Catholicism, brought to the faith at the age of six concurrently with her father’s conversion, no amount of study or memorized catechism can overcome her feelings of inadequacy; this imposter syndrome is also manifest at the level of class, where, amongst the daughters of predominantly wealthy, titled, old Catholic families, she is guiltily conscious of distorting and glamorizing her middle-class origins (26). Despite her anxieties and self-recriminations, Nanda is swiftly absorbed into the rarefied world of Lippington, within which, very largely, she finds it easy to be good: “there seemed so little time to be anything else” (40). She is passionately committed to Catholicism, moved by its mysteries but equally fascinated by its ceremonial performance. That these qualities—inner truth and outward show—operate in potentially fraught tension comes into sharp focus at Nanda’s First Communion, at the age of eleven. This event is registered by the children and nuns alike as a momentous rite of passage. Nanda prepares with fervour, eagerly anticipating not just the occasion but the epiphany she believes must accompany it. When the great day comes, the mass is framed as even more than usually theatrical: the communicants are costumed, veiled, and wreathed, each item “new and white”; they process slowly “like twelve brides” into the candlelit chapel, accompanied by “soft, lacy music”; everything is in place; all lines are learned (67). Yet as the ritual progresses, Nanda is appalled to find herself becoming increasingly detached, “numb and stupid,” mechanically going through the motions devoid of the impulse that should inspire this. A dismal sense of failure leads to the conclusion that “[w]ith all her efforts, all her devotion, there was something wrong with her. Perhaps a convert could never quite ring true” (68). Nanda’s account articulates a problem of faith that is simultaneously a problem of performance. Here, the protagonist’s theoretical belief founders as it cannot be experienced at the level of feeling when this is most needed; correspondingly, the material embellishments of the ceremony are reduced to theatrical trappings, superficial and distasteful almost, because profoundly unearned. Moreover, while the convert could in principle be judged especially sincere precisely because their path is intentionally chosen, Nanda views it otherwise: her uneasy suspicion is that the convert is at some level always acting, a masquerader amidst authentic others who have no need to perform. Nanda’s conviction of her own insufficiency may be better understood by examining her relationship with religion and the wider educative framing of the school. In an effort to unpick religion as an operational category, ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes proposes that we recognize it as a complex system composed of interacting processes. These he differentiates as ritualistic-performative; experiential-personal; mythical-historical, or narrative-temporal; doctrinal-cosmological; ethical-legal; social-cultural; and physical-spatial. As Frost in May shows, life at Lippington formalizes almost all these processes, through its intricate blending of rites and observances, behavioural codes and coercion, surveillance and literal no-go areas, rote-learned texts, and homiletic stories. But the process that cannot be constructed institutionally is the experiential-personal, which Grimes exemplifies as “feeling, encountering, praying, being healed, being possessed, undergoing a revelation” (28). Presenting these strands as a system, Grimes does not distinguish them hierarchically; Nanda’s problem, however, is that in her eyes “feeling and revelation” are the culmination of and justification for the others. That apprehension is reinforced not only by the depiction of her faith as a “secret, delicious joy” (White, Frost 17), a fervid state that sees her catapulted between devotion

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and dread, but also by the nuns, who are fond of reminding their pupils that neither book-learning nor the kind of “namby-pamby goodness” that seeks praise or privilege is what God ultimately wants from them (41). In this way, Nanda’s First Communion exhibits every formal component of the system—above all, the ritualistic-performative—except the one which matters most and makes sense of all the rest. If this episode presents Nanda as reluctant actor, disguising the indifference whose opposite would make “performance” unnecessary, a later incident brings the friction between theatrical and spiritual imperatives still more forcibly into view. On this occasion, almost the reverse problem occurs: now, ecstatic feeling is overwhelmingly in the ascendant, while doctrine, conduct, and governance are dangerously destabilized. Plays and pageants are identified in Frost in May as a regular part of Lippington life, universally popular despite their appropriation for edification and admonishment: “parts which called for an attractive appearance were usually played by the most meek and mortified children of the school, while anyone suspected of thinking herself pretty was fairly sure to be cast for a hermit with prodigious wrinkles and a long beard” (Frost 128). No surprise, then, that the pupils eagerly anticipate how roles will be distributed for The Vision of Dante, a particularly ambitious production planned to mark the visit of a cardinal. Since Mother Castello, Lippington’s “star producer,” is said to have “risen magnificently to the occasion” even before rehearsals are underway, it may be inferred that the script is her own edit of Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poem for performance; indeed, that the nuns are ready to adapt Catholic works where considered necessary is clear from one girl’s remark that the canto in The Divine Comedy featuring the adulterous couple Paolo and Francesca has “been cut out of [the] books” of the Upper First (126–8). Mother Castello’s production centres on the poem’s Inferno episode and is to be spoken in the original Italian. Nanda, now thirteen, is delighted with the minor part of Matilda of Tuscany; but in this passage of the novel her perspective is essentially spectatorial, watching two of her close friends as Dante and Beatrice. Their casting is in some ways unexpected, with the handsome but “unfeminine, unchildish” Léonie de Wesseldorf allotted Beatrice, opposite the strikingly beautiful Rosario de Palencia, both names pointing to the “very old, very wealthy” Catholic heritage Nanda lacks and longs for (64). However, the rehearsal process appears to engender a kind of magic whereby each girl mysteriously acquires qualities of the other: All [Rosario’s] softness dropped from her; she was grave, stern and passionate. Léonie, on the other hand, seemed to have borrowed all Rosario’s former grace. No one had ever supposed that Léo, with her untidiness, her slouch, her masculine gestures and her bitter tongue, could be so delicate and moving a Beatrice. (128) The power and poetic feeling in their scenes is apparent to all, with the play’s director, Mother Castello, “in raptures” (128). Here, theatrical exigency appears to overtake the spiritual, since the brilliance and charisma of the two girls’ daily selves are not used to check their prominence on stage. Indeed, the transformative force of theatre is consciously harnessed by Mother Castello, who calls for all rehearsals to be held in costume, on the newly erected stage “equipped with machinery [Nanda] had never dreamed of; there were trap-doors and spotlights, and even wires from which nervous but complacent angels could be suspended.” With such apparatus in place, the “dresses of spangles and sateen glistened magically under the coloured lights, and the dullest people looked suddenly beautiful” (129). In this way, while the play is undertaken to serve religious ends, the theatre’s inherent potency is acknowledged and exploited. This almost spell-like state is broken a week before the performance, following the attendance of Mother Radcliffe at a dress rehearsal. Nervously rising to the occasion, everyone acts better than they had before and each special effect goes off without a hitch. At the heart of it are the performances of

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Dante and Beatrice: “Rosario and Léonie shone like the sun and moon in some element of their own. They were no longer young girls, Nanda thought, … but the very spirits of poetry” (130–1). Yet immediately after this, to the shock of all, Léonie is removed from the play, her part given to the understudy, the terminally stolid and unpoetic Marjorie Appleyard. This high-handed decision is taken, Léonie reports to Nanda sardonically, since in the Mother Radcliffe’s estimation she had been seen to take “wilful and sensuous pleasure in the performance” irreconcilable with its spiritual purpose (133). The reasons behind the Mother Superior’s intervention are only partially decoded by the novel, however. Reflecting on the historically fraught relationship between religious rite and dramatic play, Bruce Wilshire asserts that despite their close organizational and symbolic correspondence, the theatre pursues “a siren call to freedom [that] disturbs the rootedness of sacred symbols in natural periodicity and place” (Wilshire 239). As he describes it: “In the theatre, every correspondence between things of the earth and the sky, and between gods and men, is focused like a burning glass in the relations between individuals before us here and now on the stage” (Wilshire 240). Watching Rosario and Léonie, Mother Radcliffe recognizes that the “strange electricity” the girls generate through performance tips the balance of attention firmly towards the “burning glass” of human relations rather than the edifying theme of the play. Indeed, Léonie is told that as Beatrice she had “emphasised the earthly side a leetle too much” (134). Beneath this perceived threat from the human realm to the divine, the corporeal to the metaphysical, lies an additional, unspoken fear of same-sex desire: regardless of the characterization that frames this as love between man and woman, in the personae of the young actors and in the febrile atmosphere fostered by the convent, the pretended passion of this Dante and Beatrice disturbingly blurs the line between male and female, children and adults, and even between the two as distinct individuals. While Rosario is implicitly as much “at fault” in this performance as her fellow, it is seemingly sufficient to remove Léonie alone; this suggests that, far more than admonishing vanity or self-indulgence, the intervention seeks to extinguish a flame that is significantly more dangerous. Nanda’s perpetual struggle at Lippington, crystallized in the episode of the Vision of Dante, lies in the apparent impossibility of reconciling spiritual and artistic realms. So moved is she by watching her friends animating Dante’s poetry that she submits to a prolonged bout of tears in a side chapel, her “attitude … that of a penitent” but the emotion not divinely inspired (131). And in response to the aesthetic desecration vested on the production, she explodes: Why can’t we for once do something for its own sake, instead of tacking everything on to our eternal salvation … I don’t want poetry and pictures and things to be messages from God. I don’t mind their being that as well, if you like, but not only that. Oh, I can’t explain. I want them to be complete in themselves. (134) Her frustration speaks to wider and indeed, age-old arguments about the purpose of art, and within this, to the compatibility or otherwise of theatre and religion. While the Church for centuries distrusted the theatre for its impiety and worldliness, hubristic ambitions, seductive imitations, and debauched associations, performance’s ability to inspire and arouse has never been in doubt (Barish).3 By the fin-de-siècle the louder strains of religious antitheatricalism had largely subsided, with moderate voices such as that of theatre manager and playwright Henry Spicer, close friend of Dickens, arguing that a “cleanly” theatre which offered “the treasures of wit and wisdom unalloyed with even a suggestion of evil” should be wholly countenanced by the Church (Spicer 31).4 In Frost in May, the episode of the stage production may catalyze Nanda’s explicit outburst, but the artistic-religious impasse ultimately drives the novel’s plot: the nuns’ discovery of the notebook containing her half-penned novel, peopled with glamorous figures made “wicked … in order that their conversion might be the more spectacular,” brings about her forceful expulsion

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from the school (159). The Mother Superior “very kindly” explains to the distraught Nanda that unfortunately no second chance is possible: For one thing, in some ways, we have no more to teach you. For another, I have a hundred other children to consider. There are some people, harmless in themselves, who can be a source of danger to others, as there are people healthy in themselves, who are what doctors call “germ carriers.” But I want you always to think of yourself as one of us, as a child of the Five Wounds. (173) The nun’s dismissal not only damns Nanda for book-learning and quietly assassinates the deepest parts of her character; her words underline that Lippington is home even as the girl is cast out of it. But this devastating banishment only confirms what Nanda fears from the outset, as did her author: that as a Catholic, writer-artist, or simply as a human being, she will always be “false and shallow and incomplete” (White, Diaries 94).

“Trying to Look Like an Actress” In the three novels that continue the protagonist’s story, Nanda Grey is rechristened Clara Batchelor but remains recognizably the same figure. Like Frost in May, The Lost Traveller employs themes of performance, for example in Clara’s efforts to “pass” at the high school (modelled on St Paul’s School for Girls, which White attended) whose bracing and secular environment contrasts brutally with Lippington. Later in this second novel, Clara, now seventeen and employed as a governess, is drawn irresistibly into extended fantasy scenarios with Charles Cressett, her young charge, together with the awkward, troubled Archie Hughes-Follett. Their role-plays, all thematized as forms of battle, grow all-consuming to a point where Clara, like Charles, comes “to resent ordinary life as an interruption,” prompting the boy’s mother to remark in amusement: “Either you’re a wonderful actress or some part of you really is ten” (White, Lost Traveller 416–17). Lady Cressett’s first speculation proves inaccurate, as I demonstrate in what follows with reference to the third novel, The Sugar House. Her suggested alternative is broadly accepted by Clara, who admits she was “rather elderly and precocious when I really was ten. I suppose it’s all coming out now” (417). Since the freedoms of the child Clara/Nanda are shown as fundamentally stifled by the regulatory system of the convent, any such “precocity” or inhibition would seem unsurprising, rather than being, as Clara implies, effectively a character fault. At the same time, Lady Cressett’s observation implicitly calls attention to the ability of dramatic play to break down “psycho-physical tension” and release creative energy: this potentiality is articulated more than once across the quartet and was also a phenomenon experienced by the author herself, as I discuss late (Barker 91). The Lost Traveller concludes with Clara breaking off her engagement to Archie, finally brought to her senses by her mother to recognize that the rash marriage will make neither of them happy, nor compensate for the death of Charles by a tragic accident for which Clara blames herself. The Sugar House begins a few years later: Clara has been to drama school, but when the first chapter opens she has already quit her course to take a minor role in a touring farce. Clara has trained at the fictional Garrick School of Drama, based on the Academy of Dramatic Art (ADA) on Gower Street where White was briefly a student. Attending stage school was predictably opposed by Antonia’s father, Cecil Botting, who “absolutely abhorred” the idea of his daughter exhibiting herself in public, but since she was by this time an adult and had paid for the course herself with fees earned from writing advertising copy, he could hardly prevent her (Diaries 220). The metamorphosis from convent schoolgirl, to governess, to actress might seem inconsonant, but it was a period that saw an influx of middle- and upper-class young women to the theatrical profession: perception of the stage had altered such that it was

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becoming an acceptable interim career for women, for some a “finishing school” prior to marriage (Davis 73; Sutherland 102). Historically, the theatre had attracted women from the poorer classes, for whom the stage, albeit a precarious living, might still have appeared preferable to the alternatives (for example, factory work). But that was beginning to change in the early decades of the twentieth century, for as the content of drama shifted to focus on the lives of the middle-classes, the theatres in turn became increasingly interested in these bourgeois newcomers who already had nice speaking voices and usually the money to pay for their own costumes (Davis 72–3). The training that White, and thus Clara, received was distinctive in being framed by a curriculum; previously actors had learned their craft in more haphazard and unsystematic ways. ADA was one of the first drama academies in the UK, founded by Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, who acknowledged that while in his opinion “acting cannot be taught,” the school would “supply the equipment” that liberates inspiration. ADA would “train the student to pluck out the dangerous weeds of trickery that beset him, to lop off the superfluous branches of convention, so that in due time the nature within him may blossom forth and come to fruition” (Anon, “Mr Tree’s School”). Yet despite these ambitions and the inspirational example of the Paris Conservatoire, which Tree hoped to emulate, the curriculum in ADA/RADA’s early decades was old-fashioned even for the era, consisting of elocution, fencing, dancing, deportment, pantomime, and gesture, alongside the rehearsal of plays. A number of the older tutors, venerable theatre professionals, favoured a mode of instruction whereby students were required to mimic their master’s emphasis and intonation line-by-line.5 Such methods might not have helped aspiring actors understand, in Tree’s words, “how to penetrate into the psychology of a personage and of a part” (“Mr Tree’s School”). Women students were additionally disadvantaged, since although they were in the majority at ADA the plays put on had more male characters, meaning that female roles had to be shared: “It seemed very unfair to Antonia that some male student could swagger about on stage throughout the whole performance, being Hamlet, for instance, from beginning to deathly end, while she and the other women were having to slip in and out of the character of Ophelia, or Gertrude” (Dunn 61). These conditions made it difficult to enter deeply into character psychology, as well as contributing to the impression that actresses, in particular, were effectively an exchangeable group. This was certainly White’s experience, not least on being cast in The Private Secretary principally because she fit the costume of the actress who had departed, and could prove—by lifting her skirt—that she was not bow-legged or knock-kneed (Dunn 61). Although drama school is seen to have had its compromises, Clara’s encounter with the professional stage in The Sugar House brings a much ruder awakening. She is shocked by the rough manner of rehearsals where she is routinely shouted and sworn at—“Walk to that chair, damn you. Don’t teeter as if you thought your drawers were coming down”—and the sheer exhaustion of touring and “never feeling properly washed or groomed” (White, Sugar 15, 28). She is nicknamed “Vere” by seasoned actress and chorus girl Maidie, a reference to Tennyson’s “Lady Clara Vere de Vere” (1842), a poem that rebukes aristocratic pride: the soubriquet carries Maidie’s imputation that, by joining the profession, Clara is “taking the bread out of other girls’ mouths”; but more broadly, it catches her air of dreamy detachment, which, as shown, comes not from hauteur but rather an enduring sense of alienation (White, Sugar 23). She observes with bafflement, and over time a growing fondness, the motley make-up of the company: among them, the outrageous and coarse-tongued yet devout Catholic Maidie; Brett Wilding, given to “squeezing” any girl he finds on her own; stage-manager Lister, “like a racing-tout”; and to Clara most confusing of all, Peter and Trevor, two men always together who “criticised each other’s clothes in minute detail” and would sit “manicuring each other’s nails” (White, Sugar 15–16). Yet these disparate, vividly drawn, and occasionally absurd figures are united and transformed through performance, just as the “stale, creaking old farce” they are touring comes to life before an audience (27). At first, a bout of stage fright on opening night paralyzes Clara altogether: but the ingrained lessons of rehearsal take over, carrying her automatically through

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dialogue and movement until she recovers her composure. And when she does, the confidence she finds onstage contrasts sharply with her benumbed and depthless performance as First Communicant: now, disciplined practice supports the spark of spontaneity; now, she is not isolated but instinctively “playing up” to her fellows in the cast (27). Despite the intoxication that performing brings, Clara does not convince as an actress. At one aftershow party, Lister drunkenly advises her: “You’re quite promising and not bad-looking when you take a bit of trouble. But I don’t see you going far unless you get a bit of a push” (87). He adds, breathing whisky fumes, that she does not help her chances by being “a ruddy little icicle” (87): it is a moment that connects pointedly with twenty-first-century disclosures of the abuse and exploitation of women in and beyond the industry (Fox-Martens). Yet regardless of the patriarchal power-play in evidence, Clara’s judgement is essentially in line with Lister’s. By her own estimation, she is “a mediocre actress” (79), lacking the aptitude and even the desire to be anything more: she had “gone to the Garrick … simply because someone else had suggested it” (15), and in the theatre, just as at school, she senses she does not belong. Indeed, “[she] was beginning to wonder if there were any place where she did perfectly fit in; any life to which she could wholly commit herself” (28). Clara’s uncertain status as performer is mirrored in the ambivalent appeal that theatre held for her creator; as Dunn sees it, White “was driven by the romantic desire just to be an actress, legitimately centre stage, holding everyone’s attention, with the power to affect the minds and hearts of others, to win people’s notice, perhaps even their love” (59–60). Certainly, the thrill Clara enjoys in the theatre is tied as firmly to the heady endorsement of applause, and the dislocating yet delightful sensation of seeing her name in print, as to acting itself. Clara’s most profound experiences of creativity, as for White, are always associated with writing; and when true inspiration strikes, she is “carried into that other realm where everything had a significance beyond itself” (White, Sugar 32). These occasions are rare indeed: all four novels are riven through with the protagonist’s impulse to write, but only once does the reader see desire crystallized into decisive action. This moment comes in The Sugar House, when one Sunday Clara urgently excuses herself from Maidie and the rest, compelled by the mental forming of a story she must immediately commit to paper. That this should be read as an instance of authentic artistry is signalled, first, by the way Clara’s story weaves together “loose threads which had been floating in her mind for weeks”; second, by its absolute unlikeness from the writing she does for money, work she scathingly dismisses as “slick” along with herself as a “hack with a certain trite facility” (33). However, while she must extract herself from the group to write, it is perhaps not coincidental that theatrical practice contextualizes and even stimulates the scene of inspiration. Clara characteristically perceives writing as either shallowly mechanical or as proceeding from some unaccountable illumination: but the theatre proffers a different model of creativity, whereby repetition, routine, and technique are not surface accomplishments but appreciated as the building blocks that make expressivity possible. In this light, the experience of making theatre—in training and on the professional stage—in its own way lets Clara’s “nature … blossom forth and come to fruition” (“Mr Tree’s School”). If Clara is an unexceptional performer sustained by “vivacious freshness” (White, Sugar 28), her fellows are practised players whose actorly personae reflect the legacy, in the early twentieth century, of the old stock system intertwined with an emergent regional touring model that the advent of the railways had enabled (Donohue 22). The stock company depended on having actors resident at a theatre, each specializing in a particular role type; that structure was inevitably destabilized by touring, but the concept of role types survived well beyond this, fostered by genres like farce which relied on absurd interplay of stereotypes rather than character-based drama. Thus, in the farcical comedy The Clerical Error, Maidie and Clara are first and second ingénue respectively, with Brett Wilding the romantic male lead, aided by hair dye to disguise his years; the others similarly know their place, as autocratic guardian, elderly chaperone, low comedian, and more. But The Sugar House includes another, recognizably more modern approach to performance in Stephen Tye, the aspiring actor with

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whom Clara is hopelessly in love through the first half of the novel. Clara encounters Stephen at the Garrick, first seeing him reflected in the mirror of a darkening rehearsal-room: she watches in fascination as his ghostlike figure endlessly repeats a series of movements, with minute variations. Stephen is evidently a talented actor, obsessively committed to his craft. Clara venerates above all such dedication and vocational certainty, just as, in a later chapter, she envies the “expert handling” of charcoal and paintbrush by the experimental modern artist Marcus Gundry (227). Stephen explains to Clara that when she first saw him he was rehearsing Lord Biron (or Berowne) in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a character described by Harold Bloom as “a highly conscious male narcissist who seeks his own reflection in the eyes of women” (Bloom 121). Bloom’s insight proves telling, since Stephen’s feelings for Clara are fatally intermixed with vanity and egoistic ambition. While she is on tour with her company, he with his, they meet just once in a reunion that, for Clara, is almost unbearably loaded with anticipation: yet in these snatched few hours, he chooses to read to her when she would rather talk, and to detail his interpretation of Richard III, appreciatively telling her that “No one listens as intelligently as you do” (White, Sugar 43). Stephen teases Clara for, in his words, “[t]rying to look like an actress” (47), sipping gin “like a schoolgirl drinking a particularly filthy cough-mixture”; meekly, she accepts his assumption that she can have “no idea what hell it is being an artist” (60). Infatuated as she is, Clara is not blind to the self-regard that in Stephen blurs the line between true emotion and its imitation. Bitterly remembering his experience as a young soldier in the First World War, he adds: “I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine.” As he gulps down whisky, eyes “hard and glazed,” Clara cannot “stop herself from noticing that his voice and gesture would have registered well on the stage” (47). That Stephen, too, is no longer sure of the difference between “real” and performed is hinted at obliquely: “‘I suppose I’m too old to have such violent emotions any more,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps I never did feel them. Only imagine them when I’m playing a part’” (58). His admission recalls the old puritanical prejudices against actors that viewed them as inherent feigners, treacherously mutable, unable or refusing to maintain a “proper identity” (Barish 102). Clara is thus chilled but unsurprised when she hears of Stephen’s career-advancing engagement to Eliza Lane, his elder and an established actor-manager: the betrayal propels her violently away from the theatre and into marriage with Archie, who has reappeared in her life, a move that further erodes her dangerously fragile sense of self.

Theatre as Metaphor: “I Often Feel Like a Kind of Ghost” Throughout the quartet, White’s protagonist is plagued by guilty conviction of inauthenticity. As shown, this applies in the context of religion through her status as convert to the faith: at Lippington Nanda is always wary of giving herself away, through small slips that reveal her outsiderness, and thus unworthiness. Yet, at Lippington and at the high school, she wants acceptance but simultaneously kicks against the system: at St Marks she “performs” Catholicism, ostentatiously dating her essays by the Feasts of Saints; conversely, visiting the Mother Superior as an ex-pupil, she is moved to “defiantly [powder] her face on the very threshold of the convent” (White, Lost Traveller 393). The need to fit in, coupled with resistance to conformity, is a human impulse fundamental to identity formation, itself a lifelong process that becomes especially urgent in adolescence (Crocetti 148). Equally, negotiating social terrain demands a measure of performance that, at certain moments, becomes self-conscious; as Wilshire puts it, we will occasionally “catch ourselves in these self-castings as personae or ‘characters’” (210). Yet for Nanda/Clara, her every “act”—which is to say, every deliberate self-fashioning—is regarded by her as a shaming marker of hollowness and duplicity. Her short-lived career in the theatre provides a respite of sorts, since acting embraces and legitimizes the self’s potentiality for mimicry and change. When this avenue closes, she is thrust back into the anxiety of purely social performance, this time exacerbated by the need to convince family, friends, and above all herself in the role of wife.

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Clara and Archie’s relationship mirrors White’s own ill-fated marriage, in 1921, to Reggie GreenWilkinson. Despite genuine fondness for one another, the couple’s real-life wedding was oddly unmotivated, except by “mutual despair”: for White, born of romantic disappointment; for GreenWilkinson, rooted in alcoholism and “his aimless existence” (Dunn 62).6 In The Sugar House, the ceremony recalls the anticlimactic and alienating scene of First Communion, likewise the stage fright of the Clerical Error opening night, as Clara moves in “a trance” towards a “tall red-headed man” she cannot initially recognize. The echo of convent schooldays is explicit in the description of the two “muttering” their vows, “like children who have forgotten the answers in catechism class, while the old priest patiently prompted them” (119–20). Once again, therefore, Clara is conscious of deficiency in fulfilling her part in a performance: here, a sacred, ritual one. That failure is immediately succeeded by another, this time at the corporeal level. The couple are obliged to honeymoon at the “superbly inappropriate” house of Archie’s aunt, attended by an excess of servants “slyly smiling” at the naïve newly-weds. On the wedding night, Archie finally stumbles into the bedroom, mumbling apologies in a voice thick with whisky, before collapsing first in an attitude of prayer, and then to sleep (122–6). Their marriage is never consummated and the novel’s title, The Sugar House, hints at a relationship of brother and sister, rather than husband and wife: it is because of this that Clara is able, subsequently, to initiate the proceedings which lead to annulment.7 But while Archie’s impotence is the cited cause, Clara as ever feels herself implicated: she “dreaded” intercourse whilst also wanting it, not through erotic feeling but in the hope that this “unknown, violent contact with another person would break down some barrier in herself” (129). The phrasing articulates the author’s own troubled relationship with sexuality and more simply, physicality. White notes in a diary entry that she had “never yet learnt the language of the body,” an acknowledgement prompted by her extraordinarily intense, and reciprocated, desire for Robert Legg (Richard Crayshaw, in the final novel): “I was not ready for it and the shock drove me out of my mind” (Diaries 94). While White embarked on a series of unsettled and unsettling relationships over the course of her life, and had two daughters, Clara remains a virgin throughout the quartet; the author made numerous attempts to continue her story into adulthood, all of which were discarded.8 In the first weeks and months of marriage, Clara and Archie strive effortfully to play the part of the happy couple. Costuming proves essential and transformative, just as it did in The Clerical Error and, before that, for the Lippington Vision of Dante; in preparation for lunch with her parents, Clara dons “dress and make up with as much care as if she were dressing for a stage part” (White, Sugar 155). These credible public personae temporarily disguise the unhappiness and, for Clara, the “paralysed drifting” which characterizes this time. The novel vividly conveys her directionless days in Tithe Place, the gimcrack rented house that initially charmed but ultimately appals her (155). Chelsea attracts Clara as a locus for artists: living amongst painters, actors, and writers will, she hopes, dynamize her own creativity. Instead, the reverse is true: perceiving these others as authentically productive intensifies her conviction of inadequacy. Weakly attempting to “play house,” she quickly discovers that the cramped, awkward rooms have been artificially enlarged by the owner’s “ingenious arrangement of mirrors” (139). Mirrors, glass, and reflection operate as a recurrent metaphor in White’s work, but the sequences in Tithe Place literalize this. Clara is deeply disturbed to find her own image fragmented and multiplied: “Three different angles of her head and shoulders and one full length figure sprang towards her. The little room … seemed to close in on her” (142). The impression of disintegration and its accompanying alienation colours her view of Archie as well as herself. At one point, alone at night and driven to near hysteria, she first switches on every light, then dashes out into the street: finding the courage to return a few minutes later she is shocked to see “a man … now standing where she herself had stood in the window. Unable to make out his face against the light, she had another rush of terror till she realized that it could be no one but Archie” (147).

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This moment, where figures materialize and multiply, or morph alarmingly into one another, is framed as uncanny: it recalls The Turn of the Screw, when the governess at Bly sees the mysterious Peter Quint on the other side of a window; but that order is reversed, since where Archie unknowingly assumes the position vacated by Clara, in James’s novella the governess deliberately takes Quint’s place, producing an impression that in turn unnerves the housekeeper (32–3). This implicit intertextuality draws attention to ambiguity in the mental state of both protagonists. James’s governess is notoriously a literary enigma, equally readable as victim supernaturally tormented or as hysteric for whom repressed emotion manifests as deadly violence (Felman).9 Clara’s portrayal is less clouded, as she edges ever closer to the mental disintegration that will engulf her in Beyond the Glass: but while in James the source of horror is usually identified as either within the governess or her surrounding environment, in White the protagonist’s confused projections and instabilities are tightly intertwined with external forces that are genuinely nightmarish. Clara’s breakdown comes in the final novel, but it looms almost from the outset: the narrative which begins with Frost in May and continues through The Lost Traveller and The Sugar House is marked by repeated and severe crises—Nanda’s expulsion, the death of Charles, a disastrous love affair, a sexless marriage—none of which are perceived by the protagonist with any measure of objectivity, but are instead absorbed and internalized as deserved punishment for some fundamental deficiency of the self. Thus, while the second half of The Sugar House takes Clara away from the formal theatre, her brief married life can be viewed as a stage of a different kind. In public she must dress, make-up, and act, in a bid to save face; in private she splits into a plurality of selves, who both perform and are each other’s audience, who are sometimes familiar and elsewhere hideously transformed. Clara lurches between being excessively “present” through kaleidoscopic reflection, or insubstantial and ghostlike. When letters arrive, she stares at her name on the envelope in puzzlement; when Archie worries she is “not the same person” she was before her betrayal by Stephen, she retorts: “I’m not any person. That’s the point. I never was and I never will be” (176–7). White had the same feelings of discontinuity or nonexistence, and was startled to discover echoes of this in her father, as she perused letters after his death: “So many things like me—depression—torment of conflicting opinions—feeling of being all bits and pieces and having no personality” (Dunn 13); to a friend, the writer Emily Holmes Coleman, she confided: “I often feel like a kind of ghost” (Dunn 129). A perception of oneself as oddly absent, drifting, or splitting could be termed “dissociative,” in other words as constituting a break in the typical interplay and flow of mental processes and behaviours. While such experiences are common at the level of daydreams, or deep absorption, in extreme form they may be symptomatic of identity disorder. In White’s case, dissociative episodes of this sort contributed to her being (mis)diagnosed schizophrenic at the age of thirty-five (Moran 3–4, 207–8). Although outside the space of formal performance, this uneasy and fractured sense of self nonetheless returns us again to the figure of the actor. This has been personified previously in Stephen, who turns daily speaking into delivered lines, counterfeits emotion he can no longer feel, and—distinct from the “poet or painter [who] creates his own material”—is, inherently and humiliatingly, “nothing without a part” (White, Sugar 60). Stephen’s words suggest that only through the framing apparatus of play and production can the actor gain substance; but beyond this, his acknowledgement of lack, or absence, can be read in terms of performance itself. Fundamental to the actor’s art is the ability to enter imaginatively into the minds and bodies of others; this is achieved through the cultivated practice of “dissociation,” as contrasted with unconscious or “normative” dissociation in ordinary life (Panero, Michaels & Winner 89–90). This conscious process is illustrated in the moment where Stephen, alone before the mirror, strives to “disappear” his daily self in order to inhabit the character of Biron. The idea of shapeshifting, central to acting’s appeal, has also been viewed as its inherent danger. Jonas Barish, mapping a history of prejudice against the theatre, notes the periodically resurfacing philosophical complaint that “the player lives wrapped in an unreality that drains all truth from his life. His

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joys, his sufferings, even his death, are cheapened and dishonoured by the falsity to which his profession commits him” (Barish 341).10 The practice of acting is in this light a dangerous seduction, made addictive by the recognition and adulation it draws: the more one acts, it is implied, the less one “is,” as mind and body slide unpredictably and frighteningly into a succession of engulfing “others.” By this argument, Stephen is indeed “nothing” without a part. Correspondingly for Clara, “acting” both in the theatre and outside it is fraught with fear of her own hollowness; fakery becomes an awful imperative for one who is “not any person.” However, the instability of identity Clara recurrently experiences has the capacity to liberate as well as terrify. The fourth book, Beyond the Glass, sees her, at first, numbed by the ordeal of marriage annulment, a process which requires verbal interrogation and invasive physical examination. The torpor that consumes her as the legal case sluggishly proceeds is abruptly shattered when she encounters Richard, midway through the novel, the two falling spontaneously and profoundly in love. This relationship is literally a meeting of minds, as they encounter one another telepathically across the room at a party; thereafter they communicate psychically as often as they do in words.11 Clara’s ecstatic affair with Richard provides further illustration of the disturbing—but this time, exhilarating and electrifying—potential for one identity to merge with another. She is plunged into a state of utterly unfamiliar, manic happiness that gratifies and then increasingly alarms everyone around her: and indeed, since she becomes convinced that eating is “hardly necessary” and sleep “a sheer waste of time if one were really alive,” it is not long before an ever “lighter body” and overset mind collapse under the emotional weight (White, Beyond the Glass 142–4). In Nazareth Royal Hospital, the fictional equivalent of Bethlem Royal Hospital where White was incarcerated for ten months between 1922 and 1923, Clara’s delirium sees her assume a series of personae, experiencing the world from radically distinct perspectives for hazily uncertain periods of time. For “months” she is convinced she is a horse, “[r]idden almost to death, beaten till she fell”; later, a salmon that lies “wriggling and gasping” for water; and in dizzying succession, an imp, a dog, and a flower, in which last embodiment she sings “all day a little monotonous song, ‘Kulalla, kulalla, kullala, ripitalla, kulalla, kulalla, kulalla, kulla’” (White, Beyond 211–16). Interspersed with animal and vegetal identities are human ones, some of which are fantastical or folkloric: a girl on her wedding day who becomes a betrayed, Miss Havisham-like figure in dusty dress and wreath; a magician who can control everything except herself and cannot sleep. At other times, she becomes someone recognizably from her former life, often a soldier whose “name was Richard,” searching for her, or coming close and then violently pulled away; this last can be interpreted as a fevered recasting of the telepathic bond, where instinctive knowledge of the other’s thoughts now dissolves, for Clara, into wholesale exchange of bodies and minds (213–16). Vividly depicting this period of psychosis, Beyond the Glass simultaneously displays the treatment meted out to inmates, both medically prescribed and roughly workaday: bundled into coarse gowns, or baths of boiling then freezing water, restrained beneath heavy sailcloth or in a straitjacket, agonizingly force-fed, mocked, and intimidated by the nurses. Once again, the fictional narrative closely reflects the biographical one, with White’s letters and diaries recording the sense of being trapped in “Looking-Glass Land” while detachedly observing that experience (233). White conceived of madness as “the beast in my jungle,” a creature that frightened yet also drew her, but which eluded her if she tried to hunt it down (Diaries 109). Whether aided by or despite this treatment, and notwithstanding the prognosis that full recovery is unlikely before middle-age, Clara regains her sanity in under a year. There is an identified turning point where mania recedes and self and surroundings settle: “Gradually she became aware of certain changes. The most remarkable was that, whenever she was fully awake, she was always the same person. This person was called Clara” (White, Beyond 229). Accompanying this discovery, the expanded consciousness that had distorted her sense of time now contracts—by her own forced effort—into a quotidian ordering of separable days. In this way, where Clara’s madness is experienced

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as a multiplication and fragmenting of identities that are temporarily and spatially dispersed, her return to sanity is formally signalled through a singular and consistent “self,” stabilized in place and time. It is notable that although recovery is ardently desired by Clara and her unhappy parents, recognizing herself as “sane” amongst the “mad” is seen as oddly dreary, as well as isolating. This new phase diverges sharply from the delirium that is vertiginous and radically unstable but also sees Clara viscerally present in the body, alert, impulsive, and even periodically “happy” (216). In addition, mania is shown to release capacities that are unexpectedly creative: Clara learns that, in her delirium, she would sing beautifully and without self-consciousness, “like a lark,” something she had never been able to do before (276–7). In this way, Clara’s insanity appears to unleash corporeal, imaginative, and artistic potentialities that were previously inaccessible or frustratingly constricted.12 A state marked by creative expression, dynamic energy and shifting personae that are inhabited physically and psychologically recalls once more the condition of the actor. Wilshire reflects on the development of the self in everyday life, a process in which the limitless possibilities for “transformations of personality” are “usually curbed or masked from view … , for our potentialities for change, dimly apprehended, frighten us” (232). For Wilshire, that fear may be understood and even welcomed if we can “rise to the occasion through imagination and communal memorialization”: such a process is exemplified by theatre, he suggests, above all in the figure of the actor who, like “an advance guard,” engages explicitly with the challenges of identity and authenticity that tacitly concern us all (234). White came to understand that exploration of the self could mean liberating discovery and release, even if she struggled to achieve this with any regularity: “It is a great art to let oneself go in the right place; does not mean disintegration as I always feel. And part of me just pants to let go. What am I frightened of?” (Moran 72) In implicit endorsement of Wilshire’s claims for the theatre, White was to encounter at least one more striking experience of the artistic, embodied, and imaginative expressivity that she craved. In 1935, long after her hospitalization and having given birth to two daughters, she became involved with the avant-garde Group Theatre, headed up by Rupert Doone and Robert Medley, a dancer and an artist, and accepted the invitation to join their summer school in Suffolk as guest writer. The model of theatrical education practised here proved to be a world away from the formalities of ADA some fifteen years earlier. White describes in pleasurable shock the “cheerfully disorderly” communal living, a shared bedroom, and even the absence of a lock on the bathroom door (Diaries 52). While part of the time is spent rehearsing The Dog Beneath the Skin, written by W.H. Auden for the Group, the work of participants is more broadly exploratory, as her diary shows: The Group Theatre and its adherents are mainly very young with a sprinkling of my contemporaries and a few earnest older women whom Rupert forces to attend his strenuous dance and exercise classes as a method of breaking down their psychological “adhesions.” The atmosphere is feverishly progressive. Revolution in politics; revolution in art; revolution in one’s way of life. (Diaries 53; see also Sidnell) This alternative model of theatre, as a practice not limited to play production but viewed as individually and collectively developmental in its own right, made an immediate and powerful impact on White: the experience evidently broke her creative “jam,” since she wrote four chapters of her new book within a week later that month (Diaries 54).

Conclusion My reading of White’s novels has not pursued in detail the threads of psychological and sexual trauma, or religious doubt, that undoubtedly run through them, as through their author’s life; nor have I been especially invested in their potential recuperation, albeit conflicted, as feminist writing. Nonetheless,

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analyzing her work from the perspective of theatre-fiction has generated insights that talk back usefully to these concerns while simultaneously opening new critical avenues for consideration. This investigative frame has illuminated the ways in which formal and informal conceptions of the stage structure the narrative journey of White’s protagonist, operating as source of fascination and repulsion in almost equal measure. Importantly, it has revealed that theatre as a practised art can be a space of liberating possibility: whether in The Vision of Dante or “creaky” touring farce, and in players who could be schoolgirls, awkward students, rising stars, or ageing hams, the act of performance is seen to generate a kind of metamorphosis, conjuring semi-miraculous effects from simple means. At the same time, the work of theatrical production proves to be alive with risk. This takes the form of unnerving destabilization for the actor, who must test the boundaries between role and performer, between the drama and “real life,” and, through the intimacy of rehearsal, between themselves and their fellow players. Troubling these distinctions brings additional pitfalls, both for the actor and those with whom they engage: and while historical charges of immorality, blasphemous imitation, mutability, and deceit may not surface explicitly within the novels, “acting” is still periodically conjoined with treachery and emotional faking. Yet, despite such disappointments and dangers, the theatre evidently remained for White a peculiarly beguiling art form, stirring writerly creativity even when she was merely “hanging about” the margins of the stage (White, Diaries 109). This chapter has also explored the ways in which theatricality functions as metaphor in White’s writing for social performance and construction of self. Here, its associations are darker and, typically, more directly damning. To act is to be an imposter, to feign emotion one cannot feel; clothing and make-up likewise become calculated disguise, an absolute necessity to conceal something repulsive, or to lend solidity and colour to one who is otherwise as insubstantial as a ghost. As the reader moves through the novel sequence, it is almost actively painful to follow Nanda/Clara’s desperate longings and continual missteps, her fleeting periods of elation always cut short by catastrophe and repetitive, unsparing selfblame. Patricia Moran has argued that White’s own psychotic breakdown, near-constant depression, and erratic compulsions indicate that she was suffering from bipolar disorder, then called manic depression, never accurately diagnosed during her lifetime: Moran’s study proposes that better informed medical understanding could have spared White years of fruitless and even damaging therapy, as she sought a psychoanalytic explanation for her relentlessly unstable and conflicting moods (Moran 2–7). Within the Frost in May quartet, theatre, both as formal art and as framework for contemplation of perilously fluid identities, is notably revealed as summoning and synthesizing what might seem similarly antithetical attitudes and behaviours. For White, when her writing flowed effortlessly—hardly ever the case—it could be judged authentic, effectively justifying her very existence; anything else was hack work that condemned her as a worthless sham. By contrast, she saw that, in the theatre, self-conscious routine and repetition made spontaneity possible: further, through theatre, she and her heroine could begin to access that elusive “language of the body,” if only temporarily, in dynamic fusion with the poetry of a text. Finally, alongside her troubled career as an author, White’s encounters with the stage track its development, in Britain, from its nineteenth-century inheritance into a recognizably modern, less stilted, more holistic practice: in its contemporary incarnations, performance is more likely to embrace and pursue a blurring of art/life boundaries than strive to reinforce such dividing lines. And while theatre is certainly not offered here as any resolution for the many-sided and deep-rooted conflict that beset White and her protagonist, my analysis has demonstrated that it valuably formalizes, supports, and celebrates the human potential for transformation, self-making, fluidity, and change.

Notes 1 The ways in which autobiographical fiction by women has been critically undervalued, while “male-authored autofiction is praised more highly and widely … and more commonly recognized as literary rather than ‘mere’

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autobiography” (232), is a phenomenon considered further in Chloe Green’s chapter within this volume, “‘Does it have to be a play?’ Autofiction as Theatrical Failure in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?” Founded in 1904, ADA moved to Gower Street in 1905. The school was granted the Royal Charter in 1920, at which point it was renamed the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, or RADA. A new theatre was added in 1925, on Malet Street, behind the original building. Jonas Barish provides a thorough examination of the historical antipathy towards the theatre (founded above all on religious and moralistic grounds) in his seminal study, The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Barish includes historical moments where values of Church and theatre were not perceived as antipathetic: the Middle Ages is a marked example, when dramatic forms including morality plays, mimetic processions, and scriptural cycle plays were privileged by the clergy as a means of communicating the central tenets of religion. These activities were still occasionally attacked, charged with “blasphemous mockery” (68) in depicting holy figures, an overbalance of “playfulness and frolic” (73), or the claim that the susceptibility of players to their parts means that actors will be “themselves guilty of the vices of the personage portrayed” (67). Although Lippington’s Vision of Dante is not suspected of the first charge, and certainly not the second, the disruption of the DanteBeatrice dynamic is partly fuelled by anxiety about the slippages between actor and character. While religious objections to performance declined significantly in the nineteenth century, fiery protests against the theatre did persist: for example, in an 1883 pamphlet titled Theatres and Christians: The Revived Question Viewed in the Most Brilliant Lights, the Scottish Presbyterian minister James Moir Porteous produces a mass of supposed evidence to argue that theatre can neither be defended nor virtuously “remoddled” (Porteous 13). Rosina Filippi describes the methods of her mentor Herman Vezin, a renowned American actor who taught at ADA in its early years, as very much in this mode: “Mr Vezin’s teaching consisted in his sitting in an armchair, his pupil in another. He first read a scene, and his pupil read it afterwards … . I sat in my chair opposite Mr Herman Vezin for three years, and then he said I was ready to act, and I acted” (Filippi 40). Filippi herself taught at the School, promoting a more modern and body-centred approach. That ADA combined the traditional with the more progressive is also evident in Filippi’s campaign, in the 1910s, to democratize the stage by establishing theatres affordable to all (Anon “A Fourpenny Theatre”). Green-Wilkinson, like Archie Hughes-Follett in White’s novels, is an ex-soldier; where Stephen Tye identifies as mentally scarred by that experience, Archie “[thanks] God for the jolly old war” that saves him having to think about his future (White, Lost Traveller 430). The boy Charles is happiest playing battle games, and when Clara falls in love again, in Beyond the Glass, it is with another ex-soldier, Richard Crayshaw. While this haunting of the novels by war is on one level simply indicative of the era and reflective of White’s circle, it has been argued that Clara’s breakdown can be read politically as prompted by and commenting on women’s positioning within wider, traumatizing violence. Kylie Valentine assesses the basis and limitations of this interpretation in “Mad and Modern: A Reading of Emily Holmes Colman and Antonia White” (126–7). The title evokes the gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel,” a story collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which brother and sister are imprisoned by a witch. While in White’s novel the entrapment is arguably of the couple’s own doing, Tithe Place, like the cottage of the fairy tale, is strangely ersatz: Archie complains that “[e]verything in it’s so damn flimsy that it breaks off in your hand like barley sugar” (White, Sugar 252). White’s relationships are too numerous and fraught to be covered in this article, but are considered closely by Dunn in her biography. While Clara’s experiences significantly mirror the author’s life up to her early twenties, where the fourth novel ends, the protagonist is spared at least one grimly abusive episode, where, six months after being discharged from Bethlem Royal Hospital, she was raped in the family home by a friend of her father’s. The resulting pregnancy was later terminated. In the context of shock and trauma, it is unsurprising that, in the moment of rape, she “neither protested nor resisted”; nonetheless, her experience of the encounter as peculiarly dreamlike reflects the propensity in White (and Clara) to detach mind from body (Dunn 89–90). Shoshana Felman’s seminal 1977 essay “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” examines James’s novella, arguing ultimately that its sophisticated “trap” is precisely the way in which the text anticipates and refutes both of these dominant readings. Here Barish references the views of Octave Mirbeau, published in Le Figaro (1882), attacking the Comédie Française; however, Barish’s study demonstrates that charges levelled at the profession of falsity, immorality, and hypocrisy are historically longstanding and tenacious. White insisted that the telepathic connection was not invented but had really existed between herself and Robert Legg. In 1954, she writes to Emily Coleman: “that odd second-sight business … All that is true … but it was odd” (Dunn 76; ellipses in original). To highlight the loosening of inhibition and indeed the decisive abandonment of Clara’s bourgeois “good girl” persona is not to argue that mania—in the fiction or in the life of its author—can be interpreted as

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Works Cited Anon. “Mr Tree’s School.” The Stage, 28 April 1904. Anon. “A Fourpenny Theatre: Miss Rosina Filippi’s Scheme.” The Manchester Guardian, 1 November 1913. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. U of California P, 1981. Barker, Clive. Theatre Games: A New Approach to Drama Training. Methuen, 2010. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998. Bowen, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” Frost in May, by Antonia White, Fontana, 1982, pp. 7–11. Campbell, Deborah. Graceful Exits: Catholic Women and the Art of Departure. Indiana UP, 2003. Crocetti, Elisabetta. “Identity Formation in Adolescence: The Dynamic of Forming and Consolidating Identity Commitments.” Child Development Perspectives, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 145–150. Davis, Tracy C. “The Social Dynamic and ‘Respectability’.” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman, Routledge, 1998, pp. 70–73. Donohue, Joseph. “Actors and Acting.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 17–35. Dunn, Jane. Antonia White: A Life. Jonathan Cape, 1998. Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies, vol. 55, no. 56, 1977, pp. 94–207. Filippi, Rosina. Hints to Speakers and Players. Edward Arnold, 1911. Fox-Martens, Ella. “‘Still a Work in Progress’: What Has #MeToo Done for Women in Theatre?” Guardian, 22 April 2022. Grimes, Ronald. “Religion, Ritual and Performance.” Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith, edited by Lance Gharavi, Routledge, 2012, pp. 27–41. Hutton, Lizzie. “The Example of Antonia White.” New England Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2005, 121–129. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. 1898. Penguin, 1994. Moran, Patricia. Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness. Edinburgh UP, 2018. Newton, Marcia. “‘Sailing in Paper Boats’: Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and a Critical Examination of the Freudian Metaphor in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Fiction.” The Journal of Psychohistory, vol. 44, no. 2, 2016, pp. 137–153. Panero, Maria Eugenia, et al. “Becoming a Character: Dissociation in Conservatory Acting Students.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, vol. 21, no. 1, 2019, pp. 87–102. Porteous, James Moir. Theatres and Christians: The Revived Question Viewed in the Most Brilliant Lights. J. Menzies & Co, 1883. Sidnell, Michael. Dances of Death: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties. Faber, 1984. Spicer, Henry. Church and Stage. Tinsley Brothers, 1881. Sutherland, Lucie. “The Actress and the Profession: Training in England in the Twentieth Century.” The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, edited byJohn Stokes and Maggie Gale, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 95–115. Valentine, Kylie. “Mad and Modern: A Reading of Emily Holmes Colman and Antonia White.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 2003, pp. 121–147. White, Antonia. The Sugar House. Virago, 1979. White, Antonia. Beyond the Glass. Virago, 1979. White, Antonia. Frost in May. Fontana, 1982. White, Antonia. The Lost Traveller (Frost in May: Book Two). Fontana, 1982. White, Antonia. “The First Time I Went on Tour (1934).” As Once in May: The Early Autobiography of Antonia White and Other Writings, edited by Susan Chitty, Virago, 1983, pp. 163–176. White, Antonia. Diaries 1926–1957, edited by Susan Chitty, Virago, 1992. Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Indiana UP, 1982.

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17 “DOES IT HAVE TO BE A PLAY?” Autofiction as Theatrical Failure in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? Chloe R. Green

One might presume that the dominant formal tensions in Sheila Heti’s 2014 novel How Should a Person Be?, given its status as one of the early representatives of the wave of autofiction in English, would be between the markers distinguishing the genres of fiction and autobiography. But Heti’s novel, which documents the struggles that accompany the narrator Sheila’s pursuit of an artistic life through her interactions with collection of characters based on Heti’s real social circle in Toronto, also grapples with the tensions produced through its engagement with another literary sphere, that of the theatre. This chapter argues that the theatre has a significant impact on Heti’s novel, even as the play that Sheila is writing fails to come to fruition, and it considers how Heti’s novel functions as a novel of theatrical failure, aligned with David Kurnick’s analyses of modernist novels in Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012). Through the inclusion of play-text sections, stage directions, and an understanding of the self as a performance, Sheila utilizes the potential of the theatre to form a collective, and even political, response to what could be considered one of the most individualistic forms of the novel today, that of autofiction. By exploiting the presence-effect of the author within autofiction, which plays with the distinctions between “real” and “performed” identities, Heti’s novel heightens the inherent theatricality of her text that continues even after Sheila admits that her play is a failure. As the hopeless state of Sheila’s failed play drives the novel’s formal innovations, theatrical failure generates the success of autofiction, insofar as it anticipates and neutralizes the criticisms of narcissism, narrow focus, and irrelevance that autofiction, especially autofiction by female authors, is charged with. Furthermore, the gestures How Should a Person Be? makes towards collective action, specifically towards challenging and redefining the confessional framing of women’s autofiction, use the social and political engagement incited by the spectre of the theatre to create a space where women’s self-expression is not deemed irrelevant to the public sphere. Instead, Heti’s novel models a way for women to exist in the public sphere, as flawed, sexual, and idiosyncratic, and transforms what is commonly understood as a singularly interior genre into one with social agency.

“Just an Autobiography”: Theatrical Failure and the Interiority of Autofiction While Sheila documents her failure to write her play, and positions her novel as the transformed end product of this endeavour, the finished product sustains the traces of its theatrical origin in its formal composition. Throughout the first half of How Should a Person Be?, Sheila is dedicated to writing a play

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commissioned by a feminist theatre company. The play itself is the saga of the Oddis and the Sings, two families who meet in Paris at a parade, and the pursuit of one of the children, Daniel, who goes missing. Even in its early drafts, the play does not seem like it will be successful, mostly due to Sheila’s desire to insert more psychological depth than her characters or setting can articulate, hindering Sheila’s desire that the play will “save the world” (87). Much of the novel’s early action depicts Sheila discussing her frustrations with her play with her best friend Margaux and their friends Misha, Sholem, and Jon, and later, after their trip to Miami, Sheila abandons her play in favour of recording and transcribing her conversations with her Margaux, as well as to pursue a relationship with sexual “genius” Israel. Writing from these recordings, which “wasn’t [her] play,” still “felt good—far better than fiddling with the dialogue of Ms. Oddi and Mrs. Sing, as [she] had been doing for so long” (158). After she shows Margaux these conversations, they have a falling out, and when they confront each other about this rift, Margaux asks Sheila to finish the play as a way to solve her questions about how to live. In response, Sheila asks “does it have to be a play?” (262), and she begins to consciously write the autofictional novel that we have been reading, which bears the traces of the play it once was. Structured in five acts, divided into chapters rather than scenes, How Should a Person Be? is suspended between novel and theatre by its toggling between first-person narration and sections of dialogue that are structured like theatre scripts.1 However, analysis of the influence of the theatre on Heti’s novel is slight; much of the critical response has focused on the novel’s use of new media technologies, particularly in regards to the tape recorder and email, with few critics identifying the play-text sections as such and not direct transcriptions of Sheila’s recordings (Dinnen 86, Wood). Dinnen argues that the new media techniques used by Heti allow the novel to exceed Sheila’s narration as “characters now speak independently of Sheila’s voice” (90), and I contend that construing these speech-acts as part of a play-text only heightens these characters’ sense of performed identity and existence as part of a social and embodied environment. Consequently, the innovations in Heti’s novel’s form allow her to represent not the primacy of the individual genius, but the social and collective environment that produces art. We can thus consider Heti’s novel as one of theatrical failure, to the extent that it directs the shortcomings of her play towards the success of her novel, and in this section I will lay out a framework for how novels of theatrical failure operate, informed by the work of Kurnick, and then explore how Heti’s autofictional context transforms and heightens these theatrical elements. In many ways, the novel arose as an expression of interiority through its self-positioning against the collectivity of the theatre, and in Empty Houses Kurnick examines the assumption that the modern novel is an apex of interiority, formed in opposition to the public spectacle of the stage. Accordingly, Kurnick argues that novels of theatrical failure undermine the assumption that “the privileged subject of modern literature is the psychic interior” (1), and they challenge the view that the modern novel is “less concerned with the public and more with the private side of life than any previous one” (Watt 209). Rather, these novels, by encoding their theatrical influences into their form, allow us to “examine the collision of the most collectively oriented of forms with one that seems axiomatically individualistic” (Kurnick 2). This collision, which Kurnick suggests “make[s] visible the regrets that accompany a genre’s process of becoming unmistakably itself,” or “the melancholy of generic distinction” (9), is a useful point of comparison for a work like How Should a Person Be?, which arguably has reversed this process through its engagement with the theatre (the novel becoming less itself through a process of exuberant genre play). Emily Allen argues that novels that engage with the theatre “body forth both the symptom and cure of their identity crisis: extreme novelistic self-consciousness” (8), “stag[ing] their own production” as a novel through “elaborate allegories of writing and reading,” and this process is only heightened in an autofictional context, given how works of autofiction frequently document the process of their own composition. If autofiction is still undergoing a process of generic self-definition, relative to the genre’s nascent form and differing definitions, I argue that the theatrical failure of How Should a Person Be? allows us to explore the collective capacities of this relatively recent

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form of the novel. Rather than a case of the novel digesting and assimilating the theatre, as part of the novel’s history of absorbing new narrative forms (Bakhtin 10), we can understand the traces of theatre that stubbornly persist in How Should a Person Be? as sustaining the presence of the many in autofiction, which could be considered the most singular, and most interior, form of the novel, and in so doing preserving both psychological depth and multiple perspectives. As a genre, autofiction is a relatively recent development in the literary world, and even more so in Anglophone literature. The first recorded use of the term was by French author Serge Dubrovsky, who used it on the book jacket of his 1977 novel Fils to characterize his work as neither purely fiction nor autobiography, and in Anglophone contexts the term has come to indicate a work of fiction that includes “a characterized version of the author,” who is nevertheless distinct from the author as they are known to exist in the public realm (Worthington 2). The genre is thus recognized by the way it toys with both fictional and non-fictional elements, and it is thus subject to the differing readerly expectations from both sides of the equation.2 In framing my discussion of autofiction, I will be advancing an argument that autofiction is in many ways the epitome of the novelistic impulse towards interiority. If the novel’s drive towards interiority responded to the contrast of the theatre’s collectivity (Kurnick 7), autofiction as a genre can be considered in some ways antitheatrical or exceptionally interior, concerned with documenting the author’s limited purview and seemingly restricting any gesture towards community or social contexts. Indeed, many of the genre’s critics have gestured towards this idea in questioning the relevance of autofiction’s authorial focus; autofiction has frequently been labelled a narcissistic exercise (Grell vii; Worthington 175), “excessively exhibitionistic” (Boyle 18), and by terms as varied as “egocentric, self-centred, self-absorbing … [and] narcissistic” (Ferreira-Meyers 43). What emerges from these statements is an assumption that autofiction, by expounding on the life of a single lived person, lacks relevance to the lives of others, and is consequently overly concerned with the self to the detriment of its readers’ enjoyment. In general, male-authored autofiction is praised more highly and widely than their female counterparts, and more commonly recognized as literary rather than “mere” autobiography.3 Perhaps unsurprisingly according to this logic, Heti’s work has been labelled “solipsistic” (Smallwood) and “pretentious navel-gazing” (The Kirkus Review), and criticisms of Heti’s novel often perform a dual function as criticism of Heti herself. In one review, Tomson refers to Heti as “dubiously trendy,” and describes the novel’s blurb from David Shields as “sugar-high,” implying that Heti’s novel is the literary equivalent of junk food (Tomson), while other reviewers describe Heti as “fashionable” (Roiphe) and a “literary pop star” (Peterson). One of the novel’s most eminent critics was the New Yorker’s James Woods, whose review comments on what he perceives as the immaturity of its subjects, to the point that “one occasionally has to remind oneself that the book’s author is thirty-five and not twenty” (Wood). Comments about Heti’s immaturity have dogged her career; Katie Roiphe in Slate captioned her review with the imperative “Grow up, Sheila Heti!” and in The Baffler Lauren Oyler comments that Heti’s second novel Motherhood (2018) encouraged critics to view Heti as childlike, and consequently her narrative strategies are naïve and “cannot be [read as] indicative of an authorial choice.” In addition to decrying its puerility, Wood describes How Should a Person Be? as “hideously narcissistic,” and undermines its subjects by asking “who cares about a bunch of more or less privileged North American artists, at leisure to examine their creative ambitions and anxieties?” (Wood).4 This comment, of course, is as much a dismissal of Heti as her novel, and there is little difference to parse between Wood’s critiques of the novel and its subjects. What emerges from these examples is a judgement on what constitutes the proper subject material for a novel and a dismissal of women’s experiences as self-absorbed, solipsistic, or prurient. In this light, we can take these comments as not only a criticism of the novel itself, but a mark of the gendered and genre-d frames in which this novel operates. How Should a Person Be? engages with the question of authorial presence through its construction of the Sheila and Margaux characters as avatars of real persons, and as celebrities. As Ros Ballaster asserts,

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the presence-effect produced through the theatre and the novel diverge due to their differing relationship to corporeality—the body of the actor and the audience comprising “the fiction of being in the presence of ‘other’ bodies,” (18) unlike the presence of disembodied consciousness in the novel. However, in autofiction, the author has an undeniable presence-effect, sustaining the embodied qualities of their lived experience even through the disembodying or estranging effects of their avatars, and I argue that this presence-effect is mediated through the performative function of celebrity. Celebrity is a central concern of How Should a Person Be?, since Margaux and Sheila’s friendship is valued for how “[they] do whatever [they] can to make the other one feel famous” (Heti 3), and the novel immediately responds to its titular question of “how should a person be?” with the answer “a celebrity” (1). Furthermore, Heti’s alignment of her authorial avatar with a specific form of celebrity, that of reality television stars, allows her to negotiate the divide between literary celebrity and celebrity in popular culture. In one notable scene in the novel, Sheila watches Paris Hilton’s sex tape and feels a sense of kinship with Hilton, who she describes as “just another white girl going through life with her clothes off” (105). Heti has frequently documented the influence of early-2000s reality television show The Hills and other socialite figures on How Should a Person Be?, noting in one interview that she “wanted the Sheila character to be in the same realm as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and the girls from The Hills,” as a way to “win those girls some depth” (Westgate). In another, Heti stated that she wanted to “cast” herself and her friends more like these televised personae, and less like conventional characters in a novel (Keeler, “Reality Fiction”). We can also see how the influence on Heti of reality television activates a debate around cultural value, which in discourse on reality television is inextricably intertwined with social hierarchy, class, and gender (Skeggs and Wood 21). Contemporary formations of celebrity, as literary scholar Sharon Marcus notes, are inversely associated with worth, leading to celebrities being associated with “superficiality, artifice, and irrationality” and even “worthlessness” (172). In contrast, literary celebrity promotes the ideal of “the uniquely inspired creative genius,” who sits outside of popular culture and is thus positioned as authentic, against more commercial authors who are seen to “sell out” or lack originality (Moran 133). By aligning herself with the forms of celebrity evident in popular culture, including women who are derided for their superficiality and sexuality, against a kind of literary celebrity that would validate her intellectual pursuits, Sheila takes a stance for a kind of embodied, performed feminine identity over the hermetic isolation of the singular author. Such conflicting notions of celebrity have been a common theme of both autofiction and its reception, particularly in Anglophone contexts. While its alignment with postmodernism has aided autofiction’s legitimacy, in North America the genre has “frequently been surrounded by the whiff of celebrity disgrace or notoriety” (Nicol 257) and was initially conceived of as “a genre of low cultural capital” (Dix 9). The musings on celebrity in How Should a Person Be? seem to cover both polarities; at Art Basel, Sheila questions the purpose of the fair: SHEILA: MARGAUX: SHEILA:

If you think that going to an art fair and having your pictures in a booth will make you famous, it won’t. But no one’s thinking that at all! Hmm. I would be thinking that if I was an artist here. (104)

A few scenes later, the two have left a pool at which they encountered Keanu Reeves, and Sheila states SHEILA:

I’m so happy with how we were making everyone jealous with how happy we were in the pool!

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MARGAUX: SHEILA:

What? That’s crazy! In my mind, we were making ourselves happy. I had no idea anyone was looking at us. All I’m saying is: if there’s a pool and people are in the pool and you’re not in the pool, you want to be in the pool just like those people in the pool. It’s just a fact of nature. (112–13; emphasis in original)

What critics of Heti’s novel deride as an “exhausting” performance for an “imagined jealous audience” (Roiphe) is actually circumvented from becoming “hideously narcissistic” (Wood) by the intrusion of Margaux’s dissent. By situating Sheila’s discussion of celebrity in play-text that is immediately countered by Margaux’s bemused disagreement, How Should a Person Be? conjures this audience and allows them distance from Sheila’s self-absorption. Heti’s novel therefore plays on the valences of autofictional celebrity, and allows space for both the pursuit of fame and the recognition that fame alone might not fulfil Sheila’s aspirations towards genius. Furthermore, framing this discussion as a play-text expands Heti’s authorial purview, and complicates her literary celebrity; as Joe Moran notes, “the creation of the author as a ‘personality’,” whether in their work or by external cultural forces, can “threaten the whole notion of authorship as an individualistic activity, taking away agency from the author at the same time as it apparently celebrates that author’s autonomy as a ‘star author’” (61), a concern further exacerbated by the gendered disparities surrounding confessional aesthetics. By positioning Sheila’s celebrity as something between the individualized genius of the literary celebrity and the socially constructed validation of the reality television star, Heti argues that art is both a product of genius and of social relations. Indeed, Heti embraces the anti-individualism of her writing as a way to understand writing as relational, a product of social relations. As I will discuss next, the inclusion of other voices in the novel’s composition, rather than diminishing agency, allows consideration of celebrity as a performance of publicness, or a way of existing in the public eye while sustaining the interiority produced through the novel form.

“A System Among People”: Theatrical Residues and Collective Engagement The inclusion of play-text, and the interruptions these texts provide to the novelistic sections of How Should a Person Be?, orients Heti’s novel towards the social. The inclusion of play-text illuminates what Graham Wolfe describes as “the generative, creative force of intermedial gaps” (7), opening up new possibilities of representation and social connection as her novel toggles between theatrical text and first-person narration. Initially, Sheila considers her play, or at least the writing of it, to be an antisocial activity or a retreat from social interaction. She avoids meeting up with Margaux initially, citing “more pressing things to do—like work on [her] play and make it perfect” (30), and feels “relieved” (29) when Margaux cancels a date, as she “was eager to finish writing [her] play.” However, as she grows increasingly frustrated with her play, Sheila recognizes that the only solution is social interaction, despite Margaux’s insistence that she is of no help: SHEILA:

MARGAUX: SHEILA:

I need some help with the play, and I thought that maybe by talking it over with you—I thought maybe you could help me figure out why it isn’t working. Then I can listen to what we say, and think it over at home, and figure out where I’m going wrong. Margaux shakes her head. First, I haven’t read your play. Secondly, I don’t have any answers. It’s okay that you haven’t read the play. I think the problem is with what happens, so I’ll just tell you the plot.

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MARGAUX:

Why are you looking to me for answers? I don’t know anything you don’t know! (59)

The “referential texture” of Heti’s novel is heightened by the inclusion of what Kurnick terms the “hypothetical theatrical context” of the actions being depicted in novels of theatrical failure (Kurnick 15). That this scene is the first use of play-text in the novel reflexively intertwines Sheila’s failure to adequately describe what would occur in her play with the productive possibilities generated by the play-texts themselves. While Margaux’s influence results in Sheila incorporating other types of genre play into the novel, including her use of numbering individual email lines, the genesis of the play-texts suggests that the central concern of How Should a Person Be? is what occurs in the spaces between these characters, and between their performances of self. In particular, Heti’s incorporation of Margaux’s dialogue, which appears less mediated in the playtexts than if her speech was incorporated into the novel’s first-person narration, allows How Should a Person Be? to undermine the very claim of narcissism that its critics insist upon. The inclusion of other voices produces a distance between Sheila’s narration and the feelings she describes, and in being checked, confronted, or challenged by these other authorial agents, Sheila can follow her most “solipsistic” or cliched tropes of the artist, and also critique them: SHEILA:

MARGAUX: SHEILA: MARGAUX:

But listen, Margaux! Otto Rank says that one day there will be no art, only artists—so the work of art is renounced! And I agree! I’m renouncing this play because it’s not in service of my life. But if the primary thing was the work, I’d spend all of my time on the play. But you know what? This does not serve my life! Right. Don’t you think that’s what’s going on? No. (71–2; emphasis in original)

The flat contradiction of Margaux’s “no” argues against the perception of Heti’s novel as a navelgazing echo chamber. Rather than eliminating the solipsistic tendencies of her characters, Heti gives voice to both Sheila’s self-absorption, in her elaborate justification of her desire to focus on her own life, and Margaux’s dissenting perspective. In this sense, the inclusion of theatrical text “intimates a democracy among its characters,” a phenomenon which opposes the novelistic hierarchy of major and minor characters (Kurnick 102). In such moments, Margaux is both character (and subject) of a novel, and active agent of performance, meaning that she (and the other voices who speak through playtext), like Kurnick’s protagonists, are “lifted from their position ‘inside’ the fiction—abstracted or formalized by means of a double consciousness akin to that of actors participating in a theatrical performance,” or “the ability to lay claim to one’s dual status as performer and as character” (Kurnick 14–15). As she asserts her both within and separate from Heti’s novel, in both play-sections and in her real-life existence, Margaux evinces how a novel of theatrical failure can “imbue … its characters with the double aspect every character enjoys as a matter of course in theatre” (Kurnick 15), and consequently her presence in the novel shows how integral these play-texts are for realizing Heti’s vision. Furthermore, this doubled aspect is extended to the reader of Heti’s novel; even as Sheila’s play itself remains a solitary experience, never reaching a reader, an audience, or its intended company, the inclusion of play-texts positions the reader of How Should a Person Be? as audience and reader, aware of their solitary reading experience and the sociality imbued through perceiving action as an audience member. I argue, therefore, that How Should a Person Be? is more consciously aware of the significance of the social than Sheila is, and that Heti’s inclusion of the play-texts reverses Sheila’s angst around using the words of others as fuel for her writing. The tension between Sheila and Margaux revolves around

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Sheila trying to script Margaux, and according to the logic of the theatre, author or determine her actions. The divide between dramatized action and lived experience causes Sheila to use Margaux as the source of her writing, causing their falling out, and the hybrid form that seeks to repair this rift appears to be a compromise between factual veracity and emotional experience. When Margaux rejects Sheila’s work, Sheila assumes that it is because Instead of sitting down and writing my play with my words—using my imagination, pulling up the words from the solitude and privacy of my soul—I had used her words, stolen what was hers. I had plagiarized her being and mixed it up with the ugliness that was mine! (179) This realization acts as a turning point for Sheila, causing her to re-examine how her conceptions of genius and artistic merit impact other people. However, Margaux actually contradicts this assumption, saying that she “agreed to be taped,” and was upset at Sheila for leaving Toronto and ostensibly abandoning their friendship (247). From Sheila’s viewpoint, her play fails because it does not approximate life in any meaningful way, and she says that “life feels like it’s with Margaux—talking—which is an equally sincere attempt to get somewhere, just as sincere as writing a play” (82). As Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan note, the pursuit of universality wrapped up in Sheila’s play about “women” is abandoned in favour of “the singularity of Sheila’s experience of being related to Margaux, rather than regarding Margaux as a model or a copy” (89). This singularity impacts the novel’s finished form, in how it allows Sheila to commit more completely to “the attachments that individuate her” (Buurma & Heffernan 90), but also through how the theatrical residues in the novel assert these characters’ existence distinct from her narration. If autofiction approximates life, and plays literalize connection and community, then Heti’s hybrid form provides a means for autofiction to avoid the very label of narcissism that her work has been so defined by. How Should a Person Be? also extends this democratizing process to the affective experiences it describes, which in turn further blurs the divide between fact and fiction in the work. Such slippages are produced in theatre, too; Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that theatre is “characterized by a tension between reality and fiction, between the real and the fictional,” a tension which is heightened by the presence of “the real, phenomenal body of the actor or actress” (“Reality” 84), and William Gruber notes that as spectators “we tend to treat the figures we see on stage (or on screen) just as if they were real people” (78) despite their evident performing as characters. Heti’s use of performed emotion complicates this division, and one such example can be found in Sheila’s wedding, where she feels inhabited by a bride she had observed, and mocked for, weeping at the phrase “for richer or for poorer” (23), and finds herself “unable to extract herself” from the “ludic (and comic) rehearsal of femininity” contained within the marriage vows (Jenkins 109). Sheila feels the same emotions welling up as she recites her vows, “tears well[ing] in my eyes, just as they had welled up in hers,” her own “voice cracked with the same emotion that had cracked [the bride’s],” but she “felt none of it” authentically, the emotion “a copy, a possession, canned” (23). Sheila’s experience of emotion is therefore both undermined and heightened by her understanding of it as a performance, and such an instance captures what Kurnick refers to as a “formal paroxysm,” a crisis of genre in which the spectre of theatrical performance causes the novel to push at its own boundaries (14). In this sense, even in Sheila’s firstperson narration, she is aware of her dual status as character and performer. The theatricality of her self-performance is heightened by her gender; as Lynn M. Voskuil observes, theatrical femininity “disrupts and disables selfhood, rendering the self multiform rather than uniform, shifting rather than coherent, constructed rather than (at some level) essential” (615). Such an example illuminates an experience that could only be captured by a hybrid such as Heti’s; the performance of emotion here is both validated, as it would be if experienced on a stage, and undermined, through the first-person narration afforded by the novel. Accordingly, Heti’s formal innovation argues for the authenticity of

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theatricality as it pertains to Sheila’s identity, her truest understandings of herself coming from her most inauthentic experiences. Furthermore, Heti’s use of theatrical elements promotes an embodied, collective engagement with the novel’s composition. Yanbing Er writes that Heti’s use of the confessional style, “by revealing the formative methods responsible for the very novel … that we hold in our hands” in a manner “renounce[s] the romanticised ideas of the artist as wholly responsible for a reified work of art” (321), which in the context of Heti’s’ theatrical influence only emphasizes the social production of art. Heti affirms this idea in an interview in The Millions, saying that her previous novel Ticknor (2005) was “neurotic” because it “was inside one person’s head,” and she wanted her next novel to “be about a system among people” (qtd. in Cameron). In contrast, Margaux states in a section of play-text that the end product of Sheila’s play is not its fantasized genius, but instead its social horizon, saying “what matters is the people you’re doing it with, and the experience you have doing it” (72). Later, too, when Sheila runs into her ex-husband, he reads aloud an op-ed for the paper he writes at, which describes community and civilization as “shar[ing] a secret with each other,” binding the community together like a family (280). In another slip analogous to Sheila’s repeated use of sould for soul (5; 186), the op-ed has been assigned the title “The World Fears Impending Plays” rather than the intended “The World Fears Impending Apocalypse” (280). That this slippage situates a utopian vision of community and sharing through an allusion to the theatre shows how Sheila’s understanding of her own play, and what it might achieve, has changed. If the theatre can be framed as “the very figure for the collective” (Jameson 11), then Heti’s use of theatrical allusions and residues enacts a way for her novel to exceed the individual. As a work of theatrical failure, Heti’s novel uses the remnants of its ambitions to be a play to “index … the collective horizon that is the necessary ground of any meaningful political engagement” (Kurnick 18), and in the final section of this chapter I will explicate what political, moral, and social horizons emerge through the theatrical failure of How Should a Person Be? As Heti’s novel negotiates slippages of genre, it also encourages its readers to move between the solitary intimacy of reading and the collectivity of spectatorship. Novels of theatrical failure, in referencing the theatre or performance, cause “the intimacy of novel reading [to be] aerated with an idea of public space,” providing an alternative mode of engagement to the intimacy of reading (Kurnick 15). In sustaining the depiction of Sheila and Margaux’s intertwined life across different generic modes of self-presentation, How Should a Person Be? uses the generic qualities of both theatre and autofiction to underline how writing always occurs through experiences of sociality. These slippages of genre also allow for a more spatial and responsive readerly experience. Heti’s use of stage directions is more interior than the theatre would allow, pointing to the invisible effects of Sheila’s “insides begin[ning] to tremble” or to the “dirty underwear” worn under their clothes by both Sheila and Margaux as they sit down to breakfast (85, 58; emphasis in original). As Kurnick argues, these interior techniques natural to the novel enact a “collectivization” that “only becomes visible when we perceive their intimate relation to theatrical form” (11). Consequently, they create a relationship between the play-text and first-person narration, as the action being described by Heti in the play-texts occurs in the reader’s mind alone, implicating the reader in the composition and enactment of the scene. By evoking such collective forms of engagement with the most intimate moments in the novel, Heti encourages the reader to feel a part of the relations being depicted. However, the democracy achieved within the egalitarian speech of the play-text sections is not always evident. In “The White Men Go To Africa,” a chapter in Act 3 of the novel, the speeches given by the producers to Sheila’s play (the titular white men) are used to emphasize the distinction between their narcissism and Sheila’s own self-absorption. As they describe their white-saviour mission to Africa as an escape of the narcissism stoked by working in the theatre, Margaux questions the producers’ motives:

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MARGAUX: BEN: SHEILA: BEN: MARGAUX:

(loudly) You guys keep saying narcissism; what do you mean by that exactly? I mean that one is very involved in one’s own mind. But all art is like that. Books and paintings and— Sure, sure. Even activism is very involved with righteousness, you know. Long pause. (166; emphasis in original)

Sheila critiques the producer’s narcissism, not in the same vein as Margaux’s questions do, but instead she challenges the idea that any form or instance of art could be more narcissistic than another. As Sheila says, “all the white men I know are going to Africa” (168), and she mocks the idea that someone like her could do the same, and “return with the story of an impoverished black woman whose boyfriend has AIDS and drinks, and whose four babies have AIDS and drink,” as a means to signal the importance of her art (169). As these men “lecture [Sheila] about [her] lack of morality,” the structuring of their conversation through play-text prevents Sheila’s narration from commenting directly on their hypocrisy, as it would have in a first-person narrated section, and instead leaves the reader to locate the humour for themselves. Furthermore, Sheila’s protest that “all art” is to some degree narcissistic undercuts her critics’ use of the term; How Should a Person Be? makes explicit what is implicit in all art. These sections of play-text, therefore, anticipate the critiques of the novel as lightweight, irrelevant, or solipsistic, and gesture towards a political or moral impetus that comes not from empty philanthropism or posturing, but from embracing what might be labelled narcissistic, the true understanding of the self. Heti’s novel thus anticipates some of the critiques that have cohered around autofiction in English, particularly those around the reception of different author-character avatars, and her invocation of the theatre is directed to alleviate some of these criticisms. If we consider how Heti, like other novelists who incorporate theatrical failure into their work, aims to “make readers aware of the availability of the social” as a means to access “an ethical and political horizon for what seem the most inwardly oriented literary forms” (Kurnick 28), we can see how concerns around autofiction’s narrow focus occlude understanding of what political implications this genre may have. The labels of narcissism or solipsism that dog autofiction would initially seem to prohibit such collectivity or public gathering, but I argue that these labels reflect a gendered anxiety about what such a feminized public identity would enact. These appellations tend to follow female authors more doggedly than their male counterparts. Rachel Sykes has noted that “writers like Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Tao Lin compose similarly autofictional accounts of their protagonists’ inner life, body, and sexual activity,” but are not viewed as “literary oversharers” in the same manner as their female counterparts (162). Specifically, Sykes sees the connotations of shame that attach to “female self-knowledge, and the public sharing of that knowledge,” as a form of misogyny which polices the cultural context in which lives are valued (158). The gendered disparities in autofiction’s reception are, as Er discusses, “analogous to the historically uneven treatment of confessional writing” (321). Critics have observed how the works of female confessional authors are constantly equated to biography, even when these works are open about their fictionality (Brain 11; Keeler, “Autofiction Grows Up”). Furthermore, confessional modes are received differently according to the gender of the author. Elizabeth Gregory contends that confessional poetics equate femininity with passive representation, literalism, and factuality, whereas men are associated with imagination and creativity (36–7). Arguably, then, the confessional aesthetics that Heti employs in How Should a Person Be? cannot be separated from concerns around femininity, and female sexuality, and their connection to a real body. In fact, the moral impetus of How Should a Person Be? resides not in these superficially altruistic acts, but in the novel’s drive to make feminine representation, and feminine sexuality, political. Even the novel’s descriptions of sexuality are more charged when considered as theatrical; if, as Fischer-Lichte

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argues “we cannot conceive of the dramatic character without a body, even if the character is conceived while reading a playscript” (Show 296), Heti’s descriptions of sex are furnished with an embodied realism that is only heightened by their autofictional relationship to “real life.” In one instance, Sheila describes how giving Margaux the transcript of her recordings prompted an “expression of aversion” which recalled a teenage memory in which her high school boyfriend “suddenly and without warning … unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock,” causing her to “burst into tears of shock” (173). Even this instance allows Sheila to step into the identity of another; like her boyfriend, she wants Margaux to see her exposure without considering Margaux’s feelings. As Sheila demands for the transcript to be seen, “thrusting it in [Margaux’s] direction,” she connects intrusions of privacy to other, gendered intrusions (173). This section conspicuously moves from play-text to first-person narration, a shift which emphasizes the distinction between private and public as the narrative openly references sexual exposure. By rendering the first-person narration more public, coloured with sexual exposure, Heti extends the quality of this exposure to the reader, causing them to feel the effects of this unwanted contact. Consequently, the sexual exposure that Heti depicts becomes weighted through its presumed connection to real bodies, those of the author, her inspirations, and her readers. Heti’s novel thus explores what public and lived sexuality means for women who write from their own experience, and refuse to confine their experience of sexuality to the private sphere. One of the first answers the novel has for how a person should exist, apart from the earlier example of a celebrity, is a “blowjob artist,” a role which Sheila thinks expresses her true genius (4). The novel’s depictions of sexuality are vivid, hyperbolic, and abject at times, and their restriction to Sheila’s first-person narration would initially seem to imply that these experiences are less social than those being captured in play-text. However, these performances of sexuality are directly addressed to the public, and while they only occur in Sheila’s mind, the sexuality evoked in them is associated with a kind of exhibitionism. In the section entitled “Interlude for Fucking” (117), Sheila begins by describing their sex as a closed system, but then expands the scene to incorporate the people she encounters as she walks through her neighbourhood, a rampantly libidinous version of Clarissa Dalloway. Addressing these passing characters, she asks why “all of you just sit in libraries when you could be fucked by Israel,” questioning the purpose of “reading books when you could be getting reamed by Israel, spat on, beaten up against the headboard” (121). She observes a woman ordering a sandwich at a lunch counter and thinks I’m just saying—because I was watching you there and I thought, This stupid fucking know-nothing slut needs her brains scrambled by the cock of Israel. Her throat has never been bruised down its back by him—is all I was thinking when I saw you ordering your sandwich. Tuna fish, lady? Do you have no dignity? Is your body a limp half-body? Or is it impossible to have any dignity unless you are getting nightly reamed by Israel? (122; emphasis in original) Dignity, here, is not a counter to the sexual experiences being imagined, but is instead generated through them. Sexuality pervades the library, the deli, and the pages of the book being narrated, and Sheila’s fantasies about sex are inherently social, prompted by the people she encounters, and the addressed “you” in the passage obliquely references the reader as well as these passersby. Consequently, novels of theatrical failure transform sexuality through their negotiation of public space within the interiority of the novel; “in going public,” Kurnick writes, “the scene of sexual deviance loses its ability to impart stigma—loses not its perversity but the spotlit isolation that renders that perversity the object of punitive specularity” (166). While Heti’s depictions of sexuality here are not so public as a performed sex act onstage, her address to both the public and her readers gains some of the mitigating exposure that Kurnick describes. By shaping such scenes through her hybrid form, Heti is implicating the reader in removing female sexuality from its objectification, and empowers them to

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participate in the graphic (and sometimes dubious) pleasures depicted. By devoting a significant portion of her novel to Sheila’s exploration of sexual desire, Heti conceives of “human pleasure in radically collective terms” (Kurnick 5), and through framing sexuality in public terms, she reaches back to the novel’s influence of Hilton and ilk. Consequently, the depictions of sexuality in How Should a Person Be? connect contemporary forms of celebrity with the theatrical self-exposure of autofiction, positioning sexuality as a necessary element for the “genius” the novel pursues. How Should a Person Be? ends with two sets of resolved tensions, the first being Sheila’s freeing herself from Israel’s controlling sexual influence, and the second being the resolution of the Ugly Painting Contest. I argue that both of these are critical for understanding the impacts of Heti’s drive towards collective identity. Firstly, Sheila’s escape from Israel’s thrall models a different way to experience her sexuality. Describing her self-debasement, Sheila says that she wanted “to be so ugly that the humiliation [she] brought on [her]self would humiliate him, too” (271). After this encounter, in which Sheila observes “[Israel’s] dick shrink away, disgusted and ashamed” (272), she reflects upon her actions: What I had done in the night—it felt like the first choice I had ever made not in the hopes of being admired. I had not done it to please him. It was not to win someone’s regard. Then, from inside of me came a real happiness, a clarity and an opening up, like I was floating upward to the heavens. (273) The transformation of self-exposure documented here, from humiliation to freedom, shifts Sheila’s sense of her sexual identity as being self-motivated, serving herself rather than the desires of others. When considered in tandem with the squash game, the politics of How Should a Person Be? are further clarified. In this game, Margaux and Sholem play to decide who won the Ugly Painting competition introduced early on, and the slippage between activities here mirrors the generic slippages of Heti’s novel. This scene is narrated from Sheila’s perspective, as she and the remaining friends observe the players “running back and forth, breathing very heavily” (305), not able to discern much more than the “explosions of laughter, moans, and cursing” that the game produces (306). As Jon comments, “I don’t think they even know the rules. I think they’re just slamming the ball around” (306), and this turns out to be the case; the conclusion of this novel is a group of friends, playing a game according to their own desires, rather than hewing to established laws or rules. If Heti’s novel, in its autofictional positioning and the spectral presence of its theatrical ambitions, can be read as “a solicitation to a collective project—at an even more basic level, as a solicitation to collective thinking” (Kurnick 27), then these two endings make a case for producing deeply personal, vulnerable art as a way to form a collective, rather than positioning the desires, quirks, and nuances of the individual as counteracting or thwarting the relevance of such art to a wider audience. If Wood asked in his review who could possibly care about the experiences of such subjects, the answer is clear by the end of Heti’s novel: the readers, spectators, and those in between who are compelled to act by their interpolation in Heti’s hybrid form.

Notes 1 Some of the small number of critics who examine the influence of theatre on How Should a Person Be? still resist classifying the inclusion of speech as an explicit function of the theatre. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, in one of the few scholarly articles written on the novel thus far, discuss its theatrical structure and in the next breath describe these sections as “transcriptions” and “conversations” rather than play-text (88–9). 2 Autofiction can, in fact, provoke an outsized expectation around the truthfulness of the experiences being depicted. Leigh Gilmore has argued that all autobiographic forms can encourage the forming of a confessional relationship between author and reader, where the presence of autobiographical elements implies that their

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“Does it Have to be a Play?” author’s work can be deemed lacking if it does not accord with the reader’s understanding of biographical truth (661). In fact, Shirley Jordan argues that the potential for readers to feel betrayed or manipulated by autobiographers is heightened, not diminished, in autofiction due to its generic play with conventions from both autobiography and fiction (80). 3 This tendency is present in both French and Anglophone contexts; Francophone criticism has often focused on established, often male, authors, and excluded or relegated to footnotes the “substantial range of experimentation by new women writers that constitutes some of autofiction’s most distinctive practice” ( Jordan 77), and Worthington’s seminal book on American autofiction, which studied twenty-three authors in total, examined only two female authors. 4 Heti implicitly addresses Wood’s critique as such in an interview, where she noted the distinction between “the character’s narcissism, vs the book’s narcissism,” and how “in a lot of the criticism [of her novel] where that word is used, I’m not sure if the critics know what they’re talking about: me, the book, the character, this culture, or what” (Berry).

Works Cited Allen, Emily. Theatre Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2003. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Ballaster, Ros. Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Boydell & Brewer, 2020. Berry, Emily. “For Entertainment Purposes: An Interview with Sheila Heti.” The Rumpus, 7 Jul 2013, https:// thequietus.com/articles/12770-sheila-heti-how-should-a-person-be-interview. Boyle, Claire. Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France. Legenda, 2007. Brain, Tracy. “Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically.” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, edited by Jo Gill, Routledge, 2006, pp. 11–32. Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. “Notation after ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti.” Representations, vol. 125, no. 1, 2014, pp. 80–102. Cameron, Claire. “How Should a Writer Be? An Interview with Sheila Heti.” The Millions, 12 June 2012, https://themillions.com/2012/06/how-should-a-writer-be-an-interview-with-sheila-heti.html. Dinnen, Zara. The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture. Columbia UP, 2018. Dix, Hywel. “Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story so Far.” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 1–23. Er, Yanbing. “Contemporary Women’s Autofiction as Critique of Postfeminist Discourse.” Australian Feminist Studies vol. 33, no. 97, 2018, pp. 316–330. Ferreira-Meyers, Karen. “Does Autofiction Belong to French or Francophone Authors and Readers Only?” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 27–48. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre.” Theatre Research International vol. 33, no. 1, 2008, pp. 84–96. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. Translated by Jo Riley. U of Iowa P, 1997. Gilmore, Leigh. “American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah’s Couch.” Biography, vol. 33, no. 4, 2010, pp. 657–679. Gregory, Elizabeth. “Confessing the Body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the ‘Real’.” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, edited by Jo Riley, Routledge, 2006, pp. 33–49. Grell, Isabelle. “Foreword.” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. v–viii. Gruber, William. Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination. Springer, 2010. Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Henry Holt, 2014. “How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life.” The Kirkus Review, 1 Jul 2012, https://www.kirkusreviews. com/book-reviews/sheila-heti/how-should-person-be/. Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. Verso, 1998. Jenkins, Emma. Body Doubles: Uncertain Ontologies in Contemporary Experimental Women’s Life Writing. 2018. U of New South Wales, PhD dissertation. Jordan, Shirley. “Autofiction in the Feminine.” French Studies, vol. 67, no. 1, 2013, pp. 76–84. Keeler, Emily. “Reality Fiction.” The New Inquiry, 28 May 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/reality-fiction/.

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Chloe R. Green Keeler, Emily M. “Autofiction Grows Up, a Little: Heti, Knausgaard, and What it Takes to Turn the Real into the True.” Literary Review of Canada, July–August 2018, https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2018/07/ autofiction-grows-up-a-little/. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. Marcus, Sharon. The Drama of Celebrity. Princeton UP, 2019. Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. Pluto, 2000. Nicol, Bran. “Eye to I: American Autofiction and Its Contexts from Jerzy Kosinski to Dave Eggers.” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 255–274. Oyler, Lauren. “Motherhood!” The Baffler, May 1, 2018, https://thebaffler.com/latest/motherhood-oyler. Peterson, Britt. “Painting Ugly.” The New Republic, 27 Jun 2012, https://newrepublic.com/article/104141/ sheila-heti-how-should-person-be. Roiphe, Katie. “Not Quite How a Person Should Be.” Slate, 6 Jul 2012, https://slate.com/human-interest/ 2012/07/sheila-hetis-how-should-a-person-be-compelling-and-irritating.html. Skeggs, Beverley, and Helen Wood. Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value. Routledge, 2012. Smallwood, Christine. “Never Done: The Impossible Work of Motherhood.” Harpers, accessed 31 Dec 2021, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/04/never-done/. Sykes, Rachel. “‘Who Gets to Speak and Why?’ Oversharing in Contemporary North American Women’s Writing.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 43, no. 1, 2017, pp. 151–174. Tomson, Gavin. “More Life: On Contemporary Autofiction and the Scourge of ‘Relatability’.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 8 Aug 2018, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2018/08/more-life-on-contemporaryautofiction-and-the-scourge-of-relatability/. Voskuil, Lynn M. “Acts of Madness: Lady Audley and the Meanings of Victorian Femininity.” Feminist Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, pp. 611–639. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. U of California P, 1957. Westgate, Marie-Hélène. “How Should a Person Be?: An Interview with Sheila Heti.” Tin House, 24 Sep 2012, https://tinhouse.com/how-should-a-person-be-a/. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020. Wood, James. “True Lives: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?” The New Yorker, 18 June 2012, https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/true-lives-2. Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction. U of Nebraska P, 2018.

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18 MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S BLACK SNOW Getting First-Personal with Stanislavski Graham Wolfe

In “Some Evil Tendencies of the Modern Theatre” (1908), revolutionary theatre director Edward Gordon Craig draws on cooking metaphors to critique theatre as a product of innumerable would-be chefs, “each throwing into the broth whatever ingredient he will,” each “under the delusion that in truth he is the one who is the artist” (51). This concern with theatre’s reliance on collaboration is likewise at the heart of Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s unfinished Black Snow (1930–7), whose protagonist Maxudov first writes a novel then adapts it into a play for the prestigious Independent Theatre, where, as he is surprised to discover on the first day, portraits of Euripides and Shakespeare hang among those of the company’s actors, directors, lighting managers, stage managers, and seamstresses. In many ways, the once suicidal Maxudov (who, at the start of the story, is “totally alone on earth” [19]) will embrace the “wonderful, magic world” (111) of the Independent Theatre, invigorated by its life and amazed by the personalities and talent he witnesses there. But even while theatre becomes as necessary for him as morphine to an addict, he quickly finds himself choking on Craig’s broth. While Craig’s proposed solution, in the early twentieth century, was a powerful director whose “one brain” (51) could control and bring unity to a theatrical artwork, Maxudov is working a few decades later in a time and place where directors had acquired more clout. His most troubling confrontations are indeed with director Ivan Vasilyevich, whose recommended revisions—including entirely new characters and relationships—arise from practical concerns such as catering to actors’ egos, as well as idiosyncratic preferences (he can’t stand the idea of a theatrical gunshot and insists on replacing it with an offstage stabbing). When Maxudov’s script is finally put into rehearsal, it becomes further vulnerable to Vasilyevich’s “theory of acting,” which “included, among other things, the idea that the text has no part to play during rehearsals and that characters should be created who write their own text as they go along” (195). In one rehearsal Vasilyevich enjoins the company—even those with no lines—to go onstage and invent their own verbal responses to the sight of a burning building. Maxudov’s originally terse scene (“all my heroine says in the play is ‘Look … there’s a fire …’” [ellipses in original]) is drowned out by individual actors’ interpretations and additions (“shouting anything that came into their heads”). Craig’s description of theatre’s broth was written prior to his famously explosive visit to the Moscow Art Theatre where, in 1911, he sought to collaborate on a production of Hamlet with Constantin Stanislavski. One can imagine the empathy he might have felt in reading Black Snow, itself a thinly-veiled rendering of Bulgakov’s own tribulations at the same theatre in the 1920s and 30s. Ivan Vasilyevich is a conspicuous satire of Stanislavski, and Maxudov’s experiences are so similar to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-23

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Bulgakov’s that Leslie Milne describes him as the author’s “buffoon double” (218). It is not difficult, as Michael Glenny contends, to see Black Snow as Bulgakov’s “revenge” on Stanislavski for the failure of his play Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites (11), which the director had kept in rehearsal for an astonishing five years before it was pulled from the stage after only seven performances. Especially in its final chapters, Black Snow evokes the protracted rehearsal process to which Molière had been subjected at a time when the great director was developing (and writing in novel form) his own “system.”1 But as Peter Doyle argues, the novel also calls to mind earlier struggles, including the endless revisions and transformations required before The White Guard, Bulgakov’s first novel, was eventually mounted as Days of the Turbins—a process in which the concerns and desires of numerous directors, veteran actors, and founding members took precedence over those of the author (who “was not even invited to the play’s premiere” [63]). To this broth, we might add an additional genre of voices that continually asserted themselves and influenced Bulgakov’s work in its Soviet context. The manyness of his theatre-world was increased by the prominent roles of censor and press, which, as satirized in his early play Crimson Island (1927), imposed themselves as implicit and explicit contributors, frequently dropping the curtain on his work or requiring rewrites when it resisted visions of “socialist realism.”2 If this aspect of Bulgakov’s career is less overtly expressed in Black Snow (Maxudov’s play doesn’t get far enough for active censorship, though his novel meets with major impediments), it is evoked in the playwright’s broader difficulties with procrustean systems and stultifying bureaucracy, forces leading to what Bertolt Brecht called a “theatring down” (43), an elimination of the unique and vitally new dimensions of a theatrical venture, configured for Maxudov in the “black snow” that he so struggles to prevent from melting away from a key scene of his play: “I was trying to ensure that the gunshot would be retained, that people heard the dreadful sound of the accordion playing on the bridge as the red blood spilt onto the white snow in the moonlight. I wanted people to see the black snow. And that was all—I did not want anything else” (188). These conditions are also registered in the very fact and form of Black Snow, the product of a writer who, at the time, held virtually no hope of seeing his new writings in print or having more of his plays staged (Gudkova 24). Black Snow itself would not be published until decades after Bulgakov’s own death in 1940. Its unfinished quality—he had intended a second half—evokes the unresolved status of so many of Bulgakov’s other efforts, which either never received full productions or came to the public in partial form. One theory on why Bulgakov never finished Black Snow pertains to his divided feelings about Stanislavski and his concern that he was depicting the director too severely. Certainly, though much of the novel’s enduring appeal relates to its darkly comic savaging of one of theatre’s loftiest figures, Stanislavski might easily be defended. If he did at times consider text subordinate to actors’ insight (as McCaw puts it, the Stanislavskian actor “can intuit the mind of the character, and thus contradict the word of the author” [138–9]), it is hard to imagine that he—or Tortsov, the literary incarnation of his principles in An Actor Prepares—would stand for the kind of arbitrary liberties that Black Snow’s diva Lyudmila Silvestrovna takes with Maxudov’s text, lacking as they are in any sense of given circumstances (“her wild shrieks about some suitcases or other that had nothing to do with the play” [195]). Indeed, some aspects of Vasilyevich’s theory of acting that induce anxiety for Maxudov, such as its opening of the play-text to an array of individual contributions, can easily be reconsidered in more positive lights. Theorists such as Marvin Carlson have credited Stanislavski with “recogniz[ing] the power and the necessity of encouraging each actor to bring the surplus of the individual voice” to a written script (321). What Bulgakov presents in a satirical way, Carlson develops into an argument against Mikhail Bakhtin’s swift relegation of theatre and drama to “monologism” (Problems 17). Stanislavskian theatre may indeed bring forward a polyvocal quality beyond what novels themselves can achieve: Such an encouragement of individual stage voices, present throughout theatre history but perhaps particularly obvious on the modern stage, not only produces dialogism in the performance itself but

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also allows the audience to focus upon and relate to different elements in the dialogue with a freedom impossible in the novel. (Carlson 321) Stanislavski’s desire for a “sense of multiple individual psyches, each bringing its own surplus to the dialogic process” (Carlson 320) had in fact been at the heart of his disagreements with Craig during the Hamlet collaboration. As Marjorie Garber writes, “Craig’s controlling concept was that the play was Hamlet’s dream” (249). Such an approach, conveying a sense of events and characters as “seen through the eyes, and the imagination, of the main character” (Garber 249), points for Julia Listengarten toward an “expressionist preoccupation with heightening an individual’s tortured and alienated vision” that Stanislavski “never truly accepted” (“Stanislavsky” 72). Denigrating Craig’s vision as Hamlet’s monodrama, he worked to undermine it, encouraging the actors toward individually conceived characters (“through a meticulously developed web of inner motivations and subtexts” [76]) instead of reflections or projections of another consciousness. We find here a different one-many dialectic than those mentioned above (between, for instance, the “one brain” of a solitary playwright and the multitude of agents whose contributions and revisions determine the flavours of a theatrical broth). Stanislavski’s interventions are in the service of restoring what Henry James, at about the same time, was praising as theatre’s defining feature (in contrast with novel writing): “No character in a play (any play not a mere monologue) has … a usurping consciousness” (90; emphasis in original.). Even “the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet, the most capacious and most crowded, the moral presence the most asserted, in the whole range of fiction, only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the story, no matter how occasional these may be.” Stanislavski’s antagonisms with Craig are not precisely analogous to those with Bulgakov, who in his own way extolled the creative agency of actors and was often surprisingly open to collaborative revisions of his work.3 But as a playwright-novelist, Bulgakov may have been even more inventive and persistent than Craig in his exploration of first-person visions in theatre, and as we’ll see, some of his most revealing disputes with Stanislavski hinged on the question of usurping consciousnesses. Throughout his career, Bulgakov experimented with novel modes of what Martin Puchner calls diegesis, integrating narrative elements into playwriting, staging authorial consciousnesses, indeed putting novelistic First Persons directly on stage—at least until Stanislavski said otherwise. Beyond its more conspicuous satire, Bulgakov’s theatrefiction plays with these tensions on levels of both content and form, or in the short-circuits it effects between them. I argue that subtler modes of dialogue and critique are at work in this theatre-novel than previous readings have revealed, and these come into focus when we consider its fundamental dialectic: Black Snow is a first-person novel, filtered through the irregular subjective perspective of a main narrating character, about a theatre director and a style of theatre that actively resisted first-person dynamics. I begin with a closer look at Black Snow’s narrator, who puts Tolstoyan ostranenie to new and often pro-theatrical uses while also reflecting Bulgakov’s expressionistic and romantic-ironic tendencies. Consideration of the ways in which this novel was conceived with its own oral delivery in mind helps accentuate the theatrical qualities of its voice, but Bulgakov’s context also provokes a more refined assessment of what it can mean for a novel to be “theatrical,” and I pursue this question through the lens of a collaboration that has received little attention in discussions of Black Snow—Bulgakov’s adaptation for the MAT of Gogol’s Dead Souls. At the heart of disagreements surrounding this production are tensions between Bulgakov’s diegetic inclinations and Stanislavski’s emphasis on “transparency,” which, I’ll suggest, is put on trial and interrogated in Black Snow through what Stanislavski had insisted on excising from the Dead Souls adaptation—its first-person perspective. If Black Snow is indeed Bulgakov’s “revenge” on Stanislavski, it exacts this revenge not simply through overt satire but through a narratorprotagonist who struggles to perceive what Stanislavski had so prized—subtext—and in this way, the novel contributes to a critique of what Una Chaudhuri has called naturalism’s “logic of total visibility” (27). A final section suggests that adaptations of Black Snow, in compelling Bulgakov’s Stanislavski to share the stage with a first-person narrator, not only bring the playwright’s revenge to culmination but

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also bring into relief the collaborative tendencies and yearnings that are already, if ironically, at work in his theatre-fiction.

First Persons and Theatre-Fiction In his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky identifies novelist Leo Tolstoy as a preeminent practitioner of “defamiliarization” or ostranenie: “He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time,” and in doing so, Tolstoy overturns habituation and “makes the familiar seem strange” (13). Shklovsky develops this analysis through specific engagement with theatre-fiction. The description of Natasha Rostov’s trip to the theatre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace makes it seem as though we’re watching theatre (in this case opera) through the eyes of someone who has never experienced it: The middle of the stage consisted of flat boards; by the sides stood painted pictures representing trees, and at the back a linen cloth was stretched down to the floorboards. Maidens in red bodices and white skirts sat on the middle of the stage. One, very fat, in a white silk dress, sat apart on a narrow bench to which a green pasteboard box was glued from behind. They were all singing something … . They finished their song together, and everyone in the theater began to clap and shout. But the men and women on stage, who represented lovers, started to bow, smiling and raising their hands. (qtd. in Shklovsky 16) The narration insistently describes things without reference to the story or characters of the opera they are performing, and without the frameworks through which an operagoer would process what was happening. Quite a normal performance thus appears ridiculous and desultory: “The people, with something like daggers in their hands, started to wave their arms. Then still more people came running out and began to drag away the maiden who had been wearing a white dress but who now wore one of sky blue. They did not drag her off immediately, but sang with her for a long time before dragging her away” (qtd. in Shklovsky 16). As Julie Buckler puts it, Natasha “takes in the details of the opera performance as though studying the rites of an alien culture” (95).4 Bulgakov, who spent much time (fruitlessly) adapting Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the MAT in 1931 (Milne 89), and whose first novel The White Guard includes a character based on Shklovsky,5 works with comparable modes of defamiliarization in his own rendering of theatre. Black Snow reveals the theatre-world through the unhabituated eyes of Maxudov, a naïve observer for whom the goings-on at the Independent Theatre are a kind of alien culture. The first-person narrator tells us on the first page, apropos of the letter he received from “Xavier Borisovich Ilchin, Director, Drama Academy, Independent Theatre” (7), that he “knew nothing of the existence of the Drama Academy. And although I had heard of the Independent Theatre and knew of its outstanding reputation, I had never been there” (8). He later adds: “I’ve never been to any theatre. I’ve not been long in Moscow, you see” (53). The narrator’s rendering of the first play he attends is almost as bare as Tolstoy’s: As soon as the lights went out in the tiny auditorium, the music struck up from somewhere behind the stage, and the characters came on dressed in eighteenth-century costumes. [A] golden horse stood on one side of the stage, and I was transfixed as the characters came out to sit at the horse’s hooves or to hold impassioned conversations by its head. … [P]eople were saying amusing things written by someone else, and from time to time everyone burst out laughing. (56–7)

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No more sense of the play’s plot or meaning is given than in the passages from War and Peace—indeed, Maxudov admits he is “unable to say whether The Favourite was a bad or a good play” (56). But in vivid contrast with Natasha Rostov’s initial distance, Maxudov is besotted with this realm from first sight. He finds “something inexpressibly attractive about the performance” (56) and is “overcome by sadness” (57) when it ends: “I’ve never known anything in my life I have enjoyed so much, either before or since.” In these respects, he has more in common with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as he relays the tale of his childhood encounter with puppet theatre, or with later theatrefictional narrators such as Angela Carter’s Dora, who in Wise Children recalls the birthday on which her grandmother had taken her to the theatre for the first time. The experience of entering the theatre-world involves an even broader defamiliarization for Maxudov: “I was like someone born again, someone whose room now looked completely different, even though it was exactly the same room” (172). But if he never loses his sense of wonder, his unhabituated eyes open more critical vantage points as the novel progresses. “I’m new!” he shouts to the actor Bombardov (162): “You’ve been through it all, but I’m new here, I can see things clearly and with fresh eyes! I’m a stranger in it” (163). This acuity extends from the theatre’s bureaucratic and organizational structures to Ivan Vasilyevich’s protracted approach to rehearsal: “I would bet my life that, were I to bring someone to a rehearsal who knew nothing about the theatre, he would be absolutely astonished” (189). The seemingly endless “études” through which the director puts his actors (from reciting lines while sitting on their hands to “writ[ing] letters with invisible pens and invisible paper on invisible tables” [194]) are brought into relief by Maxudov’s repeated insistence on his own naivete: “‘Yes, that was all astonishing,’ I thought, ‘but I only found it astonishing because I’m a non-expert in this field …’” (192). Ironically, Bulgakov turns defamiliarizing techniques toward the very kind of theatre that may have seemed an answer to Tolstoy’s own concerns. Some of Tolstoy’s harshest criticisms in “What is Art?” are directed toward the very artificiality that the MAT and Stanislavski himself sought to eradicate: [T]hat people do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place them selves at fixed distances, in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions; that nowhere, except in theatres, do people walk about in such a manner, in pairs, with tinfoil halberds and in slippers; that no one ever gets angry in such a way, or is affected in such a way, or laughs in such a way, or cries in such a way; and that no one on earth can be moved by such performances; all this is beyond the possibility of doubt. (13–14) Through Maxudov’s experience, the very techniques that would remedy the representational absurdities exposed in Tolstoy are made to look almost as absurd. At the same time, to the extent that Stanislavskian principles had, by the 1930s, acquired a revered status, Bulgakov’s intervention is very much in the spirit of Tolstoy who, as Shklovsky reminds us, “described the dogmas and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar, substituting everyday meanings for the customarily religious meanings of the words common in church ritual” (17). This juxtaposition with Tolstoy may help broach broader issues of style that are important in considering Bulgakov’s relations with his professional theatrical context. For all his indebtedness to Tolstoy—indeed, in a letter to the Soviet Government in 1930 Bulgakov himself described The White Guard as “in the traditions of War and Peace” (qtd. in Milne 89)—his career would demonstrate a significant departure from the realist novel with which Tolstoy is associated. If not so fantastical as The Master and Margarita (with its abundant black magic) or earlier works like The Fatal Eggs (in which giant snakes and crocodiles overrun Moscow), Black Snow reflects what Listengarten describes as Bulgakov’s interest in “a world seen through the individual imagination, a distorted reality reflecting an expressionist consciousness” (Russian 158). This is most evident in chapters like the peculiarly

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entitled “I Commit Suicide,” in which Maxudov, having had his novel rejected by several publishers, is delayed from killing himself by the intrusion of Faust’s Mephistopheles. Though Maxudov gradually recognizes that the “evil spirit” is in fact Rudolfi (“publisher of the only remaining privately owned journal” [22]), the first-person narrator continues to hover between Moscow and Faust even as the spirit requests to read his novel: “I should have been extremely pleased he had come to see me, even if he had come in the guise of Mephistopheles” (24). In subtle ways, this expressionistic style intersects with the world of theatre as early as the first chapter. Maxudov’s arrival at the Independent Theatre has a dreamlike feel: a “flash of lightning” coincides with his introduction to the producer Ilchinin, who is illuminated with “a phosphorescent glow” (9). The theatre is framed as a realm of uncanny coincidences—Maxudov observes “an identical divan to the one that was in my room” (10)—and as a world of enigmatic signifiers addressed to him but impenetrable: “To this very day I have no idea why the fateful meeting should have taken place in that particular room. Why was that divan there? What were the sheets of music lying scattered on the floor in the corner? Why was there a pair of scales standing on the table with those cups?” His processing of himself as both, at times, utterly irrelevant and disturbingly central, is frequently evident in the narration’s expressionistic quality: “It began to seem as if l was surrounded by the shadows of dead people running everywhere” (138); “all the figures in the portraits seemed to emerge from their frames and come towards me” (139). While the distortion of ostranenie arises often from the ways in which phenomena are presented barely and matter-of-factly, Black Snow’s narration frequently presents Maxudov’s world through a subjective vision verging on phantasmagoria. What critics have identified as a romantic-ironic bent in Bulgakov is also prominent in Black Snow, with its inclusion of a character “whose opinions and experiences we are seemingly invited to identify with those of the author” (Curtis 193). Curtis quotes A. I. Beletsky: “It is typical of Romantic heroes that they are all to a greater or lesser degree self-portraits, and the reader perceives them as such despite the semi-serious excuses authors make in their prefaces and the provisos made in the very text of the works” (193). Bulgakov’s “Foreword to My Readers” warns that he “had nothing to do with the writing of this memoir, which reached [him] in very strange and unhappy circumstances” (5). Roger Cockrell’s 2014 translation, based upon the comparatively recent Zapinski pokoinika (Teatral’ny roman) edited by Viktor I. Losev (2012), also integrates Bulgakov’s brief prefatory statement, which directly presents what follows with tongue-in-cheek humour: There’s been a rumour going around Moscow saying I’ve written a satirical novel featuring a certain very well-known Moscow theatre. This rumour, I have to say, is totally baseless. (3) An additional dimension arises when we observe the prefatory statement’s title: “To My Audience” (3). What follows does not merely frame the narrative through authorial disclaimers but also presents it as material delivered aloud—“what I will be having the pleasure to read to you today” (3)—referring to a corporeally present audience—“all you highly educated people who have gathered here to listen to me today”—and even petitioning this audience’s good graces with tongue-in-cheek humour, asserting that they will “immediately realize there isn’t even the slightest reference to one particular Moscow theatre” (4). Even if one were to skip the preface, the main text frequently conjures and addresses itself to an audience: “Anyway, I am right in supposing you know Moscow, aren’t I? … Can you tell me, for example, how to get rid of a stain from your clothes?” (164). As Smeliansky observes, “The dominant element [of Black Snow] is improvisation, plots which are conjured up and develop before our eyes and which are the key to the novel’s humour” (333). These elements remind us that the work was in fact written with a partial eye and ear to its own performance. Violetta Godkova has explained how, in Moscow of the 1930s, the tradition of private salons was revived and reconceived as

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a means of sharing work and ideas that would never go to press in their authors’ lifetimes. Something of this culture is reflected in the first part of Black Snow itself when Maxudov convenes a small gathering of peers to listen to the novel he has written, and the diaries of Bulgakov’s wife Yelena make it clear that Black Snow was one of several of his works that came to life for an audience of this kind (Gudkova 24). Though much may be lost in translation, the book resonates with the voice, feeling, and comic potentials of a delivered reading. As with Paul Scarron, who (as discussed in this Companion’s “Curtain Raiser”) famously delivered works like his Roman comique “à haute voix,” it is tempting to try to imagine Bulgakov’s performance of his own text and characters, which may well have given opportunity for his particular talents. Yelena Bulgakov relays how, even in the most trying times of his career, the playwright-novelist exhibited a wondrous facility for mimicking his theatre colleagues: “Misha was in exceptionally high spirits recounting the rehearsal of Moliere. He acted Stanislavsky, Podgorny and Koreneva, and an absolutely classic Sheremetieva in the role of Moliere’s nanny, Renée” (qtd. in Smelianksy 332). There seems a double bite to Bulgakov’s imitating of Stanislavski when we recall the director’s own relegation of imitation (“which has nothing to do with creativeness”) to the lowest forms of acting in An Actor Prepares (18). We might add that there is something peculiarly Craigian about the image of Bulgakov delivering Black Snow aloud, playing all the novel’s parts as a kind of one-man show—a literal usurpation of theatre’s manyness. This is also to say, if Black Snow, as its subtitle suggests, is a “Theatrical Novel,” Bulgakov’s theatrical may be quite different from—or indeed in tension with—Stanislavski’s theatrical and the kind of practice dominating the MAT. As I’ll consider in the next section, the formal and stylistic tendencies that enabled Bulgakov to create in Maxudov such a memorable narrator of theatrical tensions were themselves often sources of theatrical tension in his collaborations with the MAT.

Diegesis at the MAT In his discussion of “modernist anti-theatricalism” (1), Martin Puchner is especially interested in how writers from Mallarmé to Stein and Joyce, rather than outright rejecting theatre, responded to their frustrations with it (including its reliance on collaboration and its susceptibility to myriad human voices and unpredictable bodies) through various modes of what he calls diegesis, “the descriptive and narrative strategies through which modern drama tries to channel, frame, control, and even interrupt what it perceives to be the unmediated theatricality of the stage and its actors” (21–2). Modernist diegesis “mediates the theater through an art form much more acceptable to modernism, namely, literature” (25). I have suggested elsewhere a certain kinship between Puchner’s modernist antitheatricalism and much theatre-fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not simply in the sense that the latter shares concerns, on levels of plot and content, with theatre’s unwieldy collaborative manyness, but also insofar as, through its literary form, it may attempt to bring theatre under the control of one brain (Wolfe 38). Black Snow enabled Bulgakov to indulge in theatre while keeping it at arm’s length, enjoying a degree of individual authority that had been sorely denied to him in theatrical projects. But one of the things that makes Bulgakov’s case especially worth exploring is the degree to which, almost from the start, his theatrical work had itself attempted to preserve authorial voice and assert degrees of diegetic control. As Listengarten writes, “Bulgakov’s structural experiments in the late twenties were directed toward amplifying the vision or voice of the author-dramatist” (Russian 154). His second play, Flight, may be a paramount example, most conspicuously in its copious and formally innovative stage directions which frequently read as a complex kind of literary narrative. “The emergence within modern drama of elaborately descriptive and narrative stage directions,” writes Puchner, “is an instance of a more general reliance on the part of modern drama on language that mediates, describes, prescribes, and interrupts the mimetic space of the theatre” (21). Such instances of “printed diegesis”

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may have served additional functions for a writer like Bulgakov who had good reason to expect that his play might only be read (Flight wasn’t staged until seventeen years after its author’s death). But critics have also emphasized other strategies through which the playwright asserts himself in the text of Flight: “A whole system of expressive means has been devised to enable the authorial voice to be directly heard in the non-narrative, ‘objective’ form of drama” (Smeliansky 141). Listengarten goes so far as to argue that through his masterful construction of montage and his interlinking “of different leitmotifs, voices, and sounds, in which the voice of the narrator is dominant” (Russian 154), “Bulgakov was assuming in Flight the role of the director of his own dramatic work” (155). If Black Snow is a response to the frustrations of Bulgakov’s inaugural experience with collaboration at the MAT, the same could be said of Flight, which introjects resistance to what had been most traumatic about his experience with The White Guard into the very literary stuff of the play. But it’s also here that we should observe a peculiarly Bulgakovian short-circuiting of form and referent. It’s not simply that, after the fact, Bulgakov drew on literary forms to respond to tensions he’d experienced with Stanislavski in the realms of theatre. By the time of writing Black Snow, those tensions were themselves quite intricately connected with questions about the role of diegetic and novelistic elements—including first-persons—within theatre. If the struggles over The White Guard and Molière are the most conspicuous referents in Black Snow, I’d suggest that the importance of the novel’s form and style become clearer when we look to an even more fundamental antagonism between Bulgakov and Stanislavski, crystallized through the MAT adaptation of Gogol’s Dead Souls. This is perhaps the most conspicuous case of Stanislavski’s unabashed revising of Bulgakov’s writing. As Bulgakov would later put it (apostrophizing Gogol), “I transformed your Dead Souls into a play. True, it doesn’t much resemble the one that’s being performed in the Theatre, and in fact it’s not like it at all, but all the same I did my best” (Manuscripts 179). In Stanislavski’s hands, after he took over rehearsals in 1931, the play would begin comporting with “the principles of psychological realism underlining the direction of the Moscow Art Theater” as well as with “Stanislavski’s own understanding of [Gogol] as a nineteenth-century realist” (Listengarten, Russian 158). This understanding was substantially different from Bulgakov’s. Stanislavski’s most explicit intervention was the elimination of a “First Person.” This figure Bulgakov had developed in hopes of evoking the novelist’s own voice and the dynamics of literary narration. The purpose of this First Person was not simply to help explain events that were difficult to stage directly; through him, Bulgakov “aimed in some measure to convey the character and structure of Gogol’s prose” (Smeliansky 191), in order “to intensify the sense of Gogol’s own presence in the novel and this author’s private, tragic-grotesque vision of the Nikolayan era” (Listengarten, Russian 158). From all accounts, this intended figure would have been intimately involved with the mimetic action, while also asserting himself over it. He not only “commented on events [and] introduced them” but also “entered into dialogue with the characters, registered astonishment at their actions and articulated the thoughts darting through their minds” (Smeliansky 191). Such diegetic techniques were not without precedent at the MAT. Accentuating a novelist’s style and presence in an adapted work had been a preoccupation of Stanislavski’s counterpart, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, since at least 1910 with his production of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Weitzel Hickey 185–6). Nemirovich-Danchenko’s 1930 adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, a direct influence on Bulgakov’s approach to Dead Souls, featured a “Reader” figure who narrated events as actors performed them, at times even “usurping thoughts and words” of the characters themselves (Rzhevsky 89). But as is well known—and as is sent up in Black Snow itself—Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko did not always see eye-to-eye. The latter registers as a ghostly presence in Black Snow, writing letters of advice from India, his portrait having been taken down at the Independent Theatre. Stanislavski’s explicit objections to Bulgakov’s First Person, through whom Gogol’s presence would be registered in the work and in whom we could locate the adaptor’s own most prominent contribution,

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were in some ways straightforward—or at least, less conspicuously irrational and idiosyncratic than Ivan Vasilyevich’s objection to Maxudov’s black snow. He expressed a fear that a First Person “might become irksomely didactic” (Smeliansky 192), disrupting the flow and impeding an audience’s immersion in the fictional world: “The audience ends up watching the play and thinking all the time, ‘That man’s going to come out again in a minute’” (qtd. in Smeliansky 192). But this figure may bring into focus some even more fundamental aesthetic differences with Bulgakov. After all, the whole idea of a First Person on the stage—a kind of usurping consciousness—would seem at odds with what theorists like Carlson discern as a central dimension of Stanislavski’s theatre, his dominant emphasis on a “sense of multiple individual psyches” (320). As discussed, the director had long shown himself opposed to attempts to filter a play’s action and characters through an overarching consciousness, as demonstrated through his resistances to Craig’s “monodrama of Hamlet.” Neither Bulgakov’s First Person nor Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Reader necessarily precluded the development of other vibrant characters on the stage (reducing them, as Craig seemed to have envisioned, to “a faceless, monolithic crowd” [Listengarten, “Stanislavsky” 75] or to mere reflections of a protagonist’s inner crisis); but Stanislavski’s intervention into Dead Souls was not altogether different from his response to Craig’s Hamlet. He worked to strip away the aspects of the adaption that seemed most in the service of intensifying a private, tragic-grotesque vision, and he worked with his actors toward fleshing out a multitude of individual realistic characters. More straightforwardly, the very idea of retaining a narrator figure may accentuate telling in contrast with the Stanislavskian emphasis on showing and subtext. The difference is well-illustrated by considering how Stanislavski’s own techniques operated in the context of staging novels. Larlham cites Nikolai Gorchakov’s Stanislavsky Directs (1950) where, amidst a rehearsal of an adapted Dickens novel, the director coaches an actress “to speak her assigned lines of text and also to voice the thoughts that her character might develop in response to her scene partner’s words. In doing so, she must ‘use two tones—one for the text of your part and one for your thoughts’; the second tone must be ‘lower and more expressive,’ differentiating it from the first” (188). Stepanova thereby “discovers a newly complex and emotionally full ‘inner drama’ for her character.” But the second time she is directed to whisper the inner monologue “so that it cannot be heard by the audience,” and finally Stanislavski asks her to “say all that you have accumulated with your eyes only; the thought will be reflected naturally in your face” (qtd. in Larlham 188–9). What might be directly verbalized by novelistic prose—or by a First Person like Bulgakov’s—is transformed into subtext. This method brings to its height the notion of “transparency” often associated with Stanislavski’s approach—his “extreme confidence that an actor’s genuine thoughts and feelings will organically and inevitably manifest themselves in subtleties of physical expression” (Larlham 189), and that unspoken subtextual dimensions will thus be communicated to a theatre audience. If Bulgakov’s Dead Souls was pushing diegesis to new extremes, Stanislavski was doing the same in rehearsals with his emphasis on non-verbal showing: He would not even allow the actors to gesture because he believed that would keep them from searching for inner adaptation. He wanted them to convey Gogol with their “verbal vision” (and only their verbal vision). “We don’t need staging. Plyushkin and Chichikov are sitting talking, and all that interests me is the light in their eyes.” They were to incarnate the spirit of Gogol in total immobility … (Smeliansky 201)

Maxudov and Transparency The method described above, and its assumptions of “transparency,” are directly lampooned in Black Snow when Maxudov describes his astonishment at one of Ivan Vasilyevich’s rehearsals. The actors

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“were finding things doubly difficult, because they were unable to gesture with their hands,” having been “deliberately forbidden” by the director (192). Maxudov is also mystified by other activities in which actors are expected to communicate something vastly exceeding the verbal content of a scene: for instance, in silently writing love-letters, or riding a bicycle in a way that reveals love. But much of Black Snow’s critique goes beyond these more direct forms of satire, engaging with transparency on levels of both content and form. Its own First Person is central to this critique. To position Bulgakov and Stanislavski as black and white antagonists would be to obscure their many points of contact and the ways they may have learned from each other. We might note, for instance, that Bulgakov’s prose fiction often accentuates the expressive power of eyes and their ability to reveal thought, intention, and emotion. Common in The Master and Margarita (“the procurator’s face was menacing, but his eyes were anxious” [21]), this is evident as early as his writings in Notes on the Cuff, in which a character tells the comical tale of a painter of Pushkin, criticized because he has unwittingly replicated a licentious disposition that had shone through the model’s eyes: “Pushkin didn’t play cards, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have cheated!”—“Your Pushkin has the eyes of a rogue!” (28). Maxudov himself is inclined at times to read thoughts from eyes (“he shook his head, the expression in his eyes saying: ‘What an innocent child of nature!’” [55]). But through Maxudov, Black Snow also clearly makes the point that conclusions drawn from eyes alone may reflect far more of a spectator’s own imagination and fantasy than anything likely to be transpiring behind them. This is emphasized in his encounters with Misha Panin, head of the theatre’s “literary section”: “‘What sad eyes he has,’ I thought, beginning to fantasize in my usual macabre fashion. ‘He’s once killed a friend in a duel in Pyatigorsk,’ I thought, ‘and now this friend haunts him at night, beckoning to him through the window in the moonlight’” (58). Maxudov returns to this imagined subtext later when Misha laughs: “When he’d finished, he once again remembered the friend he had killed, and visibly aged.” Indeed, what most characterizes Black Snow’s first-person narrator is a marked inability to penetrate the minds of others and “arrive at an explanation of their behaviour” (147). We might say that Bulgakov’s fundamental gesture is to place in the setting par excellence of subtext, inner life, and unspoken internal monologue a narrator-protagonist who struggles to read what’s going on behind people’s appearances, who picks up on virtually none of the unspoken dimensions in his exchanges with others. Again and again, they appear utterly confounding to him, their speech (or lack of it) defying explanation: “I had no idea what he was talking about and simply looked at him in consternation” (78); “they all stopped their incomprehensible conversation and turned to me” (59). He repeatedly fails to discern the underlying motives, the intentions or actions that lie behind a remark or gesture, such that much of what others say appears as “simply delirious talk” (81). Nothing of their inner world seems tangibly expressed to him, and certainly no “through-line” is discernible. “Understand nothing” (146), he writes in a telegram to his friend Bombardov, whose role in the novel is primarily to sit down with Maxudov and put into words, after the fact, the subtext of whatever incomprehensible scene he has just witnessed at the theatre. Black Snow’s most acute irony is that these dynamics apply a fortiori to Stanislavski “himself.” Most revealing in this respect is the chapter when Maxudov must read his play to Ivan Vasilyevich at his home. The passage begins by directly addressing the reader: “Have any of you ever had to read a play to someone else, one to one? It’s a very difficult thing to do, I can assure you” (118). What follows is a description of Ivan Vasilyevich’s complete absence of reaction: Ivan Vasilyevich sat totally still, looking at me through his lorgnette without taking his eyes off me. I found it extraordinarily disconcerting that he never once smiled, even though the first scene contained some funny sections. The actors had found it very amusing when I had read the play to them, and one of them had even laughed to point of tears.

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Ivan Vasilyevich, on the other hand, not only did not laugh, but even stopped grunting. And each time I looked up at him, I saw the same thing: that gold lorgnette—and behind it, that unblinking stare fixed on me … . So I reached the end of the first scene and moved on to the second. The complete silence was broken only by the sound of my monotonous voice. I felt like a deacon intoning over the dead. (118–19) It is worth pointing out that the directorial response presented here is starkly inconsistent with many historical accounts of Stanislavski’s actual reactions to work in progress. Actor Pavel Markov describes his attentiveness and corporeal responsiveness while watching a rehearsal of Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins: As always, Stanislavsky’s face reflected every last subtle nuance of the performance … Stanislavsky was an exceptionally responsive spectator. He laughed and cried openly at the runthrough of The Turbins. He followed the action closely, biting his hand as he always did, throwing down his pince-nez and wiping the tears away with his handkerchief. (qtd. in Smeliansky 71) Watching a performance is a different matter than listening to an author read his play, but Stanislavski’s own Creating a Role stresses responsiveness to a reading, indeed elevating it to a kind of central principle: It is important for actors to find the angle of vision from which the playwright views his work. When this is achieved they are carried away by the reading. They cannot control the muscles of their faces, which oblige them to grimace or mime in accordance with what is being read. They cannot control their movements, which occur spontaneously. They cannot sit still, they push closer and closer to the person reading the play. (5) This passage, which makes “transparency” a kind of imperative when listening to plays as well as when enacting them, is almost comically out of joint with Bulgakov’s rendering of Ivan Vasilyevich (“I felt like a deacon intoning over the dead”), which thus amounts to a subtle critique on the director’s own terms. In Bulgakov’s case, Stanislavski was not adhering to his own principles, failing to adopt the angle from which the playwright viewed his work, concerned with other pragmatic matters. This is another instance of Black Snow accentuating something that applies in theory but not in practice. But here again, the scene enacts an even more powerful, subtly formal revenge on Stanislavski, not only insofar as the director himself is subordinated to a usurping consciousness, coloured and filtered by a First Person’s narration. Most distressing for Maxudov—and at the heart of the scene’s tragicomic dynamic—is that not a scrap of Stanislavskian subtext resonates, becoming legible for Maxudov. What a reader gets of Ivan Vasilyevich through Maxudov’s eyes is an absolutely expressionless figure of starkly enigmatic silence, punctuated now and then by wholly inexplicable and incoherently motivated demands. The observer gleans (and Maxudov’s narrative style conveys) nothing of the man’s inner monologue, motives, through-line, super-objective—none of this is able to surface or register. The “unblinking stare” of Maxudov’s interlocutor is the virtual opposite of the “verbal vision” that Stanislavski had sought in his production of Dead Souls: “Plyushkin and Chichikov are sitting talking, and all that interests me is the light in their eyes” (qtd. in Smeliansky 201).

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What is missing from the scene, what Maxudov the naïve observer is deprived of access to, is Stanislavski’s subtext. This is not to say that nothing does, theoretically, transpire within Maxudov’s interlocutor; but again, only Bombardov, long-time actor at the Independent Theatre, familiar with its politics and intimately involved in its dramas, can explicate the motives and super-objective of the character. Bulgakov sets up a vivid dislocation of subtext from the physical scene: we first get an impenetrable figure in which nothing of an inner life is communicated, followed later by a diegetic narrative account of what was actually going on inside at the time. What was unspoken in the scene is cast as insider information, and Bombardov’s eventual revelations perform a kind of defamiliarizing double-duty. In detaching and juxtaposing the objective description of a scene and the explanation of its subtext and given circumstances, the narrative accentuates a massive disjunction between what is actually conveyed and what is supposedly happening beneath the surface. “Transparency” is even more overtly thematized in the preceding chapter’s contrast between Maxudov and Philip Philipovich Tulumbasov, the Independent Theatre’s house manager, who does appear able (“with just a single glance” [104]) to perceive the inner world and motives of every person who comes into the ticket office: “He could discern their secret desires, their passions and their vices, knew everything that was hidden in them, as well as everything that was good about them” (104–5). Tulumbasov makes daily decisions about who among the throng of people requesting tickets for the theatre’s generally sold-out shows is deserving of special consideration. These decisions “[do] not depend at all” on the respectability of “people’s outward appearances” but on his understanding of their inner life (104). “He needed just one glance and to hear just a few words from those in front of him to know who had the right to what, to enable him to formulate his response” (105). Unable to see a fraction of what the house manager sees, Maxudov credits him with “a perfect knowledge of the human heart. He could fathom the depths of people’s innermost soul” (104). Maxudov’s conclusion that this ability has come from “be[ing] trained in the most exacting school possible” (105) may gesture not only to the ticket-office environment but to a theatre built on inner thoughts and emotions and prospects of transparency. As Rzhevsky argues, “The profound school of theater life has given Tulumbasov the skill of reading human personality with absolute infallibility. A single glance at any one of the numerous seekers of tickets is enough for him to penetrate all external clues of dress, language, and behavior” (107). But the point also needs to be inverted. A quite fundamental dimension of Stanislavskian theatre is here cast as a privilege of trained perception, something that highly experienced audience members (who live their lives at the theatre) might be good at but which remains beyond the grasp of a newcomer like Maxudov. Something more complex might also be discerned here about Bulgakov’s critique of transparency and the role of First Persons. Perhaps the issue is not simply that Stanislavskian naturalism is not clear and definite enough for Bulgakov, leaving too much room for misguided interpretations (in Rzhevsky’s words, “the chaotic and uncontrollable diversity that prevails in aesthetic reception” [109]—a diversity that needs to be reined in through diegetic interventions). Tulumbasov the house manager, in the omniscience of his perception, seems an apt figuration of what Una Chaudhuri has critically termed naturalism’s “fantasy of total visibility”—its illusion, that is, “of the impossible translation of private experience into public expression” (17). The assumptions depicted here have indeed been cited by theatre theorists as a problematic dimension of naturalism, and not simply on the grounds that such direct communication cannot be reliably achieved. The naturalist stage adumbrates a specific relationship between the performance and the spectator, connecting them to each other with an ambitious new contract of total visibility, total knowledge … a promise of omniscience, indeed of a transfer of omniscience from dramatist to spectator … to deliver the whole truth, to dispel the enigmas of past and future from a firmly drawn present. (Chaudhuri 29)

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Naturalism’s limitation for Chaudhuri (who includes Stanislavski in her analysis) is precisely its tendency to promote Tulumbasovian reception, fostering pretensions to “a public privacy” (17), positioning spectators to assume they will be granted full access to and knowledge of private worlds. If this “logic of total visibility” is, for Chaudhuri, a paradoxically “occlusive ideology” (27), what it primarily occludes is the (value of the) unknown and unknowable. With its goal as “the observation, exposition, and explication of life as it is,” naturalism aligns itself with the impulse of the era’s “powerful explanatory systems,” which “must at every moment engage and overcome the unknown” (31), including “the psychological unknown of character and motivation” (29). The naïve Maxudov (who at this point in the novel has yet to meet Ivan Vasilyevich) does of course express high admiration for Tulumbasov’s abilities, but the fantastical quality of his first-person narration (like a child observing a magician) may cast some doubt on naturalistic pretensions (how could the house manager presume such complete and decisive understanding of so many private lives, of “everything that was hidden in them”? And what basis does Maxudov have for affirming these assessments as “invariably correct” [105]?). Here again, we could discern Bulgakov’s resistance in a subtle (and characteristically ironic) twist. If Tulumbasov can “fathom the depths of people’s innermost soul” (104), one of the things that makes the house manager himself an affecting character in Black Snow is Maxudov’s sense of an inaccessible, unknowable dimension in him: “a large, fair-haired man with a pleasant round face and unusually lively eyes hiding a secret sorrow—an incurable sorrow that evidently never left him” (101). Even as he is describing Tulumbasov’s uncanny ability to see immediately and deeply into everyone else, Maxudov’s narrative makes a character of him by accentuating a “hiding” in his eyes, a “secret” and private dimension that it makes no pretense to fathom. Certainly, Black Snow accentuates how much spectators are not seeing when, at the MAT, they are permitted to indulge in fantasies of total visibility: the work and physical labour concealed behind the upstage curtain, the backstage feuds, the organizational hierarchies (and the extent to which they may determine the structure of what is ultimately presented to spectators), the characters who are modified, curtailed, or altogether cut from dramas. Maxudov’s defamiliarizing narrative draws attention to how much is ironically occluded, relegated to the wings in order for illusions of naturalistic clarity to hold, gesturing, in Chaudhuri’s terms, “toward the limits and margins of the stage,” whereupon “are inscribed the ideological limitations of naturalism” (35). But here we might also look centre-stage to what Maxudov is fighting to spotlight. Ultimately, what he remains so passionately attached to—and what Ivan Vasilyevich is primarily threatening—is not a particular message or interpretation of a character, a meaning he insists on controlling, but a kind of dark patch upon a stage of transparency. “I wanted people to see the black snow. And that was all—I did not want anything else” (188). It is tempting, in this light, to risk a phenomenological reading of Black Snow’s own eponymous stage effect. Bulgakov responds to a “fantasy of total visibility” with passionate insistence on retaining a black stain within the proscenium arch that frames a reality.

Absence of Answer With this chapter’s themes in mind, it may become increasingly hard to overlook the fact that at the heart of this disagreement between Maxudov and Ivan Vasilyevich is also, quite literally, the fate of Bakhtin upon the stage. The character they argue about—whether he should be shot onstage or stabbed offstage with a dagger, and whether, by extension, his blood should or should not visibly stain the snow—is given the name of Bulgakov’s contemporary, the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose pronouncements on topics such as the dialogism of novels, and the monologism and “novelization” of drama (Dialogic 5), have inspired so much conversation. If I am not able in what remains of this chapter to explore all the ways in which both Bulgakov’s and Stanislavski’s novelizations of theatre invite dialogue with Bakhtin,6 I’ll observe that there is something not only comically but

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almost frighteningly apt about invoking the name of this preeminent theorist of dialogue in an unfinished novel that leaves unanswered the question of whether its protagonist’s play will ever be seen or heard. As Bakhtin himself would write, “For discourse (and, therefore, for man) nothing is more frightening than the absence of answer” (qtd. in Todorov 111). The moment described above, when Maxudov is reading his play aloud “like a deacon intoning over the dead” (“The complete silence was broken only by the sound of my monotonous voice” [118]) crystallizes an absence of answer that resonates throughout Black Snow, extending back to the demise of Maxudov’s novel: “nobody has read it. Nobody could have read it, for Rudolfi [the publisher] has disappeared, clearly before he’d had time to distribute it. I can assure you that even my friend, to whom I presented a copy, hasn’t read it” (48). What so persistently escapes Maxudov is the very “watchful listening,” the “responsive understanding” that Bakhtin, writing with equally poor prospects of publication, had considered so requisite for any dialogue (qtd. in Todorov 111). Apropos of these lines, Tzvetan Todorov asks us to consider the irony that the theoretician of dialogue, a man for whom the absence of response is evil absolute, hell, [should] suffer this singular fate: never get a response? Either his books appear, but under another name … ; or he takes the responsibility for his books, but to put them in a drawer: twenty-five years for the Rabelais, forty for Questions of Literature and Aesthetics … ; others may never appear, lost or censored. (111) Bulgakov’s circumstances were all-too similar, with Black Snow itself receiving no response outside the small circle of colleagues and friends with whom he shared portions, instead remaining in a drawer until more than twenty years after its author’s death. We might speculate that the kind of “watchful listening” Bakhtin expressed yearning for is even more fundamental to plays, which, when written in hopes of collaborative response, remain partial if unrealized. As Maxudov understands, “it was impossible to write plays and not have them performed” (166). But Bulgakov may also seem proof of the silver lining that Todorov cautiously discerns in this predicament. The hypothesis that Bakhtin’s “whole theory of dialogue may have originated from the desire to understand this unbearable state—the absence of response” (111) may likewise be extended to Bulgakov, who so frequently thematized “absence of answer,” placing it at the heart of masterpieces such as The Master and Margarita, whose writer-protagonist produces an unpublished novel that receives no responsive understanding from anyone other than Margarita herself. In this respect, we might locate one of Black Snow’s chief accomplishments not simply in registering the tragedy, mastering it through the force of art, turning it at times into comedy—but also in responding to it in ways that open further creative and collaborative opportunities.

Adaptation as Answer “In so far as your novel is concerned,” stammers an embarrassed theatre administrator (who clearly has not even read Maxudov’s book), “I have … er … er … nothing but compliments to offer, but … forgive me … the stage creates its own rules” (143; ellipses in original.). It is fitting that Black Snow’s exploration and reconsideration of such “rules” should in turn have inspired several attempts at adaptation. As productions of versions such as Keith Reddin’s and Keith Dewhurst’s have proven, this novel about whether an adapted novel can “possibly be staged” may itself be staged to strong acclaim. Among the many attractions is, of course, the prospect of putting Stanislavski “himself” on the stage. But if these works can be considered a posthumous culmination of Bulgakov’s revenge on the famous director, we should again look beyond direct satire. It is with the preceding topics in mind that Black Snow’s transpositions become most interesting.7

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That adaptors would desire to retain and incorporate a narrative voice that is not only so important to the defamiliarizing effect of the novel but, as discussed, written with oral delivery already in mind, may seem to make perfect sense—Black Snow lends itself readily to adaptation because its narrative voice is already highly “theatrical.” But by the same token, at the heart of both Reddin’s and Dewhurst’s adaptations are the very sorts of diegetic dynamics that Stanislavski had so insistently banished from Bulgakov’s Dead Souls; and this may lead to a very different kind of “theatrical” than Stanislavski’s. Certainly, the adaptations involve a considerable amount of telling, especially when attempting to evoke the protagonist’s mental picturing of an event: “The bookshops! People crowd in. ‘Excuse me, but is this the issue with Maksudov’s novel?’ They sit under lamps and read it aloud …” (Dewhurst 16; ellipsis in orig.). Here, Maksudov even performs the lines of others, and events that might have been dramatically rendered on stage are directly narrated to audiences: “I don’t know how to tell you this. I’ve just been to the warehouse of Rudolfi’s publishers and … Listen! Their warehouse is closed” (16). The adaptations indeed abound in what we could call, following Puchner, modernist diegesis, in which stage action is conditioned by its own description. MAKSUDOV sits down. But the waiting is not easy. He must think of something to occupy his mind. MAKSUDOV: (To us.) Get up, and look at the photographs! (Dewhurst 35) An inner thought or decision is directly articulated by the character, imposed upon his action rather than communicated through it. Similarly, Maxudov frequently supplements his responses to other characters with a summary of his inner feelings. “(To us.) Why can’t I make a better impression?” (Dewhurst 36). The adaptation asks Maxudov to verbalize what a naturalistic performance might seek to communicate as subtext, and indeed, the imposition of narration can lead to some conspicuously un-Stanislavskian moments in performance, especially when we recall Stanislavski’s own strategies for transforming novelistic inner monologue into subtext. Adaptors of Black Snow seem to feel its dynamics are best retained by resisting some of the processes that Stanislavski would himself go through, which becomes particularly ironic when Stanislavski “himself” is on stage. In Dewhurst’s version, when Maxudov is experiencing some of his tensest moments with the director—a scene in which Ivan Vasilyevich and a collection of obscure theatre officials are informing him that his play is being withdrawn from rehearsal but not returned to him—Maxudov turns away from the director, and at the same time, from some of the principals with which his real-world counterpart is commonly associated: “(To us.) What’s going on here? What do they want? I feel asphyxiated …” (Dewhurst 67). Emotions and thoughts that could be registered in physical subtleties (“the thought will be reflected naturally in your face” [Stanislavski, qtd. in Larlham 188–9]), are instead directly stated overtop the scene’s action. Here again, the tensions become revealingly acute in the play-reading scene. Reddin follows Bulgakov in reduplicating Maxudov’s direct address and transposing narration betwixt dialogue: (Moves forward, addresses audience.) Have you ever had to read a play by yourself to another person? It is very very difficult, believe me. I would read and wipe the sweat off my forehead and glance from time to time to the great Ivan Vasilyevich to see if he was laughing or crying or just still alive … (37) Dewhurst’s adaptation likewise introjects Maxudov’s narration as diegesis overtop mimesis: [Ivan Vasilyevich] resumes the unwavering stare through his raised lorgnette. MAKSUDOV must continue. At the same time he must confide in us.

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MAKSUDOV: (To us.) Have you ever read a play to someone face to face? He hasn’t smiled once, although there are some very funny places. My voice sounds like a deacon mumbling over a corpse. I’m hoarse. I’m overcome by apathy … (51) Recalling Stanislavski’s banishment of Bulgakov’s First Person from the Dead Souls adaptation, it seems an apt culmination that the director, in adaptations of Black Snow, should have to share the stage with a First Person who imposes diegesis upon him and upon the mimetic space he occupies. An audience could theoretically be enabled to see or hear the things that Maxudov describes—the wiping of his forehead, his voice becoming hoarse, his experiencing of the reading as intensely nervewracking and embarrassing (these might be considered good opportunities for actors). It is hard not to envision Stanislavski yearning, as he had with Dead Souls, to remove the first-person dynamics and liberate the scene from a usurping consciousness. As in the novel, his own stand-in’s subtext is deferred to a diegetic explanation that comes after the fact. “You must realise that as soon as you sat down to read Ivan Vasilyevich stopped listening to you,” explains Bombardov; “What he was thinking about was how he was going to cast it without the founders making fools of themselves” (Dewhurst 70). Apparently inaccessible during his own scene, Stanislavski’s subtext must be verbalized afterward by another actor while the director is in the greenroom. So Bulgakov gets his First Person on the stage after all, and with it, the kind of expressionistic heightening of a tortured and alienated individual vision that Stanislavski, as Listengarten argues, had “never truly accepted” (“Stanislavsky” 72). If this may seem a highly monologic victory—striking not simply at the director-antagonist and his excesses but also at the polyvocal dimensions that theorists such as Carlson accentuate as crucial to Stanislavski’s theatre, with its empowering of multiple independent psyches—we should note the ironic ways in which Bulgakov’s Stanislavski himself disrupts monologism in its “pure form.” Monologism, for Bakhtin, “denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness” (Problems 318): No response capable of altering everything in the world of my consciousness is expected of this other. The monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other’s response; it does not await it and does not grant it any decisive force. Monologue makes do without the other … Monologue pretends to be the last word … (Problems 318; emphasis in original) Conspicuously unable in theatre to “make do without the other,” Maxudov is all-too aware of the “decisive force” of Ivan Vasilyevich’s response, its potential to “alter everything in the world” for him. What we have of the unfinished Black Snow leaves its First Person still waiting on “the last word”—on whether his black snow will ever appear on a stage. Adaptations of Black Snow have seen fit to preserve this waiting, this absence of answer. But perhaps what is most peculiarly Bulgakovian about the posthumous revenge enacted by Black Snow consists in another turn of the screw. While preserving and introjecting the author’s First Person, these adaptations don’t simply put Stanislavski in his place. They may ironically make of Maxudov’s nemesis a most wonderful and memorable stage character—and a great creative opportunity for an actor. No less a critic than John Simon, in his review of the Dewhurst production in New York Magazine, asserts that Ivan Vasilyevich (“who is none other than Stanislavski”) “emerges” through the production “as one of the most redoubtably comic figures in Russian literature, worthy of Gogol, Sologub, Babel, and Nabakov” (50). It is the stage that ironically elevates this character to the highest of literary ranks. This “master mystifier,” Simon continues, requires an “interpreter as maliciously witty as his creator, and in Robin Bailey he finds an incarnator of genius … His Vassilevich has, for instance, a nervous tic of a mini-cough—is it a clearing of the throat or a threat confounding his hapless interlocutors?—that will live forever in my chuckling memory.” A terrific opportunity for

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individual creation, Bulgakov’s Stanislavski ultimately makes the show, in many ways upstaging Maxudov himself. He does this as a character who is far more in the tradition of Bulgakov than of Stanislavski, and by turning the very impediment to understanding and dialogue (“confounding his hapless interlocutors”) into memorable art.

Notes 1 In Rose Whyman’s terms, Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares adopts “the novel form, with a narrator and fictional characters of teachers and students at a drama school” (xv). 2 Doyle mentions, for instance, that “just before the opening night [of Days of the Turbins], as a result of hostile critical attacks, Sudakov [the co-director] insisted on Bulgakov writing a scene portraying the Turbins’ servants” (63). 3 Throughout his career, Bulgakov was often very open to collaboration, even, on occasion, openly inviting actors’ participation in his plays’ development. Rzhevsky describes his approach as “a collaborative, open-ended endeavour,” in which the written text would not be “preordained” but developed “in the course of rehearsals,” the actor emerging as “participant in this creative process” (93). 4 If as Shklovsky argues, Tolstoy was a master of defamiliarization, we can find similar techniques at work in earlier literary engagements with theatre. Liza Knapp argues that Tolstoy’s ostranenie owes much to Rousseau’s “faux-nä ıf methods of describing the opera” through Saint-Preux’s eyes in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and notes that Tolstoy himself employed similar techniques in an earlier work, The Tale of How Another Girl Named Varinka Quickly Grew Up (1857), “inspired by Tolstoy’s nieces and nephews going to the ballet for the first time” (164). 5 Haber, for instance, sees Shklovsky as a “prototype” for The White Guard’s Shpolyansky, a modernist poet (102). 6 There may be many ways of defending Bulgakov against charges of “monologism,” or indeed turning the tables. If Black Snow presents theatre through the eyes of a First Person, it does so in order to critique Stanislavski’s system as itself procrustean, imposing a single theory that stultifies a range of other creative agencies. And after all, if An Actor Prepares is, as Stanislavski himself put it, “‘the system’ in a novel” (qtd. in Carnicke 74), could we conceive of a more “monologic” novel? 7 This integration of narrative techniques applies a fortiori to the Taganka Theatre adaptation by Yury Liubimov and Grigory Faiman, written in 1982-83 but not staged until 2000. As Beumers describes, “The adaptation draws largely on material from the novel, but also on other prose and dramatic works by Bulgakov,” and in fact, the author himself “emerges as a counterpart and commentator, an alter ego with whom Maksudov speaks” (123). In the first act, the Bulgakov character “comments on the origin of the notes for Theatrical Novel” (124) and as the play continues “parts from Bulgakov’s biography are intermingled with his animated fantasy and the plot of the Theatrical Novel.”

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, edited by Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated byCaryl Emerson, U of Minnesota P, 1984. Ballaster, Ros. Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-century Britain. Boydell Press, 2022. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett, edited by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964. Beumers, Birgit. Yuri Lyubimov: Thirty Years at the Taganka Theatre. Routledge, 2004. Buckler, Julie. The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia. Stanford UP, 2000. Bulgakov, Mikhail. Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel. Translated by Roger Cockrell, Alma, 2014. Bulgakov, Mikhail. Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov: A Life in Letters and Diaries. Edited byJ.A.E. Curtis, Bloomsbury, 1991. Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. Translated byDiane Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, Vintage, 1996. Bulgakov, Mikhail. Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories. Translated byAlison Rice, Ardis Publishers, 2011. Carlson, Marvin. “Theatre and Dialogism.” Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, U of Michigan P, 1992.

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Graham Wolfe Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-first Century. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2009. Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. U of Michigan P, 1997. Craig, Edward Gordon. On the Art of the Theatre. Edited by Franc Chamberlain, Routledge, 2009. Curtis, J.A.E. Bulgakov’s Last Decade: The Writer as Hero. Cambridge UP, 1987. Dewhurst, Keith. Black Snow. Oberon, 1991. Doyle, Peter. “Bulgakov’s Revenge on Stanislavsky: Teatral’nyy roman.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, no. 1, 1976, pp. 61–86. Garber, Majorie. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Routledge, 2010. Glenny, Michael. “About Mikhail Bulgakov, his Novel, The Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky.” Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny, Harville, 1986, pp. 5–11. Godkova, Violetta. “From Salon to Samizdat.” Bulgakov: The Novelist-playwright, edited byLesley Milne, Harwood, 1995, pp. 15–28. Haber, Edythe. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years. Harvard UP, 1998. James, Henry. “Preface to The Tragic Muse.” 1908. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, Scribner’s, 1934, pp. 79–97. Knapp, Liza. “The Development of Style and Theme in Tolstoy.” The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, edited byDonna Tussing Orwin, Cambridge UP, pp. 161–175. Larlham, Daniel. “Stanislavsky, Tolstoy, and the ‘life of the human spirit.’” The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, edited by R. Andrew White, Routledge, 2014, pp. 179–212. Listengarten, Julia. Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots. Associated UP, 2000. Listengarten, Julia. “Stanislavsky and the Avant-garde.” The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, edited by R. Andrew White, Routledge, 2014, pp. 67–81. McCaw, Dick. Bakhtin and Theatre: Dialogues with Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Grotowski. Routledge, 2016. Milne, Leslie. Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography. Cambridge UP, 1990. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Reddin, Keith. Black Snow. Dramatists Play Service, 1993. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated and edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, U of Nebraska P, 1965. Simon, John. “London, Part II.” New York Magazine, 9 Sep 1991, pp. 50–51. Smeliansky, Anatoly. Is Comrade Bulgakov Dead?: Mikhail Bulgakov at the Moscow Art Theatre. Translated by Arch Tait, Methuen, 1993. Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, Routledge, 2003. Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating A Role. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Bloomsbury, 2013. Theobald, Anne L. Stages in the Novel: Theatrical Characteristics in Sorel’s Histoires Comiques. 2011. University of Wisconsin-Madison, PhD Dissertation. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Dialogic Principle. Translated byWlad Godzich, U of Minnesota P, 1984. Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art. Translated by Aylmer Maude, Hackett, 1996. Weitzel Hickey, Martha. The Writer in Petrograd and the House of Arts. Northwestern UP, 2009. Whyman, Rose. The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance. Cambridge UP, 2008. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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PART IV

Theatre-Fiction and Young People

19 PLAYING AND SCRIPTING THE PAST WHILE IMAGINING FUTURES IN CHARLOTTE YONGE’S 1864 HISTORICAL DRAMAS Heather Fitzsimmons Frey Charlotte Yonge’s Historical Dramas (1864) is a potent invitation for a young nineteenth-century person to imagine performing a dramatic script with friends and family. Unlike many at-home theatrical publications for children from the era, it is not a how-to guide, but instead offers a doorway to creating a world. The volume consists of three short stories about the fictional Barnes, Lester and sometimes Tyndale families, and the three Christmas holidays in which the cousins and siblings experiment with at-home theatricals written by one of the young unmarried aunts. The fictional stories frame actual scripts that could have been adapted by young readers for use in their homes, or could have inspired young people to write scripts of their own. The Historical Dramas stories are fascinating for several reasons. First, they contain the narrative of creating an at-home theatrical as well as the script for that theatrical, and provide insights into ways middle-class families experienced England’s nineteenth-century home performance craze. In particular, the stories illuminate age and gender responsibilities, expectations, stakes, and opportunities within the context of home entertainment. Second, the stories frame the scripts as “works in progress.” The reader is presented with what appears to be a first draft of the script, and the short-story frame repeatedly reminds readers that the scripts could be, and in the context of the story-frame’s narrative, were, revised. The structure suggests that imagining a performance is an exercise in thinking through possibilities, potentials, risks, and opportunities. Third, since nineteenth-century English discourses included prescribed gender roles for both boys and girls, the stories invite young people, especially girls, to use performance experiences to expand their visions of what might be possible in their own lives. After offering an overview of the short stories in The Historical Dramas and a discussion of nineteenth-century home theatricals, I discuss how the stories intersect with Yonge’s own life, why presenting the pieces as works in progress matters, and how pairing the stories with the scripts is an effective way to invite young readers to imagine ways of being. Yonge contests antitheatrical prejudice, presents theatricals as thinking tools, and affirms the social order.

The Stories and Scripts in The Historical Dramas Historical Dramas (originally from a Groombridge serial publication called Magnet Stories) includes three distinct but related stories: “The Mice at Play,” “The Strayed Falcon,” and “the Apple of Discord.”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-25

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The “Mice at Play” introduces readers to the Barnes and Lester families who gather together at Barnescombe, and shares the narrative of the first time Aunt Fanny writes a script for the children to perform at Christmas time. Embedded in “The Mice at Play” is the script Aunt Fanny supposedly writes. Unlike Yonge’s story-frame about a contemporary mid-nineteenth-century family, Aunt Fanny’s script takes place in the fourteenth-century court of Edward III. The script concerns a historical anecdote about a time when Queen Philippa and Edward III returned home from France to find their children alone in the castle, abandoned by the servants, most of whom were attending the mumming and revels of St. Barthelmy’s fair. Meanwhile, the narrative of the Barnescombe children is also about what might happen when children are in the back drawing room “as if” without supervision. In particular, as I discuss below, the narrative explores age, agency, duty, and gendered expectations for both boys and girls, and ultimately, declares a somewhat unexpected hero and heroine. The second story, “The Strayed Falcon,” takes place a year later, and the children are well-primed to put on a play. Twelve-year-old Kitty Barnes is particularly enthusiastic to the point of becoming neglectful of her household duties, selfishly wanting all the best lines, costumes, and props for herself. When Kitty and her brothers try to set a real fire in the middle of the set and Kitty is forbidden to participate in the play after she speaks rudely to her grandmother about it, the narrative turns to how the rest of the actors deal with Kitty’s punishment, and how Kitty learns about respect, duty, and forgiveness. The embedded script is loosely inspired by a traditional tale retold in Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, often known as “The Bridge of Cramond,” in which King James V is attacked on the bridge and rescued by a landless farmer, whom he later rewards. Yonge also includes details about the way that King James V was said to love his falcons and go about the countryside in disguise getting to know ordinary people. Problematically, the play features three so-called “gipsy” characters (associated with Romani people), and expounds on stereotypes related to kidnapping, fortune-telling, and thievery. Elsewhere I have discussed how it could be liberating for English middle-class girls to embody powerful but racialized female characters, such as a stereotypical “gypsy”/ Romani woman. These characters did not have to follow the restrictive rules imposed on white English middle-class girls that curbed their daily lives, opportunities, and even ambitions. However, performing these characters also meant that middle-class girl actors became complicit in the subjugation of non-English and racialized people that characterizes the imperial project (Fitzsimmons Frey, “A Place”). In her exploration of nineteenth-century geography primers, Megan Norcia draws attention to this dilemma when she asks if there might have been “a route to agency/authority/autonomy for 19th-century women that did not go through the patriarchal imperial master narrative, which expropriates agency and freedom from others to shore up its domain and power?” (X Marks 145). In this chapter, my focus is how the Barnescombe children engage with the script and their family, but the implications of the racist tropes, the essentializing of Romani people, and the ways that stories like “The Strayed Falcon” not only reinforced those narratives, but invited children to embody them, are very much worth further scholarly attention. The third story, “The Apple of Discord”, is meant to take place several years after the first two, and feels like an afterthought in many ways. The eldest boy has gone to be a soldier at the Cape, but many of the other children are still at home for the holidays. Unlike the previous story frames, this one starts in the summer, when Kitty’s brother Edward is applying to be accepted to go to school at Winchester, and Kitty and her older sisters attend the Dolce Domum festivities. Edward is accepted, and when Christmas holidays bring Edward home, Fanny writes her script. Each of the children have been entreating Fanny to write a play that addresses their concerns of the moment: Winchester seems important, one child definitely wants Greek gods and goddesses, and another child wants to cast the new family pet—a parrot. At last, Aunt Fanny professes to be inspired by a story from Miss Strickland’s Queens of England which describes a moment in 1603 featuring Lady Arabella Stuart and Queen Anne of Denmark, who is very bored because she and her attendants are stuck in the tower. The women

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devise childhood games, songs, and other activities to amuse the Queen—and eventually, they agree to put on a play together, even though they will have no audience but each other (thus, this script features a play within a play). After introducing the pleasures of Winchester itself, the story’s chief focus is how Fanny constructed the play-script to respond to her family, and how the parts were cast and why. Readers are told that the play ran smoothly because Kitty and Edward had learned lessons from their previous experiences. While the story’s narrative is not especially satisfying, taken with the other two stories in the collection, it offers Kitty the opportunity to try theatricals again, and be successful. Charlotte Yonge (1823–901) was one of the most popular authors of her time (Rosefield 8),1 yet despite accolades printed in Aunt Judy’s Magazine, and Ladies Cabinet of Fashion, Historical Dramas did not circulate widely. Groombridge, who published the original Magnet Stories, failed only a year after they published the book. Although Yonge wrote to Mr. Craik of Macmillan publishers in hopes of resuscitating her out-of-print plays and stories “if they can be traced” (23 June 1886, Jordan et al), she was never able to regain copyright. In spite of her stature as an author, Historical Dramas have been out of print since 1864.

Charlotte Yonge and the Moberly Family Yonge grew up in England in the parish of Otterbourne, and was deeply influenced by the Anglican Tractarian movement, especially the family friend Mr. Keble. Although she never attended school, she was extremely well-educated, and apparently, quite brilliant. Her first publication was a short story in French in 1839, and her breakaway success as an author came with the wildly popular Heir of Redclyffe in 1853. At about the same time, she launched and began to edit a magazine for girls called The Monthly Packet (which she continued to edit until 1890). Her reputation established, Yonge continued to write and publish novels, serial novels in magazines, and short stories, and although some were specifically written for young readers, she enjoyed a broad and robust following. The entry on Charlotte Mary Yonge in the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature makes two provocative statements. First, “A reader may feel that inside the careful Church of England Sunday school teacher there was a novelist of real distinction trying to get out.” Katherine Newey argues that in the nineteenth century, from a “political and ethical standpoint … for a woman to write was a revolutionary act” (“Feminist” 101). She points out that men and women worked and lived under very different conditions, including in the theatre industry and literary markets (101), and that even though the period witnessed radical change and challenges to taste and lifestyles, “the domestic arrangements and burdens of women were little changed” (100). Some so-called conservative women did not reject the expectations of middle-class Victorian women, but, in fact, “remain[ed] willingly trapped by love and duty” (100). Newey’s concerns are about feminist historiography, and Yonge exemplifies the complicated tensions inherent in Newey’s question of how to “deal with women whose views and actions offer challenges to contemporary (twenty-first-century) feminist critical positions” (91). Contrary to Newey’s own injunction to treat “conservative” women writers with an “ethics of care,” this Companion statement diminishes the fact that Yonge’s novels and short stories were very popular and highly acclaimed by her contemporaries: she was a novelist of real distinction, even if her politics refused to question patriarchal and church authority, or compliance with gender roles. In addition, the Companion also states, “Her books show great insight into the character of children, whose rough-and-tumble ways she cheerfully accepted.” I will return to this last point because it is so important when reading the story frames surrounding the scripts in Historical Dramas. Yonge cared about children and she enjoyed them as individuals with taste, ideas, and agency, rather than as possessions to be admired and played with, as some male Victorian at-home theatrical writers did (see, for example, scripts by Keith Angus). She was a careful observer of character and of family dynamics, and

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her writing was empathetic. Although she valued duty, obedience, and supporting the group in favour of the individual, she did not believe that children should be “seen but not heard”, or that children were purely innocent and “other” from adults. Instead, she ascribed to what Marah Gubar calls the “vision of the child as a competent collaborator, capable of working and playing alongside adults” (9), even though she believed children lack skills and life experience, and benefit from adult authority. Yonge published the Historical Dramas in the 1860s, but their first drafts were probably inspired by experiences with the Moberly family in the 1840s. In 1835, the Moberly Family moved into Yonge’s community when the father, Dr. George Moberly, became headmaster of Winchester school. Yonge was about twelve years old when she and her parents went to the home to welcome them, and the families became strong friends. Eventually, the Moberly family included fifteen children, all younger than Yonge. Christabel Rose Coleridge writes in her biography of Yonge: For four consecutive years Charlotte wrote plays for the young Moberlys to act. The Strayed Falcon and the Mice at Play, afterwards published by Messrs. Groombridge in the Magnet Stories, were among the most notable of these. Her own letters record the pleasure in the task. She wrote the parts to suite [sic] the performers and many were the merry discussions over costumes and characters. Charlotte was stage-manager, and occasionally helped by taking a part, but she was not, I fancy, much of an actress. (130–1) While the narratives that frame the Historical Dramas are fictional, they are also clearly inspired by the bustling Moberly family home, and the gracious Aunt Alice character is evidently named to honour Alice Moberly, with whom Yonge corresponded about the original plans and preparations for the Moberly home theatricals. No doubt experience putting on plays in a multi-family household helped her to identify the stakes for a range of people involved in at-home theatricals, including Aunt Fanny, the story-frame playwright. Yonge’s 1849 letter to her friend Mary Anne Dyson cheerfully relates Yonge’s own uncertainty about playwriting, joking “I suppose I shall make a fine mess of it, but it will do for them at any rate to make fun of” (Jordan et. al).2

What was a Nineteenth-Century Juvenile at-home Theatrical? Between approximately 1850 and the First World War, performing a play at home was a popular activity among England’s middle classes, especially around the Christmas holidays when homes were bursting with relatives and energetic children, and the weather was too chilly to participate comfortably in outdoor activities for long periods. Although there was a whole industry around at-home theatricals (there were books and journal articles including scripts, how-to guides, and costume advice, as well as props and costume rentals), often individuals wrote their own plays, as Aunt Fanny does in the Historical Dramas, or as Charlotte Yonge herself did, prior to creating the Barnescombe stories. Since Historical Dramas discusses the Barnes family and their cousins, and simultaneously shares draft versions of scripts, the volume could be interpreted as a kind of how-to guide with scripts included—except that, because the how-to component is fiction, it offers much more scope for imagination. Juvenile theatricals (in which actors were primarily children) were typically organized by women and girls. A few interested adult men and older boys might help, yet Newey explains that at-home theatricals could be linked to many aspects of women’s labour, including child care, “the economy of the household and its improvement and entertainment” (Women 143). In between other household chores, such as darning, sewing, doing lessons, writing letters, and attending to family demands such as dressing for dinner, older girls drilled younger children in their lines, and helped them practice their songs and dances. The Historical Dramas story frames not only give details regarding what young

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people getting up a play did to prepare; they offer insights into what was at stake for the participants and their families. For what seems to have been about a fortnight of rehearsals, a significant part of the fun of getting up a play was preparing set, props, and costumes, usually made up of found and modified pieces; occasionally special items might be built or even rented. Yonge’s characters took inspiration from medieval illustrations in books that they owned. For example, in “The Mice at Play” a “moth-eaten swan’s down boa of grandmamma’s”3 was harvested for fur on borders on pockets and sleeves, and they built an enormous cone-shaped hat out of pasteboard and covered with a geranium-coloured scarf, “which, by flowing down from the peak, just saved it from being an absolute fool’s cap.” In “The Apple of Discord,” since there is a play within the play, Yonge focuses on how costumes could be easily adapted. For example, Lucy plays Princess Elizabeth, and adds wings made of wire and gauze to her costume when she becomes Cupid. Gertrude plays Lady Susan wearing a Mary of Scotland cap, but then becomes Minerva by switching the cap for an old helmet, adding a shield featuring a medusa head, and carrying a taxidermied owl. Historical accuracy was probably the source of debate in many at-home productions, especially following James Robinson Planché and William Charles Macready’s production of King John in 1823, and Queen Victoria’s penchant for fancy dress balls, beginning in 1842.4 In “The Mice at Play” Lucy wears scarlet stockings that she already owns, rather than construct some out of fabric that would be more in keeping with the time period. The aunts dismiss her objections saying that they cannot “stand upon trifles, and must put up with an anachronism or two.” Later they do the same when they incorporate Robert Burns’s airs into a sixteenth-century play: “oh, well, she sang something very like it!” Historical accuracy may not have felt like the highest priority, as young people imagined, created, and transported the family to a distant world through the fun of props and costumes.5 How-to guides of the period suggest methods to alter home spaces for performance. Juliana Horatia Ewing’s family performed theirs in the children’s nursery, while the fictional Barnescombe house has a “great back drawing-room, with folding doors, which grandpapa used to shut upon the laughing party, saying, with a wink of his good-humoured eye, “There, young folks, have it your own way; when the cat’s away the mice may play.” Later, when the young people perform in the back drawing room, they separate the stage from backstage using a folding screen, and then use the folding doors to the room as a curtain, dividing the performance space from the hall. Other features might matter to some thespians. For example, Julia Corner describes how curtains could be drawn and closed (introduction). Clara Ryland offers suggestions of how to create the impression of an onstage forest with potted plants and sprays of flowers laid into moss, trails of ivy, and poles covered in evergreen branches (16). Given the fire hazard of loose greenery on her stage, perhaps it is not surprising that the Ryland family did not bother with footlights, but in the Historical Dramas, Aunt Alice works hard to convince her grandmother that they need to have ten carefully concealed candles “without which the London minds of the Lesters would have never been content.” As Newey observes, home theatricals were not merely an alternative to public entertainment (“Home” 97), but were sophisticated spaces connecting the public and private spheres of Victorian life.

At-Home Theatricals and Antitheatrical Prejudice One of the complexities of at-home theatricals that mid-nineteenth century middle class families had to navigate (especially girls and young women) was pervasive antitheatrical prejudice. As I have explained elsewhere, many middle-class families viewed commercial theatre activities with wariness and suspicion. Anxieties could be related to imagined lifestyles associated with actors, “lying” professionally, drawing attention to oneself by having a public profile, or dancing for entertainment but the actions families took in response to their worries varied significantly (“Acting” 161–2, 167). In an 1877 essay, Yonge enters

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the debate by acknowledging concerns about undesirable audiences who attend ballet, and the moral character of performers, although she asserts that in “well-regulated theatres [they] are often beyond all reproach” (“Amusement” 123). Although she rarely, if ever, attended them herself, Yonge advised her readers that theatres and operas should not be shunned, that their enjoyment is “safe” and “a delightful study of the real beauty and purpose of isolated passages already learnt” (123). Yonge also suggests that actors have “gifts” that are intended to serve the good of humanity, yet even she observes, “of course it would be doubtful whether a profession involving so much display and stimulating of sentiments is always a safe one” (123). Antitheatrical prejudice engendered a wide range of responses to home performance: some families participated in amateur theatricals with enthusiasm; some even claimed that they were especially improving for children; others forbade them; still others permitted theatricals conditionally—perhaps only if there were no men in the audience, or, as I discuss elsewhere, if a young actress did not wear a costume (“Acting” 161). One mitigating factor for some families is that audiences for at-home theatricals were always invited: everyone in the audience knew everyone on the stage. After the performance and the applause, young actors remained in costume and mingled with family and neighbours. There might be a tea, a chance for sweets and lemonade, or even a dance to extend the event into a celebration beyond the presentation of the play. A known audience meant a safer, more controlled performance environment, but may also have raised the stakes for children performing in front of their elders. As young people began to experiment with other ways of being in the world, adults had the potential to see them differently as well, giving both an opportunity to re-imagine what could be possible. Yonge was fascinated by ways that people—even children—could engage in discussions about antitheatricality and theatre as a practice. She penned a variety of perspectives in Henrietta’s Wish (1853), Pillars of the House (1873), and especially The Strolling Players (with Christabel Coleridge 1893). As I will discuss, the stories in the Historical Dramas are no exception, and although the adults at Barnescombe obviously permit the children to perform Christmas theatricals, characters still express opinions about the nature and value of theatrical performance, inviting contemporary readers to consider their own positions on these highly topical issues.

Works in Progress Each of the three Historical Dramas stories includes a script, but the story makes it clear that the printed script is not the one that the story characters perform. In “The Mice at Play” the eldest boy, Uncle Ernest, adds unexpected lines: he was “quite perfect save that he put in sundry extemporary touches that were much to the purpose, and he had a wicked habit of whispering to the Queen, so as much to endanger her gravity in all her despair for the child.” The script in the “Strayed Falcon” is even further from the one that the story’s children perform. The reader is introduced to the script as a first draft: Aunt Fanny had written with some Scottish dialect—using words like bairn for child, and burn for creek. Once the play is cast and rehearsals have begun, Kitty (sometimes called Kate) discovers her aunt all alone, writing as fast as she possibly can: “Why, Aunt Fanny, we wrote out all the parts long ago.” “Yes, Kate but Aunt Jessie has been setting my Scotch to rights, or rather, she says I have made such a mess of it that I had better make it English at once.” Poor Kitty is frustrated because her time and labour in copying the first script seem wasted, yet Yonge has deftly indicated that the first draft of the script is just that—and that it could, and perhaps should, be revised. The reader never gets to see how Aunt Fanny modifies the text, creating an open

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invitation for reimagining and adapting. In her own letters to Alice Moberly regarding “The Mice at Play” Yonge clearly perceived the value of revising based on rehearsals. She writes, “You cannot think how I shall enjoy the fun of the rehearsals, and it will give me such a good opportunity for correcting any part of the play that may not have the right effect” (November or December 1849, Jordan et. al). Communicating that power through story is an invitation to modify each script according to the tastes and needs of any family. The final story and script combination is “The Apple of Discord.” The script includes a play within a play, resulting in almost every story character performing two roles. Instead of reminding readers that the printed script is a revisable starting point for a home performance, the story around the script explains how the script was written to accommodate the needs, ages, bodies, interests, and dreams of the available actors. For example, little Alice at nine years old was the perfect age to be the little Prince; Edward plays the character of the college boy because he is a college boy for the first time; and it is Lucy’s “fervent desire” to wear wings, so she gets to play Cupid. In one of Yonge’s letters to Alice Moberly concerning a play that she never published, she asks “Would George mind being the Colonel? He is never on the stage with Edmund, and a cloak and blue scarf would turn him into a Roundhead” (1850). Yonge understood from experience the importance of getting buy-in for each of the roles from the various young people. By writing those considerations into her story frame, she invites would-be theatre makers to consider their cast with equal respect, and to modify the script to suit the actors.

Young People, Gender, and Theatricals Pairing each script with a story is an effective way to open doors for young thespians to imagine possibilities in their own lives—for their own present moments and their own futures. As mentioned, Yonge does not “reject the expectations of middle-class femininity outright” (Newey, “Feminist” 95); she had, as Coleridge put it, a “love of authority” (130), and in fact, spoke out against women’s suffrage throughout her life (Moruzi 42). Yet, her domestic narratives could be “multifaceted and often self-consciously ambiguous” and feature “questioning, transgressive, modern heroines … [and] erring protagonists” (Wagner41). The story-script pairings suggest that Yonge was reinforcing significant nineteenth-century discourses regarding age and gender, while affirming perspectives that children were bright and capable, with ideas and agency. Since Newey asks scholars to consider how an “‘ethics of care’ require[s] us to research and write with a feminist historical imagination open to different voices, particularly those voices which appear to cut across the political project of liberation” (“Feminist” 101), this chapter focuses on Yonge’s affirming approach to creating a range of young characters. Lenses of gender and age demonstrate how engaging with at-home theatricals offers insights into those characters’ chosen behaviours and (sometimes) unarticulated dreams—Yonge’s Historical Dramas invites readers to consider exploring their own dreams through theatre. Daily-life gender performance and expectations matter in this context. In the mid-nineteenth century, the definition of a middle-class girl was someone assigned female at birth, as young as just walking or unmarried but seen as marriageable. According to contemporary ideals, girls were dependent on fathers, while women were dependent on husbands (Dyhouse 7).6 Yet characters in athome theatricals often travel, have adventures, and get to perform actions that are counter to daily expectations and might even be considered naughty. Theatricals invite girls to contribute to their family’s lives by providing significant leadership, entertainment, and education opportunities in the home. What is desirable for the “real” lives of story characters, illustrated through Yonge’s story frames, often contrasts with the “fictional” lives of characters in the scripts, and that affords Yonge the opportunity to comment on antitheatrical prejudice alongside discussions of appropriate gender roles and moral behaviours.

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At the very beginning, the story frames establish the world of adults and the world of children as separate. Over the holidays, grandpapa shuts the door on the back drawing room, separating it from the adult domain, inviting the young folks to have it their way, and creating a space that is literally the sphere of youth. The children choose to call it “The Mouse Trap” and all who inhabit it are mice. This kind of spatial arrangement was not unique to Barnescombe: many larger homes featured nurseries or even schoolrooms where middle- and upper-middle-class children spent time, while adults socialized in dining rooms and drawing rooms. Since the house is grandpapa’s, it is by his grace that the children can occupy that room—and yet, during the holidays when the young people invite the adults to see the play, it is as if they are drawing adults into the space of youth. While the actors are debriefing after the performance, grandpapa throws open the doors to the Mouse-trap “calling for all the actors to come out and show themselves, and then drink a cup of tea, after which followed a country-dance in costume.” While the gesture indicates grandpapa’s generous good will, it also shows how contingent youth control of space is. Adults decide when the separate worlds of adults and youth blend. Yonge also writes, “some of [the young people] could hardly imagine anything more melancholy than being ‘too old to be a Mouse.’” Yet, children do grow, and it seems that sometimes teens could choose when to immigrate to “the mammas in the drawing-room” or to the “grown-up gentlemen in the dining room.” As family members arrive for the Christmas holiday season, Kitty asks Ernest, a soldier of eighteen, “will you be a mouse, Uncle Ernest?” noting later that “to have him cease to be a mouse would be too dreadful! Half the fun would be gone.” And just before the reading of the first draft of Fanny’s script, Kitty bustles about clearing the Mouse-trap of those who aren’t mice, and dashing through the house to find those who are. Two children, one on either side, try to drag out pretty aunt Jessie “in spite of her laughing entreaties” before Fanny suddenly declares that she needs to stay—and as the reader later learns, it is because they hope she will take a part in the play. Both Aunt Jessie and Uncle Ernest, as young people on the threshold of adulthood, agree to take on the roles of King Edward and Queen Philippa in “The Mice at Play.” Aunt Jessie demonstrates that girls had some agency regarding how “adult” they could be within the family, but each year the group of actors performing in the Historical Dramas changes and most of this stems from the boys’ mobility. In the second story, Aunt Jessie “has not been well” and does not participate in the acting, although she helps with the preparations, and acts again in the third. However, Johnny, “a school boy,” grudgingly performs in the first, but refuses to perform again. Ernest agrees to perform in “The Strayed Falcon,” but by the third play he is at war, so while Edward performs the role of the college boy, and Fred agrees to play the tiny part of the Warden, there are no other male actors available—so Fanny writes in very few. The boys are able to move beyond the “Mouse-trap” towards entertainment options and responsibilities outside the home, such as hunting or being a soldier; the girls remain behind, limited to adventuring through the imaginary worlds they create through theatricals.

Boys and Theatricals Yonge’s treatment of gender in the stories of the Historical Dramas is, as Wagner suggests, “multifaceted” and occasionally, “self-consciously ambiguous” (41). Initially, her ideas about the lives of boys seem easier to pin down. Yonge opens “The Mice at Play” by seeming to suggest that “boys will be boys.” As the children speculate about what Aunt Fanny might have written, Edward attempts an impromptu staging of “Blue Beard” and tries to hang two girls up by their hair, and when Gertrude moans, “Oh I wish aunt Fanny would write something that would make all these boys quiet all the holidays,” Kitty replies, “No one has even written that yet” and Edward interjects “Nor ever will” as he endeavours to “hang himself by the feet to the chimney piece.” The antics continue as the performance date grows closer, and Yonge writes, “Those boys! They were the sore trial of patience!”

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Uncle Ernest amuses himself by teasing his cousins, sisters, and aunts throughout preparations, and “torturing Gertrude and Kitty by boasting of not knowing a single word of his part, nor would he ever come into the rehearsals.” During the performance itself, he whispers to Jane during grave moments in an effort to make her laugh. As the curtain drops but before they are hidden, Ernest cannot resist tweaking Edward’s ear. They are like the troublesome boys in the American plays Shanan Custer describes, who contritely apologize when they are scolded, even though one gets the impression that their antics are welcome (Custer 83). Ernest is consistently described as good-natured, reliable, and fun. He gamely wears a hot, uncomfortable fur cape as a costume, learns all his lines, and dances cheerfully at the country-dance in the end. Dyhouse argues that in nineteenth-century middle-class homes, boys were allowed to get into trouble, and were to be endlessly forgiven, whereas girls had to remain virtuous (11), a point that highlights the contrast between girls’ behaviours in the narratives of story frames and the embedded scripts in “The Mice at Play” and “The Strayed Falcon.” Johnny, on the other hand, provokes real anxiety from the girls. He is resistant as soon as he learns the subject of the first play, complaining, “Oh, it’s going to be all improving and stuff … Come along Edward and let’s have some fun in the hall.” John is speaking to a debate concerning one of the ways at-home theatricals were frequently justified to the antitheatrical crowd. Nearly every collection of scripts for young people, and many for adults, outline opportunities that theatricals offer to exercise memory, practice posture and decorum, and to otherwise “improve.” Yonge writes of Johnny, “dressing up and speaking in public were both very shocking to him” and he is particularly annoyed that Aunt Fanny has written him in for two parts rather than one. At one moment he nearly decides to quit, but his sister says very seriously that although she feels sorry for him, “it would not do to spoil the enjoyment of so many for the sake of one” and he resolves to bear it. His performance is never strong, but it’s tolerable, and at the end of “The Mice at Play,” he throws off his costume with relief. Edward, on the other hand, is caught between admiring his older cousins Johnny and Ernest, and trying to determine what he likes himself. He enters the room for the first play reading as if he were afraid of looking foolish. “Edward could not decide in his own mind whether it were manly to like the play as much as he really did, since John despised it, and uncle Ernest, perhaps, only yielded for the amusement for the girls and the little ones, on whom Edward always looked down when Johnny was at hand.” Edward and his sister are excited about preparations when they are at home together, but when they arrive at the Mouse-trap and he finds that the older boys are gone, he runs off immediately. Later, Yonge explains that Edward is flattered to be representing the Black Prince, and sometimes “took the matter up most eagerly, talked loud, flourished about, and boasted of Crecy and Poitiers as if he had already fought them.” However, he hates it when “Aunt Alice twist[s] his elbows and feet into more prince-like attitudes, or exhort[s] him not to make his speeches as if he were saying his lessons,” and he has fits of disgust, doubting “whether it were not girlish” to be enjoying the role. Although Edward has fun playing with the prop weapons, grandmama demands he promise to stop playing with the one he had really been hoping might become his after the performance. The significance of keeping a promise is remarked on several times in “The Mice at Play,” and notably, Yonge draws attention to how Edward’s own experience might have helped him to understand his character. In the script, so that he can protect the other children, young Prince Edward promises not to leave his sister’s chambers while the adults are away. When grandmama demands the difficult promise to stop playing with the prop weapon, Yonge writes, “Poor Edward! At least he knew what his name-sake felt, when bound by his word not to leave his sister’s chamber; but he kept his promise in a way worthy of the prince himself.” The King character acknowledges Prince Edward’s action saying “it is well. It is kingly to be brave, but it is more brave, more kingly, to keep a given word.” Although Edward spends much of the first story wondering if he is “manly” enough since he likes the play, his actions demonstrate the kind of manliness that really matters to Yonge. Since Edward participates with enthusiasm and without anxiety in the next two plays, readers see that his confidence

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and pleasure in acting exist beyond gender expectations and that he is no longer troubled by whether theatricals are girlish. Besides Ernest and Edward’s frequent irreverence towards the plays, boys participate in preparations in a rather ad hoc way. To Kitty Barnes’s surprise, on the first day preparing for “The Mice at Play,” Ernest and Johnny go hunting, leaving the girls to get things organized. Dyhouse argues that from the moment Victorian girls could walk, they were expected to serve their brothers and fathers (27), and that boys could take leisure time when girls must continue working (11). Perhaps that training explains why the aunts laugh that since they are making costumes, “they do not want the boys at all yet.” In fact, the boys actually do participate in some of the costume planning later. Ernest offers up his sword to Johnny, goes into town to buy Johnny a “splendid” false moustache, and then fashions a “fearful-looking weapon out of glistening tin,” attached to a pole, that he calls a Brown Bill—the very weapon Edward covets. Although John absolutely refuses to act in the play the second year, after a while he decides he is willing to help with carpentry, set-building, and such. For example, he constructs a tent that will not fall over, and is counted among the three boys who, with Kitty, are trying to build a real fire for the set. Edward and Kate set out tin, and John carries a great log, glowing red with heat, while Fred uses another shovel to catch the sparks, and Kate and Edward dance on stray ones that land on the carpet. When grandmama smells smoke and comes in to forbid the dangerous behaviour, the boys have the good sense to look ashamed. Kitty does not and is forbidden from participating in the theatrical, while they are not chastised at all. Later, Edward does declare that he will not act, since he was also involved in the fire incident, but Kitty insists that he should, and that she does not want to anymore. The final story and play focus a great deal on the visit to Winchester, and the boys are all away at college, school, or war when the girls are organizing the theatrical. Throughout Historical Dramas, boys’ participation in home theatrical preparations seems to be a welcome bonus from Yonge’s perspective, rather than an expectation or necessity.7

Girls and Theatricals When theatricals are a family affair, and primarily the domain of youth, it seems clear that they happen because of the energy and labour the girls put into them. Aunt Fanny writes and revises the scripts, Aunt Alice is the stage manager, and all the other girls and young women help with props, costumes, and the set. As I discuss in more detail in my dissertation (2016), Alice is only eighteen, yet her flurry of daily tasks includes putting out the stores, writing notes for grandmother, tracking down letters or newspaper articles for grandfather, listening to the poor describe their troubles, sending the baby to sleep, consulting with a busy brother, and “romping” with children. When she agrees to support the play, she adds to the mix by painting the scenery, “dragging the slow learners through their parts, or when the workers at costumes were in a puzzle, laying hold with her clever fingers, and getting through the difficulty as if there were fairy charm in her touch.” While much of Aunt Alice’s services to her family are invisible to the majority of the household, the painted set and costumes are not, which probably appealed to hard-working girls like her. In spite of Newey’s argument that, since participating in them was primarily viewed as an “extra” task to be fit into the day, theatricals need to be viewed as an aspect of nineteenth-century women’s labour (Women 143), Yonge makes Kitty’s struggle to balance duties and pleasurable activity a key point in “The Strayed Falcon.” Not yet expected to do her own dressmaking, she already does her own mending, and her assistance with adapting clothing into costumes demonstrates that she is developing valuable skills. An advantage to Kitty is that some of her daily work could become visible and admired, along with that of the other clever-fingered girls. Provided Kitty does not neglect her daily chores and routine tasks, the family welcomes her participation. However, in the excitement of the play preparations during the second story, Kitty does neglect her duties. Over the holidays, she has

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fewer lessons to learn except for memorizing a hymn and a psalm for Sunday. Yonge tells readers that Kitty is a thoroughly trustworthy child who would never willfully disobey her mother, yet because she so desperately wants to rush over to the Mouse-trap to participate in the play preparations, she recites in a “hasty, imperfect way” and her mother chastises her for not giving the hymn and psalm enough attention. Obliged to sit again, she catches the pocket hole of her dress on a drawer knob, dumps out the drawer, and tears her dress. Although her mother sympathizes, Kitty must clean up the mess and mend the dress before she joins the other “mice.” Kitty’s mother suggests that sewing may help Kitty to recover a more balanced disposition as well, but Kitty’s “fingers shook so much with vexation that she could hardly guide her needle, and instead of taking her mamma’s advice, she worked herself into an agony with such mutterings …” Yonge’s story indicates that the at-home theatrical labour of women and girls could be virtuous and worthy of admiration, but only as long as they do not interfere with other responsibilities, or with maintaining a good nature.

The “Aggregate,” Antitheatrical Prejudice and Theatricals Character roles in Yonge’s scripts also offer fascinating insight into ways theatricals created space for girls and young women to explore agency and opportunities. Part of the exploration is what the actor experiences through thought-provoking role-play, and equally relevant is what the audience sees. Mary Isbell productively discusses Jane Austen’s phrase “the aggregate” used by Fanny, the narrator of Mansfield Park, to describe her responses to people involved in an at-home theatrical rehearsal. Isbell interprets Austen’s phrase to suggest that “the aggregate” is a combination of a young thespian’s everyday performance of his or her “self” and the character the actor portrays. Since in juvenile theatricals like the ones discussed in Historical Dramas, the audience and performers knew each other, it would be challenging for an audience member to see only the character the actor plays and not the young performer’s daily self. If theatrical managers chose to do so, they could “exploit the aggregate” (Isbell 6) by type-casting to enhance the believability of a particular character, as Aunt Fanny does when she writes the part of Dame Devergoeil in “The Apple of Discord” especially for Alice because of her gift of scolding; or by casting against type as Fanny does when she casts Alice as the manipulative and teasing Cecily. Isbell considers whether managers of such private productions “were attempting to eliminate or exploit the aggregation of individual personalities with fictional characters” (25). Equally relevant is how the young actors experienced the clash or conflation of their daily life with the characters they play, and the possibilities that may invite them to imagine. Crossing gender may be the most obvious way to perform across type, but unlike some contemporaries who frequently encouraged girls to take on boys’ roles in theatricals, Yonge only does this occasionally. Since Johnny finds the process so distasteful, Fanny suggests that she take on one of his characters, Henry de la Mote, so that he only performs one role. Fanny offers on the condition that she can remain modest and wear a long tunic. But five-year-old Mary Barnes is delighted to play little Prince Lionel. Yonge ensures that her pleasure is apparent to observers when she writes that the audience might have worried that she would shout joyously “Look at me now that I’m a boy!” and it’s notable to read that in the country-dance after the performance, “little Lionel danced with the Queen, and could never remember whether he were boy or girl” (my emphasis). While some at-home theatricals enabled girls to play the roles of powerful government leaders, soldiers, pirates, wizards, heroes, and villains, Yonge’s play-script characters sit more comfortably in stereotypical female roles—but not necessarily ones seen as desirable in daily life: they include characters who are drunk and lazy, naughty, thieving, flirtatious or bossy. In “The Mice at Play” Yonge relates that after reading the script for the first time, all the girls cry out “oh let me be Joan … . None of the others are any fun; but she is so nice and naughty.” Gertrude is cast as Joan, even though throughout the rest of the stories, she is described as dedicated to her studies and having a superior memory for facts. Yonge

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observes, “though a most quiet, well-behaved girl, [she] put on the coquettish airs and graces of [Joan] the Fair Maid of Kent so naturally, that her mamma professed to be quite frightened to see of what she was capable.” Manipulative Cecily is played by Aunt Alice whose honest and selfless quotidian life could not be farther from that role. When her father in the audience comments aloud that she is a flirt, she momentarily drops character, makes a threatening gesture at him, and then brazenly continues with arch nods and knowing glances. The mead-loving Dame Gillian is played by Jane Lester in a “magnificent image of lazy self-consequence, talking in a fat, sleepy voice, and smacking her lips with magnificent relish over the biscuits which represented eels”, and she also adopts “gestures of scorn” that are, apparently, quite hilarious to behold. In contrast, in “the Apple of Discord,” Jane plays quite a different undesirable: the “frivolous, emptyheaded Queen,” with “pettish airs and graces.” In “The Strayed Falcon,” Gertrude announces that she would like to play self-centred Lily because “she can’t be dull and good.” Yonge informs readers that Aunt Alice had hoped for this role herself, but could not abide anyone else being disappointed, and so says nothing. Since Alice is clearly intended to be the most admirable of the girl story-characters, it’s clear that though selfishness and naughtiness can be fun to play at, they are not behaviours that Yonge imagines should find their way into daily life. Instead, Yonge’s scripts offer occasions to consider performing fictional “naughtiness,” while the story-narratives discuss real-life “naughtiness.” Thus Yonge encourages readers to reflect on whether playing at and exploring “naughty” behaviours are connected to learning or displaying them. While many girls are excited about the option to embody a character who is very different from themselves, there is also the issue of how the adults will perceive that performance. Could theatrical play corrupt young thespians? My interest in the aggregate is the performers’ and audiences’ experiences: did they feel like actors were working with or against their own character—and, in light of antitheatrical prejudice, should they be concerned or amused? Family and friends in the audience could be anxious about what immoral or unadmirable role-playing might say about what their children “were capable” of, or even how it might influence the children, and some young thespians were concerned too. The roles of the thieves in the “Strayed Falcon” are not instantly appealing: one cousin, Katherine Tyndale, says that she would not like to be a so-called gipsy and steal, while Kitty retorts, “Stealing is very good fun … I should like it myself.” Katherine Tyndale may not want to play the role of a thief because it feels counter to her “real-life” character, or because, in fact, it feels uncomfortable to perform such a role in front of judgmental others, like parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. However powerful the aggregate could be for an audience, it is clear that Yonge thought that onstage and offstage naughtiness were entirely different. The “fun” of naughtiness displayed by characters in “The Strayed Falcon” script, which includes self-centred foolishness, thieving, trickery, and kidnapping, are set up in direct contrast to poor behaviour with real consequences in the story frame’s narrative of Kitty’s life. Twelve-year old Kitty is well-behaved but when, during the preparations, she neglects her duties, insists on having her own way, ignores the feelings of the guests, or worst of all, defies her grandmother, Kitty’s father punishes her by saying that she cannot act in the second play at all. Devastated, Kitty must come to terms with behaviours which are a result not of playing an unsavoury character but of lack of attention to family responsibilities. Her siblings and cousins rally behind her, and suggest variously that they should also be punished or that they should cancel the play altogether. But Kitty insists that they should go ahead because she would not like to act anymore; it would feel like she was still being naughty. While she imagined it might be good fun to steal, the real kind of naughtiness is different. Yonge explores the aggregate one last time in “The Strayed Falcon,” relating the performance through Kitty’s eyes: [T]he whole scene seemed much more real to her than last year, when she had been taken up with her own part, her dressing, and acting. It was more to her as if time were really gone back

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three hundred years; and well as she knew every word, she could be surprised and frightened, and delighted at all the right times, and was quite able to forget the real people and the characters they had taken. The story frame enables Yonge to argue that it is entirely possible to embrace the fiction of the amateur play experience and ignore “the aggregate,” even in an at-home performance of a story that a person knows very well. Kitty’s reaction demonstrates that Yonge believed at-home audience members had the capacity to be absorbed into performances. If audiences could be swept up by the story, in spite of the double-viewing encouraged by the aggregate, the children’s (and especially girls’) onstage character-explorations carried more power as thinking tools. Yonge suggests moments when the crossover into the play-world seems very real to the actors as well. In the “Mice at Play” as the performance draws near and the preparations are more consuming, Yonge interchanges script roles with the names of children, occasionally conflating identities between actors and story characters, and simultaneously demonstrates how the worlds are colliding and blending. Sometimes, the shifts happen within a single sentence. For example, it is Alexia de la Mote who wants to use grandmother’s spinning wheel as a prop, but Gertrude (one of the children) who tells her that it is an anachronism; Cecily (one of the ladies in waiting of Edward III’s court) is working on a towering cone-shaped cap which aunt Fanny has inserted into the script because she knew the actress would love it. Meanwhile, Yonge also suggests that even though someone could, like Alice, momentarily drop her character to make threatening gestures at her father, an actor could also become as absorbed in the performances as the two children who, she writes, “seemed to themselves to really be young Plantagenets” and later scream lustily in a way they simply couldn’t during rehearsals.

Antitheatrical Prejudice vs. Theatricals as Tools for Thought Yonge ends each story with remarks that encourage readers to see that theatricals are not dangerous and in fact, they can be powerful, positive forces that encourage thoughtful reflection and noble skillbuilding among the actors. Although Yonge highlights the improving educational qualities of play creation as the children discuss the historical subjects of their plays prior to the performance, deeper reflection happens after the show. After “The Apple of Discord,” Yonge emphasizes that theatricals could encourage respectful collaboration and good tempers because, “in spite of its name, no Barnescombe play had ever gone off so well, or given so little vexation to any one. And the chief reason was that Edward and Kate [Kitty] had learnt by past experience to control themselves, and not be too eager.” Since “The Strayed Falcon’s” chief concern is Kitty’s poor behaviour and punishment, it is fitting that gracious Alice, on her way to the piano to play for the country dance, checks in with her niece to ensure that readers know how Kitty feels. Kitty responds, “Everybody is so kind to me. It really is nicer than last year, and I can’t think why, when I have been so naughty.” Immediately before “King James himself beg[s] for Kitty as his partner,” Alice has time to answer, “Ah, Kate, because there is nothing so good in this world as pardon and peace.” While Alice’s comment is moralizing and didactic, within the context of the theatre-fiction, the reader is treated to the same kind of resolution the happy ending of a play might give. Yonge reassures readers that Kitty has been truly forgiven now that she can moderate her passions and prioritize the happiness of the family over her own. While Wagner notes that Yonge’s wayward female characters are often more interesting prior to learning lessons of self-control, Yonge uses Kitty to demonstrate the importance of balance for a harmonious family life, and to indicate that theatricals themselves are not responsible for disrupting that balance. Two key conversations at the end of “The Mice at Play” underscore how powerful theatricals could be as thinking and learning tools. As the curtain drops, the girls discuss the fates of the characters they portrayed. Isabel married happily, but her husband left her because the French King began to

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doubt her husband’s loyalty; and Joan of Kent died of grief. Gertrude thoughtfully observes, “it would be very sad if people always knew what was to happen to them,” to which Aunt Fanny responds gravely, “Yes … it is well for us that all we do know is, that we are in the only truly kind and wise Hands” (ellipsis in original). Yonge interrupts “this little bit of grave talk that had so strangely sprung up” when grandpapa throws open the doors to the private space, but what is clear is that performing theatricals, and embodying those characters has provoked the girls to think more deeply about young people of the past who had many possible futures ahead of them—even if today people know how their lives turned out. Such ideas provoke introspection for girls who are imagining what their own futures might possibly become. Drama in education experts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (such as Kathleen Gallagher, Christine Hatton, and Jonothan Neelands) regularly describe drama experiences as thinking tools, but it’s clear that they could be powerful for girls in the past as well. In fact, slightly after Yonge’s publication, between 1890 and 1901, Elsie Fogerty adapted Tennyson’s epic poem “The Princess” to become a dramatic script, as a thinking tool for girls. She aimed to use the make-believe spaces afforded by dramatic activity as places where “life is re-created to our will, as opposed to the real plane which dominates, cribs, and confines our will” (qtd. in Norcia, “Performing” 15). Norcia interprets Fogerty’s assertions to mean that the stage is a “necessary space” in which to test out possibilities for women’s intellectual life (15). On stage, Fogerty hoped girls would practice exercising willpower and reimagine their worlds. Norcia augments her interpretation by saying that the stage may also allow women “to perform or rehearse capitulation so that those possibilities do not become too transgressive to the patriarchal social order” (16)—an approach that even Yonge may have been able to support. Another conversation at the end of “The Mice at Play” is interesting because it simultaneously reestablishes patriarchal authority and gendered roles, affirms the positive impact of at-home theatricals, and recognizes the value of work done by girls. Fanny’s eldest brother (also Kitty’s father) observes, “you have given us a very pretty evening’s amusement, as well as a great deal of pleasure to the children; and I don’t think it will have been without use either—not so much in the scrap of historical knowledge, as in the habits of good-temper and mutual forebearance which such sports as these entail.” Indeed, earlier in the story, Yonge had raised this very point using nearly the same words (“yielding and mutual forbearance”) when some of the children had to make concessions because otherwise “neither the play nor anything else would have gone on so well.” In gender-appropriate fashion, Fanny deflects Mr. Barnes’s good-natured but somewhat pompous praise by saying “the children don’t want any play to teach them habits of unselfishness, while they have Alice to set them the example, and show them its beauty.” She declares that Alice “in all her brightness” is the true heroine of the play. Unconcerned about a theatrical’s potential negative effect on the boy actors, Mr. Barnes adds, “I do not think the little girls have been either affected or occupied with themselves, otherwise they would never have been able to play their parts so well.” In response, Fanny harkens back to Johnny, who disparaged the play, tried to draw Edward away from it, and then ultimately participated because his sister Jane convinced him to consider the needs of the many over his own. Consequently, Fanny calls Johnny the play’s hero. Even though his behaviour has not been especially friendly and provoked a great deal of anxiety among the girls, Fanny praises him to Mr. Barnes, declaring “He has been so good-natured, and tried so hard to be good-tempered in doing what was disagreeable to him.” Yonge’s denouement to the first tale not only neatly resolves the narrative but also reassures would-be actors that taking on an at-home theatrical project will bring a lot of good into their own lives, without disrupting the balance. Yonge closes each play by reestablishing order and reinforcing the rightness of authority, which she so appreciated. With the Mouse-trap space open wide, and adults intermingling with youth, Mr. Barnes also reasserts authority of age. In “Mice at Play” he comments that being “worthy of trust” makes children’s play brighter, and Kitty agrees: “it is only in fun we call you a cat; you aren’t our

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enemy and we play all the better when you are there.” Yonge’s final line in the first story is: “And that is what all good children feel who trust in their kind parents, and whose parents trust them.” The didactic and moralizing tone Yonge adopts to end her story-frames needs to be considered, as Newey suggests, alongside women “whose views and actions offer challenges to contemporary (twenty-first century) feminist critical positions” (91). Historian Jacky Bratton argues that scholars should ask “present-minded questions” but refuse to give “present-minded answers” (14). While Yonge neither expresses the overturning politics of the fin de siècle’s revolting daughters, nor questions the rightness of rigid gender roles and patriarchal authority, what her stories do offer is a remarkable invitation to engage creatively, to construct worlds, and to explore characters and ways of being in the world. In fact, Yonge seems to assert that theatricals could be a thinking tool that might encourage young people to thoughtfully embrace rather than simply reject the current social order. Without ignoring pervasive antitheatrical prejudice, the theatre-fiction of the Historical Dramas reassures wouldbe thespians of the safety of performing plays, but it also demonstrates that play-acting could be thought-provoking, and that it could create a space for young people to explore performing otherwise in front of an audience who might suddenly consider possibilities for the actors they had never previously imagined. Furthermore, Yonge differentiates between the significance of the characters young people might play and the roles they take on to get up a play, pointing out how theatricals could be a chance for girls to develop valuable skills and contribute meaningful and high-profile work at home. By presenting the scripts as works in progress, Yonge encourages each young person to reimagine them for their own purposes. If the Historical Dramas inspire readers to create worlds of their own through theatre, they also point out the potential power, however temporary, of young people walking through and inhabiting those worlds. And if they can shape the worlds of the plays they create, perhaps they could influence the worlds they occupy in “real” life—perhaps.

Notes 1 Hannah Rosefield counts contemporary intellectuals among Yonge’s fans. Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Morris, and officers in the Crimea loved The Heir of Redclyffe, Tennyson “was a keen reader of Yonge,” and upon Anthony Trollope’s recommendation, George Eliot read The Daisy Chain aloud to George Henry Lewes while on holiday (8). 2 Like Yonge, Juliana Horatia Ewing, the celebrated fiction author and editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, also published fiction inspired by her family’s at-home theatricals: a short story called “The Peace Egg” that included memories of Christmas mummery and its “bludginess” (Ewing 48). Urged by her story’s readers, nearly twenty years later, Ewing constructed a play-script that children could use to recreate the performance part of the story. In a single volume, alongside the original fiction, she published the script and “Hints for Private Theatricals” that had also been previously published in Aunt Judy’s Magazine. The Peace Egg and Other Tales was available throughout England and North America, and even became popular in the Caribbean ( Millington 77), and the volume is readily available in 2022 on Project Gutenberg. Yet Yonge’s script and story combination (out of print for more than 150 years) is unique in that she wrote the scripts first, and in fact, the scripts were embedded into the stories from their first publication in the Magnet Stories. 3 Historical Dramas is an unpaginated book. 4 See “Re-enacting the Past” by Fitzsimmons Frey and Schweitzer for more detail. 5 Instead, some Victorian girls may have concerned themselves with “correctness,” a term discussed by nineteenth-century fancy-dress experts, and overviewed in Fitzsimmons Frey and Schweitzer. 6 Carol Dyhouse’s research emphasizes how, for Victorians, the word “girl” functioned differently depending on the person’s class, and indicated assumed sexual availability, ability to work, and potential for independent movement. Dependence on men was so desirable that a middle-class girl’s behaviour would be seen as a problem if she “sought to pursue goals outside marriage and family life” or seemed to value “anything resembling autonomy” (138). 7 Theatricals were popular at schools as well. In all-boys schools, the students performed cross-gender, and must have collaborated on all the preparations. Further research may indicate how boys could not only have had fun with the acting and organizing, but valued theatricals and theatrical-world-making as thinking tools. Boys had

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Heather Fitzsimmons Frey more future options than white middle-class girls, and could travel independently beyond the home, so they may not have valued theatricals in the same ways. Yet, they were still subject to strict expectations regarding gender conformity and social behaviours, and theatricals might offer opportunities for boys to explore other ways of being as well.

Works Cited Angus, J. Keith. Children’s Theatricals: Being a Series of Popular Fairy Tales Adapted for Representation in the Drawing Room. George Routledge and Sons, 1879. Bratton, Jacky. “Theatre History Today.” New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 3–16. Coleridge, Christabel. Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters. Macmillan, 1903. Corner, Julia. Little Plays: The Second of the Series of Little Plays for Little Actors. Dean and Son, 1854. Custer, Shanan. “Little Mothers, Mischievous Boys, and Good Little Christians: Characters Children’s Parlor Plays in American, 1858–1903.” Catholic Theatre and Drama: Critical Essays, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., McFarland, 2010, pp. 75–103. Dyhouse, Carol. Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Routledge, 1981. Ewing, Juliana Horatia. The Peace Egg and other tales. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1861. Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather. “‘A Place Where It Was Acceptable To Be Unacceptable’: Twenty-First-Century Girls Encounter Nineteenth-Century Girls Through Amateur Theatricals and Dance.” Journal of Childhood Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2019, pp. 85–105. Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather. “Acting Charades in 1873: Girls and the Stakes of the Game.” Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, edited by Ann R. Hawkins et al., SUNY Press, 2021, pp. 153–171. Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather and Marlis Schweitzer. “Reenacting the Past.” Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited byLu Ann de Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber, Cambridge UP, 205–235. Fitzsimmons Frey, Heather Marie. Victorian Girls and At-Home Theatricals: Performing and Playing with Possible Futures. 2016. University of Toronto, PhD Dissertation. Gallagher, Kathleen. Why Theatre Matters : Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the Real. U of Toronto P, 2014. Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2009. Hatton, Christine. “Educating Rita and Her Sisters: Using Drama to Reimagine Femininities in Schools.” Research in Drama Education, vol. 18, no. 2, 2013, pp. 155–167. Isbell, Mary. Amateurs: Home, Shipboard, and Public Theatricals in the Nineteenth Century. U of C, 2013. Diss. Jordan, Ellen, Charlotte Mitchell, Helen Schinske, eds. Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge. https://c21ch.newcastle. edu.au/yonge/ Millington, Peter. “Mrs Ewing and the Textual Origin of the St Kitts Mummies’ Play.” Folklore, vol. 107, 1996, p. 77–89. Moruzi, Kristine. Constructing Girlhood Through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915. Routledge, 2012. Neelands, Jonothan. “Acting together: ensemble as a democratic process in art and life.” RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 14, no. 2, 2009, pp. 173–189. Newey, Katherine. “Feminist Historiography and Ethics.” Theatre History & Historiography, 2016, 85–102. Newey, Katherine. “Home Plays for Ladies: Women’s Work in Home Theatricals.” Nineteenth Century Theatre, vol. 26, no. 2, 1998, 93–111. Newey, Katherine. Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Norcia, Megan A. “Performing Victorian Womanhood: Elsie Fogerty Stages Tennyson’s ‘Princess’ in Girls’ Schools.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 1, 2013, 1–20. Norcia, Megan A. X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895. Ohio UP, 2010. “Our Library Table.” Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion. Date Unknown. 330. 19th Century UK Periodicals. Rosefield, Hannah. “How differently it came upon her’: The Ageing Young Stepmother in Charlotte Yonge’s The Young Step-Mother and Dinah Craik’s Christian’s Mistake. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 32, 2021. Ryland, Clara. Snow White and Rose Red and Other Plays for Children. JM Dent and Co., 1896. Strickland, Agnes. The Queens of England. [Electronic Resource]: A Series of Portraits of Distinguished Female Sovereigns. Appleton, 1851. “Talk Upon Books.” Aunt Judy’s Magazine, issue XXXIII, p. 185, 19th Century UK Periodicals. Web.

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Playing and Scripting the Past Wagner, Tamara. “‘Everything Was a System with Rachel’: Charlotte Yonge’s Modern Mothers and Victorian Childrearing Manuals.” Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 41–66. Yonge, Charlotte M. Heir of Redclyffe. John W. Parker, 1853. Yonge, Charlotte M. Historical Dramas. Groombridge and Sons, 1864. Yonge, Charlotte M. “Amusement.” Womankind. Macmillan and Co., 1877. Yonge, Charlotte and Christabel Coleridge. The Strolling Players. Macmillan and Co., 1893. “Yonge, Charlotte M. (Mary) (1823–1901).” The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Daniel Hahn, Oxford UP, 2015. Credo Reference, accessed 02 May 2022, http://ezproxy.macewan.ca/login? url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/oupocl/yonge_charlotte_m_mary_1823_1901/0? institutionId=2632.

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20 “A FEW SCENES OF HUMBLE LIFE” Theatre-making in the Novels of Louisa May Alcott Karen Quigley

Louisa May Alcott’s celebrated and much-adapted novel Little Women forms the first part of a trilogy.1 The two subsequent and lesser-known novels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, follow Jo March (now Jo Bhaer) as she and her family pour their love and resources into running Plumfield, a school for boys (and a few girls) which develops into Laurence College, a small college presided over by Jo’s husband, Professor Bhaer. Across all three novels, the craft of theatre-making, specifically theatre-making by and for the family, functions as a fulcrum around which various aspects of the emotional and narrative landscapes of the books turn. Theatre productions (taking place at or near home, usually around the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, and always with a cast, crew and audience of family, friends and members of the local community) provide a mode of expression for the characters. They allow the four March daughters (and later on, their own families and the students of Plumfield and Laurence College) to imagine other possible worlds and alternative gender roles and careers, to understand each other more deeply and to make plans for the future. The labour and craft of playwriting, rehearsal, and production are threaded throughout each novel in a variety of ways. For Alcott and her characters, theatre is seen as a holistic activity that brings multifaceted meaning to the makers and their communities. It is an opportunity for connection and catharsis—the theatre production at the beginning of Little Women gives Laurie the excuse he needs to reach out to the Marches next door; the Thanksgiving performance at the end of Little Men shows the Bhaers how much they are loved by their unconventional band of students and how grateful the boys are for their care; the Christmas play in Jo’s Boys reminds Jo to be patient with her family and to let them help her when she is feeling under pressure from her dual careers as a novelist and a homemaker. Investigating in detail the trilogy’s three theatre productions, this chapter explores the extent to which theatre-making is taken very seriously in the March family, and how its rendering by Alcott creates a range of contexts for both her characters and her readers to recognize its subtle, steadfast power. Firstly, I will focus on the craft of acting (particularly women acting) in the productions, and how Alcott’s evocation of this craft simultaneously permits the novels’ girls and women to explore behaviours onstage that are not sanctioned offstage, while guarding against the sense that professional acting is an appropriate or desirable career for a woman at the time. Secondly, I will show how theatrical accidents and contingencies frame each of the three productions, understanding Alcott’s choice to show us these mishaps in the contextual light of the personal and cultural conditions of her writing of the novels, but also in relation to a complex push-pull relationship with the theatre, thinking anti-theatricality together with a desire to bring processes of theatre-making alive for the

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readers. Structurally, this chapter’s drive to explore theatre-making in the Alcott trilogy will artificially hold acting apart from the other components that make up a theatre production’s preparation and production processes rather than considering the whole theatrical apparatus holistically. As will become clear, this is in the service of understanding the detail in Alcott’s theatre-fiction writing, and how important the specificities of theatre-making are to her characters and their lives.

The Trilogy Alcott’s trilogy, published in 1869, 1871, and 1886 respectively, follows the lives of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, with principal focus on Jo. The Marches live in Concord, Massachusetts in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Little Women opens during the American Civil War, when the sisters are sixteen, fifteen, thirteen, and twelve. They live a quiet domestic life with their mother, Marmee, and a servant, Hannah. We understand that the family was previously quite wealthy, and has fallen on relatively hard times recently, requiring a general sense of frugality, and the two eldest girls to work outside the home as governess to a rich family (Meg) and companion to her Aunt March (Jo). Their father is away from home supporting the Union troops as an army chaplain during the war. Little Women follows the sisters through various domestic, artistic, personal, and social escapades, significantly their developing relationship with their next-door neighbours, the Laurences. The Laurence family consists of an elderly man, Mr Laurence, and his young grandson, Laurie, who is about Jo’s age. Laurie is introduced to the family at the beginning of Little Women, and swiftly becomes a brother figure to the sisters. The climax of the first part of the novel sees budding writer Jo selling her first stories to a newspaper, Mr March wounded on the battlefield and Mrs March travelling to be with him in Washington DC, Beth falling seriously ill with scarlet fever and Meg falling in love with Laurie’s tutor John Brooke. The second half of Little Women focuses on Jo’s continuing aspiration to be a novelist, which includes a move to New York to seek work and inspiration; Laurie’s unrequited love for Jo, and his travels through Europe as he attempts to heal his broken heart; Meg’s domestic pursuits and adventures in early motherhood with her twins Daisy and Demi; Beth’s decline and death; and Amy’s trip to Europe with Aunt March, which coincides with Laurie’s time there. The novel closes with the publication of Jo’s first novel, the marriage of Amy and Laurie, and the culmination of a relationship between Jo and a German professor of philosophy she met in New York, Professor Bhaer. We also learn that Aunt March has died, and has left her house and estate, Plumfield, to Jo, in recognition of her long years working as Aunt March’s companion. Jo and Professor Bhaer decide to open a school for boys at Plumfield, which lays the foundations for the second novel, Little Men. This second book is devoted almost entirely to the exploits of Plumfield’s students and staff, as the Bhaers develop and grow their school and guide their small band of boys through childhood and early adolescence. The novel closes with the death of John Brooke, and a Thanksgiving celebration including an evening of theatrical entertainment. The third novel, Jo’s Boys, opens ten years after the end of Little Men. The original Plumfield estate now holds a small college (Laurence College, endowed by Mr Laurence), and the entire extended March family has built houses and settled on the campus, apparently pushed out of the city of Concord by its rapid industrial development. Alongside its continuing examination of the central family, this final novel in the trilogy also follows a year in the lives of the boys and girls we met in Little Men, now young adults with professional and romantic aspirations of their own. The key moments of theatre-making across the three novels fall at the beginning of Little Women, the end of Little Men and towards the middle of Jo’s Boys, with theatre productions being performed at either Christmas or Thanksgiving. As mentioned, these productions are private theatricals taking place at home, and, as this chapter will articulate, the emphasis placed on the

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quality and craft of domestic theatre-making in the novels is striking, particularly in relation to assumptions often made about amateur or domestic theatricals. In referring to the productions in the trilogy in these terms I take my cue from Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling’s work on the term “amateur,” which aims to reclaim it from assumptions that amateur theatre-makers “are playing around … for their own enjoyment and inevitably poor outcomes follow” and imbue it with respect and thoughtfulness (Holdsworth et al 197). For instance, as Holdsworth et al note, “[c]raft is not something that necessarily springs to mind when considering amateur theatre, as the traditional stereotype casts it as synonymous with limited skill and shoddy production values—uninspiring direction, shaky sets, missed cues and unsubtle characterisation” (197). Thinking Alcott’s fictional productions together with this idea of amateur theatre (defined, albeit with caveats, by Nicholson et al as “companies of people who make theatre in, with and for their local communities for love rather than money”), it is clear that craft and quality are important to the Marches, Bhaers, Brookes, and Laurences (and their Plumfield and Laurence College communities) in their theatre-making endeavours (3). However, as the introduction to this chapter has noted, Alcott’s rendering of amateur theatre in her novels is not as binary as this. Although theatre-making skill is valued throughout, theatrical contingencies appear as part of each production—not to highlight “shoddy production values,” but, as will be shown below, to explore Alcott’s own interest in theatre and anti-theatricality in various intersecting ways.

Gendered Acting and Professionalisation Throughout the trilogy, the craft of acting (and specifically women acting) is deeply valued in the family, though this value is never straightforwardly articulated, and indeed is problematized by Alcott, especially around the question of professional training and an actor’s career. The role of acting and theatre-making in Alcott’s own early life suggests some interesting parallels with the choices she makes in her writing around how women can and should perform on stage. As Karen Halttunen notes, during Alcott’s childhood, her father (Bronson Alcott, an educational reformer) staged allegorical dramas at home in which Louisa and her older sister Anna would perform, including the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the latter of which is central to the structure and content of the first half of Little Women (Halttunen 236). The function of the Alcotts’ own private theatricals appears to have been the development of the children’s self-expression, restraint and control (237). However, Alcott subsequently became interested in theatre for its own sake, writing melodramas (as distinct from her father’s preference for allegorical tales) for herself and her sisters to perform at home, and in which she, as Jo does in Little Women, tended to play the male and/or villain characters. In her teens and early twenties, Alcott could be found performing in local amateur dramatics, leading to a disappointing year in Boston (1858–9) in her early twenties trying to seek professional employment as an actor (amongst other jobs), before returning home to Concord to write (239). One of her earliest novels, Work, fictionalizes this period of her life, focusing on a central character (Christie Devon) who attempts to have a career as a professional actor, but renounces it as too difficult a life for a woman, principally framing these difficulties as moral rather than practical: “The stage is not the place for me,” she said. “I have no genius to glorify the drudgery, keep me from temptation, and repay me for any sacrifice I make. Other women can lead this life safely and happily: I cannot, and I must not go back to it, because, with all my past experience, and in spite of all my present good resolutions, I should do no better, and I might do worse. I’m not wise enough to keep steady there; I must return to the old ways, dull but safe, and plod along till I find my real place and work.” (n. pag.)

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Turning to the March family trilogy, Meg and her daughter Josie are useful characters via whom to examine how women’s acting in the trilogy (particularly in Little Women and Jo’s Boys) is framed as simultaneously serious and frivolous—to be respected and esteemed, relied upon for the success of the private theatricals, but also to be immediately (and anti-theatrically) discarded in favour of more appropriate gendered and domestic behaviours, or even to be seen as a transformative or moral end in itself. Acting in Alcott’s writing thus permits the performance of particular roles and behaviours not sanctioned in an off-stage context, and allows for the exploration of a passion or talent that cannot be pursued in the professional world (for Meg, at least). The quality of Meg’s acting in particular is seen as crucial to the success of two of the three productions (she does not appear in the Little Men Thanksgiving production, which is performed by the children only). In rehearsals for The Witch’s Curse, an Operatic Tragedy in Little Women, Meg is described as “the best actress we’ve got” (6), and during the description of the production, her singing is “considered more wonderful than all the rest of the performance put together” (20). During the rehearsal process for the Christmas production in Jo’s Boys, Meg’s acting is, according to her son, “going to wring the hearts of our audience in the heroine’s part … when we did [the hospital scene] at last rehearsal my face was wet with real tears as you cried over me” (183). After the production, Jo’s comment on Meg’s acting in The Witch’s Curse in Little Women is revived as the now-middle-aged sisters meet backstage. Jo reminds her sister of the long esteem in which she has held her abilities: “Meg, you have saved my play! Oh, why aren’t you a real actress, and I a real playwright?” (232). Jo’s comments are corroborated by a professional actress in the audience, Miss Cameron (who has come to watch Meg’s daughter Josie perform), who notes that she “no longer wonder[s] where your children get their talent” (241). However, this approval of Meg’s acting craft is infused with various caveats throughout. For example, when she announces at the beginning of Little Women that The Witch’s Curse may mark her retirement (at sixteen) from theatre-making, as she’s “getting too old for such things”, Jo marks her disbelief at this statement, reminding Meg of the benefits of acting far beyond the details of a particular role: “You won’t stop, I know, as long as you can trail round in a white gown with your hair down, and wear gold-paper jewellery” (6). Jo appears to be indicating here that, on stage, Meg can indulge in “trailing around” (in the context of a family that places enormous emphasis on being industrious and active), swathed in impractical fabrics and temporary accessories (the appropriateness of the characters’ clothes, shoes and gloves is referred to frequently in the novel, as is the handing down of such items from mother to daughter, or sister to sister) with her hair down (a marker of childhood, as we know from the opening pages of the story that fifteen-year-old Jo has recently started to wear her hair up, so presume that her older sister does the same). None of these are sanctioned behaviours off-stage for the March sisters, and all are “likened to childish play,” as Julie Wilhelm observes (70). As we learn later in the novel, Meg enjoys luxurious and pretty things, is vain about her appearance and responds to superficial praise, traits in which she can revel in the context of acting in Jo’s melodramatic plays. However, in the wider scope of Alcott’s trilogy, these characteristics and behaviours are seen as trials for Meg to overcome through mild adversity and transformation (in the same vein as Jo’s wilfulness, Beth’s shyness, and Amy’s selfishness), and with her marriage to John Brooke, she evolves into a “model housekeeper” who wants to make “home a paradise” (273). From the point of her wedding, there is no further mention of Meg acting until a decade after her husband’s early death (towards the end of Little Men), when she appears in the Christmas production in Jo’s Boys. Meg’s transformation from The Witch’s Curse to the Christmas production is marked by Alcott in formal as well as content-driven ways. In the story of the latter production, she is cast as a mother, with two of her three children playing the two children in the story. Formally, in the same way that Jo’s plays have developed from their melodramatic origins in Little Women, via an adaptation of a fairy tale (Cinderella) in Little Men, to a realist family drama in Jo’s Boys, Meg’s return to acting in her middle

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age is to a style much more akin to what we now call “naturalistic acting” or psychological realism. Here, the aim appears to be for the character’s everyday actions to be performed on stage as naturally as possible, “as if she had done nothing else all her life” (230). As Alan Ackerman puts it in his description of the Jo’s Boys production, “the most perfect theatrical illusion is that which does not appear to be theatre at all” (182). This is in marked contrast to the characters Meg plays in The Witch’s Curse in Little Women, who “shout and gesticulate tremendously” in “stormy scene[s]” (20). Alcott’s descriptions of Meg’s acting thus reveal particular relationships with gendered appropriateness, which supplement the attitudes taken towards the idea of a career in professional theatre. For example, in Jo’s Boys, her son Demi reminds Meg of her lifelong passion for acting and how she has passed this love on to her three children, teaching them to recite poetry at an early age and acting in various family plays (not described in the books) with her children when they were small babies. Meg admits that “if your blessed father had not come along, I’m afraid I should have been an actress in spite of Aunt March and all our honoured ancestors” (182). This anti-theatrical comment is immediately challenged by Demi, who praises his mother’s work in their shared rehearsal process (playing a mother and son) for the forthcoming Christmas production, and notes that he’s “sorry you didn’t become an actress, though we [referring to his sisters and himself] should be nowhere if you had” (183). However, the implication that elderly relatives and historical progenitors would have been disappointed or scandalized if Meg had become a professional actor, despite her obvious talent and skill, suggests that acting is only valued up to a certain point in this world, beyond which it is not considered appropriate or ladylike to venture. The same interest in and talent for acting appears in the next generation, repackaged in Meg’s daughter Josie’s fervent ambition to train to be a professional actor, which is a consistent sub-plot throughout Jo’s Boys, as is Meg’s disapproval of her daughter’s career plans. During the summer vacation, Josie joins the Laurences (her uncle Laurie, aunt Amy, and cousin Bess) on a beach holiday. Miss Cameron, “the great actress”, is staying in a villa nearby, and the potential for contact with her proves an irresistible temptation for the budding young performer, for whom Miss Cameron, apparently modelled on the British actor Fanny Kemble,2 is “the sort of actress the girl meant to be” (144). Eventually, a chance encounter on the beach (Miss Cameron loses a bracelet while swimming, which Josie dives for and recovers) leads to an invitation to visit Miss Cameron at her villa: “you shall show me what you can do, and I’ll give you my opinion. But you won’t like it” (149). After an extensive session during which Josie performs a range of monologues for Miss Cameron’s analysis, followed by a long conversation about the importance of Josie continuing with her education and absorbing more life experience before she begins formal acting training, Miss Cameron promises to come and see her in action at Laurence College. Josie replies that “[w]e are going to have some [plays] at Christmas, with a nice part for me. A simple little thing, but I can do it, and should be so proud, so happy to have you there” (157). True to her word, Miss Cameron attends the Christmas production, and we glimpse her live analysis of Josie’s acting through Jo’s eyes, who sharply observes the guest “nod approval several times at some natural tone or gesture, some good bit of by-play or a quick change of expression in the young face, which was as variable as an April day” (231). This analysis is underlined by the narration, which also pays particular attention to Josie’s performance throughout the production, initially tracking her actions in an opening sketch from what we assume to be a French farce, in which she plays maid to Demi and Alice’s Baron and Marquise. Josie is followed across the stage “as she listened at keyholes, peeped into notes, and popped in and out at all the most inopportune moments, with her nose in the air, her hands in her apron-pockets, and curiosity pervading her little figure from the topmost bow of her jaunty cap to the red heels of her slippers” (228). Subsequently, in the centrepiece of the evening (a new play by Jo), Josie plays Dolly, the daughter of the central character (who is played by Meg). Her performance is described by the narrator as “capital” (231), and the audience response

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to the character is captured through laughter, unprompted comments, and a volume of tears requiring one audience member to “spread her lace handkerchief to dry” (234). However, while the professionalisation of acting is taken much more seriously in this novel than in Little Women (particularly as we meet a professional actor whose opinions about her craft and career are treated with respect by all of the other characters), it is still seen as a dubious career path, especially by Meg. The echoes of Christie’s words above from Work (written during 1859–62, after Alcott’s failed attempt to launch her own professional acting career in Boston) are very clear in Meg’s pronouncement in Jo’s Boys (published in 1886) that acting could potentially be a fulfilling career for her daughter, “if I could only feel that the life would not hurt my girl, and leave her unsatisfied when it was too late to change; for nothing is harder to give up than the excitements of that profession. I know something of it” (182). Again, acting is implied by Alcott, who herself “know[s] something of it,” to be a profession that could be damaging to a woman in moral and/or psychological terms. This view can also be identified in Miss Cameron’s own key advice to Josie when she auditions for her at the beach villa. The great actress advises Josie to “go back to school and finish your education … [c] ultivate mind and body, heart and soul, and make yourself an intelligent, graceful, beautiful, and healthy girl. Then, at eighteen or twenty, go into training and try your powers” (156). Alcott’s drawing of a professional actress thus clings to an attitude to theatre very recognisable from the writer’s own experiences, and the resultant anti-theatricality sits paradoxically alongside the consistently admired skills and talents of Meg and Josie. That said, the concluding paragraph to Jo’s Boys notes that “Bess and Josie won honours in their artistic careers,” indicating that the next generation were given the opportunity to have professional careers as artists in the way that their mothers (Amy as a visual artist and Meg as an actress) could not (349).

Theatrical Accidents and Contingencies Turning away from acting and towards a wider sense of theatre-making in the trilogy (principally in relation to playwriting and directing, which are conflated by Alcott in terms of Jo’s multi-faceted role in putting the private theatricals together), it becomes clear that the theatrical contingencies surrounding each of the three productions reveal further aspects of Alcott’s complex relationship with anti-theatricality. Following the simultaneous suspicion of and respect for acting and its professionalisation we have already encountered, an analysis of the missteps and misperformances embedded within the three productions articulates theatre’s enormous value to the Marches alongside a wariness of its power. In discussing contingency in theatre-making and the theatrical accidents we see in Alcott, I am indebted to Nicholas Ridout’s exploration of theatre’s “problems.” In his wide-ranging study of “the apparently marginal and unwanted events of the theatrical encounter” (14), including stage fright, shame, embarrassment, animals, children, laughter and fiasco, Ridout notes how such theatrical accidents appear as moments “which seem both to underpin and undermine the functioning of theatre as a mode of ethical or political communication” (33). In other words, these incidents or accidents bring the encounter between performer and spectator more securely into view, even as things on (or off) stage appear to be falling apart. For Ridout, theatricality itself emerges in the inevitable breaking down of the “huge machine” (31) upon which theatrical production depends, allowing us to acknowledge the other and consider the ethics of the exchange in which we are engaged. Returning to Alcott, each of the three productions explores a different kind of theatrical accident. Little Women opens on an evening just before Christmas with the four March sisters waiting for their mother Marmee to return home from another day volunteering with a community team sending parcels to soldiers fighting in the American Civil War. While they wait, Jo insists that they rehearse part of her latest play, The Witch’s Curse, An Operatic Tragedy, which is to be performed at home on

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Christmas night to an audience of local girls from the community, who sit on a cot-bed (affectionately called the “dress circle”). Specifically, she notes that more rehearsal is needed because of Amy’s lacklustre performance in “the fainting scene … you are as stiff as a poker in that” (6). Unfortunately, Amy’s response to the special rehearsal does not fill her director with confidence, and Jo’s preshow pep talk observes that Amy should “do the best when the time comes, and if the audience shout [with laughter], don’t blame me” (6). However, on the night of the performance, Amy’s uninspiring acting is the least of the sisters’ worries. Their impressive stage design (a tower reaching to the ceiling with a window halfway up, through which can be seen Amy playing Zara, the object of both protagonist and antagonist’s affections) comes to grief when Amy/Zara’s train gets caught on the window and causes the tower to fall on Amy and Meg (who is playing Zara’s father, Don Pedro). The latter, still in character but simultaneously alert to the audience, hisses “Don’t laugh! Act as if it was all right!” at Zara before returning to the script (19). Mirroring the tower’s collapse, the dress circle/bed shuts itself up unexpectedly during the curtain call, scattering the giggling audience to the floor. In Ridout’s terms, this moment further reinforces the relationship between performer and spectator, as the corporeality of everyone in the room is called to account, and the actors “[fly] to the rescue” of their audience’s bodies. (20) In Little Men, Jo turns her attention to creating a play with and for the children of Plumfield, based on the Cinderella fairy tale. The theatrical contingency here rests upon the cast of children, and the unpredictability of their reactions to the live production context. The efforts of rehearsal, linelearning, set design, and construction consume Plumfield in the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving performance, as described in this passage: There was a great hunting up of old ribbons and finery, much cutting and pasting of gold paper, and the most remarkable quantity of straw, grey cotton, flannel, and big black beads, used by Franz and Mrs Jo. Ned hammered at strange machines in the workshop, Demi and Tommy went about murmuring to themselves as if learning something. A fearful racket was heard in Emil’s room at intervals, and peals of laughter from the nursery when Rob and Teddy were sent for and hidden from sight whole hours at a time. (349) However, the moment of the production reveals quite a different relationship between preparation and execution, beginning with a range of “very audible directions” from Jo in director/stage manager mode (357). For example, Laurie and Amy’s young daughter Bess, who has been cast as Cinderella, is given vocal cues from offstage (Jo) and onstage (the other children performing). Despite these prompts, Bess tends to prefer admonishing her parents for their adoring audience behaviour, showing off her pretty costume and giving instructions to other actors, bringing us back to Ridout, who notes that the child actor can rarely be fully “assimilated” (99) into the fictional world of a play, which returns us to the fundamental ethical encounter between performer and audience member. This ethical encounter is defined by Ridout following Levinas’s ‘face to face’ encounter, and rests on an uncertain and paradoxical relation. As Ridout puts it: It is as though theatre depended for its life upon the success of that person up there in the light convincing you down there in the dark that they are someone else, and that something politically and socially important rests upon the success of this persuasion, while at the same time the very same process could only survive by acknowledging the fatal opposite of that success, the fact that the person up there is in [sic] not in fact someone else at all. You are both here, there’s no transport out for either of you. The face to face is both offered, then, and withheld, made available and turned down, an opportunity and a threat. (33)

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In the context of the Little Men production in Alcott, the uncertainty of this relationship and the inability to “transport out” of it is writ large by the children’s performances – sitting within and without the characters they’re playing, slipping between their family roles and relationships. The audience know the performers deeply, and vice versa. The familiar fairy tale of an unwelcome and uncared-for child, who escapes their family into a context where they can thrive and be taken care of, mirrors the backgrounds of many of the Plumfield students. This engagement with the performer and the performance, in the words of Helena Grehan, “keeps the spectator engaged with the other, with the work, and with responsibility and therefore an ethical process long after they have left the performance space” (22). Finally, in Jo’s Boys, we encounter a different theatrical accident in each of the production’s three parts (a scene from what appears to be a French farce, Jo’s new play, and a series of short comedic vignettes and tableaux vivants called The Owlsdark Marbles), and two of these three moments of contingency echo the previous two novels’ approaches. As in The Witch’s Curse, there is a stage design mishap. In the French farce scene, Demi notices that one of the upright stage flats is about to fall on his scene partner, Alice, and darts across the stage to prop it back up. As the scene continues, a stagehand dashes up a ladder to steady the flat, but his hammer falls out of his pocket and lands on Demi’s head, injuring him. In the new play, as in Cinderella, Jo has cast a real baby in the role of Meg’s character’s baby granddaughter, simultaneously hoping for a positive audience response, but aware of the precarity of the casting choice as she whispers to Laurie backstage: “If the dear thing won’t squall in the wrong place, we are saved. But it is risky. Be ready to catch it if all Meg’s cuddlings prove in vain” (230). In The Owlsdark Marbles, Alcott explores an additional theatrical contingency. Here, we see a range of Roman or quasi-Roman deities going about their business as the “marbles” of Professor Owlsdark (played by Laurie), who narrates the characteristics of these mythological characters as well as their relationships to the performers playing them, in Alcott’s homage to Mrs Jarley’s Waxworks in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. The deities are given contemporary twists—for example, Minerva (the Roman goddess of war, wisdom, and the arts) is shown as a women’s rights activist, connecting to Alcott’s own experience as a supporter of women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth century: “the words ‘Women’s Rights’ adorned her shield, a scroll bearing the motto ‘Vote early and often’ hung from the beak of the owl perched on her lance, and a tiny pestle and mortar ornamented her helmet” (238).3 Jo and Professor Bhaer play Juno (referred to as Mrs Juno) and Jupiter/Jove in this piece. The latter, as the Roman king of the gods (equivalent to Zeus in Greek mythology) is described in recognisably classical terms, with clear connections to the Professor’s intellect, wisdom, and status within the Plumfield and Laurence College communities. Mrs Juno, however, is described alongside various domestic items including “darning-needle, pen, and cooking-spoon”, and Professor Owlsdark explains to the audience about her “domestic infelicity, her meddlesome disposition, sharp tongue, bad temper, and jealousy”, to what appears to be a mixed audience response, with laughter from some quarters and “hisses from some indignant boys, who would not bear, even in joke, any disrespect to dear Mother Bhaer” (239). Crucially for our purposes here, Jo’s reaction to Professor Owlsdark’s words is described by Alcott’s narrator. In the moment, Jo appears to be “[enjoying] it all immensely, as the twinkle in her eye and the irrepressible pucker of her lips betrayed” (239). However, on their way home later in the evening, Jo observes aloud to her husband that she has recently been impatient and fretful with him, and that “Laurie’s fun had some truth in it, and I felt hit in a tender spot,” resolving to try to be more communicative and patient, a “model wife” from this point forwards (242). This theme of contingency and accident in the trilogy’s theatre productions functions in a number of ways. Firstly, the theatrical accidents described allow Alcott to revel in the details of theatremaking, particularly the intricate processes of design, stage management, and general backstage

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business. As I have written about elsewhere, theatrical contingency provides a useful framework for troubling easy assumptions about what the theatre’s possibilities and limitations are, and how these change and shift through time and context (Quigley 24–5). I argue that contingency can be seen in positive terms (rather than the negative assumptions connected with precarity, uncertainty, or accident), and applying this to Alcott’s theatrical accidents evokes a sense of the creativity and optimism associated with continuing to perform when things seem to be going awry. In the trilogy, theatre’s inherent messiness, corporeality, and liveness are evoked by Alcott in deliberate contrast to the Marches’ general emphasis on self-control. As we have seen above in relation to Alcott’s own childhood, while theatre might appear to have one kind of function, it can also operate in more slippery and unstable ways. In the Jo’s Boys production in particular, the final reflection on the evening (from the narrator) speaks back to the theatrical contingencies that have been highlighted: So all three plays might be considered successes … Demi got an unspoken question answered [from Alice’s reaction to his injury, he knows that she reciprocates his love for her], Josie’s fondest wish [to begin the first stage of her actor training] was granted, and, thanks to Professor Owlsdark’s jest, Mrs Jo made Professor Bhaer’s busy life quite a bed of roses by the keeping of her resolution [to be “a model wife” to him]. (242) Here, the “success” measure of the evening is directly related to the missteps that have occurred, creating a sense that Alcott’s own angle on anti-theatricality combines suspicion of the theatre and a theatre-making career with a meaningful sense of the power of acknowledging and even emphasising the challenges and discomforts of theatre production, allowing the literalness of performance to lead to character transformation and revelation. In conclusion, while Alcott’s novels are not strictly “theatre novels,” or novels about young performers in the tradition of writers like Noel Streatfeild or Jean Estoril, it is clear that theatre-making for the Marches and their extended families permits a level of creativity and a range of behaviours that are not always possible for the characters to explore in their everyday lives. In what becomes the older generation by the time of Jo’s Boys, Meg, Laurie, and Amy all cherished dreams of artistic careers as young people, but the expectations of the time, their genders and their social standings in their community have required a stepping back from their artistic endeavours in the service of supporting their own families. However, performing, directing, and designing for Plumfield’s domestic theatre productions allow these and other characters an outlet for expression, and a connection to their past selves. Jo uses the skills she has developed in her career as a novelist to explore other forms of writing (i.e. playwriting), and her multi-faceted role as a director-producer-manager in Little Men and Jo’s Boys not only chimes with her domestic career as matriarch of Plumfield, but gives her creative control of a project in a non-caregiver role. The work of acting, directing, and playwriting as lovingly and methodically evoked by Alcott in these three novels shows the craft of theatre-making as crucial to family life on a number of fronts, and its power ricochets through the careers, romances, conflicts and sorrows of the March family and the community of Plumfield.

Notes 1 Originally published in the UK as two books: Little Women and Good Wives, but considered for the purposes of this chapter as Little Women. 2 Ackerman mentions in The Portable Theater that Alcott met Kemble in 1855 when the latter was performing in Walpole, Massachussetts (169). 3 Alcott was among twenty women to vote for the very first time in Concord, Massachusetts. They voted in relation to a school committee at the Concord Town Hall meeting on 29 March 1880. See Cheney (2).

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Works Cited Ackerman, Alan. “Theatre and the private sphere in the fiction of Louisa May Alcott.” Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth Century Interior, edited byInga Bryden and Janet Floyd, Manchester UP, 1999, pp. 162–185. Ackerman, Alan. The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Penguin Books, 1989. Alcott, Louisa May. Little Men. Puffin Books, 1983. Alcott, Louisa May. Jo’s Boys. Puffin Books, 1984. Alcott, Louisa May. Work. Kindle ed., Library of America, 2014. Cheney, Edna. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals. Kindle ed., Applewood Books, 2010. Grehan, Helena. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Halttunen, Karen. “The Domestic Drama of Louisa May Alcott.” Feminist Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1984, pp. 233–254. “How Louisa May Alcott Voted for the First Time in 1880.” New England Historical Society, https://www. newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/how-louisa-may-alcott-voted-for-the-first-time-in-1880. Holdsworth, Nadine, with Jane Milling and Helen Nicholson. “Making Amateur Theatre.” The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre, edited by Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 191–236. Nicholson, Helen, with Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling. “Ecologies of Amateur Theatre.” The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre, edited by Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 1–22. Quigley, Karen. Performing the Unstageable. Bloomsbury, 2020. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge UP, 2009. Wilhelm, Julie. “‘Don’t Laugh! Act as if it was all right!’ And Other Comical Interruptions in Little Women.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 3, no. 19, 2009, pp. 63–82.

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21 “CLOSER TO BEING GROWN UP THAN EVER BEFORE” Theatre as a Site of Passage in Children’s Fiction Stephanie Tillotson

In Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, Graham Wolfe argues for the importance of considering theatre-fiction as an intermedial literary genre. Moreover, he proposes that it is possible to recognize sub-genres of theatre-fiction, one variation being children’s theatre-fiction. My intention in this chapter is initially to demonstrate that there is an identifiable strand of literature about theatre for children and young people. Then I will interrogate how and why certain authors of children’s fiction have been drawn to “engage in concrete and sustained ways” with the “artistic practice and industry” of the theatre (Wolfe 2). While each novel may differ in the ways in which theatre and fiction have been integrated and juxtaposed, I argue that a common feature of children’s theatrefiction is that it frequently offers young readers the opportunity to engage with the transitions and transformations of childhood, through adolescence to adulthood. Psychologists Leo B. Hendry and Marion Kloep compare the trajectory of an individual’s life journey to a magical mystery tour towards a particular destination. Whatever is the individual’s starting point, they are “constantly in transit,” subject to a variety of forces, such as biological disposition, but also influenced by personal desires and inclinations. In children’s theatre-fiction, certain individual aspirations are appropriated to address these routes towards maturation, processes facilitated by a unique dialogical interaction created in the interplay of the two contrasting, but often complementary aesthetic forms: theatre and prose. And, in this distinctive dialogue, theatre’s cultural function as a liminal space is emphasized, and appropriated as a site of passage for the young reader. In the twentieth century, some of the most famous children’s theatre-novels are those written by Noel Streatfeild. She is best known for her “shoes” books, such as her popular 1936 novel, Ballet Shoes, and its sequel Theatre Shoes (also known as Curtain Up) that followed in 1944. In 1975, the BBC transmitted Ballet Shoes as a six-episode series on television, and in 2007 the book was adapted by Heidi Thomas into a full-length feature film for Granada Television, starring Emma Watson and Richard Griffiths (both at the time appearing prominently in the Harry Potter films). Writing contemporaneously to Streatfeild, Pamela Brown published The Swish of the Curtain in 1941. The novel narrates the adventures of a group of seven young friends who form their own amateur theatre, The Blue Door Theatre Company. When first published, Swish of the Curtain was so successful with young readers that, with the earnings from the sale of her book, Brown was able to put herself through actor training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Afterwards she became an actor and then a producer of television programmes for children, using her professional life as material for four sequels to The Swish of the Curtain: Maddy Alone (1945), Golden Pavements (1947), Blue Door Venture (1949) and Maddy

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Again (1956). During the Second World War, The Swish of the Curtain was adapted for radio, and later in 1980 it was dramatized for BBC television. In 1994, the BBC recorded a further radio adaptation for transmission on Radio Five. Stories for young readers often feature an internal event or situation that distances the fictional protagonist(s) from parental influence. Ensuing choices and decisions must then be made without automatic recourse to more powerful adult voices. The subsequent developing autonomy of the narrative’s central character(s) may thus encourage in the reader an imaginative engagement with the processes of psychological and social maturation. The narrative is therefore an imaginary realization of the changes that occur when the child or young person moves through the stages of transition and transformation towards adulthood. In children’s theatre-fiction, the site of passage is frequently activated when the young people establish an amateur theatre company—for example, in The Swish of the Curtain. As the Blue Door Theatre prospers through the independent efforts and commitment of the members of the company, they dare to dream of training for a life on the stage, and of converting their amateur company into a professional organization. However, this ambition brings them into conflict with the expectations and wishes of their inter-war, English middle-class parents. It is the group’s questioning of their parents’ values and moral judgements that causes the intergenerational tension. This distancing encourages the Blue Door Theatre Company, both individually and collectively, to develop a burgeoning sense of independence and a determination to fulfil their ambitions. Yet, though she published The Swish of the Curtain during the Second World War, Brown, unlike Streatfeild, makes no mention of the effect of the hostilities on family or societal relationships. In Streatfeild’s Theatre Shoes, theatre school is offered as a site of passage for the children, but their situation is characterized by separation through multiple losses (of parents, buildings, food, clothing, and stability) brought about by the conflict. Consequently, for twenty-first century readers, the war as an historical event serves to contextualize a world that has become increasingly alien. However, though the attitudes of the young people in The Swish of the Curtain reflect the social changes that arose in the aftermath of the Great War, the world they inhabit can seem anachronistic to later generations considering the huge political and cultural shifts that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. The concept of “adolescence” itself, in much of Europe and the Anglophone world did not exist before the social and cultural transformations that occurred post-1945. The members of the Blue Door Theatre Company—though we would call them adolescents—always refer to themselves, and are always referred to, as children. Yet, the main subject of much children’s theatre-fiction is adolescence, a time understood to be set aside for development and maturation. It is an economically supported phase when young people are expected to accomplish the transitions and transformations required to leave childhood behind and to achieve adult status. Such an extended phase of life was not possible until societies achieved a certain level of prosperity. In some cultures, the concept of adolescence remains non-existent and, therefore, children’s theatre-fiction may be a culturally specific phenomenon. Thus, by the twenty-first century, fiction for children has had to adapt to accommodate mutable attitudes, expectations, and the changing shape of the nuclear family, which no longer looks as it did in Pamela Brown’s books. Since the Millennium, for instance, the trope of the “absent mother” has become a perceptibly recurring feature in children’s theatre-fiction. Helen Peters’s 2018 The Secret Hen House Theatre (arguably a novel in conversation with Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain) and Eloise Williams’s 2020 fantasy story Wilde—which involves the theatrical retelling of historical folklore surrounding an executed witch—both feature plotlines that are dependent upon the early death of the protagonist’s mother. And in Williams’s earlier 2017 novel, Gaslight—located in the world of Victorian, Cardiff Bay music halls—the plot revolves around the search for the missing mother. In Sally Gardner’s 2007 gothic romance Red Necklace, set against the backdrop of revolutionary France and interwoven with gypsy lore, the magician protagonist (Yannick “Yann” Magoza) does not remember his dead mother and is unaware that his adversary, the villainous and sinister Count

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Kalliovski, is his father. Other children’s theatre-fiction reflects twenty-first century changing attitudes to psychological individuation and diversity. Michelle Magorian, the winner of the 1982 Guardian Prize for British Children’s Books, looks at class and gender identity in her 2014 thriller novel, Impossible. Set in 1959, its twelve-year-old protagonist Josie lives away from her working-class parents so that she can attend a London stage-school. Though she dreams of a career in acting, because her appearance lacks traditional femininity she is told by her teachers that she has no ability and that her ambitions are impossible. But when she is cast as a boy in a successful West End play, Josie’s consequent exploits bring her into contact with London’s criminal world and the newly established East End Theatre Workshop led by Joan Littlewood. Gender performance, as well as same-sex and interracial relationships are examined in Robin Stevens’s detective novel, Death in the Spotlight (2018). At the book’s heart is a close female friendship forged at an interwar English boarding school where familial relationships are secondary. And in Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera’s series of popular North American novels, gay romance is the context. The cover of their latest novel Here’s to Us (2021), advises the reader that “The Stage Is Set for True Love.” This brief survey reveals an identifiable strand of literature that may be understood as children’s theatre-fiction. Although the authors of the novels discussed so far are concerned with the transitions and transformations of childhood through adolescence, they seem to have found that the practices and structures of theatre provide a flexibility that supports many different and varied modes of storytelling. Yet, while the unique dialogical interaction of theatre and fiction is vital to their engagement with adolescence, we should keep in mind that the aesthetic forms are also significantly divergent. At its core, the lived experience of theatre is essentially sensory. It is a communal practice that is dependent upon the interaction of living, present bodies. Thus, theatre is very different from the novel which is contingent on the printed word and the solitary child’s increasing mastery of the medium. As Wolfe acknowledges, theatre cannot be replicated on the page: “To read a novel about theatre is, of course, to miss the full effect of the art-form obtainable from a seat in the audience. Theatre’s illusions and attractions are dependent on so much that exceeds pages, including bodies, voices, lights, colours, collaborative energies, and collective responses” (1). However, Eloise Williams, Children’s Laureate for Wales (2019–21), is specifically drawn to employing the aesthetics of theatre in her novels because of its illusory characteristics: “Smoke and mirrors, trickery and deception, illumination and shadow” (personal email dated 25th January 2022). In her novels—and in those of Sally Gardner and Robin Stevens—the processes of shape-shifting and disguise intrinsic to theatre have provided invaluable narrative opportunities and rewards. Yet, while drawn to writing about theatre by its fantastical properties, Williams uses performance to illuminate concealed truths. In Wilde, an act of theatre exposes duplicity in a previously accepted story told about the past, and provides the protagonist with the opportunity to acknowledge her true, previously hidden, self. And if novelists cannot replicate theatre, they may often reveal what theatre customarily keeps hidden. In her detective fiction, Stevens subverts the enchantment of theatre for the purposes of intrigue and criminality, describing its quotidian reality as bearing little resemblance to its frequently imagined romance. Michelle Magorian also accentuates the disparity of the worlds, juxtaposing the plush public auditoria and front-of-house spaces with the closed sphere of the uncomfortable, unseen backstage areas inhabited by the professional theatre maker. She makes full use of the playhouse’s secret places, concealing her protagonist from present danger in the many interstitial spaces hidden within the maze of backstage corridors, corners, and cupboards.

The Theatre as Liminal Space The excitement engendered by theatre’s characteristic features of spectacle, disguise, and sleight of hand may be vital to many works of children’s theatre-fiction, but in this next section, I intend to

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explore the primary quality of theatre that makes it so valuable to the children’s novelist-its cultural function as a liminal space. Adolescence itself is a liminal experience. Its transitional processes may involve puberty, leaving school, work, romance, possibly partnership and the eventual establishment of a family life. All are affected by historical, social, cultural, physical, and environmental contexts, which in turn have psychosocial consequences for the individual. The writer of children’s literature may explore this liminal period by choosing to engage in a concrete and sustained way with the practices, processes, and structures of theatre, which is itself a highly liminal space. Theatre embodies materially the threshold between perceived reality and the world of the imagination, and thus affords a site of passage. Furthermore, in theatre-fiction children may imaginatively live in society’s interstices, in places where they are able to escape normal cultural confines. Between the pages, theatre may become a site where the young person experiences a questioning of cultural and community agendas, temporarily encountering social orders and structures from non-traditional vantage points, and thus may experiment with different possibilities on the route to adult independence. Life in the wings allows the child to participate creatively with the processes of maturation. The value of considering theatre as a site of passage in children’s fiction will become especially clear through closer examination of three, very different case studies, to which I will now turn: Pamela Brown’s realist novel, The Swish of the Curtain; Eloise Williams’s fantasy, Wilde; and Robin Stevens’s detective novel, Death in the Spotlight.

The Swish of the Curtain: Realism Meets Theatre-Fiction Pamela Brown’s novels, collectively known as “The Blue Door Theatre” books, are about a group of children who attempt to claim an autonomous space in the public domain by setting up and running their own theatre company, and producing, directing, writing, and acting in their own work. In her first novel The Swish of the Curtain (1941), the engagement with theatre allows Brown’s characters a freedom to self-express without the normal restrictions imposed by school, parents, and society. Such experimentation affords them, and the reader, a sense of empowerment. Her protagonists explore the possibility of identity as fluid, in a liminal space where they are not quite adults but no longer children. In her writing, Brown was herself exploring the freedom to self-express since—and unusually for children’s fiction—her characters share a contemporary childhood with their author. Born in 1924, Brown began The Swish of the Curtain in 1938, when she was herself only fourteen and dreaming of a life in the theatre. During the Second World War, Brown’s family left her hometown of Colchester (the setting for The Swish of the Curtain, renamed Fenchester) for the relative safety of Wales. That she felt the loss of a former sense of belonging is suggested by her continuing to write and send back the completed chapters to share with her friends who remained in Colchester. The novel was finished when she was sixteen and was followed by four further books that deal with the continuing adventures of the Blue Door Theatre Company members as they emerge as adults. However, she is most remembered for her first novel, much of the appeal of which is due to Brown’s penetrating depictions of childhood, probably attributable to her youth at the time of writing. Brown’s characters are Madeleine (at nine years old the youngest), her older sister Sandra (thirteen), their next-door neighbours, Jeremy (fourteen) and Lyn (thirteen), and the newcomers at the Corner House, Nigel (fifteen), and twins Vicky and Bulldog (thirteen). It is Madeleine who is responsible for much of the humour in the novel, as she struggles to keep up with the other adolescent members of the group. Insulted by a passing errand boy on a bicycle, Maddy throws a stone at him, but instead of reaching its target, the stone breaks the window of a disused chapel. The children agree that they must mend the window and while Nigel and Jeremy set to work with a pane of glass and some putty, Bulldog explores the abandoned building. He squeezes his “thick, stocky body” down the narrow space between the side of the hall and the warehouse next door (32). Madeleine joins him and “with much puffing and blowing” she pushes herself through the aperture: a passage described as interstitial,

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a birth canal from which the young people will emerge into a new life. Soon all the group members have pushed themselves through the narrow space into the building. Here they find a large, raised platform and rows of set chairs configured like a theatre auditorium. Their Vicar, Mr Bell, agrees to allow the children to use the building to start a drama company, while his wife donates to them two chests left over from her own amateur dramatic days. These contain “dresses, swords, hats, and all the most thrilling junk imaginable” including some heavy blue material that turns out to be stage curtains (52). Excitedly the children then gather in the room at the back of the chapel to make lists of jobs that need to be done before they can think about opening their own theatre. One of the first jobs must be to hang the luxurious blue stage curtains donated by Mrs Bell: “About the curtains,” went on Nigel, “I should think we boys could manage that if the girls sewed on curtain rings and things. But what about the paint for the door?” “There’s some blue paint in our shed,” said Jeremy. “We could call it the Blue Theatre,” someone suggested. Bulldog pounced on the suggestion. “Yes, but not just ‘Blue’—what about ‘Blue Door’? Cos we are going to paint it blue.” (56) The blue door, so casually introduced through an accident of available paint, is pivotal to Brown’s narrative about transition. It is a portal, the threshold beyond which there exists for the children a liminal space. It is the precipice edge of something new, something yet to be achieved. For the children it represents adventure, the leaving behind of an old identity to become something new. To embark on their transitional quest, they search for a group name around which they may coalesce, and they hit upon an association with the liminal space behind the door. The building becomes the Blue Door Theatre, and they are the Blue Door Theatre Company: They all tried it over to see how it sounded, and Nigel wrote it down and studied it from every angle. “We’ll vote on it,” he said, and every hand went up. They looked at each other excitedly across the table now that the decision was made. “The Blue Door Theatre Company,” announced Maddy in B.B.C. accents, “now present to you Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with Madeleine Fayne as Little Eva, and Jeremy Darwin as Uncle Tom Cobley and all.” (57–8) In their action of forming a troupe, the Blue Door is quintessential as synecdoche. The children refer to themselves, and become known in their hometown, as the Blue Doors. The structure and processes of the company offers a space of separation, the first phase in the liminal process. It is a site of passage, or as Hugh Matthews defines the liminal spaces of childhood, “a place which both makes possible and signifies a means of transition through which some young people move away from the restrictions of their childhood roots towards the independence of adulthood” (101). And The Swish of the Curtain is governed by the authorial use of liminal spaces: beaches, cliffs, gardens, streets, docklands, a corner house, fields at the edge of the town and, of course, the Blue Door Theatre itself.

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Theatre becomes a mechanism by which they work (or should that be play) towards independence. But the blue door also becomes the entrance to a site of disagreement and generational divergence, for theatre brings the Blue Doors into conflict with their parents. They accept the children’s amateur dramatic experiments as long as they don’t interfere with schoolwork and the plans that their parents have for their sons’ and daughters’ futures. When the young people claim a socially autonomous space in which they begin to develop dreams, ambitions, and aspirations of their own, they collide with their parents. They dream of a future where they train for the theatre, and afterwards return to Fenchester to set up a professional repertory. From their parents, their plan is met with confrontation and obstruction. For Mrs Fayne (Madeleine and Sandra’s mother), theatrical folk engage in “wicked ways,” and her husband expresses the fear that “our little girls [will] come home with painted faces and artificial ways, and drink and smoke and use bad language” (296). Mr Halford (Nigel and the twins’ father) does not think that the stage is a “man’s job,” while Lyn and Jeremy’s mother burst out, “But what will people say when they hear that both of my children are on the stage?” (297) Intergenerational confrontations are, according to Matthews, rituals of transition, based on a parental fear of the young people developing independence, an autonomy that may lead to their making socially divergent choices. To complete successfully the transition to young adulthood, the children form another, supportive family group, with Sandra as substitute mother, their encouraging Bishop as surrogate father, and the Vicar and his wife as extended family relatives. The children’s is an essentially safe, ordered, Christian world, presided over by kindly and understanding clerics who, through encouragement, allow them to flourish. But it is the Blue Door Theatre Company that becomes the children’s primary unit of support, friendship, and guidance, the space where their natural psychological and emotional rage, occasioned by the lack of agency dictated by the binary of child/adult, is played out. Furthermore, for child readers, the central character(s) must be one(s) with whom they can identify so that together, through imagination, they collectively experience a similar process of maturation. The reader is encouraged to adopt the Blue Door Theatre as an imagined site of passage and becomes an eighth member of the company (ninth if we include Brown herself), who together pass through the same processes of becoming. It is this collective experience that provides and embodies pleasure for the reader, a sense that David Rudd has defined as a feeling of “home,” containing “notions of abundance (‘the enjoyment of sensuous material reality’) and community (‘togetherness, sense of belonging’) rather than a homogenisation” (189).

Children’s Theatre-Fiction and the Fairy Tale: A Dialogic Relationship In Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain, theatre-fiction guides its young readers through a process of maturation by engaging them in a vicarious form of wish-fulfilment, achieved through an identification with the activities and, ultimately successful, experiences of one or more members of the Blue Door Theatre Company. A second literary genre—also frequently associated with children—employs wish-fulfilment to engage readers with the processes of maturation and intergenerational conflict: the fairy tale. Derek Brewer argues for the classification of the fairy tale as “family drama” (28), highlighting the centrality of family relationships in examples of the genre from Europe and North America. Armando Maggi argues that, since the first publication of the re-workings of traditional (mainly European) fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, a clear moral purpose may be identified within the narrative, underpinned by Christian values, and expressed in bourgeois conventions. According to Brewer, the nuclear family provides “a moral and clearly unifying structural message relating to the attitudes maintained between the members of a family” (30). However, the “family drama” does not constitute the plot, though close personal relationships offer a structure through which the narrative weaves a variable path. Family members represent, what Brewer calls, the “cast” of the fairy tale, and it

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is only by moving outside this unit that the young protagonist finds an adult identity. This is the riddle that must be solved. Thus, the processes of maturation are at the heart of the fairy tale. Furthermore, similarities between the plot configuration of much theatre-fiction written for children and fairy tales may be identified by reference to Brewer’s taxonomy of the conventional structure of the latter. Plot sequences develop from the initial finding of a loved object; the central character may fall in love with a possible life partner—as in The Red Necklace—and may also develop a passion, such as a love for the theatre. In The Swish of the Curtain and The Secret Hen House Theatre, it is the aesthetic form that becomes the love object. Because of this passion (one often disapproved of by the ruling adults), the protagonist(s) must display persistence and endurance in undertaking adventures, or trials, the successful completion of which will indicate that the youthful central characters have accomplished a process of transition to young adulthood. Helpers—sometimes magic helpers—come to the aid of the protagonist, resulting in the successful completion of the test. The narrative concludes with a happy ending, when the central characters are successfully united with the loved object. While the traditional fairy tale is a literary genre, Pantomime is a theatrical expression of the form. Characteristic motifs and narrative structure common to the fairy tale are also found in Pantomime, and thus it is possible to identify thematic and organizational parallels between children’s fiction, the theatre and fairy tales. Many writers of theatre-fiction for young people, I argue, are aware of these similarities and have consequently engaged in creative conversations between the forms. Furthermore, this dialogic relationship, concerned as it is with the conundrum of maturation, is further enriched by reference to a shared cultural understanding of the theatre as liminal space. Almost eighty years after The Swish of the Curtain first appeared in print, Helen Peters’s novel The Secret Hen House Theatre tells the story of another group of children creating their own theatre company. However, in this example of theatrefiction for children, the focus is on the central character, Hannah. Twelve at the beginning of the book, the eldest of four siblings from a farming family, she possesses a passion for the theatre that she has inherited from her mother who has recently died. Her loss is felt greatly by the family, expressed in the physical deterioration of the farmhouse and the land’s failing productivity. Clayhill Farm, like the reality of their mother, is slipping away from the children. Without his wife, their father is struggling to maintain the family and the living that he loves—a battle that becomes a crisis when the new landlord doubles the quarterly rent. Along with her brothers and sisters, Hannah and her best friend Lottie enter a one-act drama competition with a play Hannah has written, just as the Blue Doors had done before them. While they wish to prove their abilities and therefore gain a place at theatre school, Hannah’s intention is to win the prize money and save the family farm. In Grimm’s “Cinderella” the mother also dies before the story begins, but her role is pivotal within the narrative as she promises to watch over her daughter from heaven. Maggi argues that Cinderella’s responsibility for her own transformation is questionable in Grimm’s iteration of the story, since her destiny is to become the mother who has passed away (154). Unlike Cinderella, however, Hannah’s transition is from the child who is trying to fill her mother’s place in the family, to a young adult with a vision for her own future. Yet, Peters tells Hannah’s story by consciously including fairy tale motifs that suggest a happy outcome. The deserted hen house—that once belonged to Hannah’s mother—is hit upon as the perfect site for the theatre, though its transformation must be kept a secret from her father who is overwhelmed by his own problems. To keep their mission covert, Hannah and Lottie look for the hen house at night and find a thicket where Hannah’s memory reassures her the building once stood: It was a mass of black thorny twigs, crowded together like living barbed wire … [Hannah] inched forward snapping twigs and moving brambles aside with her gloved hands. The gloves were thin, and the thorns pierced through them. Brambles clawed into her coat and hat, and she had to keep stopping to pull herself free. (53)

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Behind the brambles the girls find a “hedge of Ivy” which they pull away to expose a wooden wall. Again, “Sleeping Beauty” is referenced when Hannah learns from granny that dad is selling his farm equipment to pay the rent. Hannah buries her face in a cushion, thinking that “she wished she could sleep for a hundred years” (258). But Hannah cannot be the central character in her own fairy tale life, though she attempts it through theatre. She writes herself into a play which the judge describes as “a delightful comic fairy-tale with verve and sparkle” (237). It does not win the competition, though the judge suggests the possibility of an exciting future, encouraging Hannah to harness her talent and passion for a world of “Writing plays and acting in them and putting them on—for a job!” (227). Prince Charming is also revealed to be a bit of a disappointment to Hannah. In her class at school, Jack has only to walk into a room for her stomach to do a “back flip … he looked even more gorgeous than usual. His wavy hair was all messed up and he had a cheeky grin on his face” (28). In Hannah’s teenage infatuation, Peters acknowledges the yet incomplete sexual passage of the adolescent. Desperate to become more intimate with Jack, Hannah invites him to the dress rehearsal of her play. He turns up with his dodgy friend Danny, and when the two are unable to find the way through the brambles to the hen house, they disappear into the barn, which they accidently burn down whilst playing with a box of matches. When Jack makes fun of her secret hen house theatre in front of everyone else at school, Hannah sees him for what he is: “Not a witty romantic hero. Not a rebel with a heart of gold. Just a pathetic thirteen-year-old coward who set people’s barns on fire and ran away” (242). Maturation for Hannah is the realization that theatre may offer a future, but not always a fairytale ending. However, her happy ending is delivered by an old painting left by her mother which, when sold, provides enough money for the farm to continue for a while. Hannah’s grief is a liminal space, but theatre provides a site of transition where she comes to understand what responsibilities belong to adulthood. As an autonomous space it also enables her to make decisions that will govern her future. She is learning to be independent because of her mother’s absence.

Wilde: An Encounter between Fantasy and Theatre-Fiction The same may be said of the motherless central character, Wilde, in Eloise Williams’s 2020 novel, an example of another conversation between two literary forms, in this case between theatre-fiction for children and the genre of fantasy. According to C. N. Manlove, modern fantasy owes its existence, in large part, to the traditional fairy tale (1). It is then unsurprising that children’s theatre-fiction, as it shares characteristics with the traditional fairy tale, has proved flexible enough to be appropriated by writers of fantasy for children. Here I will borrow Manlove’s definition of fantasy as “A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms” (ix). In Williams’s Wilde, the supernatural is expressed through the central character, Wilde (named for Oscar Wilde) who has wonderful and magical powers and whose distinctive narrative voice narrates her unique story. Manlove also argues that fantasy exhibits a central theme which is the “insistence on and celebration of the separate identities of created things” (ix), maintaining that a genre that demands the uniqueness of the individual is popular in Britain and North America because both are countries that are distinguished by “the scope they give to the individual, the personal and the local” (ix). Wilde, my second case study, is a novel for children that sits at the intersection of theatre, fiction, and fantasy. Wilde is a child who has no memory of her dead mother though she feels her absence intensely. Expelled from yet another school for her “weirdness,” this time a school where she is a boarder while her father is away, “researching cures for diabetes, so other people won’t die of it like mum did. It’s important” (13), Wilde moves to her mother’s childhood home at Witch Point, to live with her mother’s sister, Mae. A remote and rural Welsh town, Witch Point, it is said, was cursed centuries ago

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by a young woman called Winter, who was hanged at the conclusion of a vicious and angry witch hunt. Local legend has it that as she died, Winter cursed the town. Now, in the middle of a heatwave and having not returned since she was a baby, Wilde comes to live at Witch Point House, bringing with her only the important things: a knowledge of “the thing” that Mae “told me about my mum that I keep hidden away, deep down inside” (5–6) and her mum’s legacy in the form of “the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a photo of my mum and me when I was a baby … and a broken raven brooch I never leave behind” (8). Alone, in strange surroundings, Wilde must achieve her own sense of independence and individuality. Witch Point House has three chimneys, a menagerie of assorted animals (including a cat called Mrs Danvers, Helen the goat, and a donkey named Duran Duran) and windows that slant, as if the house is leaning. Wonky windows, we learn, help “to stop a witch from flying in” (9). Wilde, who wanted “to get away from all the weird things that were happening” to her, decides that she has inadvertently “ended up in the weirdest place in the world” (1). Her individuality—which she calls weirdness—expresses itself as a combination of a natural shyness, a high intelligence, a connection with the natural world (birds constantly follow her and protect her from attack) as well as an ability to see images of “The future. The past” in reflective surfaces such as glass and water (57). Mae—who makes a living selling plant extracts for wellbeing and medicinal purposes, and who thus appears to be a white witch—calls this “Scrying,” a talent that Wilde has inherited from her mother, but one that Wilde rejects. School is the place where she fears her strangeness is most apparent. She is determined not to be weird there and just for once not to be the outsider. “I’m so tired of causing trouble everywhere I go” she confides in the reader (37), “I want to be happy. Can I get rid of the weird here or will it be with me for life?” However, it is here, at Witch Point House, that Wilde discovers her ability to fly. During the night she wakes on the roof or finds herself miles away on the ridge of a local windmill (where she finds her mother’s initials carved). Mysterious and unnerving occurrences direct Wilde’s life. Her unfamiliar sensual experiences are disturbing, like those of puberty: Wilde wakes in a high place, is literally swept off her feet, has the ground taken from beneath her. And just at this time, at the liminal phase of transition to secondary school, Wilde’s fellow students begin to receive frightening, angry letters containing curses, and signed by “The Witch.” Everyone suspects everyone else. Malevolence stalks the landscape. The witches’ lines from Macbeth are painted on the tarmac of the school playground, indicating the way to reception: When shall we three meet again / In thunder lightening or in rain? and mock gallows stand “dark and macabre, in the town square (6–7). Also, the reality of climate crisis is manifesting itself in the intense heat that is choking the life out of the town: heat that is popularly considered evidence of an evil curse inherited from the past. And, as if adding another ingredient to the spell, it is decided that Year 6’s final school project will be a theatre project that tells the story of the witch called Winter. Wilde’s mum loved the theatre, as does Mae who trained as an actor. When young, the sisters put on plays for fun in the garden of Witch Point House, and it was during a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Wilde’s mum met her dad. Creativity and storytelling are the very foundations of Wilde’s existence. But Year 6’s play is to be directed by someone who, though disguised as a teller of tales, is described as the epitome of artificiality, Gwyneth Fox-Rutherford, who invites the children to: “become thespians. Actors. Devisors. Playwrights and performers.” She rolls her Rs and hits every consonant crisply. “Ah, I remember giving my King Lear at Sadler’s Wells … ” She begins to reel through a huge list of other parts. I’m disappointed she is more interested in sounding successful than in the characters she was playing. (33) The story of Winter that she produces with the children is revealed to be a false one, full of easy clichés of an “evil, pus-covered hag” who has pimples and blood-sucking fleas that live in her ears” (72). Yet if

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Gwyneth is fraudulent, in Year 6 there is a genuinely talented actor in Wilde’s nemesis, Jemima. Her voice is “rich as toffee. Deep and soulful,” and when she sings the others “are backing singers to a star” (131). However, Gwyneth doesn’t cast Jemima centrally in the play because she is afraid of the authentic competition Jemima represents. Jemima turns on “weird” Wilde because of frustrated ambition and disappointment, accusing her of being the malevolent force behind the written curses. Here theatre is a place of subterfuge and treachery. Personal betrayal enters Wilde’s life at Witch Point in the guise of her one close friend, Dorcas. Watching over Wilde to prevent her from what she judges must be sleepwalking, Dorcas witnesses Wilde in flight, then publicly denounces Wilde’s real identity as a witch and, out of fear, rejects her true nature. Wilde flees to the local waterfall, the Falls of Snow, where the picture of her as a baby with her mother was taken. Here this image of unity is recreated, restated, and endorsed. Wilde escapes into the pool at the foot of the waterfall where she is absorbed into the re-creation of an interuterine existence. Her fractured sense of oneness with her mother begins to be rehabilitated, healing the psychological split within Wilde’s maturing sense of identity. Her reconciliation with nature is revealed as a site of transformation for her. Following a bird behind the waterfall, Wilde discovers a carved-out place where she can embrace her true identity. Hunted down by the children of Year 6, in a re-enactment of the trial that preceded Winter’s execution in the play they are to perform, Wilde instructs the birds to hold the children perilously over the water before deciding to accept her mother’s legacy and let them down: “I am never going to hide again. I AM A WITCH” (186). Fantasy’s concern with individual “being” (“the separate identities of created things” [Manlove ix]) has been employed to authenticate the transitions and transformations of childhood to adolescence. However, it is the communal act of making theatre that is the psychological site of passage for Wilde, the liminal space by which the disjunction in the community of Witch Point is healed. During her revelatory experiences at the Fall of Snow, the child named after a playwright, saw the images of Winter’s true story projected into the depths of the pool. Taken in by a kindly woodcutter and his family, Winter is supposed to have lured his daughters to the waterfall and “drowned them in revenge for all the witches who have been dunked and drowned before her” (73). But Wilde tells her friends in Year 6 that Winter was in reality imprisoned behind the falling water by the sisters, who then escaped Witch Point. Always suspected by the townspeople because of her many remarkable gifts, Winter was blamed for the disappearance of the woodcutter’s daughters, hunted down, and hanged. In front of an audience of the local community, in the garden of Witch Point House, Wilde and her friends perform the true story of the witch called Winter. The children reuse and recycle the props left over from a performance in which Wilde’s mother had once acted, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s tale of metamorphosis. In Wilde, disturbing questions of identity and existence have been raised. But Wilde has been able to integrate the loss of her mother, thereby achieving an individual identity and finding, in Witch Point, a home at last. Fissures have been healed; the community united. As the play ends the rain begins to fall, and the heatwave is broken.

Death in the Spotlight: Collaborations between Theatre-Fiction and Detective Fiction I have chosen Robin Stevens’s novel Death in the Spotlight, (2018) as the third case study in my analysis of children’s theatre-fiction, not only because it sits at the intersection of theatre and fiction, but because it also overlaps and plays with another identifiable genre: detective fiction. Death in the Spotlight features all the distinguishing elements of the detective form: a detective, an investigation, a mystery, and a murder to be solved both by the fictional investigators and the young reader. However, this strong element of detection is both a feature of the investigation into the transgression or crime, and into the transitional and transformational processes of maturation experienced by the story’s young central characters.

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Death in the Spotlight is the seventh, in a series of detective novels for young adults written by Robin Stevens and collectively known as the Murder Most Unladylike mysteries. And though it features a professional detective, he plays only a very small supporting role. Meanwhile, crucial to the criminal investigation is the partnership of the Wells and Wong Detective Society. The novel purports to be a record of The Detective Society’s activities narrated by one of its fictional members, Hazel Wong. For Stevens, Wong’s Hong Kong Chinese origins make her ideal for this role, as she grapples with the complexities of her outsider’s perspective, trying to comprehend new transitional circumstances. Hers is the questioning narrative voice, and her role as storyteller gives her a status in the eyes of the reader that belies her secondary role as “Detective Society Vice-President and Secretary.” The president is her aristocratic friend, the Honourable Daisy Wells, a quintessentially English establishment figure. Theirs is a close, almost familial, friendship, forged in their shared experiences of separation from their parents at an inter-war girls’ boarding school, and the adventures that befall them there: “strange events and awful danger and horrid, heart-pounding surprises” (1). In response, Daisy and Hazel have founded the Detective Society, thereby claiming for themselves an autonomous space in the public domain. Together they confront many challenges that further a developing sense of their individual independence: “When Daisy and I first began investigating,” writes Hazel as narrator, “it simply did not seem possible that someone like me could detect mysteries. But now I can’t imagine my life without Daisy Wells and the Detective Society” (1). The two girls are very different characters, with complementary gifts and talents. Daisy is glamourous, dazzlingly clever (in Hazel’s eyes anyway), confident and interested in disguise. Hazel is the observer, unassuming, methodical, and fond of pouring over code books. Daisy archly refers to her as “Watson,” after the fictional narrator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The comparison is apt for it is Hazel’s “autobiographical” narration that affords her an additional, personal sense of agency, one with which the young reader is invited to identify. In her acknowledgements, Stevens cites Golden Age “crime queen” Ngaio Marsh’s novel Enter a Murderer as the blueprint for Death in the Spotlight. Theatre is a closed society and, as Marsh demonstrated in many of her novels between the 1930s and the 1980s, with a finite number of suspects to be investigated is thus a perfect site for detective fiction. It is therefore unsurprising that in Death in the Spotlight Stevens should relocate her characters from their usual boarding school setting to the closed world of a West End theatre. Here circumstances evolve, prompting an investigation that Hazel writes up as the account of the “Romeo and Juliet Murder.” She begins, she informs the reader, on Sunday 24th May 1936, at which point she is fourteen. She identifies herself as “a detective,” though she is also aware of her own status as a character in a book. She measures herself against the heroines of the detective stories that her friend Daisy likes to read (perhaps by Christie, Sayers, or even Marsh), and finds herself wanting. Heroines of detective novels don’t have spots on their noses, she writes, nor are they fond of eating too much cake, though Hazel doesn’t mind failing on this point because “in my opinion many book heroines do not eat nearly enough” (2). Lastly, she reviews her own central performance in the novel as unsatisfactory because “a book heroine … would have no trouble remembering her lines in a play” (2). The comparison she is making is between herself and Daisy, “with her flawless skin and flair for drama” (2). It is Daisy whom Hazel as narrator raises to the status of the heroine of the novel. Yet, behind Hazel’s estimation of her own casting in the story is Stevens’s ironic authorial voice, shrewdly directing the young reader to identify with Wong’s courage, despite her perception of herself as ordinary, self-conscious, and lacking in heroism. In the world of the book, Hazel is living through the spring of 1936, and influenza has infected the cast of a forthcoming production of Romeo and Juliet at the London’s West End Rue Theatre. The Rue’s owner, Frances Crompton, “is in a bit of a bind financially at the moment” (10) and so she agrees, for a small fee, to accept Daisy and Hazel as lowly bit-players into the cast of her current production. This is ostensibly as a favour to Daisy’s Uncle Felix and his new wife, Aunt Lucy, with

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whom the girls are staying, the idea being to keep them safe from the usual murders, thefts, or kidnappings which they have a habit of stumbling across. Felix Mountfitchet is a Lord Peter Wimsey figure, straight out of the Golden Age detective crime of Dorothy L. Sayers. He is aristocratic, “fascinating and quite unnerving … tall and golden like Daisy and extremely clever too” (5). Like Wimsey he wears a monocle, which he “has a habit of screwing into place” and peering through. Also like Wimsey, he has an “immensely important and secret job that we are not supposed to know anything about” (5). But so does his new wife, Aunt Lucy. It is she who receives a telegram with the news that “something urgent’s come up at work” and consequently Hazel and Daisy are entrusted to the Rue Theatre and Frances Crompton. It is Aunt Lucy who makes the arrangements, though Uncle Felix is happy because the girls will be “watched over in an enclosed space” (10). Daisy is delighted at the excitement of appearing on stage, but poor Hazel can think of nothing worse. However, the two share a common reaction when a corpse is discovered: Daisy hisses to Hazel that “Uncle Felix will be annoyed, won’t he? We were supposed to be safe from crimes here! Serve him right for treating us like children.” Her friend acknowledges their camaraderie: “So, she is thinking along the same lines as I am, as usual” (3). That the theatre is to be recognized as a liminal space in the novel, that it is intended as a site of passage, is signalled in its name “Rue,” meaning road or route, a means of transition from one phase to another new stage. Again, Hazel Wong identifies it on the first page of the novel, writing: “We are proper members of a real London theatre company and thus closer to being grown up than ever before” (1). Her first experience of the Rue Theatre is described in fairy tale terms: I have to admit that the theatre itself was a gloriously impressive place. The Rue is set to one side of a roundabout near Leicester Square, and it is a red-and-white brick cliff of a building, studded with shiny windows. It looks rather like a castle, and it even has four slender turrets shooting up the front of it like battlements. (13) Here the theatre as limen is described in magnificent terms: “beautiful, so magical,” with a “hallway that swept upwards in gold and black and red. … Light glittered from chandeliers and shone darkly off marble and the very air smelled warm and rich” (14). Yet, Wells and Wong very soon become aware of the day-to-day reality of the theatre. Despite its “magnificence” (14), Hazel recognizes the general shabbiness, opening her account of the murder investigation with a promise to explain to the reader how she and Daisy came to be “sitting in the dusty, greasepaint-smelling stalls of the Rue Theatre, while a large, blue-hatted policeman stamps about on-stage … They are there because of the corpse” (2). So begins Hazel’s narration of how “the Detective Society came upon their seventh murder mystery” (3). The corpse is that of Rose Tree, the rising star cast to play Juliet. When Rose does not appear on cue in rehearsal, she is sought for and her body discovered in the deep well located in the labyrinthine depths of the theatre building.1 The police are called and a murder investigation is initiated by Inspector Priestly, known to Daisy and Hazel because of his involvement in their previous cases. Shortly after the discovery of the body, the young theatre dresser, Annie Joy, disappears into the fog of a London “pea-souper.” What is thought to be her corpse is found in the river Thames the following day. The list of suspects includes professional actors, directors, producers, stage-managers, and costume makers, initially everyone working in the theatre at the time of the murder falls under the suspicion of guilt. Gradually however, via a close examination of the organization of the theatre building as a place of work, and the structures and practices of the artistic procedures and processes that constitute that work, Hazel and Daisy are able to eliminate most of the theatre’s personnel. Eventually, only a few of the actors are considered to have the means and motive to commit the crimes, and thus are worthy to remain on a list of the Detective Society’s suspects. The investigation comes to a head on opening night, on the stage itself, when the murderer attempts to kill the actor newly cast as Juliet, by introducing poison into the prop that Juliet drinks to fake her

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death. The successful identification of the murderer is achieved by coupling “theatre as artistic practice and industry” with the modus operandi of the criminal investigation. “The stage,” as the strap-line on the front cover of the novel advices, “is set for murder.” Daisy and Hazel foil this lethal attempt and the murderer, in the audience for the show, is apprehended as she flees the auditorium. It is none other than Rose Tree who, like the character she was to play, faked her own death. Rose strangled Annie Joy, disguised the body using Juliet’s costume, and then set about impersonating her in the fictional reality of the novel. She had played Annie in the way Rose as an actor would a part, before counterfeiting Annie’s fall from Westminster Bridge. But this is not the end of Rose’s career as an actor: “Just you wait for the trial,” she announces when apprehended, “I shall give the performance of my life” (368). That Hazel and Daisy have achieved a level of independence through their autonomous investigations of criminality at the Rue Theatre is reinforced when Aunt Lucy tells them that even Uncle Felix has come to understand that they “are not likely to give up this detection business of yours. I think that is perfectly sensible, for you are clearly very good at it” (370). Lucy is noticeably proud of their achievements, promising that “details of this business do not need to be shared with either of your parents, or with your school” (369). Order is restored without further conflict, and Daisy and Hazel return to Deepdean School for Girls and to their next adventure. Theatre has proved to be the site of new challenges. “Life is acting,” concludes Daisy in the face of Rose’s crime, while Hazel finds this proposal terrifying, “if life was acting, it was a pity that I was no good at acting at all” (40). Yet, when the killer is about to be uncovered, Hazel faces up to this new challenge: “My mind was full of detection—but first I would have to overcome a much more difficult ordeal: stepping onto the stage in front of a real audience” (342). Stevens writes that she utilized theatre in her fiction because it gave her the opportunity to include elements of the history of diversity in Britain. She introduced into her narrative the ghosts of three real individuals whose lives informed Death in the Spotlight: Lilian Bayliss on whom she modelled the Rue Theatre’s owner Frances Crompton, and the black actors Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson whose careers are reflected in Stevens’s characters Inigo and Simon. And while her novel is ostensibly set in 1936, Stevens’s setting allowed her to write about other contemporary issues of celebrity, the performance of gender and (homo) sexual identification as well as race, issues that concern twenty-first century British culture and society. “I wanted to write about one of the less-nice parts of British history,” she writes, “the fact that, until 1967, it was a crime for two men to be in love with each other” (384). She included Daisy’s love for one of the women actors and Simon’s night-time visits to gay bars. In “The Case of the Romeo and Juliet murders,” Stevens is able to reiterate the ghost of Shakespeare’s play to discuss contemporary romantic relationships that are discouraged, as well as conflating the modus operandi of the criminal investigation with the practices and structures of theatre. Each historically located writer of fiction for children and young people referenced in this chapter, has provocatively explored the possibilities inherent in the highly flexible intermedial form of children’s theatre-fiction. Each has juxtaposed and integrated theatre and the novel in diverse and singular ways. Specifically, the three writers on whom I have concentrated, have demonstrated the tantalizingly rich stories that may be created when children’s theatre-fiction is conjoined with other literary genres. Ultimately, theatre has proved valuable as a site of passage in children’s fiction, offering the opportunity imaginatively to engage with the transitions and transformations of childhood and adolescence to young readers past, present, and yet to come.

Note 1 The night after her first performance of Juliet, the protagonist of Ronald Firbanks’s Caprice—a very different kind of novel—suffers what appears to be a similar fate to Rose Tree’s. John Severn discusses Caprice elsewhere in this volume: “‘What Does it Matter—the Plot’: ‘Sapphic’ and Theatrical Reading Strategies in Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory, Inclinations and Caprice.”

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Works Cited Brewer, Derek. “The Interpretation of Fairy Tales.” A Companion to the Fairy Tale, edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri, D. A. Brewer, 2003, pp. 15–38. Brown, Pamela. Blue Door Venture. 2nd ed. Pushkin Press, 2018. Brown, Pamela. Golden Pavements. 2nd ed. Pushkin Press, 2018. Brown, Pamela. Maddy Again. 2nd ed. Pushkin Press, 2019. Brown, Pamela. Maddy Alone. 2nd ed. Pushkin Press, 2018. Brown, Pamela. The Swish of the Curtain. 2nd ed. Pushkin Press, 2018. Gardner, Sally. The Red Necklace. Orion Children’s Books, 2007. Hendry, Leo B., and Marion Kloep. Adolescence and Adulthood: Transitions and Transformations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Maggi, Armando. “The Creation of Cinderella from Basile to the Brothers Grimm.” The Cambridge Companion to the Fairy Tale, edited by Maria Tatar, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 149–165. Magorian, Michelle. Impossible. Troika Books, 2014. Manlove, C.N. The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. Kent State UP, 1983. Matthews, Hugh, “The Street as Liminal Space: The Barbed Space of Childhood.” Children in the City: Home, Neighbourhood and Community, edited byPia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien, Routledge Falmer, 2003, pp. 101–117. Peters, Helen. The Secret Hen House Theatre. Nosy Crow, 2018. Rudd, David. Reading the Child in Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Polity Press, 2005. Stevens, Robin. Death in the Spotlight. Puffin Books, 2018. Streatfeild, Noel. Theatre Shoes. 4th ed. Puffin Books, 2021 Williams, Eloise. Gaslight. Firefly Press, 2017. Williams, Eloise. Wilde. Firefly Press, 2020. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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22 “A THEATRE, THAT’S NO DRAWING ROOM, NOR IS IT A HOUSE ON A RAFT” Discovering Theatre in Moominsummer Madness Deniz Başar Tove Jansson (1914–2001), Finnish children’s book writer and illustrator from the Swedish speaking minority of Finland, is now considered a national treasure of the country thanks to her corpus in children’s literature known as Moomins. Jansson wrote and illustrated eight children’s novels and five picture books from within the universe of Moomins throughout her prolific artistic life (which included other branches of visual arts, novel and memoir writing, and theatre designs). She earned the Hans Christen Andersen Award in 1966 for her creation of the Moomin world. The focus of this chapter is her 1954 book, Moominsummer Madness (Farlig midsommar) which involves a beautifully described floating theatre stage as its centrepiece. Actor and director Samuel West, in a short opinion piece, meditates on the influence of reading Moominsummer Madness as a child: “Jansson was a lover of the theatre (and the lover of a theatre director, Vivica Bandler, to whom Moominsummer Madness is dedicated). She knew her theatrical onions: I learned the superstition about not whistling on stage from Emma the Stage Manager Rat” (West). Jansson’s insider knowledge of theatre, built through her experiences working in it, allowed her to create an exceptional work of theatre-fiction in children’s literature in which the characters’ exposure to theatre is guided through their material encounters with the space, such as trying to make sense of the missing fourth wall of the drawing room, getting confused with stage devices such as trap doors and changing backgrounds, and navigating rooms full of props, costumes or wigs. In Moominsummer Madness, theatre appears as an uncanny saviour. It gives the characters a muchneeded refuge as the safety of their domesticity is collapsing, but it is simultaneously constructed as the antithesis of the known idleness of the domesticity of the Moomin household. It destabilizes their efforts around rebuilding normalcy, and by doing that enables the characters to discover new and different sides of themselves, as will be further explored below. If much of the normalcy of the Moomin household’s petit-bourgeois life is re-established at the end of the book, Moominmamma also suggests that what she is “going to miss is a good revolving stage” (172), which can be read as a reference to the ungrounding experience of theatre, in which the ground that one stands on literally moves and revolves.

Theatre as Uncanny Saviour Moominsummer Madness opens on an idyllic mid-summer afternoon at the veranda of the Moomin household, where Moominmamma is crafting a “model bark schooner” (1) for her son Moomintroll,

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as she chats with Little My and Mymble’s daughter who are both part of the Moomin family’s household as their adopted children. This very first item introduced in the narrative, the model bark schooner, foreshadows the journey approaching without the knowledge of the characters, perhaps accompanied with another analogy around playing and toys, and theatre and stage crafts. The idyllic family scene is interrupted when black flakes of soot start flying around and landing on them, which is a sign that the volcano in Moomin Valley is activated. The instability of the volcanic movements and volcano’s eventual eruption triggers a big earthquake, which itself soon triggers a tsunami that completely swallows the Moomin Valley. They all survive the disaster by hiding in the second floor of their house, but the first floor of their home is covered with water when they wake up the next morning. Scholar Dan Zahavi underlines the importance of natural disasters in the Moomin universe to create ruptures in the regimes of normalcy: What we find in these different examples is a description of how a life ensnared in stifling conventions, empty customs and unintelligible traditions can be disrupted and liberated by upsetting external events. When confronted with the overwhelming, uncontrollable and unsettling power of nature, our ingrained habits, our habitual complacency, can be shaken and make us wonder anew. The encounter with limit situations can effectuate a kind of gestalt switch, can make us gain a richer perspective on the world, and make us reconsider the life we are living. Suddenly coming to realize the meaninglessness of the conventions that have structured our lives can be deeply disquieting, but also emancipating. (Zahavi 9)1 The first moment of defamiliarization from the domesticity takes place at this moment of the narrative, when the characters have to make a hole at the ground of the second floor, beholding their own kitchen from an angle they have never looked from before and in a floating state, and Moomintroll needs to dive into the kitchen to get breakfast items.2 After the breakfast they notice that water is consistently rising, so they climb to the roof, where Misabel and Whomper take refuge with them. It is from this vantage point that they will first perceive the floating stage. Moominpappa sees that “something strange was on its way, carried by the inward current” (33), an allusion to the famous line in Macbeth, “something wicked this way comes.” Theatre is simultaneously constructed as a life-raft and as uncanny. It literally saves the characters as their domestic realm is collapsing; but it is also described as something strangely foreign. From the perspective of Moomins, the readers meet the floating stage as follows: Now the strange thing had drifted closer. It was quite clearly a kind of house. Two golden faces were painted on its roof; one was crying and the other one laughing at the Moomins. Beneath the grinning faces gaped a kind of large rounded cave filled with darkness and cobwebs. Obviously the great wave had carried away one of the walls of the house. On either side of the yawning gap drooped velvet curtains sadly trailing in the water. (34) The description of “two golden faces” above is clearly depicting the famous symbol of theatre, but Moominpappa does not know of it, so the sign of theatre serves the purpose of either winking to the child reader who can decode the meaning of the sign, or creating a connotation map for the child reader who needs to learn more about theatre. Amongst the Moomin novels, Moominsummer Madness is unique in the sense that Jansson uses her authorial voice more throughout the narrative to address the readers such as in the following example, in which the bracketing of the intervention also recalls the stage directions in dramatic texts: “(Dear reader, Moominmamma was totally wrong. Nothing was

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going to be as usual, because the house wasn’t an ordinary house at all, nor had any ordinary family lived there. I won’t tell you more now)” (36). This state of not knowing the function of the space creates a long-term dramatic irony in the narrative, as informed readers discover theatre anew along with Moomins, and uninformed readers can learn about and think through the medium of theatre. The Moomins need to escape from the roof of their home due to the rising water and the floating stage becomes their saviour, but as the novel progresses, the family’s attempts at re-establishing some kind of normalcy while living on this stage are always fragile, as the theatre space continues to destabilize the mundanities of the domestic life that they are accustomed to. The Moomins were beginning to get used to their strange home. Every evening, exactly at sundown, the beautiful lamps were lighted. Moominpappa found out that the red velvet curtains could be pulled to against rain, and that there was a small pantry under the floor. It had a round little roof and was quite cool as there was water around it on three sides. But the nicest discovery was that the ceiling was filled with pictures, still more beautiful than the one with birches. You could pull them down and back up again, just as you liked. There was one picture of a veranda with a fretwork railing, and it became their favourite, because it reminded them of the Moomin Valley. (51–2) Since none of the characters knows what theatre is, their collective confusion continues for a long time, during which they think they are alone, but slowly they understand that there is indeed a stable resident of the space who avoids them. Moominmamma leaves food for this unsociable resident, who finally introduces herself to them to complain about the food. This is how Emma the Stage Rat is introduced, as an entitled character whose entire life is shaped by theatre. It is Emma who, after taunting the Moomin family for their ignorance for a long time, finds some compassion in her to explain all about the peculiarities of the space—and to tell them what theatre is. [Emma] seated herself on Moominmamma’s bedside and began: “A theatre, that’s no drawing room, nor is it a house on a raft. A theatre is the most important sort of house in the world, because that’s where people are shown what they could be if they wanted, and what they’d like to be if they dared to and what they really are.” “A reformatory,” said Moominmamma astonished. Emma patiently shook her head. She took a scrap of paper, and then with a trembling paw drew a picture of a theatre for Moominmamma. (110) The picture that Emma draws is also included in the following pages of the novel, and the authorial voice draws attention to it through a kind of direct address to the reader: “(You’ll find the picture here somewhere)” (110). Emma also informs the Moomin family that theatre is a place to make people into more impressive versions of themselves, where everyone speaks in blank verse and the leading actress gets to cry on stage every night. The theatre she describes is Shakespearean; it is grand, larger-than-life, and in verse. But as we’ll see, through the characters’ own experiences with theatre, Jansson also provokes a questioning of conventions, indeed locating some of theatre’s wonder and value in its unscripted potentials.

Restructuring Self-Perception Moominsummer Madness is not just pro-theatrical in a way that suggests theatre as a space of rupture from the rigid realm of social normalcy; it also presents theatre as a space that is capable of allowing a

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shifting of identities and a re-structuring of self-perceptions. At one point, one of the characters, Whomper, thinks to himself in despair, “What would life be like if a Misabel suddenly behaved like Mymble, or a Whomper like a Hemulen?” (39). This is a question that is of course central to acting, but also a question that poses a threat to the expectancies of normalcy. As a space of speculation, as a space of as-ifs and what-ifs, theatre proposes philosophical questions to the characters the more they engage with it: But Whomper felt worried. All the things around him were false. Their pretty colours were a sham, and everything he touched was made of paper or wood or plaster. The golden crowns weren’t nice and heavy, and the flowers were paper flowers. The fiddles had no strings and the boxes no bottoms, and the books couldn’t even be opened. (42) The physical space makes Whomper question his reality, which leads to a defamiliarization of the expected ways of knowing things, while gently encouraging him to rethink his own self-definitions too. In the case of Whomper, despite the fact that he finds the theatre space worrying at first, the potentiality of theatre eventually transforms all the qualities that make him feel unable to connect with others, such as his solution-oriented practicality, his responsible resourcefulness and his realistic approaches—useful in the practical realm of the backstage. These become useful and meaningful in his role as a stage manager; and at the end of the book, he becomes one of the characters that choose to stay in theatre. Similar to Whomper, Misabel goes through a major change in her self-perception through performing on stage. The possibility of changing characters, the idea of being perceived differently in every role, and the potential of holding the attention of an audience allow Misabel—who has been feeling out of place, insecure and wrong all the time before—to reveal her truest desires in life. She expresses the joy of her newfound place in the world after the first dress rehearsal: “‘Yes,’ cried Misabel, her cheeks glowing. ‘Oh, to be someone really different! Nobody would say “Look, there’s old Misabel” any more. They’d say “Look at that pale lady in red velvet … the great actress, you know … She must have suffered much”’” (112; ellipses in original). Misabel’s character arc is significant to demonstrate theatre as a “place to dream in public; [along with] its transformative power to welcome and heal, to thrill and transform” (West). According to Frangos’s analysis, Misabel’s growth in Moominsummer Madness is also important within the overall Moomin universe. As a character who first appears as a chronically depressed maid in the comics story “Moomin Mamma’s Maid,” Misabel reinvents herself as an empowered woman through theatre (Frangos 160).

Conventions and Comedy Due to accidents and the inconsistent living conditions of the floating stage, three members of the extended Moomin family get lost during their travels. Snork Maiden and Moomintroll are accidentally left behind when the stage floats away one night, and Little My falls from a trap door into the water and floats away from the stage. These separations become the catalyst for a theatrical production. Moominpappa, Moominmamma, Mymble’s daughter, Misabel, Whomper, and Emma decide to create a performance that will eventually help unite everyone. The parts of the book where the Moomin family is working on their performance are prime examples of how the novel creates humour through questioning genres and theatrical practices. At a moment where characters try to have consensus over what their performance should be like, the following conversation takes place between Emma, Moominmamma, and Moominpappa, who collectively rethink the established norms of tragedy.

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“Now go and write it all in blank verse. And remember that in all the good old tragedies most of the people are each other’s relatives.” “But how can they be angry at each other if they’re of the same family?” Moominmamma asked cautiously. “And is there no princess in the play? Can’t you put in a happy end? It’s so sad when people die.” “This is a tragedy, dearest,” said Moominpappa. “And because of that somebody has to die in the end. Preferably all except one of them, and perhaps that one too. Emma’s said so.” (115) In this short comedic dialogue, the child readers not only learn the major conventions of tragedy—that everyone is each other’s relative and everyone dies—but are also provoked to question the conventions of this established genre. Despite the attempts of Moominpappa to write a tragedy, the final performance shares more with Shakespeare’s comedies, and particularly with the humour of his shipwreck trilogy (Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors), despite the fact that the English name of the book alludes to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This allusion makes the most sense when readers learn more about the play that Moominpappa is writing, which is quite similar to Pyramus and Thisbe, the play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, accompanied with a similar sense of humour about over-confident amateurs who are enthusiastically engaging with theatre. In the evening Moominpappa had finished his play and proceeded to read it to the others. No one interrupted him, and when he had finished there was complete silence. Finally Emma said: “No. Nono. No and no again.” “Was it that bad,” asked Moominpappa, downcast. “Worse,” said Emma. “Listen to this: I’m not afraid of any lion, be it a wild ’un or a shy ’un That’s horrid.” “I want a lion in the play, at all costs,” Moominpappa replied sourly. “But you must write it again, in blank verse! Blank verse! Rhymes won’t do!” said Emma. (114–15) Emma insists on Shakespearean style as the one and only proper theatrical style, although she later suggests (to soothe the panic-ridden Moominpappa after the dress rehearsal) that “the audience won’t understand a word” (126) when everything is spoken in blank verse, ironically presenting the partial incomprehensibility of the language as a redemptive aspect of the theatrical experience. Perhaps Emma implies that this is positive since it encourages each audience member to create their own script and their own meaning. On the other hand, while the part of the performance which is regulated through the rules that Emma defines is not successful with the audience, the improvised, colloquial and

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immediate part of the performance (the part that “fails” to be what it was intended to be) is received very well. The reasons for this become clearer when the readers are presented with more sections of Moominpappa’s play text. [Mymble’s daughter] studied the audience with great interest for some time and then spoke, rapidly and casually: “If I must die tonight, in blooming youth, While all my innocence cries to high heav’n, Then into Blood may bloodily turn the sea And into dust the sprightliness of spring! A Rosebud, blushing still from childish sleep I’m slewn to earth by unrelenting Fate!” Behind the scenes rose a shrill chant. It was Emma: “O Night, O Night, O Night, O Night of Fate!” (128–9) The performance of Moominpappa’s play has its most important diversions from its incomprehensible script with the introduction of the lion, which, also recalling Pyramus and Thisbe, plays a particularly important role from start to finish in the narrative of making and presenting the performance in Moominsummer Madness. Performers acting animals (and failing to do so) is a device used in much theatre-fiction for humorous effect, perhaps because it gives rise to a “derailment of representation [which] ironically generates new, unscripted possibilities and meanings” (Wolfe 310). Within the performance of “THE LION’S BRIDES or BLOOD WILL OUT / A Tragedy in One Act by Moominpappa” (136), derailment of representation takes place throughout the performance through interruptions, misunderstandings, and misfortunes, but it is the lion’s entrance that eventually frees the performance from its textual moorings completely. The first grand entrance of the lion takes place during the dress rehearsal: A great stamping could be heard behind the scenes. Then the lion entered. It consisted of a beaver in the forelegs and another in the hind legs. The audience shouted with delight. The lion hesitated. Then it walked up to the footlights and took a bow, and broke in the middle. (133) Graham Wolfe suggests, in the context of Dickens’s description of a dismal performance of Hamlet in Great Expectations, that “[t]he comedy of such passages is irreducible to laughter at the medium’s representational struggles, [and] summons a powerful dimension of theatrical experience” (307), in which theoretically extraneous elements of enactment (including “dimensions technically at odds with the fictional world” [306]) may infuse the enacted (“as though they were part of it”). The breaking of the lion during the dress rehearsal is celebrated as a part of the performance in Moominsummer Madness. It disrupts the planned script, but also gives the already failing performance a grand finale which the

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audience enjoys. Wolfe argues that these moments (when “[e]lements of theatrical experience not technically part of the plot are insistently transposed into the dramatic fiction”) can show us “what strange, wondrous, comic worlds emerge when we include what we are accustomed (and called upon by artistic convention) to exclude” (309). The lion’s entrance creates an even more influential moment on the premier night. The show’s audience is portrayed both as naïve and as enthusiastic about the medium as the performers, which is why the lion is perceived as real by many, especially the younger ones: “Theretherethere,” said Snufkin to his panic-stricken woodies.3 “That lion’s made out of an old counterpane.” But they didn’t believe him. They saw quite clearly that the lion was chasing the Mymble’s daughter all over the stage. Little My was shrilling like a whistle. “Save my sister!” she shouted. “Brain that lion!”’ And suddenly she took a desperate leap upon the stage, rushed at the lion and sank her small sharp teeth in its right hind leg. The lion uttered an exclamation and broke in the middle. (153–4) After this second breaking of the lion, the performance abandons the text completely and mixes with the life of the Moomin family, but the improvised performance is perceived as a grand success by all audience members. Moreover, the chaos caused by the unscripted performance also leads to a resolution scene similar to those in Shakespeare’s shipwreck trilogy, where all the subplots merge. Perhaps here, we can once again sense the genre-bending approach of Moominsummer Madness within the realm of theatre-fiction. When incorporating theatre into literature, it is no coincidence that many writers chose the moments of performance failures or rehearsals gone awry, since those moments may reveal much about theatre’s own internal dramas as well as the relationships, hierarchies, and motivations of theatre-makers. Moominsummer Madness does the same, but makes the less common choice of presenting these performative failures, derailments, and unscripted potentials of theatre in highly positive lights—as ironic successes and experiences through which characters grow and mature.

Convening Communities Much of the comedy in Moominsummer Madness arises from the general ignorance of almost all its characters about theatre (with the major exception of Emma), as well as from their theatrical failures, but the novel also showcases the joy of these amateurs in creating theatre, and Jansson highlights the acts of solidarity that are required to realize a performance. It is important that the solution that Moominmamma comes up with to finding missing family members is staging a performance, and the novel proves that she was indeed right: theatre, in supporting a temporary public, calls and brings together those who were lost. Theatre is also celebrated for its potential to a convene community from quite different groups. “The beavers had been promised free tickets for the first night the following day if they would push the theatre back on an even keel, and now it was almost right, but the stage still slanted a little which made the acting slightly strained” (124). Along with the birds that take the flyers of the performance all around the landscape, with all the other animals coming to watch the dress rehearsal, and with Hemulens volunteering to be ticket control officers, theatre is supported by many. The idea of theatre-making as a public enterprise, interwoven throughout the story, demonstrates a profound aspect of theatre as a space for introspective change through creating new shared encounters.

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The potential of theatre to accommodate misfits and lost individuals in purposeful ensembles is demonstrated significantly at the end of the book when not just Misabel and Whomper but also Fillyjonk and Snufkin’s twenty-four Woodies all decide to stay in the theatre4: “I’m thinking of Snufkin’s children,” replied Moomintroll. “Are they really going to be actors, all of them?” “Some of them,” said Moominmamma. “The Fillyjonk will adopt the untalented ones. She can’t manage without relatives.” “They’ll miss Snufkin,” said Moomintroll sadly. “Perhaps at first,” said Moominmamma. “But he intends calling on them every year and he’ll write them birthday letters. With pictures.” Moomintroll nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “And Whomper and Misabel … Did you notice how happy Misabel looked when she first realized that she could stay on the theatre!” Moominmamma laughed. “Yes, Misabel was happy. She’ll act in tragedies all her life and have a new face each time. And Whomper’s the new stage manager and every bit as happy. Isn’t it fun when one’s friends get exactly what suits them?” (167) Even if the main characters seem to return to their domestic conformism at the end, they have changed through the process of living in a theatre space; and the fact that some characters decide to stay in theatre, choosing never to return to such normalcy, further emphasizes the influential disruption of societal constraints through performance. We, the readers, also see that the theatre-going public do indeed desire disruptions of the mundane and the responsibilities of their daily lives by temporarily stepping into the world of the performance. This is most dramatically demonstrated through the prison-keeper Hemulen’s excitement to see the show. “A play?” said the Hemulen thoughtfully and took off his glasses again. Deep in his heart stirred a faint, unhemulic memory of his childhood. Quite, his aunt had taken him to the theatre once. That was something about a princess who went to sleep in a rosebush. It had been very beautiful. The Hemulen had rather liked it. Suddenly he knew that he wanted to go to the theatre again. (136–7) Considering that Hemulens are a species in the Moomin world who appear as the keepers of the establishment and authority, this Hemulen prison-keeper’s excitement to engage with theatre is quite a pro-theatrical stance that highlights the need for the new visions, transformations, and boundarycrossings that theatre allows.5

Notes 1 Similarly, in the story “Fillyjonk who believed in disasters,” a Fillyjonk who lives in a house that she absolutely hates and insists on not leaving due to self-imposed social restrictions, is freed from the burdens of her domestic space by a great thunderstorm that destroys her home (Jansson, Tales 49–76; Zahavi 8).

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Deniz Başar 2 Frangos also notes: “The drawing style [of] the illustrations in Farlig midsommar in which the ordinary perceptions of the space of the home, the dishes, and the furniture, are defamiliarised against the surrealistic backdrop of the flood and the theatre” (161). 3 In the narrative thread of Snufkin, he encounters Little My after she falls from the trap door into the water and takes responsibility for her, despite the fact that he is busy planning an anarchist intervention against the imposed rules of the Park Keeper Hemulen of the public park. He carries out his plan successfully by secretly planting Hattifattener seeds—an electrically charged, miniscule species that gain abilities to walk after their initial growth in the earth—and uses the chaos caused by the Hattifatteners to take down all the signs for the rules; and without intending to do so, frees twenty-four small orphaned children, referred as Woodies, who were forced to stay silent and inactive in a sand pit the entire day. Snufkin, though dreading the task, becomes their primary care-giver, and after learning about the Moomin family’s performance from a torn flyer, he takes all of his kids to theatre (twenty-four Woodies and Little My), without knowing who is putting on the performance. Twenty-four emancipated Woodies stay in the theatre at the end of the novel. 4 Fillyjonks are an anxious, rigid, and socially restricted species of the Moomin world. This particular Fillyjonk becomes part of Moominsummer Madness’s narrative through her encounter with the two lost members of the Moomin family: Snork Maiden and Moomintroll. Later, the readers learn that she is the niece of Emma’s deceased stage manager husband. After much adventure with Snork Maiden and Moomintroll, she reunites with Emma and stays in the theatre at the end of the story. 5 Every member of the Moomin family runs away from home within the corpus of the Moomin literature, despite choosing to return each time. Even the responsible and parental figures attempt these escapes: one of Moominpappa’s escapes from his family role is explicitly told in “The Secret of Hattifatteners” (Jansson, Tales 143–70), and one of Moominmamma’s escapes from her family role is told in the comic strips titled “Moomin Begins a New Life” ( Frangos 165–6).

Works Cited Frangos, Mike Classon. “Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Tove Jansson’s Moomin Comics.” Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten et al., Routledge, 2021, pp. 151–168. Jansson, Tove. Moominsummer Madness. Translated by Thomas Warburton, Puffin Books, 2019. Jansson, Tove. Tales from Moominvalley. Translated by Thomas Warburton, Sort of Books, 2018. West, Samuel. “Actor/Director Samuel West on Tove Jansson’s Most Theatrical Title.” Sort of Books, 14 January 2022, accessed 29 July 2022, sortof.co.uk/latest-news/2018/08/samuel-west-actordirector-on-the-moominsmost-theatrical-title. Wolfe, Graham. “Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theater-Fiction.” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, 2018, pp. 303–325. Zahavi, Dan. “Manhattan Dynamite and No Pancakes: Tradition and Normality in the Work of Tove Jansson.” SATS, vol. 19, no. 1, 2018, pp. 5–19.

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23 THE BILDUNGSROMAN GOES TO ACTING SCHOOL Chris Hay

When reflecting in interviews and memoirs, trained actors often reserve some of their most scathing commentary for their time at acting school. Much of this commentary centres around the brutality of the training, and its focus on interrogating the student and breaking them down. Irish novelist and acting school graduate Eimear McBride offers this description: “at 17, I had got into Drama Centre. It was an incredible and mercurial place. The training was brutal, invasive and not particularly careful of the human. But I was dying for that” (qtd. in Kellaway). I am drawn to McBride’s description because it captures two of the key features of these reflections: not only the function of actor training to break down the student without necessarily promising to rebuild them, but also the desire of the student as a willing participant in this process. From the point of view of the student, much actor training is aimed at making them a blank slate, capable of taking on whatever characterization is demanded by a given role. This points to a core function of actor training in a conservatoire context: to learn how to both build and dismantle character. Indeed, the messiness of the overlap between the student’s own character and the character they play on stage indicates the potential for brutality when working with students who are themselves “in the process of becoming” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase (19). For my purposes here, though, I want to stress the overlap between the work of character-building done by the actor-in-training and the work of character-building done by the novelist. McBride expands on this in a profile for The Bookseller: “The Drama Centre had a reputation for being quite crazy and quite traumatic—which it was—but it was also great because it was about learning how to look at characters and work out how they are made. It is maybe a little cumbersome for actors, but great for writers” (qtd. in O’Keeffe). The emphasis on construction, on “creating character from the inside out” (McBride qtd. in Kellaway), is constitutive of such training—in Actor Training, Alison Hodge positions the genesis of twentieth-century actor training in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s belief that “the ‘self’ and the character represented are held in creative tension as the actor’s ‘inner life’ is channelled into the formation of character” (xx). As it developed around the Western world across the twentieth century and beyond, whether embracing or rejecting Stanislavsky’s system, the imbrication of actor and character remains central to actor training. In this chapter, then, I want to suggest that we can understand the work of character-building that is central to the training of young actors as doubling the character-building required of the Bildungsroman. That is, in learning how to represent others on stage, the protagonist of a novel set in the rarefied milieu of acting school learns how to represent themselves to (and in) the world. To do so,

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I will refer to three novels: Eleanor Catton’s 2008 The Rehearsal, Susan Choi’s 2019 Trust Exercise, and Eimear McBride’s 2016 The Lesser Bohemians. While they are a stylistically disparate group, the novels are united by their focus on a teenaged protagonist, an “artist of sorts” to use Jerome Buckley’s term (13), navigating actor training alongside upheaval in their emotional life—it is no coincidence, for example, that each protagonist’s first sexual encounter becomes central to their development as an actor. By nominating them as theatre-fictions and as Bildungsromane, too, I suggest that a single question can drive both the novels and the training they depict, drawn from Aleksandar Stević : “how can a nobody become a somebody?” (11). Across this chapter, I will situate each novel as a piece of theatre-fiction, and trace the deployment of one character-building exercise and its significance to both the protagonist’s training and the novel as a whole, before finishing with some observations about theatre, failure and the Bildungsroman. In so doing, I am activating an alignment between theatre-fiction and the Bildungsroman evident from an early example of both: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1795–6 novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Graham Wolfe begins his work Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing with Wilhelm (1); Karl Morgenstern similarly draws on Goethe to illustrate his foundational work on the Bildungsroman (650). In a 2020 special issue of Textual Practice on “The Bildungsroman: Form and Transformation,” the editors summarize the form thus: The defining elements of the Bildungsroman, conventionally understood, are these: a young man from the provinces seeks his fortune in the city, and undergoes a process of education in the ways of the world such that he eventually becomes reconciled with it. Yet even in this reductive formulation key variants exist: a young woman undergoes a process of worldly or sentimental education and becomes reconciled to her destiny, sometimes in the form of marriage; a young man or woman undergoes a process of aesthetic or worldly or sentimental education (sometimes all three together) and achieves success as a writer or artist. (Frow, Hardie, & Smith 1905) In theatre-fiction set at acting school, then, I argue that the protagonists receive their education in the ways of the world both on- and off-stage. Frow, Hardie, and Smith’s formulation also highlights the key role of reconciliation in the Bildungsroman; I argue that it is through the character exercises they undertake at acting school, “forming and deforming in tandem” (1906), that these protagonists both identify and become reconciled to their own “real” characters. This notion of deforming, too, will assume particular importance in considering the role of failure in these novels. By focussing on artists in training, my work here interrogates a particular thread of the Bildungsroman tradition, the Künstlerroman: “the novel of how one comes to find and nurture an artistic vocation” (Trumpener 1912). Of course, there is another large overlap here between Künstlerroman and theatre-fiction, as “in this somewhat different Bildungsroman tradition, the emphasis is simultaneously on an empathetic understanding of growth and feeling, and an experimental perspective on the nature of narrative staging” (Trumpener 1912–13). This narrative staging is literalized in theatre-fictions, and in the case of these three novels is undertaken not only through the performances that take place on stage, but also through their training and preparation in rehearsal rooms. In the work that I have quoted, Trumpener seeks to reground the Bildungsroman as a “feminist practice” (1927), and from that point of view it is significant that these three novels are written by women, and have young women at their heart. However, as my focus is on the training environment, in the sections that follow I trace the Bildung of the characters who undertake theatre training in their respective novels: Stanley in The Rehearsal, Sarah in Trust Exercise, and Éilís in The Lesser Bohemians.

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Rehearsing Character in The Rehearsal Of the three authors considered here, it is only Eleanor Catton whose work does not draw on her direct, embodied experience of actor training. Instead, in an interview with Aesthetica Magazine, Catton recalls: In 2006, I began writing a dramatic monologue for my girlfriend, who was studying acting at the NZ drama school [Toi Whakaari] … I never finished the monologue, but when I returned to the script later, it struck me that it would be interesting to see how it behaved as a piece of fiction. I broke it apart and turned it into a little series of scenes, sections of the monologue remain intact in the novel, in the first chapter and in the last. Indeed, acting notes remain littered throughout The Rehearsal as if offering stage directions to the characters—one character expresses “a new determination to reclaim the scene” (16); another section is introduced with “this is a scene from a long time ago” (103). For my purposes, though, I want to read The Rehearsal as a Bildungsroman of Stanley, the acting student who leads one of its strands. Stanley begins the novel by auditioning for acting school, and ends it by performing in a play based on the events we have read. The novel covers his first year of acting school at “the Institute,” a highly selective, tertiary-level conservatoire that offers the kind of post-Stanislavskian training that predominates in the Anglosphere. David Shirley notes that “the work of Stanislavsky is often regarded as an essential component” (“Reality” 207) of conservatoire-style training, both through his own writings, interpreters of his work, and the training traditions he inspired—most notably the American Method, as popularized by Lee Strasberg. This marks another intersection with the evolution of theatre-fiction: Graham Wolfe notes that an influential strain of theatre-fiction also responds to Stanislavsky’s work, by interrogating and seeking to resolve “intensified anxieties about real human emotion on modern stages” (Theatre-Fiction 21). At Stanley’s audition, the teachers at the Institute describe the training offered there: “‘the first term,’ they said, ‘is essentially a physical and emotional undoing. You will unlearn everything you have ever learned, peeling it off skin by skin, stripping down and down until your impulse shines through’” (Catton 26). Stanley, justifying his course of study to his father, offers a complementary description when he says, “I guess for me acting seems like a way of finding out about a person, or getting into a person” (35). This process is literalized in a training exercise called “the Outing” that takes place towards the end of the novel, where the students are instructed to go out into the world and “remain in character for two hours” (228), while being monitored by their teachers. The Rehearsal’s third-person narrator suggests that the Head of Acting’s approach to “the Outing” treats actor and character as if they “were transparent overlays that could be placed upon each other to form an amalgam, a newer, brighter image that would be better and more vibrant than either the boy or the man on his own” (228). It is later revealed that a student who drops character automatically fails the exercise. Stanley is allocated the closeted Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt from Angels in America, drawing on an ambiguity his teachers and peers have read into his sexual inexperience. When the time comes for “the Outing,” the reader is offered an uncharacteristically lengthy reflection on Stanley’s nascent acting process. Walking through a park in character as Joe Pitt, he reflects: Pretending to be somebody else gave Stanley a curious feeling of privacy in himself. The inner thoughts and processings of his character, visible only as he chose to make them visible, across his face and in the lie of his hands and through the curve of his posture, enclosed his own thoughts like an atmosphere, parcelling the real Stanley up beneath a double-layered film, the

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inner and the outer Joe Pitt. He felt snug, as if tightly curled within a nut, safe in the knowledge that nobody could truly see him beneath the double fog of his disguise. (263–4) To my analysis, the potential double meaning of “character” here is instructive: Stanley can choose not only to make visible elements of Joe Pitt, but also to reveal “the real Stanley” if he elects to. Almost immediately after this reflection, Stanley—still in character—encounters Isolde, the young woman with whom he had his first, abortive sexual encounter mere days earlier. She immediately sees through his Joe Pitt drag to the real Stanley: “You’re not doing a very good job of being him, then,” Isolde said. “I guess not.” Stanley located the feeling of lightness: he felt real, more real than he had for months. (264) In this moment, by dropping character, Stanley fails his acting exercise; yet in feeling real, and finding the ease that his training is seeking to unlock in him, he somehow also succeeds. Indeed, both the intimacy with Isolde and the acting exercise can be considered failures: Stanley ultimately admits to his teachers that he dropped character when he met Isolde, although none of them observed this during the exercise itself. In his attempt at sex with Isolde, Graham Wolfe argues “this horrendous failure takes on significance and theatrical value, redeeming the preceding chaos” (“Theatrical Fantasy” 105). I suggest that same reading can be applied to Stanley’s failure to maintain character in “the Outing.” In other words, the failure has become productive qua performance—in the case of Stanley and Isolde’s intercourse as grist for a future performance; in the case of the immersion exercise, by shifting Stanley’s conception of acting from one of hiding to one of revealing. As he tells the teacher when he reports his failure, he broke character in that moment he encountered Isolde “because otherwise she might have thought that Joe Pitt was really me … I didn’t want her to think that” (276). He reveals here that he no longer wants to play along with the representational logic of the theatre, to pretend to be something that he is not. “By framing her teens in the context of theatre and performance” (Wolfe, “Theatrical Fantasy” 95), or in other words by presenting The Rehearsal as a theatre-fiction, Catton yokes together these two different iterations of characterbuilding. In discovering through “the Outing” that the “real Stanley” does not have to exist beneath layers of film, but can instead move through the world as a protagonist, he fails to fully inhabit Joe Pitt and instead fully inhabits Stanley himself. Stanley’s failure in “the Outing,” as elsewhere in the novel, is constitutive; failure in The Rehearsal, to use Sara Jane Bailes’s phrase, “indexes an alternate route” (2)—a point to which I will return at the end of this chapter. When Stanley admits he broke character, the Head of Movement—with whom Stanley has previously had a different conversation about consent (a thread that runs throughout all three novels considered here), and whose respect Stanley craves—tells him: “Every word that comes out of your mouth—they’re just lines. They’re lines that you’ve learned very carefully, so carefully you’ve convinced yourself they are yours, but that’s all they are” (277). In being confronted with this accusation, Stanley is able to recognize that he has been rehearsing not just a series of parts (Joe Pitt, his role in the end-of-year performance, and so on), but also his own character. This realization is tellingly close to the end of the novel; in the description of Stanley’s end of year performance that follows in the novel’s final chapter, the separation between real and on-stage characters collapses. As below in The Lesser Bohemians, it is instructive that The Rehearsal covers only the first year of Stanley’s training. The ultimate success or failure of his training, or indeed of his aspirational career as an actor, is of less

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interest to Catton than Stanley’s Bildung: his character formation off-stage and his understanding of his own character, as revealed to him by the character-building exercises of the Institute.

You’re Doing a Trust Exercise Susan Choi turned to theatre-fiction in her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, in part to draw on the associations of acting school with control and deconstruction. She recalls in an interview: I didn’t really choose the drama school so much as something else I was working on got me interested in my own (minimal, brief) drama school past again … Seeing these exercises employed to break down individual egos and facilitate religious conformity sufficiently defamiliarized acting class for me so that it suddenly was interesting again and I wanted to write about it. (qtd. in Levine) In this novel, the first half of which is set at the secondary-level Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts (or CAPA), the focus of the training is on a kind of via negativa—removing the outer layers so that the authentic interior can shine through. The acting teacher, the enigmatic Mr. Kingsley, expresses this in various ways in Trust Exercise’s opening section: 1 “The foundation we require for Ego Reconstruction is Ego Deconstruction” (18–19); 2 “Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imaginary circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings” (48); and 3 “Neutrality is the self that we offer the other, alert and open, unencumbered. No baggage. This is how we come to the stage” (54). Again, I will focus here on one acting exercise to illustrate how these ideas coalesce in the novel—the titular trust exercise, which is a variation on the repetition exercises that are the foundation of Sanford Meisner’s technique of actor training, but here refers to a single, legendary acting exercise conducted by Mr. Kingsley. The CAPA students return to the trust exercise multiple times in the first section of the novel; it is much anticipated by the students, who have heard whispers of its legend from their older classmates. The exercise begins with eye contact, progresses to hand-holding, and only then introduces speech—a simple objective statement repeated between the participants. Kevin Otos and Kim Shively describe this next step in Applied Meisner for the 21st-Century Actor: “One person begins by stating an objective truth … Without pausing, the other person repeats exactly what they hear, but changes the pronoun to ‘I’ so that it represents their truth” (36). The aim here is to live entirely in the moment without anticipation or reflection; “this giving over to the other person allows them to take you on the journey of each particular exercise. Repetition trains you to listen and respond to what is actually occurring in real time” (Otos & Shively 37–8). Crucially, when the trust exercise finally arrives, the presentation on Choi’s page mirrors momentarily a script for performance, complete with italicized stage directions: SARAH to DAVID: MR. KINGSLEY to SARAH: SARAH to DAVID: MR. KINGSLEY: SARAH to DAVID: DAVID to SARAH: MR. KINGSLEY:

You’re angry. No mind-reading. Again. You’re bored. (Exasperated) Live honestly, Sarah! You’re wearing a blue polo shirt. I’m wearing a blue polo shirt. I don’t hear listening.

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SARAH to DAVID: DAVID to SARAH: SARAH to DAVID: MR. KINGSLEY: DAVID to SARAH:

You’re wearing a blue polo shirt. I’m wearing a blue polo shirt. You’re wearing a blue polo shirt. Who’s in the moment here? Anyone? I’m wearing a blue polo shirt. (59)

Sarah, whose Bildungsroman I argue Trust Exercise forms (at least in its first section), never succeeds at this trust exercise with David, the same pairing whose awkward first sexual congress opens the novel. As Mr. Kingsley’s interjections suggest, instead of “truly listening,” Sarah is “indicating listening” (Otos & Shively 38)—and so not living fully in the moment. Like Stanley-as-Joe’s encounter with Isolde from The Rehearsal, the trust exercise is compromised by crossed wires of reality. In Meisner’s repetition exercise, the first step is an open, unconditional affection: the contemporary guide I quoted above directs actors to “place your attention gently on the other person. Remember, you love this person and there is an expectation that they love you. Love is necessary for the person to compel truth from us, even uncomfortable truth” (Otos & Shively 35). This is immediately complicated for Sarah and David, whose feelings for each other remain unresolved across the novel’s opening section, and for whom summoning an unselfconscious gaze for the other proves near impossible. The trust exercise is designed in part as “a tool for refocusing the actor’s attention away from a self-conscious regard and assertion of self towards an awareness and responsiveness to the acting partner” (Durham 153). Sarah and David are unable to progress to the next stage of the exercise, which Hilary Halba describes in her account of Meisner’s technique: “a point-of-view statement is added, and they are encouraged to allow themselves to acknowledge being affected by their partner’s behaviour” (130). After all, Sarah’s problem when she is on-stage attempting the trust exercise—and the blockage she is facing—is that she is too affected by David’s off-stage behaviour, and so cannot be truthful to this moment. Sarah’s failure here stems from her inability to come to the trust exercise unencumbered; she can generate the “truthful emotions” that Mr. Kingsley demands, but not apply them to the “false circumstances” of objectivity that the exercise mandates (Choi 66). Indeed, this insistence on a separation between the imagined life of the character and the real life of the actor is a critical point of departure of Meisner’s work from that of his contemporaries. In the repetition exercise’s focus on emotional truth in the in-the-moment exchange between two actors, “it radically deviates from the affective memory-based techniques usually associated with the Method” (Halba 127). As David Shirley explains, Meisner uses the repetition exercise to prepare actors for the simulation of emotions without their whole transposition: Meisner believed that in order to inhabit truthfully a given role it is necessary to stimulate emotions in the performer that are akin to those of the dramatic character. Unlike Strasberg, however, Meisner rejected the idea that truthful emotion could only be drawn from the reality of lived experience. (“Reality” 203) In other words, unlike some of the more celebrated acting techniques of the twentieth century, which encouraged and in some cases required actors to access and activate their own real memories and experiences, Meisner’s technique seeks to generate real emotions that can be applied to fictional circumstances. This marks a “shift in emphasis away from emotional interiority and intellectual introspection” (Shirley, “Reality” 201) in favour of a technique that will instead “bypass the demands of articulacy in order to explore a deeper expressiveness” (Durham 154). In Sarah’s inability to complete the trust exercise, we again see acting training flirting with failure—she finds herself unable to decentre her own subjectivity in the manner demanded by the trust exercise.

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“In this context,” Halba reminds us, “decentring does not involve pretence, but the removal of everyday pretence in order to observe and name behaviour without social masks” (131). Indeed, it only outside of the classroom—after her teacher Mr. Kingsley has more-or-less given up on unlocking her potential—that Sarah finds herself able to act. In the wake of another awkward sexual encounter, this time with the older visiting performer Liam, Sarah marvels at “how well she could suddenly do it—act a complete part, while concealing, completely, a true self that did her no good” (121–2). Again, we see acting school being used to illustrate one of Stević ’s features of the Bildungsroman: “the all-too-frequent catastrophic disintegration of the hero’s educational trajectory” (4). For Meisner, “the foundation of acting is the reality of doing” (Meisner & Longwell 16); here, in Sarah’s awkward fumbles with Liam, “she was really with David … Indifferent to the stupid men for whom she played the role” (Choi 122). Actor and character, or self and other, remain a separation for Sarah, one that requires a complete concealment and retreat into falseness, rather than the truthful performance in false circumstances that her teachers envisage. Shortly after this realization, the novel itself decentres from Sarah’s acting school experience, and Trust Exercise becomes a more complicated reflection on narrative staging. While I have confined my attention here to the first section, during which the protagonists are in training, the narrative pivot confirms that Sarah has finally learned the lesson of the trust exercise, and used the real emotions of that time in her life to present a lightly fictionalized account in the novel we are reading. In other words, what we find out in the novel’s second section—titled, like the first, “Trust Exercise”—is that Sarah did find a way to depict truthful emotions in false circumstances, by retelling the “true” story of CAPA some decades later with some “colourful revisions” of character (Choi 134). Once again, theatrical failure has been reconfigured as a route forward. The revelation that the first, CAPA-set section of Trust Exercise forms Sarah’s retrospective reflection also highlights its function as a Bildungsroman, showing us the formation of her character from the critical distance established in the remainder of the novel.

Back There Again with The Lesser Bohemians Unlike Stanley and Sarah, the Irish protagonist of The Lesser Bohemians finds moments of joy during her first year at a tertiary-level London acting school, across a specific, named fifteen-month period from March 1994 to July 1995. For Éilís, as we learn her name is relatively late in the novel, much of the pleasure of acting is found in her effortless movement from one character to another: “And the much and much of delight, of make. Turning the body. Converting the self into flecks of form and reform. Her. Into her. Into someone else. This one” (McBride 137). There is a real sense of melding in her description—of the complete fusion of actor and character—which is prized in the training Éilís is undertaking. This was the impact of the training that the author, Eimear McBride, herself undertook, as she has reflected in interview: Drama Centre was about creating character from the inside out. For me, character is the most important thing. Language is a vehicle for content, not a showpiece in itself. The training was about what an actor does with the body and I’ve been trying to make language do that instead. It was also about trying to change language to extend its capabilities. (qtd. in Kellaway) The Lesser Bohemians follows the first-person narrator Éilís through her “fortunate discovery of acting as a technique for processing emotion” (Smyth 163), although in this novel, the acting exercises that she undertakes are not so much momentous occasions but instead irruptions in the fabric of Éilís’s Bildungsroman, as she grapples with the legacy of childhood sexual abuse while navigating her first sexual relationship with older actor Stephen.

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The rhythms of training inform even the structure of The Lesser Bohemians, whose three long sections correspond to the three terms of Éilís’s first year at acting school, framed by a prologue (“The Audition”) and an epilogue (“Last Day”). Gerry Smyth identifies that throughout the novel “acting provides Eily with a discursive mode through which she may re-negotiate her identity” through “the actor’s movement between the ‘real’ self one brings to the role, and the ‘authentic’ self one attempts to become during performance” (174). We might think of this as a dialectic of actor training, aligned with Monique Rooney’s reading of Franco Moretti’s insistence that the Bildungsroman “provides a space—or becomes a vehicle—for the negotiation of oppositional elements that can be brought into equilibrium” (2038). This is emphasized through the way the acting school exercises mirror the contours of Éilís’s relationship, especially the Emotion Memory exercise that dominates Term Three: So we’ll start the Emotion Memory exercises next week. Everyone clear what these are about? Recreating a memory from the inside out. Every detail. Sound. Every smell. As though you were back there again. You never know what you’ll find useful. It’s a big one though. Sometimes people get upset so nothing that’s happened less than two years ago, alright? (McBride 231) It is only during this exercise, which pre-supposes that the darkest corners of an actor’s life can be mined for their emotional potential, that Éilís discloses to the reader the extent of her abuse for the first time. Emotion memory is a cornerstone of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s work, introduced in its own chapter of his manual An Actor Prepares, and particularly central to its American adoption as the Method. Yet, for its centrality, while Stanislavsky “places great emphasis on the ability to draw from the emotional experiences and feelings stored in our memories, he also resists any attempt to give the impression that we can control the means by which we access such feelings” (Shirley, “Reflections” 50). This part of Stanislavsky’s system became central to Lee Strasberg’s development of the Method, where it is also referred to as affective memory. Both terms usually describe “the actor using their own memories of emotional incidents that are analogous to a character they are playing and using those memories to induce the needed emotional state” (Hetzler 88). Particularly in Strasberg’s application, this casts acting as quasi-therapy, and emotion memory as a technique for releasing traumatic emotion and eliminating psychoanalytic blockages (Shirley, “Reflections” 52–3). Éilís’s teachers certainly seem aware of this fearsome reputation—hence the warning extracted above, and the advice given to her afterwards that “the Emotion Memory opens doors it’s important to shut again properly” (McBride 250)—but it is nonetheless conducted in a manner ripe for re-traumatization, given the invitation to recreate an emotionally resonant memory in the company and for an audience of fellow students. In the specific variation of the Emotion Memory exercise that is depicted in The Lesser Bohemians, Éilís is led through a significant past event by her acting teacher, whose interlocutions encourage her to fill the training space with the rich, affective details of the memory she is sharing. It begins: Ready? I think so. Then, in your own time, tell us where you are. I’m standing in the bath. How old are you? Five. Describe it. Big. Enamel. White. Cold even with the water in. One tap’s dot’s red. The other’s gone. What do you see beyond the bath? (248) As her recount continues, it becomes apparent that this bath is a site of past childhood sexual trauma for Éilís, and she starts to anticipate the events beyond the memory. The trainer, instead of stopping the exercise, reminds her of its parameters:

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What’s affecting you? I don’t know. Say the first thing that comes into your mind. I want my father. Why? Because I know what’s next. No, stay in the moment, recreate the smell of talc and the sound of her voice, and once you’ve done that go on. I she asks Have I missed anywhere? And I point down. (249) The typography is significant here, both in the way it renders dialogue through italics (not replicated elsewhere in the novel), and in the gaps of multiple spaces (used throughout the novel). Another variation shows the reader Éilís finally acknowledging her trauma: What’s affecting you? I’m I’m ashamed. Why? Because someone already has. Make a sound. Ahhhhhhhhhhh and it goes through the Church to the balcony, beyond, back to the girl in nineteen-eighty who, for the first time, knows she is alone with something she should not know at all. Describe a physical sensation. I. Eily, do it now. I Burning. (249–50) The exercise ends shortly afterwards, and Éilís immediately phones her mother from the school’s canteen, and their conversation—although we are only presented with Éilís’s side—appears to confirm her mother knew at least her assaulter’s propensity to abuse. As her acting teachers have feared, the Emotion Memory exercise sends Éilís into a spiral of self-harm that Stephen assists her to escape, just in time for her final showcase performance. As it is depicted in The Lesser Bohemians, for Éilís the Emotion Memory exercise is ultimately liberatory. Not only does the reader learn of the full extent of the sexual abuse to which she has been subjected, but also she is empowered to confront her mother and identify her abuse. Indeed, throughout the novel the acting exercises she undertakes during her training have been key to her nascent recovery: “during her acting exercises Eily can simultaneously be vulnerable and supported; she can work through her trauma narratives in a way that allows her to tell as much or as little as she wants” (Throne 73). Like in Strasberg’s affective memory exercises, these memories—and the pain and shame they bring to Éilís— have not disappeared, but as she has signalled from the first line of the novel (“I move”), “Eily exhibits a command over her recovery from trauma, and although this agency will fluctuate throughout the novel, it will ultimately continue to grow” (Throne 73). This command is by no means guaranteed: for Stephen, the process of recovery from his own childhood sexual trauma is decades-long, as the novel depicts in its longest section (“Term Three”). Unlike the other novels I have discussed here, The Lesser Bohemians closes with an unequivocally successful performance and a triumphant reunion between Éilís and Stephen. Certainly, she seems to find much more ease as an actor than either Stanley or Sarah, both of whom end the time their novels spend at acting school more ambiguously—although Éilís may ultimately prefer a different artistic career, given she declares near the end of the novel that “when I first came here I wanted the world to look at me and now I might prefer to be the eye instead” (281). Perhaps counter-intuitively, given how much of the curatorial logic of acting school is driven by public performance, none of the three novels I consider here linger on the stage. As the only one to adopt first-person narration, though, The Lesser Bohemians offers an evocative first-person account of Éilís’s end-of-year performance as Juliet: Romeo and Juliet. All other life switched off. Get her going in myself and feel that life of hers inside. Her precious heart and all things of her moving round, readying themselves, until their time. How she walks and how she speaks. What she does. The way she thinks. Making her particular. Setting her free. Just the right way. Find the right way to show her through me. (281)

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This description, and especially its play of pronouns—the “her” set free could equally well be Éilís herself—highlights the productive melding of actor and character, as well as the deconstruction/ reconstruction that her training has sought. Having been harangued by her director for bringing her personal life into the rehearsal room merely ten pages earlier (272), on-stage Éilís is finally able to play Juliet through herself; she has constructed her own character to be robust enough for another to be built on top of it. It may not be the end of her training, but it is the crest of her Bildung; she ends the year (and the novel) on a note of triumphant release.

Theatre, Failure, and the Bildungsroman In closing, I suggest that these three theatre-fictions represent the kind of narratives that Stević describes, “in which the process of individual development is inverted and frustrated or, at the very least, put under extreme pressure” (1), a frustrated development that is dramatized through the character-building acting exercises that the protagonists undertake. They can therefore be understood as contemporary Bildungsromane, given that “the crisis of individual development emerges as a significant and, in some ways, defining preoccupation of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman” (Stević 2). Theatrical failure here is constitutive, not only of the novel itself as David Kurnick argues, but also of the moral education of the hero. In other words, it is through failure that something is learned—by failing at the work of character building in the acting exercises depicted in these theatre-fictions, their protagonists are instead able to build their own character; failure has indexed an “alternative route” (Bailes 2). Even for Éilís, whose Emotion Memory exercise is arguably the most successful (or at the very least not a complete flop), the rehearsal room activity precipitates a breakdown that is ultimately rerouted as a breakthrough. This dual sense of rehearsing character is central to the education—and to the Bildung—of all three protagonists. This understanding of the Bildungsroman sent to acting school aligns with recent scholarship that seeks to queer the form. It is this very focus on self-development that makes these novels ripe for queering, as Matthew Clarke argues Bildungsromane follow “a trajectory of self-realisation and understanding that can be queerly rerouted and reimagined” (2024). Thinking about these novels existing, as actor training does, in “a state of suspended possibility” (Clarke 2028) also highlights a queer orientation towards productive failure, as “within failure we can locate a kernel of potentiality” (Muñoz 173). In other words, by “practising failure” (Halberstam 120) in the rehearsal room and on stage, these protagonists are able to find new ways of being in the world. In their inexperience, to use Stephanie Hershinow’s term, the protagonists of these theatre-fictions try on multiple characters and try out different lives; their “plots follow protagonists who live out lives parallel to their own, their inexperience forking each encounter into the real and the illusory, the empirical and the merely possible” (10). Although their protagonists do not themselves identify as queer, understanding the queer potential of the Bildungsroman and its orientation towards failure confirms the centrality of theatrical failure to the function of these novels. Failure in training, in the rehearsal for life on- and off-stage that these theatre-fictions trace, is essential to the Bildung of their protagonists, who form in their time at acting school the “real” character they will take out into the world. Finally, what does this have to tell us about the broader genre of theatre-fiction? The most significant answer, I argue, lies in the capacity of the acting school Bildungsroman to not only stage character development, but also parallel the development of the student with the part they are seeking to play. This both/and quality of the character-building exercises undertaken in The Rehearsal, Trust Exercise, and The Lesser Bohemians highlights the capacity of theatre-fiction to stage the actor-character divide, in which “an actor signifies a character while remaining known to the audience as a different,

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working human being” (Wolfe, Theatre-Fiction 6). The blurred lines between those categories, the ways in which actors never quite disappear into character and remain visible under the layer of fiction, are spot-lit in these novels by their focus on actors-in-training. Stanley, Sarah, and Éilís are not always in control of their signifying powers; they are not always aware of the boundaries where they end and the performance begins. It is from these “gaps and distinctions” (Wolfe, Theatre-Fiction 7), constantly flirting with failure in which the distinctions would collapse entirely, that these novels draw their animating power. Like so many starry-eyed ingénues before it, the Bildungsroman went to acting school, lost itself, found itself again, and came back changed.

Works Cited Bailes, Sara Jane. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service. Routledge, 2010. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1986, pp. 10–59. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Harvard UP, 1947. Catton, Eleanor. The Rehearsal. Granta Books, 2010. Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise. Serpent’s Tail, 2019. Clarke, Matthew. “Beyond Gay: Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure.” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 12, 2020, pp. 2021–2036. Durham, Kim. “Acting On and Off: Sanford Meisner Reconsidered.” Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 23, no. 3, 2004, pp. 151–163. Frow, John, Melissa Hardie, and Vanessa Smith. “The Bildungsroman: Form and Transformations.” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 12, 2020, pp. 1905–1910. Halba, Hilary. “‘Play, but don’t play games!’: The Meisner Technique Reconsidered.” Theatre Topics, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 127–136. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011. Hershinow, Stephanie Insley. Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019. Hetzler, Eric. “Emotion memory: ‘A dangerous reputation.’” Stanislavski Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 87–96. Hodge, Alison, editor. Actor Training. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2010. “In Conversation With: Eleanor Catton.” Aesthetica Magazine, accessed 30 September 2021, https:// aestheticamagazine.com/eleanor-catton/. Kellaway, Kate. “Eimear McBride: ‘Writing is painful—but it’s the closest you can get to joy.’” The Observer, 28 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/28/eimer-mcbride-interview-lesser-bohemians-writingnever-stops-being-painful. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. Levine, David. “Controlled Ambiguity: Susan Choi Interviewed by David Levine.” BOMB Magazine, 5 September 2019. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/susan-choi/. McBride, Eimear. The Lesser Bohemians. Faber & Faber, 2016. Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. Vintage, 1987. Morgenstern, Karl. “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman.” PLMA, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 650–659. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009. O’Keeffe, Alice. “Eimear McBride: ‘I was really bored with the way sex is written about.’” The Bookseller, 30 August 2016. https://www.thebookseller.com/profile/eimear-mcbride-i-was-really-bored-way-sex-writtenabout-383191. Otos, Kevin, and Kim Shively. Applied Meisner for the 21st Century Actor. Routledge, 2021. Rooney, Monique. “Kenneth Lonergan’s Networked Bildungsromane: Howards End (2017) and Margaret (2011).” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 12, 2020, pp. 2037–2054. Shirley, David. “His Dream of Passion: Reflections on the Work of Lee Strasberg and His Influence on British Actor Training.” Stanislavski Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2016, pp. 47–62. Shirley, David. “‘The Reality of Doing’: Meisner Technique and British Actor Training.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 199–213.

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Chris Hay Smyth, Gerry. “Displacing the Nation: Performance, Style and Sex in Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians.” Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 9, no. 9, 2019, pp. 161–178. Stević , Aleksandar. Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning. U Virginia P, 2020. Throne, Megan. “Willfulness, Shame and Trauma in Eimear McBride’s Novels.” 2017. Villanova University, MA dissertation. Trumpener, Katie. “Actors, Puppets, Girls: Little Women and the Collective Bildungsroman.” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 12, 2020, pp. 1911–1931. Wolfe, Graham. “Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal: Theatrical Fantasy and the Gaze.” Mosaic, vol. 49, no. 3, 2016, pp. 91–108. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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24 STAGE STRUCK Theatre as Vocation in Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s Sheila Rabillard

Penelope Fitzgerald famously first published a book when she was almost sixty and achieved acclaim only in her eighties. Despite a highly accomplished family background and her own brilliance and promise—a First in English from Oxford, scriptwriting for the BBC, co-editing and contributing essays on a range of cultural subjects to World Review—she spent much of her life as mother and wife in financially difficult circumstances, writing reviews of work by her contemporaries and earning a living as a classroom instructor and tutor. She began teaching because she could find no other means of support when her family moved to London in 1960; she continued for twenty-six years from her mid-forties until she was seventy. In the words of her biographer, Hermione Lee: “Her first job was at the Italia Conti stage school, where she taught general subjects to aspiring child actors. This peculiar posting did not last long, but was saved up in every detail for At Freddie’s, twenty years on” (186). In this chapter, I analyse ideas of the theatre in At Freddie’s (1982) attentive in particular to Fitzgerald’s exploration of theatre as a calling—a vocation she shows can be deeply serious for a child at Freddie’s school and can express itself secretly but also with candid vulnerability, as avidity for applause or devotion to theatre as art. This is a novel for adults and in many respects is about the adult characters who are depicted with Fitzgerald’s characteristic dry wit as they go about the somewhat discouraging business of educating hopeful young performers for non-theatrical jobs, where spelling and math might be required should their present appeal as child actors fail to translate into a sustained career. Despite the initial narrative premise which suggests the students may be misguided in their choice of career and the school exploitive, I argue that Fitzgerald invites the reader to observe with respect, wonder, and curiosity theatre as a “mystery”—in the old sense, used by medieval guilds, concerning a skill to master which brings with it a place in a significant institution. Fitzgerald writes subtly and concisely leaving much for the reader to infer. With its tender, comic treatment of aspirations, missed opportunities, and painful efforts, the novel offers a view of theatre, seen from the off-stage perspective of a children’s theatre school, as an absurd and yet worthwhile occupation. While my initial concern is to consider conceptions of acting and actors expressed implicitly in Fitzgerald’s novel, I recognize her fiction likewise prompts the reader to reflect on the role of theatre audiences, the nature of theatrical pleasures, the performing arts as business, and the place and function of theatre as a national institution. As I pursue these intertwined topics, I hope to show Fitzgerald’s narrative inhabits areas of anxiety about theatre (to some extent about fictionality itself) and explores these anxieties to comedic effect.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-30

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My analysis is indebted in particular to Jonas Barish’s history of anti-theatricality traced from its classical origins. This approach, I suggest, is appropriate to Fitzgerald whose early comic novels—Golden Child, Gate of Angels, Human Voices, At Freddie’s—share something of the philosophical dimension of fables and probe the nature of truth and work. Golden Child is detective fiction set in the British Museum; in keeping with the genre, its plot is built on elusive facts and deceptive appearances. Gate of Angels, set shortly before the first world war when women are gaining entry to more workplaces and institutions of higher learning, concerns a young woman who is expelled from her prized profession and blackmailed by a journalist because of a misleading appearance of impropriety. Human Voices is still closer to At Freddie’s in its engagement with questions of truth and the work of representation. A social comedy about the operations of the BBC during the Second World War, the novel contrasts two radio men: an audio engineer in fanatical pursuit of accurate ambient sound, and a producer who at a crucial moment censors a live broadcast to prevent a speaker from damaging morale by advocating surrender to Germany. At Freddie’s develops comparable themes with like touches of philosophical fable in the historically debated context of theatre.

Acting as a “Mystery” Fitzgerald gives names and characterizations to just four of the child pupils at the fictional Temple Stage School, familiarly called “Freddie’s” after its formidable proprietor: Matthew Stewart (known as Mattie), Jonathan Kemp, Gianni, and Joybelle. Each provides a glimpse of a different approach to stage performance. Gianni is a dancer whose father, disappointed his son’s professional engagements have not progressed from chorus work to principal roles, withdraws him from the school. This outcome reflects Fitzgerald’s experience at Italia Conti’s: “After a certain age—say ten or eleven—these children, particularly the dancers, were never likely to get another part” (Fitzgerald, “Curriculum Vitae” 346). Joybelle is defined by dialogue consisting almost entirely of sexual double-entendres. She may have a future as an entertainer but Gianni comments suggestively that her parents, pub proprietors, “depend on her to drum up custom” (31–2); her name (which echoes “Joy Bells,” a popular 1953 revue)1 and her practiced patter suggest she will find a place in saucy performance of some kind although variety theatre is much faded by 1963, the year in which the novel is set. Mattie and Jonathan are much more important to the narrative and to Fitzgerald’s depiction of acting. Through them, she shows the actor as master of a “mystery” in the archaic sense: “Craft, art; a trade, profession, calling. Now archaic” (OED). For the most part, Mattie serves as a foil to Jonathan. When asked if Mattie is a “genius,” Freddie replies “I have one great talent in the school at the moment, but it’s not Matthew Stewart. Mattie is something else. He’s a success” (15). Throughout the novel great talent is defined against success, Jonathan contrasted with Mattie. Notably, “success” is what the less knowledgeable audience endorses: it is Unwin the accountant who asks about Mattie’s supposed genius; later in the novel when Mr. Blatt, businessman and investor, speaks glowingly of Mattie’s performance in Shakespeare’s King John, Freddie rebukes him: “You don’t know bad acting when you see it” (229). True acting talent is recognized and valued by experts and peers within the guild, as it were. Freddie, ruler of her school, assures Jonathan’s parents that he will emerge from his training a great Shakespearean actor: “Shakespeare or nothing. I remind them that you only get a great actor once every fifty years … They’ll only have to wait a little longer for Jonathan” (41). Mattie, although in some respects in competition with Jonathan, is at the same time drawn to his talent, continually observing him, soliciting his attention and perhaps hoping for his approval. Jonathan’s artistry is characterized by a kind of professional integrity: he refuses to perform unless he can give his best, declining to display his talents for a famous guest visiting the Temple Stage School because he doesn’t feel ready. But above all, his artistry is defined by devotion to the work of acting. In attention to craft, he resembles Uncle

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Nick of J. B. Priestley’s Lost Empires although that character, as much an engineer as an actor, delights in devising ingenious machines whereas Jonathan’s medium is his body which he disciplines to convey subtleties of human behaviour he has observed, such as the way two elderly men seen through an office window interact, “their tenderness for each other’s infirmities and a certain anxiety” (43). Fitzgerald gives a detailed account of the observational powers, thought, investigation, and practice Jonathan invests as he prepares for the role of Prince Arthur in King John. Her narrative asks respect for acting as work. “Jonathan was born to be one of those actors who work from the outside inwards” (101) and therefore he prepares for the difficult scene in King John, where Prince Arthur leaps from the battlements to his death not by trying to learn what it felt like to be desperate enough to jump from a wall, but rather “what someone looked like when they did” (101). He gets one of the academic instructors, Pierce Carroll, to describe exactly what happened when as a young boy Pierce and some friends jumped from a moving vehicle and Jonathan absorbs even the detail of a cap spiralling slowly down. He then sees what must be shown: “in a brightly lit frame surrounded by darkness, not the lorry and the cap, but Enter Arthur on the walls” (104). He reasons Arthur will know he must jump in a princely way, from a high point (192), and the novel ends with Jonathan rehearsing a dangerous leap from the wall of the school’s rear courtyard alone, in snow, at night. “In the morning there would be someone to come and watch, and tell him whether he was right or not. Meanwhile he went on climbing and jumping, again and again and again into the darkness” (230). Fitzgerald lets her readers know that in future, beyond the events of the novel, Mattie will enjoy success as a movie star. Jonathan Kemp’s eventual achievements in the theatre are left to the imagination although the novel includes the information that in later years, when Matthew Stewart is “a celebrity in every country where conditions are sufficiently settled for movies to be shown” (190), he will claim he deliberately damaged himself with an awkward jump in order to give Jonathan a chance to show his talent in the role of Prince Arthur. Perhaps Jonathan’s genius is widely recognized at this point and Mattie judges his self-sacrifice for the sake of artistic merit will therefore be admired; but how Jonathan fared remains uncertain. In some respects, Fitzgerald’s opposition of Mattie to Jonathan shares with J. B. Priestley’s theatre-fiction an ideal of theatre craftsmanship as pleasurable labour.2 The prominence of the word “success” together with Mattie’s penchant for securing attention on all occasions suggest Fitzgerald opposes the actor’s work as a calling to the contemporary showmanship of celebrity.3 Fitzgerald represents true actors, then, as skilled workers developing their talents through mental and physical labour. Young Jonathan calculates, perhaps naively, that it will take him fifteen years to fully master his art (195). While the novel’s stage school setting allows Fitzgerald to explore the development of individual actors and acting as a vocation, the production of King John (which employs first Mattie, then Jonathan), although not the work of a repertory company, provides the opportunity to depict theatre performance as a collective creation. She does so in a comic vein, amusing the reader with efforts gone awry. The director, concerned the audience will not follow the plot of King John, and thinking a modern analogy will help those unfamiliar with the play, locates his production in the Edwardian period. Edwardian political complexities, however, seem unlikely to clarify Shakespeare’s plot. The chief electrician is rightly doubtful about using refurbished Edwardian footlights which, once installed, result in glare bouncing off any metal on stage. But the director is enthusiastic and the audience is expected to respond warmly to the spectacle. Unfortunately, when the curtain rises on opening night heads are bent over programmes. The audience is intent on the plot summary provided and the set goes un-applauded. Fitzgerald seems to be mocking the rise of directorial authority perhaps as a distortion of collective theatrical labour; Hermione Lee cites evidence Fitzgerald is guying an actual 1960s “Edwardian” production of King John (Lee 203). Yet Fitzgerald also provides a sympathetic if comic portrayal of anxiety as an occupational hazard to which directors and actors are equally vulnerable. Even the respected lead actor, William Beardless, becomes more agitated as opening night

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draws near and delivers an increasing number of unwelcome notes to fellow actors with suggestions for improvements in their performances or their lives. And the director is barely prevented from anxiously over-rehearsing the cast by struggles with raising and lowering the gas supply of the antiquated footlights he introduced. What of actors neither in training nor in rehearsal but in performance? What is great acting? Fitzgerald’s plot paradoxically grants “Boney” Lewis, an actor who doesn’t exert himself, the key role in an incident which demonstrates fully effective performance—a peak moment which is fleeting, achieved in coordination with the audience, difficult to define. Lewis, another counter-example to Jonathan albeit an adult, is described as “irredeemable” (97). “He had forgiven his own shortcomings, and didn’t mind them being referred to. Presumably he had also forgiven something which no one spoke about to his face, the waste of his talent” (97). Lewis is regularly employed and makes a good living but he is usually assigned a supporting role such as he plays in King John where this remarkable acting moment occurs. Lewis is playing Hubert who has Prince Arthur in his custody and has been ordered to torture him. But at the moment where Hubert shows the child the royal warrant, he confronts a note of advice from Beardsley inserted by Mattie as a joke: —at this point, then, Boney Lewis, that easy-going, unambitious, acceptable character player, achieved the moment of electrifying contact with the audience in front of him which may only once or twice in a lifetime be the actor’s reward. Out of seventeen hundred spectators, not one stirred. The quality of attention, even the texture of the silence, changed. The theatre had bound its spell upon them. The fact of the matter was that when Boney snatched up and unrolled the warrant, with its dangling seal, the words that confronted him were: Just a little hint on Cutting Down. Today, have your first drink ten minutes later; tomorrow, twenty minutes later, and so on. Every day will be a little easier. The critics, with justice, praised the struggle for self-control which he so strongly yet delicately expressed. (175; emphasis in original) A number of inferences might be drawn from the passage above concerning the art of acting as Fitzgerald views it. This epitome of effective acting is an event defined by an extraordinary focusing of the audience’s attention. For a brief moment a collective is created out of the disparate audience members. Their attention is focused on Lewis and by what he does. Fitzgerald elsewhere in the novel describes the interaction of actors and audience as “loving war with the public” (110), a phrase which conveys the intimacy of actors and audience in any performance, and suggests that combat is perfected into collaboration in such a moment of attention given and won. In another passage Fitzgerald represents Freddie at the beginning of the autumn theatre season ruminating on the role of audiences: “They were creators in their own right, each performance coming to life, if it ever did, between the actors and the audience, and after that lost for eternity. The extravagance of that loss was its charm” (73). The moment of effective acting and the perfectly focused audience is fleeting and in that respect accords with Phelan’s writings on performance as essentially ephemeral.4 Yet Fitzgerald shows this theatrical moment can be partially replicated. Lewis observes with actorly acuity what he is doing even as he is in the process of doing it and he is able to produce the original effect “though in a broader and coarser form, night after night” (187). The narrator notes the audiences will differ too at these repeat performances because they will come prepared to appreciate a scene singled out for praise by reviewers. Finally, it is significant that the moment of intense focus has been brought about by accident. Of course, it’s funny that “irredeemable” Lewis will be praised for this. Yet the comedy of the incident reinforces one of Fitzgerald’s themes concerning the art of acting: theatre is a showing. And although the reviewers are mistaken in crediting Lewis’s acting skills, the audience rightly recognizes they are being shown with great

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precision what a man engaged in inward struggle looks and sounds like. When Lewis’s eye falls on the enraging note from William Beardless which Mattie has inserted in the property warrant, he is indeed torn by conflicting emotions and struggling for self-control. It doesn’t matter theatrically that his struggle concerns something quite different from the fictional conflict engaging his character. The audience can still take pleasure in mimesis; the external reactions of the fictional character are truthfully represented. Perhaps Fitzgerald, hinting at traditional unease about theatre’s falsehood, mischievously invites the reader to consider an audience enjoying an illusion created by less pretence.

Areas of Anxiety Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the external nature of the actor’s art, both in the scene just discussed and in her depiction of Jonathan honing his art, might be taken to express preference for acting not too much indebted to Stanislavski. But it should also be understood as one aspect of her exploration of long-standing cultural anxieties concerning actors and the theatre. This external emphasis counters Rousseau (and those before him) who assume that “to some degree, while he played, [the actor] actually became the character he was impersonating” and thus “might be thought in danger of absorbing its qualities permanently into his own nature” (Barish 276). In his classic study of antitheatrical prejudice, Barish comments that Diderot’s riposte to Rousseau, Paradoxe sur le comédien, “rehabilitates acting as an art and discipline, against the emotionalists with their insistence on self-expression and identity between actor and role” (Barish 280) and Fitzgerald’s novel likewise represents acting as art and discipline. At Freddie’s evokes a number of traditional areas of anxiety (or prejudice) regarding actors, acting, and theatre: concerns that the actor may be too avid for attention, an exhibitionist; that actors sell themselves, subservient to the tastes of the public; that pretence may become a habit and the actor an inveterate liar; or as discussed above, that playing roles may threaten the actor’s identity itself. Rousseau canvasses these threats and more, as Barish argues, weaponizing Plato (Barish ch. 9 passim). Because the actors depicted most extensively are children such generalized cultural anxieties translate narratively into threats to the children due to their inexperience, lack of power, and immaturity. Areas of anxiety are represented as potential hazards for the student actors, hazards both implied in narrated events and directly mentioned in character dialogue. Anxieties about the vulnerability of the child actors and their moral or psychological development, however, have much in common with the concerns of parents in general. When Hannah, the junior students’ instructor, reflects on her Biblical namesake the reader is reminded of the emblematic mother who bore the prophet Samuel and of the child sent away, out of his mother’s care (139). The young age of the stage school students and the vulnerability they share with all children provide plausible opportunities for the novelist to explore areas of anxiety about actors without improbably re-animating ancient prejudices; instead, they ghost the narrative. The children’s need for an audience is clear to Hannah as soon as she takes up her post at the school: “They were aching and sick with anxiety to show her what they could do” (30). Here the language of pain and illness suggests potentially harmful excess. Certainly, Freddie’s pupils delight in imitation, which Aristotle identifies as a natural pleasure: “Man is differentiated from other animals because he is the most imitative of them, and he learns his first lessons through imitation, and we observe that all men find pleasure in imitations” (Poetics 7). But the narrative suggests the stage magnifies this pleasure in a fashion requiring careful management: “He’s acting,” said Miss Blewett. “Worse than that,” said Freddie. “He’s acting being a child actor.” Both of them knew that the children came off the stage in a state of pitiable and vibrant excitement that must be allowed to expend its impulse gradually into quiet. (15)

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A description of Mattie on his way back from performing, still wearing stage make-up he has been told again and again to take off in the theatre, shows his feverish excitement, his vulnerability, his desire for attention: “Dodging round Covent Garden and up Floral Street with his reddened lips and doe’s eyes, he knew very well what kind of strangers were following him, slowed down to let them catch up, then shook them off just as he turned the corner to the school” (15). Mattie’s brush with a predator here serves as a metonym for varied risks of exploitation and casts the actor as endangered rather than dangerous. Implicitly, Fitzgerald critiques a biased stereotype of actors as sexually threatening; the stranger pursues the child and audiences may play a significant role in sexualizing the actor. Do child actors lie more than ordinary pupils? Certainly, Hannah’s students are unusually adept at fooling their instructor. She blunders through a conversation with Gianni’s father, for example, because his son has told her, convincingly and untruthfully, that his parent cannot pursue his work as a tailor because of a psychological affliction. The line between lies and play is shown to be slender. Yet Hannah recognizes that playing at life, mimesis, is a natural part of the students’ childhood. Watching Mattie try out various facial expressions she reflects that “Reality is his game” (31). The thought is immediately followed, however, by a somewhat anxious question concerning the relationship between mimesis as a childhood process of learning and as a professional occupation: “But what becomes of him if the game he is playing is his work?” (31). Hannah’s colleague Pierce Carroll goes to the heart of the matter, considering acting as an occupation which seems to trouble identity itself. “If you choose to go on the stage” he said, still pondering, “you pass your life in a series of impersonations, some of them quite unsuccessful.” “Of course they’re bound to fail sometimes.” “They earn their money that way, and in fact they want to earn it that way. Do you know, Hannah, that causes me some astonishment. It seems to me a sufficient achievement to be an individual at all, what you might call a real person.” (136) To be clear, Pierce’s comment is not about the school pupils; he seems to be considering the life of a professional actor in contrast to his own. And by “real” he means “in the sense that you might speak of a real cup of tea, meaning something up to your own standards of strength” (136). On the whole he thinks he falls short of this standard himself in his relationships with other people. Through this humble, peculiar character Fitzgerald restores some ethical force to old debates about acting and its effect on the life-long task of being a real person. This element of the novel invites comparison with Michael Redgrave’s The Mountebank’s Tale, a fable about a look-alike who is induced to impersonate a famed actor wishing to escape his celebrity identity and who then is subsumed within the adopted persona. At Freddie’s also touches on areas of cultural anxiety concerning the effects of theatre on audiences. Antitheatrical prejudice often represents audiences as unhealthily passive. Rousseau, for example, recommends in his Letter to M. d’Alembert that nothing be shown to the citizens of a republic and instead their entertainment should consist of active engagement in festivals: “let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves” (Rousseau 126). As I’ve argued above, the novel represents the theatre audience instead as active participant, even co-creator, in the theatrical event. Another version of supposed threat to audiences concerns fear of seduction by actors and theatre people—seduction of the imagination by deceptive illusion, or sexual seduction and corruption. Fitzgerald explores the supposed dangers for audiences indirectly via two seduction plots both of which concern events off stage, outside the realm of theatrical performance proper. In each, candidates for the role of victim or innocent seduced

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are far from passive. Fitzgerald, borrowing from theatre, provides cues spoken and taken up with appropriate response, scenes set and the supposed victim assenting to the silent script inherent in props, in some respects anticipating Andrew Sofer’s analysis of their influence, The Stage Life of Props. In the romance plot which brings Hannah and Boney Lewis together, with Pierce Carroll as a complicating third figure, Hannah gives cues so awkwardly obvious that she reproaches herself. “Hannah didn’t at all mind being left alone to talk to an actor, but why did she have to begin by saying ‘You’re the first actor I’ve met,’ a needless remark, just as needless as what she’d said to poor Pierce about those sheets of hers” (118). She had said to Pierce, as they folded sheets from the launderette, “My aunts would think I was giving you the come-on” (83–4). As Pierce himself notices, arch comments of this kind are designed to “signify that one party was female, the other male” (83). Hannah and the actor first have sex when Lewis enters Hannah’s flat uninvited, late at night. He points out she must have expected him because she has set the stage, so to speak: she has tidied the flat and washed her hair. “It’s not every girl who tidies up before I come,” says Boney (182). Hannah has also left the flat door unlocked—indeed, she has oiled the hinges—so perhaps Lewis is right and she has unconsciously provided the mise en scène for a sexual encounter. In any event, she accepts the implied script and they sleep together. In the second seduction plot Mr. Blatt attempts to invest in Freddie’s stage school with the intention of rationalizing its business operations and changing the school’s focus to TV work and advertising. Although neither is an innocent Freddie appears to have the weaker position, at least financially, and Blatt intends to manipulate her. But Blatt is in the hands of a woman whose wiles have made “I’ve been Freddied” a familiar phrase. His own script falls apart—Freddie quashes his tale of a hardscrabble upbringing by demonstrating personal knowledge of the slums as good as his—and Blatt finds himself playing a part in her script instead. “As a matter of fact, he had been impressed; he hadn’t meant to say, ‘Now look here, you know what money is.’ He seemed to have been made to say it, by the line he had just been given” (69). All he can do is suppress his response to Freddie’s flattery about his “artistic” hands until he is departing in a taxi: “As soon as they had got in and the door was shut, Blatt spread out his hands and looked at them” (70). Although it would be difficult to claim Blatt and Freddie are collaborating, as actors and audiences at the best of times do, one could argue both win in their intimate warfare via dialogue. Blatt becomes enthusiastic about Shakespearean performance and willing to be involved in the stage school on its old terms; Freddie, impressed by the television she watched while in hospital for a few days, determines to abandon Shakespeare and the stage in order to focus on the rising medium. This is a stalemate, perhaps, in a contest between theatre as art or as business.

Theatre and Comedy Considering theatre in the broadest terms, Fitzgerald provides a measure of the worth of the actor’s art by associating it with comedy; comedy, that is, as Paul Kottman defines it with the help of Zupančič and Pascal: Rather than reveal to us our limitations and finitude, therefore, comedy demonstrates “that man is never just a man, and that his finitude is very much corroded by a passion which is precisely not cut to the measure of man and his finitude” (Zupančič 49]. We could also invoke Pascal’s version of this humanist sentiment, “What a chimera is man … Man infinitely passes [passe] man” (7.434). (Kottman 4–5) Comedy in this sense makes a strength of what Rousseau treats as a point of weakness in human nature as can be seen in a striking passage from Émile which Barish quotes and analyses as follows: “‘The basis of imitation among us comes from the desire always to transport ourselves beyond

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ourselves’—to de-authenticate ourselves, as it were” (Barish 263). The companion of comedy, of course, is tragedy and the structure of At Freddie’s, built upon a series of oppositions, always allows the reader to see there is another way of being in the world, a grave integrity to which the art of acting is alien. To put the matter more plainly, Fitzgerald through two opposed characters with very different responses to the theatre invites the reader to consider and perhaps inwardly debate its value.5 The only teachers of academic subjects at the fictional Temple Stage School are two instructors hired by the school’s proprietor, Freddie, as the novel begins. Both have recently arrived in London from Northern Ireland; they will become emotionally (albeit unequally) entangled; and they are utterly opposite in response to theatre and approach to life. Hannah Graves is “a nice-looking girl of twenty, with too much sense, one would have thought, to consider a job at eleven pounds fifteen shillings a week” (19). She is Roman Catholic, educated by nuns, seemingly the epitome of common sense. “But Freddie had instantly divined in her that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster. Hannah had no stage ambitions; backstage was the enchantment” (19). This passage, in which Fitzgerald introduces the character of Hannah, brings a faint echo of Plato’s exclusion of poets from a wellordered republic. A post at meagre pay scarcely heralds disaster; yet the word “enchantment” suggests not only delight but also loss of control. Reflecting on her fondness for the theatre, Hannah identifies an attraction to the forbidden and an engagement of the senses, which escapes her rational analysis. She might have managed to suppress the fondness if her mother hadn’t suggested so often that she ought to do so. It was hard to explain, a matter perhaps of the senses. One of her younger sisters felt the same way about hospitals and had said that at the first breath of disinfected air she’d known she wanted to work there. Yes, the scent of Dettol had worked powerfully on Bridie. The convent, too, came at those with a vocation through its fragrance of furniture polish. In the same way Hannah felt native to the theatre, and yet she had never been backstage. (33) The theatre to which Hannah feels native is associated with defiance of convention, with emotion rather than reason, with the senses. Yet its attraction is also like the attraction of the convent for those with a vocation, at least in Hannah’s thoughts, and the comparison suggests theatre inspires devotion, provides a space apart (perhaps a heterotopia in the Foucauldian sense), and offers a calling. Hannah’s colleague Mr. Pierce Carroll, whose “grandparents had been black Protestants and had thought the theatre a place of sin” (128), is the opposite of a stage-struck person as he makes plain in his interview for a teaching post at the Temple School. “Are you interested in the theatre?” Freddie asks and Carroll replies, “No, I wouldn’t say so” (20–1). He is not much acquainted with Shakespeare; he quotes from Wordsworth (not read by Freddie, steeped in drama), a line offering solid advice on perseverance. Nor is he capable of acting, even in the social sense of playing an expected role: “I’ve taught in the deaf and dumb school at Castlehen. They say that teaching the deaf makes you into a good actor, but it didn’t have any effect of that kind on me. I’ve no ability at all that way.” Freddie waited for him to add “I’m afraid,” but he did not. (20) If Hannah’s fondness for theatre evokes an art which (for good or ill) calls to the senses, stirs the emotions, and enchants, her counterpart Pierce seems to embody honesty as the opposite of theatre, the opposite of anything at all to do with pretending. In particular, he stands apart from the metaphorically theatrical performance of one’s self as potentially larger than it is, with more possibilities: man as more than man.

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Fitzgerald, presenting Freddie’s view of Carroll at the close of his job interview, provides a strong suggestion that he is a character to contemplate: “Freddie felt some interest in Carroll, more, perhaps, than in Hannah. She had heard in his remarks the weak, but pure, voice of complete honesty. She was not sure that she had heard it before, and thought that it would be worth studying as a curiosity” (23). Hannah embraces the theatre in the figure of Boney Lewis who becomes her lover and she refuses Carroll’s offer of marriage. This is not because she expects the affair to last, nor that she thinks Lewis the better man. Boney suits her own sense of herself as somehow more: as potentially part of a backstage “secret society” (110), or in more concrete terms perhaps an assistant stage manager (127). Well into the affair, she is reluctant to spend any length of time alone with Carroll. “She had taken so readily to Boney’s heartwarming shifts and evasions that by this time she couldn’t face more than half an hour of sincerity” (206). Carroll, on his part, is so completely honest in his selfhood that he does not ask Hannah if she loves him when she invites him to stay the night. He is a person for whom it seems “a sufficient achievement to be an individual at all” (136) and he does not ask this question, Hannah realizes, because “he did not want to hear the answer” (138). In the novel’s last scene between Hannah and Pierce, Fitzgerald takes pity on Carroll’s incorruptible sincerity and grants him a moment in which he comes close to playing himself as more than himself. He announces to Hannah that he now sees her relationship with Boney Lewis differently, with less jealousy, and wants to thank her. “You don’t want me and you never did and you never will. But you’ve taken somebody who’s not at all young—I could give him quite a few years, I think—not very successful, or at all events he’s still not playing the principal parts after all this time, not in good condition, not very much to say for himself, and above all, Hannah, nothing much to look at. It’s a wonderful consolation to me that you didn’t want a smart fellow, or a good-looking one that would do you credit in company. You asked me what I had to thank you for, and now I think I’ve made you see it. Even if you didn’t turn to me, and I’m well aware that was too much to hope for, at least you turned to someone who resembled myself.” (216–17) Carroll doesn’t quite misperceive himself—he knows he’s a failure—but comes very close when he sees a version of himself-as-failure in the actor Lewis and thus can feel more positively that Hannah has chosen as partner someone like himself. Fitzgerald here invites the reader to consider contradictory perspectives. Lewis is in fact a success in business terms with a sustained, profitable career, so Carroll is mistaken and perhaps unconsciously keeping his spirits up with a misguided notion that he and Lewis are alike; but at the same time, Lewis is also a lazy actor who doesn’t develop his art to the full and he is therefore a failure when contrasted to the talent and focused hard work of young Jonathan—recognized as extraordinary by the school, honing his art in the final scene of the novel. Does Carroll unwittingly see himself as more than the mere facts of his existence (see himself comedically as more than man)? If not, would it be better for him if he did? These are puzzles Fitzgerald leaves to the reader. As for her character, one might say that Fitzgerald grants him an equivocally comedic exit—discovering a kind of equivalence with a rival, maintaining grounds for his hopeless love of Hannah, finding a way to carry on. Reflecting on her work as a writer, Fitzgerald asserts: I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it? (“Curriculum Vitae” 347).

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Theatre as Institution In keeping with my metaphorical claim that acting is a “mystery” in At Freddie’s, I will sketch, by way of coda, the novel’s representation of English theatre as institution. It would stretch the metaphor very far indeed to assert Fitzgerald shows London theatre in 1963 to be organized like a guild, even though the stage school trains its pupils rather like apprentices: they work on the professional stage as they learn and the narrative provides few details about their classroom instruction in performance. Although scarcely organized like a guild, theatre as a cultural institution has a distinct presence in the novel embodied in the extraordinary character of Freddie to whom the work is dedicated. Hermione Lee’s biography discusses Fitzgerald’s borrowing of details from actual theatre buildings and allusions to real theatre practitioners so there is no need to rehearse the range of references here.6 Instead, I will focus on Freddie’s actions, features of the plot which contribute to Fitzgerald’s depiction of English theatre in a time of institutional change and to her comedic treatment of the material. Freddie’s habit of scrounging cast-off costumes, used carpet, old theatre furnishings, and the like, to supply the Temple Stage School makes her a figurative repository of theatre tradition: her school seems a shabby 1960s version of renaissance companies supplied with the outworn garments of aristocratic patrons as described in schoolbook histories. The remarkable gown she dons to dine with Mr. Blatt appears to be the famous dress worn by Ellen Terry in her Sergeant portrait as Lady Macbeth (Lee 202). In the novel Freddie is supposedly a former colleague of Lilian Baylis, and the narrative represents these theatrical power-houses as too alike to share the same space pacifically: “the two of them, compressed under the same roof, might provide the conditions for an explosion” (8). Her accumulations—including a painted banner from a production of King John, the parting gift when her work with Baylis ended—imply not only the long history of English theatre and the achievements of great practitioners on stage and behind the scenes but also the precarity of its endurance. The accumulations also bespeak the collegiality and generosity of theatre people who allow themselves to be “Freddied” and are pleased to report evidence of her incorrigibility afterwards. There is a kind of cohesion and loyalty in such habits suggestive of a loosely-defined institution and exemplified by the visit of The Master to the Temple school. The famous visitor, Noel Coward, sings an amusing, improvised song in the persona of an Old Boy returned: “Freddie, you made it fun” (82). The reader learns, however, that he has no apparent connection with the school. Blatt wonders “Had he ever been there? It didn’t seem that he had” (80). The performance seems to testify instead that he and Freddie belong to a shared enterprise. In the course of the novel Freddie engages in two negotiations—with the government and with Mr. Blatt—which make her a bellwether in an era of significant change for English theatre as an institution. Both are crucial to the survival of the Temple School. After protracted public debate and a series of government initiatives (the National Theatre Act, 1949; the laying of a foundation stone, 1951, for a theatre never built) the National Theatre effectively begins in 1962 with the formation of the National Theatre Company under the direction of Sir Laurence Olivier.7 This historic event occurs the year before the action of the novel begins. It marks a shift towards government sponsorship of theatre and perhaps a recognition of theatre as a “social amenity” (Revels History of English Drama VII, 57) or at least as part of the tourist economy. The National Theatre was perceived in some quarters as a potential competitor; within the novel a (fictional) National Junior Stage School is to be established and directly threatens the Temple School. Freddie springs into action and scuttles the project by means of a letter-writing campaign. Milking her legendary status and leveraging everyone’s nostalgia for their own childhood she persuades many eminent persons (but no experts) to write letters to the papers opposing the new scheme and supporting the Temple School. “Her plea, she saw, must be based on one point and one point alone: longevity” (158). “Freddie herself had fulfilled one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on for a very long time” (53).

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The success of Freddie, emblem of theatre as institution, suggests that English theatre survives in part by performatively demonstrating its traditional, historic, character. As she remarks on another occasion: “They’ll say I’m just the same as ever. That’s all they want from me you know” (61). However, as the narrator comments wryly, “Remaining the same requires an exceptional sense of balance” (61). The rise of television disturbs the balance of the performing arts in the sixties; watching television in the hospital after a literal loss of balance, a fall, convinces Freddie to revise her negotiations with Mr. Blatt and focus on training children for TV. The abrupt reversal of her position comes as a shock to Blatt and to the reader, a shock amplified by thoughts of Jonathan’s future—Blatt asks what will become of his training—and by the reader’s awareness that the child is practicing a perilous leap alone in the dark even as Freddie dines with Blatt. Perhaps Jonathan survives and prospers. Perhaps Freddie’s actions are those of a classic comic protagonist, lucky and resilient. And perhaps theatre as an institution is also destined to endure although probably not by remaining the same. As Hannah notes of her students, “the first professional secret they learned was an insane optimism” (30).

Notes 1 See posters for the revue reproduced in Alan Chudley’s essay “Indian Summer.” 2 See Graham Wolfe’s chapter on J.B. Priestley in Theatre-Fiction. 3 Although distaste for showmanship lies at the heart of Michael Fried’s critique of “theatrical” paintings and sculptures “aware” of the audience and catering to it, his advocacy of film as a means of avoiding such anthropomorphic effects paradoxically elides film’s affinity with celebrity culture. See Martin Puchner’s discussion of varieties of modernist anti-theatricality in his “Introduction” to Stage Fright. 4 See Peggy Phelan’s “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction” in Unmarked. 5 I suggest there is some kinship between the theatricality of philosophic dialogue and Fitzgerald’s provocative, dialectical pairings: see Puchner’s wide-ranging study of the connections between Platonic dialogue and modern drama in The Drama of Ideas. For a different view of theatre relevant to my suggestion that Fitzgerald’s pairing is both theatrical and reminiscent of philosophical debate, consider Quigley’s contention in The Modern Stage and Other Worlds that characters of the modern stage often bring to their conflicts not so much opposed interests as incompatible worlds: “It is just this connection between multiple worlds and multiple ways of knowing that is fundamental to the crises of pluralism present in the texture, structure and themes of modern drama” (18). 6 Lee’s biography traces the novel’s connections to Fitzgerald’s teaching experience and the relation of the fiction to real events, places, and people; she also mentions details from the author’s notes and drafts (Lee 199–207). 7 Daniel Rosenthal’s history of the National includes an account of active opposition to the project (then known as the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre) during the inter-war years on the part of supporters of the Old Vic including Lilian Baylis. Struggle against the government’s National Theatre plans is another feature connecting Freddie to Baylis.

Works Cited Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Translated by Leon Golden, Florida State UP, 1981. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. U of California P, 1981. Chudley, Alan. “An Indian Summer,” ArthurLloyd.cok. http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/IndianSummer.htm. Fitzgerald, Penelope. At Freddie’s. 1982. HarperCollins, 2013. Fitzgerald, Penelope. “Curriculum Vitae.” The Afterlife, edited by Terence Dooley et al., Counterpoint, 2003, pp. 337–347. Fitzgerald, Penelope. Human Voices. Collins, 1980. Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Gate of Angels. 1990. HarperCollins, 1991. Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Golden Child. 1977. Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Hunt, Hugh, Kenneth Richards, and John Russell Taylor. The Revels History of Drama in English. vol. 7, Methuen, 1978. Kottman, Paul A. “Slipping on Banana Peels, Tumbling into Wells: Philosophy and Comedy.” Diacritics, vol. 38, no. 4, 2008, pp. 3–14.

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Sheila Rabillard Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. “mystery, n.2., 2a.” OED Online, Oxford U P, December 2022. Accessed 2 February 2023. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993. Priestley, J.B. Lost Empires. Heinemann, 1965. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Puchner, Martin. The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy. Oxford UP, 2010. Quigley, Austin E. The Modern Stage and Other Worlds. Methuen, 1985. Redgrave, Michael. The Mountebank’s Tale. Heinemann, 1959. Rosenthal, Daniel. The National Theatre Story. Oberon Books, 2013. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre. Translated by Allan Bloom, 1960. Cornell UP, 1968. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. U of Michigan P, 2003. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing. Routledge, 2020. Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. MIT Press, 2008.

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PART V

Theatre-Fiction, Asymmetries, and Antitheatricalities

25 THEATRE-STORIES IN EARLY MODERN CHINA Mei Chun

The stage was ubiquitous in early modern China. There were two types of stages: the felt carpet used in private performances (quyu 氍毹) that usually lay on the ground in a courtyard or hall, and the raised stage (xipeng 戲棚) used in public performances (Hu 85). In Chinese, the term “theatre” (xichang 戲場), often shortened to chang, meaning a level, open space, suggests the ubiquity of theatre in everyday life (Wang 4). A performance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could quite literally take place anywhere where there was flat, open ground suitable for staging. Although theatre could be urban or rural, public or private, all theatre in early modern China shared a distinctive trait—an interactive atmosphere that purposefully included audience interaction with the performance (Tan 136). Scholars of Chinese theatre have paid attention to both theatre performances and the influences theatre had on literature. Zhou Yibai, Tanaka Issei, and Cyril Birch have pioneered the study of the various social practices—watching theatre, owning dramatic troupes, styles of acting—within early modern Chinese theatre. Building on their work, Grant Guangren Shen has written the most informative work to date on actual Ming (1368–644) theatre performances. In contrast to actual theatre performances, I explored the fascination with theatre by early modern fiction writers in my The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China. In the book, I argued that early modern Chinese writers valorized the theatrical and materialized their fascination by including an abundance of performance, masquerades, metamorphoses, and other theatrical forms in their fiction. In this kind of “theatrical novel,” writers paid close attention to performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship. As such, the production and reception of theatricals become of primary importance to literary audiences. These fictional works represented life as a theatrical performance by exploring and blurring the boundaries between the virtual world of theatre and the literal world of everyday life. Early modern Chinese writers aestheticized the idea of “play” and thus presented identity as artificial, performative, and relational. Their works give us insight into an early modern “theatrical” culture that endowed the exploration of theatricality—theatrical events and relationships—with great epistemological and ontological significance. In scholarship on Chinese theatre, the prominent metaphorical approach to theatricality—viewing the world as a stage—has resulted in a lack of attention to fiction that embedded theatre within its plotlines. To correct this oversight, this chapter introduces and analyses two theatre-stories that were included in well-known and exceptionally popular collections of vernacular short fiction (huaben xiaoshuo 話本小說) in the seventeenth century. The authors of these two stories embed theatre within their plots by having their main characters become actors. The actor-characters, and their professional

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-32

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involvement with theatre, are at the centre of plot development (Fu et al. 79).1 By analysing these two stories, we can better understand how they engaged with “the concrete structures and spatial arrangements of theatrical performance” (Wolfe, Theatre-Fiction 152). How did the use of the constitutional elements of theatre help the authors develop their plotlines, characters, and atmosphere? In both of these stories, I argue, early modern Chinese fiction writers not only embedded theatre in their fiction, but also foregrounded the proximity of audience to actors to highlight the contiguity of theatre and real life—theatre’s “constitutive contiguities”—while constantly reiterating the distinction between theatre-people and scholars (Wolfe, “Theatrical Extraneity” 314). Vernacular short fiction was the genre that dominated the book market in seventeenth-century China. The two most popular collections, Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–646) Three Words (Sanyan 三言) and Ling Mengchu’s 凌蒙初 (1580–644) Two Slappings (Er’pai 二拍), alone consisted of 198 stories. Written by highly educated scholars, most of whom had failed the civil service examinations and became literary writers, these vernacular stories employed the distinctive features of the genre by using the stock phrases of the storyteller and incorporating verse in their prose narratives. In the seventeenth century, vernacular short fiction appeared in collections that contained an abundance of paratextual materials, such as interlineal and marginal commentaries designed to influence the reader, illustrations, prefaces, and postfaces by the author, editor, or other commentators. Overall, vernacular short fiction was meant to educate, but more importantly, to entertain. As such, the prized literary effects of the genre were marvel, wonder, and ingeniousness. The distinction between theatre-people and scholars in the two stories highlights the low social status of professional actors in early modern China. In the early modern period, there were four major role types in Chinese theatre: sheng 生 (young male leads), dan 旦 (young female leads), jing 淨 (villains), and chou 丑 (clowns). The young male lead usually played a scholar who had passed the civil service examinations, become an official, and married the female protagonist (Shen 226). Professional actors, however, were placed outside the official Confucian class hierarchy and were thus prohibited from participating in a number of social activities, including taking the civil service examinations (Shen 229–30). In other words, the lead male actors who played scholar-officials were personally prohibited from the lives they usually portrayed. The abysmal reality for theatre-people was that while the theatre became more integrated into everyday life, they remained as segregated as ever from upward mobility in early modern Chinese society.

“Zhang Tingxiu Escapes from Death and Saves His Father” The first theatre-story to be analysed is “Zhang Tingxiu taosheng jiufu” 張廷秀逃生救父 (Zhang Tingxiu escapes from death and saves his father). The story is from a famous collection of vernacular stories entitled Stories to Awaken the World (Xingshi hengyan 醒世恆言, 1627), which is the last volume of the Three Words collections edited by Feng Menglong, the great author and editor of popular literature. Langxian 浪仙 is believed to be the author of the story, about whom not much is known except for his association with Feng (Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story 120–39, 124). Feng Menglong added his own marginal commentary to the story before publishing it. In the story, Zhang Tingxiu is a carpenter’s son who is adopted by a local wealthy merchant, the son-less Squire Wang. Squire Wang eventually betroths his second daughter, Sister Yu, to Tingxiu to strengthen Tingxiu’s status in the family. After the announcement, Wang’s eldest daughter, Sister Rui, and her husband Zhao Ang, become jealous and resentful of Tingxiu. To get him thrown out of the house, they slander him. To tarnish his reputation further, Zhao Ang also bribes a local yamen runner to get Tingxiu’s birth father embroiled in a lawsuit. Tingxiu travels by boat to the inspectorate in Zhenjiang to plead his father’s case, but Zhao Ang pays another local yamen runner to pretend to give him a ride in a police boat but then throw him into the river to drown. At that precise moment, a traveling theatre

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troupe just happens to be passing by and pulls Tingxiu out of the river. With few prospects for the future, Tingxiu joins the troupe, is trained to be the male lead, and proves to be an exceptional acting talent. Noticing Tingxiu’s talent, the troupe master, Pan Zhong, refuses to pay him hoping to force him to remain in the troupe. Eventually, Tingxiu escapes by turning to an official for help after a performance. The sympathetic official adopts Tingxiu and teaches him how to pass the civil service examinations. After succeeding in the examinations, Tingxiu returns to the Wang family disguised in tattered clothes and introduces himself as an actor. As it so happens, the extended Wang family is enjoying a performance of Thornwood Hairpins (Jingchai ji 荊釵記) just when Tingxiu arrives. He immediately volunteers to perform the male lead for their entertainment. In the midst of the performance, the local prefect arrives at the Wang family compound. When the prefect asks to speak with Tingxiu, the family suddenly realizes that he has become an official because he keeps his costume on when he meets the prefect. Ultimately, Tingxiu and Sister Yu are married, Sister Rui commits suicide, and Zhao Ang and the local yamen runner are executed for their crimes. In early modern China, the plot of “Zhang Tingxiu” was a tale of prosperity and transformation (faji biantai 發跡變泰), a popular thematic structure used in short vernacular stories. Born into a financially strapped artisanal family with little opportunity for upward social mobility, Tingxiu is allowed by this family to be adopted into a wealthy household. From the outset, Tingxiu’s precarious social status means that his fortune depends upon patronage, but he proves to be exceptionally adept at learning new skills. Before being adopted, Tingxiu shows himself an excellent apprentice carpenter. When his birth-father’s carpentry business starts doing better, Tingxiu is able to attend school, where he becomes the best student. Later, when he is pulled out of the river by the passing troupe, he quickly becomes the best actor in the group and the prominent male lead. After he leaves the troupe, he resumes studying for the civil service examinations. Though he hasn’t studied for many years, he applies himself assiduously and in less than two months is able to write beautifully and elegantly. He passes the provincial and metropolitan examinations at the first opportunity. Langxian’s creative use of the theatre in the story is central to his rewriting of the prosperity and transformation theme. Essential to Langxian’s plot is his play with the conflicting duality of the theatre in early modern China. In the story, an actor playing a male lead becomes an official onstage, but is a person of low social status off stage. The story confirms and repeatedly reiterates this contradiction. On the one hand, the narrator, the protagonist, and other characters, all describe acting in the theatre as a lamentably low profession. Before offering to adopt Tingxiu out of the troupe, Mr. Shao says, “If you stay in this profession, when will you ever make your way in the world?” Earlier in the story, when theatre master Pan Zhong pressures Tingxiu to become an actor after saving his life, Tingxiu agrees, but says, “In ancient times, Qizi had been a slave and Wu Zixu had been a beggar. Even such great men had to be flexible when hard times came” (Xingshi hengyan 444; Awaken 445). On the other hand, the skills required of actors and scholars were in some ways quite similar. Tingxiu’s intelligence allows him to be a great actor, but also a talented scholar. His powerful memory and success as an actor would later make him an excellent civil service candidate: “With his natural endowment, he quickly learned to sing the arias that were taught to him just a few times. In a few days, he was good enough to go on stage. His performance exceeded expectations and appealed to both refined and popular tastes.” Through the scholar-official and master physiognomist Shao Cheng’en, who is an official from the Ministry of Rites, Langxian distinguishes theatre-people from scholars. Shao’s ultimate purpose is to emphasize that Tingxiu is fundamentally different from regular theatre-people. After about a year as an actor, Tingxiu and his troupe are called to perform in Shao Cheng’en’s residence to celebrate Shao’s sixtieth birthday. Shao and his colleagues applaud Tingxiu’s performance because it is so true to life. But, Shao is also a master physiognomist. While Tingxiu is good at acting in character, Shao sees in Tingxiu’s performance a person engaging in work that is beneath him. Despite his excellent performance, it is Tingxiu’s corporeal identity, displayed through his facial features, that marks him as

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distinct from regular theatre-people. Shao beckons to Tingxiu about halfway through the performance, closely examines his face, and concludes the actor is destined to be a highly placed official. Shao tries to penetrate through Tingxiu’s confusing identity after the performance: “Zhang Tingxiu, with your imposing appearance, you certainly don’t look like someone of a lowly status. Tell me the truth. Where are you from? How old are you? Why did you have to learn such lowly skills? Tell me everything. I may do something for you” (Xingshi hengyan 452; Awaken 453). In contrast to Mr. Shao, Pan Zhong, the theatre troupe master, strives to keep Tingxiu trapped as an actor to make money from him. Langxian’s ingenuity in remaking the theme of prosperity and transformation in this short story lies in his decision to use the theatre as the dramatic venue on which to literally stage the return scene of the protagonist. In tales about prosperity and transformation, the return scene, wherein protagonists return to an earlier place in their lives—and where their past and present identities intersect—is of critical importance. In “Zhang Tingxiu,” Langxian makes creative use of the fluidity of the actoraudience-stage dynamic to produce a marvellous return scene that structures the success of his story around the specifics of its engagement with the components of theatre, such as actors and audience, costumes and makeup, and spatial arrangements and stagecraft. Langxian constantly reminds his readers of the importance of the theatre in transforming Tingxiu’s life. Midway through the story, Tingxiu has become an official, but he deliberately puts on a tattered blue cloth gown and a hat when he presents himself as a professional actor upon his return to Squire Wang’s residence. The decision to put on the masquerade is clearly Tingxiu’s choice. The commentator of the story, likely Feng Menglong (Awaken xxii), highlights the link between Tingxiu’s masquerade and his past identity as an actor, “He was an entertainer for a time, after all, and had a flair for the dramatic” (Awaken 460). The appearance of a literal theatre performance accompanying Tingxiu’s masquerade is presented as coincidental, a coincidence essential to the creation of “marvel,” an intentional literary effect popular among vernacular short fiction writers. As Tingxiu enters the main hall of the Wang household, he hears the clang of cymbals and the beating of drums as his eyes pass over seats filled with guests. He pushes his way through the crowd to get a better look and sees that the play Thornwood Hairpins is being put on. He also notices that Zhao Ang is the guest of honour. Tingxiu’s performance in Thornwood Hairpins is marvellous because of the contiguity of onstage and offstage (his life off the stage is similar to his role on the stage). There is a scene in Thornwood Hairpins in which the protagonist Wang Shipeng holds a memorial service for his wife, Qian Yulian, after he has passed the civil service examinations and become an official. Returning to his hometown after his triumphant performance on the examinations, Wang Shipeng discovers that his wife has drowned herself after being tricked by a rival suitor named Sun Ruquan, who had sent her a fake divorce letter signed by Wang. Likewise, Tingxiu had also already passed the civil service examinations when he discovered that Sister Yu had attempted suicide because she thought he was already dead. By playing the character Wang Shipeng, Tingxiu was expressing his love for Sister Yu through his performance. He performed the scene in which Wang Shipeng held a memorial service by the river. Recalling what he had just heard about Sister Yu’s suicide attempt and identifying her with Yulian in the play, he put all his heart into his singing and acting, as if he were none other than Wang Shipeng himself. Moved to tears and sniffles, the audience cheered heartily. (Xingshi hengyan 451; Awaken 462) In this part of the story, Langxian highlights the duality of theatre (an actor who plays a character) by describing the audience’s response: they cheer Tingxiu’s performance as an actor while also being moved to tears by his real emotions.

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Besides the contiguity of onstage and offstage (the actor’s conflation of theatre and the real), the scene has remarkable fluidity because the audience has control over what is performed and who performs it. While Squire Wang is furious when he learns that Tingxiu has a career as an actor, other family members in the audience are more open. Since Tingxiu is an actor and offers to perform, they believe, he should be allowed to perform like any hired entertainer. They push Tingxiu into the dressing room, where he puts on an official’s robe and hat to replace the male lead just in time for the scene in Thornwood Hairpins in which Wang Shipeng holds a memorial service for Qian Yulian. Tingxiu himself later becomes an audience member, and the guest of honour, when the friends and family of Squire Wang, after realizing that Tingxiu has passed the civil service examinations and become an official, beg him to take the seat of honour for the rest of the play. Tingxiu, however, watches the rest of the play while still wearing the robe and hat from his performance, an intended example of the comical confusion between actors and audience members. The suspension and resumption of the performance of Thornwood Hairpins in the story highlights the fluidity of the theatre. The main hall of the Wang household switches back and forth from a theatre hall to an everyday meeting place for social events. During Tingxiu’s performance, a real servant enters the hall to announce the arrival of the prefect to see Judicial Supervisor Shao. Feng Menglong, in the commentary, applauds this moment as part of a “good plot” (Awaken 462). Upon hearing the announcement, the guests and performers become nervous and restless; the play is temporarily suspended. The main hall is instantly transformed from a theatre back into a formal “hall” when Tingxiu offers to meet with the prefect: Well, after Squire Wang, Zhao Ang, and the guests had fled the main hall upon the prefect’s arrival, a servant came to say, “Number Three is sitting there, chatting with the prefect.” None of them believed this report. Everyone went up to the screen and peeked from behind it. Indeed, there they were in the hall, chatting away. (Xingshi hengyan 463; Awaken 464) The return scene in prosperity and transformation stories typically involves a farce: some of the characters do not realize that the protagonist has transformed and prospered. Here, the servant continues to call Tingxiu, “Number Three,” his nickname from the days when he was a carpenter’s boy under the patronage of Squire Wang. Though the servant has not yet realized that Tingxiu has become Judicial Supervisor Shao, the older and more experienced Squire Wang realizes, “So, that cursed one is now an official in disguise, he tricked me.” The theatricality of this meeting is particularly marked because Tingxiu continues to wear his theatrical costume. Squire Wang, Zhao Ang, and the guests, who were an audience watching a theatrical performance just a moment before, are now suddenly observing a meeting between fellow officials from behind a screen. The screen is part of the spatial configuration of the private theatre that separates the inner quarters of the house from the performance area. The dressing and undressing attracts much narrative attention in this story because of its association with theatre and costumes. When he returns to the Wang household, Tingxiu takes off his official robes and puts on tattered clothes. When the audience accepts his offer to play Wang Shipeng in Thornwood Hairpins, Tingxiu puts on an official’s robe and gauze hat. He continues to wear the costume robe and hat in his meeting with the prefect because Tingxiu is an official and thus has no fear of the law that forbids actors from wearing official clothing outside the theatre. But, when the yamen runner that had pushed him into the river earlier in the story is suddenly discovered, Tingxiu strips off his stage costume and puts on his official’s hat and waistband, the proper attire for punishing a yamen runner. The most significant moment in Tingxiu’s return in this tale of transformation and prosperity is when he continues to wear his costume in the main hall, which had been a theatre, but which was

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suddenly transformed into a meeting place for fellow officials. The social event is presented through the perceptual dynamics of viewers-viewed: Squire Wang, Zhao Ang, and the guests, who fled the main hall when the prefect arrived, peek out from behind the screen to see that Tingxiu and the prefect bow to each other, drink two cups of tea together, and have a long, drawn-out conversation. An inserted poem, part of the generic convention of the vernacular short story, begins with the following line, “Who would have guessed that Mr. Shao of Changzhou/Was Wang Shipeng on the stage?,” pointing once again to the duality of the theatre (Xingshi hengyan 462; Awaken 463).

“In the Theatre Tan Chuyu Conveys His Feelings” Li Yu’s 李漁 (1610/1611–80) theatre-story, “In the Theatre Tan Chuyu Conveys His Feelings, Liu Miaogu Dies for Her Chastity After an Aria” 譚楚玉戲裡傳情, 劉藐姑曲終死節 (hereafter referred to as “Tan Chuyu”), included in his fiction collection Wusheng xi, er ji 無聲戲, 二集 (Silent Operas, Second Collection), is an elaborate example of theatre-fiction from a story-telling master who was known for both plays and fiction. Li Yu was truly a maverick of cultural creativity; he was a theatre connoisseur, owner and director of a family-based theatre troupe, a graphic designer, a fiction writer, and a publisher. Viewing fiction and theatre as two closely related forms, Li Yu produced plays sharing the same plots as his fiction. For example, “Tan Chuyu” was remade into a thirty-two-act drama, A Couple of Soles (Bimuyu 比目魚), shortly after the fictional version was published. Li Yu also encouraged Zhu Suchen 朱素臣 (c. seventeenth century) and others to dramatize his fiction. He even edited and commented favourably on one of Zhu’s plays (Abe; Zhu). The main plot of “Tan Chuyu” is a romance between Tan Chuyu, a scholar, and Liu Miaogu, an actress by birth, set in a fictional village in Zhejiang where people make their living by acting. Early in the story, Chuyu falls in love with Miaogu. To be close to her, he ignores the lowly status of actors and joins the troupe run by Jiangxian, Miaogu’s mother. The two perform as lovers onstage, but their theatre romance is ended when Jiangxian betrothes Miaogu to a landlord. Miaogu asks that her final performance be the play Thornwood Hairpins, in which the heroine drowns. While acting in the play, Miaogu literally throws herself into a river running alongside the outdoor stage on which the play is performed. Chuyu follows her into the water. An official-turned-fisherman surnamed Mo saves them both. Later, after succeeding in the civil service examinations and becoming an official, Chuyu decides to relinquish worldly glory because he understands the ephemerality of life through his experiences as an actor. Chuyu and Miaogu’s performance as a couple onstage is mesmerizing because of their feelings for each other offstage. Their performance comes from the very marrow of their bones. Their troupe soon garners fees that are double, triple, or even quadruple that of other troupes. The commentator on the story, under the pseudonym Libationer of Slumberland (Shuixiang jijiu 睡鄉祭酒), probably the eccentric poet and Li Yu’s friend Du Jun 杜濬 (1611–87), applauds Chuyu’s genius in turning to theatre as a superb domain for alternative living: Acting as husband and wife on-stage allows tens of thousands of people to see this romantic relationship. We can say that they have the best of all romances. Compared to that of pillow and bed, their performed love has more flair (qu 趣). Tan Chuyu is an enlightened person. (Li Yu quanji 4.257) “Tens of thousands of people” is contrasted with the private intimacy of a real life romance—the pillow and bed. An onstage romance is superior because it has more qu, a quality highly sought after in the cult of authenticity in the seventeenth century (Chou 52–4; W. Li 39–41; Epstein 108–11). Qu points both to the truthfulness of Chuyu’s love for Miaogu in real life and also to theatre’s ability to reveal their love to a huge audience of theatre lovers.

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Li Yu places the most important twist and turn in the story—their change of identities and reentrance into their past community—into the structure of a specific temple theatre dedicated to the deity, Lord Yan. Li Yu describes the concrete structures of the theatre at Lord Yan’s Temple: “The temple lay opposite a broad stream, and the stage had been erected outside the temple gate, with its back resting on the bank and its front extending out over the water” (Li Yu quanji 4.267; Silent Operas 184). By placing the theatre in a temple, Li Yu ensures the theatricals are put on during a specific day of the year, the god’s birthday, when a large crowd/audience would be present. As was standard theatre practice, the troupe provides a repertoire from which audience members can choose. The constitutional elements of the theatre, and the fluidity of theatre/stage/audience, are key to Li Yu’s storytelling. The two theatre events at the Temple of Lord Yan mark the change of identities for the main characters. The first theatre event occurs when both Chuyu and Miaogu are professional actors, but the circumstances of real life intrude into their onstage romance. After the performance, Miaogu is supposed to marry a rich man. Miaogu’s performance as Yulian in Thornwood Hairpins on that day shows the proximity of stage to real life. In the first few scenes, Miaogu is merely playing the character Yulian. Her performance is superb, but it does not captivate the audience. When she reaches a later scene, and touches upon her own anguish, she “unconsciously bares her heart and soul” to the audience and entrances them (Li Yu quanji 4.266; Silent Operas 182). In the final scene, “Clasping a Rock and Plunging into the River,” the actor takes over the character completely. In the play, Yulian only expresses her anguish privately and does not denounce anyone. While Miaogu is playing Yulian in this scene, she suddenly curses Sun Ruquan by name and improvises a curse-filled denunciation of both Sun Ruquan and the rich landlord who has purchased her betrothal. “Miaogu stood facing [the landlord], and every time she spoke the words ‘False-hearted rogue’ she pointed at him, and every time she said ‘Damned Villain’ she stared him in the eye” (Li Yu quanji 4.266–7; Silent Operas 183). Miaogu thus conflates the villain in the story with the villain in the play, her offstage life merging with her onstage performance. The conflation of theatre and real life reaches its climax when Miaogu steps from the stage and performs a real “drowning” act: “Clasping the rock, Miaogu went straight to the front of the stage, from which, as she concluded her song, she gave a mighty leap—right into the river” (Li Yu quanji 4.267; Silent Operas 184). The spatial arrangement of the temple theatre here is crucial for the interwoven staging of a play and a real life happening. In a typical performance, Miaogu would have exited the stage after her aria. Miaogu, however, plunges into the river, her real drowning overlaying the character’s drowning in the play. As a result, Miaogu acts out a real play (做出一本真戲). This real play within the story is something that Li Yu was exceptionally proud to create as he highlighted in describing the story’s seven ingenuities. “Whereas playwrights have always developed plays from real events, this story develops real events from a play” (Li Yu quanji 4.279; Silent Operas 201). With this scene, Li Yu is presenting the differences between theatre and real life as thinly as possible. After all, the distinction between the theatrical drowning (the drowning onstage) and the real one (the drowning offstage) lies only in the direction in which Miaogu leaps. The reader is left to wonder whether the rock that Miaogu clasps is a prop or a real rock. The real drowning “act” in the river symbolizes Miaogu’s use of theatre to end her real life as a professional actress. Miaogu, thereafter, begins a new life outside the theatre while Chuyu resumes his studies and eventually passes the civil service examinations. Miaogu’s drowning ends her life as a professional actress whose low social status leads to her being sold into a marriage. The close proximity of the green room renders a joint drowning possible. Before Miaogu plunges into the river, she calls out in the direction of the green room, urging Chuyu to follow her into the water. But she refers to him as “Husband, Wang Shipeng!,” using the name of Chuyu’s character to evoke their marital status in the play. Chuyu, sitting on the prop trunk in the green room at the time, jumps up and flings himself into the river after her.

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Like the actors, the audience is marked by the fluidity of onstage and offstage identities. One audience member, who receives much narrative attention, is the landlord that Miaogu is supposed to marry after the performance. On the day of the performance, he is proud of himself and eager to show off his good fortune in marrying such a beauty. He appears in the theatre “dressed in his finest clothes and begins parading up and down in front of the stage, hoping to catch the audience’s eyes and make them sigh with envy” ((Li Yu quanji 4.265; Silent Operas 180). When he swaggers into the green room to ask for the repertoire (a privilege given to the benefactor of the temple theatre), he generously lets Miaogu choose the play. He is therefore flaunting his real life identity as a rich landlord who can buy Miaogu and sponsor theatre performances. When Miaogu as Yulian curses Sun Ruquan/the landlord using phrases such as “false-hearted rogue” and “damned villain,” however, the rich man says “Quite right!” identifying himself as an audience member without realizing he is also the target of the curses. The rest of the audience is also markedly comical because of their dual roles as good audience members and practical-minded villagers. On the one hand, they become furious with the landlord because they understand the love between Chuyu and Miaogu and the injustice of the impending marriage. The audience, all crying, also become spectators of the actress’s real life personal sorrow. On the other hand, they are also mercenary, practical-minded villagers who use Miaogu’s death to get back at the landlord, who had been flaunting his wealth and good fortune. They are “positively gleeful and rise up in arms, ready to go before the prefect and lodge a petition” (Li Yu quanji 4.269; Silent Operas 186). The landlord has to buy the audience’s silence with a thousand taels of silver (Li Yu quanji 4.268–9; Silent Operas 186). In both respects, Li Yu highlights the audience’s proximity with the theatrical performance. If Miaogu is the one who directs the suicide scene, Chuyu is the mastermind who orchestrates the couple’s return scene into a theatrical finale of reunion (tuanyuan xi 團圓戲) by taking advantage of the spatial structure and practices of the temple theatre. This second theatre event takes place more than three years later, after Chuyu has passed the civil service examinations and is on his way to his official post with Miaogu, but they take a detour through Miaogu’s hometown: [Chuyu and Miaogu] could see from a long way off that the stage was still standing in front of the Temple of Lord Yan, and that the table and chairs were still on it, as if the performances were not over. Tan sent one of his servants off to inquire … Now, people who put on ritual plays claim to be doing it for the benefit of the god, but actually they do it for the audience. If the conditions don’t suit the audience, the god will scarcely be allowed to enjoy the play on his own! So the benefactors cancelled the performances and arranged a make-up celebration for the third day of the following month. Tan and Miaogu just happened to arrive as the performances concluded and the actors were about to be dismissed. (Li Yu quanji 4.274; Silent Operas 194) Since the stage is erected outside the temple gate with its front extending out over the river, travellers on boats can watch the play, which is why Chuyu and Miaogu realize that the theatre is still giving performances that year. They make inquiries and learn that Jiangxian’s troupe happens to be performing. Like Tingxiu, who brings into full relief his transformation by acting as an official onstage and wearing his costume offstage, what marks the transformation of Chuyu and Miaogu is their change from actors to audience/benefactors of the theatre, who have the privilege of choosing a play for the troupe to put on. Coincidences in Li Yu’s fiction draw the reader’s attention to his deliberate focus on creating the “marvellous” in storytelling. The timing is particularly pinpointed to the near completion of the play, showing how fluid it is. Li Yu’s plot hinges on the social practice of temple performances, for which there can be multiple benefactors. Chuyu sends a servant to inform the troupe manager that he is

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passing by and would like to sponsor an additional play. Since the actors have not been dismissed, and an additional benefactor is willing to pay for a performance, the theatre continues. The additional theatre event orchestrated by Chuyu is marked by the conflation of theatre and the real. As benefactors of the temple theatre, Chuyu and Miaogu request that Thornwood Hairpins be put on, which puts Jiangxian in the position of playing the male lead in the same play and on the very stage where Miaogu drowned herself. While Chuyu and Miaogu watch the play from their boat moored alongside the temple, they are also testing Jiangxian’s feeling for her daughter. As Jiangxian appears on stage as Wang Shipeng, she shows no distress during the first few scenes. In the scene in which Yulian throws herself into the river, she has to fight back her sobs and keep dabbing at her eyes with her sleeves. When the play progresses to the scene “Sacrificing to the River,” the same scene that Tingxiu played in, Jiangxian bursts into unrestrained sobbing and changes the script, in which a husband mourns a wife, into a mother mourning her child (Li Yu quanji 4.276; Silent Operas 196). Seeing the conflation of Jiangxian’s onstage and offstage identity, Miaogu appears out of the audience and addresses her as Mother. The eager crowd presses forward to get a good look at the young woman, whom they thought was dead. To increase the expectations of this enthusiastic audience, Chuyu suggests that Miaogu step off the official boat with him dressed in their finest clothes—a crimson collar, phoenix hood, and cloud mantilla under bright-blue parasols and accompanied by servants and maids. Chuyu relates his story in a “loud, ringing voice,” as if performing the sheng role again (Li Yu quanji 4.277; Silent Operas 196). The difference between the official’s hat and clothes and theatre costumes is blurred. Before Chuyu and Miaogu enter the stage to announce their return to the local community, they change into their official clothes in the same way as performers change into costumes. The clichéd description of Chuyu and Miaogu’s real official clothes further reminds the reader of theatrical costumes. Chuyu’s real life success and status are at the forefront of the theatrical grandeur; the enthusiastic audience welcomes Chuyu’s and Miaogu’s reemergence partially because they simply reenact a theatrical dénouement, one the audience is already familiar with. While building his story on the contiguity of onstage and offstage, Li Yu, like Langxian, also distinguishes theatre-people from scholars. The theatre-people in Li Yu’s story include Miaogu’s mother, Liu Jiangxian, other troupe members, and the theatre god Erlang. Unlike Chuyu, who picks up acting quickly and switches from the jing to the sheng role easily, the troupe’s sheng role does not even qualify to be a chou. Other than Chuyu, none of the other members of the troupe understand classical Chinese. Li Yu’s distinction between theatre-people and scholars is achieved through the inclusion of two gods in the story, a literati god, Lord Yan, and the patron god of theatre, Erlang. The long critique at the end of the story draws attention to the inclusion of Lord Yan as the fifth extraordinary feature of the story: Five: since cults are established by the gods, Erlang, as the patron of the acting profession, ought to have been called upon to play the celestial matchmaker; instead he is left out, and it is Lord Yan, with no connection to acting, who takes his place. (Li Yu quanji 4.279–80; Silent Operas 201) It is only natural for Lord Yan, as a river deity, to assist the lovers when they try to drown themselves in the river. More importantly, it is Lord Yan who helps Chuyu and Miaogu. Lord Yan was a Song or Yuan official later deified as the god in charge of calming storms and ennobled as the Marquis Pacifier-of-Waves. Lord Yan is directly involved in the romance between Chuyu and Miaogu, but is also a particular kind of deity who “wants [their romance] to begin in the theatre and end in the theatre” (Li Yu quanji 4.274; Silent Operas 194). That the lovers should thrive under the protection of Lord Yan instead of the theatre god reinforces Li Yu’s distinction between theatre-people and scholars. The accompanying commentary reminds the reader of Chuyu’s identity as a scholar. Erlang, the patron god of the acting profession, on the other hand, serves as

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Lord Yan’s foil. The merest hint of an affair offstage between the sheng and dan roles, though they are often required to act out romantic feelings for each other onstage, is enough to offend Erlang, who then brings down punishment on the entire troupe (Li Yu quanji 4.259; Silent Operas 173). Rather than facilitating Chuyu and Miaogu’s romance, Erlang forbids it because he dictates that the theatre should be separate from real life. The contrastive characters, Miaogu and Jiangxian, act as another distinction between scholars and theatre-people. Miaogu is an authentic character who utilizes theatre as a vehicle for personal expression. She insists on living theatre as part of her real life: since she is assigned to be Chuyu’s wife on stage, she should remain truthful to him in real life. Miaogu recognizes Chuyu as a true romantic and through this recognition she is elevated from a professional actress to a scholar’s zhiyin (recognizer). She also has the ability to quit the theatre and take up weaving to support her husband so that he can concentrate on his studies. Although Miaogu has never woven in her life, she learns the techniques quickly because of her intelligence. Jiangxian, by contrast, lacks the ability to join the gentry class. Although she is versatile in theatre—she can play all four roles of sheng, dan, jing, and chou—she is incapable of forsaking the acting profession itself. When she leaves her troupe because it is inappropriate for the mother-in-law of an official to be an actor, she becomes sick and has to resume her career as an actor to stay healthy. The narrator explains that because of Jiangxian’s birth horoscope she has to be an actress for her whole life. In real life, Jiangxian fakes emotions with her patrons for financial gain and is not picky about whom she goes to bed with. For her, performance and prostitution are intimately linked and she is resigned to forsake her true emotions for her livelihood (Li Yu quanji 4.264; Silent Operas 180). The writers and commentators of the two vernacular stories discussed in this chapter, Langxian, Feng Menglong, and Li Yu, all saw theatre, with its constitutional elements and interactive relationship between audience and actors, as a particularly fruitful site for exploring a variety of popular themes in early modern Chinese short stories. As Patrick Hanan notes in his masterful book, The Invention of Li Yu, Li Yu relies on “the illusory medium of drama to express a truth that cannot otherwise be revealed” (89). Theatre has more significance than just being an illusory medium; its components are all fundamental to Li Yu’s making of the story. Though Li Yu liked to claim that all of his stories were original, he drew much from the earlier theatre-story by Langxian in crafting this story. He even embedded the performance of the same play, and even the same scene, into his own short story. While Li Yu was more outspoken in his commentaries, the decision to embed theatre into his fiction gave him creative opportunities not otherwise available. For Li Yu and Langxian, the spatial arrangement of a temple theatre and of a private felt carpet theatre in a main hall, were the most important elements in their creation of the literary effect of marvel or wonder, an effect highly prized by readers in early modern China. Both prized marvel and wonder, but they also prized the distinction between theatre-people and scholars, a distinction important to their own identities as failed scholars who made their living catering to enthusiastic audiences.

Note 1 Fu Mange, Yu Zhandong, and Yang Xiaohui calculate that there are sixteen collections of vernacular short stories in the Ming dynasty, eight of them including stories that embed the literal theatre.

Works Cited Abe, Yasuki 阿部泰記. “Shu Soshin ni yoru Ri Ryoo no Dorama ka 朱素臣による李漁のドラ英化” (The dramatization of Li Yu according to Zhu Suchen). Yamaguchi daigaku bungakukai shi 山口大学文学会誌, vol. 38, no. 1, 1988, pp. 23–38.

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Theatre-Stories in Early Modern China Chou, Chih-p’ing. Yüan Hung-tao and the Kung’an School. Cambridge UP, 1988. Epstein, Maram. Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Harvard UP, 2001. Feng, Menglong. Stories to Awaken the World. Translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang, U of Washington P, 2009. Feng, Menglong. Xingshi hengyan 醒世恆言. Rpt. Renmin wenxue, 1956. Fu, Mange 伏漫戈, Zhandong Yu 於展東, and Xiaohui Yang 楊曉慧. “Xiqu yishu zai Mingdai huaben xiaoshuo zhong de chengxian” 戲曲藝術在明代話本小說中的呈現 (The inclusion of theatre arts in Ming dynasty vernacular short fiction). Wenhua yishu yanjiu 文化藝術研究 (Studies in culture and art), vol. 13, no. 3, 2020, pp. 78–86. Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Vernacular Story. Harvard UP, 1981. Hanan, Patrick. The Invention of Li Yu. Harvard UP, 1988. Hu, John. “Ming Dynasty Drama.” Chinese Theater: From Its Origins to the Present Day, edited by Colin Mackerras, U of Hawaii P, 1983, pp. 60–91. Li, Yu. Silent Operas. Translated by Patrick Hanan. The Chinese U of Hong Kong P, 1990. Li, Yu. Li Yu quanji 李漁全集. Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1992. Li, Wai-yee. “The Rhetoric of Spontaneity in Late-Ming Literature.” Ming Studies, vol. 35, 1995, pp. 32–52. Mei, Chun. The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China. Brill, 2011. Shen, Grant Guangren. Elite Theater in Ming China, 1368–1644. Routledge, 2005. Shen, Jing. “Role Types in The Paired Fish, a Chuanqi Play.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 226–236. Tan, Fan 譚帆. Youling shi 優伶史. Shanghai wenyi, 1995. Wang, Anqi 王安祈. Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang ji qi yishu 明代 傳奇之劇場及其藝 術. Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1986. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020. Wolfe, Graham. “Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theater-Fiction.” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, December 2018, pp. 303–325. Zhu, Suchen 朱素臣. “Qinlou yue” 秦樓月. Li Yu quanji, vol. 11, 1991, pp. 1–121.

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26 AGAINST ANTI-THEATRICALITY The Stage as Respectable Profession in Florence Marryat’s Theatre-Novels Catherine Quirk

Despite the wide-spread popularity of the theatre throughout the nineteenth century, the stage continued to be seen by many as a disreputable place. For women in particular, pursuing a career on the stage was considered a sure way to lose one’s reputation. While actors throughout the nineteenth century worked to establish the theatrical profession as a source of productive, sustainable, and morally-sound careers, commentators and the wider public continued to hold sceptical views of the stage. Critics have traced this anti-theatrical rhetoric in Western Europe to Plato’s reading of the dangers of mimesis in The Republic (c. 380 BCE). “In [Plato’s] view, theatrical performance—acting—encouraged citizens to be something other than they actually were” (Ferris 165). In England, after the reopening of the professional theatres in 1660, much anti-theatrical rhetoric focused on the actresses newly-visible on the stage: the theatre “not only placed its women on public view but often put them in positions of physical and emotional intimacy with men not their fathers or husbands” (Gardner 75). Felicity Nussbaum notes that many “misogynist anti-theatrical tracts charged that women, often taken to be metonyms for the theatre itself, were at once responsible for the theatre’s corrupting influence and more susceptible to it” (149). Sos Eltis emphasizes the shock with which these anti-theatricalists regarded women on the stage: “in an age when the private domestic life was the touchstone of a woman’s integrity, and female virtue was commonly figured as open, artless and sincere, an actress’s public assumption of emotions she did not feel was doubly suspect” (171). In addition, the public nature of the stage contributed to the ongoing equation of the actress with the prostitute. “Acting was the only living other than prostitution in which a woman’s own labour could be so financially rewarding” (Davis 19), but because of the actress’s reliance on “her physical attributes to please an audience, [she] was still vulnerable to age-old assumptions of sexual looseness” (Eltis 171). While elements of this association remain, as Victoria Wiet has pointed out, in castingcouch culture and the identification of certain Hollywood actresses as sex symbols, by the end of the nineteenth century the equation of the two professions had begun to lessen. In part, the growing number of professions open to women made the association a nonsensical one. But more specifically, as Mary Jean Corbett suggests, “the changing status of the actress [was] part of the overall embourgeoisement of the Victorian theater” (108). While Henry Irving’s 1895 knighthood often marks the theatre’s shift to a respectable profession in England, the attempt to establish this respectability had begun much earlier: at least with Sarah Siddons’s height of fame at the turn of the nineteenth century. Shearer West argues that “Siddons is best remembered for rendering respectable a profession that had previously besmirched the name of

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-33

Against Anti-Theatricality

any woman who joined it” (193). West’s study of Siddons suggests that the actress played on “the unconscious perceptions of audiences who tended to see the performer and the role as two sides of the same coin … By extracting qualities of pathos, heroism, stoicism, determination and filial dedication from her characters, Siddons directed audience attention to their virtuous qualities” (193). In the second half of the century the stage was increasingly identified among the professions open to the middle classes, and by the end of the nineteenth century, professionalization had become a marker of the respectability of the stage. Florence Marryat was one of the many late-nineteenth-century actresses who took advantage of the profession’s growing respectability. Born in 1833, the ninth child of naval adventure novelist Captain Frederick Marryat, her early adult life saw her traverse the globe in the wake of her soldier first husband. When this relationship fell apart, Marryat returned to England in 1860 and began to support herself and her children by writing novels in the newly popular sensation fiction genre. With over seventy novels published in her lifetime, Marryat is one of the most prolific authors of the nineteenth century. Her novels range in subject from sensational love story in her first novel, Love’s Conflict (1865), to detective fiction in Her Father’s Name (1876), and vampirism in The Blood of the Vampire (1897). Having established herself as a writer and editor, in the 1870s Marryat turned to the stage for additional financial support, with her first play, Miss Chester, opening at the Holborn Theatre on 6 October 1872. Between 1881 and 1883, as she wrote many of her theatre-novels, she was concurrently touring England with Richard D’Oyly Carte’s company (Pope, “Regulation” 20). Marryat continued to both write and perform for much of the next two decades, before shifting her attentions to spiritualism in the final years of her life. These theatre-novels of the 1870s and 1880s consistently draw on Marryat’s own professional experience as an actress to treat at length the assumptions made about working women. As Catherine Pope notes, Marryat “show[s] women … as cultural agents who resisted and redefined the identity imposed upon them during this crucial period of social change” (“Marryat” 8). As such, her fiction should stand alongside that of the prominent New Women writers who were, at the end of Marryat’s career, her contemporaries. Her writing, however, has been largely “overlooked” by the “feminist recovery projects” which have revisited other women writers of the period (Palmer 16), and she remains relatively obscure despite her extensive body of work. In the context of this collection, however, the sheer number of her theatre-novels (Marryat’s oeuvre contains the largest number of theatre-novels of any nineteenth-century novelist) as well as their explicit social commentary make Marryat a prime nineteenth-century example of the power of theatre-fiction. Marryat’s theatre-fiction falls within the often-overlooked novel genre Sarah Bilston calls “theatrical women’s fiction” (40). Bilston situates the height of the genre’s popularity in the 1870s and 1880s (41), but novels such as Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1848), Edwina Jane Burbury’s Florence Sackville, Or, Self-Dependence (1851), and Annie Edwards’s The Morals of Mayfair (1858) anticipate the trend, and Mabel Collins’s Juliet’s Lovers (1893) and Louise Closser Hale’s The Actress (1909) bring the genre into contact with the concerns of the fin de siècle. The focus of each of these novels is a young actress-heroine, depicted as “sympathetic, hard-working and self-renouncing” (Bilston 41) in deliberate revision of the common stereotype of the immoral, ambitious actress. Many of the novels follow strikingly similar plotlines: a young girl characterized as loving and selfless enters on a stage career to assist her family or provide for her own subsistence. Through hard work, selfsacrifice, and dedication to learning her craft, she slowly works her way up to fame and fortune, at which point she is reunited with her family and makes a brilliant marriage which removes her from the stage and grants her a high social standing. The novels focus on respectability and professionalization, both for the individual actress and for the theatrical profession as a whole. The majority of these actress-heroines begin their stage careers out of financial necessity. In Bertha H. Buxton’s Nell, On and Off the Stage (1880) and Eva Ross Church’s An Actress’s Love Story (1888),

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for instance, the heroines have been born into theatrical families. Going on the stage, for Buxton’s Nell, forms part of her familial duty, and her uncomplaining willingness to enter into this career marks her propriety as a dutiful and self-denying daughter. For Ross Church’s Myra and for Margherita in Edith Stewart Drewry’s Only an Actress (1883), the choice to go on the stage is acceptable only because of the girls’ theatrical antecedents. In Eliza Lynn Linton’s Realities (1851), Clara turns to the stage to support herself when she is left a penniless orphan. In many of these examples, “financial need helps legitimize the young actress’s choice, but the novels amplify their defence of the profession by emphasizing that the disposition to perform is inborn and irrefutable” (Bilston 102). Whatever her initial circumstances, each of these actress-heroines proves her morality and dutiful nature by the order in which her motivations are presented: the initial financial need gives way only later to love of the theatre, recognition of talent, and ambition for professional success. Many of these novels use the stage as a contrast to society to emphasize the actual respectability and professionalism of the stage in opposition to the assumptions of popular anti-theatrical sentiment. While Bilston does not argue for this opposition as a commentary on anti-theatricality, she does note that the theatre-fiction of the mid- to late-nineteenth century tends to include at least one character who speaks from the position of conventional prejudice. In Buxton’s Nell, On and Off the Stage, for example, both Nell’s mother and Mrs. Dalrymple, the mother of Nell’s society counterpart, lament their daughters’ love of the stage, describing the profession as improper, unladylike, and demeaning to their social position. This expression of anti-theatricality enables authors to write “on the defensive”: to explicitly combat the stereotype by including in direct response “lengthy discursive passages [which] adjure the reader to re-evaluate such ideas about the theatre and distance the true artist from the shallow actress of popular imagination” (Bilston 48–9). Working against the stereotype, theatrenovelists such as Marryat present their actress-heroines as role models rather than as cautionary tales, focusing on the hard work and dedication necessary to a successful career on the stage. In the three theatre-novels discussed below—and to a lesser extent in Her Father’s Name, Facing the Footlights (1882), and The Nobler Sex (1892), which I have no space to discuss at length—Marryat draws attention to the hypocrisy at the basis of these assumptions by pairing the stage and high society. In My Sister the Actress (1881), she contrasts the impeccably moral actress, Betha Durant, with a series of increasingly improper society women to emphasize the hypocrisy of the latter. Peeress and Player (1883) draws attention to this contrast by highlighting the innate virtue of the central character, Susie Gresham, while in both roles of the title. Miss Harrington’s Husband (1886) expands Marryat’s commentary further, focusing on the baselessness of society’s prejudices against the actress and, by extension, all working women. In each of these three novels, Marryat emphasizes professionalization over frivolity and respectability over immorality, flipping the anti-theatrical narrative to instead comment on the failings of society off the stage. In this chapter, I argue that Marryat subverts an antitheatrical hierarchy and advocates for the intrinsic respectability of the stage by identifying the theatre as the sphere of innate respectability, and society as dependent on deception. Expanding on the work of such scholars as Bilston and Pope, and following Renata Kobetts Miller’s assertion that, in the nineteenth century, the actress was “emblematic of women participating in the public sphere” (1), I consider the actress-heroine as a figure for working women more broadly, positioning Marryat’s theatre-fiction amongst those better-known nineteenth-century novels which address women’s role in society.

“I Could Not Live a Life of Duplicity”: My Sister the Actress Emily Allen argues that “dishonesty is in fact endemic to the middle-class ideal of female behavior” (127). Marryat’s theatre-fiction certainly corresponds to this claim: in each novel she singles out the deception rampant in society in contrast to the purer motives of her actress-heroines. In My Sister the

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Actress, Marryat establishes an opposition between her central actress figure, Betha Durant, and the well-bred and well-trained society women Betha associates with throughout the novel. Betha begins the novel as a well-off young lady, and so her progression upwards in the theatrical profession lacks the overt necessity of many other fictional actresses’ journeys; Betha nevertheless devotes herself to improving the status of her profession and rises through natural talent and genuine propriety rather than through ambition and deceit. Betha, like many other actress-heroines, initially enters the theatrical profession for purely financial reasons. Early in the novel, Marryat addresses the widespread issue of the unmarried woman in need of employment and the scarcity of occupations deemed acceptable by respectable society. In Betha’s initial search for work, she acknowledges the necessity of finding employment, but at the same time notes the hierarchy of available jobs. When the manager Mr. Henderson suggests that she become an actress rather than a teacher she refuses. Teaching, Betha asserts, would be a “duty,” however meagre the salary and however unfit she may be for the work; going on the stage “would be contrary to all etiquette” (1: 169). Rather than having her heroine jump at the first chance of employment offered her, concerned only with making an income, Marryat notes the prejudices that might keep even a woman who must work from entering into a career on the stage. Betha’s motivations shift over the course of the novel as she begins to recognize her vocation and ambition to succeed. Unlike many actress-heroines, whose progression from necessity to ambition constantly foregrounds their commitment to duty, Betha recognizes her love of the stage immediately upon making her debut. On reading the papers the next morning, she “feels fairly intoxicated with her success. The love of histrionic display is inherent in her: it has lain dormant, hitherto, for want of encouragement; but it is her second nature, and her present indulgence proves to be like the first drop of blood to the tiger” (1: 174–5). Betha’s love of acting is described as innate to her character, and leads to Betha’s desire for advancement both in and for her chosen profession. As the novel progresses, Betha increasingly works to rehabilitate the reputation of the theatre as a whole, reminding her fiancé Rob, for instance, that “it is noble, grand, intellectual, and elevating,” and that she “feel[s] honoured to be one of its members” (2: 29). While Betha certainly does have personal ambition and a desire for fame and fortune, she remains a dutiful and honest character throughout the novel because of her selfreliance and hard work in pursuit of that fame. Rather than, for instance, taking a well-connected lover to further her theatrical ambition, Betha continues to work hard at her craft, to make personal sacrifices, and to honour those placed above her. Marryat draws attention to the common view of the stage as a frivolous pursuit in order to make this point about the hard work necessary to the profession—and the positive repercussions of this necessary work. Rob summarizes this view of the theatre as one of “the jolliest things ever”: a place of amusement (1: 271). While not unequivocally dismissing the theatre for its flawed morals and corruption, such an assessment of the theatre as inconsequential diversion, rather than legitimate professional endeavour, nevertheless expresses popular anti-theatrical sentiment. Having experienced only the entertainment offered to an audience member, Rob cannot begin to imagine the hard work and long hours of drudgery the illusion requires. Betha in turn credits this necessary hard work with the moral uprightness at the centre of her defence of the stage. “The life of an actor is full of hard work. He has very little time to think of anything but his business; and since the men and women employed at a theatre only meet there for rehearsals or performances, there is not much opportunity for carrying on flirtations behind the scenes” (3: 113). Contrary to the popular conception of the stage as a place of idleness and frivolity, the stage necessitates a devotion to work, often at the expense of pleasure. Marryat sets up the contrast between Betha and her society counterparts early in the novel, juxtaposing her self-forgetfulness as she searches for her mother with the self-interest of Mrs. Wallerton, before ever suggesting Betha might go on the stage professionally. The description Marryat gives of the widow focuses on her talent for and reliance on duplicity: she has “a waist of five-and-twenty

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inches—that owes its size to compression rather than to Nature,” and is “very attractive to such people as have not the power to look below the surface” (1: 38). Marryat emphasizes the danger of women like Mrs. Wallerton in terms reminiscent of those used in anti-theatrical rhetoric to represent the dangers of the actress. She is able to take on any character and thus has “the power of appearing all things to all men” (1: 39). Marryat’s narrator goes on to emphasize the universality of Mrs. Wallerton’s character, asking “how many ladylike liars do we not meet as we pass through the world! They are the poison of society—that make it the vile sham it is of subterfuge, and backbiting, and untruth” (1: 39). This universality continues with Mrs. Wallerton’s successful training of her other step-daughter, Hyacinth, in the duplicity expected in conventional society, as becomes apparent on the young woman’s reappearance in Volume Three. Betha’s sister has learned how to present a false front to the world: “She is a most wonderful young lady to look at; very pretty and very fashionable: with … more than a suspicion of pearl powder on her face—and a patch of black plaister under her left eye to increase the delicacy of her complexion and the brilliancy of her glance” (3: 70). This initial description of Hyacinth’s effective use of cosmetics—another form of false presentation often associated with the stage—shifts the point of society contrast from Mrs. Wallerton to Betha’s own sister, making use of the intrinsic duality of sisterhood seen in many nineteenth-century novels. The commentary central to Marryat’s novel—against society and in defence of the stage—appears most strongly in her treatment of Hyacinth’s conduct in this last volume. The narrator explains that Betha’s failure to understand her sister shows that the actress “has yet to make acquaintance with the fast girl of the period, who has no respect for age, nor religion, nor public opinion, nor even for herself” (3: 99). Betha, busy with her professional pursuits, “has not hitherto enjoyed an opportunity of being instructed in the doctrines of fashionable morality” (3: 121), and cannot comprehend her sister’s reliance on deceit, flippancy, and contempt. Hyacinth also embodies the hypocrisy that Marryat reads into the anti-theatrical views held by many in high society. Initially, Hyacinth is to be kept away from her sister for fear of contamination by association with an actress (1: 213–7). Only once Betha has achieved fame and fortune, and has thus earned the approval of fashionable society, are they allowed to meet again. Hyacinth then justifies her own actions by stating the assumptions she has been taught to hold about the stage: “I thought you all flirted and made love together on the stage, and would think nothing of a girl having more than one string to her bow” (3: 112). Hyacinth endorses conventional assumptions about an actress’s loose morals, and assumes Betha’s support of her own lapses in proper conduct. Marryat shows through the contrast of the two sisters that society is considerably worse than the assumed state of the stage. In the middle volume of the novel, Marryat supports her opposition of stage and society by pairing Betha with a series of school fellows, showing how Betha’s entry into and dedication to an arduous professional pursuit has helped distance her morally from those with whom she was brought up. When, having made her professional debut, Betha encounters her former classmates Ada and Ella Matthews, she is delighted to be treated once again as an equal, after being driven from her family. She makes a point of being honest about her circumstances, ensuring Ada and Ella are aware of her professional position and why that position means she “should not go and stay with [them] at Black Abbots” (1: 241). When Betha does receive an invitation from the twins’ mother, she projects her own unswerving honesty onto her friends, assuming they have told their parents the truth of her status: “innocent Betha goes into the trap, blindfold, never doubting that she has been invited there, spite [sic] of her profession, and proportionately grateful for the fact” (1: 253). The dramatic irony of this episode—Marryat narrates the twins’ lies to their parents while Betha remains blissfully unaware of the falsehood—allows the reader to participate in the author’s evident frustration with the Matthews’s anti-theatrical sentiments. Mrs. Matthews epitomizes the hypocrisy innate to those who critique the morality of the theatre: the character lacks a single redeeming quality. Betha explicitly accuses her hostess of training her

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daughters in the very deceit the older woman has just associated with the professional stage: the actress asserts, scathingly, that she has “not taught [Ada and Ella] to tell falsehoods” (2: 47). Marryat’s social commentary also appears in Betha’s tirade against her hostess’s prejudices: “if I have chosen a profession that numbers some amongst its numbers that are not all they should be, I have done no more than if I had become a countess, under the idea that all the aristocracy are virtuous” (2: 47). Deeming all actresses to be immoral without any proof, when perhaps a few might in fact be, Betha claims, is no different than making a sweeping judgment of any segment of society. Marryat focuses the reader’s attention on Mrs. Matthews’s inability to recognize her own daughters’ potential for deceit, and the ease with which she instead attributes evil actions to someone outside the realm of her immediate experience. Betha remains silent in the first half of this scene, allowing Mrs. Matthews to implicate herself and to prove her own hypocrisy. The conversation ends with Mrs. Matthews’s assertion that deception “may be the practice in the miserable calling to which you belong, but [Ada and Ella] have been brought up, thank heaven! in a very different manner, and do not even know the names of the vices with which you must unhappily be familiar” (2: 45). The blatant untruth of this statement, coming as it does on top of many other examples of the general deceitfulness of society, constitutes Marryat’s strongest defence of the stage as a proper occupational space for respectable women. Marryat sets Betha as a contrast to the novel’s other women characters—and the stage as a contrast to high society—by continually emphasizing the honesty of the actress. Describing Betha’s sentiments about the potential of a reunion with her family, the narrator reminds us that “Betha cannot tell a falsehood even in her softest moments” (3: 91). Confronted by the husband of her former friend, Mattie Kemyss, and suddenly realizing Mattie’s own reliance on falsehoods, Betha reflects that “deceit is foreign to her nature, and she cannot understand it in that of others” (2: 136). Most significantly, Betha deliberately contrasts the requirements of her profession with her sister’s approach to daily life: “I have many faults, but I could not live a life of duplicity” (3: 115). In refusing “duplicity” specifically, Betha recalls anti-theatrical characterizations of the acting profession as inherently duplicitous: as relying on a performer’s ability to deceive her audience into thinking she is something or someone she is not. Betha, whose professional success relies on her talent for such “duplicity,” can neither understand nor condone the same practices off the stage. For the majority of Volumes One and Two, Marryat maintains this rigid separation of stage and society, to heighten her contrast. In Volume Three, however, once Betha has returned from America an unquestionable star, Marryat uses Mattie to illustrate the positive influence the professional stage might have on society. Mattie has been depicted as another representative of the evils of society: “a young, heedless creature, with extraordinary beauty, an affectionate heart, and a very small amount of brains” (1: 137). Like Hyacinth, Mattie assumes Betha’s morals must lapse with her experience of the stage, and so sees in her friend a perfect accomplice for her own romantic intrigues with the actor Geoffrey Clifford. Having fallen out of favour in society after her elopement and Geoffrey’s subsequent desertion, Mattie realizes not only that she had previously treated Betha unfairly, but also how worthy of praise Betha’s theatrical life has been when considered against her own off-stage duplicity. Betha’s advice to her friend as Mattie follows her into the profession emphasizes the honesty intrinsic to Marryat’s depiction of the stage: “Be true to yourself, dear Mattie, in the future—and the last part of your life may be better than the first” (3: 249). Truth and honesty, which Marryat here associates with life on the stage, will serve Mattie better than the most fashionable self-interested falsehood.

“She Has Never Heard of Evil”: Peeress and Player In Marryat’s later theatre-novel, Peeress and Player, she complicates this contrast of stage and society by having both embodied in the central character, Susie Gresham. Marryat’s title at once emphasizes the central contrast of her rebuttal to anti-theatrical rhetoric and refers to the fitness of the actress to hold a

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position in respectable society. The novel follows Susie from her birth to a provincial actress and her manager husband, through her upbringing by her intensely anti-theatrical aunt, to her subsequent return to act with her father’s company. She leaves the stage to marry the aristocratic Lord Luton, only to discover he is still in love (Susie is led to believe) with his first wife. Susie returns to the stage, and while the final volume of the novel unfolds with the actress hiding behind an alias, the reader knows that she is at once a peeress and a player. The title, however, also holds a second implication. Throughout the novel, Marryat contrasts Susie with Lena Anstey: at first her childhood playmate, and later the first wife of Lord Luton. When Susie and Lena first meet as children, the two clearly form opposite ends of a spectrum of good and evil. Lena Anstey has been reared without either faith or restriction … Left to the influence of strangers and dependents, and brought up in a land full of superstition, mystery, and fallacious argument, the soul of the dean’s daughter has outgrown her body, and for all her impetuous and ill-governed nature, she is older in heart than Susie will be to the last day of her life. Miss Prescott’s charge, on the other hand, though a little woman in many respects where Lena is a child, retains a mind as innocent and confiding as when it first shone forth from her baby eyes. She has never heard of evil. (1: 83–4) Lena runs wild, causes disruption, and enacts literal violence, kicking her puppy to death; Susie unquestioningly obeys, sits quietly, and is unable to tell a lie, even when it would be in her best interest. Once married to Lord Luton, Lena again causes only pain and disruption, leaving her husband for another man and creating a rift between Luton and his family. Susie, Luton’s second wife, also leaves her husband, but she does so because she thinks it will be best for him: she leaves to allow him to live happily with the memory of his first wife, as she believes he will do. Significantly, the contrast Marryat draws between Susie and Lena is never one of actress and society lady. Instead, whenever the contrast appears in the novel Marryat positions it as between two women only. When they are contrasted as children, Susie has not yet learned of her theatrical heritage; when contrasted as the first and second Lady Luton, she has left the stage and taken up a position as an aristocratic wife. Susie herself draws attention to this contrast’s location in the two women’s respective characters, rather than in their social positions: “though I may not be so beautiful, or clever, or well-bred as she was, I am more worthy to be loved in return. I would not deceive him—God knows I would not. I would die sooner than dishonour a hair of his dear head!” (3: 8; emphasis in original). The novelty of Marryat’s contrasting characters comes into clearer view at the end of the novel, when Lena reappears as Abby, Susie’s dresser when she returns to the stage. In Lena’s transformation into Abby, Marryat seems to literalize the fall of the society lady in contrast to the rise of the actress. The unfaithful, deceitful, and selfish aristocrat has become a downtrodden and ill lower-class working woman, while the consistently virtuous actress is sought after and respected both on and off the stage. But we also see here the effect of the theatre, and of hard work, on even the least respectable society lady: Lena’s association with the theatre and her constant work on behalf of others has led her to a place where she is able to see, if not yet address, the error of her former ways. Lena’s death cements this redemption, when she finally performs a selfless act in giving Susie’s secret up to Lord Luton. By reframing Lena first as the dresser and then as the vehicle for Susie and Luton’s reconciliation, Marryat emphasizes the virtue of the theatre: her work on behalf of others backstage has brought Lena’s character closer to the virtuous, minimizing the contrast between her and Susie. As in My Sister the Actress, here too Marryat supports her central contrast with a range of other women. Once Susie goes on the stage, she forms the “respectable” end of a hierarchy of actresses. At the opposite end Marryat positions “Cock Robin”: “a lady better known on the music-hall stage than

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in the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy” (2: 17–18). The music-hall actress appears only once, in the scene of Susie’s temptation: a post-show dinner party with the untrustworthy men from the garrison. Susie “experiences a repulsion for her that she has not yet felt for any of her male companions” (2: 18), locating Cock Robin as not only the lowest of the women the reader has yet been introduced to, but the lowest of all the characters, regardless of gender. She is clearly at home with the men from the garrison, and is just as clearly kept separate from the rest of the women for the remainder of the novel, marking her relative position on Marryat’s spectrum of theatrical practitioners. Even burlesque, however respectable Mr. Gresham’s company might be, falls short of the theatrical ideal. When Susie returns to the stage in Volume Three, her new colleague Miss Hunter remarks that burlesque is the realm of “those who can’t do anything else, and a few foolish girls who think they’ll catch the fancy of some of the swells in the stalls, and perhaps marry them” (3: 110). Marryat has already presented specimens of both of these women in the relatively respectable leading burlesque actress Geraldine de Vere, whose absence makes the temptation dinner possible (2: 38), and Louie Montressor who “fancies every man in the theatre has come expressly to look at her” (1: 198). Even though Louie instigates the flirtation which leads to the temptation dinner, Marryat describes her as a step above the vulgar and repulsive Robin: “She is a girl of the people, who has climbed to her present position by dint of hard work” (1: 201). Susie begins in burlesque along with the other women in her father’s company. When she returns to the profession in the third volume, however, she fulfils Louie’s prophecy—“I expect the emotional, melodramatic screeching and fainting line will be much more your style” (2: 9)—by moving up the hierarchy into melodrama, alongside Miss Hunter. None of these other women, however, is described as anything close to the evil of Lena, nor does their treatment of Susie come close to the deliberate gaslighting practiced by Mrs. George, the society lady who convinces Susie her husband does not love her. The other actresses in the novel fall short of Susie’s virtue, as indicated by their positions on lower rungs of the theatrical hierarchy, but they do not act with the malice of the novel’s society women. Given the multiple implications of the title, Marryat not only sets up a contrast between the two worlds of peeress and player, but also notes the consistency of Susie’s virtue in both worlds. As she moves from player to peeress and back again, Susie remains the same respectable woman, repeatedly characterized as good by all those who meet her. Marryat presents Susie’s goodness as innate to her character, not something to be contaminated by her association either with the stage or with high society. In part, Marryat traces this innate goodness to Susie’s early training in the house of her devout (and devoutly anti-theatrical) aunt, Miss Prescott, where she “has been trained to believe that to tell an untruth is to have fellowship with the devil” (1: 53). Susie retains her early religious training even when she returns to the stage, which allows Marryat to insert one of her more direct pieces of narratorial commentary: “It is not incompatible with a professional life to be a very good Christian, although the grossly ignorant are so apt to declare it is” (1: 193). Susie’s ability to retain her virtue when she enters the professional theatre runs counter to anti-theatrical expectation. Marryat’s insistence on the compatibility of theatre and virtue positions Susie not as a novelty, made virtuous by nurture, but as a representative type: the virtuous actress. Even in her final rise to the “highest walks of the drama” (1: 192), Susie’s main claim to respectability in contrast to the other actresses comes from her naiveté. Luton is first drawn to this innocence, in which he sees a contrast both to the other actresses of the company and to the society women he has associated with: “I marry Susie because I want a sweet, pure woman to take the taste of all the filth I have wallowed in, out of my mouth” (2: 79). In another stark contrast to anti-theatrical views, Luton sees Susie as a beneficial influence. He soothes her fears about their respective stations in life by insisting that “you are a dear innocent child, who has the power to win me to a fresher, purer life, without in any way reminding me of a past I am earnestly striving to ignore” (2: 72–3). In Luton’s view, she holds the power of innocence, in contrast to his fallen state. Marryat makes a final response

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to the anti-theatrical assumption of the actress’s supposed contaminating effect by incorporating another reversal: Luton intends to benefit from Susie’s innate virtue, but instead becomes the agent of contamination. From the moment Susie enters his house, her own virtue is tested, until she finally repeats his first wife’s action of running away. Marryat’s support of the stage as a place of respectable work and professional endeavour continues in this novel’s representation of what it is that makes Susie so eminently respectable, both on the stage and off. Marryat repeatedly returns to the inherited nature of Susie’s character by emphasizing her “theatrical blood” (1: 109), even while she remains unaware of that lineage. Susie’s desire to be an actress and her insistence on following through on that desire come from her suddenly being made aware of her mother’s profession. When she first meets her father, she expresses her willingness to work alongside him, not knowing what that might entail. Only after he has told her of the nature of the family business does she realize her desire to go on the stage: “Oh, father! only let me try and be everything my mother was, and you will make me so happy,” she insists (1: 171). Mr. Gresham in turn emphasizes the profession’s respectability by assuring Susie that her mother was both an actress and “one of the purest and best women that ever breathed,” and that this dual identification should encourage her to “hold the theatrical profession in the highest honour” (1: 170). When she has left the stage to marry, she again reflects on this natural inclination. In her lowest moments of introspection, Susie contrasts her aptitude for the stage with her apparent failure as an aristocratic wife: “Often she thinks she will go back to the stage. She was born to it, she says, and she is not, and never will be, fit for anything else. The grandeur and formality by which she is surrounded oppress and subdue her” (3: 33). In these moments, Marryat reveals the ambition that accompanies an artistic vocation, in contrast to the apparent aimlessness of Susie’s life as Lady Luton. As Susie contemplates the possibility of going back on the stage, Marryat notes that “in Susie’s breast there is a very powerful touch of ambition, inherited from both parents—the ambition of the artist to do something worthy of his name before he dies” (3: 34). A career on the stage, Marryat suggests, holds better potential for the fulfilment of this ambition, this possibility of doing “something worthy.” In making this division, Marryat adds a gendered element to ambition, to this desire to do something worthy with one’s life, that her previous theatre-novels have not so overtly included. Susie’s desire to leave her mark on the stage—in professional, working life—contrasts the domestic role she fills as she makes this reflection. Conventionally, the aristocratic wife’s mark on the world would come through her children, through support of her husband, or perhaps through charitable work of some sort. Susie, because of her inherited theatrical nature, cannot see the worth of this conventional sort of contribution to society. When she does finally leave Lord Luton and go back on the stage, she expresses this step not as an escape from her marriage but as a return to work: “I want to go back to the stage and support myself,” she says to Henrietta Jarrod, now her step-mother. “I was happier and freer there” (3: 80). Her virtuous nature remains unchanged on the stage or off the stage, but only in supporting herself as an actress is she is best able to make a fulfilling and productive contribution to society. This commitment to work and to useful contribution, Marryat argues throughout Peeress and Player, sets the actress apart from her society counterparts, and contradicts the anti-theatrical image of her as a corrupting influence.

“She Has Always Worked Honestly at Her Calling”: Miss Harrington’s Husband In the later Miss Harrington’s Husband, Marryat further complicates both her critique of society and her defence of the stage, though she again contrasts the central actress character, Georgie Harrington, with society women and other actresses alike. Like Susie Gresham, Georgie has returned to the stage after marriage. In her case, this necessity has arisen because of her husband’s inability to support the pair. As such, for much of the novel Georgie is positioned in the odd realm of the “society actress” (6): a woman neither of one world nor of the other. Throughout the novel, those who accept Georgie in

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either sphere are able to do so by separating those two parts of her identity: society and actress. She belongs to the stage in spite of her society background, and she belongs to society in spite of her professional endeavours. Georgie remains a lady regardless of her association with the stage, a fact illustrated by her motherin-law’s treatment of her upon their first meeting, late in the novel. Lady Kinlock has been presented to the reader only through her anti-theatrical sentiments, which led to her quarrel with her son upon his marriage to an actress. She and her husband “looked upon the stage as a sink of iniquity, and its professors as lost souls” (46). Marryat plays up the dramatic irony of the two women’s meeting by having Lady Kinlock express her disapproval of her daughter-in-law to Georgie herself, before the aristocrat is aware of the other woman’s identity: “she belongs to a profession which renders her unfit to associate with me or my daughters” (260). Lady Kinlock assumes her interlocutor holds a similar station in society to her own, having judged only by external appearances. Marryat constructs this scene to show the relativity of respectability, when judged only from the outside. Georgie’s actions and character have not changed, but Lady Kinlock’s reception of her has done, based only on the circumstances in which they meet. The aristocrat makes assumptions about Georgie based first on her profession (the actress as necessarily immoral because of her professional associations), and later on her self-presentation (the woman as necessarily a lady, because of her external appearance). The same conversation, however, problematizes the easy location of anti-theatrical hypocrisy only in the aristocrat. Georgie, in her third-person defence of herself, is equally disparaging of her own profession: I can tell you so far—she is a lady—as much so as yourself—and she has never been contaminated by the profession you stand so much in dread of. She has always worked honestly at her calling, and she has had two safeguards against all temptation—her love of principle, and her love of her husband. (260–1) Georgie defends herself only, not the profession, in contrast to Marryat’s earlier location of innate virtue in the profession itself. Georgie is respectable, and that characteristic has allowed her to remain safe from contamination while working on the stage, but Marryat’s defence of the stage in Miss Harrington’s Husband falls short of those presented by her earlier theatre-novels. The later text instead broadens the defence of the working actress to encompass working women more generally. What marks Miss Harrington’s Husband as an outlier amongst Marryat’s theatre-novels is the focus throughout the novel on blame within the Leghs’ marriage. Marryat emphasizes throughout that neither party within the marriage fits the role expected of them by society: Gerard fails to provide the financial support expected of a typical bread-winning man, and Georgie does so. Thus the specifics of Georgie’s profession are less significant to the novel’s depiction of gendered roles than the fact that she continues to work after marriage. In the age of the New Woman, Georgie could have entered any number of professions. Any profession, however, automatically unfits her, in her aristocratic relatives’ eyes, for her role as the wife of a gentleman. For Lord and Lady Kinlock, “Gerard’s previous peccadilloes—his gambling and extravagance at college—his disreputable behavior in the army—and many other scrapes in which he had been detected since, all fell into insignificance compared with his having married an honest woman who earned her own livelihood” (234; emphasis added). The aristocratic pair certainly hold anti-theatrical sentiments, but their initial suspicion of the match comes from Georgie having been a working woman at all, rather than in response to her profession specifically. In Miss Harrington’s Husband, then, Marryat expands her previous contrast of stage and society, and the relative respectability of each, to address all professional women. In doing so, she firmly situates the stage amongst these other professions, marking it—as Henry Irving’s knighthood would do a decade later—as one amongst many respectable business pursuits.

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“It Will Be My Pride to Take You from this Life of Toil for Ever”: Endings Although Marryat fully supports the independent, professional woman, all three novels end by having their heroines marry (or reunite with their husbands) and retire from professional life. Such an ending, while apparently inconsistent with the aims of the theatrical women’s novel, in fact forms one of the genre’s conventions. Bertha Buxton is one of the few authors willing to alter the convention of ending with a marriage and the actress-heroine’s full removal from her professional career. Jennie of “The Prince’s” successfully merges domestic and professional futures; in Nell, On and Off the Stage, Buxton strays even further from convention, ending with Nell pursuing a successful career in the provinces, with only the hint of a future marriage. Edith Stewart Drewry also ends Only an Actress with Margherita both married and continuing her stage career. Like Georgie Harrington, Juliet Vane in Mabel Collins’s Juliet’s Lovers is in fact married for much of the novel, but details of the plot require the marriage to be kept secret. When she remarries at the end of the novel, she too leaves the stage. Henry Chorley, reviewing Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters in The Athenaeum, notes that the actressheroine’s assent to a “high marriage” by way of her artistic talents “is a familiar intention” in those novels that focus on “women of genius” (288). Chorley suggests that such an ending is not only conventional but also natural: the marriage of the actress-heroine “is not introduced merely because novels usually cease with the marriage ceremony;—but because … it has never been admitted that Art can be the main business of her life, as of Man’s” (288). Art, like all work, remains a masculine world, and so even when a novel has chronicled a woman artist’s rise to fame, that novel must, to remain plausible, reposition the heroine back in her natural—that is, domestic—sphere. Of the three actresses considered here, Susie Gresham follows Chorley’s pattern most exactly when she leaves the stage for a second time at the close of the novel. Marryat introduces the possibility of the working married actress early in the novel through Miss de Vere, who insists: “my husband was perfectly aware when I married him that I should not give up the profession” (Peeress 1: 181). Her dual role—wife and actress—sets up the possibility that Susie might follow a similar path, and retain her own dual role of peeress and player after her marriage. Luton’s insistence that Susie leave the stage before their marriage suggests, however, that such a dual role would not in fact meet expectations of off-stage respectability, a contrast that seems at odds with Luton’s continued insistence that he is proud of his wife’s professional background (2: 122; 2: 155). This insistence that Susie leave the stage implies that her profession was only temporary: a way of making money until something better came along, which positions the stage as stop-gap rather than vocation. The heroine of Marryat’s Miss Harrington’s Husband is also married throughout, but returns to the stage to support her ineffectual husband. The novel ends with their saccharine reunion, in keeping with Chorley’s characterization of the theatre-novel’s necessary trajectory. While Georgie suggests she will not be off the stage long (“My art has been so much a part of myself that I don’t feel as if I could ever quite give it up” [316; emphasis in original]), the final narrative description of the novel shows her apparently contented as a wife and new mother (319). Because of Marryat’s focus in this novel on gendered conventions within the Leghs’ marriage, once Gerard takes on the role of supportive spouse, Georgie’s professional endeavours are no longer necessary. Her professional role has served its purpose, supporting the family while the traditional (male) breadwinner was unable to do so; once the gendered roles are reconfigured, the novel can end with Georgie in the conventional wife and mother role without apparently weakening Marryat’s argument for the stage as a viable profession. Marryat ends My Sister the Actress on a more radical note of ambiguity. Rather than explicitly removing her heroine from the stage and placing her back into the domestic sphere, the novel closes before Betha’s marriage to Rob takes place. By ending before Betha’s marriage, Marryat emphasizes her heroine’s independence and control over her own life: qualities associated with the public sphere and the stage rather than the private sphere. As Catherine Pope points out, many of Marryat’s novels end

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in a similar state of ambiguity, rather than a definite marriage and a sentimental closing image of the perfect domestic scene: “This is a device she frequently employs—reaching a morally acceptable resolution, but leaving an air of ambiguity—suggestive of alternative endings” (“Regulation” 118). In My Sister the Actress, the ambiguity of the ending rests on Betha and Rob’s previous discussion of what would occur after their marriage: Rob’s second proposal, at the beginning of the second volume, relies on Betha leaving the stage. This promise, “to leave the stage and become [Rob’s] wife” (2: 30), is the one Betha renews in her concluding letter to Rob. Marryat leaves her reader with the assumption rather than the certainty that Rob will hold Betha to both aspects of her earlier promise, and that she will retire to the domestic sphere. Marryat refuses, however, to remove the possibility that Betha the wife might coexist productively with Betha the working actress. In these three theatre-novels, Marryat contrasts her actress-heroines and their respective highsociety counterparts in order to establish the overall respectability of the theatrical profession. At the same time, the contrast emphasizes the hypocrisy of a society that condemns actresses for assumed behaviours while ignoring similar behaviours in women off the stage. My Sister the Actress shows an actress who is wholly honest and self-sacrificing, while her society counterparts enact multiple deceptions. Peeress and Player argues that innate virtue can easily fit a woman for either sphere: aristocracy or the stage. And Miss Harrington’s Husband suggests that a woman does not necessarily remove herself from respectability by entering a profession. All three novels work to rehabilitate the reputation of the stage and to establish the theatre as a suitable avenue of professional pursuit for women. Where Marryat goes further than many of her contemporaries, though, is in using the stage as a metonym for the public sphere more broadly. In each of these three theatre-novels, Marryat enters into the larger argument of the working woman’s place in the world, showing the actress, as a working woman, to be innately virtuous, hard-working, and morally incorruptible, in contrast to the idle women of high society.

Works Cited Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2003. Bilston, Sarah. “Authentic Performance in Theatrical Women’s Fiction of the 1870s.” Women’s Writing, vol. 11, no. 1, 2004, pp. 39–53. Burbury, Mrs. [E. J.]. Florence Sackville: Or, Self-Dependence. 3 Vols. Smith, Elder and Co., 1851. Buxton, Bertha H. Jennie of the Prince’s. 2 Vols. 1876. Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1877. Buxton, Bertha H. Nell, On and Off the Stage. 1880. Tinsley Brothers, 1884. Chorley, Henry F. “Review of The Half Sisters.” Athenaeum 1064, 18 March 1848, pp. 288–290. Closser Hale, Louise. The Actress. Harper and Brothers, 1909. Collins, Mabel. Juliet’s Lovers. 3 Vols. Ward and Downey, 1893. Corbett, Mary Jean. Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies. Oxford UP, 1992. Davis, Tracy C. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. Routledge, 1991. Drewry, E. S. Only an Actress. 3 Vols. F. V. White and Co., 1883. Edwards, Annie. The Morals of Mayfair. 3 Vols. Hurst and Blackett, 1858. Eltis, Sos. “Private Lives and Public Spaces: Reputation, Celebrity and the Late Victorian Actress.” Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1600–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 169–188. Ferris, Lesley. “Introduction to Part Five: Cross-Dressing and Women’s Theatre.” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman, Routledge, 1998, pp. 165–169. Gardner, Viv. “The New Woman in the New Theatre.” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman, Routledge, 1998, pp. 74–79. Jewsbury, Geraldine. The Half Sisters. 1848. Oxford UP, 1994. Linton, Eliza Lynn. Realities: A Tale. 1851. Valancourt Books, 2010. Marryat, Florence. Miss Harrington’s Husband. George Munro, 1886. Marryat, Florence. My Sister the Actress. 3 Vols. F. V. White and Co., 1881.

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Catherine Quirk Marryat, Florence. Peeress and Player. 3 Vols. F. V. White and Co., 1883. Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Edinburgh UP, 2019. Nussbaum, Felicity. “Actresses and the Economics of Celebrity, 1700–1800.” Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1600–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 148–168. Palmer, Beth. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. Oxford UP, 2011. Pope, Catherine. The Regulation of Female Identity in the Novels of Florence Marryat. University of Sussex, PhD Dissertation, 2014. Pope, Catherine. Florence Marryat. Edward Everett Root, 2020. Ross Church, Eva. An Actress’s Love Story. 2 Vols. F. V. White and Co., 1888. West, Shearer. “Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Ageing Actress.” Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1600–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 191–213. Wiet, Victoria. “#MeToo, Actress Novels, and the Radical Potential of a Forgotten Victorian Genre.” V21: Victorian Studies for the Twenty-First Century. 27 September 2018, http://v21collective.org/victoria-wietmetoo-actress-novels-radical-potential-forgotten-victorian-genre/.

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27 AFFECT IN THE THEATRE-NOVEL Performing Shame(lessness) in Wilkie Collins’s No Name Anja Hartl

It has become somewhat commonplace to argue that, in the Victorian Age, the history of the novel—which has been in the limelight of scholarly discussions for many decades—cannot be fully understood without taking into account “the attractiveness, ubiquity, variety, centrality, and influences of theater” (Weltman 48). Recognizing, in Emily Allen’s words, that “Victorian theatre was the novel’s ally, inspiration, and competition” (“Victorian” 571), a number of studies have recently been dedicated to an exploration of these generic intersections, focusing, for example, on representations of theatre in the novel and analysing strategies for adapting dramatic techniques to novel-writing (see Kurnick; Allen, Theater Figures). In this context, Graham Wolfe has identified intermediality as a defining characteristic of the hybrid genre of theatre-fiction, foregrounding the “challenges and opportunities that arise in engaging through one medium with elements and attributes of another” (6). This intermedial perspective emphasizes that, rather than merely serving as a disembodied metaphor in the novel, theatre must be construed as a “lived social and material praxis” (O’Quinn 377). Thus, as Emily Allen insightfully argues, “with its spectacular bodies on stage and tradition of embodied viewing, theater reminds the novel of the very materiality it would like to forget” (Theater Figures 7). This understanding of theatre “as an embodied channel for the communication of ideas and sensory experiences” (Palmer and Hofer-Robinson 2) has, however, so far remained underexplored in scholarly discussions of theatre-fiction. Building on an intermedial notion of the genre, this chapter draws on Wilkie Collins’s theatre-novel No Name (1862) to illustrate how theatre can be conceptualized as a material and corporeal artistic practice in novels and to explore the implications of intermediality for readers’ engagement with the fictional text. The interface between theatre and the novel can be understood as an affectively charged encounter. Focusing specifically on the role of affective intensities in theatre-fiction, I argue that the genre’s medial hybridity enhances the circulation of affects both within the fictional world and in readers’ experience of the text. Theatre lends itself particularly well to the study of affective energies, which offers a crucial vantage point for reconsidering theatre-fiction and addressing a blind spot in the debates so far. Defined by liveness and the co-presence of bodies during performance, theatre represents a prime space for the articulation, shared experience, and transmission of affects: it is “an apparatus for the production of affect” (Ridout 168). As Adam Frank elaborates, theatrical art is characterized by a strongly physiological and affective dimension: “theatrical performance almost inevitably foregrounds expressive bodies, in particular framing the face and the voice—primary physiological mediums of affective communication—as aesthetic experience” (10). Hence, by virtue of its material and corporeal dimension theatre is capable of mobilizing affective intensities and of communicating with its

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-34

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audiences on sensuous and physiological levels. While this sense of immediacy has tended to be understood as medium-specific and thus in opposition to novel-writing and novel-reading, Marcie Frank has shown that a “theatrical history of the novel” complicates the common alignment “of performance with embodiment and print with disembodiment” (2–3). Extending this insightful argument, I contend that this investment in affect and the body is a characteristic feature of much theatre-fiction. The Victorian Age offers a particularly productive context for exploring the affective dimensions of theatre-fiction. Questions of physiology, materiality and embodied subjectivity were of eminent concern to the Victorians and shaped their understanding of literary writing and aesthetic experience (see Morgan; Dames). By drawing attention to Victorian conceptualizations of the body as a material entity, as well as to their physiological understanding of mind and consciousness, scholars have established the Victorians as precursors of contemporary affect and new materialist theories (see Macdonald 125; Cohn 564). The significance of affects in Victorian literature and culture crystallizes in nineteenth-century theatre-fiction. Using Collins’s No Name as a prime example of the genre’s affective potentiality, I show that theatre serves as a source for enhancing the “affective valences” (Ahern 7) of the novel. No Name is based on a paradigmatic scene of shame, which triggers an unfolding of affective energies in—and through—the novel that is reinforced through the ways in which the text engages with and draws on theatre both thematically and aesthetically. After the sudden deaths of their parents, Magdalen and Norah Vanstone find out that they were born out of wedlock. Their illegitimacy turns their existence into a shameful one in the eyes of the society of their time, depriving them of their inheritance and name. Unlike her sister, who straightforwardly submits to her fate, Magdalen resolves to resist and to gain control over her shame by turning to the theatre: her acting talent enables her to instrumentalize the very shame society imposes on her as a means of reclaiming her name and asserting her rights. Collins connects his critique of the shame-inducing Victorian laws and norms to his portrayal of theatre as an affectively contagious artistic practice. “[S]imulat[ing] the effects” (Palmer and Hofer-Robinson 3) of theatre in the medium of the novel, Collins deploys theatre’s affective potentiality as a strategic device for mobilizing affective energies, for enhancing the novel’s sensational quality, and for thereby spurring its critical thrust.

Theatre, Affect, and Anti-theatricality in No Name Theatre and popular entertainment more generally perform a leading role in No Name. Lyn Pykett, for example, has characterized the novel as “preoccup[ied] with performativity and theatricality” because it employs “acting as a general metaphor for social existence” (41). In a similar vein, Isobel Armstrong suggests that “[t]he parallel worlds of bourgeois realism and theatre continually comment on each other” (155). While these and other previous studies have offered insightful interpretations of the significance of theatre and of theatricality more broadly in the novel, I argue that Collins’s engagement with theatre goes decidedly beyond these metaphorical levels. Specifically, Collins, a keen theatregoer and successful playwright himself, conceptualizes theatre as an embodied and material artistic practice in No Name. Thus, the novel presents and, as I will show in more detail below, exploits theatre as a motor of affective circulation, thereby mobilizing affective energies as a means of fuelling the novel’s social critique on an affective level. Opening on the day after Andrew Vanstone and his daughters Norah and Magdalen attended a concert in a neighbouring town, the novel introduces public entertainment as a pre-eminent concern. The concert took place in Clifton, a 16-mile journey by railway and a 19-mile journey by road from the family’s country residence. While the novel’s emphasis on these details suggests the growing accessibility of public entertainment in the course of the nineteenth century through an increasingly developed infrastructure, it also underscores the energy and effort that are required in order to be able to attend an event in the first place. What predominates in the characters’ reports the next morning is

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therefore not so much the artistic quality of the concert itself as their bodily and sensuous experience of the spectacle. The footman Thomas, who accompanied the party and witnessed the performance “at the back” (4), thinks that the concert was above all “loud” and “hot” (4). His impression matches the father’s, to whom it was “[n]othing but Crash-Bang, varied now and then by Bang-Crash; … smothering heat, blazing gas, and no room for anybody” (5). Similarly, Miss Garth, the former governess and long-time member of the family household, asserts that one needs to be “strong enough for concerts twenty miles off” (6) to be able to endure “[t]he vile gas, the foul air, the late hours” (7). Hence, public entertainment in No Name is presented as a source of physical experience and accordingly defined by its impact on the spectators: it is first and foremost associated with bodily discomfort and a potentially harmful impact on people’s health. This emphasis on the material and embodied dimension of theatre has direct implications for the conception and presentation of the characters in the novel. The opening chapter describes the Vanstone family home as a haven of domesticity through a plethora of details, raising generic expectations that stand in stark contrast with the strongly sensational qualities of the remainder of the story (see Bisla 2). At the same time as employing conventional realist strategies, however, this section is also deeply theatrical, functioning as an exposition that introduces its dramatis personae in dramatic fashion. One by one, the characters appear on the landing of the stairs as if entering a stage; the narrator’s descriptions—comparable to stage directions in play-texts—especially focus on the figures’ bodies and their external appearance. Andrew Vanstone, for example, is introduced as “show[ing] his character on the surface of him freely to all men” (4). While this evokes nineteenthcentury theories of physiognomy, according to which “one could discover a person’s predominant temper and character through the interpretation of outward appearance” (Ryan 43), the novel exposes such surfaces as deceptive. Above all, the detailed descriptions serve to underscore the protagonist Magdalen’s difference from her relatives, as she “present[s] no recognizable resemblance to either of her parents” (8). Notably, Magdalen stands out through her physical qualities, especially her “extraordinary mobility” and “exuberant vitality” (8). As opposed to the other attendees, she is energized by the concert and yearns to repeat the experience of being “plunge[d] … into a crowd of people, and illuminate[d] … with plenty of light, and [set] … in a tingle of excitement all over, from head to foot” (10). As Lauren Eriks Cline insightfully concludes, the experience “leaves Magdalen almost excessively able-bodied” (251). By introducing the characters with reference to the concert, then, Collins evokes the wider context of public entertainment to foreground the significance of the body and the senses in the novel. The narrator’s insistence on Magdalen’s innate versatility—her “seductive, serpentine suppleness” (9)—further differentiates her from her relatives and foreshadows her passion for acting. An invitation to participate in a theatrical event organized by the Marrable family for their daughter’s birthday provides her with a first opportunity to experiment with acting. Particularly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, performances by amateurs to invited audiences in private households were a well-established, albeit “elitist” and “exclusive” ritual (Burroughs 265; see also Russell 192). These private theatricals were a distraction “[t]o overcome the luxury of boredom” (Burroughs 265) and thus a popular pastime for those who could afford them.1 No Name emphasizes the labour and expenses involved in staging a play at home, as the Marrables’ “drawing-room [is] laid waste for a stage and a theatre,” a process that is accompanied by “the breaking of furniture and the staining of walls … thumping, tumbling, hammering and screaming; … doors always banging, and … footsteps perpetually running up and down the stairs” (35). These viscerally concrete descriptions reflect the almost violent impact the theatrical transformations seem to generate. More importantly, “[c]reating a dramatic world out of a domestic chaos” (35), the ostensible “privacy” of these theatrical undertakings is undermined: the supposedly safe home is infiltrated by the publicity of theatre (and vice versa), unsettling boundaries not only between private and public spaces but also between fiction and reality.

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Situated on the threshold between private and public, the so-called “private” theatricals accorded women a central position because, as managers of the domestic sphere, they were vital in organizing the theatrical undertakings too (see Russell 192). More significantly, this type of theatre also provided them with an exceptional opportunity for actively participating as amateur actresses and for thereby “assert[ing] themselves in public culture as a whole” (Russell 193)—crucially, “without the stigma of involvement in the professional stage” (199). While this “theater of the closet … was particularly friendly to women’s creative endeavors” (Burroughs 266), the private theatrical in No Name, a performance of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), is presented as a decidedly riskier undertaking. The choice of this comedy, which stages characters disguising and thereby playfully undermining any stable sense of identity in their pursuit of love, is significant because it closely intertwines with and to some extent anticipates the plot of No Name. Magdalen assumes a leading role in the preparation and performance of this play. Taking control over the casting process and assuming the role of director, for example, she obliges her passive lover Frank to join the project and coaches him during the rehearsal (40–1). When another participant withdraws from the project, Magdalen takes over this vacant role, which gives her the opportunity to learn to adopt and differentiate multiple identities within the same play. As a performer, Magdalen stands out from the other amateurs because she succeeds in “concentrat[ing] in herself the whole interest and attraction of the play” (49). According to Lauren Eriks Cline, Magdalen’s acting “conjures an audience with all the markers of physical copresence” (254) and has an enrapturing effect on the spectators. Underscoring theatre’s capacity to transmit affective intensities, this sense of absorption is reinforced through the heated, affectively charged atmosphere in the auditorium. Echoing the conditions of the concert in Clifton, there is “an African temperature” (47) in the room and “a bursting of heated lamp-glasses” (47), as two hundred spectators are “all simmering together in their own animal heat” (48). In this atmosphere, Magdalen’s performance is described as unfolding a strongly infectious affective power. In one way, then, the participation in the private theatrical provides Magdalen with an arguably safe space for self-assertion and with an opportunity to experiment. Yet, her acting adventure is perceived as potentially dangerous and harmful precisely because it expands her sphere of influence and authority and allows her to live out her emotions and desires, which develop a beguiling, contagious quality that enraptures her spectators. Miss Garth, who is the most outspoken representative of what Jonas Barish has identified as “antitheatrical prejudice,” considers these effects deeply unsettling. After fiercely criticizing the damaging impact of the concert on the family’s health, she has a “battery of reproof” ready to “open fire” (37) against Magdalen’s involvement in the private theatrical. Predicting that “Magdalen, in the character of a born actress, threaten[s] serious future difficulties” (44), her growing anxiety about Magdalen’s acting skills culminates in her wish to send her away to a convent (see 42–4). Crucially, this desire to hide and conceal is indicative of Miss Garth’s shame: in her eyes, the theatre is an “idle … scheme” (50) and therefore a shameful enterprise. Yet, even though Collins focalizes the events through Miss Garth, the novel is far from endorsing her anti-theatrical position: the stereotypical way in which Collins cites this litany of suspicions towards theatre underscores his parodical intent. Rather, I argue that the novel instrumentalizes the very stigma attached to theatre, which was itself thought to be located on the threshold between legitimacy and illegitimacy in nineteenth-century culture (see Pearson 2; Armstrong 161), and deploys it as a strategic device to interrogate the social standards of its time. Building on the embodied and material dimension of theatre, Collins mobilizes his critique of Victorian inheritance laws and social conventions on an affective level through a deliberate transgression of norms—in other words, a strategic shamelessness. Blurring distinctions between the legitimate and illegitimate, the novel reverses common assumptions about theatre and shame and presents them as intimately connected sources of affective empowerment.

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Theatre, Shame(lessness), and Affective Management Revolving around the revelation of Magdalen and her sister Norah’s illegitimacy, No Name is built on a paradigmatic scene of shame, which the novel refracts through the medium of the theatre. Because of the shame that was associated with it in the Victorian cultural imaginary, theatre serves as a critical lens through which No Name interrogates Victorian notions of (il)legitimacy and (un)lawfulness. In the novel, shame functions as an affective motor of the plot, especially because it is a versatile affect that manifests itself in various ways, ranging from a conspicuous lack of emotion to anger to pride. As Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark explain, “the particular power of shame to combine with other affects—anguish, contempt, rage, fear—is one of the things that make it such a crucial element in the emotional life of human beings” (13). Crucially, shame can be ascribed distinct theatrical qualities: it is defined by “[b]lazons” (Sedgwick 5) of characteristic gestures, such as a lowering of the eyes and a hanging head, and marked by a dramatic “dialectic of showing and concealing” (my trans.; Geisenhanslüke 15). As a situation of public exposure, shame requires an (imagined) audience in front of whom acts of shaming and of feeling ashamed are performed. In No Name, Collins presents shame as a theatrical affect by drawing on the affective energies associated with dramatic performance to express his critique of the law and the social conventions derived from it. Deliberately transgressing social norms, Magdalen shamelessly appropriates the shame associated with both her illegitimacy and her theatrical career as a means of emancipation to recuperate her name and inheritance. Above all, acting empowers her because it facilitates emotional control. While the novel emphasizes Magdalen’s affective exuberance and the contagious force of her theatrical experiments, it also suggests that successful acting both depends on and enables emotional self-command. Rather than exposing Magdalen to the stigma of her illegitimacy by turning her into a spectacle, the novel allows her to remain “off-stage” when the lawyer Mr Pendril informs Miss Garth about the sisters’ situation after their parents’ death. Magdalen, however, listens in on their conversation from outside and learns that her illegitimacy is the result of a shameful series of secret marriages, re-written wills, and unlawful relations in the family. During this episode, the narrator withholds Magdalen’s own thoughts and presents Miss Garth and Mr Pendril’s reactions instead. Notably, Miss Garth’s paralysis and her inability to figure out how to “speak the dreadful words” and confront the daughters with “their own illegitimacy” (112) reflect her profound vicarious shame. By contrast, once Magdalen reappears on the scene, the novel emphasizes her emotional control: she is calm and collected rather than ashamed, sad, or enraged. Magdalen’s composure shows that she seems to have already “learnt” (114) to deal with her new situation. Her lack of emotional display is provocative, and it “distress[es]” (122)—we might say it shames—the assembled characters. Because of her unusual and inappropriate behaviour, Magdalen seems increasingly opaque to the other characters: while they do “[notice] a change in her” (124), they fail to describe it in words. As Mr Clare, her late father’s friend, presciently observes, Magdalen has begun to wear a “mask” (125), thereby not only protecting herself but also potentially manipulating her environment. More precisely, Magdalen’s illegitimacy not simply “enable[s]” but enhances her “inherently protean qualities” (Palacios Knox 79): the revelation of what is perceived as her shameful situation empowers rather than weakens her and encourages her to take action in order to restore what she considers to be rightfully hers. For this purpose, Magdalen decides to make use of her artistic talent and to undertake a theatrical career not because it offers her a means of disguising and concealing her shame but rather because it allows her to manage her emotions and to take back control over her life. To achieve this, she deliberately excludes herself from society: she “deconstructs the social order to get back into it” (Armstrong 159).2 Thus, cutting all ties with her family, Magdalen seeks theatrical training to be able to work as an actress. In the Victorian era, acting offered women a unique opportunity to partake in “the active, disciplined life and potentially the financial rewards of a

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profession” (Powell 3). While theatre increasingly gained in respectability in the course of the nineteenth century, professional actresses—in contrast with amateur actresses in private theatricals—“remained stigmatized” (49) and were frequently aligned with prostitutes in social discourse (see Powell 35; Hankey 227). As Tracy C. Davis explains, Actresses were symbols of women’s self-sufficiency and independence, but as such they were doubly threatening … Society’s ideology about women and prescriptions of female sexuality were constantly defied by the actress whose independence, education, allure, and flouting of sexual mores … gave her access to the male ruling elite while preventing her from being accepted by right-thinking and—especially—feminine society. (69–70) Echoing these concerns, Miss Garth considers Magdalen’s “fancy for going on the stage [reckless]” (159). Later in the novel, Magdalen learns from Miss Garth that her sister Norah has had to leave her position as governess because her employers had found out that Magdalen was “performing in public” (253) and thus leading “a suspicious way of life to all respectable people” (254) that potentially blemishes not only herself but her entire family. Hence, by choosing to pursue the career of a professional actress, Magdalen wilfully transgresses social norms as a means of recuperating her name and inheritance. Magdalen’s shameless behaviour is strategic, however: it signifies her attempt to take control over the very shame she is considered to embody. What enables her not only to control but also to capitalize on her shame is precisely the theatre: Magdalen undertakes a career as a professional actress not only as a source of income but above all to acquire acting skills in order “to further her own private ends” (207). To reclaim her name and inheritance, Magdalen needs to learn to disguise herself, to pretend to be someone else and to manage and manipulate her emotions. She is assisted in this endeavour by her distant relative Captain Wragge, who hopes to profit from his affiliations with the Vanstone family.3 Introducing himself as a “moral agriculturist,” Wragge is a sly manipulator who displays a “superhuman” degree of “shamelessness” (169). Inspired by the early-nineteenth-century performer Charles Mathews, a comedian adept at imitating identities, Wragge devises a one-woman show in which Magdalen adopts various roles and with which she successfully tours the country (see 190–1). Just as she did in the private theatrical, she excels in performing various roles and, crucially, in keeping them apart. Importantly, while her talent allows her to hide her (perceived lack of) identity, her adoption of other identities also fulfils important functions for her shame management. Notably, by imitating Miss Garth, the episode in the dramatic entertainment composed by Wragge that was most popular with audiences, Magdalen mimics the very authority of propriety and voice of shame in the novel, thereby parodying the social scripts which posit Magdalen’s illegitimacy and her theatrical work as shameful in the first place. In this vein, the success of her theatrical enterprise shows her that, as an actress, she is able to appropriate and play with the very social norms which have turned her existence into a shameful one in the eye of the public. Having learned to deploy her emotions strategically, Magdalen embraces the stigma of both her illegitimate status and her theatrical career to recuperate her name and inheritance. As Lauren Chattman notes, “Instead of demonstrating Magdalen’s rediscovery of proper feminine values through abandonment of self on stage, her brief career serves instead to point to the theatrical nature of the domestic role she has lost” (82). Hence, later in the novel, when her maid Louisa, with whom Magdalen intends to swap identities, objects that this reversal of roles is bound to fail because of their class differences, Magdalen counters: “Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance” (503). This insight into the theatrical essence of any identity is key to Magdalen’s plan: progressing “from private theatricals to professional performances to fraudulent impersonations” (Palacios Knox 85), she begins to apply these skills to her own life, further undermining the barriers between fiction and reality, as well as private and public.

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Rather than simply “wish[ing] to regain” (Chattman 82) her former respectability, however, what Magdalen desires above all is justice: a right to bear her name and to receive her inheritance regardless of social conventions. For this purpose, she abandons Wragge and leaves for London to appeal to her cousin Noel Vanstone, the heir of the late Michael Vanstone’s property and thus in possession of Andrew Vanstone’s legacy. Magdalen experiences her perceived lack of a socially recognizable, legitimate identity as a freedom to adopt any role: “Give me any name you like … I have as much right to one as to another” (194). At the same time, however, she is forced to realize that acting “in real life” is a different business altogether: “The art which succeeded by gaslight failed by day: the difficulty of hiding the plainly artificial nature of the marks was almost insuperable” (217). Thus, rather than choosing to appear in her own identity, she disguises herself once again as Miss Garth and, adopting the governess’s principles of propriety, attempts to shame Noel into recognizing the sisters as rightful heiresses. She acutely feels the transgressive nature of her project, which is expressed in viscerally explicit terms: “Her heart beat fast; a burning heat glowed in her as she thought of her false hair, her false colour, her false dress … A horror of the vile disguise that concealed her; a yearning to burst its trammels and hide her shameful painted face … took possession of her, body and soul” (221). The fact that she imitates Miss Garth no longer for “pleasure” but “for real” (Armstrong 158) puts her under tremendous emotional pressure. Acknowledging her shame, she finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between herself and her adopted role when she visits Noel and his housekeeper, Mrs Lecount. Crucially, this lapse is framed as a difficulty in managing her emotions, as Magdalen repeatedly falls out of her role in moments of intense feeling. Deeply agitated, she inadvertently slips back into her own voice when attacking Noel: Once more, her own indomitable earnestness had betrayed her. Once more, the inborn nobility of that perverted nature had risen superior to the deception which it had stooped to practice. The scheme of the moment vanished from her mind’s view; and the resolution of her life burst its way outward in her own words, in her own tones, pouring hotly and more hotly from her heart (236). While her acting skills help her to control her emotions to some extent, the burden of her disguise increasingly challenges her self-command and composure. Following this failed attempt to imitate Miss Garth in order to shame Noel into sharing the inherited money, Magdalen continues to adopt other identities, both real and fictional, and to wear other people’s “Skins” (263) to achieve her purpose. As the story progresses, however, Magdalen’s emotional upheaval and suffering increase: “continually impersonating others seems to wear down the actress’s body” (Palacios Knox 85). While Magdalen is ultimately successful in recuperating her inheritance, the price she has to pay for it—physically, socially, and psychologically—is considerable. Crucially, however, Marisa Palacios Knox concludes that “Magdalen is not vulnerable when embodying other characters, but rather in the spaces between those characters” (89). Especially when she is not (consciously) role-playing she is able to acknowledge her turmoil. Thus, early on, she confesses to Wragge that “I have lost all care for myself … I am nothing to myself” (273); her nihilism grows as her attempts to reclaim her name and propriety are repeatedly frustrated and culminates in her consideration of suicide: “O, my life! my life! … what is my life worth, that I cling to it like this?” (407). Through the device of internal focalization, the narrator grants readers access to Magdalen’s interior suffering and it becomes clear that what hollows her out to such an extent is not her acting and “the psychic damage to which the actress was thought to be particularly susceptible” (Palacios Knox 85). On the contrary, “her theatrical training literally keeps her upright as long as she is performing” and exerts a “sustaining power” (Palacios Knox 91) over her. Neither is her ostensible loss of identity the reason for her recurrent breakdowns. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that Magdalen has not

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so much lost her identity as her name—and through this, an identity that is perceived as legitimate and therefore socially acceptable. Consequently, her aim is not “to restore her true character” (Miller 79)—the novel precisely questions any such distinction between true and feigned, authenticity and fiction. Rather, it is a question of making her self—above all, her body—recognizable (and representable) to society by pretending to submit herself to its laws and norms. This simulated subjection to the law, which culminates in her marriage to Noel Vanstone in order to access her inheritance as his wife, is what paralyzes her: “The horror” of the marriage “petrified all feeling in her, and annihilated all thought” (393). It is when she finally seems to have achieved her aim that she suffers most: “She had never suffered in secret, as she suffered when the Combe-Raven money was left to her in her husband’s will. She had never felt the means taken to accomplish her end so unutterably degrading to herself as she felt them on the day when the end was reached” (493). Thus, while her acting talent enables her to control her shame, the price she has to pay for it is tremendous, as she suffers physically, mentally, and socially from her self-imposed exclusion. Rather than echoing common anti-theatrical ideas, the novel uses theatre and the profession of the actress as a critical lens to target Victorian notions of propriety and legitimacy as well as the pretence they give rise to across society as a whole. What makes Magdalen’s disguise and manipulation necessary in the first place is the pervasive hypocrisy she encounters. In one way or another all characters are pretending and playing roles: from Magdalen’s parents, who feign a legitimate marriage, to Miss Garth’s strategizing to return Magdalen home, to Mrs Lecount’s manipulation of Noel Vanstone—acting is necessary to achieve personal aims while upholding an appearance of respectability. Shifting attention from the individual case to a general diagnosis, then, Magdalen’s development exposes the harm caused by social expectations and the shame which deviance from these norms triggers. In this context, Magdalen’s theatrical engagement is a source of affective empowerment and emancipation because it allows her to learn to control her emotions, to offset her shame and thereby to challenge social conventions. Rather than idealizing Magdalen’s trajectory, the fact that Collins portrays her increasing suffering only reinforces the novel’s critique of the stigma associated with the illegitimacy of both Magdalen’s birth and her theatrical career. Hence, interrogating the relations between theatre and the novel, Collins draws attention to No Name’s complex affective economy. Theatre is portrayed as an affectively potent art form which offers both an outlet for Magdalen’s intense affective experience and a means of gaining control over it. This focus on affect, and on shame more specifically, complexifies previous readings of No Name, above all by shedding new light on the affective significance of theatre, which can be understood as an important medium between Magdalen and the other characters. As I will show in the next section, this radical potential of the circulation of affective intensities also has important implications for the relation between text and readers.

Generic Hybridity, Intermediality, and the Circulation of Affects In No Name, theatre is presented in its material dimension as an embodied artistic practice and as a source of affective intensities. Because of the agency, publicity, and affective energy they afforded their participants, acting and spectating were considered shameful activities, especially for women. Collins uses this perspective on theatre as an affectively charged art-form not only to express his critique of Victorian inheritance laws and social norms but also to render this critique tangible for readers: affective energies transgress not only bodily but also textual boundaries. In this section, I argue that No Name’s engagement with theatre creates a specific stylistic and aesthetic mode that serves to heighten the “affective valences” (Ahern 7) of the novel, thereby directly appealing to and sensuously involving the readers. The circulation of affects in and through No Name is above all tied to generic factors. As an example of sensation fiction, a genre that was particularly popular in the 1860s, No Name is part of a corpus of novels that are preoccupied with the production, circulation, and reception of affective

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intensities both within the text and on the part of readers. The label “sensation” aptly describes the visceral quality of these texts: the genre “was distinctively transgressive in that it was thought to appeal directly to the ‘nerves,’ eliciting a physical sensation with its surprises, plot twists, and startling revelations” (Gilbert 2). Hence, sensation fiction establishes an intimate relation between text and recipients: it “promised visceral affect” and “sought to elicit physical reactions … by creating an immersive experience” (Palmer and Hofer-Robinson 1). Drawing on various literary traditions, sensation novels are not only fundamentally hybrid in nature (see Gilbert 2) but also closely connected to Victorian theatre. According to Isobel Armstrong, No Name combines “the external theatricalities of farce and melodrama with the inwardness and observation that signal realism” (154). To Armstrong, this represents an “impossible marriage of genres” which serves to “[set] up the impossibility of marriage and its fundamental illegitimacy” (154). This emphasis on “impossibility,” however, obscures the extent to which theatrical and novelistic generic markers fruitfully intertwine in Collins’s novel. As I argue, No Name’s sensational quality hinges on Collins’s conceptualization of theatre as an affectively charged artistic practice. The ways in which theatre informs the novel structurally, narratively, and aesthetically serve to mobilize affects in the relation between text and readers and to enhance the sensational character of the novel. In the “Dedication” to his novel Basil (1852), Collins famously describes “the Novel and the Play” as “twin-sisters in the family of Fiction” (5). While this is an oft-cited statement, its implications for Collins’s theatre-novels, especially on material and affective levels, deserve closer attention. The quotation continues thus: “the one [the Novel] is a drama narrated, as the other [the Play] is a drama acted; and … all the strong and deep emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the Novel-writer is privileged to excite also” (5). Rather than merely suggesting that drama and novel are intertwined, Collins posits more radically that the novel is a kind of drama in its own right because it is no less suited to spur and convey affective energies than theatre. Hence, it is on the level of affective communication, rather than in its content, that Collins connects the novel to theatre and that his fictional works unfold their sensational quality. What distinguishes play- from novel-writing are the techniques deployed to achieve this effect: whereas drama relies on acting, the novel can achieve the same effects through narration. To illustrate this point, it is instructive to turn to Collins’s dramatic adaptation of No Name, which lacks any explicit reference to theatre and Magdalen’s spectacular career as an actress.4 Renata Kobetts Miller has connected this conspicuous absence of theatre in Collins’s stage version to the ostensible morality of the play: without the theatrical context, “Magdalen maintains her morality and identity” in the play, which “make[s] her easier to reclaim” (90). In this regard, the play is certainly less radical than the novel. Yet, from an intermedial point of view, Collins’s decision to reduce the significance of theatre in the play can be explained through the affective potency of the medium. The function theatre fulfils in the novel—namely to mobilize affective energies—is already achieved through the performance situation itself: the liveness and bodily copresence at the theatre establish an immediate form of affective communication between stage and auditorium that seems to make any additional reference to or interrogation of theatre in the play redundant. Hence, Collins’s characterization of the novel as “a drama narrated” is reflected on formal and aesthetic levels and has important implications for the novel’s intermedial quality as well as its communication with its recipients. In No Name, Collins capitalizes on theatre-fiction’s hybridity by playing with generic cues to undermine readers’ expectations. Thus, John Frow has defined genre as “not a property of a text but … a function of reading” (102) because it “guides interpretation” (101). In No Name, generic markers are strategically employed to confound expectations precisely as a means of heightening the affective charge of the text. Conspicuously, the novel is divided into “Scenes” and sections “Between the Scenes,” which creates a self-consciously theatrical frame that draws attention to the novel’s hybrid identity. The latter parts consist mostly of letters, diary entries, and excerpts from other documents. As Eriks Cline has demonstrated, Collins’s “use of epistolary tools,” for example present tense and first-person perspective, is

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“strategic” because it serves to “reenact and readapt theatrical liveness” (256) and thereby facilitates a more immediate and affectively charged mode of reception in these sections. Yet, this effect is not limited to the epistolary intermissions to which Cline refers. Documents play a defining role in the novel as a whole: wills, notes, and official writings represent important material objects in the “Scenes,” too. They shape its structure by interrupting the narrative flow, for example when the content of a newspaper article or letter is printed in the text. More importantly, these insertions create highly self-conscious scenes of reading in the novel which serve to enhance its intermedial and affective quality. Thus, Marcie Frank has argued that novels can “[provide] readers with experiences of embodiment partly on the basis of a homology between reading and theatergoing that depicted reading as mental theater” (2)—an effect that is heightened in theatre-novels like Collins’s No Name.5 Crucially, the notion of “mental theatre” encompasses both cognitive and affective dimensions. Exploring the intersection between bodily sensation and mental perception in Victorian literature and culture, David Sweeney Coombs draws on Elaine Scarry’s argument that, while “reading has almost no actual sensory content,” it “provides us with virtual sensory content” (Sweeney Coombs 2). This virtual sensory content is decisive for readers’ affective engagement with No Name, which depicts emotionally intense scenes of reading that also raise awareness of readers’ own emotional implication in the novel. Thus, shortly after the revelation of her fate, Magdalen insists on her right to know the full details of the lawyer’s negotiations with Michael Vanstone, the sisters’ uncle and legitimate heir, and to read the letter in which he rejects any sympathy and substantial support for the orphans. Reading the letter not only marks a turning point for Magdalen but is also a profoundly emotional experience for her. Because the text of the letter is included in the narrative, readers are allowed to read it together with and through Magdalen; indeed, we are invited to imaginatively play Magdalen’s role, which creates a sense of immediacy and shapes our own affective experience of and participation in the novel. By enabling readers to “perform” the reading together with Magdalen, Collins enhances the “virtual sensory” quality of the novel, turning the act of reading into a performative, affectively charged embodied practice. This effect is reinforced in the subsequent paragraph, as the narrator describes the observations the other characters have made while they were watching Magdalen during her reading of the letter. This creates a self-reflexive framework that draws attention to the reading process as such and, by extension, to our own reading experience—in other words, we are not only constructed as readers but also as performers and spectators in the novel: Line by line—without once looking up from the pages before her—Magdalen read those atrocious sentences through, from beginning to end. The other persons assembled in the room, all eagerly looking at her together, saw the dress rising and falling faster and faster over her bosom—saw the hand in which she lightly held the manuscript at the outset, close unconsciously on the paper, and crush it, as she advanced nearer and nearer to the end—but detected no other outward signs of what was passing within her. As soon as she had done, she silently pushed the manuscript away, and put her hands on a sudden over her face. When she withdrew them, all the four persons in the room noticed a change in her. Something in her expression had altered, subtly and silently, something which made the familiar features suddenly look strange, even to her sister and Miss Garth; something, through all after years, never to be forgotten in connection with that day—and never to be described. (124) Rather than depicting Magdalen’s thoughts, the narrator focuses on her bodily response to the letter as it is perceived by the other characters. Her strong physical reaction is rendered in climactic fashion, which testifies to the intensity of her experience. As D. A. Miller has argued with reference to Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), sensation fiction turns readers’ bodies—in the case of No Name, both Magdalen’s

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and, through her example, our own—into a site of spectacle: “the excitement that seizes us … renders our reading bodies … theaters of neurasthenia” (187). Accordingly, as Nicholas Dames has shown with reference to nineteenth-century physiological theory, “the act of novel-reading seems like a performance—a performance enacted in and by the nerves—rather than an encounter with an object” (11). The physiological details in the narrator’s description of Magdalen foreground reading as an embodied practice. Her reading of the text activates affective intensities that circulate both within and through the medium of the text, thereby providing an affectively charged experience of the novel for its recipients. In this way, it is paradoxically Collins’s investment in the written word—in the writing and reading of documents, from letters to diary entries to the novel itself—that enhances the performative quality of the novel for the readers, as affective energies transgress bodily as well as textual boundaries. At the same time, this intermedial framework is highly self-conscious, drawing readers’ attention to processes of reading as well as to their own implication in the novel. No Name capitalizes on this effect when Magdalen engages in her final attempt to recuperate her inheritance. Even though she has in the meantime become Noel’s wife and thus his legal next-of-kin, Noel’s housekeeper Mrs Lecount interferes with Magdalen’s plans: she has identified Magdalen’s scheme and has revealed her false identity to Noel. Manipulated by Mrs Lecount, Noel re-writes his will, installing his friend Admiral Bartram and his son George rather than his wife as inheritors. After Noel’s death, Magdalen introduces herself as a maid into the Admiral’s household to find the Secret Trust in which Noel has stipulated the conditions attached to his will. In a highly suspenseful episode, Magdalen finally gets hold of the document. The narrator foregrounds her intense bodily and affective experience during the reading process and closely observes the movement of her eyes (cf. 551–2). However, before she reaches the decisive lines, a member of the Admiral’s household catches her reading the letter. This discovery triggers a final cathartic release for Magdalen, who reacts with a nervous breakdown: “She never struggled with him, she never spoke. Her energy was gone; her powers of resistance were crushed” (552). Ironically, readers have, in fact, long been familiar with the content of the Secret Trust, as we have witnessed Mrs Lecount’s dictation of the text (cf. 468–70). Thus, while this episode marks an emotional climax in the novel, readers may find themselves at a greater distance from the protagonist: rather than reading and experiencing with Magdalen, we have already read the letter in its entirety and are now in a privileged position compared to Magdalen. Contrasting different, affectively potent processes of reading both within and of the novel, No Name creates a complex self-reflexive network between text and readers. The affective shift in readers’ positioning towards Magdalen through the self-conscious use of letters is particularly significant at the end, which stages a conspicuous move from reading to acting and from the written word to bodily immediacy. After her physical and mental collapse, she is saved in the novel’s Last Scene by Captain Kirke, a character who has so far only played a marginal role in the novel but who is key to its denouement. Recognizing Magdalen from an earlier encounter, Kirke, who has just returned with his merchant ship from a voyage to China, intervenes, like a deus-ex-machina figure, to prevent Magdalen’s removal from the house where she has been staying and to see to her recovery. While the constellation between Magdalen and Kirke, her future husband, may seem all too conventional,6 I agree with Armstrong that “this does not confirm societal arrangements” (200): “the prior travail of identity loss has done too much work for that” and “[t]he distortion of the simulated sexuality that does violence to her personhood is still too present” (200). As a love relationship gradually develops between both characters, Magdalen feels compelled to reveal to Kirke the story of her life, which she writes down in a letter. This time, however, the document is withheld from readers. Similarly, Magdalen asks Kirke not to respond in writing, but to meet face-to-face. Confronting him, she asks him to “[t]ell [her] the truth”: “Say what you think of me, with your own lips” (610; my emphasis). Taking this all too literally, Kirke answers not by speaking but by “kiss[ing] her” (610)—and these are also the final words of the novel. This emphasis on the body endows the ending with a theatrical quality that draws readers’ attention to their own bodily presence in the reading process and in their communication with the

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text. The shift from the written word to sensuous experience and performance at the end of the novel creates an impression of immediacy and anticipates a similar movement in the reader in the transition from fictional world to “reality.” Daniel Hack has insightfully analysed the “play of bodily and textual presence and absence” (145) in the final pages of the novel, which he interprets as reinforcing “the ontological gap between real reader and fictional character,” thereby underscoring “the impossibility of directly converting readers’ sympathy or identification into action” (Hack 146). The extent to which Collins foregrounds the body and the senses at the end, however, seems to suggest that, rather than erecting borders between fiction and reality, the novel capitalizes on its affective and theatrical qualities to invite a crossing of bodily as well as textual boundaries. By concluding with an emphasis on bodily movement and action, No Name offers a final appeal to its readers to engage with the novel’s critique, to interrogate their own position towards the events—and, ultimately, to act.

Conclusion Considering theatre-fiction an intermedial genre, this chapter has explored the significance of affect in the encounter between theatre and the novel by drawing on Wilkie Collins’s No Name as a key example of sensational theatre-fiction. While building on previous discussions that have identified physiology, materiality, and affect as central concerns in Victorian sensation fiction, this chapter has focused on theatre as a source of affective energies for enhancing this emphasis on the physiological and sensational qualities of the novel. Thus, in No Name, theatre is understood as an embodied and affectively contagious artistic practice whose affective force gives rise to both shame and empowerment. Collins connects the shame associated with theatre to the shame the protagonist Magdalen Vanstone experiences because of her illegitimacy, and uses the affective potential of theatre to fuel the novel’s critique of Victorian laws and conventions. Shame is not so much a mechanism of social control as an affect that is appropriated by the heroine in her attempt to recuperate her name and inheritance. Instrumentalizing the stigmatization that Magdalen is forced to undergo by shamelessly transgressing social norms, No Name probes shame as a means of affective emancipation. Crucially, Collins’s treatment of theatre as an affectively charged art-form also serves to render the novel’s critique palpable for its readers. Enhancing the affective potential of the novel, theatre informs No Name not only thematically but also aesthetically and medially. Through its generic hybridity, the novel plays with readers’ expectations by destabilizing distinctions between theatre and the novel. In particular through the inclusion of documents, notably letters and excerpts from wills and newspaper articles, and through the combination of internal and external focalization, Collins simulates the effects of theatre in the medium of the novel by turning reading into a performative practice that involves readers in the story. Foregrounding the body and the senses and drawing readers’ attention to their own bodily sensations, Collins conceptualizes reading as an embodied activity through which readers become implicated in the novel’s affective network. Capitalizing on the affective force of theatre as a means of fuelling its interrogation of Victorian laws and norms, No Name intricately connects theatre and fiction, spectating and reading, as well as performing and writing. As a “drama narrated,” it powerfully demonstrates the productivity of joining theatre and novel on thematic, formal as well as medial levels as a means of performing and enacting critique.

Notes 1 For further discussions of private theatricals in theatre-fiction, see Karen Quigley’s chapter “‘A few scenes of humble life’: Theatre-making in the Novels of Louisa May Alcott” and Heather Fitzsimmons-Frey’s “Playing and Scripting the Past while Imagining Futures in Charlotte Yonge’s Historical Dramas” in this volume.

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Affect in the Theatre-Novel 2 Similarly, Renata Kobetts Miller writes that “Magdalen’s lack of an ‘essential self’ is not innate, however. Rather, her pursuit of her purpose, impelled by her loss of wealth and class, requires the dissolution of her identity” (84–5). 3 Critics have highlighted the ambivalence underpinning the relationship between Wragge and Magdalen, which may be seen to reproduce the very hierarchies and structures Magdalen seeks to undermine (see Armstrong 159; Talairach-Vielmas 138; David 38). At the same time as Wragge’s influence shapes Magdalen’s trajectory, however, she clearly sees through his scheme to control and benefit from her success as an actress (see 178). 4 Other stage adaptations of theatre-novels show a similar shift away from theatrical contexts. In his adaptation of Emile Zola’s Nana, for example, William Busnach has left out the significant episodes in which Nana performs on stage. I am grateful to Graham Wolfe for drawing my attention to this example. 5 In this way, she suggests that a “theatrical history of the novel” is capable of “problematiz[ing] the usual association of performance with embodiment and print with disembodiment” (3). 6 Critics have numerously offered such conservative readings of Magdalen’s fate. Debra Morris, for example, concludes that Magdalen “is silenced in the last words of the text […] and thus finally succumbs to her place in society” (284). Patricia Zakreski equally suggests that “Magdalen is allowed […] to marry again and live out her life as a conventional domestic woman. Once re-established within the domestic sphere, she bears little mark of the transgressions she has committed” (164).

Works Cited Adamson, Joseph, and Hilary Clark. “Introduction: Shame, Affect, Writing.” Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, edited by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, Suny Press, 1998, pp. 1–34. Ahern, Stephen. “Introduction: A Feel for the Text.” Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text, edited by Stephen Ahern, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 1–21. Allen, Emily. “The Victorian Novel and Theatre.” The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Lisa Rodensky, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 571–588. Allen, Emily. Theatre Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2003. Armstrong, Isobel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford UP, 2016. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. U of California P, 1981. Bisla, Sundeep. “Overdoing Things with Words in 1982: Pretense and Plain Truth in Wilkie Collins’s No Name.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 38, 2010, pp. 1–19. Burroughs, Catherine B. “‘A Reasonable Woman’s Desire’: The Private Theatrical and Joanna Baillie’s The Tryal.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 38, no. 3/4, 1996, pp. 265–284. Chattman, Laura. “Actresses at Home and on Stage: Spectacular Domesticity and the Victorian Theatrical Novel.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 28, no. 1, 1994, pp. 72–88. Cline, Lauren Eriks. “Epistolary Liveliness: A Narrative Presence and the Victorian Actress in Letters.” Theatre Survey, vol. 60, no. 2, 2019, pp. 237–260. Cohn, Elisha. “Affect.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3–4, 2018, pp. 563–567. Collins, Wilkie. Basil. Vol. 10 of The Works of Wilkie Collins. AMS Press, 1970, pp. 3–455. Collins, Wilkie. No Name. Penguin, 2004. Collins, Wilkie. No Name: A Drama, in Five Acts. James Rusk, June 2009, https://jhrusk.github.io/wc/noname/ noname.html. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford UP, 2007. David, Deirdre. “Rewriting the Male Plot in Wilkie Collin’s No Name (1862): Captain Wragge Orders an Omelette and Mrs. Wragge Goes into Custody.” The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction, edited by Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyer, CRC Press, 2000, pp. 33–44. Davis, Jim. “Collins and the Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor. Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 168–180. Davis, Tracy C. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. Routledge, 1991. Frank, Adam. Transferential Poetics, From Poe to Warhol. Fordham UP, 2015. Frank, Marcie. The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen. Bucknell UP, 2020. Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2006. Geisenhanslüke, Achim. Die Sprache der Infamie III: Literatur und Scham. Wilhelm Fink, 2019. Gilbert, Pamela K. Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History. Cornell UP, 2019. Hack, Daniel. The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel. U of Virginia P, 2005.

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Anja Hartl Hankey, Julie. “Body Language, the Idea of the Actress, and Some Nineteenth-Century Actress-Heroines.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 31, 1992, pp. 226–240. Knox, Marisa Palacios. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading. Crises of Identification. Cambridge UP, 2021. Kurnick, David. Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. MacDonald, Tara. “Bodily Sympathy, Affect, and Victorian Sensation Fiction.” Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text, edited by Stephen Ahern, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 121–138. Miller, D. A. “Cages aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.” Speaking of Gender, edited by Elaine Showalter, Routledge, 1989, pp. 187–215. Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Edinburgh UP, 2018. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. U of Chicago P, 2017. Morris, Debra. “Maternal Roles and the Production of Name in Wilkie Collins’s No Name.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 27, 1998, pp. 271–286. O’Quinn, Daniel. “Jane Austen and Performance: Theatre, Memory, and Enculturation.” A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson, John Wiley & Sons, 2009, pp. 377–388. Palmer, Beth, and Joanna Hofer-Robinson. “‘Twin Sisters’: Intermediality and Sensation in Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 42, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–15. Pearson, Richard. Victorian Writers and the Stage: The Plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins and Tennyson. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Powell, Kerry. Women and Victorian Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1997. Pykett, Lyn. The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel. 2nd ed., Northcote House, 2011. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge UP, 2006. Russell, Gillian. “Private Theatricals.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 191–204. Ryan, Vanessa L. Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Farrar, 1999. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” GLQ, vol. l, 1993, pp. 1–16. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The Rivals, edited by Elizabeth Duthie, Ernest Benn, 1979. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Routledge, 2007. Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. “Drama and Performance.” The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, Routledge, 2020, pp. 45–57. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020. Zakreski, Patricia. Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman. Ashgate, 2006.

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28 “WAITING IN THE WINGS” The Economics and Ethereality of Theatrical Space in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus Rachael Newberry

Many of Angela Carter’s novels lend themselves to the theatrical stage. Her friend and literary executor, Susannah Clapp asserts: “Although she hated the cut-glass accents, the mopping and mowing of ‘naturalistic’ theatre—‘that dreadful spectacle of painted loons in the middle distance making fools of themselves’—Carter was an extraordinarily theatrical writer” (124). Carter herself wrote screenplays for The Magic Toyshop (1967) and The Company of Wolves (1981), and Wise Children (1991) was adapted at The Old Vic in London in 2018, the second of Emma Rice’s productions of Carter’s work (she directed Nights at the Circus at The Lyric, Hammersmith, with Kneehigh in 2006). If not for COVID-19, Theresa Heskins’s adaptation of The Company of Wolves would have gone into production in 2020. The myriad ways in which Carter’s theatricality presents—through themes of spectacle, illusion, and aspects of the simulacra—will be explored throughout my chapter with reference to Carter’s penultimate novel Nights at the Circus (1984), a riotous exchange of sexual, transactional, and gendered performativity. The novel opens with the main protagonist, the winged aerialiste, Sophie Fevvers, watching herself in the ambiguity of her dressing room mirror, as she rips a pair of false eyelashes from her lids. Fevvers performs both on and off the stage, repeatedly daring the audience to “LOOK AT ME!” as she navigates and tours vast, eclectic cultural and performative spaces. Indeed, the theme of looking and surveillance is an enduring one throughout the novel, and a key concern of my argument. The scopophilic pleasure achieved in looking is frequently subverted by Fevvers in the evident joy she takes in being seen, whilst simultaneously maintaining an essence of self that she keeps hidden as a key element of her performance—the duplicity inherent in acting a part. The theatre in general, in its many forms, invites such voyeuristic behaviour, a space which perfectly conforms to Michel Foucault’s understanding of heterotopias. For Foucault, “heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another” (25). Along with the theatre, Foucault also names the brothel, the train carriage, and the passenger ship as ideal heterotopic spaces, all liminal sites in which Carter places her characters. Furthermore, by setting her tale in the gaps that open at the end of the nineteenth century, the “fag end of history” (19), Carter also draws our attention to the distinctions inherent between late Victorian and early twentieth century theatre history, the move away from theatrical naturalism and towards European modernism. Bearing in mind Nights at the Circus begins in fin-de-siècle London, and straddles two centuries, I interrogate what Carter might be telling us about such an anticipatory period in the history of Western theatre.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-35

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My argument also seeks to explore questions about female theatrical illusion as it intersects with the rather messy necessities of economic and symbolic exchange in the marketplace. The stage on which Fevvers performs—both the public and private stages we are invited to view—often exposes, as “oracular proof,” systems of economic exchange, masquerade, and the ephemeral in a novel stuffed with such ideas. With this in mind, I examine aspects of the simulacra, as explored by Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 work, Simulacra and Simulations, published just a few years before Nights at the Circus. To balance these dominant critical voices, I engage with more recent work by Anna Kerchy, Jessica Farrugia, and other more contemporary scholars working in the field of Carter studies and nineteenthcentury theatre. As Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton argue, “the most insistent feature of current Carter studies … is her interest in that bundle of tropes—theatricality, spectacle and playacting—now commonly associated with theory and (cultural) politics of gender as performance” (14). I am particularly interested in the ways in which this “bundle of tropes” plays out in a character who purports to hide her essence behind a masquerade while simultaneously making herself vulnerable through exposure to a collection of disparate audiences (and readers) who are in thrall to her. My analysis begins where it should, with Fevvers herself, who, of course, refuses to be ignored. Fevvers is a piece of performance art as soon as we are introduced to her, an orphan hatched from a “bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang” (7). As the novel progresses, we are repeatedly asked to question the authenticity of this mercurial winged orphan who trades on illusion and performativity. Fevvers’ own awareness of herself as a performance is clear. As she tells Jack Walser, American biographer and journalist, in relation to the economic exchange of which she becomes a part in Ma Nelson’s whorehouse, “we knew we only sold the simulacra” (39). The inclusion of the word “only” in this declaration disturbs Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra which posits: “Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original … The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true” (Simulacra 2). For Baudrillard, the truth of the simulacra is that there is no truth, and this is a concept that Fevvers plays with throughout the performative journey she takes. On the very first page of the novel, we learn of her slogan: “Is she fact or is she fiction?” (1). Of course, she is fiction in the sense of being the protagonist of a novel. But in the context of a novel that plays with the question of historical truth, what might it mean, we may ask, for Fevvers to be fiction? In centring the simulacra (or, in effect, presenting the simulacra as that which uncovers the inauthentic “truth”), Baudrillard presents a challenge to Fevvers’ own motivation to conceal her “essence” (or truth) behind an illusion of theatricality. If indeed, the simulacrum is true, Fevvers spends the majority of the novel revealing this truth, albeit inadvertently, to her audience. For Fevvers, the essence of self she is so keen to preserve is not a facet, or even the entirety, of the simulacra. Instead it is something beyond the simulacra that belongs just to her—an innate characteristic that she vehemently refuses to share, while at the same time possessing the awareness of this refusal as part of her performance. As the novel comes to a conclusion, she tells her adopted mother Lizzie: [I]t is not possible that I should give myself … My being, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible. To sell the use of myself for the enjoyment of another is one thing; I might even offer freely, out of gratitude or the expectation of pleasure … But the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me? (280–1) Here Fevvers reveals herself as both a public theatrical spectacle, well versed in the dynamics of economic exchange, and at the same time something wholly private. Whilst it is possible for her to sell, or even give herself away as use—or exchange—value, she purposefully withholds what she regards as her essence or authenticity from the marketplace. Indeed, this withholding of self is as much a part of the show as the (usually bodily) parts of her she chooses to reveal—her desirability as a

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spectacle comes about through her insistence that something about her remains mysterious and hidden. As she insists, it is only as a “real” woman that she holds true meaning, and this “essence” or realness is not authentically shared until the very close of the novel, revealed through peals of her own mocking laughter. Until this moment, though, we meet Fevvers in a range of stage roles, her mercurial character having been nurtured in the place she is brought up, a London whorehouse run by the matriarch and proprietor, Ma Nelson.

The Brothel—A Heterotopia of “Deceitful Candles” The brothel, as an early introduction to theatrical space in this novel, provides the template through which later performative spaces, such as the circus ring or music hall, are judged. Foucault identifies the brothel as an extreme type of heterotopia: “a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory” (Foucault and Miskowiec 27). Faced again with this question of illusion and reality, Foucault highlights the “real space” as fictive in the same way that Baudrillard positions truth, questioning the authenticity of every spatial encounter. At least, he seems to be saying, the liminal space of the brothel knows what it is. Carter invites us to consider two distinct brothels, Ma Nelson’s decadent whorehouse, catering specifically to the pleasures of the flesh, and Madame Schreck’s far more punishing regime which “catered for those who were troubled in their … souls” (57; emphasis added; ellipsis in original). These hyper-sexualized, private spaces offer alternative options for both sex workers and clients to tailor their performances. Ma Nelson’s brothel is initially described as a fantasy of mythological decadence, with a “marvellous banister of wrought iron, all garlands of fruit, flowers and the heads of satyrs, with a wonderfully slippery marble handrail … a handsome fireplace … A brace of buxom, smiling goddesses supported this mantelpiece on the flats of their upraised hands” (26). We see in this lyrical description, a mythical, fantastic, and sexually liberating space, inhabited by goddesses and satyrs which are in some ways reminiscent of Fevvers in her own half-human, mythological state. Furthermore, this description of the brothel would appear to align with Carol Rosen’s assertion that: “Although … a brothel is more likely to resemble a nondescript rooming house than an ornate pleasure dome, popular literature favors fancy rather than reality. And the brothel, an institution of tabooed sexuality, is an especially inviting premise, promising to substantiate forbidden dreams” (513). Following Ma Nelson’s death, when the curtains are finally opened on the scene, and the light let in, we discover that the reality of this space is nothing like its appearance. Instead, it is a “room which deceitful candles made so gorgeous! … the moth had nibbled the upholstery, the mice had gnawed away the Persian carpets and dust caked all the cornices. The luxury of that place had been nothing but illusion” (49). Illusion is Fevvers’ stock in trade, a characteristic she has picked up in the environment of the whorehouse, her childhood home. Having been brought up in an illusory space, Fevvers understands the fluidity of such binaries as fantasy/reality and truth/illusion and manipulates these categories throughout the novel. Indeed, the novel form lends itself well to voyeurism, the experience of a reader, unlike an audience member, often being private, quiet, and secret. In contrast to Ma Nelson’s house, the brothel that Madame Schreck runs (herself a bony woman who started her career as a Living Skeleton touring side shows) bears a certain authenticity, presenting itself entirely as it operates. “[A] gloomy pile in Kensington, in a square with a melancholy garden in the middle full of worn grass and leafless trees. The façade … blackened by the London soot as if the very stucco were in mourning. A louring portico over the front door … and all the inner shutters tightly barred” (57). The naturalistic description of this nineteenth-century melancholic urban space is in sharp contrast to the previous ornate descriptive passages of Ma Nelson’s establishment, and the effect is taken to extremes when we learn of the underground “Black Theatre” that Madame Schreck runs, which offers the exhilarating promise of “a noose around the neck” for its frustrated male clients.

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The space thus becomes one of conceivable danger and sexual risk-taking. Magali Cornier Michael argues that the dynamics of this exchange enable male clients to watch from a position of power. She explains: The museum’s male visitors indulge in a pornographic voyeurism; they don costumes and look at the female “prodigies of nature” arranged as spectacle. The gentleman who favors Fevvers, for example, never touches her but, rather, looks at her while “playing with himself under his petticoat.” The male engages in sexual actions without the female in this pornographic situation and thus remains in control; she serves merely as a visual stimulus. (508) Although Cornier Michael accurately describes the male visitors’ active status in this sexual exchange—in dressing up and masturbating—I take issue with this analysis of the female as “merely a visual stimulus” and instead concur with Kirsten Pullen’s assertion that “the whore position may allow women a space for agency; performance is the strategy by which they expand that position to offer alternative narratives of female sexuality and experiences” (2). It is performance, then, this arrangement as spectacle, that provides women—all women in this novel, not just the prostitutes we meet in the early chapters—with the tools of expression that enable them to reach outside of the sex-gender boundaries that have been defined for them through the structures of a patriarchal system. As Mary Russo succinctly puts it, “Nights at the Circus is unique in its depiction of relationships between women as spectacle, and women as producers of spectacle” (165). The description of women as producers is not only a nod to theatre-makers themselves, traditionally regarded as male, but also signals the theatre as a place of production, both economic and artistic. It is also worth noting that Russo draws our attention to relationships between women in this quotation, rather than those between men and women. Cornier Michael solidifies these relationships still further when she tells us: Carter transforms the whorehouse into a “wholly female world,” a “sisterhood” of active, ambitious women … The prostitutes are “all suffragists”—not “suffragettes”—and professional women. They engage in “intellectual, artistic or political” pursuits … and are thus active subjects as well as sexual objects. By making the prostitute its version of the feminist, the novel disrupts accepted norms and dualisms—including conventionalized notions of feminists. (505) The contradictions inherent in Cornier Michael’s analysis are similarly played out through descriptions of the prostitute herself. Like the whorehouse, the prostitute inhabits a position of ambiguity, as Pullen’s historical analysis confirms: “On the one hand, the prostitute is a victim: denied sexual agency she is also denied a voice, a place in history, an identity as an autonomous woman. On the other hand, though vilified, the prostitute can speak for and from the margins” (1). We might extend these observations to include the actress more generally, a role that has long been associated with prostitution. Pullen again: “the body of the actress (assumed to be an object onto which male desires were projected) and the body of the prostitute (assumed to be an object onto which male desires were enacted) slipped discursively into one: whore/actress” (2). Janice Norwood concurs, placing specific emphasis on the touring actress: “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the actress was often assumed to be a prostitute or, at the very least, what Kristina Straub terms a ‘sexual suspect’ … Although such severe condemnation was less prevalent in the Victorian era, the performer still needed to guard her reputation carefully, especially when touring” (3). As a touring actress herself, Fevvers is thus associated with the sexual deviance encapsulated in Norwood’s observation. The connections are cemented still further through the conflation of the two when Fevvers asks Wonder, a prostitute in Madame Schreck’s whorehouse, why she does not earn a living on the boards. Wonder’s

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response is telling and allows us to consider not only the question of female agency, but also the role of the audience in the theatrical event.

The Audience—“Horrid, Nasty, Hairy Things” Wonder’s response to Fevvers’ question about working as an actress tells us something particular about the composition and dynamics of audiences in this theatre-novel. Wonder explains, through Fevvers’ narrative voice: “I’d rather show myself to one man at a time than an entire theatre-full of the horrid, nasty, hairy things, and, here, I’m well protected from the dark, foul throng of the world, in which I suffered so much. Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?” (64–5). Wonder’s reference to the audience, whether it be one man or something more expansive, is key to the dynamics and economics of the theatre. As Viola Spolin and many other theatre practitioners have remarked: “Without an audience there is no theatre” (13). Wonder’s preferred audience is the single, private, paying voyeuristic male, who offers the possibility of an intimate, and potentially actively shared gaze, rather than the homogenous, and monolithic gendered audience of the theatre. In contrast, Fevvers comes to life in the presence of such audiences, large-scale mass crowds that look down upon an expansive public stage in places such as the Alhambra Music Hall or the circus marquee in Captain Kearney’s Grand Imperial Tour, or “the savage audience” (275) of the Siberian tundra. As Graham Wolfe argues, “the ability to perform for many on large stages—where Fevvers appears ‘twice as large as life’—is repeatedly cast as liberating vis-à-vis the violence of the story’s various forms of reduction” (156). Although I would agree that Fevvers becomes active in these large spaces, I am not sure I would describe them as particularly liberating. Although Fevvers is truly able to spread her wings and “fly,” it is in the private space of the dressing room (which I will come on to explore), or the intimacy of Walser’s gaze, that we see Fevvers truly liberated from such public performativity. Indeed, it is in her dressing room, when in the company of Walser, that she reveals one of her wings to be broken. In keeping with Magali Corner’s analysis, the brothel audience Wonder describes, though private and singular, is a more active and involved presence than large-scale theatre audiences, calling to mind the audiences of immersive theatrical events or those associated with Forum theatre—active participants rather than passive spectators. By extension, the private theatrical spaces of the brothel and the dressing room, reveal to us the power of enforced intimacy. The most enduring, and transformed, active singular audience member (at least in the early sections of the novel before he becomes an entertainer) is Walser, who enters the novel as a scribe, “with his open notebook and his poised pencil” (7) and leaves, lying naked on a brass bed (having reconstructed himself as clown, wizard, and finally, “deceived husband”) to the infectious laughter of Fevvers. However, these are complex, gendered dynamics. As Farrugia states: “By placing Fevvers in the company of a male audience, and more specifically, a man who wishes to construct his own narrative of her, Carter deals not only with ideas of gender and performance, but with the notion of patriarchal representation” (3). Audiences in this novel tend to be gendered male, and Farrugia’s observation of this singular male audience member as a representation of structural patriarchal power, and a recorder of female experience, alludes to the power of the male gaze. This extends to the ways in which women are excluded from the narrative of personal histories more generally, for example in biography and autobiography, and also in novel writing. In a 1989 interview, Carter states: “on the whole the bias does tend to be more towards comic tales and tales of heroics and cunning and so on, and it’s men talking, men’s storytelling” (Carter and Bernofsky 161). Fevvers, of course, is having none of this, and reconstructs the dominant historical discourse throughout her life, telling Lizzie: “Think of him [Walser] as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we’re yet to tell him, the history of those women who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been” (285). Thus, we might conclude that the novel fits into a larger body of feminist historical writing about theatre, recategorized as

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“her-story” (Wallach Scott 18). Whilst Walser’s intention in scrutinising Fevvers is initially to expose her as a hoax, it is Fevvers who ends up manipulating him in order to expose the larger systematic historical privileging of men and erasure of women. Indeed, in the very act of writing her own herstory, Fevvers positions Walser as part of the economic system of exchange that circulates around her. Furthermore, Fevvers’ playful warning to Walser, “You mustn’t believe what you write in the papers!” (294) is perhaps a telling nod to some of the journalism written about Carter herself, who refused to fit the script of femininity and was a source of intrigue and interest for biographical writers throughout her writing life. Norwood discusses the way in which women have historically been able to utilize and manipulate biographical documentation more widely. Thinking through the historical documentation of touring actresses, she interprets published interviews as “a form of quasi-autobiographical writing whereby the women deliberately intervene in the narratives created around them” (10). We can see this in the interventions both Carter and Fevvers make in Walser’s biographical account of female performance, the biography he sets out to write being, inevitably, one that is curated by Fevvers. Despite his spending the entire novel shadowing her, notebook and pencil in hand, it is not until the final pages, when he asks a couple of searching questions, that Fevvers cries: “That’s the way to start the interview! … Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!” (291). We might therefore consider Walser, in his role as journalist, audience, performer, and scribe, to be something of a bridge between the past and the future, between seeing and being seen, between spectator and spectacle, between the written and performative creative form. Indeed, as I have already shown in relation to the brothel, the boundaries between the spectator and the spectacle are particularly fluid. This is displayed on stage, for example, in the scene where the singer Mignon waltzes with a circus tiger. At the end of this performance, there is “[m]ore applause, far more than hitherto because every single one of the Educated Apes crept in to perch along the upper benches” (163). As is usually the case with Carter, we can read this scene in a number of alternative ways. The Educated Apes are, of course, animals from the circus troupe, their move onto the upper benches breaking any semblance of a fourth wall and disturbing the boundaries between actor and audience. Their anthropomorphism lends itself well to such juxtaposition. Who, we might ask, is the audience on this occasion? The paying customers who also take up position on the upper benches, or the circus apes who not only sit among the paying audience, but play an active part in the systems of exchange in which the workforce engage? Carter tells us: “The point about the apes is that they learn to read and write and it’s the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As soon as they learn to read and write, they read their own contract, tear it up, and renegotiate it” (Carter and Bernofsky 163). Soon after this scene, Walser, as an observer or audience member, is commandeered as a volunteer, to dance (waltz) with the rescued Mignon, thus disturbing the boundaries between audience and participant still further. Indeed, the transformation is complete when Walser finally becomes part of the circus act himself as a clown on the St Petersburg leg of Captain Kearney’s Grand Imperial Tour. As I have argued, then, audiences and performers are often conflated in the novel, merging into one group of scopophilic voyeurs, and it is often in economic terms that the distinction is most clearly made. We hear about the contrast between “hirelings” and “those who hire” from Buffo the clown, who, using the whore as a template, highlights a disparity between audiences who pay to be entertained, and the entertainers who provide this service in order to be paid. He asserts: “[L]ike a whore, we know what we are; we know we are mire hirelings hard at work and yet those who hire us see us as beings perpetually at play. Our work is their pleasure, too, so there is always an abyss between their notion of our work as play, and ours, of their leisure as our labour” (119). The Marxist implications of Buffo’s statement are clear, particularly in his description of circus performers as “mere hirelings hard at work.” Marx’s concept of alienation includes the alienation experienced by the worker in the production or labour process. For Marx, no account is taken of the pleasure that might

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be experienced by the “hireling.” But for Buffo, play (or pleasure) becomes part of what the performers must enact in order for those who do the hiring to experience their own pleasure. The audience is paying for the expectation that the performers are “perpetually at play.” Thus pleasure becomes a commodity, something to be enacted by the performers, bought and sold in the marketplace and only fully experienced in any authentic sense by those who do the hiring. There is a simplicity in this transaction which Fevvers describes as “the clarity of bought pleasure” (38). Erin Holliday-Karre explores the strategy of the clown more specifically, asserting: “The role of the clown is to play at being, challenging the prescribed categories for knowledge and identity. By foregrounding his artificiality, Buffo highlights the weakness of a system that would like to claim subjectivity for all” (276). Buffo describes the playful advantages of being a clown: “We possess one privilege, one rare privilege, that makes of our outcast and disregarded state something wonderful, something precious. We can invent our own faces! We make ourselves” (141). This illustrates the (unearned) pleasure to be experienced in the ability to create oneself anew in the process of performance. For Buffo, the act of making himself, potentially one of labour, is transformed into an experience of creativity and imagination. Thus, although Buffo highlights the dichotomy between work and play, or pleasure, he goes on to offer (as does the novel as a whole), a more complex understanding of the relationship between work, pleasure, and money than he might initially espouse.

The Economics of a Theatre in which there is “No Second Hand Market for Flowers” Whilst bearing all this in mind, the novel does foreground the relationship between theatre and economics time and again, nowhere more profoundly than in the construction and reconstruction of Fevvers’ persona. Asked in an interview whether Fevvers was out to create her own myth, Carter replied, “No, Fevvers is out to earn a living” (Katsavos). Indeed, Fevvers appears to display no emotion or sentimentality in response to an overwhelmingly positive audience response. Instead, there is a ruthlessness in the way she engages with and uses the theatrical stage to her advantage. Following a particularly successful circus performance, we learn how there is “the roar of applause and cheers. Bouquets pelt the stage. Since there is no second-hand market for flowers, she takes no notice of them” (18). Fevvers reveals a preoccupation with economic gain to such an extent that money is embedded within her material being. Her relationship with money is literally written on her body. We learn how her eyes, “made for the stage” (29), later “narrowed down to the shape of £ signs” (172). What might it mean, we may ask, for Fevvers’ eyes to be made for the stage? Materially, it may suggest that her eyes are made up for the stage, adorned with false eyelashes and coloured eyeshadows that enhance the masquerade. Then again, being made (or produced) for the stage, they connote aspects of labour that become a mark of her identity in a system of economic production. We learn how she “served [her] apprenticeship in being looked at—at being the object of the eye of the beholder” (23). At the same time, she is a looking subject, consuming everything around her with her eyes. “Night had darkened their colour; their irises were now purple … and the pupils had grown so fat on darkness that the entire dressing-room and all those within it could have vanished without trace inside those compelling voids” (31). This description of Fevvers’ eyes reads something like the theatrical stage itself, as the curtain is pulled open and the lights dim for the performance. It is not in her own eyes, however, that recognition finally comes, but in the reflection of herself through the eyes of her lover. In the final pages of the novel, we are told that “[i]n Walser’s eyes, she saw herself, at last, swimming into definition, like the image on photographic paper; but instead of Fevvers, she saw two perfect miniatures of a dream. She felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection in Walser’s eyes” (290). This recognition of herself as both defined and doubled, yet also trapped suggests this is not a moment of freedom for Fevvers after all. In fact, “[f]or one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life” (290). However, there also seems to be

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something liberating for Fevvers about being trapped within someone else’s definition of her, and it is at this point, in this moment of submission, that she is able, finally, to show off her wings, one of which is revealed to be broken. I would argue, then, that Carter’s comments about Fevvers only being out to make a living are perhaps not as literal as we might imagine. Despite the material evidence that is written on her body, Fevvers’ motivation is not wholly financial. She gives herself away with the suggestion: “Since money it is that makes us rich or poor, why, then: abolish money! … all that money is, is a symbolic means of facilitating exchanges that should, by rights, be freely made or not at all” (185). It is Lizzie’s pragmatic response that encourages Fevvers to re-evaluate her thoughts once again, and as she performs for the Grand Duke, “she smile[s] like a predator. Here comes Property Redistribution Inc. to take away your diamonds” (185). Brought up within the structures of capitalism that the brothel represents, she ultimately defaults to this way of thinking. As Pullen asserts, in a text that gives a very good account of the interplay between actresses and whores: “Prostitution functions as a synecdoche for capitalism” (12). Indeed, Fevvers utilizes these learned childhood experiences to her advantage throughout the novel. Despite these enduring contradictions, finally, what truly gives her away is that she falls in love, doubling and splitting herself in an act of pure faith rather than financial ambition. In further considering the mechanics of the theatre, or the myriad extras that make it economically viable, I turn to the ways in which the novel’s engagement with theatre as spectacle is not just about the performance or staged event, but everything associated with theatrical endeavour. As an ephemeral medium, the theatre in general relies heavily upon both theatrical reviews and audience satisfaction to sustain it. Patricia O’Hara explores the connection between the fin-de-siècle actress and the periodical The Music Hall and Theatre Review of the 1890s, asserting: The often erotically-charged depictions of the women in the review were, like the performers themselves, exhibited to draw audiences to purchase the journal and patronize the halls. The images, performers, and the review itself were among the commodities traded in the economy of the music hall and circulated in the marketplace of popular entertainment. (O’Hara 142) Along with theatre reviews—in the novel and more generally—and the audience response, there is also the transactional exchange that occurs in the box-office (the audiences’ saved bill tickets, kept as yellowing souvenirs, which are as much about memory and keepsake as they are economics and branding), along with the rehearsals of musicians as they tune up their instruments; the policing and surveillance of the entertainers’ private spaces by the stage doorkeeper; the selling of merchandise which both reinforces and responds to the cult of “Fevvermania,” and the imagery on pasted advertising posters littering the surrounding streets long after the circus has left town. “On a crumbling wall, reluctantly lit by a meagre streetlamp, was a freshly pasted poster … Fevvers, in all her opulence, in mid-air, in her new incarnation as circus star. The colonel had taken the French dwarf’s design but added to it, by some less skilful hand, representation of the Princess” (125). Once again the image of Fevvers is manipulated as everything associated with her becomes altered, fragmented, and reproduced, pre-empting the reflection she sees of herself trapped in Walser’s eyes and proliferating in time and space. Her own image is conflated with that of the Princess of Abyssinia so that she is presented to us as a hyper-real, regal spectacle, suspended in mid-air. Representations of her proliferate in souvenirs shops so that “[e]verywhere you saw her picture; the shops were crammed with ‘Fevvers’ garters, stockings, fans, cigars, shaving soap … She even lent it to a brand of baking powder; if you added a spoonful of the stuff, up in the air went your sponge cake, just as she did” (8; ellipsis in original). The merchandise is first described here in phallic or erotic terms, echoing that of the theatrical event, before moving to an image of “feminine” domesticity through its association with baking powder and sponge cake. The significance of these artefacts, solid evidence that the theatrical

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event ever took place at all, are important in recording history and positioning women within a theatrical world which traditionally dictated that “Victorian rhetoric … worked to gender the theatre as being distinctively, irrevocably masculine” (Powell xi). The description of the merchandise, as it morphs from masculine to feminine symbolism, suggests something more subtle than Powell argues, highlighting the complexities of the theatre as a gendered whole, and conforming to Renata Kobetts Miller’s recent reworking of gendered Victorian theatre which sees the materiality of domesticity (here on display as memorabilia) as an attempt to improve the prestige of the theatre by refiguring the actress as compatible with the domestic sphere (Miller 17).

The Dressing Room—Where the Air is Breathed in Lumps Quite apart from the stage or circus ring, and the souvenir shops where Fevvers and her colleagues are on display, there are other physical spaces in which performances occur that disturb spatial and theatrical boundaries. Kerchy notes: Carter’s fictional places—be they associated with heterotopias, affective spaces, or any abjectified Outside constitutive of the normalised Inside—are characterised by tactics of transgression such as the destabilisation of boundaries, the preference for haphazard openings, clandestine passageways, sidetracks and detours to official main entrances or obligatory paths. (Kerchy 44) The dressing room in which we first meet Fevvers is a place that houses evidence of such transgressions. As a heterotopic space, the nineteenth-century dressing room has been well theorized. Citing Katherine Adams and Michael Keene, Farrugia explains that circus goers at the turn of the century were more enticed by the private dressing rooms than they were by the show itself, and “seemed enthralled with getting a look at the exotic space” where “circus women would comport themselves in private” (Farrugia 1). In relation to Nights at the Circus, Farrugia states: “Fevvers invites readers to consider the distinction between her public and her private self. However, in the liminal space of the dressing room, a space that facilitates illusion and performance, that distinction is not so straightforward” (2). Whilst I would suggest that the distinction between public and private self is never straightforward for Fevvers, this comment positions the dressing room as a conduit between the public space of the theatrical stage and the private off-stage world to which all performers eventually retreat. The dressing room facilitates the move from Fevvers as producer of spectacle to Fevvers as object of spectacle as she makes herself up for the delectation of the audience. Although the dressing room is “notable for its anonymity” (13), “a wall-size poster, souvenir of her Parisian triumphs, dominat[ed] her London dressing room” (7). Farrugia argues that the positioning of the poster in the dressing room draws into question aspects of the simulacra and questions of truth: “Not only does this adornment offer a metaphorical bridge between the auditorium and the dressing room, suggesting an ambiguity between the public and private spheres, but it also reminds the reader that Fevvers’ private conduct should be regarded with as much suspicion as her on-stage persona” (Farrugia 3). Thus, although this memorabilia once again provides documentary proof of Fevvers’ theatrical existence, it also reinforces the role of Fevvers as spectacle, disturbing the distinctions between seeing and seen, public and private, performer and performance, and truth and illusion. It is significant that items on display in Fevvers’ dressing room also belong elsewhere, thus reinforcing these elements of liminality and heterotopic space. Her swivelling dressing-stool, originally a piano stool, is “lifted from the rehearsal room” (7), belonging at once to several different theatrical spaces, and conforming to the heterotopic ideal of being in a single space and multiple spaces at once. Similarly, there is a toilet jug which doubles as an ice-bucket, with twice-used ice collected from a fishmonger’s (8). We might extend this doubling to Fevvers, who occupies space as both a chameleon

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and an anomaly. On stage Fevvers is “heroine of the hour,” provoking wonder and awe amidst her audience, but in the liminal space of the dressing room, the very air is breathed in lumps, a choking, visceral presence in which “‘essence of Fevvers’ … clogged the room” (9). On the stage, such essence provokes awe and wonder, but in the semi-private space of the dressing room, it is overwhelming, taking up too much space. Not only does the dressing room operate as a bridge between public and private space, but, as Farrugia argues, it also functions as a historical conduit between nineteenth-century theatrical naturalism and later, more experimental, modernist theatre. She suggests that the dressing room intensifies Fevvers’ performance by “engag[ing] with artistic movements of Carter’s generation, in particular Antonin Artaud’s First Manifesto on experimental theatre” (Farrugia 2). In fact, the novel alludes to this shift in artistic movements at other moments, for example, when the narrator reveals that “not just Lautrec, but all post-impressionists vied to paint her … Alfred Jarry proposed marriage” (11). Here we see how illusion merges with historical fact, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction. As M. L. Kohkle explains: “As the temporal malleability of myth intersects with a specific juncture of ‘real’ time in a community’s past, ‘not quite real’ characters and contexts vie with actual historical persons and events for prominence, disturbing the presumed objective bases of historical knowledge” (153–4). As the reader then, we are asked to navigate these borders between truth and illusion, fact and fiction, real and “not quite real,” whilst at the same time being aware of the porous nature of such unstable dichotomies. As Carter tells us in relation to the reader: “Part of the point of the novel is that you are kept uncertain. The reader is more or less kept uncertain until quite a long way through” (Katsavos 12). As it is for the reader, so it is for the audience, including Walser, who are all kept uncertain throughout this display of female theatricality. Turning again to Baudrillard, “[i]t is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (Baudrillard 170). The unstable dichotomy of truth/illusion keeps the reader, and the audience, guessing. We are invited to become active, questioning participants in the dynamics of theatricality, to suspend disbelief and enhance pleasure through the uncertain possibilities that an unstable truth offers.

History to Herstory—“the Fag End of History” The uncertainty the reader experiences within these pages extends outside of the internal spaces of the stage and its environs to the historical and geographical spaces through which the protagonists journey. I turn, in this final section, to these big questions of historical and geographical space, and the effects place can have upon performance. The novel is set in the liminal gaps between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century” (265). Carter states, it is “at exactly the moment in European history when things began to change. It’s set at that time quite deliberately, and she’s the new woman” (Katsavos 14). As the “new woman,” Fevvers is therefore held up as the prototype of female hope and possibility. In what might be deemed to be undue pressure, Ma Nelson tells her very early on: “Oh my little one. I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground” (25). The New Woman of the fin de siècle has been well theorized in academic discourse, threatening historical and conventional ideas about womanhood as passive, dependant and silent (see, for example, Richardson, Willis). As an emblem of the New Woman, Fevvers again bridges the gap between the real and the imaginary, the public and private, and the inside and outside as she collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction. Indeed, as Kohkle makes clear, being plainly situated in “real” time, and teasing us with her questions about authenticity, Fevvers continues to disturb the boundaries of the historically “real” and “not quite real.” The geographic spaces to which we are taken reinforce this distinction between historical fact and imagination still further. The London sections are replete with a sensuality that is echoed in

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the London theatres of the time. Tracy Davis examines the geography of sex in Victorian London theatres, claiming: “The presence of various illegal, erotic, and gastronomic entertainments throughout the West End set up expectations about and within the zone, potentially effecting everything within it … Expectations were formed to a large extent by the sensual topography of the neighbourhood” (143). Thus, the New Woman, as an emblem of change, is both immersed in the urban surroundings of transgression, and, at the same time, an instigator of such transgression. As Fevvers explains, London is a “little village on the Thames of which the principal industries are the music hall and the confidence trick” (8). Brought up in these industries, Fevvers can only end the novel by telling her audience, “It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence” (295). The sections set in Russia are similarly informed by the past, although here Fevvers becomes a foreigner in another land, just passing through on a (toy) train that is destined to crash. As Foucault states: “a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by” (Foucault and Miskowiec 23–4). Rachel Carrol argues that it is through an engagement with space and time that the novel offers the opportunity of hope for the future. She argues, “Nights at the Circus holds a wake for the past: the narrative journeys towards a radically ‘other’ space and time, arriving at the threshold of the ‘somewhere, elsewhere’ (p. 249) of utopia” (187–201). Utopia is a complicated place for which to strive, and, as Dragan Klaić asserts, not the happy conclusion it may often purport to be. “Utopia is the deeper, disguised infrastructure of dystopia, the hidden premise of dystopian vision, and dystopia has become in our times a via negativa to express utopian strivings” (3–4). Whilst we are filled with promise about the future, we are also reminded, as the stoic Lizzie regularly reminds Fevvers, that utopia does not necessarily deliver on the promise it offers. Although the future may not turn out to offer the hope we may imagine, being able to speak from the margins potentially does. Sarah Gamble tells us: “while it is easy to conceptualise marginalisation in terms of estrangement, solitude and silence … for Carter it was nothing of the sort. Envisaged through her writing, the margins are transformed into a place of life, colour and movement” (190). The margins here are performative, heterotopic spaces—the brothel, museum, circus, music hall, dressing room—which “all stand in powerful opposition to what the word ‘home’ signifies in fin de siècle England” (Ozyurt 3). Fevvers, and the circus acts she travels and performs with, teeter on both the edge of the century and the edge of gendered performance, disrupting theatrical norms and recontextualising women’s place within theatre history.

And Finally Carter’s description of theatre and performance in this novel, and the ways in which the performers navigate these spaces, moves from the naturalistic, if subversive, space of the brothel, to the more immersive and experimental spaces of the circus ring and the music hall to the liminal spaces of the dressing room and beyond. But it is not a linear theatrical development from naturalism to modernism that Carter takes us through. Carroll states: A double dynamic is in motion in Carter’s text: a return to origin, to the past, the archaic, the “primitive,” and a projection into the future. This departure from the past is signified by motifs of passage; the picaresque narrative is transported through space by means of the railway, while it traverses time and history by means of memory. (188) Whilst Carter may have hated the “mopping and mowing of ‘naturalistic’ theatre,” she is also the inheritor of such a movement. It is no accident that the circus troupe travels through Russia just at the moment the naturalistic Moscow Art Theatre is born. And, as Gamble argues, “It is no accident that Angela Carter’s most memorable characters are all, in one way or another, performance artists, for they

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echo their author’s own bravura performance; poised perfectly, as well as perilously, ‘on the edge’ of propriety, convention and classification” (190). For me, exploring theatre-fiction in such a richly packed novel always presents the challenge of what to leave out. Every line reminds the reader (audience) of multiple directions that one might go with scholarly analysis. Like the theatrical stage itself, there is always somewhere else to look. As I have argued throughout this chapter, performance is a place of freedom through disguise. Simultaneously, we are reminded that it is a place of confinement, seen, for example, in the panopticon the Countess P forces her female inmates to build in Siberia. Echoing Foucault, we learn how “[t]he cells were lit up like so many small theatres in which each actor sat by herself in the trap of her visibility” (211). Barbara Freedman asserts: “[T]heatre replaces the desiring eye with the blinded eye g(l)azed over … Theatre enacts the costs of assuming the displacing image returned back to society—the mask which alienates as it procures entry into society. In short, theatrical looking assumes a gaze which is a looking back, if not a staring down” (379). Of course, we are not in an actual theatre here, we are inside a novel that tells us all sorts of contradictory and unreliable things about the theatre. A novel that gives its characters back to society through confrontation, acquiescence and a shared sisterhood. Pleasure in the theatrical spaces that inhabit this novel comes about through the public/private spaces of sexual bondage, domination, sexuality, desire, and the pleasure (and shame) in being seen. As Carter herself ponders, “in the gap between looking and seeing, truth might lie” (Shaking a Leg 3). It is our challenge, as readers, viewers, and scholars, to seek this truth.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, U of Michigan P, 1994. Bristow, Joseph, and Trev Lynn Broughton. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. Taylor and Francis, 2016. Carroll, Rachel. “Return of the Century: Time, Modernity, and the End of History in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 187–201. Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. Vintage, 1994. Carter, Angela. Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. Virago, 1982. Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. Vintage, 2013. Carter, Angela, and Susan Bernofsky. “‘We’re Not Dealing with Naturalism Here’: An Interview with Angela Carter.” Conjunctions, no. 40, 2003, pp. 161–172. Clapp, Susannah. “The Greatest Swinger in Town.” The Guardian, 29 January 2006. https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2006/jan/29/theatre.angelacarter Cornier Michael Magali. “Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: An Engaged Feminism via Subversive Postmodern Strategies.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 35, no. 3, 1994, pp. 492–521. Davis, Tracy. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. Palgrave, 1991. Farrugia, Jessica. “Publicising the Private: Dressing Room Performances in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, vol. 21, 2015. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Freedman, Barbara. “Frame-up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theatre.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 3, 1988, pp. 375–397. Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh UP, 1997. Holliday-Karre, Erin. “Seductive Nights: The Circus as Feminist Challenge in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2019, pp. 274–286. Katsavos, Anna. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 14, no. 3, 1994, pp. 11–17. KerchyAnna. Body Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter: Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View. Edwin Mellen, 2008. Klaić, Dragan. The Plot of the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Modern Drama. U of Michigan P, 1991. Kohlke M.-L. “Into History through the Back Door: The ‘Past Historic’ in Nights at the Circus and Affinity.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2004, pp. 153–166. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol 2. Penguin Classics, 1992.

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“Waiting in the Wings” Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Edinburgh UP, 2018. Norwood, Janice. Victorian Touring Actresses: Crossing Boundaries and Negotiating the Cultural Landscape. Manchester UP, 2020. O’Hara, Patricia. “‘The Woman of To-Day’: The ‘Fin de Siècle’ Women of ‘The Music Hall and Theatre Review.’” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 1997, pp. 141–156. Ozyurt, Mine. “A Mirror-Like Pool of Ink: The New Woman in Carter’s Night at the Circus.” NineteenthCentury Gender Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2006. PowellKerry. Women and Victorian Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1992. Pullen, Kirsten. Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society. Cambridge UP, 2005. Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis, eds. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. Palgrave, 2002. Rosen, Carol. “The Structure of Illusion in Genet’s The Balcony.” Modern Drama, vol. 35, no. 4, 1992, pp. 513–519. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. Routledge, 1995. Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theatre. Martino Fine Books, 2017. Wallach Scott, Joan. Gender and the Politics of History. Columbia UP, 2018. Wolfe, Graham. Theatre Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2020.

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29 SPECTATORSHIP AND MYTH Zola’s Theatre Episodes in The Kill and Nana Juliana Starr

Despite being an avid theatregoer, an enthusiastic supporter of new drama, and a respected theatre critic who published hundreds of reviews throughout his long career, Emile Zola (1840–902) joined Balzac, Flaubert, and most other major French novelists of the nineteenth century in failing almost completely to write and produce for the stage (Brown 155). His sole theatrical success during his lifetime, Thérèse Raquin (1873), an adaptation of his novel by the same name, enjoyed only a limited theatrical run (Jackson 124). Still, reading and writing about drama served him well, especially during his early career. Theatre helped shape his critical views, turned him from fantasy to reality in his work, led him to personal and professional contacts, and taught him some difficult and important lessons about the literary and dramatic marketplace. The energy of its conflict, its power to persuade, and the variety of roles and masks it suggests responded to his own conflict between idealism and ambition, his own need to persuade others of his abilities and vision, and his own search for the right forms, the most effective ways to capture the public’s interest. While neither his theatre criticism nor his plays produced the large sums the novels eventually did, his articles on theatre of the late 1860s and early 1870s helped lift him out of poverty, generating a respectable income well before the great triumphs of L’Assomoir (1877) and Germinal (1885) (Jackson 119–20). Although he never achieved broad commercial success as a playwright,1 Zola’s depictions of theatre episodes within his novels have long been recognized as complex, interesting, and even essential to the development of his plots, characters, and ideas, particularly in the works of his highly successful twenty-volume cycle, The Rougon-Macquart: The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire (1871–93). Indeed, critics have consistently recognized the importance of the theatre scenes in these novels, while also understanding the portrayal of the female body and the violent attacks that it sustains as central to Zola’s literary methodology (Peterson 216). The confluence of these two important thematic threads—the stage and women’s suffering—is embodied in two of the author’s most well-known protagonists, Renée Saccard of La Curée (The Kill; 1871) and Nana Coupeau of Nana (1880), both stage performers (Renée is an amateur performer, while Nana is a professional actress and prostitute), who suffer acute pain in the form of miscarriages, beatings at the hands of their lovers, rape (in the case of Renée), and slow agonizing death from smallpox (in the case of Nana). In this chapter, I will show how the theatre episodes in his novels The Kill and Nana, the second and ninth instalments in the Rougon-Macquart series respectively, serve as a nexus of myth while offering a sharp critique of the contemporary theatre scene, one dominated by comedic operettas structured to appeal to male voyeurism. Using Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and

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Narrative Cinema,” I will analyze the system of spectatorship created in these episodes to demonstrate that while Zola enthusiastically embraces the new visual world founded on the precepts of scientific observation, he deplores the male gaze founded on voyeuristic fantasy, the exploitation of women, and the debasement of myth. Indeed, I will show how he adapts and modernizes ancient myth to offer fresh insights into the problematic role of women’s bodies in a culture when men are both the main creators and main consumers of art. Finally, I will demonstrate how these scenes, taken with their novelistic environment, articulate something that the author failed to accomplish in real life: his vision of the ideal theatrical artform combining the classical formula of France’s national stage—with its deep analysis of myth and psychology—with the profound truth of the modern scientific method. In 1867, when attacked in Le Figaro by the well-known critic Louis Albach for the supposedly immoral and pornographic aspects of his novels, Zola fought back by contrasting his works with those of the highly successful Jacques Offenbach, who, according to Zola’s translator, was the leading French composer of operetta, sometimes called “opera bouffe,” and founder of the Bouffes-Parisiens (1855–present), a theatre for light opera that inspired the genre’s name (Goldhammer 299). Offenbach is most known as the composer of the cancan, and his popular operas bouffes, still performed today, combine elements of bawdy comedy, satire, parody, and farce. When Zola published his third novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein was the toast of the French stage (Brown 161). In Zola’s response to Albach, he makes it clear that, for him, the real pornographer is Offenbach whose shallow, gaudy shows give undiscerning patrons all they really want from an evening in the theatre, a titillating parade of scantily clad women (Brown 162).2 Critics like Peter Brooks have emphasized that despite his embrace of scientific observation and realistic detail, Zola was an expert on the Ancients who displayed a strong “tendency toward mythologization and allegory” (125). Indeed, for Zola, there are two kinds of myth: profound, tragic myth, and the comic mythic spin-offs like La Belle Hélène (1864), another popular operetta by Offenbach that he despised, and that he parodies in the opening scene of Nana (Waddell, “Naked” 143). In both novels, Zola enacts the parodic debasement of myth, and conveys the artificial nature of the entire Parisian society of the Second Empire through the metaphor of the theatre. The first representation, in chapter six of The Kill, is a tableau vivant performed in the civilian space of the Saccard mansion, where the couple impersonates, in a mythological mise en scène, their own drama (Pagano 167–8).3 The second is in chapters one and five of Nana, where the eponymous heroine performs her starring role in the hit show, Blond Venus, a hodgepodge of deities cavorting on Mounts Olympus and Etna made of cardboard and paper mâché.4 And finally, the third is a rehearsal of Petite Duchesse in chapter nine, Nana’s unsuccessful follow-up to Blond Venus. In “Naturalism on the Stage” (1881), Zola articulates the need for a theatre that unites the classical formula with the scientific method: This idea is what has led me to say so often that the naturalistic formula carries us back to the source itself of our national stage with its classical formula. In Corneille’s tragedies and Molière’s comedies, we find this continuous analysis of character which I find necessary; plot takes a secondary place, and the work is a long dissertation in dialogue on man. Only instead of an abstract man, I would substitute a natural man, put him in his proper surroundings, and analyze all the physical and social causes which make him what he is. To me, in a word, the classical formula is a good one, on condition that the scientific method is employed in the study of society itself, in the same way that the science of chemistry is the study of compounds and their properties. (10) At the heart of this, “scientific method” is the notion of observation. Naturalism, as influenced by significant developments in the sciences, especially in the field of medicine, was part of a wider movement that placed a new emphasis and value on observation through the nineteenth century. We

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see it in the mid-century fashion for the panorama, cyclorama, and diorama, for the international expositions that promised to make the world visible in a single installation, and of course in the development and spread of photography (Rebellato 180). Jonathan Crary notes these were the symptoms and not the cause of this desire to observe, suggesting that the technology was “dependent on a new arrangement of knowledge about the body and the constitutive relation of that knowledge to social power,” which was then embodied in the development of new visual prostheses like the camera obscura and stereoscope (17). Zola enthusiastically embraced this new visual world, taking thousands of photographs, most famously at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900. We have only to think of his department store windows in The Ladies’ Paradise (1883) or his elaborate displays of food in The Belly of Paris (1873) to understand his interest in all things visual. Recent criticism links him to the world of movies, moreover, focusing on his fiction as a locus of an innovative process of imaging, as a type of writing predicated on the desire for the image, and as an art that positions the reader as cinematic spectator. For critics like Anna Gural-Migdal and Tony Williams, Zola not only creates unforgettable images, but he also associates them syntactically, like a filmmaker (22–3, 143). It is not unreasonable, therefore, to analyze his texts though a cinematic lens. Though Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” addresses the system of visual pleasure constructed by mainstream narrative cinema, its insights can be effectively applied, as we shall see, to other types of narrative visual art such as painting and theatre. For Mulvey, the cinema is an advanced representation system that poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all cinema that fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. Central to this coding was the image of woman (362–3). For Mulvey, woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning (362). In this world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (366). In both The Kill and Nana, Zola explores these notions of visual pleasure and the creation of meaning through his interpretation of the myth of Pygmalion, the male genius who turns stone beauty into flesh. In the original myth, it is Pygmalion, an artist king, who makes a statue of a woman and falls in love with it, but it is a woman, the goddess Aphrodite, who brings the statue woman, later named Galatea, to life. Hence, both man and woman participate in the artistic process. Many depictions of the myth, however, tend to portray the male artist as not only the creator of the woman/art object but also as the person who, through the quasi-magical powers of his genius, breathes life into that object. It could thus be argued that, over time, many writers and painters, in ignoring Aphrodite’s contribution to the story, represented the myth in such a way as to diminish woman’s power as artistic creator while accentuating male powers of creativity. In The Kill, “the great Worms,” an English dressmaker, is the much sought-after couturier of the wealthy women of Paris who pay exorbitant sums for his creations.5 His customers pose for hours in his “studio” while he takes their measurements, contemplates their bodies, and exercises the powers of his imagination to produce his elaborate gowns (99). As such, his relationship to his clients is that of artist and model, or artist and muse. As Renée poses for him, trying her best to hold her breath and remain motionless, he is explicitly compared to a great painter: “the master was absorbed in contemplation of his client, much as Leonardo da Vinci is said by the high priests of art to have been absorbed in the presence of Mona Lisa” (99). This quotation is significant for several reasons. First, by placing Renée in a static pose it implicitly compares her to a statue, reinforcing Worms as a Pygmalion

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figure (100). In addition, her depiction as both an art object and a client underline the complex links between art and economics. Finally, the scene replicates the active/male and passive/female structure of looks that Mulvey outlines. The artist actively gazes and creates art, while his silent model passively receives his gaze and is the object of art. This scene anticipates the tableau vivant theatre production in the Saccard home, the centrepiece of a costume ball honouring Maxime’s engagement, and including, in the audience, the upper crust of Parisian society. The show consists of three tableaux in which Renée and nine other amateur actors, all women in various stages of undress (with the exception of the effeminate Maxime), play silent mythological characters in a series of static poses. The actors’ only task, therefore, much like that of Worm’s customers, is to strike and hold poses. Monsieur Hupel de la Noue, a prefect and amateur dabbler in theatre, is the author, director, and set designer who places his human statues, coordinates their minimal movements, and provides the spoken commentary. For the costumes, he engages Worms, and a large fruit of their collaboration, together with the help of the new invention of electricity, is the successful simulation of feminine nudity: And beneath the electric light, ingeniously directed onto the scene through the garden windows, all that gauze and lace and other diaphanous fabric blended so well with the shoulders and tights that those flesh tones came alive, and it was hard to be sure that these ladies had not carried their pursuit of artistic truth to the point of appearing on stage completely naked. (236) I would argue that this quotation, implying that the actresses’ nudity is of their own making, part of their “pursuit of artistic truth,” reflects the perspective of the male spectator and his fantasy that he might actually possess the naked women on stage who, in his mind, have willingly made themselves available to him. Indeed, the men’s enjoyment of the tableau is described in unmistakably erotic terms, ones that emphasize the importance of the gaze as the motivating force behind their desire: An amorous breeze, a current of suppressed desire, had proceeded from the simulated nudity on the stage into the drawing room, where … the men exchanged smiles and whispered in one another’s ears … [and] in the mute looks exchanged amidst all this decorous delectation one sensed the shameless frankness of love offered and accepted at a glance. (237) In addition, when the director explains the risqué note of lesbianism in the tableau, he does so for the exclusive titillation of the male spectators: the marquise d’Espanet and Mme Haffner stood wrapped in a single cascade of lace, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, their hair entwined, lending a risqué note to the tableau, a hint of Lesbos, which M. Hupel de la Noue explained in an even lower voice meant to be heard only by the men: his intention, he said, had been to use this example to demonstrate the power of Venus. (236) In this sense, the two male artists, Worms and Hupel de la Noue, have attained the goal of the erotic spectacle, one that seeks not only to display women’s nudity, but also to convince the male spectator that it exists for his own personal benefit. The very architecture of the mansion itself, an ostentatious display of female exposure and availability, reinforces this fantasy through its integration of abundant statuary evoking the Pygmalion theme: “The mansion disappeared beneath its sculptures … There were balconies that resembled planters held aloft by huge naked women, their hips twisted and nipples thrust forward” (15). Similarly, Nana is described as “an invention of Bordenave’s,” referring to the Svengali-like director of the Théâtre des Variétés, who discovers her, grooms her, and turns her into a star,

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strategically launching her stage career in conjunction with the World’s Fair opening in Paris (9). The director of both her debut show that he writes especially for her, Blond Venus, and her second play, Little Duchess, as well as the designer of the giant promotional posters greeting his patrons, he is the “showman of the [female] sex” who insists that people refer to his theatre as a “brothel,” a term whose French equivalent resembles his name (bordel/Bordenave) (10). His job is thus not only to display women, but also to market and sell them, an unabashed point of pride: “Oh yes, he sold ‘em; he knew what they fetched, the wenches!” (11). Hence, he explicitly assumes the role of pimp to Nana’s prostitute, a role mirrored in Mignon’s relationship with his actress wife Rose, whom he lends out for sex with the banker Steiner and others. The analogies of artist/director-pimp, actress-prostitute are thus complete, and situate women as the raw materials and commodities of exchange with which men create art. As such, male designers and directors are the controllers of the look and the creators of meaning. They determine how the system of gazes is structured. These satirical interpretations of the Pygmalion myth reflect Zola’s distaste for a popular theatre that he sees as exploitive of women and lacking in seriousness of purpose. Another myth closely related to Pygmalion and Galatea is that of Narcissus and Echo, the topic of the tableau vivant titled The Amours of Handsome Narcissus and the Nymph Echo, a show in which Maxime and Renée, playing the title roles, enact their own drama. Central to both myths are the themes of specularity and masculine self-love. Pygmalion falls in love with his own creation, the object of his gaze, while Narcissus falls in love with his own image in the stream, ignoring Echo’s desiring looks as well as her pleas for him to gaze upon Venus. Both are thus profoundly specular myths, treating the subjects of looking, gazing, and desire. All three tableaux feature the same poses in the foreground: on the left, Renée/Echo reaches out her arms towards the great goddess Venus, her head half-turned towards Narcissus/Maxime as if begging him to gaze upon Venus, the mere sight of whom is supposed to be enough to kindle irresistible flame in his breast. But Narcissus, on the right, makes a gesture of refusal, hides his eyes with his hand, and remains cold as ice, while gazing upon his own image in the stream (236). The first and second tableaux are applauded due largely to what they portray in the background, the first featuring feminine nudity, as we have seen, and the second, even more applauded, featuring a heaping display of real gold: “The boldness of the twenty-franc coins, the dumping of the contents of a modern safe into a corner of Greek mythology, enchanted the imaginations of the ladies and the financiers in attendance” (241). As such, the success of both tableaux can be explained in their presentation of familiar subjects and their deft appeal to the lasciviousness, ambition, and greed of the spectators. The third tableau, however, lacks the distractions of wealth and nudity, thereby forcing the audience to focus directly on the two central figures and their death. Unsurprisingly, it is by far the least popular of the three: “the ladies and gentlemen of the audience, whose clear, practical minds had understood the grotto of flesh and the grotto of gold, had no interest in delving into the prefect’s mythological complexities” (246). I would like to suggest that its lack of success is due in large part to its disruption of the structure of looks outlined by Mulvey, a disruption that renders it boring and incomprehensible for the fictional spectators, (but intriguing for the curious reader of the novel). Again, for Mulvey, pleasure in looking is split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly, and this structure is what creates meaning in much of mainstream art. But here, Echo expresses her own desire as she gazes longingly and pleadingly at Narcissus. She actively looks while he is the passive receiver of her look. Furthermore, she gets nothing for her yearning, since Narcissus does not return the look or reciprocate in any way. He only gazes upon himself in the stream/mirror. I would like to suggest that woman is so entrenched in her passive role in the system of visual pleasure, that on rare occasions like this, when she actively gazes and desires, there is little understanding or meaning on the part of the spectators. It is a semantic dead end, leading only to death, since the system does not include a language for woman’s desire. The unrequited yearning leads to the death of both figures, as

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Narcissus turns into a flower and Echo turns into a white marble “statue” (245). But Narcissus gains finality and satisfaction in his death while Echo is doomed to gaze upon him forever: “Narcissus had at last, in death, satisfied the desires he had awakened in himself … [S]he [Echo] thrust herself backward, her body as rigid as a statue, with nothing left of life in her other than her gleaming female eyes, which were fixed on the aquatic flower” (245–6). Shortly after the performance, Renée must come to terms with her complete powerlessness and loss of self. She discovers that her lover has left her to marry someone else and her husband has stolen her entire fortune. Both men have used her and cast her aside. It is thus fitting that she play the role of Echo, a figure whose desiring gaze is shunned and whose only power lies in her ability to repeat what others say. In this way, Renée’s symbolic demise in the final tableau foreshadows her real death on the last page of the novel. Zola offers the tragedy of unrequited feminine desire in the patriarchal, narcissistic society of the Second Empire. For Mulvey, women, in their traditional exhibitionist role, are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote “to-belooked-at-ness” (366). Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle; from pinups to striptease, from Zeigfeld to Busby Berkeley, “she holds the look, plays to, and signifies male desire” (366). Since the primary goal is to feed the fantasies of the male spectators, physical beauty and sex appeal trump talent on the part of the actress. As we have seen, the tableau vivant requires mere poses. And for Bordenave, it is clear that because of her significant physical attributes, all the eighteen-year-old Nana needs to do on stage is to appear: “She’s only got to come on, and all the house will be gaping at her” (11). Though she cannot act or sing, in her title role in La Blonde Vénus, she in fact eclipses Rose, a talented and experienced actress and singer.6 The fact that her second show Petite Duchesse, in which she abandons the seductress role and attempts to play a proper bourgeois lady, fails abysmally, proves that she has no acting talent and that the public values her only as a sex object. The notion of naked beauty as being the most valuable attribute of the actress is reflected in the real life of both protagonists, Nana the prostitute, and Renée, the beautiful trophy wife whose husband, after initiating intimate relations with her for the sole purpose of stealing her fortune, compares her to Blanche Muller, the star of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène: “She’s got an awfully nice figure, I must say … a shape like Blanche Muller’s, you know, but ten times more supple. And those hips! The curve, the elegance—” (221). On the first pages of Nana, the reader is immersed in the pre-show darkness of the near-empty Théâtre de Variétés, where two men, the journalist Fauchery and his cousin Faloise, anxiously await the start of the opening night performance of Blond Venus, the new operetta starring Nana, the discovery who has been the talk of the Parisian theatre world for months. The themes of deferral and delay are evident throughout the chapter, starting with the very first bit of dialogue, where the two men express their impatience with the late curtain time: “Didn’t I say so, Hector?” cried the elder of the two … “We’re too early! You might well have allowed me to finish my cigar.” An attendant was passing. “Oh, Monsieur Fauchery,” she said, familiarly, “it won’t begin for a half hour yet!” “Then why do they advertise for nine o’clock?” muttered Hector, whose long, thin face assumed an expression of vexation. “Only this morning, Clarisse, who’s in the piece, swore that they’d begin at nine o’clock punctually.” (8) Many factors—visual, spatial, and aural—continue to propel the themes of impatience and anticipation, thus contributing to the growing atmosphere of excitement. The reader experiences the

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sound of carriage wheels as patrons arrive, joining the sounds of the frequent opening and closing of doors. As small groups of men arrive in the entrance hall, they gaze upon lofty yellow posters with the name of “Nana” in great black letters. A constant din of voices uttering the name of “Nana” resounds throughout the theatre. Groups of men crowd around Bordenave, pleading him to answer their questions about her. Passers-by crane their necks to get a peek into the theatre while impatient patrons gaze at their watches and wonder, “Why didn’t the play begin?” (14). Crowds crush against the box office. Men lose their hats and a woman’s dress is torn in the constant jostling. When the bell finally rings for the show to begin, a stampede ensues, causing an assault upon the seats. People continue to flood in as the overture begins, accompanied by shouts of “Hush!,” “Silence!,” and “Sit down!” (18). Thus, Zola creates an atmosphere in which the anticipation of viewing Nana’s burlesque performance reaches a fever pitch. For Roland Barthes, readers’ desires are aroused by the texts they read and aspects of the reader’s sexual identity, such as sadistic or masochistic impulses, are also mobilized by the reading encounter. In The Pleasure of the Text, he describes the narrative suspense on which realist texts depend though the image of the striptease, suggesting that masochism is defined by scenes of waiting and suspense, the masochist being aroused precisely by the deferral of pleasure (20). I would like to suggest, therefore, that Zola uses scenes of deferral as a strategy for creating readerly pleasure. Deferral of course enhances the possibility of gratification, thereby aligning the reader with the vicarious pleasure felt, I would argue, by the spectators of La Blonde Vénus. But while Zola evokes the pleasure that the male spectators gain from Nana’s performance in unmistakably erotic terms, this does not mean that he merely allows readers to enjoy the same types of pleasures as the male spectators. On the contrary, by focusing on their perspective, he exposes their lasciviousness and the hypocrisy of an artform that caters to the fiction of the male seducer. In the following quotation, it is the men who, hunched over on their chairs with the hair on the backs of their necks standing up, are like sex-crazed canines. Nana, once again, mostly stands there. “A wave of lust had flown from her as from an excited animal … At that moment her slightest movements blew the flame of desire: with her little finger she ruled men’s flesh. Backs were arched and quivered as though unseen violin-bows had been drawn across their muscles; upon men’s shoulders appeared fugitive hairs” (35). The fact that the men can absorb such displays of female nudity and then, in a selfserving delusion, attribute their own animal-like reactions to the female, is troubling, and bespeaks a hypocrisy which allows men to simultaneously exploit women for pleasure even as they deny that such exploitation takes place (Waddell, “Naked” 147). And by depicting Nana as a supremely selfpossessed individual who emanates lust, Zola again poses the possibility of feminine desire, the possibility that Nana actively returns her spectators’ desiring looks, the possibility that she too might want sex. Hence, as in the third tableau of The Kill, he questions the validity of the active-male versus passive-female dichotomy, thereby forcing the reader to confront the uncomfortable reality of a feminine desire that does not fit neatly into Mulvey’s structure of pleasure. The reader experiences the performance largely through the eyes of the male characters, most of who will become one of Nana’s lovers: Fauchery, Faloise, Bordenave, Daguenet, Muffat, Mignon, Chouard, Hugon. The three-act operetta is ingeniously constructed like a striptease, with Nana appearing in increasingly scant clothing and with her entrance in each act being delayed as long as possible. Thus, before her entrance in Act I, the reader experiences the audience’s impatience: “And still no Nana! Was the management keeping Nana for the fall of the curtain, then?” (21). At the resumption of each act, as the house lights dim and the show starts, a new world unfolds before the patrons. The strategic use of lighting contributes to the illusion that they are peering into a magical world where their fantasies can find full expression. Opera glasses, a must-have fashion accessory for all opera and theatregoers by the mid-nineteenth century (Perkins), intensify the experience by allowing every spectator to gain a close-up look: “Every opera glass fixed on Venus. Every man was her slave.

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She had taken total possession of the public” (35). Again, Mulvey’s insights are useful in understanding the theatrical experience even if, as we shall see, they have their limits: Cinema portrays a hermetically sealed world that unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer. (363) While Mulvey’s points about the contrast of light and dark are still helpful for our purposes, her musings have their limits when it comes to live theatre which affords an interaction of spectators among themselves as well as a back-and-forth between actors and audience members quite foreign to cinema. Theatre’s world isn’t hermetically sealed like a movie on the screen and doesn’t always unwind indifferent to the presence of the audience. We must distinguish between audience behaviour in a movie theatre, with its stiff noise restrictions, and the looser audience guidelines in live theatre where, depending on the type of play, spectators interact with other spectators and even with the actors. Indeed, the spectators speak freely among themselves and make comments during the shows, in both The Kill and Nana. Just as Hupel de la Noue provides spoken commentary for the exclusive benefit of the male spectators, as we have seen, so too Bordenave regales the men in his section, admirers of Clarisse’s costume, with the titillating story of her nudity in the dressing room: “‘You know that she draws up her chemise to put that on,’ said he to Fauchery, loud enough to be heard by those around him. ‘We tried the trick this morning. It was up under her arms and around the small of her back’” (19). One vociferous spectator in particular, the young Georges Hugon, proves especially important, as his loud outburst of “That’s very smart!” (21) heard by virtually everyone and occurring at a crucial moment when Nana is being booed, totally disarms the spectators, makes them laugh, and turns them in favour of her. In addition, Nana is not merely an image in a movie, hence we must distinguish between woman’s power on screen, where the audience sees her pre-recorded image and hears her pre-recorded words, versus her power on the live stage. Unlike a movie icon, Nana gauges the audience reaction, plays to it, adapts to it, and skilfully shapes her performance for maximum impact. What she lacks in talent she compensates for in her remarkable awareness of her own strengths and weaknesses, playing up the former (her beauty and sex appeal) while downplaying the latter (she can’t sing but can win over the public by laughing at herself): Nana, in the meantime, seeing the house laughing, began to laugh herself … She stood there waiting, not bored in the least, familiar with her audience, falling into step with them at once, as though she herself were admitting, with a wink, that she had not two farthings’ worth of talent, but that it did not matter at all, that in fact she had other good points. (22) By emphasizing Nana’s subjectivity, confidence, and adaptability, Zola depicts a woman whose live presence is highly interactive and is at least as impactful, if not more so, than the image of the female film icon. Her performance impacts the bodies of the spectators in real ways, as evidenced by their turning pale, turning red, pinching their lips, growing thirsty, or, most frequently, feeling a “shiver”: “A shiver of expectation traversed the house” (18); “it [her voice] caused them to give a little shiver of pleasure” (20); “A shiver of delight ran round the house” (33). The “shiver” can be compared to the climax of sexual pleasure, and at the height of Nana’s nudity, Zola focuses primarily on the physiological

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responses of the male spectators, using the trope of the theatre to paint them as voyeurs eager to share their visual enjoyment with other male audience members: “Nobody laughed anymore. The men strained forward with serious faces, sharp features, mouths irritated and parched … ‘By God,’ said Fauchery, quite simply, to la Faloise” (34). The intermission between each act, when patrons discuss the show while enjoying various visual stimuli such as nude paintings, mirrors, and headshots of stars, also serves as a deferral and spark to excitement. The finale consists of her appearance in a costume so diaphanous that, like women’s costumes in the tableau vivant, it gives the impression of total nudity: “Nana was nude … Some gauze enveloped her, but her rounded shoulders, her Amazonian bosom, her wide hips … her whole body, in fact, could be divined, nay, discerned, in all its foam-like whiteness of tint, beneath the slight fabric she wore” (33). Hence for the spectators (and the reader), the pleasure of the show derives not only from its titillating visual stimuli but also from its cyclical structure of deferral, excitement, and gratification. This voyeuristic experience intensifies months later, in chapter five, during the thirty-fourth performance of Blond Venus. While previously, readers saw the theatre through the eyes of the patron, exploring the house, vestibule, balcony, and café, they now see it through the eyes of the backstage visitor, gaining access to the exclusive spaces of the green room, wings, prop rooms, storage areas, and, most importantly, the women’s dressing rooms. Hence, they are drawn into closer and more intimate proximity to feminine nudity. Several factors contribute to the themes of delay and deferral, thereby fanning the winds of desire that Barthes outlines. The chapter opens in the green room, where the actors await the call for the second act and for the arrival of the prince, a prestigious patron from London and Nana’s latest conquest. Rumour has it that the royal will not only be in the house tonight, but will also come backstage between acts to visit Nana in her dressing room. The text is peppered with urgent calls of “They’ve knocked!” and “Curtain’s up!” (128). We learn that during the theatrical run, Nana has adapted a habit hinted at in the first chapter: “This Nana made one wait with a vengeance” (20). Indeed, she is notoriously late for her entrances, often holding up the whole show, and she will not be controlled by the threat of fines. Hence, in this way too, her ability to delay audience gratification extends her power far beyond that of the pre-recorded film actress. Society men sending handwritten date requests use a designated storage room as a waiting area. Here, among the piles of junk, they await an answer to their request to spend the evening with an actress after the show. Finally, ever since Count Muffat saw her on opening night, he has been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to get closer to Nana, and here his wish comes true, though it only creates more unrequited desire. Tonight, Nana will go home with the prince, so he will have to wait for weeks for the opportunity to see her again. His circuitous journey through the backstage spaces in the presence of Bordenave, the Prince, and his father-in-law, Marquis Chouard, forms an odyssey of desire that constitutes the primary focus. Hence, the story, structured around instances of peeking, peering, and gazing, is seen largely through the eyes the timid Muffat, a character whose theatrical inexperience (he has never been backstage in a theatre) jibes with his sexual inexperience (he has never been disloyal to his wife). To the extent that the chapter recounts the process of his moral corruption caused by the sight of Nana, the backstage area, and even the very act of looking itself, is associated with danger. When the men arrive backstage where the sceneshifters are setting the scene for the third act, Muffat is uneasy and fearful as he gazes up at the fly system, a universe unto itself: “He looked up into the heights above him, where more battens, the gas-jets on which were burning low, gleamed like galaxies of little bluish stars amid a chaos of iron rods, connecting-lines of all sizes, hanging stages, and canvases spread out in space” (137). The connection between gazing and danger becomes clear when the prince, at this moment, must warn him to get out of the way to avoid being hit by a set piece: “And the Prince himself had to warn the Count, for a canvas was descending” (137). He then spots actresses at a peephole: “Two little women, dressed for the third act, were chatting by the peephole in the curtain.

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One of them, straining forward, and widening the hole with her fingers in order to better observe things, was scanning the house beyond. ‘I see him,’ she said sharply. ‘What a mug!’” (138). In this way, by depicting a woman as the one who actively looks and the anonymous male audience member as the receiver of the look, Zola again disrupts the dichotomy of active-male versus passive-female, while posing the possibility of feminine desire. This moment serves as a learning experience for Muffat, who will follow their lead later by peering through a peephole of his own. By that time, he has already gained access to Nana’s dressing room, a tiny space with “a grated peephole of the kind used in convents” (141), where he and as many as six other men ogle the actress as she prepares for the final act. Bordenave, serving as guide to the distinguished gentlemen, enters without knocking, and they catch a glimpse of her naked from the waist up. She jumps behind the privacy curtain, in a blatant act of fake shyness and modesty, thus making them wait to catch another peek, only coming out when they plead with her. As the count watches her put on her make-up, the act of looking is again associated with danger, and he feels himself possessed by the devil: he was terrified by the stealthy, all-pervading influence which for some time past Nana’s presence had been exercising over him, and he recalled to mind the pious accounts of diabolical possession which had amused his early years. He was a believer in the devil, and, in a confused kind of way, Nana was he; with her laughter, and her bosom, and her hips, which seemed swollen with many vices. (146) In a defining moment, when they both reach for her brush, his visual pleasure turns tactile, as her hair, a leitmotif throughout the novel, passes over his hands: “Their breath mingled for a moment, and the loosened tresses of Venus flowed over his hands” (147). Muffat’s odyssey culminates in his peering at Nana’s finale through a peephole. Again, Mulvey’s insights, taking inspiration from Freud, are useful. For her, cinema offers several possible pleasures, one of them being scopophilia. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud associated it with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. In later writings, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active, controlling sense, an objectified other (363). In Muffat’s peering, a clear case of scopophilia, we note several important factors. His view is like that of a regular patron peering through opera-glasses in that it allows him to focus on a close-up. But much of the thrill stems from his privileged position backstage, which gives him the opportunity to view Nana from behind while she faces the audience, an angle unknown to the typical theatregoer. In addition, the brightness of the floodlights contrasts with the darkness of the house, thus reinforcing Mulvey’s contention that voyeuristic fantasy is enhanced by the extreme contrast of light on the screen versus dark in the audience. The spectators appear as an impersonal background of neutral colour against which Nana “pops” visually as a large mass of white. But even if they appear as a background, Muffat can see the audience behind the performer in a way that could never happen in a movie theatre. I would like to suggest that Muffat’s enjoyment is actually increased by his awareness of the audience, and by a sense of having a unique vantage point on someone that so many others desire. Alone backstage, Muffat experiences a sense of separation from the other spectators and the impression of peering into a private world where he alone possesses Nana. But the severed head of the prompter represents symbolic castration, thus emphasizing her as a man-eating, dangerous figure. Indeed, her “undulating” body can be seen as that of a snake, recalling the Biblical serpent and underlining the notions of threat, danger, and temptation. Her hair, symbolizing her animal nature, serves as a leitmotif throughout her performance and the novel itself. Then, having finished her song, in what could

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be compared to a cinematic “fade out” Nana backs up towards the peephole, thereby blotting out the view. Pleasure depends on the spectator’s ability to hold the object of his gaze at a distance. When the object gets too close, the eyes can no longer focus and the fantasy ends. As we have seen, she provokes a variety of actual physiological responses from her spectators. In this case, Muffat’s face turns white, matching the white colour of his muse. Finally, in its depiction of a peepshow, the passage reinforces the image of the theatre as a brothel: Then Muffat was seized with a desire to see; he put his eye to a peephole. Above and beyond the glowing arc formed by the footlights the dark body of the house seemed full of ruddy vapour, and against this neutral-tinted background, where row upon row of faces struck a pale, uncertain note, Nana stood forth white and vast, so that the boxes from the balcony to the flies were blotted from view. He saw her from behind—noted her swelling hips, her outstretched arms, whilst down on the floor, on the same level as her feet, the prompter’s head—an old man’s head with a humble, honest face—stood on the edge of the stage looking as though it had been severed from the body. At certain points in her opening number an undulating movement seemed to run from her neck to her waist, and to die out in the trailing border of her tunic … And seeing her thus as, with bending form and exaggerated hips, she came backing towards the Count’s peephole, he stood upright again, and his face was very white. (155) It is significant that in the final show of her lifetime, just months before her death, Nana plays the title role in another mythological spoof, Mélusine, depicting the water spirit, a serpent from the waist down. A purely static and mute part requiring only three poses, it again associates the act of looking with the notion of danger, as evidenced by the serpent, while recalling the silent, static roles of Renée and the other statue-women in the tableau vivant: “Her part was simply spectacular, but it was the great attraction of the piece, consisting, as it did, of three poses plastiques, each of which represented the same dumb and puissant fairy” (451). Here, her final stage role as a mute body on display anticipates the image of her decaying corpse laid out theatrically for its final viewing. Zola contrasts the debasement of myth, her relegation to three poses in a show meant to titillate, with the profound myth of the Three Graces. Nana dies under the eyes of Venus’ attendants; the clock in her room representing “the Three Graces as nude young women, smiling like opera-dancers” (460). The final allusion to Venus thus directly implies the notion of time while referencing the world of theatre (the “opera-dancers”), bringing the novel full circle. Zola pointedly sets the Graces atop the clock, a symbol of mortality, reminding us that his Venus is subject to time and exists in the modern world (Waddell, “Venus” 77). The clock also recalls Barthes’s notions of delay and deferral, and with Nana’s death, they take on metaphysical connotations. Interestingly, Muffat spends the final chapter on a bench outside the mansion where Nana lies, desperately waiting for news of her condition. The Three Graces, as “nude young women” also unite the novel’s images of the youthful Nana and underline the contrast with her hideously decaying corpse, the only sign of beauty remaining being her golden hair, a major leitmotif: “the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold. Venus was rotting” (467). Zola’s description of Nana’s lovely tresses resonates with both her status as a goddess, her nudity, and simultaneously, with the gold that is symbolic of capitalism and man’s greed (Renée’s hair is also blond). It stands in stark opposition to her disease-ridden face, however, which is nothing more than “a shovelful of corrupted flesh thrown down on the pillow” (467) and reminds us that, in Zola’s fictional world, Aphrodite is all too mortal (Waddell, “Venus” 146). To the extent that this scene successfully unites the profound myth of the Ancients and modern scientific observation, exposing the reader to the harsh physiological realities of death, it accomplishes what Zola wished for in “Naturalism on the Stage”—the marriage of the classical formula with the scientific method.

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For Zola, Blond Venus and the first two tableaux in The Amours of Handsome Narcissus and the Nymph Echo, like Offenbach’s operettas, are successful due largely to their spoof of myth and their deft accommodation of the male gaze. His episodes indicate that, for him, too much of contemporary “theatre” is merely burlesque spectacle, failing to portray the human condition, and opting instead for the easy commercial success that comes with feeding the salacious needs of a largely male public. The discerning reader, however, can see in the final scene of the tableau vivant and in the complex links between the protagonists’ performances, their lives, and their demise, serious explorations of myth mixed with depictions of women resistant to regulatory norms and eager to express their own desire. Indeed, these novels show us not only Zola’s sympathy for women, but also his vision for an artform that would combine the classical formula of France’s national stage (with its deep mythical and psychological analysis), with a truly naturalist theatre—one based on the scientific method of observation. Zola offers a critique of the male gaze; he does not merely cater to it. Rather than simply immerse the reader in the theatre that he describes, his novelistic episodes serve to distance readers from it, holding it (and the fictional spectators indulging in it) up for consideration. By putting theatre on the pages of his novels, he exposes the functioning of the male gaze and the structures of visual pleasure. In unforgettable scenes, he subjects his readers to the same visual temptations as his nineteenth-century theatre-going characters, thereby positioning them at the locus of voyeur. This brings up the real possibility that readers could be aroused by the reading experience and that part of their engagement with his books could be interpreted as an erotic investment in the text. In this sense, readers’ implication in a complex network of desire makes Zola’s novels a privileged site for the discussion of author-reader relations. On the one hand, in his condemnation of Offenbach’s operettas, he dismisses burlesque shows as cheap entertainment, but on the other hand, as his novels clearly indicate, he is fascinated by their powerful central image of woman, their narrative appeal, and their endless potential as interesting source material for his stories. Indeed, his deep understanding of the inner workings of voyeuristic fantasy, combined with his eagerness to share its enticing effects with his readers, suggests that just as his fictional characters are irresistibly drawn to the pleasures of erotic spectacle, so too is the author himself.

Notes 1 Though Zola never enjoyed broad commercial success as a playwright, we can consider his important work at Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, a playhouse created for the express purpose of mounting Thérèse Raquin and other naturalist plays, as a sign of artistic success. 2 While Zola’s particular nemesis was Offenbach, other similar playwrights like Amédée Guillemin, author of Le Ciel (1866), also incited his censure (Brown 109). As for Offenbach, there was likely some professional jealousy on the part of Zola, whose disastrous play Les Mystères de Marseille, which debuted in Marseille in 1866, was scheduled between two large-scale hits, Hugo’s Hernani and Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein (Brown 155). 3 Though I focus primarily on the theatre episodes in which the protagonist performs as an actress, it is worth mentioning Renée’s trip to the Théâtre-Italien, accompanied by her stepson and lover, Maxime, to see a representation of Racine’s classical masterpiece, Phèdre, in chapter five of The Kill. In their opposing interpretations of the play (Renée is genuinely moved by the emotional performance of the famous actress Ristori in the title role and, in a rare moment of self-reflection, sees herself as a modern-day Phèdre, while Maxime dismisses the work as “deadly,” stating his preference for the shows at the “Bouffes”), Zola offers another critique of the male gaze and of Offenbach while underlining his sympathy for women and his high respect for France’s classical repertoire (200). 4 Many real people have been proposed as models for Nana’s character, including Victorine-Louise Meurent (a model for the painter Manet), Cora Pearl, an infamous Second Empire courtesan, and Empress Eugénie, Napoleon’s wife (Waddell, “Venus” 74). Zola used Offenbach’s librettist, his friend Fromental Halévy, as a tour guide to the Théâtre des Variétés while conducting preparatory research for the writing of Nana (Brown 418).

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Juliana Starr 5 Worms is probably patterned after Charles Frederick Worth (1825–95), the English designer who dominated Parisian fashion in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 6 The Parisian stage of the era includes a real example of the untrained showgirl gaining more attention than the skilled performer. In 1909, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, the famous Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova, was eclipsed in her role as the faithful fiancé by the amateur Ida Rubinstein who played the title role of Cleopatra in Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet of the same name. Rubinstein’s role, like that of Nana and the women in the tableau vivant, was essentially a static one involving a mere series of poses ( Starr 185).

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du texte. Seuil, 1973. Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. Yale UP, 2005. Brown, Frederick. Zola: A Life. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press, 1990. Gural-Migdal, Anna. L’É crit-É cran des Rougon-Macquart: Conceptions iconiques et filmiques du roman chez Zola. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012. Jackson, Anne Worrell. “A Space She May Act or Die In”: Women and Theatre in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Émile Zola’s La Curée. 2002. Columbia U, PhD Dissertation. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, pp. 361–373. Pagano, Tullio. “Allegorizing La Curée.” Excavatio, vol. VI–VII, 1995, pp. 166–176. Perkins, Davin. “The History of Opera Glasses and Theater Binoculars.” https://www.fineoperaglasses.com/ pages/The-History-of-Opera-Glasses-and-Theater-Binoculars.html Peterson, Samantha. Experimenting on Difference: Women, Violence, and Narrative in Zola’s Naturalism. 2015. Boston U, PhD Dissertation. Rebellato, Dan. “Sightlines: Foucault and Naturalist theatre.” Foucault’s Theatres, edited byTony Fisher and Kélina Gotman, Manchester UP, 2020, pp. 175–191. Starr, Juliana. “The Mummy’s Dance: Staged Transpositions of Gautier’s Egyptian Tales.” Translation and the Arts in Modern France, edited by Sonya Stephens, Indiana UP, 2017, pp. 173–188. Waddell, Holly Woodson. “Et elle tomba en vierge”: Venus and the Modern Mother in Zola’s Nana.” Excavatio, vol. XV, nos. 3–4, 2001, pp. 74–91. Waddell, Holly Woodson. “The Naked Truth: Renée and the Myth of Phaedra in La Curée.” Excavatio, vol. XVIII, nos. 1–2, 2003, pp. 143–156. Williams, Tony. “Eisenstein and Zola: Naturalism, Cinema, and Mythography.” Excavatio, vol. VIII, 1996, pp. 142–158. Zola, Émile. Nana. World Publishing Company, 1946. Zola, Émile. “Naturalism on the Stage.” Playwrights on Playwriting: From Ibsen to Ionesco, edited by Toby Cole, Cooper Square Press, 2001, pp. 5–14. Zola, Émile. The Kill. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Modern Library, 2004.

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30 THEATRICAL EXTRANEITY John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theatre-Fiction Graham Wolfe

The first chapter of John Irving’s In One Person (2012) recounts the boyhood origins of two lifelong passions. Fifteen-year-old Billy is gradually ushered by his town’s transgender librarian into the oeuvre of Charles Dickens, while his involvement with the local amateur theatrical society, where his mother works as prompter, gives rise to an obsession with acting. These focuses of Billy’s life have also been prominent aspects of Irving’s own oeuvre since his first novel in 1968. Time magazine’s claim, quoted on the cover of In One Person, that Irving is “as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens,” reflects an enduring critical tendency to compare the writers, as well as Irving’s own liberal acknowledgements of Dickens’s influence (Shostak 130). But while critics have frequently drawn attention to recurring tropes like wrestling, bears, and writercharacters in Irving’s fiction, theatre has gone generally unexplored, despite the fact that few novelists have engaged with that medium in so many books. In One Person places theatre at its centre as William becomes an actor, and several of Irving’s previous novels revolve around characters who have important experiences while acting and creating shows. Until I Find You (2005) begins with the sentence, “According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor” (3), and follows Jack’s journey with recurring attention to the boy’s stage performances and eventual stardom. Son of a Circus (1994) engages with shows of different kinds and casts an actor as a central character. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), Irving’s most popular book and the focus of this chapter, brings the Dickensian and the theatrical aspects of Irving’s oeuvre into direct contact. The community theatre of Gravesend (a fictional New Hampshire town whose British namesake plays important parts in three Dickens novels) stages a production of A Christmas Carol in which the preternaturally small Owen plays the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. That a “contemporary Dickens” should frequently evoke theatre is apt when we recall how often theatre appears in Dickens’s own writings, including Sketches by Boz, The Uncommercial Traveler, and numerous novels. Memorable chapters of Nicholas Nickleby concern the protagonist’s time with a provincial company led by the inveterately theatrical actor-manager Mr. Crummles and populated by a range of remarkable stagers, from Lenville the tragedian to Crummles’s daughter the Infant Phenomenon. Great Expectations wanders famously into theatrical performances, from pantomime to a downmarket Hamlet starring Pip’s townsman Wopsle. For Dickens and Irving alike, such literary preoccupations seem partially engendered by early practical experiences with theatre. In an interview about A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving directly links himself with Dickens apropos of their youthful ambition to act. “Like Dickens, my first love was the theatre … I first wanted to be an actor. I never desired to write for the stage, but to be on it. And gradually the writing, the novels, took over, and I realized I could be all the characters, not just one” (qtd. in Atlas). This realization is further actualized when Irving, like Dickens before him, delivers public readings of his works.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-37

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To state, however, that one of Irving’s most Dickensian features is his engagement with theatre is to beg the question of what makes Dickensian theatre Dickensian. This is no simple question and critical assessments have varied considerably, from those accentuating the great author’s “devouring passion” for the art-form and his sympathy for its working people (Barish 370), to Nina Auerbach’s analysis of his career-long “hostility to the actual theatre, his compulsion to expose its meretriciousness” (8). Theorists such as Jeffrey Franklin and Emily Allen have included Dickens in their analyses of the vital importance of theatre to “novelistic self-definition throughout the nineteenth century” (Allen 8), revealing the medium’s role as a “mass-cultural foil” for the novel-form’s own purported refinement, moral supremacy, and association with “the rise of the private bourgeois individual” (Allen 9). Dickens, after all, would pen some of history’s most evocative descriptions of the deplorable polyvocality of mid-century theatres: “resounding with foul language, oaths, catcalls, shrieks, yells, blasphemy, obscenity—a truly diabolic clamour” (“Shakespeare” 25). The capacity of theatre literally to embody such clamour rendered it a powerful foil for Victorian novelists’ intimate, sincere modes of communicating with individuals about individuals. I’ll suggest, however, that the connections between Irving and Dickens are most productively approached in the spirit of recent theoretical challenges posed by David Kurnick to such “antagonistic models” of novelistic relations with theatre (Empty 6). For Kurnick, counter-narratives “about what novels are and what ideological work they do” (3) emerge when we recognize how novelists tap into the phenomenal dynamics and “democratizing potential” (19) of theatre, understood as a collectivelyexperienced and spatially-situated practice. While Irving certainly shares Dickens’s joyful predilection for exposing the theatrical medium’s failures and representational ironies, what most profoundly links these authors is their employment of theatre’s constitutive many-ness as a means of complicating the novelform’s purported disinclination, in Nancy Armstrong’s terms, “to think beyond the individual” (25). This claim may at first appear incongruous with Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, given the intensity with which that enduringly popular book spotlights a particularly, indeed metaphysically, special individual, marked out for a singularly dramatic destiny. Few characters in fiction are more literally scene-stealing than Irving’s eponymous Owen, whose prominence is ensured from the book’s start on lexical levels—everything he says is rendered in capital letters, a reflection of the “wrecked voice” (13) with he was fated to enter the world—and whose theatrical performances, as narrated retrospectively by his best friend Johnny Wheelwright, inevitably blow everyone else off the stage. But the very extremity of this upstaging opens a revealing perspective on the potentials of novelistic engagement with theatre. In Irving as in Dickens, theatre-fiction is intricately entangled with what Alex Woloch calls the “problematics of distribution” (3), with “an asymmetric structure of characterization—in which many are represented but attention flows toward a delimited center” (30–1). Even as Owen Meany’s stages provide an acid test for its protagonist’s inherent distinctiveness, the spatiality and co-presence of theatre’s collective experiences are drawn upon to powerfully complicate the narrative’s centralizing dynamics and asymmetries. I investigate this apparent contradiction by developing a concept of “theatrical extraneity,” gesturing to the paradoxical, anamorphic ways in which, in Irving and in Dickens, what is properly, conventionally, and semiotically extraneous to theatrical representation is—both comically and transformatively—brought into the spotlight.

Diegesis and Theatrical Extraneity The first scene of the Hamlet that Pip witnesses in Great Expectations suffers from numerous flaws: On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer with a dirty

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face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life, and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white silk legs … (252–3) Scenery is cheap and conspicuously artificial (arm-chairs substituting for thrones and a kitchen-table serving awkwardly to elevate them); actors are poorly costumed, unwashed, physically incongruous with their roles, and insufficient in number to represent an entire Court. The rest of the show is similarly marred by illusionary inadequacies and intrusive materiality. The ill-clad youth playing the “noble boy” is in fact sextuply-cast, conspicuously reappearing “as an able seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match” (253). The ghost of Old Hamlet is “received derisively” (253) for reasons including the actor’s cough, his conspicuous reliance on a crib sheet, and the patent falsity of his emergence from the floorboards. This chapter of Great Expectations has received more critical commentary than almost any other novelistic rendering of theatre, but limited attention has been paid to the peculiarities of what we might call Dickens’s diegesis—his manner of imposing descriptive language on theatrical performance.1 Distinctive about the chapter’s style, and at the heart of much of its humour, is its peculiar elision of the show’s fictional world with the space and materials of its representation. Pip, we are told, arrives not in a theatre where Denmark is being represented but “in Denmark.” The kitchen-table he beholds there is not supposed to be a kitchen-table, but the description flatly presents it as such (the king and queen are seated “on a kitchen-table”). The sartorial, hygienic, and numerical deficiencies of the actors representing Claudius’s Court are attributed to the Court-members themselves (the dirt is indeed positioned as a signifier of the Peer’s unusual social trajectory); and we read not of a hopeless actor who ruins his portrayal of the ghost with a hacking cough but of a metaphysical paradox: “The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him to the tomb, and to have brought it back” (253). The basic technique here is to speak of things that pertain to the level of theatrical enactment as though they signify on the level of enacted, treating dimensions technically at odds with the fictional world as though they were part of it. To appropriate Jean Alter’s semiotic terms, Dickens’s diegesis conflates elements that properly belong to the show’s “performant” realm with its “referential function” (52).2 If, as Edwin Eigner suspects (91), Dickens had read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as early as the 1830s (thus accounting for Nicholas Nickleby’s comparable sojourn with a theatre company), he may well have taken inspiration from the German writer’s own sparing but memorable applications of this technique. Goethe elides enactment and enacted apropos of a far more successful Hamlet’s curtain call: “The four princely corpses sprang aloft, and embraced each other. Polonius and Ophelia likewise issued from their graves …” (307). Dickens, however, returns repeatedly to the technique, using it later in Great Expectations when Wopsle appears in a pantomime, whose “Enchanter” is described as “coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after an apparently violent journey” (382)—as though the unsteadiness pertained to the journey from the netherworld and not to the stage machinery. This device also recurs when Dickens evokes his own early impressions of theatre: Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else. (Uncommercial 120–1) As with the description of Wopsle’s Hamlet, this passage could be read as travestying the theatre of Dickens’s time, giving, in Malcolm Andrews’s terms, “almost a burlesque elevation to the production’s crude flaws,” exposing its falsity under a tone of “politely deflationary” gentility (91). The

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phrase “wondrous secrets of Nature” is surely ironic. But Dickens’s language doesn’t simply poke fun at the giveaway presence of a self-same actor beneath various roles; it simultaneously engenders a world of fascinatingly “awful resemblances,” where witches seep into thanes and where kings fail properly to perish. Dickensian diegesis doesn’t merely mute the material elements that threaten lofty verse and fiction; it engenders a kind of metaphysical madness, wherein coughs return with the dead they killed, children in gigantic boots hold office in the land’s highest court, and the same person shifts unaccountably through numerous professions within a few weeks. Contra Auerbach’s analysis of the Wopsle Hamlet as “one of the most excoriating antitheatrical passages in the English novel” (8), it is hard not to sense that Dickens enjoys theatre’s uncanny capacity for bisociation and resurrection. The comedy of such passages, irreducible to laughter at the medium’s representational struggles, summons a powerful dimension of theatrical experience. We might indeed discern something characteristically Dickensian in this stylistic insistence on including, as part of a story, what conventional perception strives to exclude as extraneous. This playful engagement with theatrical extraneity is a compelling point of contact with John Irving. One of A Prayer for Owen Meany’s most memorable parts is its narrator Johnny Wheelwright’s recollection of the 1953 church Nativity play that his childhood friend, the precocious Owen, had attempted to raise to new levels of realism and coherence. Much of the comedy of the rehearsal scenes derives from the incongruity of the eleven-year-old’s ardent attachment to literal illusionism in an event that has long been forgiven for shortcomings. Owen’s primary aesthetic imperative is to eliminate things that have disrupted the story in previous years—from “turtle doves” that are larger than cows and look more like aliens (140) to cribs that contradict accompanying song lyrics (“no crib for a bed” [154]). His primary justification for engineering his own casting as the baby Jesus is the elimination of a particularly egregious corporeal extraneity. For years, the Reverend Wiggin and his wife Barb “insisted that the Baby Jesus not shed a tear, and in this pursuit they were relentless in gathering dozens of babies backstage; they substituted babies so freely that the Christ Child was whisked from the manger at the first unholy croak or gurgle—instantly replaced by a mute baby, or at least a stuporous one” (140). This process was facilitated by a “line of ominous-looking grown-ups” adept at handling babies but decidedly out of joint with the represented fictional world: “Were they kings or shepherds—and why were they so much bigger than the other kings and shepherds, … like a bucket brigade of volunteer firemen” (140). Though Owen’s interventions will rectify this and other failings, his efforts cannot prevent the Nativity of ’53 from being a remarkable debacle, afflicted as it is with all manner of corporeal contingency and mechanical derailment. But in Irving as in Dickens, comedy arises not simply from the ways in which the performance falls apart but from the narrator’s habit of persistently transposing theatrical extraneity into the story’s world: [T]he Christ Child’s nose was running. (195) A cow trod on an angel. (196) A particularly disastrous succession of derailments is triggered by the old church’s furnace system which, “throwing out the heat full-tilt” (198)—combined with the effects of a retrograde spotlight “hot enough to ignite the hay where the Baby Jesus lay”—renders the manger stifling, especially for those playing the front or hind portions of donkeys: We were still listening to the reading from Luke when the first donkey fainted; … The donkey’s ass and hind legs simply dropped to the floor, as if the beast had suffered a selective stroke—or had been shot; its rump was paralyzed. The front half of the donkey made a game effort, but was

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soon dragged down after its disabled parts. A cow, blinded by its horns—and trying to avoid the falling donkey—butted a shepherd into and over the low communion railing; the shepherd struck the kneeling cushions a glancing blow, and rolled into the center aisle by the first row of pews. (198–9) A reader will of course recognize what is happening as pertaining to the enactment; but the narration itself drops any active reference to the differing domains. As in Dickens, the phrasing itself gives rise to the real chaos, the absurdly comic bisociation of vulgar materiality and transcendence. Elements of theatrical experience not technically part of the plot are insistently transposed into the dramatic fiction, showing us what strange, wondrous, comic worlds emerge when we include what we are accustomed (and called upon by artistic convention) to exclude: The Baby Jesus, suddenly anxious about the direction and force of Mother Mary’s swoon, reached out his arms to catch her. (199) The cows and the donkeys tore off their heads so that they could get a better look at him. (202) A Prayer for Owen Meany also subjects this dynamic to additional twists. The audience in Dickens seems fully aware that Old Hamlet’s “ghostly manuscript” is indeed a crib sheet—only the narration treats it as though functioning on the level of representation—but when Harold Crosby, the boy who plays the Christmas Angel, in his all-too human terror at being suspended above the stage, forgets his lines and is prompted by the baby Jesus (who has past experience with the role), the Gravesend congregation cannot help but integrate this extraneity. The event increases their amazement at “whatever special Christ this was who not only knew his role but also knew all the other, vital parts of the story” (198). Nicholas Ridout refers to such moments of theatrical ambiguity as “semiotic shudders”: “the audience has no way of knowing whether they are seeing an actor making themselves into a sign or an actor failing to do so” (60). For the Gravesend audience, “shudder” becomes too mild a term when the infant Jesus, having perceived among the audience his own parents (who, on account of what Owen will call an “UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE” [213], have long stayed clear of churches), shockingly shatters the fourth wall. “‘WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING HERE?’ the angry Lord Jesus screamed” (200). Members of the congregation, transposing this theatrically extraneous shriek into the character, are traumatically interpellated. Feeling “that they stood accused,” they get up to leave (200). For other audience members, the very derailment of representation ironically generates new, unscripted possibilities and meanings. Mr. Fish, knowing nothing of the Bible, imagines “that everything Owen had done was in the script” and is consequently “impressed by the dramatic qualities of the story” (208): “I love the part when he tells the angel what to say—that’s brilliant,” Mr. Fish said. “And how he throws his mother aside—how he starts right in with the criticism … I mean, you get the idea, right away, that this is no ordinary baby. You know, he’s the Lord! Jesus—from Day One. I mean, he’s born giving orders, telling everyone what to do … I had no idea it was so …primitive a ritual, so violent, so barbaric.” (208; 3rd ellipsis in original) Fish, open to the full range of “deviations” (208) that arise when one does not divide intended fictions from mishaps, is easy to laugh at, but the comedy again derives force from the incongruous images and paradoxes to which his dissolution of boundaries gives reign. Moreover, the temptation to dismiss Fish’s perceptions as the absurd products of undereducated spectatorship is undermined by the

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narrator’s own espousal of the kinds of re-visioning that arise when one treats the extraneous as significant. Irving’s is a book about the recasting of old stories, the awakening in them of latent potentials, such that, for critics like Paul Eisenstein, they begin to “pose interpretive problems” (14). Johnny himself will emerge from the Nativity debacle with a thoroughly new version—“The Nativity I witnessed in ’53 has replaced the old story” (205). Transposing contingencies and mishaps into the enacted, he envisions a Christ “born angry and accusing,” who makes demands before he can walk, who “banishes his mother and father from the house of prayer and song” (206). Even the lead actor’s escape from the performance space informs Johnny’s new image: “I will never forget the inflamed color of his bare skin in the winter cold, and the hospital white-on-white of his swaddling clothes against the new snow” (206). The chapter locates the lesson of this Christmas not in an unchanging story but in stories’ potential for renewal, actualized here through theatre’s susceptibility to the contingent and unscripted, and through a rendering significant of the conventionally extraneous.

Anti-Dickensian Christmas Carols Owen Meany’s interest in re-envisioning old stories is directly short-circuited with Dickens through the second production in which Owen stars that season. A Christmas Carol, under the direction of Johnny’s stepfather Dan Needham—who, attempting to revitalize the “lackluster Gravesend Players,” has roused “the histrionic natures of half the townspeople by inviting them to try out” (96)—transforms Dickens from a perpetual ghostly presence to a palpable part of Irving’s show. Several commentators have pointed to the novel’s thematic links with Dickens’s well-known Christmas tale, which like Irving’s novel concerns fate and foresight (Eisenstein 5); but the full extent of Irving’s parodic interplay with Dickens emerges when we consider how his renderings of the Gravesend Christmas Carol reflect Dickens’s own renderings of theatre and theatrical companies. The production is introduced through Dan’s complaining “about what a mess amateurs could make of A Christmas Carol” (162), his criticisms recalling the deplorably pretentious over-seriousness of the Wopsle Hamlet, the excesses of Crummles’s troupe in Nicholas Nickleby, and Dickens’s own lampooning of “Private Theatres” in Sketches by Boz. Mr. Early of the Gravesend Academy English Department, who “embraced every part that Dan gave him as if he were King Lear—madness and tragedy fueled his every action, and a wild melancholy spilled from him in disgusting fits and seizures” (163), is woefully excessive as Marley’s ghost. Like Crummles and the tragedian Lenville from the same book, Mr. Early never ceases to act, carrying his “overblown and befuddled sense of Learlike doom” (265) into daily exchanges; and like Old Hamlet in Great Expectations, his spiritual performance is hindered by material intrusions, including his “jaw bandage, the unwinding of which [causes] him to forget his lines” (163). Indeed, the production’s “deepest failure”—“that none of these ghosts was frightening” (164)—conspicuously recalls Wopsle’s Hamlet. Mr. Early is “not as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Mr. Kenmore, a butcher at our local A&P, who (Mr. Fish said) smelled like raw chicken and shut his eyes whenever Mr. Fish spoke—Mr. Kenmore needed to concentrate with such fervor on his own role that he found Scrooge’s presence a distraction” (163). Irving’s Christmas Carol also recalls Dickens’s attraction to the comic potentials of theatrical rivalries and upstaging, memorably at work, for instance, in Nickleby’s immediate success when he joins the Crummles troupe: “His air, his figure, his walk, his look, everything he said or did, was the subject of commendation. There was a round of applause every time he spoke” (316). The novitiate Nickleby indeed reduces Lenville, the troupe’s juvenile lead, to unnoticeable second business: “instead of having a reception every night as he used to have, they have let him come on as if he was nobody” (377). A similar fate awaits Irving’s Scrooge. Mr. Fish, initially so proud to play the show’s central part, will be driven into a rage and then “a silent depression” (187), so consummate is his upstaging at the hands of Irving’s protagonist. Owen Meany, in his first role with the Gravesend Players, “simply dwarfs” the

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town’s established stagers (185) through his staggering performance of Dickens’s final apparition. Dan had initially resisted casting the boy as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, even when the mailman Morrison quits and leaves the production in dire straits, but when Owen is costumed and put on stage, the result is a theatrical miracle. His performance inspires an unfathomable dread, conjuring a malevolent presence and fateful foreboding that provokes stupefied horror (or in the case of young Maureen Early, pant-wetting) followed by rapturous applause: “There was a fourth curtain call on Saturday night, and Dan sent Owen out onstage alone. Mr. Fish had already been out onstage with Owen, and by himself—it was clearly Owen whom the crowd adored” (189). The comic irony of Irving’s parody is heighted by the ways in which, amidst all these Dickensian associations and in spite of Owen’s passion for the role (“A GREAT PART FOR A GREAT ACTOR” [179]), he emerges as a decidedly anti-Dickensian force: “what troubled Dan was what Charles Dickens might have thought of Owen Meany. Dan was sure that Dickens would have disapproved” (185). The intensity of the boy’s performance threatens the very character-system of Dickens’s story—“Even The Gravesend News-Letter failed to recognize that Scrooge was the main character” (185)—and it certainly transforms the tone of this Christmas tale. “We’ve started warning mothers with small children at the door. It’s not quite the family entertainment it’s supposed to be. Kids leave the theater looking like they’ve seen Dracula!” (185). In the very act of rectifying all that was wrong with the ghost of Wopsle’s Hamlet, Owen creates an inverse aesthetic threat, destabilizing the production because his apparition is too realistic and powerful. Irving indeed comically invokes this inversion by playing with a memorable detail of the Wopsle production. Whereas the ghost’s cough in Great Expectations is a key source of its downfall, Owen’s own developing cough is perceived by Dan as a potential boon: “Such a human noise from under the dark hood would surely put the audience at ease” (186). But Irving’s engagement with theatre may also appear more fundamentally to invert the dynamics of Great Expectations. Owen is not simply a more talented performer than everyone else. His performance operates for the narrator as proof of something inherently, metaphysically distinct about him: “his authority onstage was beyond ‘adult’—it was supernatural” (186). Theatre emerges as a vehicle for investigating one of the novel’s two central questions—is Owen somehow divine? The inexplicable force arising when he is staged seems strong evidence that he is somehow different from common humanity. The costume and the role—which conceal his irregular “translucence” and strip him of his most distinctive feature, his stunning voice—distil an uncanny Real, actualizing a force that remains virtual in daily life. Truth is revealed by way of public jury, in contrast with the merely individual responses of characters such as the superstitious maid Germane, whose perception of Owen’s strangeness might otherwise be dismissed. As with his role as the Christ child, this performance also appears an acid test for Owen himself, a self-reflexive mousetrap, as though he is using theatre to try out theories about himself (Am I a Son of God? Am I an Angel of Death?). Even his initial proposal to Dan—“IF EVERYBODY IS SCARED, I’M THE ONE” (180)—frames the role as an express testing-ground for inherent specialness. Owen Meany’s use of theatre may, in this light, appear fundamentally at odds with the spirit of Great Expectations, which David Kurnick has discussed apropos of “the delusions of personal importance” (“Stages” 96). Both Pip and Owen consider themselves not only special but the privileged addressees of important messages from the world. As Kurnick writes, “Pip’s most salient psychological characteristic is simply his psychologisation of everything, his ability to convert all phenomenological data into personal data” (100). But while Dickens’s protagonist moves from conceiving “a universe fantastically menaced with personal meaning” to a “discovery of his lack of centrality” (100), Irving’s Owen does appear special—his belief that the world has particular messages for him appears borne out. Having accidentally killed Johnny’s mother at a baseball game, he regards himself as God’s “instrument” (13), and the book seems gradually to affirm his conviction (fed by numerous signs and visions) that he is divinely chosen for an act of sacrificial heroism amidst the Vietnam war. In several respects, theatre is on the side of this

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assumed specialness, not only testifying to his distinction but affirming most spectacularly his belief in a prescripted destiny. On its final night the Gravesend Christmas Carol will become even more shocking than usual when Owen, in his feverish condition, perceives his own name and date of death on Scrooge’s gravestone. Theatre, seemingly a site for a multitude of eyes, presents Irving’s protagonist with an absolutely solitary vision, one which, as Johnny’s narrative reveals, comes true: Owen will die heroically, saving a roomful of Vietnamese children on the day identified by his theatrical vision. Irving has frequently declared that he begins writing his books with their endings,3 and Owen Meany certainly thrives on a teleology of “closure,” its protagonist pre-conscious of his own final scene and indeed actively rehearsing it (for instance, by practicing “the shot” with Johnny [291]—a basketball manoeuvre that ultimately enables him to expel a grenade from the room of children). Readers’ formal appreciation may derive, towards the book’s end, from recognition of how apparently disparate components of the story fit together and become significant. Owen’s obsession with an armless aboriginal statue is not merely an extraneous idiosyncrasy—it proves significant when his own arms are torn off by the grenade’s blast. Likewise, Owen was given his peculiar voice so he could quell the Vietnamese children’s anxiety; he was made small so they’d trust him—everything comes together. But “closure” may also be considered in a different sense. As Kurnick observes amidst his analysis of theatre in novels, the term can be applied “not to what happens to individual characters but to the more elementary fact of their co-presence, their shared containment” (Empty 20), both in physical theatres and in literary narratives. If Irving’s novel accentuates specialness, it also partakes of the dualistic dynamic that Kurnick discerns in Dickens, for whom theatre, a place for star turns (“assertive scene-stealing”), is also a social space of reception, of bodily co-presence and community—a site indeed of inspiration for the author’s “radically democratic imagination” (“Stages” 91). In this respect, I’ll suggest, Irving may indeed be more Dickensian than Dickens himself. Kurnick draws attention to the repeated emphasis in Great Expectations on “the literal space” of the theatre, “its conjoining of a public and a troupe in the same place,” noting that almost “all of the jokes in the Hamlet sequence turn on various kinds of spatial proximity” (“Stages” 104). From the crowd’s nut-throwing, to Hamlet’s wrestling with Laertes “on the brink of the orchestra” (255), to the incongruities of a ghost which, while acting as though having “walked an immense distance,” “perceptibly came from a closely contiguous wall” (253), Dickens accentuates theatre’s constitutive contiguities—the nearness “of the audience to the stage, of onstage to offstage,” “the audience’s collective proximity to the action” (Kurnick, “Stages” 104). While Pip feels that the world is all about him, that he is the singular and privileged addressee of its meanings and messages, Dickens employs theatre—“perhaps the nineteenth century’s most robust aesthetic technology for thinking uncomfortable intimacy” (Kurnick, “Stages” 106)—as a powerful reminder of multiplicity and mutual implication. “Dickens’s constant references to theatrical space remind us that a theatre can never pretend not to be a place, a space for an imagined social congregation that is the ground of whatever fiction transpires there” (Kurnick, “Stages” 105). The medium’s proximity, contiguity, and copresence mean that its stars breathe the same air as its minor players and its spectators, whose responses in turn affect a cast’s performance. As Pip’s experience at Wopsle’s pantomime accentuates, theatre is also a place where seeing is uncentred. “I saw that you saw me” (382), Pip’s post-show remark to Wopsle—who, from the stage, had been staring both at Pip and at someone behind him, the significance of whose presence went unperceived by the protagonist—captures for Kurnick a “phenomenological law” of theatre-spaces, wherein stage-lighting may direct but never govern perception: A theatre is etymologically a “space for seeing”—and while we usually assume that what is to be seen is the spotlit space of the stage, Dickens gets maximum mileage out of the fact that the spatial closure of the theatre … means that the sightlines can run in all directions. (“Stages” 104)

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For all the limelight Irving shines on his protagonist, he seems simultaneously intent to get even more mileage than Dickens out of theatre’s dynamics of “closure,” playing with and extending some of the earlier novelist’s particular devices. His Christmas Carol grants a larger role to what had, in the theatre of Great Expectations, remained a small element afflicting only an individual: the ghost’s cough. “Everyone was sick that Christmas” (186), begins Johnny, and the narration plays with the spreading ailment in ways that accentuate the constitutive co-presence of theatre, registering the intimate and inescapable connections between star performer, cast, and community. In addition to Owen, Mr. Early is also hacking and sniffling, prompting his interlocutor Mr. Fish (already apprehensive about his own centrality) to take evasive measures: “thus Scrooge retreated from Marley’s Ghost in an even more exaggerated fashion” (186). The illness extends to those who, on its account, will miss the show, such as Lydia, the retired maid of Johnny’s Grandmother. Even as Owen obliterates everyone else from the stage and leaves Gravesend audiences uniformly gaping, the novel draws on theatre’s mediality to emphasize the complex entanglement and “closure” of all its people. Indeed, beyond Owen’s radical star-turn, the most memorable part of Owen Meany’s theatrefiction may be its manner of framing all those other people in the town, those not, seemingly, cast in vital roles in a metaphysical drama. If the Gravesend production of A Christmas Carol initiates the process of investigating Owen’s divinity, it is also a site for the novel’s second key (and decidedly Dickensian) question: who is Johnny’s father? This question calls the narrator to turn attention to the many who constitute a theatrical audience. During the Christmas eve performance, having decided to watch from backstage so he can be with Owen, Johnny discovers what will prove a new fascination. Through a hole in the curtains he observes the audience as they watch, and it occurs to him that this could be a powerful means of discerning his father. This mode of looking affords Johnny irregular insight, magnifying and unmasking his townsfolk: “You can see more in faces that can’t see you” (218), and in faces that are watching a show. Johnny’s employment of theatre’s dynamics is complex. He uses this backstage gaze to trigger his memory of a previous audience that, he believes, must have included his father. At the baseball game where his mother had died, just before Owen hit the fateful ball, she “had noticed someone in the bleachers … she was waving to someone just before she was struck” (215). Johnny feels certain that this person was his father, and his backstage vantage-point affords him a terrific opportunity to recall who was and wasn’t present at that summer game: “watching the Christmas Eve faces of my fellow townspeople, I could begin to populate those bleacher seats on that summer day” (216), to “‘see’ everyone who’d been there” (217). But if Johnny is searching for “that special someone” (217), the process leads him to attend carefully to everyone. “With no idea how I might hope to recognize him, I began with the front row, left-center; I went through the audience, face by face” (215). The narrator shines the spotlight “row by row” on the apparently insignificant: Mrs. Kenmore the butcher’s wife, their son Donny, Mr. Early’s daughter Maureen, Caroline O’Day beside her, Arthur Dowling, Mr. Chickering the baseball coach, and countless others. Irving uses theatre to put everyone else, the hitherto extraneous, into the spotlight, and for Johnny this is a process of defamiliarization, counteracting the dynamic of small-town life wherein “you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace” (72). The sometimes cynical narrator professes his fascination: “What daydreams I accomplished backstage on Christmas Eve! How I fed myself memories from the faces of my fellow townspeople!” (219). Johnny’s aim may be to discover his father, but the process takes enjoyment in the detours: “Such was my interest in the audience, I did not turn to face the stage until Owen Meany made his appearance” (219). This backstage gaze does not, however, merely lead away from the onstage Dickens but is developed through intersection with it. “Mankind was my business,” Marley tells Scrooge at the very moment when the narration is making Johnny’s townspeople its business (215). The Dickens being staged, moreover, is itself concerned with the protagonist’s focus on what his vision has typically

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excluded—all those whose lives he failed to process. Johnny’s procedure indeed finds an ironic correlative with the Ghost of Christmas Future, whose function is to introduce a self-difference into everyday scenes, such that what might otherwise be filtered is attended to. “Scrooge,” Dickens writes, “was at first inclined to be surprised that the Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so trivial: but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be” (71). Psychologically, the moment is significant in Johnny’s own development, marking a movement away from the child’s solipsistic world and claustrophobic (even incestuous) psychodrama, hitherto focused on his mother (who had never left home), his best friend (who had praised his mother’s breasts), and his surrogate father (the show’s director). To fill in that audience is to recognize a plurality of identities and lives in what had previously appeared an indistinguishable backdrop. But this moment in the theatre is also formally significant. We might say that what Johnny experiences here is what leads him to write the kind of memoir that A Prayer for Owen Meany is. Its ostensible mission—to provide, through the story of Owen’s life, an explanation for why Johnny believes in God—is repeatedly, even counterproductively, supplemented by attention to a dizzying array of characters. If few twentieth-century novels are so explicit in their fixation on a unique individual’s ordained destiny, fewer still are so populated as Owen Meany, with over a hundred characters to whom the narrator gives what may appear extraneous attention. Irving’s theatre, in this regard, is metonymic of his novel’s own internal tension. While the protagonist Owen is in the wings about to perform his habitually radical upstaging and effacement of everyone else, the narrative’s fixation on a host of minor characters temporarily but powerfully challenges what Alex Woloch would call the book’s “asymmetric structure of characterization” (30). A Prayer for Owen Meany is resolutely what its title claims, but it is also a novel that needs to be about Harry Hoyts. Harry is that otherwise unmemorable Gravesend boy who was up to bat prior to Owen, who walked to first base, who inadvertently prolonged the game enough for Owen to kill Johnny’s mother. Harry is later killed in Vietnam, dying not, like Owen, in an act of self-sacrificial bravery that bestows meaning and order on preceding events and traumas, but in an almost extravagantly meaningless way—from a poisonous snake that bites him while he is urinating outside a Vietnamese brothel. Owen Meany never forgets, as Owen himself insists, that America “IS FULL OF HARRY HOYTS” (409)—and it is through theatre that Irving initiates this challenge to the novel’s asymmetry, spotlighting the markedly insignificant, the multitude who are vital to Irving’s narrative not in spite of but because of the fact that they are, from the vantage point of Owen’s individual destiny, so very extraneous.

Theatrical Minorness In this light, one of the most revealing links between Irving and Dickens consists in their peculiar engagement with theatrical minorness,4 the paradoxes of which are well-illustrated apropos of the character initially cast for Owen’s role in A Christmas Carol. The town’s mailman, Mr. Morrison, had a gloomy, detached quality that Dan had imagined would be perfect for the grim, final phantom—but when Mr. Morrison discovered that he had no lines, that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come never speaks, he became contemptuous of the part; he threatened to quit, but then remained in the role with a vengeance, sneering and scoffing at poor Scrooge’s questions, and leering at the audience, attempting to seize their attention from Mr. Fish (as if to accuse Dan, and Dickens, of idiocy—for denying this most important spirit the power of speech). (163–4) In his very resistance to the confines of his Dickensian role, Morrison exhibits ironic commonalities with many of Dickens’s own theatre-characters. Nickleby’s actors’ ardent desire to extend the contours

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of their roles and seize more of the limelight (regardless of the cost to the dramatic fiction) is most memorably displayed when news spreads among the Crummles troupe that a certain “London manager” is attending a show. Each performer, however limited in theatrical abilities (and however minor between the covers of Dickens’s book), is the hero of his or her own life, and thus, “Everybody happened to know that the London manager had come down specially to witness his or her own performance, and all were in a flutter of anxiety and expectation” (396). Confined within the parts they are scripted to perform, all performers strain ardently, even grotesquely, against the space and function allotted by that play’s character-system in hopes of stealing enough spotlight to alter their place in the theatre-world. Crummles himself captures the tragicomedy of this predicament in his conspicuous attempt to distort the very ontological limit of his character’s space: he grotesquely extends and personalizes his demise, dying “point blank at” the London manager; “and when the two guards came in to take the body off after a very hard death, it was seen to open its eyes and glance at the London manager” (396). The irony is that these characters become memorable through their very (spectacular) failure to impress and draw the attention of the manager; Crummles’s dying at becomes a wondrous novelistic moment in its own right. Indeed, though he and his colleagues will never supplant Nickleby’s protagonist, they are much more memorable than him, and this memorability is directly correlative to their inability—or their catastrophically abortive attempts—to assume the limelight. Though unmentioned in Alex Woloch’s discussion of minorness in Dickens, Crummles and company acutely register and literalize a paradox at the heart of his analysis: that it is in minor characters’ peculiar, distinctive manner of failing to exceed the spaces allotted by scripted roles that they may take on affective charge, ironically acquiring force through their very effacement. The Dickensian “minor character’s significance rests in—not against—his insignificance; his strange prominence is inseparable from his obscurity” (129). Morrison may indeed, in this respect, be rather more Dickensian than Dickens himself. “You’ve given that fool much more attention than he deserves” (179), says Johnny’s Grandmother to Owen, who—in the mailman’s sole scene of dialogue—had attempted to convince Morrison of the greatness of the part he had finally resigned. After he exits (“most undramatically,” Grandmother notes), the novel itself will reduce Morrison to a non-speaking part, but it will perversely continue to shine spotlights upon him, staging grandly the very trauma of his effacement. Having been unable to recognize any potential in his ghostly role (“all anybody sees of me is one finger!” [179]) and preferring to have no part than play a minor one, his novelistic fate will be to witness—in literal silence—his replacement’s supernatural transformation of his discarded part. Morrison’s narrative life is correlative to his agony at being so thoroughly acted out of memory; he is defined in his very minorness by his lost chance with a role he had repudiated as too minor, and he is made perpetually and literally to bear the weight of this radical effacement: [I]t is incalculable how much he suffered to hear of Owen’s success. He stooped under his leather sack as if he shouldered a burden much more demanding than the excess of Christmas mail. How did it make him feel to deliver all those copies of The Gravesend News-Letter, wherein Mr. Morrison’s former role was described as “not only pivotal but principal”—and Owen Meany was showered with the kind of praise Mr. Morrison might have imagined for himself? (187) As though to rub it in, Irving grants Morrison narrative spotlight here precisely through a nonspeaking part dependent on physicality. The narrative will frequently return to “that lugubrious mailman [who] did not invite so much as a nod of recognition,” if only to revisit his woeful inability to “inspire a greeting as unselfconscious as a wave” (215). In short, Irving seems intent in Morrison to extend what Woloch describes as a central (and wondrous) paradox in Dickens:

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It is as though he has followed the process of asymmetry to the point where it turns in on itself. Making people minor produces more and more distortion and flatness, until that distortion becomes so extreme that it begins to call attention to itself … The surging forth of minor characters within Dickens’s novels always takes place in relation to this socionarrative condition: the character’s presence (visually, affectively) is intricately linked to his or her simultaneous effacement (structurally, axiologically). (129) Irving is repeatedly drawn to variations on this paradoxical minorness. His theatre-scenes abound with characters who are granted narrative attention in their very capacity of being undistinguished, framed in their very lack of qualities that could warrant them centrality. In additional to the radically upstaged Mr. Fish—whose unmentioned status in reviews, and his correlative silence (“he sighed often and said nothing” [187]), are themselves voiced and reflected upon—the most extreme example is the family of Reverend Merrill, who enter the narrative as “utterly forgettable” [109] but acquire ironic attention when Johnny gazes upon them from backstage. Far from simply uninteresting, they “laboured under a plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even their proneness to illness, which was remarkable” (109). Irving here captures the paradox that dullness itself, when extreme enough, can outshine. At the theatre, “the Merrill children acted out their displeasure at being dragged to an amateur theatrical” (214)—indeed, the only thing about these “shapeless,” unnamed characters that enables their inclusion in the narrative is the way they recalcitrantly resist allotted space, in both the theatre and the text. The eldest son “sprawled his legs into the center aisle, indifferently creating a hazard for the elderly, the infirm, and the unwary” (214)—expanding to capture as much space as he can in the one sentence granted to him. The middle child “sunk herself so low in her seat that her knees caused considerable discomfort to the back of the neck of the unfortunate citizen who sat in front of her”—as though literalizing the smallness of the space into which she is crammed by the narrative, ironically maximizing obtrusiveness by sinking into it so excessively. “The third and youngest child, of undetermined sex, crawled under the seats, disturbing the ankles of several surprised theatergoers and coating itself with a film of grime and ashes—and all manner of muck that the patrons had brought in upon their winter boots” (214). Perhaps the most minor character in all of Irving—conspicuously devoid of any identifiable characteristics—this third child can register its existence only by squirming out of its spot. But we should note how, in this utterly insignificant human entity, Irving captures the phenomenality of theatrical closure. Smeared with the residues and detritus of its community, the formless child—who will turn out to be the narrator’s half-sibling—is an eminent embodiment of the corporeal co-presence defining theatrical spectatorship. One need not commit the sacrilege of suggesting that Irving’s minor characters are as “memorable” as Dickens’s—indeed they are not intended to be, and herein may consist a vital difference in the novelists’ engagement with theatre. If Dickens’s central figures, as Woloch stresses, are frequently “overshadowed by the minor characters who surround them” (132) (a statement applicable to Nickleby’s theatre-chapters, in spite of its protagonist’s onstage success), the same cannot be said of Owen Meany, who, for all his preternatural smallness, is the book’s most scene-stealing character on even purely lexical levels (Irving’s rendering of his mysteriously harsh voice in capital letters ensures that nothing he says will ever NOT stand out). Irving’s own literary coup de théâtre consists in his intricate short-circuiting of this protagonist with theatrical extraneity. For the best example, we should return to the Nativity and its ascending angel Harold Crosby, another of Irving’s paradoxically memorable minor characters—memorable in his extreme effacement. An inversion of Morrison, who wanted more lines and more spotlight, Harold Crosby is (distinguished as) the least theatrical character imaginable, wanting nothing more than total obscurity. From

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the moment he is introduced, when roles are being decided for the Nativity, he is pronounced in his very proclivity for being so remarkably unnoticeable: In the rear of the nave, rendered even more insignificant than usual by his proximity to the giant painting of “The Call of the Twelve,” pudgy Harold Crosby sat diminished by the depiction of Jesus appointing his disciples; all eyes rarely feasted on fat Harold Crosby, who was not grotesque enough to be teased—or even noticed—but who was enough of a slob to be rejected whenever he caused the slightest attention to be drawn to himself. Therefore, Harold Crosby abstained. He sat in the back; he stood at the rear of the line; he spoke only when spoken to; he desired to be left alone, and—for the most part—he was. (150–1) Owen’s refusal any longer to play the angel compels Harold to do so. But Harold is raised to prominence only to be all the more remarkably, memorably upstaged. The light supposed to illumine him when he is flown over the manger to deliver his big speech will inadvertently fall towards the novel’s Prince of Peace (who indeed delivers that speech on the terrified Angel’s behalf), and amidst the Nativity’s subsequent developments Harold will vanish entirely from perception: Barb Wiggin had cranked Harold Crosby up so high that he was completely gone from view; up in the dark dust, up in the gloom inspired by the mock flying buttresses, Harold Crosby, who was still probably facing the wrong way, was flapping like a stranded bat—but I couldn’t see him. I had only a vague impression of his panic and his helplessness. (198) Though the narrative will likewise lose sight of Harold for the remainder of the pageant, Irving’s orchestration of this upstaging per se will subtly work against his own protagonist’s scene-stealing dynamics, indeed complicating Johnny’s new vision of Christmas. The chapter does not end with Owen’s big curtain and dramatic exodus from the church. After a narrative detour, Johnny must go back inside to confront the aftermath of the show, which includes, as Mr. Fish comes to announce, the revelation “that the angel was still ‘on-high.’ He wondered if this was a part of the script—to leave Harold Crosby hanging in the rafters long after the manger and the pews had emptied?” (209). Fish is again, ad absurdum, transposing into the enacted an element that belongs entirely to the vagaries and mishaps of enactment. And once again, the narration itself plays (in darkly humorous ways) with the additional signifying potentials of this theatrical extraneity: “Harold Crosby, who thought both his God and Barb Wiggin had abandoned him forever, swung like the victim of a vigilante killing among the mock flying buttresses” (209). There is, in this case, a barb in the very comedy of Fish’s postulations, in his insistence on reading significance into this remainder. What we miss in laughing off his comic over-reading is the fact that we too have likely forgotten Harold up there, leaving him suspended, unconcerned about his fate amidst the flourish of Owen’s exit. Irving here directly short-circuits theatrical extraneity with minorness. It would be hard to conceive a character who more vividly and literally registers the effects of being yanked out of the limelight—Harold, having lost all voice, utterly abandoned and forgotten by co-actors, technical staff, and audience, deprived of any mobility while being granted no concrete place to rest, has vomited all over himself. His vertigo seems entirely appropriate to the state of limbo pertaining to his formal position in the text; and in an act of grotesque bisociation he has even attempted “to wipe himself with one of his wings” (209). But in this very abject minorness, Harold offers a keen demonstration of how Irving’s narrative simultaneously works against its own apparent mission of raising Owen to the centre of its universe. It is as though the minored, obviated characters are helping each other out—Fish, defined by his own upstagedness, is the agent of contesting Johnny’s star-centred

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re-conception of Christmas, compelling it to include the utterly excluded Harold, who is up there vomiting because Owen refused to play the part any longer, insisting instead on the Christ role. Fish insists on transposing Harold’s very exclusion back into the story, making it mean; Fish’s very marker of flatness—his eccentricity of so absurdly interpreting theatrical extraneity as significant—becomes the source of Harold’s re-inscription. Irving will perform a similar literary coup de théâtre via A Christmas Carol, adding yet another level to his parodic engagement with Dickens’s coughing ghost. Irving sets up a particular link with one of the book’s most pronouncedly minor characters, Lydia, the aged, wheel-chair-bound former maid of Johnny’s grandmother. Lydia is brought into Johnny’s narrative almost exclusively in her capacity for being undistinguished and for fading away: Johnny notes her uncanny lack of difference from his Grandmother (“I had to look to see which one of them was speaking”) and her habit of falling asleep in the wheelchair, “facing into a corner” (186). But Lydia will, like Harold Crosby, be complexly linked with the novel’s theatrical protagonist. “He’s getting to be like Lydia,” observes Johnny’s Grandmother (186) apropos of the sickly Owen’s tendency, while preparing for his two dramatic roles that Christmas, to sleep all afternoon; and the narration subtly integrates Lydia between references to the cough afflicting the Gravesend Players: “Lydia had such a violent cough that she would occasionally propel herself backward in her wheelchair” (186). But Lydia is not only one among many coughers that Christmas. Too sick to attend A Christmas Carol, she will die of the cough (or its related illness) on Christmas Eve at the very moment Owen is upstaging Scrooge. Her death indeed coincides with Irving’s protagonist’s vision of his starring role in a metaphysical plot—when Owen, in his feverish condition, sees his name on Scrooge’s gravestone and screams. As with the Nativity, the narration’s emphasis on Owen’s “big curtain” is complicated by a shortcircuit with extreme minorness, with the offstage death of eminently undistinguished Lydia, who is postulated indeed to have died from Owen’s scream (loud enough, claims the maid Germaine, to have travelled from the theatre to Lydia’s bedside). Owen’s foreseen death, the epitome of significance (it will both save innocent lives and prove God’s existence) is directly short-circuited with an eminently insignificant, offstage finale. In a post-show telephone conversation, Johnny confronts Owen with his Grandmother’s logical theory that “it was Lydia’s death that the gravestone foretold,” that Owen had simply “confused it with his own”: “You were thinking of yourself—you’d even been writing your own name, just moments before. And you had a very high fever. If that gravestone actually told you anything, it told you that someone was going to die” (229). The novel thus compels us not simply to accept Owen’s vision of reality (menaced with personal meanings, orchestrated by an “awesome design”), but to recognize his mode of perception as correlative to radical upstaging and erasure—to ask what is distorted, obscured, sacrificed through his inveterate (and Pip-like) personalization: “IT WAS MY NAME … NOT LYDIA’S” (229). Though Johnny will grow to accept Owen’s vision—indeed the narrative’s ostensible mission is to affirm the validity of what he claims to have seen while enacting Dickens’s Ghost—I suggest that the Lydia theory continues formally to haunt this book, complicating its apparent asymmetry. As “witness” (159), Johnny does not simply (in the tradition of a Matthew or Luke) relay the sayings and miraculous deeds of Irving’s Christ-figure. His mode of narration, while adhering to the specialness of its protagonist, simultaneously accentuates the limitations and distortions correlative to that protagonist’s own mode of perception, encouraging readers to perform the comic operation of that minor character Mr. Fish who inveterately integrates extraneity per se into a story’s world. It is through engagement with theatre, whose sightlines, as Kurnick puts it, “run in all directions” (“Stages” 104), whose messages never have a singular addressee and can never be cleanly extracted from the extraneities of their medium, that Irving adapts and performs anew the democratizing potentials of Dickensian mise-en-scène.

416

Theatrical Extraneity

Notes 1 I use this term in the sense developed by Martin Puchner, who (drawing on its Platonic origins) employs it to designate “descriptive and narrative strategies” imposed upon mimetic action (21), especially in ways that function to “channel, frame, control, and even interrupt … the unmediated theatricality of the stage and its actors” (22). 2 The performant function “involves activities that take place on the stage, focusing on the actors, and … operates outside the communication process whereby a story is told to the audience” (Alter 52). 3 As Irving states on his website, “I always begin with a last sentence; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.” 4 “Theatrical minorness” is my variation on the notion of minorness as developed by Alex Woloch in The One vs. the Many.

Works Cited Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP, 2003. Alter, Jean. A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre. U of Pennsylvania P, 1990. Andrews, Malcolm. Dickensian Laughter: Essays on Dickens and Humour. Oxford UP, 2013. Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. Columbia UP, 2005. Atlas, James. Interview with John Irving. A Prayer for Owen Meany, narrated by Joe Barrett, Audible, Audiobook, 2009. Auerbach, Nina. “Before the Curtain.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited byKerry Powell, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 3–14. Barish, Jonas. The Anti-theatrical Prejudice. U of California P, 1981. Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Christmas Books, edited by Ruth Glancy, Oxford UP, 1988. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Oxford UP, 1993. Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Oxford UP, 1966. Dickens, Charles. “Shakespeare and Newgate.” Household Words 4, 10 April 1851, pp. 25–27. Dickens Journals Online, www.djo.org.uk/. Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces. Oxford UP, 1964. Eigner, Edwin. “The Absent Clown in Great Expectations.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 11, 1983, pp. 115–133. Eisenstein, Paul. “On the Ethics of Sanctified Sacrifice: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.” Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 17, 2006, pp. 1–21. Franklin, Jeffrey. Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, vol. 1. Translated by Thomas Carlyle, Ticknor and Fields, 1865. Irving, John. In One Person. Doubleday, 2012. Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany. William Morrow, 1989. Irving, John. Until I Find You. Random House, 2005. Irving, John. “The Books of John Irving.” John Irving. john-irving.com/the-books-of-john-irving/. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton UP, 2012. Kurnick, David. “Stages: Theatre and the Politics of Style in Great Expectations.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 1, 2013, pp. 94–111. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge UP, 2006. Shostak, Debra. “The Family Romances of John Irving.” Essays in Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1994, pp. 129–145. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003.

417

SELECTED LIST OF THEATRE-FICTION

Inevitably incomplete, this list of novels and stories with a substantial focus on theatre—its people, practices, and industries—is included here in the interest of supporting further research into this Companion’s topics. The list is indebted to numerous sources including suggestions from contributors, online chats (including a SCUDD listserv discussion initiated by Frances Babbage and a Twitter discussion initiated by Mark Ravenhill), as well as the editor’s own research and conversations with colleagues. Athenaeus, The Deipnosophisthai (c. 200–220 CE) Alciphron, Letters of the Courtesans (Second Sophistic) Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, El viaje entretenido (The Entertaining Journey) (1603) Langxian, “Zhang Tingxiu taosheng jiufu” (“Zhang Tingxiu Escapes from Death and Saves His Father”) (1627) Mijin Duzhe, “Yi xiupu” (“The Shifted Embroidery”) (1640s) Paul Scarron, Le Roman comique (1651, 1657) Li Yu, Silent Operas (Wusheng xi) (c. 1656) George Farquhar, The Adventures of Covent-Garden (1698) Samuel Richardson, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741–1742) Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) Thomas Mozeen, Young Scarron (1752) Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote; or, the Adventures of Arabella (1752) William Woty, The Spouting-club (1758) Oliver Goldsmith, “The Adventures of a Strolling Player” (1759) Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) Frances Brooke, The Excursion (1777) Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778) Thomas Holcroft, Alwyn; or The Gentleman Comedian (1780) Thomas Holcroft, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794) J. W. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) Sophie Mereau-Brentano, “Die Flucht nach der Hauptstadt” (“Flight to the Capital”) (1806) Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814) Carl Jonas Love Almquist, The Queen’s Tiara (1834)

418

DOI: 10.4324/9781003405276-38

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Charles Dickens, “Mrs. Joseph Porter Over the Way” (1836) Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (1837) Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1839) Edgar Allan Poe, “The Spectacles” (1844) Henry Chorley, Pomfret; or, Public Opinion and Private Judgment (1845) Geraldine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters (1848) Edwina Jane Burbury, Florence Sackville, or Self-Dependence (1851) Eliza Lynn Linton, Realities (1851) Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853) Charles Reade, Peg Woffington (1853) Anna Cora Mowatt, Mimic Life; or, Before and Behind the Curtain (1855) Annie Edwards, The Morals of Mayfair (1858) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860) Wilkie Collins, No Name (1862) Théophile Gautier, Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863) Charlotte Yonge, Historical Dramas (1864) Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask (1866) Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868) William Black, In Silk Attire (1869) Joseph Hatton, Christopher Kenrick: His Life and Adventures (1869) Louisa May Alcott, Little Men (1871) Ivan Turgenev, Torrents of Spring (1872) Louisa May Alcott, Work (1873) B. H. Buxton, Jennie of ‘The Prince’s’ (1876) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) B. H. Buxton, Nell—On Stage and Off (1879) B. H. Buxton, From the Wings (1880) Émile Zola, Nana (1880) Edmond de Goncourt, La Faustin (1881) Florence Marryat, My Sister the Actress (1881) Edgar Monteil, Cornebois (1881) Florence Marryat, Facing the Footlights (1882) Edith Drewry, Only an Actress (1883) Florence Marryat, Peeress and Player (1883) Arsène Houssaye, La comédienne (1884) Harriet Jay, Through the Stage Door (1884) Mary Augusta Ward, Miss Bretherton (1884) William Black, Judith Shakespeare (1885) John Coleman, Curley An Actor’s Story (1885) George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885) Louisa May Alcott, Jo’s Boys (1886) Florence Marryat, Miss Harrington’s Husband (1886) John Coleman, The Rival Queens: A Story of the Modern Stage (1887) Jean Blaize, Les Planches (1888) Eva Ross Church, An Actress’s Love Story (1888) Henri Bauer, Une comedienne: Scenes de la vie de théâtre (1889) Henry James, The Tragic Muse (1890) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

419

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Henry James, “The Private Life” (1892) Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (1892) Mabel Collins, Juliet’s Lovers (1893) Henry James, “Nona Vincent” (1893) Dorothy Leighton, Disillusion: A Story with a Preface (1894) Francis Gribble, Sunlight and Limelight: A Story of the Stage Life and the Real Life (1898) Leonard Merrick, The Actor-Manager (1898) Louis Vaultier, Une étoile (1898) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900) Anatole France, Histoire comique (1903) Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (1903) Saki, “Reginald’s Drama” (1904) Arthur Symons, “Esther Kahn” (1905) Émilie Lerou, Sous le masque (1907) Sholem Aleichem, Wandering Stars (1909) Louise Closser Hale, The Actress (1909) Gaston Leroux, Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1909–10) Colette, La Vagabonde (1910) Leonard Merrick, The Position of Peggy Harper (1911) Colette, L’Enfant de Bastienne (1912) Colette, L’Envers du music hall (1913) Ronald Firbank, Caprice (1917) Willa Catha, My Ántonia (1918) Colette, Mitsou (1919) D.H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (1920) Horacio Quiroga, “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa” (1921) Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921) Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, El Comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor) (1923) Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927) Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, Enter Sir John (1928) Patrick Hamilton, Twopence Coloured (1928) Avery Hopwood, The Great Bordello: A Story of the Theatre (1928) J. B. Priestley, The Good Companions (1929) Clemence Dane, Broome Stages (1931) Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, Re-Enter Sir John (1932) Damon Runyon, “For a Pal” (1932) Rachel Ferguson, A Child in the Theatre (1933) Dorothy Parker, “Glory in the Daytime” (1933) Damon Runyon, “Broadway Complex” (1933) Agatha Christie, “Swan Song” (1934) Alan Melville, Quick Curtain (1934) Irène Némirovsky, “Ida” (1934) Ngaio Marsh, Enter a Murderer (1935) Horacio Quiroga, “El Puritano (1935) Horacio Quiroga, “El Espectro” (1935) Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes (1936) Mikhail Bulgakov, Black Snow (1930s; published 1967) Klaus Mann, Mephisto (1936)

420

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning (1937) Michael Innes, Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) Ngaio Marsh, Vintage Murder (1937) Somerset Maugham, Theatre (1937) Ngaio Marsh, Overture to Death (1939) J. B. Priestley, Birmanpool (1939, unpublished) Dorothy Sayers, “Blood Sacrifice” (1939) Dorothy Sayers, “Nebuchadnezzar” (1939) Geoffrey Trease, Cue for Treason (1940) Sinclair Lewis, Bethel Merriday (1940) W. Somerset Maugham, “Gigolo and Gigolette” (1940) Pamela Brown, The Swish of the Curtain (1941) Gypsy Rose Lee, The G-String Murders (1941) Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941) Frances Lockridge and Richard Lockridge, Death on the Aisle (1942) Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) Damon Runyon, “The Melancholy Dane” (1944) Noel Streatfeild, Curtain Up (1944) James Thurber, “The Macbeth Murder Mystery” (1945) Pamela Brown, Maddy Alone (1945) Ngaio Marsh, “I Can Find My Way Out” (1946) Jorge Luis Borges, “Averroe’s Search” (1947) Ngaio Marsh, Final Curtain (1947) J. B. Priestley, Jenny Villiers: A Story of the Theatre (1947) Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel (1948) Pamela Brown, Blue Door Venture (1949) Antonia Forest, Autumn Term (1948) Rumer Godden, A Candle for St Jude (1948) Françoise Loranger, Mathieu (1949) Mary Orr, “The Wisdom of Eve” (1950) Noel Coward, “Star Quality” (1951) Robertson Davies, Tempest-tost (1951) Ngaio Marsh, Opening Night (1951) Antonia White, The Sugar House (1952) P. G. Wodehouse, Barmy in Wonderland (1952) Yukio Mishima, “Onnagata” (1953) Tove Jansson, Farlig midsommar (Moominsummer Madness) (1954) Cothburn Madison O’Neal, The Dark Lady (1954) Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954) Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar (1955) Pamela Brown, Maddy Again (1956) Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star (1956) Ngaio Marsh, Off with his Head (1957) Karen Blixen, “Tempests” (1958) Richard Bissell, Say, Darling (1959) Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959) Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Sea Change (1959) Michael Redgrave, The Mountebank’s Tale (1959)

421

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Ngaio Marsh, False Scent (1960) John le Carre, Call for the Dead (1961) Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961) Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year (1964) Vladimir Nabokov, “Lik” (1964) Fritz Leiber, “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” (1965) J. B. Priestley, Lost Empires (1965) Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom (1965) Julio Cortázar, “Instrucciones para John Howell” (1966) Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo (1966) Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (1967) Ngaio Marsh, Death at the Dolphin (1967) Michael Blakemore, Next Season (1968) Amanda Cross, The Theban Mysteries (1971) Jean Plaidy, Goddess of the Green Room (1971) Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (1972) Syed Mustafa Siraj, Mayamridanga (1972) Doris Lessing, The Summer Before the Dark (1973) Alejo Carpentier, Concierto barroco (1974) Angela Carter, “The Loves of Lady Purple” (1974) Harry Secombe, Twice Brightly (1974) Simon Brett, Cast, In Order of Disappearance (1975) Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975) Ian McEwan, “Cocker at the Theatre” (1975) Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder (1976) Nicholas Meyer, The West End Horror (1976) A. S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden (1978) David Holbrook, A Play of Passion (1978) Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (1978) John Mortimer, “Rumpole and the Showfolk” (1979) John Arden, Silence Among the Weapons (1982) Ngaio Marsh, Light Thickens (1982) P. D. James, The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) Charlotte Worgitzky, Meine ungeborenen Kinder (My Unborn Children) (1982) Jane Dentinger, Murder on Cue (1983) Thomas Bernhard, Holzfällen (Woodcutters) (1984) Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) Jane Dentinger, First Hit of the Season (1984) Beryl Bainbridge, “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie” (1985) Janet Burroway, Opening Nights (1985) Angela Carter, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” (1985) Jane Dentinger, Death Mask (1988) Lilian Lee (Li Bihua), Farewell My Concubine (1985, revised 1993) Simon Brett, “The Haunted Actress” (1985) Linda Barnes, Blood Will Have Blood (1986) Thomas Kenneally, The Playmaker (1987) Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1987) Normand Chaurette, Scènes d’enfants (1988)

422

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) Wilton Barnhardt, Emma Who Saved My Life (1989) Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie’s (1989) Jane Gardam, “Groundlings” (1989) Caroline Graham, Death of a Hollow Man (1989) Harry Mulisch, Last Call (1989) John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) Edna O’Brien, “Dramas” (1989) Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) Angela Carter, “In Pantoland” (1991) Angela Carter, Wise Children (1991) Michael Malone, Foolscap, or, The Stages of Love (1991) Christopher Stasheff, A Company of Stars (1991) Rumer Godden, Listen to the Nightingale (1992) Robert Lee Hall, Murder at Drury Lane (1992) Ellen Hart, Stage Fright (1992) Mike Ockrent, Running Down Broadway (1992) Vladimir Sharov, The Rehearsals (1992) Simon Shaw, Bloody Instructions (1992) Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993) Parnell Hall, Actor (1993) Carla Kelly, Miss Billings Treads the Boards (1993) Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) Michelle Magorian, A Cuckoo in the Nest (1994) Jane Dentinger, Who Dropped Peter Pan? (1995) Doris Lessing, Love, Again (1995) Terry Pratchett, Maskerade (1995) Barry Unsworth, Morality Play (1995) Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (1998) Donald Antrim, “An Actor Prepares” (1999) Susan Sontag, In America (1999) Melissa Nathan, Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field (2000) Timothy Findley, Spadework (2001) Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil (2001) Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001) Mo Yan, Sandalwood Death (2001) Abraham B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride (2003) Edgardo Cozarinsky, El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp) (2004) Robert Goddard, Play to the End (2004) David Lodge, Author Author (2004) Will Eaves, Nothing to Be Afraid Of (2005) John Irving, Until I Find You (2005) Anita Nair, Mistress (2005) David Nicholls, The Understudy (2005) Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark (2005) Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (2006) Julia Golding, Cat Among the Pigeons (2006) Julia Golding, The Diamond of Drury Lane (2006)

423

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Claire Legendre, La Méthode Stanislavski (2006) Sally Gardner, The Red Necklace (2007) Patrick Rothfuss, Name of the Wind (2007) Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal (2008) Suzanne Selfors, Saving Juliet (2008) Nicola Upson, An Expert in Murder (2008) A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (2009) Ann Featherstone, Walking in Pimlico (2009) Glen David Gold, Sunnyside (2009) Lisa Mantchev, Eyes Like Stars (2009) Valerie Martin, The Confessions of Edward Day (2009) Philip Roth, The Humbling (2009) Nicola Upson, Angel with Two Faces (2009) Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010) Joshua Braff, Peep Show (2010) Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (2010) Craig Higginson, Last Summer (2010) Lisa Mantchev, Perchance to Dream (2010) Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light (2010) Helen Peter, The Secret Hen House Theatre (2010) Boris Akunin, All the World’s a Stage (2011) Gillian Bagwell, The Darling Strumpet (2011) Melissa Brayden, Waiting in the Wings (2011) Ann Featherstone, The Newgate Jig (2011) Christopher Fowler, The Memory of Blood (2011) Essie Fox, The Somnambulist (2011) Esther Freud, Lucky Break (2011) Lyn Gardner, Olivia’s First Term (2011) Peter Lovesey, Stagestruck (2011) Vincent H. O’Neil, and Henry V. O’Neil, Death Troupe (2011) Priya Parmar, Exit the Actress (2011) S. M. Stevens, Bit Players, Has-Been Actors and Other Posers (2011) Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Painted Girls (2012) Elizabeth Eulberg, Take a Bow (2012) Heather Haven, The Dagger Before Me (2012) John Irving, In One Person (2012) Eric Flint and David Carrico, 1636: The Devil’s Opera (2013) Beverly Swerling, Juffie Kane (2013) Lauren Graham, Someday, Someday, Maybe (2013) Scott Lynch, Republic of Thieves (2013) Barclay Price, Misdirection (2013) Natalie Haynes, The Amber Fury (2014) Sadie Jones, Fallout (2014) Michelle Magorian, Impossible! (2014) Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014) Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) Stephen Berkoff, Sod the Bitches! (2015) Laini Giles, The Forgotten Flapper: A Novel of Olive Thomas (2015)

424

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies (2015) Tara Guha, Untouchable Things (2015) Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” (2015) Edwin Wilson, The Patron Murders (2015) Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed (2016) Dwayne Brenna, New Albion (2016) Serena Chase, Intermission (2016) Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (2016) Orhan Pamuk, The Red-haired Woman (2016) Francine Prose, Mister Monkey (2016) Susie Boyt, Love and Fame (2017) Amy Rose Capetta, Echo After Echo (2017) Bernard Cornwell, Fools and Mortals (2017) Christina Lauren, Roomies (2017) Patrick McGrath, The Wardrobe Mistress (2017) Emma Mills, Foolish Hearts (2017) Rachel Nightingale, Harlequin’s Riddle (2017) Riley Redgate, Noteworthy (2017) M. L. Rio, If We Were Villains (2017) Andrea Camilleri, The Sicilian Method (2018) Jennifer Donaldson, Lies You Never Told Me (2018) Helen Peters, The Secret Hen House Theatre (2018) Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight (2018) Susan Choi, Trust Exercise (2019) Fiona Davis, The Chelsea Girls (2019) Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019) Elizabeth Gilbert, The City of Girls (2019) Aditya Iyengar, Bhumika: A Story of Sita (2019) David Nicholls, Sweet Sorrow (2019) Joseph O’Connor, Shadowplay (2019) Aimee Agresti, The Summer Set (2020) Mona Awad, All’s Well (2020) Helena Dixon, Murder at the Playhouse (2020) Anne Enright, Actress (2020) Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (2020) Emily Neuberger, A Tender Thing (2020) Eloise Williams, Wilde (2020) Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera, Here’s to Us (2021) Donna Andrews, Murder Most Fowl (2021) Jason Dorough, Akithar’s Greatest Trick (2021) Nicole Galland, Master of the Revels (2021) Ethan Hawke, A Bright Ray of Darkness (2021) Anthony Horowitz, The Twist of a Knife (2022) Marisa Kanter, As If on Cue (2021) Jen Silverman, We Play Ourselves (2021) Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Good Company (2021) Claire Thomas, The Performance (2021) Karin Tidbeck, The Memory Theater (2021)

425

Selected List of Theatre-Fiction

Kate Bromley, Here for the Drama (2022) Sopan Deb, Keya Das’s Second Act (2022) Karen Joy Fowler, Booth (2022) Louise Hare, Miss Aldridge Regrets (2022) Emma Lord, When You Get the Chance (2022) Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre (2022) Ava Reid, Juniper and Thorn (2022) Christine Barker, Third Girl from the Left (2023) Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson, I Only Read Murder (2023) Anne Patchett, Tom Lake (2023) Laura Purcell, The Whispering Muse (2023)

426

INDEX

Page numbers followed by “n” indicate notes. Académie française 15, 17 Ackerman, Alan 81, 284, 288n2 acting schools and training, theatre-fiction and 1, 8, 10, 16–17, 76–7, 96, 111, 160–4, 189, 214–15, 217, 219–20, 228n2, 228n5, 282, 284–5, 288, 291–2, 296, 313–23, 325–35, 367, 369 affect 81, 119, 165, 188, 214, 318, 320, 363–76 affordance 43–6 Albertalli, Becky, and Adam Silvera: Here’s to Us 292 Alciphron: Letters of the Courtesans 48–9, 50 Alcott, Louisa May 2, 6; Jo’s Boys 280, 281, 283–4, 288; Little Men 280, 281, 283, 286, 287; Little Women 280, 281, 282, 283, 285; theatremaking in the novels of 280–88 Alkaap 116–128 Allen, Emily 231, 352, 363 antitheatricality 10–11, 218, 232, 249, 263, 267–8, 269, 271–7, 285, 329–30, 335, 350–61, 364–6, 404–5 archives, and theatre-fiction 29–30, 42–52, 162 Aristophanes 51 Aristotle 21, 46, 147, 329 Athenaeus: The Deipnosophisthai 51, 52 at-home theatricals: See private theatricals Atwood, Margaret 2; Cat’s Eye 152; Hag-Seed 146–53, 157; Surfacing 152 audiences, theatre-fiction and 14, 18, 20–1, 23, 24, 30, 34, 56, 80, 82–4, 94, 97, 107–8, 127–8, 165–6, 188, 195–6, 207–9, 234–40, 268, 275, 328, 330–1, 365–6, 370, 381–3, 384, 410–11 (See also: copresence, and theatre) Austen, Jane: Mansfield Park 174 autofiction 3, 10, 169n1, 227n1, 230–41 Awad, Mona: All’s Well 3, 184–91

Bakhtin, Mikhail 19, 232, 244, 255–6 Ballaster, Ros 16, 19, 23, 232–3 Balzac, Honoré de 86, 390; Illusions perdues 6 Bandyopadhyay, Manik 118, 119 Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar 118, 119 Barish, Jonas 228n3, 329, 366 Barthes, Roland 85, 396 Baudrillard, Jean 378, 379, 386 Bengali literature, theatre in 117–18 Bharucha, Rustom 117–18 Bhattacharya, Bibhutibhusan 118 Bildungsroman 156, 313, 314, 322–3 Black, William: In Silk Attire 6 Blasco Ibañez, Vicente 54–5, 63–4; El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor) 54, 55–60; El juez (The Judge) 55 Bloch, Ernst 7, 11n6, 78 Brown, Pamela 3, 10; Blue Door Venture 290; Golden Pavements 290; Maddy Again 290–1; The Swish of the Curtain 290, 291, 293–5 Bulgakov, Mikhail: Black Snow 1, 14, 243–59; Crimson Island 244; Days of the Turbins 244, 253, 259n2; The Fatal Eggs 247; The Master and Margarita 247, 256; Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites 244, 250; The White Guard 244, 246, 250 Burbury, Edwina Jane: Florence Sackville, Or, SelfDependence 351 Burney, Frances: Evelina 44, 49 Buxton, Bertha 360; Nell, On and Off the Stage 351, 352 Calderwood, James 173, 175, 178 Carlson, Marvin 68, 72, 74, 90, 92 Carter, Angela: The Company of Wolves 377; The Magic

427

Index Toyshop 377; Nights at the Circus 377–88; Wise Children 4, 247, 377 Cather, Willa: My Ántonia 8, 81–7; “The Novel Démeublé” 82, 86, 87; The Song of the Lark 80, 83 Catton, Eleanor: The Rehearsal 51, 146–8, 153–8, 191, 314–17 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote 21, 39 Chattman, Lauren 6, 368 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra 118 Chaudhuri, Una 245, 255 children’s theatre-fiction 10, 290–302, 304–11 Choi, Susan: Trust Exercise 314, 317–19 Church, Eva Ross: An Actress’s Love Story 351 closet drama 81, 108, 131 Colette: The Vagabond 4, 10, 205–12; and vaudeville 207–8 Collins, Mabel: Juliet’s Lovers 351, 360 Collins, Wilkie 4, 363, 464; Basil 371; No Name 4, 195, 363–374; The Woman in White 372 Comédie Française 69, 70, 72, 73 comedy, theatre-fiction and 18, 20–1, 23, 92, 118, 132, 136, 185, 190, 256, 307–10, 331–3, 366, 391, 406–7, 415 contingency, and theatre 18, 20–1, 285–8, 309–10, 406–7 copresence, and theatre 14, 18, 20–1, 366 Coquelin, Benoît-Constant 69–70 Coward, Noel 334, 421 Cozarinsky, Edgardo 54–5; El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp) 54, 55, 60–4; Vudú urbano (Urban Voodoo) 63 Craig, Edward Gordon 243, 245, 251 Dane, Clemence: Broome Stages 5 Davies, Robertson 1, 2, 9, 14, 89–98; Fifth Business 92; Hope Deferred 94; Love and Libel 95; The Manticore 92; Tempest-Tost 8, 90, 94; World of Wonders 1, 2, 4, 89–98 defamiliarization 8, 246–7, 254, 255, 259n4, 305, 307, 411 Derrida, Jacques 6, 54 Dickens, Charles 5–6, 93, 287, 403–4; A Christmas Carol 408–12, 416; Great Expectations 5–6, 404–5, 408, 409, 411; Nicholas Nickleby 403; The Old Curiosity Shop 287; Sketches by Boz 403, 408; A Tale of Two Cities 93; The Uncommercial Traveler 403 Diderot, Denis: Paradox sur le comédien 329 diegesis 147, 166, 245, 249–51, 257–8, 404–8 Dinesen, Isak 42–3 Dio Chrysostom: The Hunters of Euboea 46, 47 Dionysus 50, 51 directors, and theatre-fiction 243–59, 286, 322, 327–8, 393–4 doppelgangers 161, 167–9 doubling 20, 89, 90, 92–94, 95, 96–7, 97, 98, 384–5

Drewry, Edith Stewart: Only an Actress 352 Dumas, Alexandre 83, 86; Twenty Years After 22 Dumas fils, Alexandre 69; La Dame aux Camélias 81, 84, 85, 86 Edwards, Annie: The Morals of Mayfair 351 Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda 195; Middlemarch 19 ergon 54, 55, 57, 58, 64 Feng, Menglong 340, 342, 343, 348 Fielding, Henry: The History of Tom Jones 45 Firbank, Ronald 2, 130–144; Caprice 131–41, 144n2; Inclinations 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139; reading strategies 134–8; Vainglory 131–8, 140, 144n2 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 14, 236 Fitzgerald, Penelope: At Freddie’s 329–335; Gate of Angels 326; Golden Child 326; Human Voices 326 folk 117–18 Forsyth, Ethel Mary. See Leighton, Dorothy Foucault, Michel 377, 379, 387, 388 Frank, Marcie 364 Frank, Siggy 4–5 Frow, John 3, 371 Gardner, Sally: The Red Necklace 291, 296 Gautier, Théophile: Capitaine Fracasse 1–2, 4 gekisho (theatre-books) 108 genre 2–7, 371; family resemblances 2, 4, 9, 11n2; generic hybridity 370–4; generic similarity 180–183; theatre-fiction as genre 2–7 (See also: autofiction, Künstlerroman, memoir, science fiction, sea fiction, sports fiction) ghosting, theatrical concept of 67–78, 72–76 Goethe, J. W. 2; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 11n6, 247, 314, 405 Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls 245, 250, 251, 258 Hale, Louise Closser: The Actress 351 Hamburger, Käte: “epic preterit” 147–148 Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance 46, 48 heterotopias 377, 379–381 Heti, Sheila: autofiction 230–234; How Should a Person Be? 9, 230–240; theatrical failure 230–234 Howells, William Dean 81, 87 Ibsen, Henrik 112, 196, 200–1, 210 intermediality 7–9, 12n8, 14, 20, 21, 30, 39, 68, 84, 86, 90, 126, 131, 147, 160–162, 182–4, 363, 370–374; intermedial anamorphosis 86; intermedial gaps 21, 234; “intermedial reference” 7–8, 20, 160, 162 intertextuality 161, 162, 173–4, 177–9, 196–7, 224 Irving, Henry 70, 91, 350 Irving, John 8, 11, 403–416; and Dickensian theatrefiction 403–404, 409–410; In One Person 403; A

428

Index Prayer for Owen Meany 403, 404, 406–411, 412; Son of a Circus 403; Until I Find You 403 James, Henry 6, 67, 68–69; The Ambassadors 67, 68; The Awkward Age 68; Daisy Miller 69; Guy Domville 67, 68; The Other House 68; The Portrait of a Lady 67; scenic method 67; theatre criticism 68–71, 76; The Tragic Muse 6, 24n2, 67–78, 197 Jansson, Tove: Moominsummer Madness (Farlig midsommar) 8, 304–311 Jarcho, Julia 11n5, 67–68 Jewsbury, Geraldine: The Half-Sisters 6, 351, 360 kabuki 103–114 Künstlerroman (“novel of the artist”) 7, 11n6, 78, 314 Kurnick, David 8, 11n4, 19, 24n3, 24n5, 67, 68, 94, 95, 96, 230, 231, 235, 236, 322, 404, 409, 410, 416 Langxian: “Zhang Tingxiu taosheng jiufu” (“Zhang Tingxiu Escapes from Death and Saves His Father”) 340–2, 347 Legendre, Claire: La Méthode Stanislavski 169n1 Leighton, Dorothy 2, 195–203; As a Man Is Able 196; Disillusion: A Story with a Preface 195–9, 201, 203; Thyrza Fleming 196, 197, 201, 203 Li, Yu 2, 8; “In the Theatre Tan Chuyu Conveys His Feelings, Liu Miaogu Dies for Her Chastity After an Aria” 344–8 Linton, Eliza Lynn: Realities 352 Litvak, Joseph 11n4, 81 Lucian: The Ass 46, 48 Magorian, Michelle: Impossible 292 male gaze 391, 392, 394, 401 Mann, Klaus: Mephisto 5 Mann, Thomas: Schwere Stunde (Difficult Hour) 78 Marcus, Sharon 83, 84 Marryat, Florence 6, 352–61; Miss Chester 351; Miss Harrington’s Husband 352, 358–9, 360, 361; My Sister the Actress 352–355, 360–1; Peeress and Player 355–8, 361 Martin, Valerie: The Confessions of Edward Day 1, 2, 3, 160–9 Martin-Harvey, John, Sir 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97 Maugham, Somerset: Theatre 5 McBride, Eimear: The Lesser Bohemians 1, 2, 3, 9, 313, 314, 319–22 McEwan, Ian: Atonement 6, 171–83; and Shakespeare’s plays 177–9 Mei, Chun 5, 11n5, 339–49 memoir, and theatre-fiction 3, 42, 91, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166–8, 313, 412 Menander 48–50; Dyskolos 49, 51 method acting 160–5, 167, 169 Miller, Renata Kobetts 5, 11n5, 195–204, 352, 371, 375n2, 385

mimesis 166, 257, 329–31, 350 minorness and upstaging, and theatre-fiction 412–16, 417n4 mise-en-scène, and theatre-fiction 70, 85, 103–5, 126, 134, 331 Mishima, Yukio: “Onnagata” 103–14 modernism 81, 84, 85, 86, 130, 131, 137, 172, 205, 206, 209–11, 230, 249, 377, 387 Mokurô, Kimura: Theatre under the Microscope (Gekijô ikkan mushimegane) 107 Moore, George: A Mummer’s Wife 199 Morris, Clara 81, 84, 86 Mulisch, Harry: Last Call 146 Mulvey, Laura 390, 392, 397, 399 Muñoz, José Esteban: queer utopia 77 Murdoch, Iris: The Sea, The Sea 3 music hall, and theatre-fiction 4, 205–7, 356–7, 379, 381, 384, 387 (See also: vaudeville) Nabokov, Vladimir: theatricality 4, 5; Invitation to a Beheading 5 narration: first-person 246–9; homodiegetic 161, 163–4; and improvisatory time 23; tenses 146–58 narrative voice 5, 24n5, 160, 164–7, 207, 210–11, 257, 297, 300, 381 naturalism 3, 55, 85, 161, 199, 245, 254–5, 377, 386, 387, 391, 400 New Woman novel 195–203 Newark, Cormac 4, 6 O’Connor, Joseph: Ghost Light 146 Offenbach, Jacques 391, 395, 401, 401n2, 401n4 O’Neal, Cothburn: The Dark Lady 14 O’Neill, James 83, 86 onnagata 103–14 Oriard, Michael 2–4, 6 parergon 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64 Peters, Helen: The Secret Hen House Theatre 291, 296 Phelan, Peggy 328, 335n4 Pirandello, Luigi 51, 57 Plato 350 Postlewait, Thomas 30, 35, 39, 40n11, 40n12 postmodernism 113, 150, 172, 176–80, 191, 233 Priestly, J. B.: Lost Empires 327, 335n2 private theatricals 263, 266–77, 281–5, 365, 366, 368, 374 props, theatre-fiction and 16–17, 33, 57, 81–2, 84–7, 90, 150, 179, 208, 264, 266–7, 299, 304, 331 Puchner, Martin 181, 131, 245, 249, 257, 335n3, 417n1 Rajewsky, Irina 7–8, 18, 147, 160 Ramírez, Miguel 31–9 Reade, Charles: Peg Woffington 195, 419

429

Index reality effect 20, 85–6 Redgrave, Michael: The Mountebank’s Tale 330, 421 rehearsal, theatre-fiction and 3, 90–1, 96, 136, 189, 217, 220, 243–4, 247, 251, 253, 267–9, 283, 284, 286, 308–10, 315–16, 322, 328, 366, 391, 406 Richelieu, Cardinal de 15 Ridout, Nicholas 285, 286, 407 Ríos, Nicolás de los 29, 31, 32, 34, 35–9 Roach, Joseph 72, 74, 90 Rojas Villandrando, Agustín de: El Viaje Entretenido (The Entertaining Journey) 2, 29–37 Roman theatres 45–6, 47 Roth, Philip: The Humbling 5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 259n4, 329, 330, 331 Rueda, Lope de 29, 30, 32, 33, 39

Streatfeild, Noel: Ballet Shoes 290; Theatre Shoes 290, 291 subtext 90, 95, 136, 144, 245, 251–4, 257–8

Sabatini, Rafael: Scaramouche 91, 93, 96 “Sapphic” reading 131, 134–8 Scarron, Paul: Dom Japhet d’Arménie 18; Recueil de quelques vers burlesques 22; Roman comique 2, 14–24, 249 science fiction 6–7 sea fiction 2, 5, 18 Second Sophistic 45–6, 48, 49, 50, 51 sensation fiction 351, 370–2 Shakespeare, William 162–3, 173, 175, 177–80, 184, 185, 187; All’s Well That Ends Well 184, 185–6, 190; Hamlet 6, 45, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 243, 404, 405, 406, 408, 410; King John 327; Macbeth 164, 185–6, 190, 298, 305, 334, 405; The Merchant of Venice 179; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 298, 299, 308; Richard III 187; Romeo and Juliet 131, 162–3, 177; The Tempest 148, 149, 150–2, 179, 187; Twelfth Night 179 Shakespeare in Love 50 shame 363, 364, 367–70, 374 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 366 Sherwood, Robert 5 shibai mitamama (“Theatre-Seen-As-Is”) 108, 109, 112 shingeki 110, 111, 112, 113 Shklovsky, Victor 246, 247 Siraj, Syed Mustafa: Mayamridanga 2, 116–28; performativity and sexuality in 122–126 Sofer, Andrew 85, 90, 331 Solano, Agustín 31–39 Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus 6 Spanish Golden Age Theatre 30, 32, 33, 37, 56 spectacle 17, 48, 60, 70, 89, 93, 165, 365, 373, 377–9, 382, 384–5, 393, 395, 401 spectral effects 89–98 sports fiction 2–3; compared with theatre-fiction 3–4 Stanislavski, Constantin 136, 161–4, 169n1, 243–5, 247, 249–59, 315, 320, 329 Stevens, Robin: Death in the Spotlight 292, 299–302 Stevenson, Robert Louis 92, 93 Stević, Aleksandar 314, 322

tableau vivant 287, 391, 393, 394, 398, 400, 401 Terry, Ellen 70, 334 Théâtre Français 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76 Theatre under the Microscope (Gekijô ikkan mushimegane) 107 theatre-fiction: children’s 290–302; compared with Künstlerroman (“novel of the artist”); compared with sports fiction 2–4; craft of writing 184–91; definitions 3–7, 24, 30, 117, 177; as genre 2–7; and intermediality 7–9, 12n8, 14, 20, 21, 30, 39, 68, 84, 86, 90, 126, 131, 147, 160–162, 182–4, 363, 370–374; selected list of 418–24; theatricality and 4–5, 11n4 (See also: acting schools and training, audiences, comedy, contingency, copresence, directors, minorness and upstaging, props, rehearsal, spectacle, subtext, tragedy, and individual authors/titles) theatrical extraneity 404–408 theatrical failure 230–234 Tolstoy, Leo: The Tale of How Another Girl Named Varinka Quickly Grew Up 259n4; War and Peace 5, 86, 246, 247; “What is Art?” 247 tragedy 5, 46–7, 92, 178–9, 185, 307–9, 332–3 vaudeville, theatre-fiction and 4, 10, 89, 90, 134, 205–12 vernacular short fiction 339–40 White, Antonia 6, 214–27; Frost in May 6, 214–27; Beyond the Glass 214, 215, 224, 225, 228n6; form and feeling 215–19; The Lost Traveller 214, 215, 219, 224; The Sugar House 214, 215, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224 Wilde, Oscar 130, 134; Lady Windermere’s Fan 201; The Picture of Dorian Gray 134, 419; Salomé 141 Williams, Eloise: Gaslight 291; Wilde 291, 292, 297–9, 424 Williams, Tennessee 164 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2 Wolfe, Graham 30, 68, 90, 160–161, 178, 191, 196, 234, 290, 363, 381 Woloch, Alex 404, 413, 414, 417n4 Woolf, Virginia 2, 86, 209, 211; Between the Acts 8; “Modern Fiction” 86; A Room of One’s Own 211 Yates, Richard: Revolutionary Road 5 Yonge, Charlotte 201, 263, 264, 265–78; Historical Dramas 263–78 Zola, Émile L’Assomoir 390; Germinal 390; Nana 3, 390–401; The Kill 390, 391, 392–401; The Rougon-Macquart 390; Thérèse Raquin 390, 391

430