Female Performers in British and American Fiction 9783110558425, 9783110561043, 9783110558661, 2018941732

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Barbara Straumann Female Performers in British and American Fiction

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 58

Barbara Straumann

Female Performers in British and American Fiction

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292

ISBN 978-3-11-055842-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-056104-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-055866-1 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941732 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments Having written a book about voice, it is a great pleasure to invoke the voices of the colleagues and friends with whom I have been in dialogue and whom I would like to thank for their generous help and constructive advice in the various stages of my project. Female Performers in British and American Fiction is based on my Habilitation thesis, which I wrote at the University of Zurich. Special thanks go, therefore, to my colleagues at the University of Zurich, especially to Elisabeth Bronfen for her inspiring presence and continued support of my work. I also thank Mireille Schnyder, Martin Heusser and Dani Schreier for serving so efficiently on my Habilitation committee. In the early stages of the project, I was a member of the Gender-Graduiertenkolleg at the University of Zurich, and I would like to warmly thank Therese Steffen for orchestrating many stimulating events as part of the Graduiertenkolleg. A decisive moment in the development of my project was a research trip to Ljubljana, where Mladen Dolar spent a considerable amount of time discussing and sharing his theoretical insights into issues of voice with me. I would like to thank him for his extraordinary generosity. The most substantial portion of work on this study was carried out during the year I spent as a Visiting Fellow at the Department for Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Romance and German Studies at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. I am very grateful to Eric Santner and Naomi Segal for hosting me at their respective institutions, David Levin and Christopher Wild for their thought-provoking feedback in their performance studies workshop, Tan Wälchli and Mimmi Woisnitzka for inspired conversations, as well as Vreni Naess and Karina Halstead for welcoming me in their homes in Chicago and London. I would also like to thank Ina Schabert for her in-depth discussion of my work, Angela Esterhammer for her encouraging feedback on my reading of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, as well as Doris Kolesch, Valentin Groebner, Gabi Rippl and Virginia Richter for their invaluable suggestions regarding the overall project. I am also very grateful to Sylvia Mieszkowski, whose invitation to participate in her conference on noise allowed us to discover our shared interest in issues of sound, voice and gender. Many ideas were first presented at conferences and in guest lectures, and I would like to thank Christian Kiening, Lothar van Laak, Donatella Izzo, Margaret Tudeau Clayton, Thomas Austenfeld, Patrick Vincent, Barbara Buchenau and Sigrid Nieberle for their helpful comments. My thanks also go to the students in my seminars on voice and on female performers. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-001

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I am also immensely grateful to Christina Ljungberg and Benno Straumann for time and again discussing formulations and the question of how to develop a ‘voice’ in academic writing. I thank them as well as Kyle Greenwood, Sabin Jeanmaire, Lisann Anders and Salma Ghandour for their help in preparing the manuscript. Finally, I would also like to thank Gabi Rippl and the other editors of the Anglia book series for accepting my book proposal and the team at De Gruyter for their professional support.

Contents  . .  . .

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Introduction 1 Postmodern Recyclings: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991) 2 Performer Voices in the Long Nineteenth Century 19 49 Corinne and Her Aftereffects on the British Stage Triumph and Apotheosis of the Romantic Genius Voice: Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) 65 The Professional Victorian Actress: Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half 75 Sisters (1848) 93 Visionary Preaching in Britain and America Self-Authorization through the Divine Word: George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) 103 The Divine Self: Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth 122 Century (1845) 151 American Political Speakers Haunted by the Perpetual Performer: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) 159 “Let her overflow”: Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) 180 203 Acting Anxieties Singing in an Allegorical Voice: George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (1864) and Vittoria (1867) 204 Acknowledging the Monstrous Performer: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) 216 Fin-de-Siècle Ventriloquism and Modernist Self-Authorship The Ventriloquized Voice: George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) 237 “A strange sound”: Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” (1934) 250 Conclusion

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Illustration Credits Bibliography Index

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1 Introduction The strong fascination with the feminine voice is a phenomenon that has permeated Western culture for a very long time. However, it is in nineteenth-century literature and culture that the voice of the female performer becomes a particularly urgent issue. This book focuses on the figure of the female performer in narrative fiction so as to explore the fantasy of the woman with a public voice as a remarkably vibrant cultural theme in British and American narrative texts written in the period between the late 1840s and the early 1930s. Yet how can we read this literary preoccupation with the feminine voice? Why does the female performer become such a central cultural obsession in the long nineteenth century? What are the specific cultural concerns that are negotiated by the voices of female performers? And how can the literary staging of these voices be brought together with the specific mediality and aesthetic texture of the novel, in which we never hear an actual voice, in which the voice is always mediated by the written word of the text? The nineteenth century forms a cultural period in which women’s voices become important on several levels. In literary production, female characters who have a voice in public as singers, actresses, speakers or preachers become prominent from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It is also the mid-nineteenth century that sees the emergence of the organized women’s movement, which formulates the right to vote as one of its central concerns, thus contending that women should be given a voice in politics. One of the key arguments of this book is that nineteenth-century novels about female performers can be seen to link the voices of their singers, actresses, speakers or preachers with issues of feminine agency and to negotiate issues concerning the social, cultural and political role of women in this period. The public voice of the woman who performs on the theatre stage, who preaches from the pulpit or speaks from the lectern becomes a trope these texts use to address questions regarding the cultural position and visibility of women. I call the public voice of the literary performer a trope because even in texts that are not overtly political, the performer’s voice can be seen to negotiate the very issues raised by the Victorian feminist movement. Moreover, the literal voice the performer has as a woman performing in public raises questions pertaining to the figurative ‘voice’ women have in culture. By having a close look at a number of selected novels, we will see how the question concerning women’s voice and agency, which is so important for this period, is played out in the literary imagination of the long nineteenth century. The appearance female performers – singers, actresses, speakers and preachers – make in narrative texts written by nineteenth and early twentieth-century https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-002

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authors, ranging from George Meredith to Henry James and from George Eliot to Isak Dinesen, harks back to several earlier vocal traditions. These traditions comprise mythopoetic figures such as the siren, the oracle, the muse and the prophet, but also Orpheus, who marks the very beginning of opera history because of Monteverdi’s early operatic adaptation of the myth. At the same time, the phenomenon of the female performer persists in contemporary literature and culture. Relevant examples include the superstars who professionally market themselves in today’s opera business, most prominently Anna Netrebko and Cecilia Bartoli, or the self-assertive performers that can be found in the areas of rock and pop music especially, including stars such as Madonna, PJ Harvey and Björk, all of them self-determined women artists who emphasize that as performers they have an independent ‘voice’ of their own. A recent example for a self-confident female voice in film is Stephen Frear’s biopic Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), in which Meryl Streep plays the famously eccentric singer who insists on giving public concerts even though she has a completely unmusical voice. Among the best-known literary examples that attest to the contemporary fascination with the feminine voice are Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991) and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), both of which place female performers centre stage in their narratives.

1.1 Postmodern Recyclings: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991) Wise Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet are not just the most prominent novels about female performers in contemporary fiction. The reason why I turn to these decidedly postmodern novels to frame my discussion is the self-conscious manner in which their narratives recycle issues that are relevant to virtually all the texts that feature in this book. Both texts rewrite motifs that are prominent in nineteenth-century novels: the tragic loss of voice in the case of Rushdie and the social marginality of the female performer in the case of Carter. In tracing these themes, my postmodern frame allows us to see the continuities between nineteenth-century representations and these two postmodern novels. Equally important, however, are the transformations these themes undergo as they migrate to a different historio-cultural context. These shifts that take place between the nineteenth and the twentieth century allow us to gauge the specific problem of the woman’s voice as it presents itself in the earlier, nineteenth-century novels at the core of this book. In other words, my discussion of the two novels by Carter and Rushdie serves a twofold purpose: It shows certain continuities in nineteenth-century and postmodern representations of female performer voices,

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while at the same time, it illustrates the shifts that occur between these periods, notably the idea that the preoccupation with the feminine voice appears to have far less political urgency in postmodern culture. Although the novels by Rushdie and Carter are not at the centre of this study, they help illustrate the specificity of the nineteenth-century texts and especially the way these earlier examples treat the voices of their female performers. The figuration Rushdie is primarily interested in is the culturally hybrid voice of the rock-star who reaches a global mass audience. But how does Vina Apsara, the female performer at the centre of Rushdie’s novel, turn into a collective voice that is so captivating that it has worldwide resonance? Vina Apsara, who performs together with her erotic and professional partner, the rock-musician Ormus Cama, achieves cult status already during her lifetime. However, it is significant that the ultimate apotheosis of the icon Vina Divina is triggered by her tragic death in an earthquake. The plot of The Ground Beneath Her Feet thus foregrounds an empowering self-construction of the performer on the one hand, and a problematic alignment of the woman’s voice with death on the other. By opening his narrative with the fatal accident and the posthumous idolization of his female singer, Rushdie suggests that the voice of his performer stands at once for her effervescent self-theatricalization and her dubious appropriation by her fans and her lover, who, after her demise, come to ventriloquize this “voice-ofthe-century voice” (Rushdie 2000: 466). As a result, the text recycles a pervasive pattern that underpins a vast majority of earlier performer novels, namely a dialectic that highlights both the appearance and the disappearance of the woman’s voice. In the chronological storyline of Rushdie’s novel, Vina Apsara’s voice initially appears as a site of vitality, energy and intensity. It is in and through her singing that she asserts herself, often literally, against the catastrophes that punctuate her biography as a recurring refrain. As a girl, she narrowly survives the murder of all the family members at her mother’s hand because of her habit of singing in a certain spot in the forest for herself alone. Later, after a disastrous car accident has sent Ormus into a prolonged coma, it is again her voice that – in “a significant gender reversal” (Bronfen 2001: 131) of the ancient Orpheus myth – returns him to life. Even more important for the narrative theme refigured by Rushdie, however, is the way in which Vina reinvents herself as a self-assured artist. Rushdie’s female protagonist is characterized as a public persona who expands and magnifies herself by virtue of her voice. Vina does not confine herself to her performances as the lead singer of the famous band, VTO, which she has founded together with Ormus. On the contrary, she goes as far as making all the world a stage for her vocal self-display. By publicly declaring her opinion on virtually every issue, ranging from lifestyle choices to political questions, she not

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only confirms what the narrator calls her “big-mouth attitude” (Rushdie 2000: 466), but also attains a strong vocal presence as she becomes a cultural authority on both the subject of herself and the world at large. The voice Vina has as a singer thus comes together with the voice she has as a quasi-political personage. The existential authenticity that nourishes the talk and song of Rushdie’s rock singer is the reason why she fascinates a multitude of fans. In fact, her superstardom hinges on her radical self-exhibition, her proclivity to discuss the most personal details of her life: The willingness of Vina Apsara to talk publicly about private matters – her catastrophic childhood, her love affairs, her sexual preferences, her abortions – was as important as her talent, perhaps even more important, in the creation of the gigantic, even oppressively symbolic figure she became. (Rushdie 2000: 176)

As the novel suggests, Vina fashions herself as a collective figure and voice by completely collapsing the boundaries between the private and the public, by bringing her psychic dramas boldly and unabashedly to the open. What becomes evident as “the queen of overexposure” (Rushdie 2000: 423) lays herself bare to her audience is her existential rootlessness, which is part of the reason why her voice ‘speaks’ to an international audience and, in doing so, has a powerful global impact. Her “polyglot trash-talk” (Rushdie 2000: 135) resonates with many different cultural languages, straddling both her Indian and her American background, and finds an echo in her audience because it literally gives voice to a fragmented, rather than unified, self. Although the energy of her voice is nourished by her provocative self-display and her fractured existence, it is paradoxically after her fatal accident that the binding force of the singer’s voice is at its strongest. The premature death of Vina Apsara provokes collective mourning rituals and a sense of global kinship, while her recorded voice travels around the world with its universal song, which seemingly transcends all cultural and ethnic boundaries. “Music – Vina’s voice, singing Ormus’s melodies – surges round the world, crossing all frontiers, belonging everywhere and nowhere […]” (Rushdie 2000: 531). The earthquake which engulfed the rock star as she was launching her solo comeback tour without Ormus literalizes the lack of solidity beneath her feet, the fact that she was never firmly grounded to start with. At the same time, her death immediately transforms her into Vina Divina, the mythical icon. As the narrator observes, “[…] Vina was […] passing into myth, becoming a vessel into which any moron could pour his stupidities, or let us say a mirror of the culture, and we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse” (Rushdie 2000: 4).

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With the tragic fate of Vina Apsara, the star, Rushdie’s literary text cites a cultural tradition in which singing turns out to be fatal for the woman, be it as a literal exhaustion of her life or as a metaphorical depletion of her individual ‘voice’. A real-life example of this tradition, which can often be seen to inspire literary female performer narratives, would be the nineteenth-century prima donna Maria Malibran, who having suffered a riding accident, refused to see a physician and several months later collapsed on stage. Despite the incident, Malibran insisted on performing the very next day and, at the age of 28, died during her performance. In the twentieth century, the best-known example for this tradition is doubtlessly Maria Callas. Both her premature death and the deterioration of her singing voice in the final years of her life are often traced back to the strains that her transformation into a glamorous singer put on her body and voice.¹ Whereas singing and dying directly coincide in Malibran’s case and Callas seems to have been literally exhausted by her stellar singing career, Rushdie foregrounds the metaphorical depletion of his performer and her voice. After her actual demise, which reminds us of the close cultural conjunction of death and celebrity, Rushdie’s singer undergoes a figurative death as she is mythically depleted as an individual, “as the world turned her into its iconic Vina Divina and lost its grip on her quirky humanity” (Rushdie 2000: 614). In the aftermath of her fatal accident, her songs are constantly replayed in various efforts to resurrect her: In addition to tribute albums and memorial concerts, her demise triggers an impersonation craze, with countless women imitating the dead icon, while Ormus cannot bring himself to stop listening to the last recording of her voice on the answering machine. In his attempt to preserve her voice despite death, he seeks to reanimate her first by setting up a gigantic video installation with multiple monitor screens featuring hundreds of Vina impersonators. Later he relaunches the VTO band for a tour modelled on the myth of Orpheus, his descent into the underworld and his attempt to reclaim his dead beloved Eurydice. Vina herself, however, remains unheard in this process. Although she had no sense of belonging when she was alive, the dead singer is now turned into an “acoustic mirror” supporting Ormus’ desire to be reflected as a stable self.² Or put differently, once she has lost her actual voice as a performer, her agency is eliminated as well. In fact, her voice is reduced to a

 See, for instance, Elisabeth Bronfen’s discussion of Maria Callas in Bronfen and Straumann (2002: 50 – 58). For a discussion of the literary treatment of the fatality of feminine singing, see Bronfen’s article “‘Lasciatemi Morir’: Representations of the Diva’s Swan Song” (1992a).  The function of the feminine voice as an acoustic mirror is theorized and discussed extensively in Kaja Silverman’s classic study The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988).

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mere echo of the narcissistic desires and projections of others once she is no longer able to assert herself in person, once her voice can no longer draw on her outrageously outspoken energy. Rushdie’s novel thus taps into a tradition in which the female public voice is silenced because it is fetishized and appropriated by other ‘voices’. However, since this tradition appears in the context of Rushdie’s postmodern recycling, its implications are no longer as politically urgent and significant as would be the case in nineteenth-century performer novels. These earlier texts were written in a context in which, in contrast to Vina, women had to overcome cultural conventions holding them back and even excluding them from the public sphere before they could attain a public voice and make themselves heard culturally. As women characters who do have a voice in public, the female performers in these nineteenth-century texts challenge cultural norms of femininity and, at least implicitly, make a political claim for the participation of women in the public sphere. In contrast to these earlier examples, Rushdie’s novel offers a comment on stardom rather than engaging with the concerns of the women’s movement. The fact that these political concerns are far less pressing in postmodern treatments of female performers, which comment on stardom and not on women’s rights, is also evident in Angela Carter’s Wise Children. Like Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter shows a penchant for mixing a plurality of different cultural languages in her writing. However, by foregrounding the marginal social position of her eccentric showgirl protagonists, she recycles a tradition that is different from the silenced female voice highlighted by Rushdie with the tragic fate of his mythic star performer. While in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the “polyglot trash-talk” (Rushdie 2000: 135) of the Indian-American singer underlines the geo-cultural hybridity of the global star and icon, the focus of Wise Children is on the ways in which the opposition between high art and popular culture intersect with the different social strata of British class society. In Carter’s novel, this social hierarchy is represented by the various members of a theatre family dynasty, which includes eminent Shakespearean actors, who derive their cultural capital as “a national treasure” (Carter 1992: 38) from the Bard, on the one hand, and the twin sisters Dora and Nora Chance, a duo of showgirls who dance and sing in music halls, on the other. Wise Children is, significantly, the only novel discussed in this study to cast a performer as its narrator. The first-person narrator is Dora Chance, who narrates the career and family story which she has in common with her twin sister Nora Chance on their seventy-fifth birthday. At the beginning of the narrative, she presents herself in the following manner: “Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks” (Carter 1992: 1). In Dora Chance, Carter chooses a narrating voice that clearly speaks

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both from and for the margins. “Bugger the robin!” Dora exclaims and goes on to describe her and her twin’s living arrangements: What would have become of us, if Grandma hadn’t left us this house? 49 Bard Road, Brixton, London, South West Two. Bless this house. If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags, […] bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out again immediately for disturbing the peace, to gasp and freeze and finally snuff disregarded on the street and blow away like rags. (Carter 1992: 1– 2)

Even though they live on Bard Road, an address that evokes Shakespeare and thus the respectable branch of the family, the home they have inherited and are happy to live in is clearly located on the wrong side of the Thames. The social marginality of Carter’s showgirl duo harks back to the ambivalent position in which the nineteenth-century performer finds herself: as someone who does not belong to any social class. While she is admired by her audience, she is, at the same time, excluded from respectable society. Some of the most successful performers such as Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell “became well-known public figures, welcomed in polite society”, but “women who had been on the stage always retained a hint of impropriety” (Cooper 2001: 54). In contrast to the far more ambivalent treatment typical of nineteenth-century fiction, where we often find a tension between the voice of the performer and the voice of the narrator, Carter’s text derives much of its argumentative force and refreshing energy from the fact that the story is told through the narrative voice of Dora. Rather than framing the female voice as would be the case in a nineteenth-century performer novel, the text has Dora positively affirm the marginal position from and for which she speaks. Although Dora claims that on stage “I didn’t have much of a voice, anyway” (Carter 1992: 90), she does have agency, as she shapes her narrative with her particular perspective, tone and pitch and, in so doing, captivates the reader with the verbal wit and energy of her incessant talk. While reminiscing about her career in the context of her family history, Dora emphasizes that she and her twin sister Nora are “illegitimate in every way – not only born out of wedlock, but we went on the halls, didn’t we!” (Carter 1992: 11). Significantly, Carter makes the twin sisters the unacknowledged bastards of Melchior Hazard, the famous head of the theatre dynasty. Moreover, when the Chance sisters follow the family tradition by taking to the theatrical boards at an early age, they do not go for the legitimate stage, as the respectable branch of the Hazard family does, but instead opt for various forms of popular theatricality and entertainment associated with the British music hall tradition, which would have included a mixture of popular song, dance, comedy and specialty

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acts (performed, for instance, by acrobats, ventriloquists and drag artists). Dora recalls how on their seventh birthday, invited by their grandmother to make a birthday wish as they blow out the candles on their cake, the stage-struck twins conjure up the following vision of their showgirl future: We closed our eyes and there we were, under the painted moon on the other side of the curtain, where the painted clouds will never move and everything is two-dimensional. Nora looked at me and I at Nora; frills, sequins, fishnet tights, high heels and feathers in our hair. We smiled. We raised our right legs, thus … ready for the orchestra. Let’s face the music and – Of course, we didn’t know, then, how the Hazards would always upstage us. Tragedy, eternally more class than comedy. How could mere song-and-dance girls aspire so high? We were destined, from birth, to be the lovely ephemera of the theatre, we’d rise and shine like birthday candles, then blow out. But, that birthday tea-time sixty-eight years ago, we blew out all our birthday candles with one breath and yes, indeed! life gave us our birthday wish, in due course, because the Lucky Chances faced the music and they danced for wellnigh half a century, although we would always be on the left-hand line, hoofers, thrushes, the light relief, as you might say; bring on the bears! Or, bares. Our careers went down the toilet along with the profession itself. We ended up showing a leg at the fag end of vaudeville in all those touring revues with titles such as Nudes, Ahoy! Here Come the Nine O’clock Nudes! Nudes of the World! and so on, backing up Archie Rice and other comics of that ilk. The showgirls would stand there, topless, living statues, and we would do our number in and out the nipples in our tasselled bras. (Carter 1992: 58 – 59)

Dora herself points out that she and her sister represent a frivolous mode of entertainment. They start out by making their debut during the culturally liberal and permissive era between the two world wars. They first perform as a songand-dance duo in vaudeville and music halls before they serve as extras in an ill-fated Hollywood musical film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After the Second World War, when their flamboyant performance mode becomes outdated in the more restrained cultural climate of postwar England, they end up appearing in nude shows. “We’d still sing, we’d still dance”, Dora notes. “But we felt our art was swirling down the plughole and those were the days when high culture was booming, our father cutting a swathe with the senior citizen roles in Shakespeare […] but he still didn’t want anything to do with us, as ever was” (Carter 1992: 165). While Rushdie foregrounds the tragic fate of the extraordinary performer voice, Carter offers an optimistic counter-narrative by putting her focus on the comic freakishness of her showgirl duo. The two sisters always dance and sing as a pair. Their appearance as a duo of performers, neither of whom is remark-

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able on her own, explodes notions of unique individuality, which is perhaps why they effectively evade tragedy. In contrast to the rather ominous name ‘Hazard’, the family name of the ‘Chance’ sisters underlines the idea of randomness. Unlike the unique Vina Apsara, who is destined to be a tragic star, their lives are shaped by unpredictable and lucky turns. Whereas Vina Apsara achieves fame on a global scale and becomes a cultural icon after her fatal accident, Dora and Nora Chance never gain a comparable degree of cultural prominence. On the contrary, their sister-act always remains, as it were, out of place. It is precisely their defiant eccentricity that defines their specific energy, the fact that they construct themselves in opposition to dominant culture and patriarchal traditions embodied by their father. They insist that they are peripheral and, crucially, they do so in an exuberant spirit. “[…] I refuse point-blank to play in tragedy” (Carter 1992: 154), Dora Chance notes, thus summing up her and her sister’s attitude. Indeed, rather than picking up on the Shakespearean tragedies and histories performed by their father, Melchior Hazard, Dora casts her narrative voice in the mould of the eloquent and resourceful heroines that can be found in Shakespearean comedy. Calling themselves “The Lucky Chances”, the twin sisters recognize – and, in fact, revel in – the chance involved in their illegitimacy. Not only are they at liberty to fashion themselves at will, being quasi-orphans, but they also affirm and enjoy their impropriety when they enter the ‘illegitimate’ stage of the popular theatre as young girls. With the professional choice of its protagonists, Carter’s novel consciously harks back to Victorian culture when female acting was considered an improper métier. By rewriting this cultural tradition, which will resurface in my discussion of British stage performers and their contentious social position, in an optimistic vein, Carter re-encodes what in a Victorian context would have appeared as a risqué exposure of the female body and voice as an invigorating self-display. Dora and Nora perform their song-and-dance numbers with obvious relish – “What a joy it is to dance and sing!” (Carter 1992: 5, 232) is Dora’s repeated refrain and the motto of the book as a whole – and equally they take pleasure in all forms of carnivalesque physicality, including their erotic escapades off-stage. In a climactic scene towards the end of the novel, for instance, Dora has sex with Perry, her uncle, who is endowed with a body of gargantuan proportions, in her father’s bedroom. Dora describes the scene of sexual intercourse from the perspective of Nora, who told her afterwards how she experienced the party which, covered by the media, took place at exactly the same time directly below the master bedroom in their father’s house:

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1 Introduction

Nora told me afterwards how the agitations of the steel bed began to make the chandelier downstairs directly beneath it, shiver, so that the music of the lutes, now plucking away at a selection of show tunes for the delight of the dancing guests, was almost imperceptibly augmented by the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of all the little lustres as the tiers of glass began to sway from side to side, slopping hot wax on the dancers below, first slowly, then with a more and more determined rhythm until they shook like Josephine Baker’s bottom – ‘What a clatter!’ said Nora. ‘Like cymbals, darling. Don’t you think I didn’t guess what you were up to?’ There was just one ecstatic moment, she opined, when she thought the grand bouncing on the bed upstairs – remember, Perry was a big man – would bring down the chandelier and all its candles, smash, bang, clatter, and the swagged ceiling, too; bring the house down, fuck the house down, come (‘cum’?) all over the posh frocks and monkey jackets and the poisoned cake and the lovers, mothers, sisters, shatter the lenses that turned our lives into peepshows, scatter little candle-flames like an epiphany on every head, cover over all the family, the friends, the camera crews, with plaster dust and come and fire. (Carter 1992: 220)

In true carnivalesque spirit, Nora fantasizes in this scene that, together with their uncle and his grotesque body, Dora might be able to make the house of the elevated, high-culture family patriarch collapse – to “bring the house down, fuck the house down” (Carter 1992: 220). Similar to the promiscuous energy of Rushdie’s female performer and in a radical departure from Victorian norms, the corporeality of the Chance sisters is invoked not as an unfavourable stigma but re-encoded as a positive marker of their professional and sexual self-determination. By highlighting their out-of-bounds bawdiness, Carter emphasizes that her autonomous heroines resist any appropriation, whether as stage performers or sexual adventuresses. The tone of Dora’s colloquial talk encompasses a wide range of moods and colours. It covers the whole spectrum from cheerful, irreverent, tender and frank. At the same time, the prevalent mode of her narration is carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense. For instance, she describes the mayhem that follows as Lynde Court, the country house of their father Melchior Hazard, goes up in an inferno during the “Lynde Court Twelfth Night Costume Ball” (Carter 1992: 96): The fire had unleashed a kind of madness. A babble of agitated chorines cross-dressed in ruched knicks and hose had commandeered a crate of bubbly on their way out and now, pop! with a fusillade of small explosions, opened the bottles and hurled the contents into the fire, whinnying helplessly under the strain of their fruitless endeavours, while a row of chorus boys, in jester’s garb, lacking champagne, unfastened their flies and added their own liquid contributions […]. […] Nothing whets the appetite like a disaster. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Coriolanus stoutly buggering Banquo’s ghost under the pergola in the snowy rose-garden whilst, beside the snow-caked sundial, a gentleman who’d come as Cleopatra was orally pleasuring another dressed as Toby Belch. […]

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So there was an orgiastic aspect to this night of disaster and all around the blazing mansion, lit by the red and flickering flames, milled the lamenting revellers in togas, kilts, tights, breeches, hooped skirts, winding sheets, mini-crinolines, like guests at a masquerade who’ve all gone suddenly to hell. (Carter 1992: 103)

For Mikhail Bakhtin (1984b), the carnivalesque turns all oppositions between high and low upside down. What is carnivalesque in Dora’s description of the fire at her father’s noble country house are not just the acts of crude copulation and urination but also the pleasure that she takes in evoking the riotous scenario in her starkly informal language. It is with great relish that she describes the obscene behaviour of the party guests in the garb of Shakespearean characters in the midst of the general pandemonium of the fire that consumes the paternal country house. Constructed and celebrated by the implied author as an ebullient force of the popular and bawdy low, Dora’s narrative voice upholds the freakish otherness of the Chance sisters and, at the same time, undermines the opposition between the high and the low, the legitimate and the illegitimate. By bringing the incest, coupling and cross-breeding that runs through the family history into the open, Dora’s narration not only highlights the transgressions within the dynasty but, in so doing, also deconstructs the hierarchies that have defined the relations between the Hazard and the Chance branch of the family. What Carter thus emphasizes is the notion that the family dynasty, and by extension culture at large, are both hybrid and plural, errant and promiscuous – just like the passage quoted above, which blends the vulgar with intertextual allusions to Shakespearean drama. At the very end of the novel, when Melchior Hazard publicly acknowledges Dora and Nora as his daughters, the different social and cultural languages of the Chances and the Hazards are no longer in juxtaposition but intermingle in a heterogeneous mix. Moreover, it is important to emphasize again that Dora Chance has two voices, that, in addition to the voice she has as a performer, she also has a voice as the narrator of the story. Indeed, her narrative voice means that she has a cultural voice as an individual subject and can articulate her specific position in the more inclusive society envisioned by Carter’s ending. Although Carter and Rushdie differ in their thematic treatments of the female performer voice and the traditions recycled by their texts, they share a common interest in voice as a multiple phenomenon. Their postmodern novels emphasize the multiplicity of the performer’s voice, which oscillates between selfassertion and tragic loss in the case of Vina Apsara and between numerous different tonalities in the case of Dora Chance’s narratorial voice. At the same time, the two novels also proclaim themselves as multi-voiced texts in fusing different

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cultural languages as well as stressing their orchestration of different character voices. In doing so, they can be seen to pick up on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia as the co-existence of different social languages and his notion of dialogue as a model of culture. As Bakhtin (1981) suggests in an argument that will be central for this study and its discussion of voice in narrative fiction, the genre of the novel is characterized by its inherent dialogue. As the most dialogic literary genre, the novel represents a complex juxtaposition of various ways of speaking, a site at which many different, and potentially differing, voices enter into dialogue with each other (see Morson and Emerson 1990: 218, 239). According to Bakhtin, [t]he novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. […] The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types [raznorečie] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speech of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorečie] can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices […]. (Bakhtin 1981: 262– 263)

Bakhtin conceives of the novel as the multi-vocal literary form par excellence. With their emphasis on hybrid cultural languages, Carter and Rushdie employ what Bakhtin describes as the heteroglossia of the novel. Oddly enough, however, their postmodern texts appear to be less heteroglot than novels that were written about female performers in the nineteenth century because there is far less tension between their different textual voices. Rushdie and Carter rework two complementary tropes – a seemingly boundless and pleasurable projection of voice on stage as well as in various media on the one hand and that voice’s fatal freezing and silencing on the other – that are typical of novelistic stagings of female performers. They recycle aspects that are crucial to many nineteenth century texts, namely the demise of the performer following her grandiose self-dramatization in public and the impossibility of a happy end in the case of Rushdie and the appropriation of an ‘improper’ place of speaking in the case of Carter. Yet these aspects are cited as pure literary refigurations outside of any political context. As a result, these recycled traditions are no longer as urgent and generate far less textual tension than would be the case in nineteenth-century texts.³ Whereas in nineteenth-century culture, the

 Rushdie does reintroduce complexity into the theme he rewrites, and indeed criticizes, when Mira Celano, the impersonator whom Ormus has chosen to incarnate Vina on his Orpheus tour, counters Ormus’ narcissistic appropriation of Vina’s voice. Reminiscent of Mirah Lapidoth, one

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position of women was highly debated, women do have a political and a cultural voice in the late twentieth century, when Rushdie’s and Carter’s novels are published. Hence both the loss and the assertion of the performer voice do not carry the political implications that would be at stake in nineteenth-century texts. If the recycled themes carry less weight in these two contemporary texts, this is primarily because their postmodern refigurations no longer operate within the paradigms of gender and space that are at work in nineteenth-century literature and culture. By speaking or singing in public, nineteenth-century performers violate the prevalent gender norms that define the public sphere as masculine and the domestic sphere as feminine. The literary representation of the female performer who has a voice in public by virtue of her appearances on a public stage clearly runs counter to contemporary social reality, where women were hardly granted a public voice of their own. This means that in view of the actual struggle of women to attain a voice in nineteenth-century politics and culture, the gain but also the loss of the performer’s public voice in narrative fiction becomes a highly symbolic comment on the situation of women and their voices at the time. Moreover, on the textual level, the public appearance of the performer more often than not causes a tension between her voice and position on the one hand and the voice and position of other characters, the narrator, or the implied author on the other. That is, in contrast to the recyclings by Rushdie and Carter, nineteenth-century texts tend to be characterized by a far greater tension between various textual voices, their judgments and evaluations of the performer’s voice. This tension or heteroglossia characterizing nineteenth-century texts can be read against the backdrop of the cultural debate that took place with regard to the social role and political position of women in nineteenth-century culture. In the tragic fate of Vina Apsara, there are echoes of the way in which the voice of the performer is often treated as the pivot of both her making and undoing in the nineteenth-century imagination. However, the gender of Vina’s voice becomes largely irrelevant if we consider her stardom in the context of postmodern celebrity culture, in which Rushdie couches her fated career. Here the crux is no longer gender difference but media attention. The overriding ques-

of the singers in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, her name ‘Mira’ resonates with the word ‘mirror’, thus underlining that her function in Ormus’ scenario is to mirror his desire for his dead beloved Vina. However, at the end of the novel, Mira emphasizes the individuality of her and Vina’s voices when she refuses to go on embodying the dead woman, whose death, she insists, is irrevocable: “Nobody comes back from underground. Nobody did return. Vina Apsara’s gone” (Rushdie 2000: 608 – 609). Yet in the dramaturgy of the text, Mira’s rejection appears to come as an afterthought that creates hardly any more friction than the collapse of oppositions at the close of Carter’s novel.

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tion concerns how – and for how long – a public persona can hold the attention and sustain the fascination of a mass audience. In the economy of contemporary entertainment and celebrity culture, star performers appear as individuals that can be objectified and fetishized by the public gaze regardless of whether they are female or male. As is suggested by the fates of a host of male singers, including Elvis Presley and John Lennon, whose real-life destinies resemble that of Vina Apsara, gender is no longer the only decisive factor in whether a performer finds cultural resonance, whether he or she enjoys a cultural afterlife after his or her demise, and whether the voice of the star performer comes to be absorbed into myth. Indeed, Rushdie interweaves the fate of the female performer Vina Apsara with a more general cultural dynamic of fame and celebrity and the potentially fatal effects it has on public figures.⁴ This dynamic can be applied to male performers as well and concerns not just the voice but also the performer’s visual presence in various media. In contrast to Rushdie, Carter still foregrounds the gender issues surrounding her female performers. Her postmodern treatment of the woman who exposes herself on stage rewrites a Victorian legacy in which the female performer tends to be regarded as a transgressive phenomenon. In this tradition, the mere public appearance of the performer alone is coterminous with a violation of the codes of ‘proper’ femininity. In Carter’s novel, this deviancy re-emerges as an out-of-bounds excessiveness, which articulates itself physically but also verbally. The powerful profusion of language in Dora’s extreme talk affirms Carter’s reading of the female performer as a freak whose self-assertion hinges on her eccentricity. In other words, there are two voices at play: The diegetic voice of the freakish performer is doubled by the voice of the assertive narrator. The strategy of Wise Children hence consists in rewriting prior themes and traditions in an empowering reversal.⁵ In contrast to Rushdie, who seems more interested in repeating prior tropes, Carter can be seen to re-encode cultural traditions.

 For a reading of Rushdie’s novel which focuses on the obsession with celebrity and catastrophe that permeates contemporary culture, see the article “Fault Lines: Catastrophe and Celebrity Culture” by Elisabeth Bronfen (2001).  One cannot help but think that Carter names Nora after the heroine in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), a play that marks an important moment in the literary reflection on the emancipation of women, while Dora seems to be named after Sigmund Freud’s Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901]), his famous case study of Dora (a.k.a. Ida Bauer), whose most prominent hysterical symptom was her loss of voice and who abruptly terminated her treatment by Freud. Another performer novel by Angela Carter that recycles and rewrites earlier traditions in an empowering manner is Nights at the Circus (1984).

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It is not by accident that the protagonists of Carter’s revision should reach the acme of their professional success in the period between the wars. This is the time in which, for example, the two cabaret artistes called the ‘Dolly Sisters’ celebrated their greatest triumphs with their duo dance acts. Born in Hungary, the twin sisters Rosika (Rose) and Jansci (Jenny) Deutsch emigrated to the United States before touring the vaudeville theatres and dance halls in Europe, especially those in London and Paris, during the Roaring Twenties.⁶ In the pictures the photographer James Abbe took of the sisters, they are decked out with the type of risqué and frivolous costume, all “frills, sequins, fishnet tights, high heels and feathers” (Carter 1992: 58) that Carter’s twin sisters dream of on their seventh birthday.⁷ Often the Dolly Sisters can be seen to look into Abbe’s camera with a directness and self-confidence that bespeak the 1920s sexual revolution, which liberated women from cumbersome and confining dress conventions and provided them with an unprecedented symbolic freedom and a greater scope of self-articulation. As women of mature years, Carter’s sisters watch Busby Berkeley musicals, which belong to the type of entertainment that became possible thanks to the female liberation represented not least of all by the Dolly Sisters and their frivolous excess. Dora describes how decades later – when it has been relegated to an afternoon time slot on television – she and her sister revisit this form of popular entertainment. “We got the VCR to catch up with those Busby Berkeley musicals they put out Saturday afternoons. We tape them, watch them over and over, freeze-frame our favourite bits” (Carter 1992: 10). As is suggested by the constant replay of their favourite scenes, the twins keep returning to the entertainment form of the period that not only coincides with their own prime but also constitutes a culturally congenial context. Indeed, the period during which the Chance sisters enjoy the most success, the interwar era, also stands for a more general feminine self-assertion. During the First World War, the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain was halted due to the national war effort. Yet in 1918, after the war period had provided women with a certain degree of independence, women over the age of 30 were enfranchised and in 1928 women over the age of 21 gained the vote as well. As a result, women in Britain were able to vote for the first time in the General Election in May 1929. In A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, Virginia Woolf refers to the novel of a fictitious novelist she calls Mary Carmichael to underscore  A detailed account of the lives of the Dolly Sisters can be found in Gary Chapman’s biography (2006). Also note the film The Dolly Sisters (1945), starring Betty Grable and June Haver as the famous sisters.  See the catalogue Shooting Stalin: The ‘Wonderful’ Years of Photographer James Abbe edited by Bodo von Dewitz and Brooks Johnson (2004).

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Figure 1: The Dolly Sisters in costume for their revue Paris-New York, Casino de Paris, 1927, photograph by James Abbe

that in the post-WWI period, in which she writes her essay, it has become possible for women to tell completely new types of stories: ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. […] Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity. ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together ….’ I read on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anæmia; although one of them was married and had – I think I am right in stating – two small children. (Woolf 2001: 70 – 71)

These new kinds of stories mirror the progress achieved by the women’s movement. Given “how immense a change” (Woolf 2001: 70) the period following the First World War brings to the situation of women, it is hardly surprising that

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Carter should set her novel Wise Children in this era.⁸ Her portrait of her twin performers could hardly find a cultural era that would be more congenial to its liberating spirit.

Figure 2: Two women on their way to the polling station where they will vote for the first time in the General Election of May 1929

Having examined the postmodern refigurations in the two novels by Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter, it is worth returning to and re-examining earlier ex-

 Also note the following passage in which Woolf underlines the important role war has played for women. Their situation, she suggests, has been improved “thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later” (Woolf 2001: 93).

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amples of performer novels because of 1) the historical specificity, 2) the aesthetic complexity and 3) the ideological contradiction that this will add to issues raised by the literary character of the female performer. The postmodern novels by Carter and Rushdie are highly self-conscious but also on some level monologic in their recyclings because, although the texts depict their performers as tragic and eccentric respectively, they feature no diegetic or narrative voices that would speak against or stand in competition with the performer and her voice. By contrast, performers in nineteenth-century novels are controversial, which is also the reason why the texts themselves tend to be contradictory: As dialogic novels in the Bakhtinian sense, they can often be seen to pit the ‘voice’ of the performer against the narrative frame and against the character voices in the text that oppose or criticize the female performer because she has a public voice. Nineteenth-century performer novels tend to be contradictory and their public female voices controversial because they challenge traditional dichotomies. As has been shown by Michel Foucault (1990) and Thomas Laqueur (1992), the overriding system of difference in nineteenth-century culture is gender, which structures all other culturally significant oppositions, notably those between nature and culture, and the private and the public. Once we reach the postmodern context in which Carter and Rushdie write, these binary oppositions have been problematized and deconstructed. In Carter’s novel, the gendered mapping of space can still be traced in the juxtaposition between the illegitimate stage occupied by the Chance sisters and the legitimate theatre represented by the family patriarch, while in Rushdie’s novel it becomes entirely obsolete. In fact, the division between a feminine domestic space and a masculine public space no longer holds in the cultural context in which these novels are set: While the members of the Hazard dynasty live their family life literally on the theatre stage, the appearances of Vina Apsara in the TV studio completely dissolve the boundaries between the intimate and the public in her contemporary brand of stardom. By contrast, earlier performer novels take a more distinctly gendered dichotomy of space as their point of departure. Their women performers emerge in tension with the bourgeois ideology of the ‘separate spheres’, which means that they can be seen to stage a potentially disruptive instability of both gender and space constellations by vocally and physically occupying both private and public arenas. By juxtaposing the voice of the performer with other ‘voices’ that oppose her public appearance, these nineteenth-century novels emerge as sites of different, and differing, voices battling both in an aesthetic and ideological sense. The tension between the voice of the performer and the voices of other characters, the narrator and/or the implied author contributes to the aesthetic texture of the

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novel and simultaneously refers us to an ideological struggle between different positions. Reminiscent of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, these novels foreground not just a tension between competing literary voices but also a political battle between the different ideological viewpoints these voices metonymically represent. In fact, by juxtaposing the performer voice with other textual voices, these Victorian novels can be seen to think through various ideological positions, cultural values and philosophical ideas. The texts themselves reflect on political issues by means of their dialogic aesthetics. As a result, the literary text comes to develop a complex aesthetic form of thinking.

1.2 Performer Voices in the Long Nineteenth Century As we shift our focus from Carter and Rushdie to the public performers that rise to prominence in the nineteenth century, we notice a curious contradiction. Paradoxically enough, it is precisely in the historical period in which bourgeois ideology seeks to consign women to the domestic sphere that the feminine voice performing in public becomes the object of a cultural craze. Indeed, what is played out in the cultural imagination of the time is an almost obsessive staging of the feminine voice. On the operatic stage, the feminine soprano becomes a privileged voice so that, from a musical standpoint, women are given roles in musical performances that allow them to sing with keen relish and enjoyment on stage. Likewise, nineteenth-century narrative fiction features a striking abundance of female characters who enjoy public visibility by speaking and/ or singing on a wide variety of public stages such as professional theatres, makeshift pulpits and orators’ platforms. The abundance of singers, actresses, speakers and preachers to be found in aesthetic texts betrays a curious cultural fascination with the public display of female bodies and voices. Viewed against the backdrop of bourgeois middle-class culture and its cult of domestic femininity, the woman who performs in front of public audiences represents an exceptional and even transgressive figure. This is because the public performer violates the feminine gender norms prevalent at the time. Moreover, while social norms tend to promote one single image of middle-class domestic femininity, literary texts frequently add a different second image. Literary female performers thus often come to possess considerable vocal power and presence as they transgress the boundaries of the strictly gendered space of their culture. Because of its representation in fiction, this power does not reflect social reality, nor is it stable within the fictional realm. Instead, texts about female performers can be seen to offer a fantasy of female power. This fantasy, having no equivalent in social reality, can either serve as a wishful

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scenario or be used as a vent by representing this power within fiction so as to prevent its actualization and thus not to see it in reality; in other words, this fantasy of female power can be used as a deliberate means of maintaining the status quo. In either case, the power of the performer turns out to be unstable because invariably the texts represent not just the gain but also the loss of her voice. Literary narratives that revolve around female performers often represent the public articulation of singers, actresses, preachers and speakers as an act of selfempowerment. In their book on the politics of the prima donna, Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope point out that although the ideology of the separate spheres seeks to exclude women from the major arenas of public life, there are resilient counter-examples of female individuals, both fictional and non-fictional, who do not follow the nineteenth-century gender norms that define silence in public as a feminine virtue. The argument Leonardi and Pope make about the star singer also holds for other performers: They have a voice, both literally and metaphorically.⁹ By speaking and/or singing in public, they possess power and presence outside the domestic sphere. Indeed, star performers at their most triumphant attain considerable scope for their public self-fashioning in addition to their professional success and economic independence. As Joanne Wilkes points out, acting represented the only career in mid-nineteenth-century culture in which women could achieve the same prestige and salary as their male colleagues. Because it depended on the public performance of their talent for money, acting was also the occupation that took women “furthest outside the private sphere” (Wilkes 1994: xvii). Moreover, the profession of the public performer draws on the voice, foregrounding it as an effective instrument with which she can powerfully affect her audience. In contrast to the woman writer, another prominent nineteenth-century figure who also enters the public sphere, but who does so through her disembodied writing, it is by virtue of her vocal performance that the female performer characteristically presents herself as a public persona. By producing and projecting her voice, she literally takes up space as she fills her surroundings with the concrete sound of her voice, however ephemeral its presence may be. At the same time, her concrete vocal expansion correlates with the symbolic power she occupies as a star performer off-stage, that is as a professional woman who can command high salaries as well as the admiration of her fans.

 Similar recuperative readings of the figure of the singer, both literary and non-literary, are also proposed by Rupert Christiansen (1986), Susan Rutherford (1992) and Paula Gillett (2000: 141– 186).

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However, despite its empowering potential, the public performance of the feminine voice is not without its ambivalences. By entering the public sphere, female performers unsettle the hegemonic norms and codes of a culture in which the expression ‘public woman’ constitutes a rather slippery term. While the phrase ‘public man’ refers to a citizen with political rights, ‘public woman’ equally applies to the performer and the prostitute (Auerbach 1985: 255, Yeo 1998a: 1). In contrast to the public man who participates in political debates, the performer is either conflated with, or at least seen in close proximity to, the woman who prostitutes herself.¹⁰ As is suggested by the ambiguity of the term ‘public woman’, feminine sexuality and vocality are both considered to be in excess and, hence, in need of control and containment, especially if they manifest themselves beyond the protected confines of the domestic family home. In the cultural period of the long nineteenth century, the position of the performer who exposes herself to the public gaze (and ear) is, therefore, almost always controversial and often also precarious. In the aesthetic imagination, it is their public self-theatricalization together with its concomitant association of transgression and excess that meets with resistance and renders performers vulnerable to virulent attacks. Indeed, as well as transgressing the gendered boundary between the public and the private sphere, the performer also violates feminine gender norms that prescribe self-effacement, by virtue of her public selfdisplay, her pleasurable and potentially narcissistic projection of her self and her voice. While literary enactments of the performing woman frequently foreground an empowering gain of voice, the losses are almost as numerous and at least as dramatic. All too often the female performer seems to be caught up in a dialectic of appearance and disappearance. It is as if she raised her voice only to fall silent – or indeed as if her voice were merely staged by the texts in order to be erased by their plots. Many novels, after having granted female performers powerful voices, culminate in their eventual silencing.¹¹ Some texts appear to be intended as a warning to women of the dangers of public self-exposure, while others offer a critique of the fact that for women, life in the public sphere

 For extended discussions of the proximity of the actress and the prostitute in the cultural imaginary and in social history, see Tracy C. Davis (1991) and Kirsten Pullen (2005). As Kerry Powell notes, “The word ‘actress’ was […] a euphemism for ‘prostitute’ in the [Victorian] press, where the meanings of the two words were at times indistinguishable” (Powell 1997: 33).  In the long nineteenth century, many operas, too, have women expend themselves and sing their hearts out in both senses of the word. Examples include Mimì in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème (1895) or the heroine in his Madame Butterfly (1903). A large number of further operatic examples can be found in Catherine Clément’s study (1997).

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should often turn out to be so tragic. Yet in either case these novels can be seen to offer a form of negotiation: Even if the performer eventually falls silent, she has made an appearance in the text; her voice has become present and can never be obliterated altogether. Indeed, by putting the focus of my discussion on the public appearance of actresses, singers, speakers and preachers in nineteenth-century fiction, I emphasize the presence, rather than the absence, of their voices. The discussion of female performers in this book touches on a preoccupation with the feminine voice that has, of course, a long genealogy. Feminist movements have traditionally seized on ‘voice’ as a pivotal trope in their struggle for the political enfranchisement of women, their social emancipation and sexual self-liberation. Virginia Woolf wrote her classic essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) shortly after the decisive moment already mentioned before, namely after the prolonged campaign for women’s suffrage came to a successful end as women in Britain and the United States gained the right to vote and with it, a political voice after the First World War. As already mentioned in connection with the interwar period portrayed in Angela Carter’s Wise Children, Woolf mentions in her essay that women writers can now tell entirely new stories about women such as the one she tells about Chloe and Olivia, who work together in a laboratory (Woolf 2001: 70 – 71). At the same time, she also examines the reasons why women’s voices have been so conspicuously absent in cultural history and isolates the material conditions, social norms and conventions that have prevented women from writing. She famously imagines that Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, who would have evinced the same spirit of genius if only culture had provided her with the opportunity to express herself. In doing so, Woolf, as a writer, lends her voice to the mute history of those who have been deprived of the means and the space conducive to and, in fact, necessary for literary creativity and self-articulation.¹² Even if it did not materialize itself in writing, she argues, there must have been genius among women, going on to add: When […] one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious

 Also note Woolf’s demand for a new revisionist type of historiography. Observing that hardly anything is known about women’s lives in the early modern period, she points out the need to “rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they [the students at Newnham and Girton, the first women’s colleges] not add a supplement to history […]? For one often catches a glimpse of [women] in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear” (Woolf 2001: 37– 38).

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Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. (Woolf 2001: 41)

With her novel Orlando, published in 1928, just one year before A Room of One’s Own, Woolf offers a fictional counterpart to her essay. By tracing how the male protagonist, an Elizabethan aristocrat and courtier, changes gender, turns into a woman and eventually becomes a successful writer in the late 1920s, the novel tells the story of a woman gaining a cultural voice. Tillie Olsen, the American feminist writer and intellectual, can be seen to pursue a project reminiscent of Woolf’s by raising the question why women are less likely to be published authors. In her famous non-fiction volume, aptly entitled Silences (2003) [1978], she writes about writer’s block and the difficulties women have in finding time to concentrate on their writing. Olsen wrote the texts included in Silences in the 1960s and 1970s. That is, her work coincides with the period in which second-wave feminists made their pitch for the importance of finding a voice to express a specifically feminine experience, while feminist scholars began to (re)construct a feminine tradition by retrieving texts by female authors that had been forgotten and excluded from the traditional literary canon. Issues of feminine voice and subjectivity also feature prominently in the scholarly debate on issues pertaining to the representation of women and femininity. Notably in poststructuralist approaches, a strong accent tends to fall on the close connection often established by modern literature and culture between femininity on the one hand and death, hysteria and silence on the other.¹³ In their analyses of stifled feminine expression, poststructuralist critics have drawn attention to the overwhelming number of examples in nineteenth-century literature and other aesthetic representations of the period in which femininity is conflated with the lack of voice and/or even death. Nonetheless, by foregrounding how feminine subjectivity is erased, these critical readings also draw attention to the fact that whenever something is rendered absent, it retains – by virtue of this marked disappearance – an oblique presence. Following these earlier dis-

 See in particular Sigrid Weigel’s Topographien der Geschlechter: Kulturgeschichtliche Studien zur Literatur (1990) and her essay “Musen und Junggesellenmaschinen: Mythen vom Geschlecht der Künste” (1996), Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992b), Claire Kahane’s Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman 1850 – 1915 (1995) and Corina Caduff’s Die Literarisierung von Musik und bildender Kunst (2003).

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cussions within gender studies, my own reading of the cultural role played by feminine vocality is consciously recuperative. Taking my cue from Woolf and her influential endeavour to take stock of women’s position in cultural history, I propose shifting our gaze to how women are present in nineteenth-century literary representations and how they mark their presence by making themselves heard. It is by putting our focus on the public appearance and performance of feminine voices that we can seek to move away from a tragic reading. This book offers not just the first sustained discussion of the singer, actress, speaker and preacher,¹⁴ it also reshifts the critical focus so as to argue that there are, in fact, a number of public arenas in which women in nineteenth-century culture do have a voice, at least in the literary imagination. As my reading of a selected set of texts will show, women do not lack public voices but rather articulate themselves in sites and under conditions that differ from the classic standard domains of public culture. While these standard domains are usually defined by political institutions, including the national government and parliament but also municipal corporations at local levels, by newspapers and the running of companies and businesses, the female performers portrayed in narrative fiction gain their voices and articulate themselves on the professional stage, in the preacher’s pulpit and on the orator’s platform.¹⁵

 Discussions of individual examples include Kent (1977), Stokes, Booth and Bassnett (1988), Davis (1991), Balk (1994), Dudden (1994), Powell (1997), Marshall (1998), Glenn (2000), the volume edited by Möhrmann (2000), Perry et al. (2011) on the figure of the actress; Christiansen (1986), Leonardi (1987), Theilacker (1989), Bronfen (1992a), Rutherford (1992), Leonardi and Pope (1996), Gillett (2000), Miller Frank (1995), Grotjahn et al. (2011) on the singer; Overton (1985), Krueger (1992) and Brekus (1998) on the preacher; Campbell (1989a), Bardes and Gossett (1990), Levander (1998), Joseph (2006) and Cutter (1999) on the political speaker. An important inspiration for the conception of this study has been Ellen Moers’s brief and yet pioneering discussion of what she calls “the fantasy of the performing heroine” (Moers 1985: 174). Her chapter on “Performing Heroinism: The Myth of Corinne” (Moers 1985: 173 – 210) traces literary representations of female characters who act, sing and preach back to the Romantic genius Corinne in Germaine de Staël’s eponymous novel (also see Chapter 2 of this book). In so doing, her discussion shows the influence of Staël’s heroine but also the ambivalence she evoked in other women writers as a model of feminine genius.  Also note Jürgen Habermas’s definition of the public sphere (1992) as composed of social sites and arenas where citizens freely engage in critical public debates, where they articulate and negotiate ideas, thus forming and shaping public opinion. According to Habermas’s historical account, the public sphere emerged in the eighteenth century, when feudal structures were replaced by a new civic society. In the formation of the public sphere in Britain, a crucial role was played by coffee houses and a new type of literary journalism. Habermas’s notion has been criticized by a number of feminist critics, including Nancy Fraser (1990) and Joan Landes

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In proposing a comparatively optimistic reading of the public female voice, I intend to neither idealize nor glorify female performers. The actual working conditions of ordinary actresses, for instance, were in reality far from glamorous.¹⁶ However, what seems crucial to a discussion of female performers in literature are not so much the real living conditions actual performers faced historically, but the public platforms novels offer to female performers, however imaginary their counter-narratives may be. Rather than the social history of the theatre as a concrete place and location, this book explores the ways in which theatre and theatricality are deployed in female performer novels as heterotopic sites. Michel Foucault defines heterotopias as “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986: 24). Theatres are heterotopic in nineteenth-century culture because they offer an alternative site to prescribed domesticity by providing women with a voice they do not have within the confines of the family home. At the same time, the novel itself is also heterotopic because it offers a countersite to the social reality confronting nineteenth-century women, including real performers. Regardless of whether or not they finally grant the woman a voice of her own, these novels use the idea of the theatre and theatricality as a venue or mode for negotiating issues that address what at the time was debated under the rubric of the so-called ‘Woman Question’. Indeed, the social role and cultural position of women formed one of the crucial questions in the Victorian period. Should women be granted the right to own property, to divorce their spouses and have access to higher education? These were some of the issues that were debated, along with the central question of whether women should be given the right to vote. With the exception of Margaret Fuller’s manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), none of the texts discussed in this study make any feminist claims in a straightforward sense. But they do provide examples of grand self-theatricalization. In doing so, they foreground the public articulation of the actress and the singer at precisely the time in which the personal and political liberties of women had become the topic of urgent public debate. Historically, the emergence of the British performer novel coincides and overlaps with the formative period of the organized women’s movement. From the perspective of the women’s movement in (1998b), who point out that the supposedly universal public sphere conceptualized by Habermas excludes marginal groups, especially women.  For a detailed acccount of the socio-historical conditions that shaped the Victorian stage, see Tracy C. Davis (1991). On the differences between the “reality” and “imagination” of the Victorian actress, see Christopher Kent (1977).

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Britain, the most important issue was women’s suffrage, that is, the right to vote and to run for office (Karl 2011: 62). Further demands of the movement, already mentioned above, included access to higher education and professional employment as well as the legal right to own property and file for divorce.¹⁷ These were radical claims at a time when women were defined by their relation to others, notably their fathers and husbands. At stake was the overriding demand that women ought to be recognized as individuals in their own right, rather than being represented politically and legally by men. What the ambivalent fascination with the public feminine voice enacts in literary texts, written by both female and male authors, is the controversial position women occupy in nineteenth-century culture. That is to say, what comes to be theatricalized by performer novels, whether they involve theatre actresses or political speakers, is a cultural controversy over the feminine voice which formed part of more general emancipatory claims and the shift towards modern democracy in the long nineteenth century. When we look at individual novels, we note that there is often a tension or even a discrepancy between what the narrator of each text claims or explains and what the novel as a multi-vocal dialogic text performs. Hence the narrative may emphasize the eventual loss of the performer’s voice, be it through her death, marriage or the deterioration of her professional singing voice, but the mere fact that she makes her appearance in the text – before being silenced by the narrative plot – ensures that this silencing of her voice can never be total. The fact that she has made herself heard in the text may well be what the reader eventually remembers. That is, her articulation (be it in the form of her inner monologues, dialogues or performances) may leave a more lasting impression on the reader than her eventual silencing by the narrative plot. Catherine Clément, in her well-known study aptly entitled Opera, or, the Undoing of Woman (1997), offers close readings of a wide selection of libretti in order to illustrate the insistent silencing of the feminine voice that permeates and perhaps even inspires nineteenth-century opera. As her analyses show, the fact that so many opera heroines are silenced in the final act can be read as a way of punishing the woman who transgresses the symbolic boundaries of the patriarchal order as she asserts and insists on articulating desires of her own. As convincing as Clément’s readings are in the general thrust of their argument, they focus on one single aspect, the libretto, at the expense of the musical  Among the numerous historical accounts of Victorian feminism see, for example, Christine Bolt (2004), Barbara Caine (1993, 1997), Philippa Levine (1990, 1994) and Martha Vicinus (1985). For general overviews of the development of the woman’s movement, see Michaela Karl (2011) and Christine Stansell (2011).

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score as well as the sound of the singing voice. What her approach does not take into consideration are all those dimensions of opera that exceed its narrative plots, including the affect and the mood (‘Stimmung’ in German, a word that resonates with ‘Stimme’)¹⁸ evoked by the particular tone of a voice, or the physical presence conveyed by its ephemeral sound. It is not just that the exclusion of the affective qualities of voice is surprising in view of the key role they play in the performance of opera. But the examples discussed by Clément may well turn out to be more conflicted were one to juxtapose the fatality of the plots with the considerable musical and vocal presence the heroines possess before they are eventually silenced. This is not to detract from the important contribution made by Clément. In fact, the eventual undoing of the woman highlighted in her readings becomes even more dramatic, and indeed violent, if one considers the tension that is played out between the musical celebration of the feminine voice on the one hand and a simultaneous desire for its symbolic silence on the other.¹⁹ In narrative fiction, we find an analogous conflict or tension that can be used as leverage for a critical re-reading of the woman’s voice. To start with, it is important to emphasize that the type of voice under discussion is one that is always mediated by the non-voiced language of the literary text. While in opera there can be a tension between the libretto with its narrative silencing of the female voice on the one hand, and the actual performance of the music with the concrete vocal presence of the singer as well as her bodily gestures and movements on the stage on the other, literary texts are, of course, composed purely of language. Voices in literary texts are never literally embodied, and there are no concrete vocal performances in novels. Aspects such as the particular timbre or tone of a voice and its affective force are necessarily mediated by the written word of literary language. Sometimes texts are interested in the concrete sound of a performer’s voice and offer descriptions of its particular timbre. Sometimes they describe an actual performance, giving details, for example, of how the performer makes her appearance on stage and how her audience responds to her performance. However, regardless of whether or not individual texts are concerned with the literary representation of concrete sounds and performances, they all use the

 The German word ‘Stimmung’ was first used in the sixteenth century in relation to concrete sound, namely the tuning of musical instruments, before it also came to denote mental and emotional states in the human subject from the eighteenth century onwards (Duden Etymologie 1989: 712).  This tension is complicated even further if we consider the generic conventions of tragedy, which plays a key role in nineteenth-century opera, namely the fact that tragic plots tend to kill the greatest stars.

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fact that the performer has a voice in public as a trope for feminine agency. In other words, the public performer is used to raise questions concerning the cultural position and subjectivity of the woman in the nineteenth century. Regardless of whether or not the text describes her concrete voice, the literary performer can have a voice of her own in the sense of taking up a position, of becoming visible and perceptible. For instance, in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, which is discussed in Chapter 5, the former singer Alcharisi has lost her professional voice long before she makes her appearance in the text, and yet she has a vocal presence on the textual level because she is able to articulate and present her position. Although she no longer sings, her statements resonate in and through the text, and even after her two brief appearances, her ‘voice’ keeps reverberating in the text because of her unmistakeable position, which differs radically from all the other diegetic voices in the text, as well as that of the narrator. The example of Alcharisi shows that, even though voices in literary texts are never fully embodied, but always mediated by the narrative text in which they are contained, they can have a different affective force, setting them apart from other character voices. With regard to the question of whether women have a voice of their own, it is crucial that female performers take part in the mediated tension between various positions (often standing for ideological attitudes) in a text, that is, what Bakhtin (1981) calls heteroglossia. This multivoicedness has to do with the notion, already mentioned above, that narrative fiction always orchestrates various textual and ideological positions in dialogic fashion. In narrative texts, the female performer voice emerges in relation to, and often in tension with, other character voices as well as those of the narrator and implied author.²⁰ Performer voices can appear as the effect of the ways in which they are perceived, described, celebrated and judged by other textual voices. Yet this dialogic setting also allows us to show in a negotiated reading how a performer can be demonized and/or silenced at one level and emerge as the text’s most resonant voice at another. As on the actual stage (whether opera or theatre), so too in a literary text, voices resonate beyond and outside the narrative. Even if a literary character is silenced, the way (and the fact) that she articulated her position may well be what we remember. What holds for opera is also true for novels. Even if

 See Bakhtin, who writes the following about character voices and their relation to the authorial voice: “The language used by characters in the novel, how they speak, is verbally and semantically autonomous; each character’s speech possesses its own belief system, since each is the speech of another in another’s language; thus it may also refract authorial intentions and consequently may to a certain degree constitute a second language for the author” (Bakhtin 1981: 315).

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the cultural fascination with and enjoyment of the woman’s voice go together with a desire for its curtailment and control, they cannot do without its prominent theatricalized display. In yet another paradoxical turn, voices can never be fully erased once they have made their appearance in a narrative. In the articulation of a particular voice, but also in its control by other forces, there always emerges what one might call a performative excess. There is a subversive aspect of voice that escapes full containment, while the force that seeks to tame this surplus is itself excessive. Focusing on these manifestations of excess is one of the strategies that can be deployed to open up even the most seemingly conservative texts to the possibility of negotiated readings. In fact, if female performers are under threat, this is largely because of the energy and intensity they display in their performance. On the diegetic level of the text, the unmistakeable presence of their voices in public settings provokes an ambivalent mixture of anxiety and pleasure, which is the reason why so many of them are ‘domesticated’ and/or sacrificed in the end. Their containment does not just reflect on the culturally ambivalent context in which their voices are staged. The process in which they are muffled and muted can also be read ex negativo: For the reader, their eventual silence continues to reverberate with their vocal presence. This book examines female performer voices as a concrete phenomenon described in narrative texts and goes on to discuss them as a cultural theme and aesthetic effect. Rather than providing a survey of a literary motif, the book offers a number of close readings in order to trace a cultural tradition of public feminine speaking and singing as it is expressed in a certain set of British and American narrative texts written in the period between the late 1840s and the early 1930s. As we shall see, the cultural phenomenon of the female performer emerging in these texts feeds on earlier traditions of feminine vocality, including mythopoetic figurations such as the fatally seductive song of the sirens, or the inspiration of the frenzied oracle by a divine voice other than her own.²¹ An important question concerns the ways in which these traditions come to be refigured by nineteenth and twentieth-century texts leading up to a period in which the female voice increasingly gains agency and independence and eventually becomes part of a larger cultural and political context so that its embodiment is no longer restricted to the theatrical stage. After the First World War, women not only gain the vote but also a wider scope of aesthetic articulation. As Woolf writes, women “may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a  For a discussion of the siren’s voice, see Vic de Donder’s Le chant de la sirène (1992) and Adriana Cavarero’s chapter “The Fate of the Sirens” (2005: 103 – 116). On the ancient oracle, see Stephen Connor’s chapter “Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle” in his book Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000: 47– 74).

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method of self-expression” (Woolf 2001: 68). Having gained a cultural voice due to both their political enfranchisement and their aesthetic empowerment, women begin moving into a next phase.²² As we shall see in the conclusion, which briefly discusses the contemporary situation, women in the early twenty-first century have moved into public offices and assumed political mandates, firmly placing them in the symbolic domain of politics. The nineteenth and early twentieth-century fascination with the feminine voice performing in public thus raises the question of how culturally entrenched fantasies highlighting the sensual allure of feminine vocality are reformulated in this context in which women’s rights come to be debated. Does feminine articulation participate in symbolic processes such as politics and education, or is it aligned entirely with pure sound and real jouissance? ²³ There are long-standing traditions that grant femininity privileged access to the voice but, in the same gesture, elide feminine subjectivity.²⁴ In Romantic notions of poetic creation, for instance, femininity is often treated as a mere materiality that can be appropriated by a male artist as a source of poetic inspiration, feeding his own artistic voice.²⁵ Or even more blatantly, in Greek mythology, the figure of Echo, robbed of her own speech and ‘language’, is doomed to repeat the utterances of others, rendering her incapable of declaring her desire. As the myth has it, her body

 Writing about the screwball comedies of the 1930s, Stanley Cavell suggests that “this phase of the history of cinema is bound up with a phase in the history of the consciousness of women” (Cavell 1981: 16). At the same time, he notes that by the time these films were made, the demands of the suffragists had been fulfilled so that the next generation came to explore new forms of expressions for the concerns their mothers had voiced in public (Cavell 1981: 17).  On the figuration of the feminine voice as sensual and senseless, see Mladen Dolar (2006: 43 – 51, 2008: 11). Note in particular Dolar’s discussion of the cultural tradition in which the feminine voice has been juxtaposed with the masculine logos: “The fascination with the woman’s singing voice is something with a terribly long standing, it is inscribed in one of the most inveterate fantasies which runs through our culture. The bearer of pure and genuine voice happens to be a woman, the voice beyond logos, with the sexually determined opposition between the masculine logos and the feminine voice. The power is the affair of deciphering, hermeneutics and control, hence ‘culture’, while the woman is on the side of the genuine joy and uniqueness of the voice, its overwhelming magic, hence ‘nature’, beyond culture, law and its vicissitudes. There was a massive tradition of fighting, exorcizing the insidious dangers of the effeminate voice and its boundless jouissance and of attempts to pin it down to logos […]” (Dolar 2008: 11).  For individual discussions of the ways in which western culture has tended to encode the voice as feminine, see the essay collection Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (1996).  See Elisabeth Bronfen (1992b), Sigrid Weigel (1996) and Corina Caduff (2003). For an extended discussion of the rhetorical aspects of this figuration, see Bettine Menke’s work on voice (1993, 2000, 2002), in which she draws on Paul de Man’s discussion of prosopopeia.

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withers away, reducing her to a mere voice that is strangely amputated from her former self. Bearing these traditions in mind, we need to ask how novels written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century relate gender, voice and subjectivity. Of particular importance is the way in which individual texts configure the relation between the performer’s body and voice as well as the question of what happens when the voice is no longer embodied but instead becomes pure textuality as is the case in modernist writing. Similarly, we need to address the question why the concern with the female performer voice surfaces with so much force and gains so much momentum at a time when women have arguably less of a say in public affairs than perhaps in any other era. What is at stake in this cultural obsession and its insistent enactment of feminine vocality? What cultural values, philosophical notions and political concerns are negotiated by the feminine voice performing in public? This is the reason why it makes sense to treat the discussion surrounding a woman’s voice as a trope: What needs to be traced is not just the affective effect of voice in a literary text, but also the significance of the cultural and political notion that voicing oneself is an act of taking responsibility, of insisting on hearing oneself and on being heard, of having one’s desires and fights acknowledged. As we shall see, the woman’s voice in British and American narrative fiction is far more closely aligned with the symbolic domain (as the realm of cultural laws and political processes) than one might expect. Although some of the novels revolve around singers, they seem to be less concerned with the kind of figuration of the singer’s voice discussed by Michel Poizat in his book The Angel’s Cry (1992) as a voice that evokes an extreme form of jouissance by moving beyond verbal meaning. Instead, the readings in this book highlight how the performer’s voice (even if it articulates itself in the context of theatre rather than politics) can be read in relation to the feminist demand that women be included in the symbolic processes of culture. In the literary imagination of the nineteenth century, female performers constitute at once socially marginal figures and culturally central voices. This does not simply mean that, as required by the classic ‘star myth’, most performers come from ‘nowhere’ before they rise to social prominence, but also that they occupy a socially ambiguous position and, at the same time, reveal and bring into focus crucial cultural concerns. The literary preoccupation with female performers is all the more significant as the texts of the time feature only few male performers of note.²⁶ This suggests a sustained reflection on the feminine voice and

 Male performers in my corpus of texts include “Herr Klesmer”, the Jewish musician in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Glorioli, the Jewish singer in George Du Maurier’s Trilby, and Svengali,

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its position and ambivalence in culture. More specifically, the voices of female performers can be seen to condense core issues of modernity having to do with feminine subjectivity. The publication of the first British novel discussed in this book, Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, coincides with both the rise of feminist thought in the context of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the first women’s rights convention in the United States, held in Seneca Falls in the same year. As is the case in most performer novels, Jewsbury’s text does not explicitly connect its performer protagonist with the arena of politics, let alone with the political struggle for women’s suffrage. Nevertheless, the treatment of the performer’s voice in The Half Sister and other performer novels can be seen to be inflected by the very issues debated as part of the ‘Woman Question’. That is, all the examples discussed in this book can be related to the way in which women attempt to gain a political voice in the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. This means again that literature can be called heterotopic because it rehearses a situation (of women articulating themselves in public) that will become a reality; it anticipates this political reality, perhaps even imagines it so that it might come to be realized. At the same time, the literary treatment of female performer voices does not follow a linear development. Instead the voice of the female performer remains surrounded by fierce controversy throughout the nineteenth century. What will thus be foregrounded by the close readings are the ways in which individual novels as well as the specific cultural domains and public arenas they depict can be seen to represent different sites of intense conflict over the woman’s voice. Voice as a concept encompasses a number of different aspects and layers, ranging from the concrete sound that we hear, to the invocation of voice as a trope of self-expression and the effects of ‘voice’ or tone evoked by written texts. It is important to bear in mind that, when we consider the relation between vocality and femininity, what is at stake is not just voice as a sound that we can actually hear, but also voice in a political sense. The woman who has a voice

the Jewish musical genius, in the same novel. Interestingly, the latter wishes to sing but, having no singing voice, he appropriates the voice of the young woman Trilby, who becomes a spectacular singer under his hypnosis. The fact that all these male musicians are Jewish is no accident. As Phyllis Weliver points out, in nineteenth-century England, music was regarded as “an emasculating or debasing activity for men of the aspiring middle classes and nobility to practice (2000: 19). Instead the production of music was “one of the few cultural forms in Britain which was associated with marginal figures. Indeed, since at least the eighteenth century, music was the only field dominated by foreigners, and was one of the few careers [sic] options open to women” (Weliver 2000: 20 – 21).

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does not necessarily have a voice of her own.²⁷ The question is always whether she can speak for herself, whether her voice is actually heard, recognized and acknowledged.²⁸ Another important cluster of questions concerns the aesthetic representation of voice in narrative fiction. Unlike drama and, to some extent, lyrical poetry, the literary genre this book is concerned with does not feature any concrete voices; in literary fiction, voices are always textualized.²⁹ How do vocal sounds – in their materiality but also their evanescence – correlate with their descriptions in narrative fiction? How do narrative texts map the representational elusiveness of voice, that is, the spectrum of vocal sounds and affective moods that are in excess of verbal language? How do they evoke aesthetically what escapes them medially? Does a narrative text have a voice and if so, how can it be theorized? As these preliminary questions already indicate, the voice crystallizes a wealth of concerns that are important to literary and cultural analysis precisely because of the conceptual mobility of voice. Issues of voice have been eclipsed by Jacques Derrida’s critique of Western phonocentrism (1997) [1967] and his reading of the voice as a cipher for transparent meaning and self-presence. The discussion ‘after Derrida’ has come to cover a far wider range of vocal phenomena, including aspects that are also at the core of this study, notably an em-

 My discussion of the difference between having a voice and having a voice of one’s own is indebted to Stanley Cavell’s reading of George Cukor’s film Gaslight (1944). Cukor’s melodrama revolves around the niece of a murdered singer and – as Cavell argues in his compelling discussion (Cavell 1994: 134– 136, Cavell 1996: 47– 78) – around the question whether Paula (Ingrid Bergman), who follows her aunt’s legacy by training as a singer, has a voice of her own. Her husband Gregory (Charles Boyer), who has murdered the great singer, is after a rather more tangible legacy, namely the jewels, which he assumes are still in the house inherited by his young wife. He systematically drives Paula out of her mind and into silence so as to deprive her both of her property and her voice. Yet the heroine finds her voice when in the climactic dénouement she confronts her husband with a knife. Her speech or ‘aria,’ as Cavell calls it, picks up on her aunt’s signature role as Lucia di Lammermoor. Rather than suffering the fate of the operatic character Lucia (her unhappy marriage, the stabbing of her husband), Paula rescripts the scenario in a happier key. She takes on the legacy of her aunt and simultaneously speaks for herself having found her ‘voice’.  These questions are also at the centre of Stanley Cavell’s work on the woman’s voice. Cavell’s most sustained discussions of feminine vocality can be found in A Pitch of Philosophy (1994) and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996). Also see Elisabeth Bronfen’s text “Silent Voices, Silencing Voices: The Ambivalence of Feminine Self-Articulation” (2009a), which builds on Cavell’s discussion.  Sound only comes into play in narrative texts if they are read out loud. For a discussion of the role that vocal performances and the representation of speech play within the Victorian novel, see Ivan Kreilkamp’s study entitled Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (2005).

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phasis on the embodiment of voice and the relation voice bears to subjectivity and agency. Carolyn Abbate’s discussion of opera (2001), for example, shifts the emphasis from the abstraction of an operatic work to an attention to live performance. In so doing, she observes a paradoxical amalgamation of the materiality and ephemerality of the operatic voice.³⁰ Similarly, Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer (2006) conceive of voice as a performative phenomenon and emphasize both the elusive character and liminal status of voice as it oscillates between body and spirit, nature and culture, affect and intellect. Finally, Mladen Dolar (2006) proposes a topology in which the voice emerges as a surplus which disturbs rather than supports self-presence. As Dolar emphasizes, the voice can inspire a reassuring sense of self-identity, but there is also a vocal dimension that moves us beyond symbolic and imaginary codes. At once uniquely familiar but also uniquely strange, the voice is, therefore, intimately connected with psychoanalytic notions of subjectivity and their emphasis on the uncanny character of the split subject. Important to issues of voice are also the discussions in sound studies, which explore various sound phenomena from a wide range of interdisciplinary angles and perspectives. Prominent subsections contributing to the very broad and highly heterogeneous field of sound studies include areas as diverse as, for instance, acoustics, sound design, music, media history and philosophy.³¹ Within the humanities, the interest in sound has increased considerably during the last two decades.³² As a result of this ‘acoustic turn’, attention has been shifted to acoustic phenomena and dimensions that had previously been neglected. Sounds, both structured and unstructured, sound media, histories of listening and hearing as well as soundscapes of particular historical periods, for instance,

 Further critics who emphasize aspects of the body and performance in their discussions of opera include Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon (2000), Susan McClary (2002a), Michelle Duncan (2004) and David Levin (2007).  Two early pioneers are R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and environmentalist, and Jacques Attali, the French economic and social theorist and political adviser. In 1977 Schafer and Attali both published books that have greatly influenced the development of contemporary sound studies. Schafer’s The Soundscape explores the relationship between subjects and the sounds of their environment; Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music examines both noise and music as socio-political phenomena.  A great number of handbooks and readers attest to the great interest in sound within the humanities. See for example The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012) edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, The Sound Studies Reader (2012) edited by Jonathan Sterne, The Auditory Culture Reader (2016) edited by Michael Bull and Les Back.

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have all received a lot of critical attention.³³ Issues of voice, too, have moved to the critical forefront, and the debate on voice has been particularly vibrant in philosophy, media as well as performance and theatre studies.³⁴ Yet sound and voice are also explored in literary studies. While they still need to be defined as an area of research, literary sound studies attempt to combine literary criticism with sound studies (Mieszkowski 2014: 9). At the same time, literary sound studies differ from sound studies in their object of analysis. While discussions in sound studies focus on concrete sounds, literary approaches explore textualized sounds. Sylvia Mieszkowsi points out that “although [literary sound studies] share the interest in analysing the production, medialisation, perception and interpretation of various sounds in history, they do not primarily deal with ‘actual’, audible or measurable sounds” (Mieszkowsi 2014: 23). Indeed, rather than examining actual vocal performances in drama, or rhythm, metre and prosody in poetry, literary sound studies are mainly concerned with the representation of sounds and voices in the medium of the written text. Scholars working in the field “analyse sounds and processes of hearing, [sic] which have been medialised by (written) words” (Mieszkowski 2014: 24). Since they examine acoustic phenomena in conjunction with the specific mediality of literary texts, literary sound studies also form part of the discussion revolving around intermediality.³⁵ Important work on the intermedial relations at stake in literary sound studies has been done on the musicalization of fiction and on noise.³⁶ In recent years, there has also been an increased interest in

 See, for instance, John M. Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2003), Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2007), Peter Szendy’s Listen: A History of Our Ears (2008) and the volume Unlaute: Noise / Geräusch in Kultur, Medien und Wissenschaften seit 1900 (2017) edited by Sylvia Mieszkowski and Sigrid Nieberle, which examines noise from various interdisciplinary perspectives.  See, for instance, Lydia Goehr (1998), Karl-Heinz Göttert (1998), Steven Connor (2000), Jonathan Rée (2000), Dieter Mersch (2000, 2006), Reinhardt Meyer-Kalkus (2001), Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho and Sigrid Weigel (2002), Cornelia Epping-Jäger and Erika Linz (2003), Brigitte Felderer (2004), Erika Fischer-Lichte (2004: 219 – 227), Doris Kolesch and Jenny Schrödl (2004), Doris Kolesch (2004), John Durham Peters (2004), Adriana Caravero (2005), Mladen Dolar (2006), Daniel Gethmann (2006), Doris Kolesch und Sybille Krämer (2006), Doris Kolesch, Vino Pinto and Jenny Schrödl (2009), as well as Alice Lagaay (2008).  An overview of this type of work at the interface between literary criticism, sound studies and intermediality theory is provided Philipp Schweighauser’s article “Literary Acoustics” in The Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music edited by Gabriele Rippl (2015).  See Werner Wolf’s The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999) and Philipp Schweighauser’s The Noises of American Literature, 1890 – 1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (2006).

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voice and vocality among literary scholars, who have explored issues of voice from thematic, intermedial and psychoanalytic perspectives.³⁷ The present study draws on these discussions so as to explore voice as both a thematic issue and aesthetic effect in literary texts. While the close readings examine how the production and the reception of female performer voices are described and evoked in narrative texts, the aim is not to develop a systematic typology of the various intermedial relationships between voice and literature. Instead this book follows literary sound studies and intermediality theory by shifting attention to the representation of voices in narrative fiction in order to highlight the considerable presence female performers have in their fictional environments but also in the texts themselves. Of interest are not just the literary descriptions of the sound quality of their voices. Even more important is the question of how fiction uses these voices as a trope for feminine agency. In order to conceptualize the various layers and aspects of voice for a discussion of narrative fiction dealing with female performers, I therefore combine the recent turn towards the acoustic with a return to Mikhail Bakhtin. Indeed, Bakhtin’s work on the heteroglossia of the novel constitutes a crucial framework because he offers an approach to textual analysis that highlights the multi-vocal aspect of the novel that is so important for the type of text discussed in this study. Given the prominent role that the actual, audible voice plays in the theatre and the performing arts, it is not surprising that much important work on voice has been done by critics in the area of performance and theatre studies. The primary focus of these discussions is often on the concrete voice and its direct sens See especially the essay collection Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction edited by Jorge Sacido-Romero and Sylvia Mieszkowski (2015). Sacido-Romero and Mieszkowski point out that for a long time, the voice in cinematic narratives received far more critical attention; examples include Michel Chion (1999 [1982]), Kaja Silverman (1988) and Amy Lawrence (1991). Notable exceptions in literary studies are Claire Kahane’s Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman 1850 – 1915 (1995), Felicia Miller Frank’s The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (1995) and several articles in the essay collection Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (1996). More recent discussions include Richard Aczel’s article “Hearing Voices in Literary Texts” (1998), Bettine Menke’s Prosopopoiia: Stimme und Text bei Brentano, Hoffmann, Kleist and Kafka (2000), the reconsideration of narratological frameworks in several articles in volume 32:2 of New Literary History and the essay collection Stimme(n) im Text: Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen edited by Andreas Blödorn, Daniela Langer and Michael Scheffel (2006), the Lacanian approaches in Josiane Pacaud-Huguet (2008) and Annie Ramel (2008) as well as the essay collection Cross-Gendered Literary Voices: Appropriating, Resisting, Embracing edited by Rina Kim and Claire Westall (2012). Also note the general overview of the significance of voice in literary analysis provided by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle (2004).

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ual experience by the audience from a phenomenological perspective. Doris Kolesch (2006), for example, examines examples of contemporary art (video and sound installations, theatre performances, art films) in order to show how they challenge and undermine traditional forms of perception by exploring the multi-faceted interactions and transitions between seeing and hearing. According to Kolesch, contemporary art is characterized by a shift from a type of perception that creates meaning (German ‘Sinn’) to an emphasis on sensual perception and hence the senses themselves (German ‘Sinne’) (Kolesch 2006: 47). This means that rather than being made to serve as a vehicle of verbal meaning, voice is treated as sound material (Kolesch 2006: 48). What comes to the fore is not what is said and heard but how it is said and heard (Kolesch 2006: 50). As Kolesch emphasizes, the voices featured in contemporary art are not always embodied but can also be recorded and mechanically reproduced (Kolesch 2006: 49). Crucially, all the examples used by Kolesch concern themselves with voices that can actually be heard as concrete sound. This is also the reason why Kolesch’s discussion and related approaches in the area of performance and theatre studies do not really fit into the discussion of this book, as stimulating as they are. In narrative fiction, there are obviously no concrete sounds, and voices are always mediated by the non-voiced literary text. Voices in narrative fiction are entirely spectral and acousmatic, since they have to be mentally evoked by the reader in the act of reading.³⁸ Moreover, while some of the texts are interested in the perception of the listeners and the affective impact that the performer’s voice has on them, this sensual aspect always forms part of a narrative and can thus never be directly accessed. Indeed, rather than offering an immediate sense perception, performances and their reception are often used in a figurative manner in order to underline the symbolic power that the performer holds as a woman who speaks or sings in public. It is by virtue of her performance that she gains a voice in a figurative sense. Female performers in narrative fiction do have presence, but, rather than a concrete vocal presence, they have a textual presence, namely by virtue of the way in

 The term acousmatic is borrowed from Michel Chion (1999 [1982]), who uses it to refer to voices in cinema that cannot be located because their source cannot be seen. Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (1990) makes an important contribution to the silent sounds effects that written texts create in the inner ear of the reader. In order to draw attention to aspects of texts that are aural without literally being heard, he proposes a phonemic reading – a “reading that proceeds to give voice, or at least to evoke silently such voicing” (Stewart 1990:1). Rather than proposing a method of interpretation, Stewart practices a different form of reading by emphasizing the silent pronunciation in the mind of the reader as he or she processes the phonotext (also see Mieszkowsi 2014: 25).

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which they become perceptible and thus make themselves heard in the text. This is also why Bakhtin’s discussion of voice in the novel is suitable for the type of work proposed here. Bakhtin’s theory emphasizes that in speaking, subjects take up a position and have agency. Equally important is his idea that the aesthetic texture of the novel is made up of the interaction and tension between various textual voices and their ideological standpoints. This is also the reason why his theory lends itself so well to an analysis of female performer voices, other textual voices and the ways in which their orchestration can be used to negotiate issues of feminine agency. Another notion that must be highlighted here at the outset is the multiplicity that characterizes individual voices. More specifically, it is important to note how female performers fuse the intimate and the public, the individual and the collective as a result of the multivocality that unfolds in their appearance as performers. Individual voices are always multiple and plural; they carry a multilayered complexity because vocal sounds are shot through with infinite ‘colours’, affects, moods and intonations, and also because any voice is inherently dialogic. Bakhtin’s work (1981) is crucial here, as is his famous claim that dialogue is fundamental to language, culture and the self. According to his theory, any utterance is carried by its fundamental addressivity and responsivity. In other words, any vocal articulation involves a concrete speaker and listener. Speech is shaped both by the anticipation of a response, the ‘not-yet-spoken’, and previous utterances, the ‘already-spoken’. Whenever we speak, we respond to earlier utterances and thus find ourselves in “an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value judgments and accents […]; the social atmosphere of the word […]” (Bakhtin quoted in Morson and Emerson 1990: 138).³⁹ This multiplicity is heightened by the female performer who sings and/or speaks in an eminently public manner. Her voice can be said to emerge in dialogue with her audience and the culturally resonant traces that are transported by her speech and song, especially in the form of scripts, scores and libretti. Following Bakhtin, it is important to highlight that voice is a fundamentally dialogic and performative phenomenon. Voices never just resonate with themselves alone but always need the other to resonate. In other words, they emerge by resonating with something else as well as by effecting resonances elsewhere. A voice comes into being by calling on an addressee, a listener who acknowledges and attests to its existence. Steven Connor (2000: 4) suggests that our voices have to be pro-

 My reading of Bakhtin is indebted to the rich discussion of his work by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their book Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (1990). Several parts of their book focus on Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue; see in particular pp. 49 – 62, 130 – 149.

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duced to a far greater extent than any other personal feature. As Connor writes, “my voice is not something that I merely have, or even something that I, if only in part, am. Rather, it is something that I do” (Connor 2000: 4). Rather than forming a stable attribute, the voice emerges in a performative process, an ongoing dialogue with the other. Through its production and perception in the hereand-now, the voice creates a provisional acoustic space it shares with its listener(s). Furthermore, as cultural beings, we inevitably speak in reference to previous ‘voices’ so that our own voices become the effect of multiple echoes and reverberations.⁴⁰ What is foregrounded so compellingly by the staging and public display of the female performer is the complex way in which individuality, subjectivity and culture intersect and converge in the voice. Traditionally, the voice has often been understood as a privileged marker of individual selfhood. After all, the timbre of each and every single voice is distinctive and unique, which is the reason why the voice is frequently regarded as an inalienable marker, as an acoustic fingerprint, which allows the instant identification of individuals.⁴¹ Moreover, there is a close link between individual interiority and an inner voice of selfdeliberation, a sonority which speaks in us, with which we converse and through which we actually have consciousness. Since the emergence of the modern self, together with notions of intimate interiority and the development of emancipatory discourses, the voice has come to be valorized as the privileged organ of authentic self-expression and individual agency. At the same time, the voice also refers us to the fact that subjects are ‘spoken’ (or ‘sung’) from elsewhere – by the symbolic law, language, culture, history and/or a divine source. To a certain extent, each voice is ventriloquized as a medium of cultural traces and discourses. This is not to say that individuals are necessarily subsumed by voices other than their own. What is at stake is the voice as a curious interface between self and culture. In fact, the voice is what hooks individuals into a cultural community and thus allows them to participate in its respective culture. This is also emphasized by Bakhtin’s theory of speech as human agency. As speakers, we do not use an abstract language system but instead draw on concrete cultural instances of speech: […] when we select words in the process of constructing an utterance, we by no means always take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually

 See Sigrid Weigel’s text on voice and cultural afterlife (2006).  See the detailed discussion of the ‘physiognomy’ of the voice which Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus develops in his book Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (2001).

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take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme, composition, or style. (Bakhtin 1986: 87; original emphasis)

Bakhtin also emphasizes that each utterance enters into dialogue with the internal dialogism of words, the earlier contexts they remember, the traces, deposits and crystallizations by which they are surrounded. By speaking, we inevitably evaluate previous utterances. The question is, therefore, one of tone. For Bakhtin, every speech act is singular in time and space, and because each utterance is ‘embodied’ in this way, speakers can inflect given words in different and distinct manners. It is precisely by speaking through and in relation to other voices that subjects can speak in a tone of their own. Thus, what is crucial is whether individuals can inflect their speech with their own particular tone or intonation. Because a woman’s voice is always already marked by previous cultural utterances – including dramatic texts, opera libretti and musical scores, which, for the most part, were written and composed by men – she must shape and take control of these “other utterances” (Bakhtin 1986: 87) in order to gain agency and a ‘voice’ of her own. What is it about the voice that can affect its listeners so powerfully? As Roland Barthes points out, there can be no neutral human voice, no voice which is not the object of desire – or horror (Barthes 1990: 280). Voices have the power to charm, enthral, seduce, fascinate, irritate or repulse us. Reflecting on what attracts him to the voice of certain singers, Barthes refers to what he calls the “grain of the voice” (Barthes 1977 [1972]: 179 – 189): a corporeal component of voice that exceeds the semantic meaning of verbal language and that can be circumscribed as pure resonance, as the energy and intensity of sonorous sound. This raises the question of whether and how this dimension of voice can be produced by literary texts, given the fundamental inaudibility of narrative fiction. After all, any voice in narrative texts is entirely phantasmatic, imagined by the reader in the solitary act of reading. How then can we talk about the mood (German Stimmung) that connects the performer and her audience, the mood that is projected by her voice and enjoyed by her listeners? Here it is important to emphasize the idea that the charismatic impact of the performer voice arises in dialogue with cultural traces but also her listeners. It is because she can accent, in a tone of her own, the scripts and scores she enacts, the divine inspirations she transmits, and the political ideas and visions she invokes that her speech and song amplify her individual timbre. The voice of the performer emerges, therefore, as a complex effect of a double resonance. Her voice resonates with myriad traces and traditions and, at the same time, finds resonance elsewhere, namely in the powerful manner in which it affects her audience. Indeed, the voice of the performer might be said to be the effect of the feelings and emotions it evokes in her listeners.

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In modernity, there is a significant overlap between voice and public culture. As pointed out by Friedrich A. Kittler, Thomas Macho and Sigrid Weigel (2002: ix), it is in the voice, rather than in images and texts, that social synthesis finds its most effective realization. In certain languages, although not in English, there is a close linguistic relation between voice and the political vote. The vocabularies of German and French include a number of expressions, such as Stimmrecht, Abstimmung, seine Stimme abgeben, Stimmen zählen, donner sa voix, compter les voix, which connect the voice to political practices.⁴² In keeping with this metaphorical dimension of the voice and its capacity for (political) representation, individuals can turn into the ‘voice’ of larger entities. By addressing public audiences, the speech and song of the female performer can potentially evoke, and in fact represent, a larger collective body. She speaks to and for larger groups, not unlike the prophet who transmits the divine word and law to the people, or the political leader who represents a constituency. Similar to these other public figures, female performers can address, and in doing so constitute, a cultural community, a religious congregation, or speak on behalf of a political movement. Alternatively, the performer can unite the various members of her audience by the aesthetic and/or erotic pleasure they take in the sound of her voice. A related example of how voice creates social cohesion is mentioned by Benedict Anderson, who outlines the significant role played by songs, especially the singing of national anthems, in the formation of imagined communities. As Anderson suggests, “there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity” (Anderson 1991: 145). Although we may not know when and where others sing, there will be a sense of “unisonance” and “unisonality” (Anderson 1991: 145) as long as we are aware that others sing the same song(s). The “imagined sound” (Anderson 1991: 145) alone will connect and unite the community of singers. In the case of the female performer, of course, the performative ritual works along somewhat different lines. Here it is not the joint performance of a song but the shared reception of the extraordinary performer voice that can have a cohesive effect.⁴³ It is the single, and singular, voice of the performer that attracts

 These expressions translate as follows: Stimmrecht – suffrage, right to vote; Abstimmung – election, referendum; seine Stimme abgeben – to cast one’s vote; Stimmen zählen – to count the votes; donner sa voix – to cast one’s vote; compter les voix – to count the votes. In German the word Stimme in the sense of ‘opinion’ and ‘vote’ has been in use since the fourteenth century. The expression seine Stimme abgeben emerged in the sixteenth century, Stimmrecht in the eighteenth century (Duden Etymologie 1989: 712).  Early on in Renée Fleming’s autobiography The Inner Voice, there is a remarkable passage in which the American opera singer speculates about the question “why people so often turn to a

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the attention of listeners and binds them together in her role as a collective voice. At the same time, her voice remains plural. The figure of the performer collects and condenses the myriad cultural traces by which her performance is inspired. Yet, in emerging in dialogue with her audience, her voice also condenses the many different fantasies, interests and ‘voices’ of her listeners. As a result, the performer comes to embody a composite voice that is plural on many different levels. The question remains, of course, whether the individual performer has a voice of her own, whether she speaks for herself and is thereby able to gain agency. There is an extensive tradition in which feminine vocality is imagined as a ruinous threat to masculine subjectivity and the collective interests it represents. Beginning with the dangerously seductive song of the sirens, the enjoyment of this feminine vocality is thought to lead men off course and sometimes even lure them to their death. This raises the question of whether and how women can have a voice in the symbolic order of a community. In order to answer this question, it is important to determine whether the woman performing in public is actually heard and recognized as an individual in her own right. Potentially, her voice can be rejected and excluded because she insists on her position as an individual subject. But as we have seen in Rushdie’s novel, her voice can also be appropriated and ventriloquized by other characters so that she becomes a vessel for their ideas, values, fantasies and projections. In some texts, the performer lends her body and voice to other characters, thus turning herself into a medium for the interests and desires of others, while effacing herself as an individual. In other examples, she uses her role as performer as a vehicle through which she constitutes herself as an individual ‘voice’ so as to speak for herself and make herself heard by others, which grants her the agency required to act of her own free will and shape her own destiny. It is, therefore, important to determine whether the individual voice of the performer is actually heard and acknowledged, or whether her voice is subsumed under the interests of others. Does the voice given to the performer by the text produce an imagined political community? Does the performer turn into an acoustic mirror of the de-

classically trained musician, and most often a singer, in times of national conflict or grief” (Fleming 2004: xvi). Fleming suggests that there may be two reasons why a soprano is chosen to “represent our collective emotional experience” (Fleming 2004: xvi). The first one resonates with Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, that is, the fact that “the tradition of music grounds us and connects us to one another through a sort of universal appreciation […] particularly in such songs as ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘God Bless America’” (Fleming 2004: xvi). The second reason given by Fleming touches on the importance of mood, namely the “sense of strength” projected by a trained singer who sings with “the entire body” (Fleming 2004: xvi).

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sires and fantasies of her audience, which is tantamount to the obliteration of her individual voice? Or can she assert what Stanley Cavell would call her separateness as a subject with desires and fantasies of her own, that is, the alterity she represents as an individual with a subjectivity of her own, which cannot be subsumed under the projections of others?⁴⁴ While women in nineteenth-century culture were excluded from direct participation in the official public sphere, there are several public spaces in which they perform in nineteenth-century narrative fiction. My discussion focuses on three prominent areas in which fictional female performers make their appearance, namely theatre, religion and politics. Although there are marked differences between these cultural domains, there are also crucial overlaps in their modes of articulation. Through their mise-en-scène of public voices, performer novels foreground a mode of public life that is theatrical in a fundamental sense. Theatricality in these novels is, in other words, not confined to the professional theatre but equally shapes, or at least inflects, both the religious and the political domain. At the same time, the figuration of the preacher as a medium inspired by another voice or authority also surfaces in instances in which the singer, actress or speaker is voiced by a voice other than her own. The political, too, informs the public articulation of the female performers under discussion. As already mentioned earlier, a central claim of this book is that whenever female performers make their appearance in nineteenth and early twentieth-century narrative fiction, their voices are politically charged, even if their utterances do not make any explicit reference to the field of politics, as is the case with the majority of the aesthetic and religious performances of the singer, actress and preacher. This is not merely to say that by giving them public vocal presence, their appearance alone entails a profoundly political gesture. I also make the more specific argument that narrative fiction in the nineteenth and early twentieth century uses the figure of the female performer in order to negotiate questions revolving around the concrete participation of women in these cultural spheres. I begin my readings with a British text that focuses on the professional stage, namely Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1848). As we shall see, this text can be read as an aftereffect of Germaine de Staël’s influential novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807). Not only is Staël’s fictional alter ego the first female genius in Romantic literature, but the performances of this celebrated improvisatrice also establish a blueprint for various types of feminine articulation, ranging

 See again Cavell’s discussions of the woman’s voice in The Pitch of Philosophy (1994) and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996).

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from the narcissistically pleasurable projection of one’s voice to its tragic silencing. Again in reference to Corinne, the universal artist who also casts herself as a visionary and thus quasi-religious voice, the third chapter examines the modes of feminine preaching we can find in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and the work of Margaret Fuller, who is included despite the fact that her writing does not fall under the category of narrative fiction. Chapter 4 traces how the American performer appears in the guise of the political speaker in two texts written about nineteenth-century America, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) and Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886). In the next chapter, we return to an earlier period to examine the cultural nervousness that women actresses pose with the example of George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni or Emilia in England (1864) and the sequel Vittoria (1867), as well as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which parallels the cultural anxiety discussed in relation to the political speakers in Hawthorne and James. Chapter 6 juxtaposes two radically different modes of articulation – the sexist ventriloquism of the female singer in George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and the protean self-fashioning in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” (1934) – so as to examine the ways in which the performing voice transforms and finally dissolves into the pure textuality of modernist aesthetic practice. The reason this study combines texts written on both sides of the Atlantic rather than focusing on either British or American literary production is the sense that the core concerns they bring to the fore are closely related even though they play themselves out in scenarios that are culturally specific. What is absent from my discussion in this study is the vast area of African-American preaching and singing. Examples here would be slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which was one of the first female slave narratives to be published, and which was meant to address white women and acquaint them with the experience of the slave woman in order to further the abolitionist cause, but also all the speakers who spoke publicly for the abolitionist movement. Most prominent among them was Sojourner Truth, an ex-slave and itinerant preacher who sang and spoke in public for both the abolitionist and feminist movement, and who became famous for her speech repeatedly asking the question “And a’rn’t I a woman?” (2006: 524), delivered at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio. Truth, who possessed an imposing physique and a low sonorous voice, is said to have bared her right arm to underline that being capable of as much work as a man, she as a woman ought to be given the same rights as a man. Representations of preachers and singers are particularly abundant in both narrative and dramatic African-American texts written in the second half of the twentieth century. Examples include Langston Hughes’s Tambourines to Glory (1958), James Baldwin’s The Amen Cor-

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ner (1968), or Toni Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992). Although African-American women in the nineteenth century were in many cases deprived of their families due to slavery and did not participate in middle-class domestic culture in the same way as their white counterparts, they were nevertheless confronted with the feminine norms of bourgeois ideology.⁴⁵ The problem of their doubly disenfranchised voice, however, does not appear to be negotiated through the literary performer figure even though there were many African-American women who did perform in public as activist speakers and preachers.⁴⁶ When female performer texts begin to emerge in African-American literature, they do so at a much later stage and in a context more intent on reconstructing and commemorating a collective African-American history, in which the rich traditions of vernacular orality, religious sermons, gospel, blues and jazz improvisation form an empowering cultural strand. As a novel that is composed of many different voices, Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, represents the matriarch Baby Suggs as a preacher who inspires and holds together a religious community, while also granting voice to the experience of a nameless slave on the Middle Passage. Although these trajectories overlap with some of the concerns discussed in this book, they also open additional perspectives concerned with the ethnic inflections of voice that go beyond the scope of the present study. Another group of texts that could potentially be examined concerns the treatment of star performers by American authors. For example, Henry James’s The Tragic Muse (1890), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900/1912) and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) all feature successful female performers

 Discussing the negotiation of issues of voice, language and identity by nineteenth-century African-American women writers, Hazel Carby notes that “in order to gain a public voice as orators or published writers, African-American women had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood […] (Carby 1987: 6).  Catherine Brekus’s historical survey of feminine preaching in the United States includes several African-American preachers (1998). On African-American activist speakers, including Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee, see Carla Peterson (1998). A key moment in the history of African-American female performers concerns the world-renowned Marian Anderson, who was the first African-American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955 and who represented the United States in the United Nations in 1958. In 1939 Anderson had been prevented by the conservative women’s association “Daughters of the American Revolution” from performing in Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. Eleanor Roosevelt left the organization in protest against its race discrimination and together with her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, organized a legendary open-air concert with Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, which was attended by an audience of 75,000 listeners. See Anderson’s autobiographical sketch in Rieger (2002: 226 – 271).

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1 Introduction

who, rather than meeting a tragic end, assert themselves on the theatre stage in highly successful ways. However, these texts are not included because they belong to an American tradition of literature that deals with fame as a specifically American concern. In fact, these novels highlight a successful feminine version of the American Dream rather than negotiating the issues of feminine self-articulation that is key to the examples discussed in this study. The phenomenon of the female performer is by no means unique to British and American literature. German and French texts also feature performers, especially singers. However, with the exception of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807), which will figure prominently in my discussion, and George Sand’s Consuelo (1842), which charts the artistic development of its heroine, an independent gypsy singer, in the form of a Künstlerinnenroman, these texts tend to treat their performers in a different way. The Künstlernovelle in German Romanticism, for instance, frequently has the voice of the female singer absorbed by a male artist for his own artistic expression.⁴⁷ Significantly, this pattern hardly features in the British and American tradition of performer narratives, which begins somewhat later. The only significant exception is the immensely popular late Victorian novel Trilby. As we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 6, Du Maurier’s protagonist, young Trilby, becomes an acclaimed singer when she is hypnotized by the demonic musician Svengali. Her singing career, of which she is entirely unaware, transforms her into a dehumanized instrument and automaton. In configuring its heroine in this way, Du Maurier’s novel recalls a tradition in which the feminine voice is (re)constructed as a non-human machine, as is the case in Tomorrow’s Eve (1886) by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and The Castle of the Carpathians by Jules Verne (1893).⁴⁸ While Trilby is discussed as a British counter-example that is strongly influenced by these figurations resembling the posthumous fetishization of Vina Apsara’s voice in Rushdie’s novel, the discussion in this book is not going to delve into a close analysis of the German and French texts themselves. Instead, the textual examples have been chosen to reflect a cluster of cultural concerns and scenarios that are typical of the British and American tradition. While German and French performer texts often follow a Gothic mode by conceiving of the female performer voice as a de-personalized instrument or

 A well-known example is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Rat Krespel” (“Councillor Krespel”), where Antonie’s singing is superseded by the violin play of her father. For a sustained discussion of this and similar figurations, see Corina Caduff (2003). For a brief overview, also see Jörg Theilacker (1989).  Felicia Miller Frank’s The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in NineteenthCentury French Narrative (1995) offers an astute analysis of this tradition.

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even as a dead voice in its spectral resuscitation, this Gothic strand is largely absent from the context under discussion.⁴⁹ The uncanny voice effects of Gothic fiction typically derive from an unsettling division between voice and body, the fact that the spectral voice is a disembodied voice. Crucially, performer novels in the British and American tradition are not just devoid of these effects, but they also pursue a trajectory that is almost diametrically opposed by emphasizing the embodied character of their performer voices. Indeed, the figuration foregrounded in this study hinges on a distinctly embodied performance of voice even if the staging of each woman arrives at us as a literary description. While Steven Connor has done interesting work on ventriloquized voices in his book Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), this figuration is less pertinent to the texts under discussion, which emphasize the embodiment of voices as well as the agency this entails. What is crucial to my readings is the question of how the concept of voice changes over time as well as the idea that the novels condense political (and hence metaphorical) notions of voice with the concrete performance of voices and bodies. What does it mean to map actual voices and bodies onto voice as a political trope and vice versa? The metaphorical notion of the political voice and thus agency operates in these texts via the dramatic enactment and embodiment of concrete voices, and the presence and power of the performer voice reverberate with a concrete political debate. At the same time, we can also talk about the enactment of texts, namely the specific ways in which they imagine and stage the concrete singing and speaking of performers in relation to a metaphorical and indeed political dimension of voice. Although the development presented in the following chapters does not follow a strict chronology, all the performer texts taken together can be seen to reflect on how the concrete performance of bodies and voices correlates with a politically inflected cultural battle, waged since the mid-nineteenth century, over what it means to have a voice of one’s own for feminine subjects. The readings in this study isolate three key moments: 1) the emergence of the performer as an important cultural figure and the very positive positioning of the feminine voice in Germaine de Staël’s Romantic novel Corinne, or Italy; 2) the

 Although Anglo-American Gothic fiction is haunted by ghostly voices, they tend to be male as suggested by Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), where the ventriloquist Carwin wreaks havoc and destroys the nuclear American family, by E.A. Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), where a disturbingly spectral voice issues from an uncannily undead body before its final decomposition, or by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), where the narrator Marlow is nothing but a voice which addresses its listeners in the nocturnal darkness, while he is himself fascinated by the disembodied voice of Kurtz.

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theatricalization of concrete voices and bodies and the negotiation of whether the performer’s vocal presence in public means that she has a voice of her own in a number of British and American texts written during the Victorian period; and, finally, 3) the optimistic treatment of the performer and the dissolution of her voice in the textuality of Isak Dinesen’s modernist writing. Because my main focus is on British and American texts in which the encouraging effects of Corinne can be seen to resurface in order to negotiate questions concerning the voice and agency women have in public, my critical narrative begins in the mid-nineteenth-century, the era marking both the beginning of the modern women’s movement and the firm establishment of the novel as a literary genre. My narrative ends with the early 1930s, the cultural moment when women have gained a ‘voice’ in the form of the political vote. The performer novel disappears not just because it comes to be displaced by concrete voice media, namely radio and sound film. The performance of feminine voices on the theatrical stage also becomes less urgent because women’s voices have become part of a much larger political culture. It is at this point that the bodily enactment of the performer and her voice comes to be modulated into a less embodied articulation of voice as we find it in modernist writing, as is exemplified in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” (1934).

2 Corinne and Her Aftereffects on the British Stage A crucial textual precursor to female performer narratives of the long nineteenth century is Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne, or Italy (1807). Staël’s depiction of the public voice of her protagonist also plays an important role for the representation of the professional actress in the British performer novels, including Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1848). As we shall see in this chapter on the professional British actress and the subsequent chapters on other types of performers, Staël’s optimistic figuration of her female improviser serves as an important model for the representation of the woman’s public voice in texts written during the long nineteenth century. Staël develops the figure of her performing heroine after the French Revolution, that is after the short period in which women’s rights were discussed for the first time. Significantly, it is almost half a century later – when the ‘Woman Question’ is established in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century – that the figure of the performer appears again, this time in the British novel. What is at stake is a cultural aftereffect, in which earlier issues and concerns resurface at a later point in time: Staël’s performer theatricalizes the woman’s voice in a grandiose manner, and it is several decades later when issues of feminine voice and agency become culturally and politically urgent that the figure of the performer makes her return in the medium of the novel. After introducing Germaine de Staël’s heroine Corinne and sketching the historical background of the emergence of the professional performer on the British stage, this chapter offers close readings of Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and Jewsbury’s The Half-Sisters so as to show how the voice and the agency of the Romantic genius performer is refigured in the literary representation of the British Victorian actress. Staël’s novel Corinne, or Italy introduces its performing heroine at the moment of her greatest public triumph. The people of Rome throng into the streets, eagerly awaiting the magnificent procession that leads Corinne to the Capitol, where she is to be crowned as a poet laureate in the tradition of Petrarch and Tasso. After the performer is praised for her extraordinary talent, she begins to improvise on the glory and bliss of Italy. First she addresses the country – “Italy, thou empire of the Sun; Italy, to whom the world stands subject; Italy, cradle of learning, I salute thee” (Staël 1987: 26) – before she goes on to invoke the poets, the dead and the monuments that constitute Italy’s past. Her public performance and improvisation on Italian culture involve a complex exchange between the individual performer and the country as a whole. Her voice is inspired by a myriad of Italian texts and images and Corinne, in turn, inspires a national culture avant-la-lettre. In https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-003

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fact, Staël’s heroine not only addresses Rome and all of Italy, but in effect also creates both city and country by invoking them in her apostrophe and by assembling various parts of Italy’s culture in her improvisation. By bringing Italy into being through her performative speech acts, the performer herself comes to speak and sing for an entire cultural community. She is a collective voice speaking for all of Italy, but not exclusively. The cultural space of Italy that she invokes in her improvisation also nourishes the individual voice that she creates for herself as an exceptional performer. What renders this passage remarkable is, therefore, not just the public celebration of its performer but also the fact that she absorbs an entire cultural space into her individual voice. Staël’s Corinne, or Italy is crucial for a discussion of the woman who has a voice in public because it is the first novel to culturally establish the female performer as a novelistic character. The genius Corinne is a published writer and renowned painter, but it is primarily as an actress, singer and improviser that she is represented by the text.¹ In the scene at the Capitol, her audience celebrates the exceptional talent that Staël’s heroine possesses as a performing poet in a great public ceremony. At the same time, her voice is also highly valorized by the text as a whole. The novel constructs Corinne as a voice that resonates with an entire culture and, at the same time, she comes to stand for a seemingly boundless vocal expansion. Later Staël’s heroine loses her voice and dies at the end of the novel. Tragic as her fate may be, the novel transforms her death into a grand heroic gesture, culminating in the apotheosis of its performing heroine. The novel’s description of Corinne’s last song suggests that the spirit of this extraordinary voice will survive in the characters whom she has inspired, notably the young girl who performs her last song in her stead and her niece Juliette, to whom she has taught her songs so that she will continue to sing them after her aunt’s death. But this is not the only way in which the voice of Staël’s performer survives. From its publication in 1807 and its English translations in the same year, the novel enjoyed great cultural popularity. Almost half a century after Staël’s heroine first appeared, the female performer also came to play an important role in British novels, where Staël’s Romantic genius serves as a blueprint for the representation of Victorian professional actresses. From the midcentury onwards, there is a striking abundance of British novels featuring professional female performers. This chapter discusses one of the most salient examples, namely Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, together with the way in which this British text refigures Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy as its ‘role model’. Later representations of the professional performer in George Mer-

 On Corinne’s performance as improviser, see Angela Esterhammer (2008: 83 – 91).

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edith’s Sandra Belloni, which was originally entitled Emilia in England (1864), and his sequel Vittoria (1867) as well as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) will be discussed in Chapter 5, entitled “Acting Anxieties”.² As we shall see, the female performer figures in these examples receive different treatments as a result of the different ways in which they respond to the cultural ambivalences surrounding female performers in the particular period of time in which they were written. However, what all these novels share is a strong preoccupation with feminine voices that speak or sing on the professional theatre stage. Although the performers in these texts cannot sustain their public voices in the end, their professional careers follow the path cut by the triumphant, and even jubilatory, appearance Corinne makes on the Capitol.³ But how can we read this return of the female performer figure several decades after the publication of Corinne, or Italy? In what sense can these later novelistic representations be seen as aftereffects of the female performer voice created by Staël? Which aspects of her Romantic performer text become culturally important again, and why do they gain renewed significance? The notion of the aftereffect involves a temporal structure of belatedness: Aftereffects are effects that follow after an interval. An earlier moment has a belated effect, which means that aspects of this moment resurface at a later point in time and become culturally urgent again.⁴ The aftereffect at stake in the examples under discussion is the following one: What returns in the British novels together with the figure of the female performer are some of the crucial cultural and political con-

 Further British stage performer novels in the Victorian period include Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) and Elizabeth Mary Braddon’s The Venetians (1892). Female performer figures also occur in a myriad of Victorian novels that are less well known today, for example in Evelyn Innes (1898) by the Irish novelist George Moore or in Miss Bretherton (1884) by Mary Augusta Ward, who published her novels under her married name Mrs Humphrey Ward and who was one of the founders of the National Anti-Suffrage League in 1908. One of the most popular nineteenth-century British performer novels is George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), which is discussed in Chapter 6.  In her pioneering study Literary Women, Ellen Moers writes that the description of Corinne on the Capitol “establishes the ultimate fantasy of the performing heroine with a brio, a luster, and a folly beyond the possibility of future novelists to exceed” (1985: 179). Moers’s text has been seminal for the development of this study. In her rediscovery of Corinne, or Italy, Moers refers to a number of texts that can be seen in this tradition, including George Eliot’s Adam Bede, which features in the next chapter of this study. However, while Moers seems to largely deplore the fantasy of the performing heroine, which celebrates the talents of the exceptional woman in public and, in so doing, allegedly foregrounds a feminine narcissistic self-absorption, I propose an altogether more recuperative reading of the performing heroine phenomenon.  Note Stephen Greenblatt, who speaks of a “fifty-year effect” in a different context, namely the resurfacing of Catholic beliefs in the Reformation (2001: 248).

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cerns regarding women’s political rights and their inclusion in the republic that Staël’s novel negotiates by invoking the voice of this figure as a manifestation of her agency. Two generations later these cultural questions concerning the female public voice remain unresolved, but they do move to the centre of public discussion and make a return in narrative fiction as well. Germaine de Staël wrote her text in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which was a period of political disillusionment and cultural backlash against revolutionary ideas. The discussion of universal human rights and the revolutionary demand for liberty and freedom had raised the question of the rights of women and their right to self-determination – agency, in other words – for the first time. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she argued that women ought to be educated properly so as to be able to fulfil their roles in a new social order based on equal rights. Any hopes for women’s political participation were thwarted, however, as it became clear that women were not to be part of the democratic fraternité in France. The French Republic may have been symbolized by the female allegory Marianne, but women were excluded from the civil rights enjoyed by male citoyens. The few improvements on the social situation of women that the revolution had introduced were reversed by the Napoleonic Code established in 1804. The discussion of women’s rights was stalled and would only resurface several decades later in the mid-nineteenth century. Germaine de Staël, the daughter of Jacques Necker, Director of Finance under Louis XVI, and Suzanne Curchod, a renowned salonnière, did not describe herself as a feminist. But she had set great hopes in the republican goals of the revolution, which were frustrated first by the violence and mass executions of the so-called ‘Reign of Terror’ and later by Napoleon’s autocratic regime. Because of her political convictions, Napoleon sent her into exile, through which she came to fashion herself as a cosmopolitan traveller and salonnière who conversed with writers and intellectuals across Europe. It is against this historio-political backdrop that Staël develops her heroine as a counter-figure to social reality. While most middle-class women at the time came to be increasingly restricted to the domestic realm as a result of the bourgeois separation of spheres, Corinne possesses a powerful voice in public. What is more, she embodies liberty and freedom by turning herself into the voice of Italy, speaking and singing for an independent cultural space. Like most of Europe, Italy was under the occupation of Napoleon. By having her heroine salvage Italy’s past and inspire a future national culture, Staël develops a different type of public figure who stands in sharp contrast to the dictatorial leader. Yet Corinne also differs from the traditional way in which female figures are often taken to allegorically represent countries or other larger entities (as is the case with Marianne or Britannia, the allegorical personifications of France and Britain). At a

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time when the only function of femininity in the political domain is to serve as an allegorical sign, Corinne has an extremely powerful voice in the public domain. As a performing artist, Corinne has an aesthetic voice, but her position as Italy’s preeminent public voice simultaneously renders her an intrinsically political figure. Interestingly, all the British novels about professional performers are from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This means that the figure of the performing woman resurfaces precisely in the period in which the ‘Woman Question’ comes to be debated as one of the defining concerns of the Victorian era. The aftereffects of Corinne that can be traced in Victorian performer novels hark back to the issues of feminine articulation and agency already raised by Staël after the French Revolution. Half a century later, the issue of women’s cultural roles and political rights gains prominence and shifts to the centre of public debate. It is at this point that novels show an interest in and fascination with professional singers and actresses. Their performing voices echo Corinne both in her public triumph and her tragic last song, and, similar to Staël’s Romantic improviser, they refer to fundamental questions concerning the role of women and their voices in the political and cultural domain. The publication of Staël’s text triggered a veritable Corinne craze. This was reflected in the forty editions the novel went through between 1807 and 1872 in France alone and its translations into English in the year of its French publication. Several women poets composed poems, using Corinne’s public triumph but also the tragic loss of her voice as their templates.⁵ Furthermore, Staël’s portrait of the Romantic woman genius, a figure whom she may well have conceived as her fictional alter ego, also appears to have provoked a strong sense of identification among women artists and writers, as is suggested by various practices of self-representation.⁶ Many women artists and writers visited the places described in the novel or had themselves portrayed à la Corinne. Delphine Gay, for instance, fashioned herself as the “nouvelle Corinne” (Morgan 2000: 249), while calling herself “the muse of the nation” (quoted in Vincent 2004: 73) and making “energetic but vain efforts to become France’s national occasional poet” (Gutwirth 1999: 28). Similarly, Rachel Félix, the great tragic actress who herself inspired a host of

 The literary appropriations of the Corinne myth in both European and American literature have been traced by a number of critics. See in particular Ellen Moers (1985), Ina Schabert (1997: 463 – 469), Madelyn Gutwirth (1999: 28 – 30), Linda M. Lewis (2003) and Patrick Vincent (2004).  Staël’s construction of a female genius in her novel becomes all the more significant in view of the longstanding tradition in which the idea of the genius has persistently been associated with masculinity. See Christine Battersby’s book Gender and Genius (1989).

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literary actress representations, had herself portrayed by Delacroix in 1838 as “The Sybil with the Golden Bough” (aka “The Cumaen Sybil”), “in a persona resembling depictions of Staël as Corinne more than the actress herself” (Gutwirth 1999: 28).⁷ In these explicit re-enactments of Staël’s text, the female performer serves as a figure of identification for women artists. Her public triumph and her last song, culminating in her apotheosis, represent a powerful myth which they use as a model for their own artistic self-fashioning and as a pattern for reflecting on their struggle for public recognition as artistic voices.

Figure 3: Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne, 1809 by Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun

Compared to these explicit appropriations, the novelistic treatment of female performer figures discussed in this and other chapters in this study relates to Staël’s text in a more implicit way. Moreover, the focus of my discussion lies not so much on intertextual traditions one could trace but on the resurfacing of cultural and political issues concerning the social role of women. By foregrounding the public voice of the female performer, British performer novels re On Rachel Félix also see the biography by Rachel Brownstein (1995). In the final chapter, Brownstein explores the literary afterlife of the great tragédienne. John Stokes (1984) reads Rachel as “a creature of myth” and explores “the inspirational hold that she gained on the imagination of the Victorian novelist” (Stokes 1984: 774).

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visit questions already raised by the earlier novel. What is the status of the feminine voice performing in public and how does it relate to the cultural role and potential agency of women? What does it mean to speak and/or sing in public? Can the performer speak for herself, or is her voice absorbed by other voices? As suggested by Corinne’s improvisations on the Capitol, her voice turns into a collective voice that speaks and sings for a larger cultural entity, while at the same time she absorbs an entire cultural space into her individual voice. But how do the British texts construct their performer voices? What are the preconditions of public feminine articulation in these texts? Does the public theatrical appearance of their performers and their voices mean that they also have a voice of their own in the sense of agency and self-determination? Given our focus on narrative fiction, it is also important to note the heteroglossia of this literary genre, namely the fact that novels interweave a multiplicity of voices. Crucial to a critical investigation of the representation of the performer is the question of how her voice, its position and status emerge as a result of the specific way in which the novel in question orchestrates its various textual voices. As already mentioned in the introduction, Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) suggests that the novel occupies a special status as a literary genre and aesthetic medium which includes and juxtaposes different textual voices and hence confronts different social accents, positions and perspectives with each other. Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony (1984a) refers to an interaction between the discourse of the (implied) author and the discourse of the characters on equal terms. By contrast, the concept of ‘heteroglossia’ outlines the clash and the collision between different social ‘voices’ and positions. My discussion of Corinne and The Half Sisters will show how female performer voices are represented, evaluated and judged differently not only by the individual texts but also by the different textual voices within the texts, namely the character voices, the narrator and the implied author. In Victorian performer novels, the cultural contradictions that surround female stage performers in the Victorian period manifest themselves in a variety of ways. On the plot level, the female stage performers in all the examples discussed in this book are given a powerful voice, which allows them to triumph professionally. In the end, however, they all leave the theatre stage and thus lose the public voice they once had. At the same time, the novels recall the Victorian debate over the female performer, as well as the wider question of the cultural and political role of women, through their juxtaposition of various textual voices. Often the voices of different characters, the narrator and the implied author represent different social positions, which can range from outright rejection to enthusiastic support of the theatrical performer. This ‘multi-voicedness’ surrounding the issue of the female performer in the novel raises the question

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of how the text orchestrates the various voices and positions. Do the different voices coexist alongside each other in what Bakhtin would call polyphony, or do they clash in an antagonistic manner in what he defines as heteroglossia? What is the tone the overall text adopts in relation to the performer voice? Is the position of the implied author aligned with or distanced from the performer voice? The close readings of Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters in this chapter are driven by the following questions: How are the voices of the protagonists evaluated? And can they eventually sustain their voices? An important aspect that has to be emphasized here at the outset is the fact that, as characters who perform vocally in public, they have considerable power and presence. By highlighting the vocal presence of these performers, both Staël and Jewsbury use the public self-display of their heroines to negotiate political issues and concerns pertaining to the metaphorical dimension of ‘voice’ as agency, which the texts mediate through the concrete voice of the female performer figure as she attempts to acquire a ‘voice’ of her own. Rather than focusing on the concrete theatre and the theatrical performance per se, these novels can be said to use the theatrical stage as a cipher standing in for the public domain. References to the political arena do not have to be as explicit as in George Meredith’s novel Vittoria, one of the examples in Chapter 5, in which one of the songs the female performer sings on the operatic stage serves as a call-to-arms for the revolutionaries and heralds the wars fought on the battlefields in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. Rather, theatre and politics serve as imagined sites which mutually inflect, represent and mirror each other. It is important to highlight the particular historical moment in which Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1848), the first British performer novel, first appeared. Three years before the publication of the novel, Margaret Fuller had published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first feminist manifesto written in America (which will be discussed in the next chapter). The Seneca Falls Convention, the founding moment of the women’s movement in the United States, took place in 1848, and the petition for the political enfranchisement by the Sheffield Female Political Association, the first women’s suffrage organization in the United Kingdom, was presented to the House of Lords by the Earl of Carlisle in 1851. In the same year, the philosopher and women’s rights advocate Harriet Taylor Mill published her seminal essay “The Enfranchisement of Women”. In 1866, her husband, the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, presented a petition in favour of women’s suffrage to Parliament. He was defeated by 194 votes to 73. Three years later, John Stuart Mill published his liberal feminist manifesto The Subjection of Women, which he had developed in conversation with Harriet Taylor Mill, his wife. All these seminal moments in the

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struggle for the political enfranchisement of women took place in the period in which Jewsbury, Meredith and Eliot develop their professional performer figures. Nineteenth-century feminists usually did not pay much attention to professional stage performers (McDonald 2000: 231). It was only at a relatively late stage that the theatre and the feminist movement began to collaborate. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a vogue for the plays by Henrik Ibsen because they redefined roles for women both on and off stage. Their examination of feminine gender norms coincided with the cultural emergence of the so-called ‘New Woman’, who stood for economic independence and sexual autonomy. Especially feminist performers such as Elizabeth Robins, an actress and author of the suffrage novel The Convert (1907) and its adaptation into the first suffrage drama Votes for Women (1907), eagerly welcomed and championed Ibsen’s plays.⁸ In 1908, the Actresses’ Franchise League was founded. Members of the League, which counted as many as 900 actresses, marched and spoke at suffrage demonstrations, taught elocution to future leaders of the movement and, in some cases, helped leading suffragettes to disguise themselves (Kent 1977: 113 – 116, Vicinus 1985: 249, McDonald 2000: 231). While this explicit fusion of the theatre with the political project of the women’s movement occurs much later historically, we can already observe an implicit overlap between theatre and politics in Victorian performer novels. Because of their public vocal performance, the theatrical performers in these novels can be read as quintessentially political figures in the manner of Corinne. In my discussion of the British Victorian performer, I am primarily interested in the theatre as a literary and cultural trope rather than as a concrete historical site. The treatment of the star performer in British Victorian fiction, however, cannot be separated from the cultural imaginary that is produced and nourished

 On Ibsen and the significance of his plays for actresses and the New Woman in England, see Sally Ledger (2002). For a general discussion of the New Woman in British fin-de-siècle fiction, see Sally Ledger (1997), Elaine Showalter (1992, 1999, 2002b) and the volume The New Woman in Fiction and Fact (2002) edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis. On the connection between the figure of the New Woman and the theatre, see the volume The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850 – 1914 (1992) edited by Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford. Also see Susan Glenn’s Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (2000), which focuses on the stage history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and makes an argument similar to the present study, namely that there is a close connection between the concrete performance of women and the women’s movement. Another study examining the overlap between feminine performance in modern stage history and the women’s movement is Penny Farfan’s Women, Modernism, and Performance (2004). On the cross-fertilization of the finde-siècle feminism of the so-called New Woman and the theatre in France, see Mary Louise Roberts (2002).

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by contemporaneous developments in stage history. Since the beginning of opera in Italy in the early seventeenth century, women had been singing on the operatic stage.⁹ In England, the first women started acting on the theatrical boards when the theatres were reopened after the English Civil War and with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.¹⁰ The Restoration actress Nell Gwyn, who became the mistress of King Charles II, was the first actress to develop into a glamorous theatrical and public icon (Roach 2011), and in the late eighteenth century, actresses such as Mary Robinson and Sarah Siddons achieved considerable theatrical fame.¹¹ However, it was in the period in which novelists such as Jewsbury, Meredith and Eliot wrote their novels about professional performers that the theatre gave unprecedented presence and prominence to a select group of star performers. Indeed, it was in the nineteenth century that the emergence of the star performer took place. In these early days of modern celebrity (a term which first appeared in the 1840s; see Clark 2008: 116) most stars tended to be women. The most stellar performers included singers such as Maria Malibran, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Jenny Lind and Adelina Patti as well as actresses such as Elisabeth Rachel Félix, Adelaide Ristori, Fanny Kemble, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse.¹² Star performers like these became world-famous, and many of them promoted their international fame and consolidated their global claim by touring the world. Clearly these were exceptional careers. For the vast majority of nineteenth-century performers, who were less fortunate, the professional stage was far less glamorous. In her social history of the Victorian actress, Tracy Davis (1991) shows that acting was chronically underpaid and re On the first professional female singers in Italian opera see Susan McClary (2002b).  For a general historical overview of the presence of women on the stage from antiquity to the twentieth century, see the volume edited by Renate Möhrmann (2000a). As noted by Möhrmann, the English stage was particularly misogynist in the Renaissance period in that women were not allowed to perform in the (newly established) professional theatres. Later, however, it was especially Shakespearean drama that offered rich opportunities to actresses, who for a long time did not find many attractive roles elsewhere (Möhrmann 2000b: 25). On the first actresses on the English stage after the Civil War, see Elizabeth Howe’s The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660 – 1700 (1992). For a wide array of discussions of actresses, see The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (2007) edited by Maggie Gale and John Stokes.  See The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (Perry et al.: 2011).  On the figures of the prima donna and the star actress see Claudia Balk’s Theatergöttinnen: Inszenierte Weiblichkeit (1994), Susan Rutherford’s The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815 – 1930 (2006) as well as the essay collections Diva – Die Inszenierungen der übermenschlichen Frau (2011) edited by Rebecca Grotjahn, Dörte Schmidt and Thomas Seedorf and The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012) edited by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss.

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Figure 4: Fanny Kemble as Portia, early nineteenth-century print

garded as morally problematic, especially for women. It was above all the display of her body to a paying mass audience that rendered the actress an erotically ambiguous figure and placed her in close proximity to prostitution. Nineteenth-century gender norms were strict and the range of available social roles extremely limited, especially for middle-class women. They were expected to become wives and mothers nurturing the emotional well-being of

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Figure 5: The Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet, theatrical portrait print, 1858

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their husbands and children in the family home. The theatre, however, formed a cultural space in which gender roles could potentially become more fluid. A useful term to describe its function in nineteenth-century culture is Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (1986), which refers to spaces that mirror, invert and contest the conditions and rules of the so-called ‘normal’ unmarked social space. As a heterotopia, nineteenth-century theatre challenged the existing gender system. This was particularly pronounced in the practice of cross-dressing and so-called en travesti performances, in which female performers would play male characters, and in trouser roles specifically written to be performed by women.¹³ Most important of all, however, was the fact that acting represented one of the very few professional careers open to women. It was also a career in which they could potentially outstrip their male colleagues in their professional success. As shown by John Stokes, Michael Booth and Susan Bassnett, the importance of the actress grew parallel to the increasing social constriction of women: “The principal actress became a major box-office draw, and male performers, with a very few exceptions, […] took second place” (Stokes et al. 1988: 2). The theatre took women out of the private sphere and placed them prominently in the public sphere, where they enjoyed a great deal of public interest and attention. This practice ran completely counter to the hegemonic gender norms of the era. By performing in public and making a living as an independent individual, the female performer thus provoked a great deal of cultural anxiety. Yet the potential of the new cultural role she embodied also generated excitement. In the Victorian period, the theatre held a special allure for many women who saw the actress as a powerful model (Powell 1997, 2004a). Among those attracted to the stage were intellectuals such as Helen Taylor, the daughter of Harriet Taylor Smith and the stepdaughter of John Stuart Mill, and Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, who played Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll House (Showalter 1992: 53). Initially, the career wishes of Helen Taylor and Eleanor Marx met with paternal opposition – even though John Stuart Mill seems to have recognized the potential that the professional stage held for

 In nineteenth-century opera there is a whole tradition of male roles that are intended to be sung by a female voice. See, for instance, Naomi André’s study Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Opera (2006). Moreover, the male part of Hamlet, for example, was an important role for star actresses to show their histrionic talent and skill. Although we never actually witness her in the role, the heroine in Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters thinks of playing Hamlet (Jewsbury 1994: 224), and the most memorable embodiment of Hamlet by a woman is, of course, Sarah Bernhardt’s. See also Tony Howard’s Women as Hamlet (2007).

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women as the only artistic career that was widely accessible to them.¹⁴ Nevertheless, they both made brief excursions into the realm of acting before Taylor became a leading feminist reformer and Marx a socialist propagandist and literary translator of authors such as Flaubert and Ibsen. As Eleanor Marx’s sister Jenny put it, acting was “the only free life a woman can live” (quoted in Powell 1997: 4).¹⁵ To the successful star performer, the theatre provided a stage on which she could revel in the sound of her own voice in front of a mostly mute and passive audience. As Kerry Powell writes, one of the aspects that rendered the performer such an attractive role model for women was “her power to subjugate large audiences of men and women alike by the sound of her voice and her physical presence” (Powell 2004a: 354). At the same time, her concrete vocal presence also translated into symbolic power and agency. This was particularly the case in opera, where the female soprano displaced the castrato as the privileged voice, which meant that opera came to be largely dominated by women. As Paula Gillett points out, “the great prima donnas were, except for empresses and queens, the most highly paid women of their time” (Gillett 2000: 141). The female star singer, therefore, represented a figure whose position was extraordinary and exceptional both within opera and the social landscape at large. While she was able to use her singing voice to influence and control the affects of her audience, her power also extended offstage since she could command high salaries and provoke extreme forms of admiration. As the undisputed queens of the stage, the prima donnas had quasi-regal stature.¹⁶ In their symbolic power, they were rivalled only by other star performers and the reigning political sovereign.¹⁷

 In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill writes: “The only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to men” (Mill 2006: 211).  On Helen Taylor’s and Eleanor Marx’s involvement in the theatre, see Kent (1977: 103, 113) and Kerry Powell (1997: 4).  About her enthusiastic reception in Russia, the great French tragedy queen Rachel Félix wrote that she was treated “like a sovereign, not a make-believe sovereign of tragedy, with a crown of gold-colored cardboard, but a real sovereign made by the Mint” (quoted in Brownstein 1995: 200). As the dramatic star of the Comédie Française, Rachel was a national institution. On her death, she was given a state funeral, which was attended by over 100,000 Parisians.  Coincidentally, Queen Victoria, who hardly counts as a theatrical figure herself, took a keen interest in theatre and opera. As a princess, Victoria sketched performers, and she took singing lessons for twenty years. The young Queen often attended theatre performances together with her Prince Consort. As Christopher Kent (1977: 99) points out, this renewed royal support meant that in the 1840s, the moral and social image of the theatre received a boost. Victoria favoured particular actresses, including Helena Faucit, who was also greatly admired by George

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Figure 6: Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889 by John Singer Sargent

What is important about the historio-cultural situation of the theatre for the discussion of the British stage performer novels are the contradictions and ambivalences that we find inscribed in the history and the imagination of the Victorian star performer. Because theatrical acting and the bodily display it entailed were seen as improper for women, the female performer was socially stigmatised and marginalised, especially in bourgeois middle-class culture. This was the reason why Jenny Lind, the exemplar of moral purity among nineteenth-century

Eliot and who was convinced that the theatre stage had a positive moral influence on society (Kent 1997: 99 – 100).

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prima donnas, chose to resign from the operatic stage prematurely and instead went on to pursue a career in the more respectable field of oratorio and concert singing.¹⁸ While performers occupied a culturally central position as sovereignlike figures, their symbolic power was ambivalent. On the one hand, the professional stage represented the site in Victorian culture in which women could triumph in the most audible and visible form. On the other hand, it was precisely the fame and prominence resulting from such triumphs that were perceived as morally dangerous. As Paula Gillett notes, “The belief that constant admiration was an influence likely to degrade the character of the female performing artist was widely accepted during the Victorian era and well beyond” (Gillett 2000: 144). The star performer, as it were, falls victim to her own success: The immediate recognition she finds in the applause of her audience is thought to increase her need for adulation as well as her penchant for narcissistic self-display. The problem is no longer just the public exposure of the performer’s body mentioned above but also her personal ambition and her individual self-theatricalization. While Victorian gender norms stipulated that women had to be selfless and define themselves not as individuals but in relation to others, particularly their fathers and husbands, the star performer unduly pushed herself to the fore by presenting herself as an individual. It was not just that she violated gender codes in asserting her individuality, but her alleged self-centredness, her desire to be admired as an individual, made her a morally dubious figure. Staël’s Corinne, or Italy forms a useful foil for a reading of Victorian performer novels because of the various modes of feminine public articulation introduced by this Romantic precursor. The text emphasizes the pleasure Corinne takes in the seemingly boundless projection of her individual voice but also its ultimate fading in her tragic last song. On the one hand, Corinne is admired and celebrated for her unique voice while, on the other hand, her voice is a pure effect of resonance (her voice is the result of the way in which it resonates with cultural texts and images and the affects it evokes in her audiences by deeply moving them). In the following, we first explore the different modes of feminine articulation deployed by Staël’s novel – namely the grand self-theatricalization and the impersonal diffusion and dispersal of the performer voice – before we then trace how these modes are refigured in Jewsbury’s novel The Half Sisters.

 For an in-depth discussion of Jenny Lind’s self-positioning in Victorian culture, see Lowell Gallagher (1995).

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2.1 Triumph and Apotheosis of the Romantic Genius Voice: Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) Corinne’s coronation on the Capitol in Rome is significant for our discussion not only because it marks her greatest public triumph, but also because it introduces and, in fact, creates her as a composite figure. The passage allows us to see how the text constructs Corinne’s voice through many other ‘voices’. In depicting this occasion of public recognition, Staël presents her protagonist as a character who is literally created through her exchange with her audience as well as through the cultural texts and images nourishing her persona and performance. While the first appearance of Corinne in the text culminates in a literal performance, namely her improvisation on Italy, the passage leading up to this moment is itself performative as her figure is evoked by the speech acts of several other character voices.¹⁹ Just before she appears for the first time, the narrative text performs a generic shift and adopts a quasi-theatrical mode in order to dramatize the speech acts of these figures, which, as it were, ‘produce’ Corinne even before she makes her appearance in the text as an actual figure. Thrilling music sounded before the triumphal procession came into view. No matter what the event, it will stir the emotions if heralded by music. Many Roman noblemen and a few foreigners led the way for the chariot bearing Corinne. There goes her troop of admirers, said one Roman. Yes, responded another, she accepts everyone’s praise, but she gives no one special preference. She’s rich and independent; they even think she’s well born – and certainly she looks it – but she doesn’t want her identity known. Say what you will, continued a third, she is a goddess amid the clouds. (Staël 1987: 20 – 21; italics in the original)

What is remarkable in this passage is the fact that the narratorial instance is reduced almost to mere stage directions. As is the case throughout the novel, the heroine is described not by means of direct narratorial commentary but through other characters who discuss, read and reflect on her character and appearance. This means that Corinne is composed of many different voices not just because her improvisations recycle and modulate the various texts, images and ‘voices’ that make up the past culture of Italy, but also because her figure emerges as a conglomerate of various readings. Interestingly, the passage leading up to her coronation compares her to several images, which suggests that

 On the performative production of Corinne as a character also see Georges Poulet (1974).

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her extraordinary figure prompts a desire to read and adequately portray her.²⁰ In the passage leading up to her coronation, one of the recurring verbs in the French original is in fact ‘peindre’ (‘paint’) (Staël 1985: 55, 57). However, none of the verbally evoked paintings can actually capture Corinne. Instead, the accumulation of images goes to underline not only her elusiveness but also her phantasmal presence. The star performer is no more and no less than the feelings and responses she evokes in her audience. The text passage that immediately precedes the previous quotation already introduces the protagonist through a multitude of other character voices. They are overheard by the male protagonist, Oswald, Lord Nelvil of Scotland, who comes to the scene as a stranger and observes its participants with the impartiality of the outsider. Oswald went out, making his way toward the public square where he overheard people talking about Corinne, her gifts and her genius. […] he heard her name on everyone’s lips, as people all around told of some new sign heralding the union of all those gifts that captivate the imagination. One person said that she had the most moving voice in Italy; another, that no one in Italy could play tragedy as she did; still another, that she danced like a nymph and that her drawing was as charming as it was original. It was universally agreed that never before had anyone written or improvised such beautiful poetry, and that in ordinary conversation, her eloquence and grace captivated her listeners’ minds. They debated over what Italian city had given her birth, but the Romans stoutly maintained that you had to be born in Rome to speak such pure Italian. Her last name was not known; her first work had come out five years earlier signed only Corinne [italics in original]. No one knew where she had lived before or what kind of person she had been. […] To Lord Nelvil, the combination of mystery and public notice – this woman everyone discussed without even knowing her real name – seemed one of the wonders of the singular country he had come to visit. (Staël 1987: 19 – 20; my emphasis)

As in the previous quotation, the text offers no conclusive authorial description of Corinne. Instead the protagonist, who has not appeared yet, is evoked through the gossip and hearsay of the Roman population. Another important aspect of the construction of Corinne’s voice in this passage and the chapter from which it is taken is the multi-layered exchange

 The passage quoted above verbally depicts an image of Corinne as “a goddess amid the clouds” (Staël 1987: 21). Then, shortly after she becomes visible for the first time, the text compares her to a number of artworks as if she were emerging from them. She is dressed like the Sibyl figure in Domenichino’s paintings, and “her tall full figure” (Staël 1987: 21) is said to recall Greek statues. Likewise, the poems composed and recited to praise her cite “a pleasant mixture of images and mythological allusions” (Staël 1987: 22– 23). On the multi-medial quality of Staël’s text, see the article by Cornelia Klettke (2003).

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through which Corinne is produced as a voice and as a figure. This exchange involves 1) the people of Rome, who speculate about her mysterious identity; 2) the past and future of Italy’s culture, which she invokes in her improvisations at the Capitol; and, finally, 3) Oswald, the stranger who with his outside view observes and provides coherence to the entire scenario as the privileged focalizer of the text. As already suggested, Corinne is literally invoked as a composite voice by the various speech acts uttered by Romans. By shifting from “everyone” to “one”, “another” and back to “everyone” (or, in the French original, from the impersonal “on” to “l’un”, “l’autre”, “tous” and back to “on”), the passage quoted above highlights the heterogeneity of the diverse utterances and their speakers. At the same time, because they all speak about Corinne, her figure transforms the heterogeneous crowd into a unified community. Corinne does not simply address Rome and the entire country in her apostrophe – “Italy, thou empire of the Sun; Italy, to whom the world stands subject; Italy, cradle of learning, I salute thee” (Staël 1987: 26) – but by evoking them in great detail, she also in effect creates them, just as she also brings herself into being as a figure who speaks for an entire cultural community. The role of Oswald, finally, is to hold together this complex exchange. By addressing her second improvisation to him, Corinne singles him out as her privileged listener. Yet his primary role is to frame and provide coherence to the event as the main focalizer throughout the passage. In observing the entire scene of the procession and the coronation, he occupies a comprehensive vantage point. But rather than positioning him as an individual character, his perspective is a mere structural function which Corinne’s voice needs in order to bring together and unify the feelings and responses she simultaneously evokes in her larger audience. All these aspects of Corinne’s complex exchange with her audience are geared towards the construction and elaborate mise en scène of her voice. The entire scene and all its participants, including Oswald, thus become extensions of the performer’s voice. Rather than through direct narratorial commentary, the text presents Corinne’s performer voice in indirect fashion, namely through the way in which other characters talk about her and the way in which she herself speaks through the culture of Italy. Instead of discussing her own feelings and emotions, Staël’s heroine comments on Italy – and presents herself through the way in which she talks about the country. This indirect presentation has a paradoxical effect. Corinne’s creation as a composite collective voice implies a grandiose view of the female performer voice that reaches far beyond “the cult of genius” (Staël 1987: 32) celebrated in the scene at the Capitol. In the course of the novel, the voice of Staël’s performer comes to resonate with an entire cultural space as she recycles the cultural past of Italy in her utterances and, at the same time, gives voice to a national culture avant-la-lettre. On the one hand, this boundless vocal expansion

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suggests a narcissistic self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, the omnipresence that Corinne gains as a collective composite voice implies a curious elusiveness. Staël’s heroine fills all of Italy with her voice and, in so doing, dissolves as a subject. As already suggested by the two passages cited above, the figure of Corinne evokes fantasies and desires. Importantly, however, all the fantasies and desires described by the text are those of her audience rather than hers. She embodies emotions, but because they emerge in her dialogue with her audience and Italy’s culture, these collective feelings do not refer to her as a psychological subject. As a powerful relay that mediates between her audience, the cultural objects she describes for them and the affects she evokes in them, the figure of Corinne lacks clear boundaries. She both absorbs and merges with her surroundings and Italy’s culture. The fact that her voice resonates with other voices, cultural texts and images renders her at once full and empty. Lacking any individual psychology, she is instead composed of a myriad of texts – a rich assemblage of the fragments, ruins and monuments that define Italian culture. As a result, she is purely textual. By constructing her protagonist in this way, Staël develops a feminine subjectivity that radically departs from notions of original individuality and interiority that are so central to the discourse of Romanticism. Corinne also differs fundamentally from later novelistic heroines such as Jane Austen’s “Emma” (1816) or Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” (1857). Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary also absorb a myriad of narratives, but they always translate them into their individual fantasy scenarios. By contrast, Corinne does not appear to possess any fantasies or drives. Instead she figures as a medium of other voices and traces, which she reinforces and intensifies with her enthusiasm. The novel presents her as a collective figure who mediates both the cultural material of Italy and the affects of her audiences rather than constructing her as a psychological individual. The impersonal elusiveness of Staël’s heroine makes it impossible to determine who or what Corinne actually is. Her enigmatic status is already indicated by the bipartite title Corinne, or Italy, which establishes an uncertain relation between the protagonist and Italy. Is the title to be read metonymically – ‘Corinne in Italy’ – or metaphorically – ‘Corinne in the place of Italy’ (in other words, ‘Corinne is Italy’)?²¹ Does the title emphasize the heroine’s spatial proximity to Italy as her favourite cultural space in her residence and travels, or does it suggest an

 See Marie-Claire Vallois (1991: 89). My subsequent reflections on the relation between Italy and Corinne’s voice have been influenced by Vallois’s article.

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even closer relation by having Corinne substitute for the country? After she has chosen Oswald as her privileged listener and growing love interest, Corinne guides him through Rome and Italy. The novel temporarily turns into a travel report as Corinne comments on the monuments, ruins, works of art and natural landscapes which she shows to Oswald. The triangular relation between Corinne, Italy and Oswald suggests that the text deals not with ‘Corinne in Italy’ alone but simultaneously works with a substitution. By presenting Italy to Oswald, Corinne ‘speaks’ through its monuments and ruins, although most of the time we do not hear her in the first person. The many sights that she shows him become extensions of her voice. They all come to be filled with her voice and, at the same time, they also turn into vehicles of her voice. By speaking through cultural fragments, Corinne turns Italy into her vocal space, that is, the space in and through which she can speak.²² The technique of internal focalization, which allows narrative fiction to create and show the inner life of characters, develops in the early nineteenth century, that is, in tandem with or in any case parallel to discourses highlighting the subject’s individual interiority. However, rather than invoking the type of interior perspective that will be deployed to such great effect by both Austen and Flaubert, Staël chooses to display Corinne’s subjectivity on an exterior stage. Contrary to the paradigm of interior depth that becomes important around 1800, the text operates entirely on a surface level.²³ Rather than referring to a

 Other critics tend to regard the substitution of woman and country in Staël’s novel as problematic. Frank Paul Bowman (1991) speaks about a distortion of transparent communication in this mode of indirect speech, whereas Margaret R. Higonnet reads the ruins as the material of a “recreative activity” and an “imaginative bricolage” (1991: 80), which, however, fail in the end. Similarly, Marie-Claire Vallois argues that the substitution of Corinne and Italy points symptomatically to the fragmentation or even impossibility of the feminine voice: “This exalting of feminine talent seems curious when in the novel the poet finds herself being reduced to silence in order to let the stones speak. It would seem that the Staëlian novel demonstrates almost perversely all the dangers implicit in feminine fiction’s strategy of metaphorical substitution. This delegation of the power of speech is not without risk. By assigning to the décor of ruins the task of refracting her image and presence, as if speaking in her name, the heroine not only effaces herself as the subject of the discourse but in the end positions herself as the object of the masculine gaze. Does not the fiction of the touristic narrative, a strategic feminine tactic, risk falling right back into the phallocentric representational trap in which woman is unable to inscribe herself unless it is as an object in ruins, a mutilated object?” (Vallois 1999: 134). Reading this substitution in a more positive light, I argue that instead of being silenced by the monuments and ruins, Corinne’s voice uses all of Italy in order to resonate with an entire culture space.  In his text “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (2000), Michel Foucault speaks about the illusion of interior depth that characterizes modernity after 1800 as well as the critique of this illusion by the

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psychic inner space, Corinne’s voice disperses and diffuses in the vast geographic space evoked by her travel report. By guiding Oswald through Italy, Corinne subsumes him, making him into ‘her’ listener, in whom she can acoustically mirror herself. Similarly, by absorbing myths, texts and images, she mirrors herself in all of Italy, which intertwines her person ever more with the country. Her reading and rendition of the external world can be seen as a materialization of her thoughts and feelings. This means that in speaking about Italy, she implicitly always speaks about herself. Corinne can fashion herself as a figure replete with texts and images drawn from Italian culture because she has relinquished her individual history. As mentioned above, Corinne is first introduced in the text by the people of Rome, who exchange speculations and rumours about her origin and background while awaiting her procession in the streets. While the characters do not know where she comes from, the readers learn halfway through the novel that Corinne has become a public performer after having abandoned her paternal family background. Following the early death of her Italian mother, Staël’s protagonist initially moves to England, the homeland of her father, where her passionate and spontaneous mode of expression meets with opposition. After the demise of her father, she experiences the conventions of provincial England, namely the silence prescribed by feminine gender norms, as increasingly stifling. Finally, on hearing a group of Italian musicians, her longing for the maternal homeland reaches unbearable proportions. She discards her family name, has herself symbolically buried and invents herself as the independent artist Corinne. It is by emptying herself of her individual past and filling her character with a plethora of texts and images that Corinne can literally speak and sing herself into being as a collective figure and, simultaneously, as her own work of art. Because of her self-construction as the voice of Italy, Corinne might be seen as an allegorical personification of the country. However, the novel suggests a departure from of the classic tradition whereby a female figure is appropriated as an allegorical sign, representing a country or an abstract concept.²⁴ Rather than serving as an allegory of Italy, Staël’s female performer is herself embodied by the entire country. The comments of her travelogue do not so much show Italy to Oswald as that the country presents Corinne, giving her both body and voice. Instead of being reduced to an allegorical figure, Corinne creates herself as a composite voice, which gains substance and intensity through the dialogue interpretational techniques developed by Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, which, according to Foucault, stage an exterior depth or surfaceness.  The traditional figuration of the female allegory is discussed in depth by Marina Warner in her classic study Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1987).

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with monuments, ruins and other cultural fragments that she presents in her travelogue and improvisations. By resonating with the cultural past of Italy, she inspires a rebirth of Italian culture, animates and gives voice to an Italian nation state avant-la-lettre. And in the same gesture, she also gives birth to her own Romantic genius. Ultimately, this means that the whole of Italy transforms into an acoustic space reverberating with her ‘song’. Corinne is Italy, and Italy is Corinne. What is unusual in Staël’s figuration of the feminine voice is the fact that an entire cultural space turns into the presentational mode and stage of the individual performer figure. The paradox of Corinne’s voice can be summed up as follows: Corinne may not have an individual voice of her own, but her voice expands and diffuses through the infinite space evoked by her dialogue with the culture of Italy. The boundless projection of her voice implies, on the one hand, a grand self-presentation and, on the other, a striking dispersal and diffusion of the self. The tension between these two trajectories becomes most evident in her last song. The scene of the last performance before her death will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, which examines Corinne’s visionary voice in the context of feminine religious preaching. However, what is important to emphasize here is how her last song marks both her final dissolution and her grand apotheosis. After his Italian journey with Corinne, Oswald returns to Scotland, where his father has died. Feeling guilty for spending time with Corinne instead of attending to his father on his deathbed, Oswald learns that his father reached a scathing verdict on Corinne in a letter written a few years earlier. His father’s letter mobilizes the very prejudices that also circulate in the cultural discourse of the nineteenth-century female performer discussed in the first part of this chapter. The letter stipulates that Oswald must not marry Corinne because of her theatrical “need to please, to captivate, to attract attention” (Staël 1987: 329).²⁵ As a result, Oswald deserts Corinne and instead marries her English half-sister Lucile, who is fully emplaced in the domestic sphere. In addition to losing her privileged listener, Corinne also allegedly loses her gift for spontaneous improvisation. Depleted of her former energy, she becomes a mere shadow of her former self. However, she herself appears to accelerate the process of her demise, which culminates in a final gesture of grand self-dramatization.²⁶ Like her improvisations, Corinne’s last performance once more takes place in public. Because she has become too weak to perform, her final verses are de “I do not know”, Oswald’s father writes, “what theater would be broad enough for the active mind, the impetuous imagination – for the passionate character, in short, perceptible in her every word” (Staël 1987: 329).  See Margaret Higonnet’s reading of Corinne’s suicide as a form of self-construction (1991).

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livered by a young girl, suggesting a separation between her body and voice. In addition, the description of her veiled figure as a “shadow” and “apparition” (Staël 1987: 415) implies a more radical dissolution into the immaterial. While her body is about to die, it seems as though her disembodied voice will continue to circulate as a spectral presence. The spirit of her voice will live on in the young girl but also in her half-sister Lucile and, above all, in Juliette, her niece. Juliette, the daughter of Oswald and Lucile, bears a striking resemblance to Corinne, as if to give living evidence to the fact that, during her pregnancy, Lucile had constantly been thinking about her half-sister. Even more importantly, Juliette is educated by Corinne, who takes “great pains to instruct the child, and to transmit all her talents to her, like a legacy she was pleased to bequeath while she was still alive” (Staël 1987: 411). By training Juliette, Corinne makes sure that her niece will go on singing her aunt’s songs, thus keeping her painfully alive to Oswald. Moreover, as she senses her approaching death, Corinne asks Lucile to embody her memory together with Juliette: “You will have to be you and me at the same time […] since I must die soon, my only personal desire is that Oswald find some traces of my influence in you and your daughter, and that at least he can never enjoy feeling without remembering Corinne” (Staël 1987: 413). Anticipating her death in her conversation with Lucile, Corinne wishes to live on in her half-sister and her niece so as to haunt Oswald from beyond the grave. Yet by the time we reach the end of the novel, the text marks complete indifference towards him so as to focus its attention on Corinne and her glorious apotheosis. It is a doomed situation into which the male figures and the novel have put Corinne by pitting her public performance against a traditional romance plot. Her public career is rendered incompatible with her fulfilment in a love relationship, and the private sorrows of her lovesickness appear to undermine her talent as a public performer. At the same time, however, her tragic death underlines the extraordinariness of Staël’s heroic protagonist. Her brilliant genius must by definition culminate in death. What is often read as an act of self-sacrifice in the face of self-consuming love actually turns out to be something much more powerful, namely the highly effective dissolution of the performer voice into an impersonal spirit and the preparation of her final apotheosis as a quasi-divine presence. If Corinne is extraordinary, Oswald is ordinary through and through. The last paragraph of the novel focuses on Oswald’s life after Corinne’s death. The narrator describes his intense mourning as well as his eventual return to Lucile and Juliette and closes with a series of questions raised by the exemplary domestic life that he leads with them in England: “[…] did he forgive himself for his past behavior? Was he consoled by society’s approval? Was he satisfied with an ordinary lot after what he had lost?” (Staël 1987: 419). Having asked these questions, the narrator does not pursue them any further. “I do not know”,

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the novel’s last sentence runs, “and on this score I wish neither to blame him nor to grant him absolution” (Staël 1987: 419). Given the glorification of Corinne by the novel as a whole, it does not come as a surprise that the figure of Oswald should be dismissed by the voice of the narrator in this way. In view of the text’s ending, which transforms the heroine’s tragic fate into her grand apotheosis, it even seems as though Corinne may have chosen Oswald precisely because of his ordinary character: In addition to setting off her extraordinary genius, his ordinariness has propelled her both tragic and heroic fate because he cannot live with a woman of exceptional talents. What is certain, however, is the fact that the extraordinary voice of Corinne remains triumphant even in her death. Corinne, or Italy is the first novel ever written about a female Romantic genius figure, and what renders the text so remarkable is the almost adulatory fashion in which it exalts its female heroine. Staël’s text foregrounds the seemingly boundless speaking of her performer and her absorption of an entire cultural space, as well as her apotheosis in death. As mentioned earlier, Staël creates her female genius performer in response to the cultural climate following the French Revolution. In her own position as a public intellectual, Staël was strongly influenced by the salon culture she grew up in and also by the French Revolution as a critical cultural moment that brought ideas such as universal human rights and democratic political representation into circulation. However, as it turned out, women were to be excluded from these constructions, and the citizens participating in public culture came to be defined as exclusively male. It is in the light of her disillusionment with the Revolution, on which she had set high hopes, but also the autocratic regime of Napoleon, who controlled large parts of Continental Europe and had himself crowned King of Italy in 1805, that Staël develops her genius performer. Her literary alter ego can be seen as a fictional counter-voice which salvages the past and inspires the future of an entire culture and, in so doing, speaks for the liberation and independence of Italy as a future nation state. At the same time, the text puts great emphasis on both the pleasures and the difficulties of feminine public speech. It would, therefore, be difficult not to read Corinne’s voice as making a powerful claim for the active participation of women in the cultural and political domain. When the figure of the female performer resurfaces in British Victorian novels several decades later, her prominent public articulation refers us to issues that resemble those raised by Staël’s 1807 text. The appearances performers make in the British texts do not occur on an equally grand scale as Corinne’s performance at the Capitol. As was the case in the historical context of the earlier text, the mid-nineteenth century was a cultural period which tended to limit rather than expand the articulatory range women had in public. It is against this back-

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drop that their fictional voices are developed and placed on the public theatre stages. In constructing its performing heroine, Corinne or Italy introduces several modes of feminine articulation. Among these are, notably, a seemingly unlimited expansion of the female voice in the public sphere, the fading of the actual voice in the process of dying, the absorption of an entire cultural space by an individual voice as well as its impersonal diffusion. In what follows, we will examine how these modes of utterance are refigured by the later British novels. What forms of articulation do their performers use, and how are their voices evaluated and judged by the other textual voices, that is, the other character voices, the voice of the narrator and the overall ‘voice’ or tone of the text? To what extent does the treatment of the female public voice in these novels tie in with the ambivalent position that the female performer occupies in the cultural imaginary of the time? In other words, do the texts emphasize the symbolic empowerment of the performer like Helen Taylor and Eleanor Marx, who viewed the actress as a positive role model, or do they underline the cultural anxiety that surrounds the female performers in the Victorian period (and that is already anticipated by Oswald’s father)? Finally, what is the narrative argument of these texts, and how is this argument reinforced or undermined by virtue of the specific modes of articulation used by their performers? In contrast to Corinne, who speaks for an entire culture and, in so doing, turns an entire country into the stage of her self-articulation, the Victorian performers are much more closely aligned with the professional stage. This means that instead of the entire cultural space filled by Corinne’s voice, they occupy a far more specific site. However, because the novels use the theatre as a trope, the performers’ appearance on the theatrical stage can be seen to raise questions concerning the status they have as public feminine voices. Can they use the theatre stage as a site of individual self-articulation analogously to the way in which Corinne uses Italy for her own vocal self-expansion? Or do they lend their public voices to collective projects so that they potentially come to be subsumed under a larger entity? Indeed, as we have seen, Staël greatly valorizes the voice of Corinne. Her performer enjoys a lot of public visibility because she speaks both for and to an entire cultural space. Moreover, Corinne has a lot of agency, reinventing and fashioning herself as a great public figure. What happens as we shift from her Romantic universal genius to the Victorian working professional? What does public visibility mean in the case of the actress in Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters? As we shall see, the concerns Staël formulates in the aftermath of the French Revolution reappear in the way in which the British text uses the performer voice as a trope for professional independence and hence feminine agency.

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2.2 The Professional Victorian Actress: Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1848) Like Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, Jewsbury’s novel The Half Sisters (1948) gives its performer an English-Italian background. However, rather than the triumph of the heroic genius, which is emphasized in the Romantic text, what is foregrounded by the narrative of the Victorian novel is the professional development and success of the actress as a working woman. More specifically, the text traces how the industrious protagonist, Bianca Pazzi, initially develops her speaking voice and then goes on to become an acclaimed actress. When she first arrives in England with her Italian mother, Bianca does not speak any English and, as a result, has to resort to the eloquence of “her looks and actions” (Jewsbury 1994: 8). Joining a travelling circus out of economic necessity, she first performs as “the Dumb Girl” (Jewsbury 1994: 29) in a pantomime act. Initially driven into performing by the pressing need to make a living and support her ailing mother, she soon develops a fascination with the theatre. “I love the profession”, Bianca observes at an early point in her performing career, “but I would like to have better things to say […]; I desire beyond all things to enter a regular theatre […]. I can speak English now, and I feel I could make my way” (Jewsbury 1994: 88). Through her perseverance and hard work Jewsbury’s performer moves from the social margins to the centre of established culture. After steadily perfecting her art and building her reputation in provincial theatres, she eventually enters the London stage and rises to stardom as a nationally renowned actress. At the end of the novel, however, she abruptly relinquishes her public voice. Unlike Corinne, who is exalted in her death, Bianca decides to leave the stage in order to get married and lead an ordinary domestic life. How can we read this conventional ending? What is the relationship between the heroine’s retreat into private domesticity on the one hand and her earlier independence as a professional woman on the other? Why is her public voice curtailed in the end? As a short summary will show, Jewsbury’s narrative hinges on a double plot that highlights the contrast between two half-sisters, Alice Helmsby, the legitimate daughter of English upper-middle-class parents, and Bianca Pazzi, the illegitimate daughter her father had with an Italian mistress. Coming to England as an impoverished semi-orphan, Bianca begins to work as a circus performer and later as a theatre actress in order to support both herself and her sick mother. As a natural talent, she enjoys the support of two mentors, Conrad Percy and an old actor, both of whom advise her on her artistic development. During her time at a provincial theatre, the manager offers her leading roles in exchange for sexual favours, but Bianca fends off the advances of both the manager and other men and, as a result, is dismissed. In contrast to Bianca, who seeks to

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make her way as a professional actress, her half-sister Alice is destined for domestic life. Her mother discourages her from educating herself and, as a result, she grows restless and melancholy. She falls in love with Bryant, a businessman, and when he proposes to her, she accepts. Interestingly enough, Alice is reading Staël’s Corinne, or Italy in a Romantic landscape at the critical moment in which Bryant makes his marriage proposal; however, rather than leading a life in public as the heroine of the novel she is reading (but will never finish), she is about to embark on a domestic existence, much like Corinne’s half-sister Lucile. After entering into the “ordinary routine of domestic life” (Jewsbury 1994: 102), Alice barely sees her husband, who is entirely absorbed by his work. It is at this point that the two half-sisters cross paths for the first time. Having lost her job and undergoing an emotional crisis following the death of her mother, Bianca is invited by Alice to stay with her. At Alice’s house, Bianca discovers a portrait of her dead English father but does not tell Alice that they are half-sisters. Having introduced the two half-sisters with their different backgrounds, the text then goes on to trace their developments in the theatre and the home. Initially, Alice seeks to persuade Bianca to become a nursery governess because she does not consider acting respectable. However, Bianca insists that she is meant for the theatrical stage and accepts a promising theatrical engagement, explaining to her that you cannot change my nature, I must be what I am. The stage is to me a passion, as well as a profession; I can work in no other direction […]. You don’t know what it is to be devoted to an art; it possesses one like a demon; it is a sacred necessity laid upon me, which I cannot help obeying. […] I must realise myself in my own way, or not at all. (Jewsbury 1994: 134)

When her mentor Conrad Percy sees Bianca back on the theatrical stage, he is captivated by her. Since his father is fiercely opposed to a potential marriage, Bianca asks Conrad to travel on his own for three years, while she works her way up in her profession in order to become his equal. As her reputation grows, she becomes a great favourite and is even accepted into respectable society. Conrad, however, takes a turn for the worse during his travels. His notions of femininity become more conservative, and he also develops a distaste for the theatre. Back in England, he does not attend Bianca’s first London performance, which is enthusiastically received by the public. She is conscious of having become a “finished artist” (Jewsbury 1994: 175), but Conrad now wishes women to appear in public only with their fathers and husbands and to speak with “a sweet voice, like a whisper of a breeze” (Jewsbury 1994: 179). Conrad’s friend Lord Melton, however, is enthralled by her performance and falls in love with her.

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Despite the fact that Bianca is now “a woman of distinction” (Jewsbury 1994: 262), Bryant does not want his wife Alice to renew her friendship with Bianca. Suffering from the ennui caused by her domestic existence, Alice comes to be attracted to Conrad Percy, who recognizes his newly found ideal of femininity in her. Planning to elope with Conrad in her husband’s absence but caught by his early return, Alice suffers “a most severe attack of hysteria” (Jewsbury 1994: 289) and dies shortly after. Bianca, on the other hand, finds herself at the height of her career. She devotes herself to her art, convincing herself that to live a life “dedicated like that of a priestess, cold, strong, and pure, to the utterance of the oracle confided to her, was indeed the noblest and highest vocation she could embrace” (Jewsbury 1994: 355). Jewsbury’s protagonist has realized her most ambitious hopes but, at the same time, she suffers from her isolation in her position as a brilliant and self-reliant artist. In the end, she prefers companionship to her art as she decides to marry Lord Melton. In fact, she even yields to the request of Lady Vernon, Lord Melton’s sister, that she will never again appear on stage. The marriage is announced in the newspapers alongside “bitter lamentations for the irreparable loss the stage had sustained from the abdication of its high-priestess” (Jewsbury 1994: 390). By intertwining the storylines of the two half-sisters Bianca and Alice, the novel contrasts not only acute poverty with secure comfort but also meaningful employment with suffocating boredom. The juxtaposition of the two half-sisters reminds us of Corinne, or Italy at the same time as it reverses the fates of Corinne and Lucile, her domestic half-sister. In contrast to Staël’s text, in which the performer dies a both tragic and heroic death, the protagonist of Jewsbury’s novel survives. Significantly, in this text, it is not Bianca, the public performer, but Alice, her half-sister, who perishes because of the stifling conditions of her domestic existence. The life of enforced idleness that Alice leads as an upper-middle-class wife means that she has no meaningful occupation to sustain her mentally, which is why she is driven into adultery, hysteria and ultimately death. By contrast, Bianca, in following a long and difficult path, gains the opportunity to develop her talent. By having her start out both penniless and homeless – Bianca is endowed neither with the economic means nor the cultural home that Staël’s heroine possesses – the novel underlines her position as a selfmade woman who achieves both economic and individual independence. Initially she hones her acting skills in order to gain social respectability as a successful actress and thus to become worthy of Conrad Percy. But when he leaves her – like Lord Nelvil, who deserts Corinne – she survives her romantic loss because she no longer solely acts for him. Instead, having become a socially recognized star performer, she finds fulfilment in her art.

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Given the great emphasis that the novel puts on the successful career of its performer, it seems odd that her public voice should be effaced in the end. After all, Bianca’s storyline is presented as more viable than her less fortunate half-sister’s. Yet the proto-feminist narrative of the empowering development of the performer finds a conservative closure as she not only gets married but also abandons her career as a celebrated actress. Viewed from the ending, Bianca seems to turn herself into a consummate artist by virtue of her hard work and perseverance only to be ultimately absorbed into marriage and domesticity. Thanks to his progressive convictions, Lord Melton promises to be a more congenial companion than Bryant, Alice’s husband. Moreover, Bianca’s personal resilience and emotional strength make it unlikely that she will suffer from the domestic ennui that beset her sister. But how are we to read the fact that, having explored the professional stage as a site of feminine empowerment, the text should reject the theatre in favour of domesticity, which earlier in the text was depicted as a source of intense feminine malaise? The fact that Bianca willingly abandons her career at the behest of Lady Vernon, who is far less liberal-minded than her brother Lord Melton, seems to contradict the narrative thrust of her previous development as an independent artist.²⁷ Yet, as we shall see, her absorption into marriage marks not so much an abrupt narrative shift but a logical continuation of the particular way in which Jewsbury characterizes the public voice of her performer. How is Bianca’s performing voice constructed in the first place? Interestingly, the text never provides any actual accounts of her theatrical performances and we are never given any detailed descriptions of her public voice. Instead, we are frequently provided with exchanges between various characters about the cultural and social position of the actress. These discussions typically consist of extended passages written in direct speech, which almost entirely displaces the voice of the narrator. As a result, the text foregrounds the disagreement between different characters and their conflicting views of the theatre and the actress. In so doing, the novel continually refers to the cultural ambivalence that surrounds the figure of the public female performer in nineteenth-century culture. Reflecting the cultural discourses of the time, the conflicting attitudes crystallize around the dubious reputation of female performers and their violation of gender norms on the one hand and the enabling potential of their profession on the other. Rather than showing Bianca’s voice in public performance, the text  In his text on the nineteenth-century novel and theatricality, David Kurnick suggests that The Half Sisters forms part of a group of domestic novels that “express contempt for the domesticity they narratively celebrate and fascination with the theatre they narratively reject” (Kurnick 2012: 314).

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uses her as a public performer figure in order to explore questions pertaining to the contemporary social role of women – notably whether they are to be defined through their relations to others, or whether they should be encouraged in their self-development – as well as questions concerning the particular position of the actress as a professional woman – whether her performance on stage undermines her femininity, or whether it provides her with an enabling sphere of activity. Because the novel emphasizes the discussion of the professional woman, it eludes any actual representation of her voice. The most deep-rooted prejudice against women on stage are voiced by Alice’s husband Bryant and Conrad Percy. The former regards acting as “a questionable line of life” and explains to Alice, who wishes to support Bianca in the moment of her greatest crisis, “I have an intense dislike to actresses, and all that sort of thing […]” (Jewsbury 1994: 139). Compared to this sweeping statement, Conrad is more specific in formulating the prejudices that he has developed during his travels against professional women in general and actresses in particular. In a conversation with Lord Melton, which forms one of the most extended passages of dialogue in the novel, he expresses his disgust “with all that [is] theatrical, or [has] a tinge of display in women” (Jewsbury 1994: 178). As he explains to Lord Melton, it is the public self-exposure of the performer to which he objects. In his view, what renders the female performer a problematic figure is not primarily the potentially erotic exposure of her body (around which the discourses surrounding the actress at the time tended to revolve and which is referred to in the passage in which Bianca has to fend off male sexual advances) but the revelation of her inner life to a paying audience.²⁸ He also disapproves of the attention and gossip that she attracts: “Is she not a free topic – is she not a public character?” (Jewsbury 1994: 212). Most important of all, however, the performer violates his ideal notion of a domestic and “low-voiced” femininity (Jewsbury 1994: 218). Bianca’s profession, Conrad argues, “has unsexed her, made her neither a man nor a woman” (Jewsbury 1994: 216). But performers are not the only ones he believes to undermine feminine gender norms. In fact, he extends his prejudice to all women working in the public sphere:

 As Conrad Percy explains to Lord Melton, “[…] I have got a real horror of professional women. […] A woman who makes her mind public, or exhibits herself in any way, no matter how it may be dignified by the title of art, seems to me little better than a woman of a nameless class. I am more jealous of the mind than the body; and, to me, there is something revolting in the notion of a woman who professes to love and belong to you alone, going and printing the secrets of her inmost heart, the most sacred workings of her soul, for the benefit of all who can pay for them” (Jewsbury 1994: 214).

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[…] I have a horror of all professional women. There ought to be a law to keep women from getting their own living: there are men enough in the world to work. Women ought to be taken care of, and kept in retirement; they have no qualities which fit them to struggle with the world. (Jewsbury 1994: 208)

As underlined by this statement, Conrad’s notion of ideal femininity is predicated on a clear separation of the private and the public sphere. What renders professional women like Bianca problematic in his eyes is the fact that they transgress the gendered boundary between these separate spheres and, in doing so, upset a clear hierarchy of dependence, financial and otherwise. Conrad wishes women to remain dependent on their fathers and husbands. Yet he is sharply contradicted by Lord Melton, who emphasizes that instead of being defined in relation to others, women should be educated in a way that allows them to realize their full potential as part of their own self-development.²⁹ As Melton points out, gifted women are in need of an “adequate mode of manifestation” and “a definite profession” (Jewsbury 1994: 220). It is “because […] it gives her a personal and independent existence” (Jewsbury 1994: 221) that he supports the professional career of Bianca and women like her. By making statements such as these, Melton positions himself as an advocate speaking on behalf of women in general and Bianca in particular. Although he points out in his argument with Conrad that he represents a moderate position – “I am not a stickler for the ‘rights of women’, if by those you mean becoming a soldier, or a lawyer, or a member of Parliament” (Jewsbury 1994: 222) – his role as a spokesperson anticipates a figure such as John Stuart Mill, who represented women’s interests in his liberal feminist manifesto The Subjection of Women as well as in his parliamentary petition for women’s political rights. Melton speaks not only for the interests of women but also in the place of women, who, as he claims, are not yet in a position to fully formulate their wishes and demands as they have not received a proper education and lack guidance (Jewsbury 1994: 219). As he explains, “The rights they really do want, though they cannot so well articulate them, is […] not to have their lives and souls frittered into a shape to meet the notion of a ‘truly feminine character’, but to be allowed to grow up freely […]” (Jewsbury 1994: 222; my emphasis). His progressive views are thus conveyed in

 Note for instance Lord Melton’s following statement: “If women were machines, were in very deed our property, then, indeed, all this might answer; but they are not, and there is no possibility of educating them up to the point of being conveniently fascinating, and then stopping short; – they have higher qualities existing in them, and unless those qualities are appealed to, you cannot hold them, or influence them; they are living souls, and you cannot dogmatise to a life, nor cut it out according to pattern” (Jewsbury 1994: 220; original emphasis).

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a paternalistic manner. The text has Melton speak in place of the heroine instead of allowing her to express herself and thus letting her political opinion be heard, albeit in private rather than in public.³⁰ At the same time, Bianca herself does intervene and participate in the discussions revolving around the role of women in general and actresses in particular as someone who has been “allowed to grow up freely” (Jewsbury 1994: 222). In fact, her analysis of the social situation of women is at least as sophisticated as Melton’s. Thus she asserts, for instance, that in contrast to the women of the upper middle class, who “have all vitality choked out of them”, she has “had a definite employment all my life”: […] when I rose in the morning my work lay before me, and I had a clear, definite channel in which all my energies might flow. I was without social position, I had no friends, no respectability; often wanted food. […] but with all this I was kept clear of ennui, which eats like a leprosy into the life of women. I was leading a life of my own, and was able to acquire a full control over my own faculties; and I have always had a sense of freedom, of employment of my existence […]. (Jewsbury 1994: 249)

A related statement from Bianca can be found in another conversation with Lady Vernon, who considers the theatre “worthless, and unworthy” (Jewsbury 1994: 253). Lady Vernon believes that theatrical acting – “pretending to be that which you are not” – is “especially dreadful when followed by a woman” (Jewsbury 1994: 253). Yet the actress points out that the theatre has offered her the possibility of self-realization that she would not have had in a more traditional feminine life. “You forget”, she explains to Lady Vernon, that I am […] with as clear a vocation for being an actress, as any of the saints of old had for being martyrs – I could have done nothing else in the world. I needed to have all the restless energy worked out of me. […] I should have found no opening for my energies in the smoothly-compacted surface of female existence. God gave me talents, such as they are, and I should have been possessed by a demon, if I had not been able to give free scope to them. (Jewsbury 1994: 253)

 Critics have deplored the fact that The Half Sisters appears to rely on the authority of a male spokesperson for its most radical statements on female self-realization. See for instance Lisa Surridge (1995: 91– 92) and Linda M. Lewis (2003: 81), who both criticize the novel for its endorsement of male authority in the figure of Lord Melton. “It is one annoying facet of Jewsbury’s rhetoric”, Lewis writes, “that her most advanced ideas on education and careerism for women are voiced by Melton, as if they are more weighty when spoken by a male character than they would be coming from a female” (2003: 81).

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In contrast to Victorian women whose lives are shaped by the norms of domestic femininity, Bianca has found a way of putting her energy to a creative use in her professional acting career. By juxtaposing these various character comments on the general figure of the actress with each other, the text highlights its heteroglossia, namely the clash between various voices and positions drawing on the ambivalence that surrounds the cultural imagination of the female performer in nineteenth-century culture. Indeed, it is by staging this conflict between different ideological positions that the novel underlines the extremely contentious role of women in general and female performers in particular. At the same time, the text as a whole appears to privilege the views of Bianca and Lord Melton if we consider the plot revolving around the dissimilar lives of the two half-sisters. Bianca’s analysis of “the condition of women” (Jewsbury 1994: 249) through the lens of her acting career appears to be validated by her own success story on the one hand and the tragic fate of her half-sister Alice on the other. While her arduous stage career has allowed her to continually grow, develop and find an outlet for her energy, her half-sister suffers under the stifling conditions of her privileged idle uppermiddle-class life and ultimately breaks out in hysterical convulsions preceding her death. Geraldine Jewsbury’s novelistic representation of the actress and her halfsister whose self-expression is inhibited by the norms of feminine domesticity can be read as a fictional parallel to Cassandra, the feminist essay Florence Nightingale wrote in 1852, four years after the publication of The Half Sisters. Coming from a wealthy upper-class background, Nightingale herself felt a restless discontent with the conventional feminine gender norms that her family tried to impose upon her. She spent an increasing amount of time daydreaming, “escaping in fantasy from the restrictions of her life” (Stark 1979: 8). While her dreams seem to have revolved around heroic action, she was terrified by her habit of daydreaming, which she considered as “a symptom of mental illness” (Stark 1979: 8).³¹ Her essay Cassandra offers a passionate critique of the life of idleness that was enforced on women of her class and argues for systematic education and meaningful work. Nightingale’s description of the paralysis, thwarted energy and waste of talent characterizing the lives of middle and upper-class Victorian women calls to mind Jewsbury’s portrayal of Alice, her enforced inaction

 For a short overview of Nightingale’s life and achievements, see the informative introduction by Myra Stark (1979). For a detailed biography, see Mark Bostridge (2009).

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and her eventual hysteria.³² “What these [women] suffer – even physically – from the want of such work no one can tell”, Nightingale writes. “The accumulation of nervous energy, which has had nothing to do during the day, makes them feel every night, when they go to bed, as if they were going mad […]” (1979: 43). In a manner that again echoes Jewsbury’s text, Cassandra underscores the importance work has in a fulfilling life: If [women] see and enter into a continuous line of action, with a full and interesting life, with training constantly kept up to the occupation, occupation constantly testing the training […] they are re-tempered, their life is filled, they have found their work, and the means to do it. (Nightingale 1979: 41)

Interestingly, Nightingale identifies acting as a possible way of leading a rewarding life of work: Women, while they are young, sometimes think that an actress’s life is a happy one – not for the sake of the admiration, not for the sake of the fame; but because in the morning she studies, in the evening she embodies those studies: she has the means of testing and correcting them by practice, and of resuming her studies in the morning, to improve the weak parts, remedy the failures, and in the evening try the corrections again. (Nightingale 1979: 41)

 A sense of restless discontent similar to the one plaguing both Nightingale and Jewsbury’s character Alice is also voiced by the protagonist in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in the following passage, which interestingly, is also quoted by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (2001: 58 – 59): “[…] I longed for a power of vision, which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen; […] I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. […] Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented; I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. […] It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex” (Brontë 1985: 140 – 141). Although the orphaned Jane Eyre works as a governess and hence does not lead a life of leisured boredom, she suffers from the limited and limiting gender roles Victorian culture imposes on women.

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After writing Cassandra, Nightingale famously served as a manager of nurses she trained during the Crimean War. Her war effort transformed her into a celebrity, and she continued to work as a celebrated social reformer and pioneer of modern health care. In 1860 she founded a school for nurses and, the following year, another for midwives. By setting up these institutions, she created new professions for women that were both respectable and well-paid in a period when women had hardly any opportunities to train for a profession and make a decent living for themselves (Stark 1979: 2). Similar to Nightingale, Jewsbury’s actress emphasizes the potential that the theatre offers women as a site where they can find fulfilling work. At the same time, however, the text also exhibits a fascination with the sense of power enjoyed by the performer as she is acting in front of large audiences: An actress’s triumph is certainly made visible and tangible, is brought home to her senses in a vivid manner that no other profession admits of; her influence may be short-lived, but it is an infatuation whilst it lasts; and to feel that she is exercising ‘sovereign sway and masterdom’ over a whole assembly, wielding their souls as she chooses, producing what emotions she will, playing upon them as upon some curious instrument, is like being possessed of a magician’s power; the fruits of her successes are all paid into her hand, she, as it were, receives ready money for her genius. (Jewsbury 1994: 206)

In contrast to the descriptions and discussions of the role of the actress mentioned earlier, this passage emphasizes her performance as public appearance and, in doing so, highlights the power she enjoys as a result of her appearance in front of an audience. As the passage underlines, theatrical performances are marked by ephemerality. In return, however, they allow the performer to immediately experience her success as she senses the powerful influence she exercises over her audience while she is performing. In a similar vein, Bianca explains to another character that the applause of her audience gives her immediate proof that her performance has a direct effect on her audience, evoking in them the emotions that she wants them to experience, and that she would not want to exchange the power she has as an actress over her audience for the power of a queen: I do not scruple to confess to you that the applause I receive is sweet, and that I should find it very hard to live without it; it is the seal and token that I have produced the effect I aimed at. […] You do not know the sense of power there is in seeing hundreds of men and women congregated together, and to know that I can make all that assembled multitude laugh, weep, or experience any emotion I please to excite: – there is positive intoxication in it, and I would not change that real power to become a queen, and have to work my will through the cumbrous machinery of a government. I act directly upon my subjects, and the effect follows instantly upon my effort. I see all I produce; and I cannot express to

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you the zest, the intoxication, the delirious enjoyment of a successful performance; it gives a sense of power, that for the time elevates one above mortality. (Jewsbury 1994: 254; original emphasis)

The “positive intoxication” and “delirious enjoyment” that Bianca says she experiences in her theatrical performance remind us of the pleasurable mode of public speaking introduced by Staël’s Corinne. However, while the novel foregrounds both the power and exhilaration Bianca enjoys during her performance, it also underlines that for her, the theatre is more important than herself. As Lord Melton says to her, “you are worthy to possess [power and position], for you use them to noble aims and not to your own aggrandisement and glorification” (Jewsbury 1994: 224). What is at stake in Bianca’s acting is neither a penchant for self-display nor any other personal self-interest. On the contrary, Jewsbury’s performer is free of any narcissistic tendencies, and even as a performer, she is remarkably non-theatrical.³³ In her acting, she follows “a higher aim; I hope to elevate my profession into one of the fine arts, – to see it ennobled, and freed from the meretricious degradation into which it has sunk” (Jewsbury 1994: 254). Rather than using the professional stage as a vehicle for her self-aggrandizement, she acts in the service of the theatre, seeking to establish acting as a legitimate art form. The respectability she aspires to extends not only to her as a performer but also to the theatre as a cultural institution. As a result, her quest recalls the goal of historical actress-managers such as Madame Vestris and Marie Wilton, who endeavoured to establish the theatre as a both respectable and respected social site.³⁴ Like Vestris and Wilton, who crusaded for the social respectability of the professional stage, Jewsbury’s text draws on a rhetorical gesture typical of nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture, namely the idea that moral discourses are a typically feminine preserve. The notion that women are particularly well-suited to wield moral influence was often used to justify the role of women as the guardians of the home, the site where children were formed as moral subjects, but

 As Emily Allen points out, “[…] Bianca must overcome her own natural aversion to display in order to embark on her career” (Allen 2003: 124). When she first participates in the advertising procession of the circus, she is “stunned, bewildered, and ashamed of her conspicuous position, and of the wonder and notice [the circus performers] obtained from the crowd […]” (Jewsbury 1994: 30). Similarly, she experiences stage fright on the evening of her debut at the circus: “When […] she stood for the first time before the blinding lights and the oppressive presence of so many hundred human eyes, her whole being seemed to turn to stone; she would have run away if she could only have moved” (Jewsbury 1994: 32).  On female theatre managers in the Victorian period see for instance Christopher Kent (1977: 99, 104– 105), Jan McDonald (2000: 207– 220) and Jo Robinson (2007).

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could also be used to legitimize a variety of women’s moral interventions in the public sphere, ranging from the temperance movement, to the philanthropic support of ‘fallen women’ and Florence Nightingale’s pioneering health care reform. In The Half Sisters, Bianca follows the advice of her old mentor, a former actor, who urges her to raise the stage from its degenerate state – “It needs to be purified from the sensualism that has defaced it, before it can assume its legitimate rank” (Jewsbury 1994: 161). In helping elevate the theatre to a respectable cultural institution, she effectively turns herself into “its priestess” (Jewsbury 1994: 162) and her profession into “a vocation, a call that requires the abdication of self” (Rosen 1996: 28). If we compare her to the singer La Fornasari, the other female performer in the novel, Bianca’s selfless commitment to a larger cause – the aesthetic and moral reform of the theatre – is thrown into even greater relief. As a minor character, La Fornasari only makes a few short appearances in the text, but like many other female performers who appear as secondary characters in novels, she fulfils an important function by serving as a negative foil.³⁵ Indeed, the Viennese singer is as self-absorbed as Bianca is selfless. As Lord Melton observes, even her performance on stage is affected by her narcissistic self-centredness: “She had a magnificent voice, and showed flashes of genius in her personation of character, but all was marred by the constant intrusion of herself. Music, singing, acting, all seemed nothing but so many vehicles for the glorification of herself” (Jewsbury 1994: 340; original emphasis).³⁶ Rather than lending her voice to the roles she performs, the prima donna uses song and performance for her own individual self-display.³⁷ In fact, by characterizing her as a performer who seems to be interested in the stage as a means for her own self-theatricalization, the novel echoes Conrad Percy in his anti-theatrical rhetoric and rejects the public display of feminine narcissism. What further underlines the self-absorption of La Fornasari is the fact that she has abandoned her own child – a move that

 Other performer figures with this function include the character of Vashti, modelled on the French tragédienne Rachel Félix, in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), or the frivolous French opera dancer and mother of Adèle in Jane Eyre (1847). Another famous case is, of course, Alcharisi in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, who will be discussed in Chapter 5.  Also note the following passage: “She was so largely endowed and organised, that in herself she seemed the epitome of the whole sex; but all her gifts were limited and vulgarised by being centred in herself, and by the total absence of all elevation of thought or feeling” (Jewsbury 1994: 345; my emphasis).  Also see Emily Allen: “Where Bianca is modest, La Fornasari is ‘utterly shameless’; where Bianca is steady and true, La Fornasari is all caprice and performance. Indeed, this ‘meretricious woman’ comes to embody all that is wrong with theatre and theatrical display: vulgarity, corporeality, and deceit” (Allen 2003: 130).

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will be repeated by Alcharisi in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, who is encoded as monstrous because she has violated feminine gender norms by giving away her baby boy in order to be able to pursue her brilliant career as a singer. Importantly, the text offers a description of a performance of La Fornasari and its “singularly unpleasant effect” (Jewsbury 1994: 340) on Lord Melton. Although he finds her beautiful and her voice magnificent, he cannot share the enthusiasm of the audience. On the contrary, “her singing and acting disgust[…] him” (Jewsbury 1994: 340) because of her narcissistic self-display. Conrad Percy, who has also attended the performance, connects La Fornasari to the mythopoetic tradition of the sirens, who draw men to perdition with their dangerously alluring voices, thus describing her as a femme fatale who seduces and ruins men (Jewsbury 1994: 341). Lord Melton replies that rather than captivating, he finds the singer repulsive: “[…] I could not have conceived it possible that any one so beautiful, so gifted, and with a voice I never heard approached (much less equalled), could produce such an utterly disagreeable impression” (Jewsbury 1994: 341). To him she suggests “not the idea of a syren […], but something far less classical”, namely the figure of Delilah, who in the Bible stands for feminine temptation and betrayal: “[…] all the time she was singing with that fierce, cruel, insolent, and yet enticing look, I could think of nothing but Delilah beguiling Samson to betray him to the Philistines” (Jewsbury 1994: 341). With this passage, the novel places more emphasis on La Fornasari’s performance and its effects on the audience than is the case with Bianca. Furthermore, in the case of La Fornasari, the voice is explicitly mentioned, whereas in Bianca’s case it is not.³⁸ With its different representations of the two performers, the novel separates the dangerous performer voice of La Fornasari from Bianca’s pure unselfish motives, which render her power as a performer legitimate. Indeed, the description of La Fornasari condenses some of the most derogatory prejudices against female performers circulating in nineteenth-century culture as if to deflect them from Bianca.³⁹ By suggesting that the singer may be an erotically ruinous voice and characterizing her as a self-absorbed prima donna interested only in herself, the novel not only creates a sharp contrast between

 When it comes to singing, Bianca is even said to have “very little voice” (Jewsbury 1994: 241).  As Lisa Surridge observes with regard to the construction of La Fornasari as Bianca’s negative foil, “Few portraits in Victorian antitheatrical literature are as derogatory as this one” (Surridge 1995: 91). Also see Emily Allen: “The beautiful but nevertheless abject figure of La Fornasari siphons off the damaging effects of public display to purify the transcendent figure of Bianca, a procedure that makes this theatrical half sister both dangerous and necessary” (Allen 2003: 131). As Allen goes on to suggest, the novel makes La Fornasari “liable for all the evils of theatrical excess” (Allen 2003: 131; original emphasis).

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La Fornasari and Bianca, but also makes clear which of the two performers is to be preferred. Bianca is shown to be justified in her pursuit of a theatrical career because she exhibits no self-interest. On the contrary, she helps her ailing mother by becoming a performer and, rather than using the stage as a means for her self-display, puts herself into the service of the theatre. Unlike the Chance sisters in Angela Carter’s postmodern novel Wise Children, who, as we have seen in the introductory chapter, revel in their social marginality as illegitimate semiorphans and disreputable vaudeville performers, Bianca’s endeavours are determined by her aspirations to respectability. For instance, we see her having to assert herself vis-à-vis a theatre manager who has “the character of being very profligate in his conduct towards women” (Jewsbury 1994: 93). However, she not only makes herself sexually unavailable by ignoring “the impertinent familiarity of his look and manner” (Jewsbury 1994: 93), but later in the narrative, she also uses the social influence she gains by being accepted into respectable social circles as a result of her theatrical success in order to elevate the theatre to a worthy art form. Her propriety and selflessness render Jewsbury’s performer a remarkably conventional Victorian heroine. She carves out a stellar career by appearing on the stage, and her individual self-development as an artist and her economic independence as a professional woman remind us of many of the demands formulated by the women’s movement, which was emerging at the time Jewsbury was writing her novel. But her characterization as a selfless woman actually conforms to traditional Victorian norms of femininity. By positioning its protagonist in this conventional way, The Half Sisters suggests a curtailment of the public performer voice both on and off the theatrical stage. Throughout her career as a performer, Bianca serves the theatre, and in the end, she is absorbed into marriage. In both cases she is subsumed under a larger entity. In fact, her selflessness as a performer appears to prepare her for her role as a wife.⁴⁰ The novel’s construction of Bianca as a performer who is simultaneously empowered and unselfish suggests a contradictory treatment of femininity. On the one hand, the novel uses the theatre and the figure of the performer in order to make a plea for the self-perfection of the artistically gifted woman. A similar idea is also at stake in Lord Melton’s statements emphasizing the importance of women’s self-development through education, since this will allow them to gain access to meaningful employment and economic independence (Jewsbury: 1994: 221– 222). Indeed, after her wedding to Melton, Bianca takes charge

 In his text on theatricality and the nineteenth-century novel, David Kurnick (2012: 13) quotes Lauren Chattmann, who argues that certain nineteenth-century theatrical novels, forming a subgenre of domestic fiction, actually prepare their actresses for domestic life.

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of a school in order to help provide young girls with an education (which is what might have saved her sister Alice from her disastrous fate). In emphasizing the importance of women’s education and employment by virtue of its plot, the novel aligns itself with the progressive statements that Bianca and Melton make in their frequent discussions about the social role of women.⁴¹ Yet on the other hand, the text rejects theatricality as a means of feminine narcissistic self-display as is shown by the representation of La Fornasari, whom Melton finds “perfectly hateful” (Jewsbury 1994: 341). Although Jewsbury puts Bianca at the centre of her text (but in contrast to the self-absorbed prima donna La Fornasari), her performer represents a decidedly conventional Victorian femininity because of her modest selflessness. In fact, Jewsbury’s treatment of her protagonist underlines the importance of meaningful and useful employment for women but does not show any interest in the sustained self-assertion of Bianca’s individual voice. Once Bianca has fully realized herself and her talents on the professional stage, she is ready to leave the theatre and run the school founded by Lady Vernon, assisting young girls and women in their self-development. By managing the school and establishing others based on its model, Bianca Pazzi reminds us of Florence Nightingale, who founded the Nightingale School for Nurses at St Thomas Hospital in London and the Training School for Midwives at King’s College Hospital, thus creating professional training opportunities for women. However, whereas Bianca withdraws from public life, Nightingale continued to work with Queen Victoria’s public officials on a daily basis into her old age. Although she never held any official public position, she was recognized and respected as a figure of public and political authority. Nightingale’s contemporaries went as far as to refer to her bedroom as the “little War Office” (Stark 1979: 2– 3). “Even when she was well into her eighties, most official papers on Army sanitation and medical affairs were routinely sent to her for criticism; indeed, when the War Office misplaced a document, they often sent over to Florence Nightingale for her copy” (Stark 1979: 3). In 1907 her work in and for the public was honoured when she was given the Order of Merit by King Edward VII, which was the first time that a woman had received this award (Stark 1979: 3). In her career, Nightingale had managed to fuse a traditional feminine image of altruistic care with the socially influential role and exceptional reputation she enjoyed in the public eye.  The author Geraldine Jewsbury, who fashioned herself in an androgynous manner, does not seem to have joined the most radical feminists on the ‘Woman Question’ (Lewis 2003: 68 – 69). However, she did put emphasis on work as a source of empowerment and argued that “the ‘right to labour’ is the noblest franchise women have yet conquered. […] This is the true key to their ‘enfranchisement’” (quoted in Surridge 1995: 88).

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A similar example in the area of the professional theatre would be Jenny Lind, one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century singers. After causing a veritable ‘Lindomania’ in Europe and America, Lind left the operatic stage and thus abandoned the public visibility it provided to her as an actress. Instead, she chose to pursue a career in the far less theatrical discipline of oratorio and concert singing, to become a professor of singing in London and to devote herself to a range of philanthropic causes, especially the founding of schools in her native country of Sweden. However, Jewsbury does not grant her heroine a comparable sphere of activity that would allow her to remain in the public world. Her figuration of the performer as a professional but ultimately selfless woman, who eventually withdraws from public life, is further reinforced by an episode towards the end of the novel. Before her marriage, Bianca becomes the mentor of a particularly gifted young girl and has her trained for a professional career as a singer; “pleased at such a good opportunity of putting some theories of her own into practice, about the training of women for a profession”, she helps put the young girl “in the way of making herself independent” (Jewsbury 1994: 358). Although Bianca is about to leave the stage, her legacy as a professional performer will live on in Clara, not unlike Corinne’s voice, which survives in her niece. Significantly, however, the voice of the young singer turns out to be just as selfless and conventional as Bianca’s. When Clara embarks on her stage career, she does so as the wife of her former music teacher, which allows her to appear in public with “the sanction and protection of a husband” (Jewsbury 1994: 377). Even more importantly, we learn at the end of the novel that like her mentor, the young singer serves a higher purpose. “Clara’s voice kept its promise; […] there was every reason to expect that she would take the lead amongst English singers […] and raise the credit of the English school” (Jewsbury 1994: 396). What speaks in favour of this performer is again not her individual voice but her dedicated service in the interest of a higher cultural goal. As we have seen in this chapter, Staël’s Corinne, or Italy emphasizes the selfaggrandizement of its heroine as well as the pleasure she takes in her boundless speaking and singing. The voice of Staël’s performer is the voice of an entire cultural space; she speaks for and to Italy, and Italy gives her both a public voice and visibility. In Jewsbury’s novel, the voice of the performer is much more limited to the theatre, and Bianca devotes herself to her profession in a selfless way. Compared to the Romantic novel that exalts its genius performer voice in a grand manner, the Victorian refiguration treats the prominent public visibility of the professional performer as far more ambivalent. Although the actress undeniably has a voice of her own in public, Bianca must not appear as a narcissistically self-absorbed figure. This is the reason why she is subsumed under larger entities; she serves the theatre as a cultural institution and eventually leaves the

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stage in order to enter into marriage. However, the novel simultaneously invokes the notion of the professional actress as a role model of independent femininity – an idea which, as we know from women such as Florence Nightingale, Helen Taylor and Eleanor Marx, also circulated in Victorian culture. What is important here is the fact that the professional theatre provides Bianca with a public stage for her self-empowerment; it represents a cultural site where, following her Victorian work ethic, she can develop and perfect her talent as well as herself as a person in a productive and fulfilling way. In The Half Sisters Jewsbury narrativizes the purposeful training and meaningful employment that Nightingale demands in Cassandra. Indeed, Bianca’s relentless tenacity as a performer anticipates Nightingale’s description of the actress as someone who finds fulfilment through the constant refining of her professional skills. Having started out by asking how the figure of the women performing in public that is developed by Staël resurfaces in Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, we can now say that her British performer novel uses this figure as an empowering model. By using the professional stage as a site of individual development, Jewsbury’s actress can be seen to fulfil one of the core demands of the Victorian women’s movement, namely women’s need for meaningful employment. At the same time, we can also note an important difference in the way in which the two heroines are represented. While Staël repeatedly describes the actual public appearances that Corinne makes in front of an audience, Jewsbury foregrounds the private discussions of the figure of the professional woman but not her public voice. Interestingly, the text describes only the voice of the singer La Fornasari, whose self-absorption serves as a negative counterexample. The voice of the narcissistic singer is thus foregrounded, while the voice of the selfless Bianca is not given any description. Moreover, although Bianca is said to have become a nationally acclaimed actress, she is never shown to actually perform in this role. Compared to Staël’s novel, Jewsbury’s text appears to give its performer far less public visibility. Indeed, in contrast to Corinne, whose last song is staged as a grand public performance, Bianca is not granted a comparable heroic exit from the theatre stage. Instead of showing her in one final performance, the text simply refers to the newspaper announcements of her marriage. All of this renders Jewsbury’s professional performer more mundane and conventional compared to Staël’s extraordinary Romantic genius. The way in which she is curtailed both by her marriage and the text’s avoidance of her actual public voice refers us to the ambivalent position that the female performer occupies in the cultural imaginary of the Victorian period. The fact that the text states Bianca’s symbolic empowerment but never actually demonstrates how this empowerment plays itself out in an actual stage performance can be read in reference to this cultural ambivalence. On the one hand, Bianca’s professional car-

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eer reminds us of Victorian women like Florence Nightingale, Helen Taylor and Eleanor Marx, who viewed the actress as a positive role model. On the other hand, the novel’s elision of her actual performances – and thus of her public visibility – is characteristic of Victorian cultural anxieties surrounding the female performer. This ambivalence will return in various forms in the examples discussed in the following chapters.

3 Visionary Preaching in Britain and America Germaine de Staël’s heroine Corinne forms an important model for performers in different cultural domains. In the previous chapter, we explored the aftereffects which Staël’s protagonist produces in The Half Sisters, Geraldine Jewsbury’s Victorian novel about a professional actress. In this chapter, we return to Corinne, or Italy as a founding text for the treatment of female performer figures in nineteenth-century British and American literature. However, this time the focus is on the voice of the female preacher. More specifically, the discussion in this chapter traces the cultural survival of Corinne’s spiritual voice by examining how George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859) and Margaret Fuller’s feminist manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) refigure her divine mediumship as well as her divine status in their construction of the feminine preaching voice. The Romantic heroine of Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne or Italy (1807) is not just a gifted theatrical actress and improviser, but she is also represented as an extraordinary spiritual voice. Just as she is about to be crowned at the Capitol after delivering her improvisation on Italy, the protagonist is described as “an inspired priestess, joyously devoting herself to the cult of genius” (Staël 1987: 32). Furthermore, the novel time and again refers to the mythopoetic figurations of the ancient oracle and the sibyl. The reference to these ancient spiritual women figures, both of whom prophesy under the influence of a deity, underscores Corinne’s status as a feminine voice that is divinely inspired and, in turn, inspires others. To be more precise, Corinne is a divine medium who has access to the spiritual realm as well as the power to animate the world for those surrounding her. As one character puts it: The universe of my imagination […] is composed of the palaces I have visited with her, the music we have heard together, the paintings she has shown me, the books she has brought me to understand. In all these objects is a spark of her life, and if I had to live far away from her, I would want at least to surround myself with them, sure that nowhere else would I find that trace of fire, that trace of herself, as it were, which she had left in them. (Staël 1987: 24).

Elsewhere, a similar observation is made by another character who notes that “she alone brings life” (Staël 1987: 170). For these figures, the universe is animated, if not created, by Corinne’s “spark” of life (Staël 1987: 24). This is because she perceives the world in an intensified fashion and, in fact, energizes its objects through her visionary power. Corinne acts as an intermediary between the spiritual and the material, and she is also a medium who makes others see the world through the lens of her https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-004

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divine vision. In retrospect, Staël’s early Romantic heroine reminds us of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, in his later “Defence of Poetry” (1821/1840), famously describes poets as “prophets” and “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley 1991: 207, 233). Shelley’s poets are defined by the fact that they communicate their heightened aesthetic experience to others, who do not have the same divinatory insight. Corinne aestheticizes the world in a similar way. She transmits its hidden beauties to the audiences that witness her public improvisations as well as to individuals, notably her lover Oswald, to whom she shows Italy’s treasure of landscapes and artworks. In the previous chapter, we saw how her voice reanimates Italy and creates a national cultural space avant-la-lettre. Yet the visionary power of the Romantic artist also enables her to make present what is inaccessible to others: the realm of the divine, the spiritual and otherworldly. For a discussion of Corinne’s spiritual voice, it is important to note that, as an artist, she derives her creative power from her inspiration as a divine medium. Indeed, what renders Staël’s poet-prophetess unusual is the fact that she occupies the positions of the poetic muse and the productive creator at one and the same time. It is because she conceives of herself as a medium transmitting a divine spirit that she has agency and can thus shape both herself as an artist figure and the way in which others perceive the world around them. In contrast to traditional models of masculine artistic creativity, where the artist tends to appropriate the source of his inspiration – nature, materiality and/or femininity – so that he can claim all creative power for himself, Corinne’s voice neither effaces nor supersedes her source of inspiration.¹ On the contrary, instead of empowering herself by having her art replace, or even obliterate, what inspires her, Corinne serves as both her own muse and artwork in addition to giving birth to herself as an artist. It is because as a Gesamtkunstwerk Corinne merges with her sources of inspiration – Italy, its cultural past and natural landscapes – that her voice diffuses everywhere and enlivens the world through the “spark of her life […] that trace of fire, that trace of herself” (Staël 1987: 24). It is not just that Corinne and her world are permeated by a divine spirit. She is herself exalted as a god-like presence when in the end her voice dissolves into pure spirit. Having introduced its heroine through the grand public scene of her coronation at the Capitol, the novel concludes with her equally glorious apotheosis. Corinne’s death at the close of the text is often read as an act of self-sacrifice for the sake of tragic love. But her demise actually coincides with a highly

 For discussions of the traditional model of masculine artistic creativity, see Elisabeth Bronfen in Over Her Dead Body (1992b) as well as Sigrid Weigel (1996) and Corina Caduff (2003).

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effective diffusion and dispersal of her voice. Like her improvisations, her last song is again performed in public. However, as already mentioned in the previous chapter, what is different this time is the fact that it is a young girl who sings Corinne’s verse instead of herself. As a result, the passage traces the separation of her voice from her body and goes as far as to culminate in a complete dissolution as well as a highly effective dispersal of Corinne. As she witnesses the public performance of her last song as a veiled figure, as a mere “shadow” and “apparition” (Staël 1987: 415), Staël’s heroine passes into the evanescent, the immaterial and ghostly. Separated from her body, her voice becomes pure breath, pure spirit. By transforming into a spiritual presence that is as omnipresent as it is immaterial, Corinne’s voice inspires the young girl singing her verse. At the same time, the spirit of her voice will live on in her niece Juliette, who will continue to sing the songs she taught her to deliver, as well as her half-sister Lucile, who has promised to keep her memory alive. During her lifetime, the genius improviser has absorbed the past of Italy as a myriad of cultural traces and inspirations without suffering from any “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1973). After her death, we can surmise, her voice will keep circulating as the energy of pure breath and animating inspiration. Much like her improvisations, which once connected the cultural past of Italy with its present and future, her posthumous ‘voice’ will blur the boundary between the living and the dead because she will continue to inspire other characters as a disembodied presence. The ‘spirit’ of Staël’s performer points to two interrelated aspects that are important for my reading of feminine self-presentations in relation to the divine in this chapter. In the final scene of her apotheosis, Corinne herself rises to divine status as she dissolves into spirit, while elsewhere in the text her charismatic spiritual voice serves as a medium of the divine. How do these two manifestations of the divine – the individual performer voice that acts as a medium of the divine and that forms a presence that is itself divine – live on in other performer texts? How do later texts refigure Corinne’s inspiration by the divine, but also the uplifting effect she has on other characters? And how do they reimagine the power of her spiritual voice to animate and thus transform the world? George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede and Margaret Fuller’s feminist essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century both feature female performers who preach to public audiences and inspire others, notably women, through their religious speech. Eliot’s novel refers to Corinne’s role as a divine intermediary by emphasizing the religious mediumship of its female performer figure. As we shall see, Eliot’s Methodist preacher Dinah Morris is authorized in her preaching by an extraordinary divine calling, which is why she can speak with a self-assured voice. In the case of Margaret Fuller’s text, which constitutes the first feminist manifesto

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written in America, it is the author herself who appears as a preaching voice. Fuller refigures the divine status of Staël’s star performer by constructing herself as a voice that is itself divine. Professing her faith in the divine identity of the self, she both speaks as a divine voice and aims to convince women of the divine worth they have as individuals. As already suggested by my brief reading of Corinne as a spiritual performer, a discussion of voice in the religious domain inevitably refers us to issues regarding inspiration and mediumship. At the same time, it also brings into play the effect and energy that are produced by charismatic spiritual speech. The figure of the woman preacher raises questions as to how exactly her voice relates to the divine. Is her voice turned into a mere vehicle and thus subsumed under the divine message that is proclaimed through her, or is it precisely because of her divine inspiration that she can speak with authority and a spiritual voice of her own? However, what is at issue is not just the voice of the preacher. More often than not, the source of divine inspiration is itself represented as a voice in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here subjects can hear God as a voice that addresses and potentially speaks both in and through them. What is more, in Judeo-Christian theology, the voice of God refers individuals to the symbolic law as the central aspect that holds culture together and hooks them into their respective community. The crucial reference here is of course the Book of Moses. As suggested by the role Moses plays as the intermediary between God and the people of Israel, the divine law must be transmitted by the human voice of the divinely inspired prophet. As the only direct witness of God’s revelation, Moses is needed as a messenger who conveys the law to the people of Israel in the form of the Ten Commandments. A similar convergence of the voice with an extreme manifestation of the symbolic law can also be found in the Prophetic Books of the Old Testament. According to the classic narrative, the individual future prophet hears the voice of God as he calls on him to become a vehicle of the divine law, often against his initial will.² Yet the biblical  The Prophetic Books typically begin with an account of how the Word of God ‘came’ to the respective prophet. Jeremiah, for instance, is told by the Lord that he was already ordained as prophet before his birth. When the prophet protests that he cannot speak, the divine word is literally put into his mouth: “Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth” (Jeremiah 1:9). After seeing visions of God, Ezekiel is inspired by the Word of God in an equally literal way, namely in the form of a roll of writing that he is given to eat and ingest: “And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake to me. […] And when I looked, behold, an [sic] hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without […]. Moreover, he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak to the house of Israel. So I opened

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prophet is presented with no choice: He has to subject himself to the supreme authority of God and assume leadership as a spiritual voice. It is because they respond to their interpellation as bearers of a divine message that prophets are authorized to address and, if necessary, rebuke and criticize the community in the name of God. For women preachers, the mythopoetic figuration of the prophet represents a particularly powerful rhetoric because it allows them to present themselves as leading figures in a cultural domain which has often sought to exclude and silence women’s voices. In spite of the fact that the Bible features a number of vocal female leaders,³ most Christian denominations and institutions in the centuries leading up to and including the nineteenth century put official bans on women’s public religious articulations. The Roman Church, for instance, went as far as to prohibit female voices from participating in church music performed outside of women’s convents. From the sixteenth until the eighteenth century, the soprano and alto parts were sung by castrati (Theilacker 1989: 8). By banning women’s voices from public congregation assemblies, religious organizations took their cue from Paul’s injunction against women’s public religious speech – “Let your women keep silence in the churches” (1 Corinthians 14:34)⁴ – rather than his plea for spiritual equality before the divine – “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). A number of non-conformist sects, notably the Quakers as well as the Methodist and Evangelical revivalist movements, which flourished in eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury England and America, did authorize their mostly lower-class women preachers to speak in public.⁵ Most other religious groups, however, made it ex-

my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll. And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness” (Ezekiel 2:2– 3:3; original emphasis).  Note for instance the prophet and poet Miriam. Miriam saves her baby brother Moses, leads the community of women in the desert during the Exodus from Egypt, and sings in public to express thanks for the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery to freedom (Exodus 2:1– 10, Exodus 15:20 – 21). She also questions the authority of her brother Moses, the religious leader and prophet, for which she is punished with a disease that turns her skin leprous (Numbers 12). Another example is the judge, poet and prophet Deborah, who leads the people of Israel and instigates and indeed supervises a war in the name of God (Judges 4:1– 16, Judges 5:1– 23).  Also note Paul’s insistence on women’s silence and disempowerment in 1 Timothy: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (2:11– 2:12).  See Catherine Brekus (1998) for a reconstruction of the largely forgotten tradition of the American evangelical women preachers during the First and the Second Awakening, the reviv-

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tremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, for women to enter the ministry and speak from the pulpit. Nevertheless, as is suggested by the early example of prominent figures such as Hildegard von Bingen and Joan of Arc,⁶ women time and again appropriated religious discourses and referred to their divine inspiration so as to legitimize their spiritual leadership roles. Many of them made the powerful claim that they saw visions and heard voices and were therefore legitimized by a higher law to proclaim the Word and Will of God. The reason why the prophetic voice is rhetorically so attractive and effective for women is the fact that it allows spiritual performers to circumvent official church conventions and instead place emphasis on the personal experience of the divine and the direct relation between individual consciousness and God. In fact, the figure of the divinely inspired woman prophet implies an intriguing transfer between psychological introspection and public forms of selfhood. The divine voice which the subject either hears or finds within herself not only prompts her to reflect on her subjectivity and consciousness in relation to the divine, but it can also motivate her to enter the public sphere and address others as a religious leader. Social gender norms regulating feminine speech and public participation are thus suspended by a divine force and a spiritual law. Instead of acting as a mere vessel for a divine voice as is the case with the ancient oracle, whose frenzied utterances had to be interpreted by religious authorities, the woman prophet, by proclaiming the divine Word, speaks for the symbolic law in the religious congregation which she addresses as a teacher and preacher.⁷

alist movements which took place between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. On the Methodist women preachers, who were active in Britain during the same time period, see Susie Steinbach (2005: 163 – 167) and Christine Krueger (1992: 3 – 82). Women’s leading roles in a wide range of non-conformist religious movements in the US (including Shakerism, Pentecostalism, the Theosophical movement among others) are discussed in the interdisciplinary volume Women’s Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream edited by Catherine Wessinger (1993).  Both of these medieval saints form powerful examples of feminine religious expression on the European Continent. In the case of Hildegard von Bingen, it was her identification as a prophet that gave rise to her equally charismatic and self-confident self-presentation. As well as delivering sermons as a travelling preacher, composing church music and heading a convent as abbess, Hildegard had numerous mystical visions, which she eventually wrote down after being told to do so by a divine voice. It was thanks to her divine inspiration that she was recognized by religious and worldly authorities as a spiritual leader and that she was able to both advise but also criticize and exhort renowned contemporaries. Similarly, Joan of Arc referred to her visions of God, who told her to reclaim her homeland from the domination of the English. Her self-definition as a divine envoy allowed her to assume the role of both spiritual and military leader.  See Steven Connor’s chapter “Earth, Breath, Frenzy: The Delphic Oracle” in Dumbstruck (2000: 51– 74) for a discussion of how the ancient oracle is ventriloquized by a divine source.

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She has a voice in her community because her divine calling provides her not only with spiritual charisma, but also with a position of authority that legitimizes her intervention in social and/or political debates. Thanks to her prophetic role, she is able to publicly express her opinion on worldly affairs.⁸ Moreover, her authority allows her to guide her community as a spiritual leader. The mythopoetic figuration of the prophet allows us to trace how the feminine preaching voices in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century justify their giving sermons, and how they interact with their audiences as spiritual leaders. In Eliot’s novel, the prophetic role empowers the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris to present herself as a passive vessel of a divine voice and, at the same time, speak with authority as she preaches the gospel and reprimands individual members of her congregation. Margaret Fuller appears to believe that she does not need to be authorized by the voice of God because she finds a divine source within herself. But she, too, speaks as a prophet: Her feminist manifesto criticizes an imperfect social order and, at the same time, prophesies a glorious future by calling for a spiritual rebirth of women as individuals as well as a fundamental regeneration of American society at large.⁹ Al-

 A particularly compelling historical example of feminine spiritual involvement in the political sphere is provided by Ina Schabert. As Schabert (1997: 186 – 192) points out, there were several Puritan women prophets and preachers who raised their voices and positioned themselves as religious leaders in the period of the English Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Their oral and written ‘prophecies’, which consisted of a hybrid textual mix of prophetic predictions, biblical interpretations, moral appeals, mystical visions and elements of spiritual autobiography, constituted a powerful form of public intervention. Modelling themselves on the Old Testament prophets, the Puritan women prophets could circumvent the institutional authority of ministers and priests and present themselves instead as direct recipients of the Word of God. On the one hand, they argued, in keeping with traditional notions of feminine weakness, that their bodies were nothing but the earthly material instruments transcribing the voice of God. On the other hand, it was precisely their divine mediumship that provided them with the justification and authorization they needed to intervene in public affairs and articulate their ideological viewpoints and political convictions with impunity. Disappointed by Cromwell’s regime, they gave full vent to their discontent and demanded revolutionary change, all the while grounding their statements in divine authorship.  Although the adversities in colonial America initially meant that women were on a more equal footing with men in their everyday lives, women in America were not recognized as independent individuals by the law (see Karl 2011: 32). The equality and “unalienable rights” mentioned in the “Declaration of Independence” only applied to white men. It was out of the abolitionist movement, in which women learned to write petitions and hold speeches, that the American women’s movement emerged. As in Britain, the core demands of the women’s movement concerned women’s property rights, divorce and custody laws, access to education, and the right to vote. For more detailed discussions of the history of the American woman’s rights movement

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though the two texts configure the relation between the individual and the divine in different ways, the preacher figure Eliot presents in her novel and the spiritual voice Fuller constructs in her essay have both spiritual and social authority thanks to their identification with the prophetic role. Yet issues of authorization and authority do not pertain to the textual level alone. The spiritual authorization of the performer voices in these texts also raises the question of how Eliot and Fuller legitimize the voices they have as female authors articulating themselves as social critics. How do the textual voices which these two writers animate in and through their writing correlate with the public voices they create for themselves as writers? Eliot and Fuller refer to feminine religious leadership in a cultural context that is marked by a profound feminization of religion.¹⁰ Nineteenth-century gender norms posited a close connection between femininity and spirituality.¹¹ Clearly there was already a long-standing tradition which encoded religious piety as feminine. However, nineteenth-century culture offered an unprecedented array of opportunities and practices as well as a massive expansion of female religious activity. Women showed religious commitment, for example, as clergymen’s wives, daughters and sisters, who fulfilled semi-official duties in pastoral care and religious welfare; as conveners of prayer meetings; teachers of Bible classes for girls; missionaries at home and overseas; writers of religious tracts; philanthropists in voluntary associations and charitable campaigns; professional religious ‘sisters’ in all-female communities, which often ran homes for ‘fallen’ women; or as spiritualist mediums, who led séances and communicated with the dead.¹² The notion of women’s privileged access to the spiritual and their allegedly innate superior morality could be used to promote both radical and conservative

see Karl (2011: 32– 48), Stansell (2011), Bolt (2004), Flexner and Fitzpatrick (1996), as well as Matthews (1994). Also see my discussion in Chapter 4 on “American Political Speakers”.  On the feminization of nineteenth-century religion and culture see Barbara Welter (1974), Ann Douglas (1977) and Sue Morgan (2002: 1– 19).  This is not to disregard the old opposition in Western religious thinking between feminine carnality and masculine spirituality. There is, however, an important shift in nineteenth-century culture, as a result of which femininity comes to be aligned with a privileged access to the realm of imagination, emotion, the unconscious, the mystical as well as the spiritual.  See Susie Steinbach (2005: 153 – 171) for a survey of the various opportunities and roles that were open to women in the religious sphere, Eileen Janes Yeo (1998b) for an analysis of both the religious activities and rhetorics of women in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as Alex Owen (1990) and Ann Braude (2001) for in-depth discussions of spiritualism and the suggestive ways in which the spiritualist vogue intersected with the women’s movement in Britain and the United States.

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agendas. Especially middle-class wives and mothers could be pushed back even further into the domestic sphere by the argument that, sheltered from the aggressive and potentially corrupting world of business and politics, the home was the privileged space of religiosity, and woman the guardian of the family’s faith (Steinbach 2005: 151– 152). At the same time, the ideology of feminine moral refinement could be used to justify activities in the public sphere (Steinbach 2005: 147). This included women’s attempts to regenerate the social order and renew the world by civilizing the public sphere and the nation at large. In the early twentieth century, the suffragettes invoked this tradition as they presented their militant struggle for women’s political participation as a moral mission and crusade of a morally superior femininity.¹³ Women’s increased religious activity in the nineteenth century did not necessarily give them a public voice and/or a leading role. While women were religiously more active than men (Steinbach 2005: 141) and constituted the majority of church congregations (Welter 1974: 141, Morgan 2002: 1), the clergy of the mainstream churches still remained male. However, a number of women did become visible and audible thanks to their roles as charismatic religious leaders. Among the most vocal female religious leaders were the lower-class itinerant preachers who, like Eliot’s Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, were recognized as charismatic authorities by their non-conformist evangelical sects.¹⁴ They also included women activists in the reform movements who, like Fuller in her feminist manifesto, grounded their political claims in the notion of spiritual equality. A few very radical women, finally, even presented themselves as selfappointed female messiahs. As well as declaring themselves as divine, they posited the vision of a female Christian saviour.¹⁵

 See Melanie Phillips (2004), who traces how moral discourses were harnessed by the campaign for women’s rights throughout its history from Mary Wollstonecraft to the suffragette movement.  For a discussion of non-conformist women preachers, see again Brekus (1998), Steinbach (2005: 163 – 168) and Krueger (1992: 3 – 82).  Alex Owen writes that belief in a female messiah was “an ancient heresy” and “a consistent theme” in millenarian sects in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century (Owen 1990: 12). One of the most celebrated figures in this context was Joanna Southcott (1750 – 1814), a Methodist upholstress and servant from Devonshire who heard voices that told her that she was the saviour. Initially mocked by other members of her congregation, she not only wrote a tract about herself and went to London to preach but also claimed in 1813 that she was pregnant with a new messiah. As Susie Steinbach suggests, Southcott’s “alleged pregnancy meant that she was the ultimate woman as well as redeemer, and that the two roles were intimately linked” (Steinbach 2005: 163). By the time of her death Southcott had 100,000 followers in London and thousands more in industrialized northern England (Steinbach 2005: 162, Owen 1990: 13). On the concept of

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The religious feminine voices in Eliot’s novel and Fuller’s essay are exceptional not just because of their spiritual charisma but also because of their position in the literary landscape. While novels of the period frequently associate their female characters with domestic forms of piety, Eliot and Fuller both connect feminine spirituality with public performance.¹⁶ Similar to the Prophetic Books, in which future prophets respond to their divine calling, both texts work with the notion that individual women discover something in themselves which allows them to find their voice in their respective communities and the idea that charismatic leadership in the public sphere is nourished by a discourse of interiority. At the same time, Eliot and Fuller’s texts treat the sustainability of the feminine spiritual voice speaking in public in different ways. At the end of Adam Bede, the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris gives up her public preaching, similar to the way in which the actress Bianca in Jewsbury’s novel leaves the theatre stage in order to get married. Despite her divine call, Dinah retreats to the domestic sphere because her Methodist denomination no longer sanctions any women preachers. That is, George Eliot’s preacher enjoys considerable agency and authority as long as she has the support of her religious community, but

a female saviour and the identification of women with the suffering and innocence of the crucified Christ, see Barbara Welter (1974: 140 – 141).  One of the most prominent examples of feminine piety in nineteenth-century fiction is Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In her classic study The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas notes that “Stowe intended Little Eva’s patient and protracted death as an exemplum of religious faith, but it does not operate exclusively as such. […] her religious significance comes not only from her own extreme religiosity but also from the protective veneration it arouses in the other characters in the book, and presumably in her readers” (Douglas 1977: 4). Similar figurations of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity can be found in the figure of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre (1847) and Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Literally consumed by her consumptive illness, Brontë’s figure of Helen calmly accepts her death, strengthened by her belief in God and an eternal afterlife, an attitude which contrasts with Jane Eyre’s earlier fear of death and ghosts but also with her ‘pilgrimage’ which she undergoes as a resilient Christ-figure. Dickens’s Little Nell also dies a selfless death and, in so doing, evokes a sentimental response similar to Little Eva in Stowe’s novel. Not only are all of these religious female figures young girls, but it is because of their Christlike suffering, their bodily weakness and their eventual death that they turn into angelic messengers of the divine. The message that is transported through these pious figures is one of spiritual self-sacrifice and requires that the respective girl dies gracefully and thus turns into a mute corpse rather than raising her voice as a public preacher. Another spiritual rhetoric can be found at the end of Stowe’s anti-slavery novel. In the final paragraphs of the last chapter entitled “Concluding Remarks”, the writer refers to the appearance of Christ and, in so doing, adopts a preaching mode frequently found in abolitionist speeches, to which I will return in my discussion of Margaret Fuller later in this chapter.

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her public voice is eventually silenced by the patriarchal decree of a religious institution. The spiritual voice envisaged by Margaret Fuller, on the other hand, is not dependent on any institutional legitimation. Quite on the contrary, her feminist manifesto promises a radical transformation of the social and political world, thus prophesying the birth of a new moral order based on the self-reliance of women and their spiritual voices. Adam Bede and Woman in the Nineteenth Century offer different notions of divine inspiration, and the texts are diametrically opposed in their answers to the question of whether or not the woman preacher needs the support of a religious institution. Yet they both invoke the type of feminine communion Staël develops towards the end of her novel. Like most performer figures discussed in this book, Corinne, through much of her performing career, addresses audiences that are, for the most part, male. Significantly, however, it is her inspiration of other female characters and their voices at the close of the novel that becomes prominent in the two examples analysed in this chapter. Both texts discussed in the following foreground dialogic settings in which their female spiritual voices enter into communion with other women. This suggests that, in contrast to the other cultural domains discussed in this book, namely politics and the professional theatre, religion is treated by these performer texts as a decidedly feminine realm. Similar to Corinne, who makes her most lasting impression on her half-sister and niece, the performers in these examples primarily address other women. Indeed, what is significant is not just the fact that in their attempt to contribute to the spiritual well-being of other women, the spiritual performers in question stand in a particularly close and intimate rapport with their female addressees. What is even more important is that as feminine voices that are inspired by the divine – regardless of whether the subject locates the source of inspiration in herself as an individual or in a divine authority that is situated elsewhere – the spiritual performers of these texts seek to teach other women how they can gain control of their lives. In other words, they address and speak to other women in order to empower these women to attain a ‘voice’ of their own.

3.1 Self-Authorization through the Divine Word: George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher in George Eliot’s first full-length novel Adam Bede (1859), represents an extraordinary voice in both nineteenth-century narrative fiction, in which she represents the only female figure with a divine call to preach in public, and in the text itself, where she occupies a position of spiritual authority. Eliot’s preacher is absent from large portions of the text, and the

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novel’s title puts emphasis on Adam Bede, a carpenter, who is much admired and respected by the other characters for his intelligence and integrity. But no other character in the novel has as much vocal presence as Dinah Morris, whose preaching voice is unparalleled, in both its spiritual and rhetorical power. The crucial role of her divinely inspired voice is compellingly foregrounded by her two major speeches and the fact that they simultaneously form the two core scenes with which Eliot frames her novel. The first of these two scenes, which introduces the character of Dinah Morris, is characterized by the markedly public performance of her voice. The passage in question describes – predominantly through the perspective of a passing stranger (a magistrate, as the reader learns much later in the text) – how the young working-class preacher speaks from her makeshift pulpit on the village green and exhorts her vast audience to listen to the message of the gospel. Her sermon runs the whole gamut from ordinary conversation when she talks about personal experiences to visionary ecstatic oratory when she asserts that Christ is corporeally present here and now. The delivery of her sermon, which uses no bodily gestures but draws all its energy from the inflections of her voice, produces responsive sighs and groans among the Methodists and one convert among the more sceptical villagers. Towards the end of Dinah’s open-air preaching, Bessy Cranage, the villager whom she reprimands for her vanity, wrenches off her large round earrings, adorned with false garnets, throws them away and breaks out into loud sobs in the presence of the entire congregation. In stark contrast to this public scene, which is illuminated by the reddening light of the evening sun and takes place in the wide-open space of the village green, the second of the two major scenes takes us into an altogether different chronotope, because of both its nocturnal setting and its decidedly intimate quality. The magistrate, who observed the first scene as the anonymous stranger, admits Dinah Morris to the secluded prison cell of Hetty Sorrel, her cousin, who is orphaned like herself and who has been sentenced to death for killing her newborn child. With the reader as the only witness, Dinah speaks to and prays with Hetty all night. The utter darkness in the cell eclipses the visual field, thus giving prominence and directing the reader’s attention to the voices of the two young women. At the same time, Eliot also achieves a powerful effect by contrasting the confined setting of the prison cell with the liberation of both the soul and the voice of Hetty. It is thanks to Dinah’s compassionate voice that Hetty, who has not been able to talk about the circumstances leading up to her child’s death, can eventually tell her own story.

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Figure 7: Dinah Morris preaching on Hayslop Green, 1861 by Edward H. Corbould

Voices play a prominent role throughout Adam Bede. ¹⁷ In keeping with Eliot’s realist project, the novel foregrounds the dialects and idiolects of its various characters who live in Hayslope, a fictional village in the Midlands, the provincial region where Eliot herself came from.¹⁸ By injecting the speech of the in For an overview of the significance of voice in Eliot’s novels, see Delia da Sousa Correa (2014).  The emphasis of the novel on vocal sound is evident from the very beginning. The first chapter opens with a description of a carpenter workshop and the voice of Adam Bede singing a hymn. His “sonorous voice” is described as a “strong barytone”, coming from “a broad chest”

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dividual members of the rural community with both idiosyncratic and local colour, the novel draws attention to ordinary people from a geographic area and a social segment that were usually not heard in literature (Cunningham 1996: viii). However, if we move beyond the concrete sound quality of these voices and consider which characters are granted agency in and through their speech, Adam Bede turns out to be a novel that gives a voice above all to its female figures. As well as primarily concerning itself with women’s stories (Cunningham 1996: xvi), Eliot’s text puts the literal voicing of their perspectives front and centre. As mentioned above, the novel begins with the powerful appearance Dinah Morris makes as a religious leader on the village green and reaches its climax in the vocal empowerment of both Dinah and Hetty in the confined space of the prison cell.¹⁹ Despite her long absences, which take her to the bleak industrial centre of Snowfield, where she works in a cotton-mill and ministers to the poor, the sick, and the dying, Dinah’s voice enters into a resonant dialogue with other character voices. It is thanks to her rhetoric and the tone of her “sweet treble voice” (Eliot 1996: 108) that Dinah manages to console and/or convert other women and, in some cases, succeeds in giving them a voice. At the same time, questions of feminine vocality inflect the novel not just on the diegetic level of the text. What is at stake is not only the voice the novel gives to its women characters, but also the voice George Eliot has as an author. As we explore the remarkable preaching voice of Dinah Morris, it is important to bear in mind that, as the first novel George Eliot wrote, Adam Bede marks the beginning of her career as a novelist.²⁰ Before reinventing herself as an author, Mary Ann Evans worked as an editor and translator for many years and assumed her masculine pseudonym George Eliot in 1858, when she published her story collection Scenes of Clerical Life. But it was with the publication of Adam Bede in 1859 and the novel’s popular success that she became a renowned novelist. In fact, we can go as far as to say that Eliot’s public voice as an author came into being as a result of her creating a fictional instance of the female public voice in the character of her female preacher. Or put differently, the construction

(Eliot 1996: 5 – 6). In the second chapter, the landlord of the Donnithorne Arms is said to talk “in a treble and wheezy voice, with a slightly mincing accent” (Eliot 1996: 15). As he adds himself, he is not from the region and does not speak its dialect, which is difficult to understand for the gentry, among whom he has been brought up. These are only just two examples of the novel’s frequent evocation and description of vocal sounds.  Another very vocal female character is Aunt Poyser, the only other remaining relative of the two cousins, Dinah and Hetty.  This is a point which both Valentine Cunningham (1996: viii–x) and Margaret Reynolds (2008: xvii, xxxv) make and expand on in their respective readings of the novel.

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of Dinah Morris as a public religious voice runs parallel to George Eliot’s self-invention as an author. What connects the real author and the fictional preacher figure is the question of their respective self-authorization. How does Dinah Morris legitimate herself as a female public speaker, and how does George Eliot develop her public voice as an author? The discussion of Eliot’s first novel Adam Bede in this chapter will show how at the beginning of her literary career as an author of narrative fiction, the novelist constructs the preacher Dinah Morris in order to reflect on the ambiguous status of a public feminine voice which speaks in and for traditional discourses. The plot of Adam Bede revolves around four characters who are all part of the village community of Hayslope. From the beginning, the eponymous hero and morally exemplary figure Adam Bede is in love with young and sensuous Hetty Sorrel. As a poor farm girl, Hetty cannot afford to have an expensive taste in her clothing. Nevertheless, in her childlike and coquettish way, she does have a proclivity for self-display and conceives of herself as a spectacle that attracts the attention of other characters.²¹ Hetty is constructed as a frivolous self-performer, and her fancy for finery is contrasted with the subdued attitude of her altruistic and far more mature cousin Dinah, who shows total disin-

 Another self-performer who defines herself through the gaze of others is Gwendolen Harleth in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, which will be discussed in Chapter 5. Gwendolen, who comes from a privileged background, is characterized by her sophisticated taste and her feeling of superiority. Despite the difference in their social positions, Gwendolen and Hetty can both be described as self-performers who present themselves as visual spectacles, wishing to be admired by others. As the narrator points out in the chapter entitled “Hetty’s World”, “Hetty was quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her” (Eliot 1996: 96). Although she does not reciprocate Adam Bede’s love, it fills her with a sense of power and control: “She liked to feel that this strong, skilful, keen-eyed man was in her power, and would have been indignant if he had shown the least sign of slipping from under the yoke of her coquettish tyranny […]” (Eliot 1996: 98). At the same time, the narrator notes: “Hetty had become aware that Mr Arthur Donnithorne would take a good deal of trouble for the chance of seeing her; that he always placed himself at church so as to have the fullest view of her both sitting and standing; that he was constantly finding reasons for calling at the Hall Farm, and would always contrive to say something for the sake of making her speak to him and look at him” (Eliot 1996: 99). Hetty’s narcissistic self-admiration is also underlined by the fact that she likes to look at her mirror reflections in Aunt Poyser’s perfectly clean and shiny house: “Hetty Sorrel often took the opportunity, when her aunt’s back was turned, of looking at the pleasing reflection of herself in those polished surfaces, for the oak-table was usually turned up like a screen, and was more for ornament than use; and she could see herself sometimes in the great round pewter dishes that were ranged on the shelves above the long real dinner-table, or in the hobs of the grate, which always shone like jasper” (Eliot 1996: 73).

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terest in her looks and instead defines herself through the voice she has in public. Indeed, the novel suggests that what renders Hetty vulnerable is her naive self-absorption and identification as an object of the gaze of others.²² Indeed, it is largely because of her desire for luxury, romance and attention that she succumbs to the seduction of the irresponsible Arthur Donnithorne, the grandson and heir of the local country gentleman and principal landowner. On interrupting an erotic rendezvous between the two lovers, Adam starts a fight with Arthur and has him promise to give up Hetty and return to his militia. Once Arthur has gone, Hetty agrees to marry Adam. Yet the wedding does not take place. Having discovered that she is pregnant with Arthur’s child, Hetty leaves Hayslope in search for Arthur and, failing to find him, begins to roam the countryside because she is afraid of the public shame she would have to endure in Hayslope were she to return and expose herself as a ‘fallen’ woman. After the birth of her child, she leaves her newborn baby in a hole next to a tree where it dies. At her trial for infanticide, Hetty remains silent because she cannot talk about the circumstances of her child’s birth and death. She is found guilty of infanticide and sentenced to hang. It is at this point that Dinah visits Hetty in her prison cell and encourages her to tell her story. The nocturnal dialogue between the two young women is followed by another poignant passage in which Dinah accompanies Hetty in the cart that brings her to the gallows the next morning. Shortly before Hetty is to be hanged, Arthur has the death sentence commuted to legal banishment. Hetty is transported to the colonies, where she dies several

 Hetty’s penchant for self-display, but also the contrast between the two cousins, is emblematically illustrated by the chapter entitled “The Two Bed-Chambers” (Eliot 1996: 149 – 161). While daydreaming about Arthur Donnithorne, who has kissed her in the wood, Hetty makes herself look like the lady in a painting in the Donnithorne residence. Instead of going to bed, she decks herself out with huge glass earrings and an old shawl, looks at herself in an old mirror and parades up and down her bedroom, all the while fantasizing that Arthur is present as an “invisible spectator” (Eliot 1996: 150) and looking at herself as she imagines he would look at her. While the text depicts Hetty in the classic vanitas tradition, Dinah is looking out of her bedroom window. Rather than being absorbed by herself, she thinks “of all the dear people whom she had learned to care for among these peaceful fields” (Eliot 1996: 157). Her position at the window evokes the scene in Middlemarch (1874) in which Dorothea Brooke looks out of her window, feeling “the largeness of the world” and realizing that she “was part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining” (Eliot 2008: 741). Similar to Dorothea and in sharp contrast to Hetty, who worships her own looks, Dinah feels love and sympathy for others. On hearing a voice that tells her to go to her cousin in the next room, Dinah offers Hetty her friendship should she ever find herself in trouble. As if to reinforce the emblematic contrast between Dinah’s altruistic compassion and Hetty’s narcissistic self-absorption, the text emphasizes that Hetty is literally irritated and disturbed by Dinah’s voice (Eliot 1996: 159).

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years later, shortly before her sentence is to reach its end. In the meantime, Dinah and Adam have married, and Dinah has given up her public preaching following the historical ban the Methodist Convention in 1803 imposed on female preachers. In her journal entry entitled “History of ‘Adam Bede’”, George Eliot notes that the novel, especially the character of Dinah Morris, whom she describes as its “principal figure” (Eliot 1996: 542), grew out of her recollection of her aunt. Eliot’s aunt, Elizabeth Evans, was one of the significant women preachers who gained a very audible voice in the evangelical discourse and culture of eighteenth-century English Methodism. John Wesley, who founded English Methodism and was himself a consummate open-air preacher, initially opposed female preachers. Although he never came to openly advocate female preaching, he later granted that women with an extraordinary call had the right to preach in public.²³ Mostly working-class, Methodist women preachers were known for their plain and unadorned rhetoric and their preference for speaking in an informal way about their personal relationship to God (Steinbach 2005: 164). After Wesley’s death in 1791, female preaching was prohibited by the 1803 Methodist Convention, the ban which stops Dinah’s preaching in the novel. However, at least some women preachers continued to evangelize in public. The new quest for respectability and propriety of Wesleyan Methodism caused some Methodists to splinter off and found a number of radical sects allowing, and in some cases even actively encouraging, female preaching (Steinbach 2005: 164– 165). Because George Eliot’s aunt did not join any of the radical Methodist sects, the future writer never witnessed Elizabeth Evans preach to a public audience.

 English Methodism emerged in the eighteenth century as an evangelical sect and revivalist movement which claimed that the official Church of England failed to preach the gospel adequately. Rather than making the interpretation and dissemination of the gospel a prerogative of the ordained clergy, Methodists put emphasis on a spiritual individualism reminiscent of Puritanism. According to their evangelical hermeneutics, the Bible is literally the Word of God and, at the same time, directly accessible to individuals. Notably on those individuals with an extraordinary call, the scripture imposes the duty and the authority to interpret and spread the Word, and thus effectively to turn into the voice of God. Drawing on this prophetic figuration, John Wesley sanctioned female preachers as long they had received a divine call. Even though he did not openly promote female preaching, this meant that for a certain period and in a particular social milieu, spiritually gifted women were able to be active in the public domain and gain a voice as religious orators. See Christine Krueger (1992), who offers a comprehensive discussion of eighteenth-century Methodist women preachers and the tradition of social criticism they inspired in the writing of nineteenth-century women novelists, notably Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. For a brief overview of female preaching, especially in the Methodist tradition, in the long nineteenth century in Britain, see Susie Steinbach (2005: 163 – 168).

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Yet an entry from her journal mentions that she was able confide in her beloved aunt and talk to her about her inner life thanks to their special relationship of trust: “She was loving and kind to me, and I could talk to her about my inward life, which was closely shut up from those usually round me” (Eliot 1996: 542). Together with this personal experience, her journal also contains the anecdote that was to form the “germ” of her novel (Eliot 1996: 541), namely the account given by her aunt of how she had visited Mary Voce, a girl who had been sentenced to death for killing her child and who refused to confess to her crime. Similar to Dinah Morris in the novel, Elizabeth Evans stayed praying with the young woman all night until she finally “broke out into tears, and confessed her crime” (Eliot 1996: 541). It is sheer coincidence that the family name of the girl visited by Elizabeth Evans happened to be ‘Voce’ – an English family name that is etymologically not related to ‘voce’, the Italian noun for ‘voice’, but nevertheless evokes the word due to its homographic spelling. Yet the scene that came to play such an important role for Eliot’s novel hinges on a complex relationship between female voices. Eliot’s retelling of her aunt’s anecdote in the journal entry focuses on the way in which the initially voiceless Mary Voce gains a voice thanks to the woman preacher. At the same time, this story of vocal empowerment gives a voice to the novelist George Eliot. It is by absorbing the voices of Elizabeth Evans and Mary Voce and reworking them in her first novel that Eliot engenders herself as an author. In other words, she gains her voice as a writer by giving voices to her fictional women characters, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. But how does George Eliot characterize the voice of her fictional preacher, which marks the beginning of her literary career? What legitimizes Dinah Morris in her public preaching? For George Eliot, who believed that she could address the reading public only by adopting a masculine pen name, self-naming was never easy (Cunningham 1996: xx). As often noted, the author felt torn between her wish to address the reading public from a position of cultural authority and the social conventions that regulated respectable feminine behaviour.²⁴ By contrast, the self-authorization of Dinah Morris as a public voice is far more straightforward. At an early point in the text, she firmly asserts her name – “Yes, I am Dinah Morris […]” (Eliot 1996: 109) – which suggests how comfortable and confident she is in her role as a working-class woman preacher. But this is not all. The reason why Dinah Morris can speak in her self-assured voice is her literal inspiration by the Word of God. It is precisely because Eliot’s preacher is inter-

 See for example Rosemarie Bodenheimer (1990: 8).

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pellated by a divine voice that she can both speak in her own right and authorize herself as a leading religious voice. The Althusserian term ‘interpellation’ (Althusser 1971: 170 – 183) is particularly apt for my discussion of Dinah Morris’s preacher voice because of the way in which Eliot positions her in relation to the voice of God as an extreme manifestation of the law. In her self-presentation as a preacher, Dinah Morris follows classic Methodist discourse, notably in her emphasis on personal inspiration and the divine call on the individual. By becoming a preacher and thus following her vocation (a word that is, coincidentally, derived from the Latin verb ‘vocare’, meaning ‘to call’ and, unlike the family name mentioned above, etymologically linked to ‘voice’), she literally responds to a calling from God.²⁵ That she legitimizes her status as a female public preacher with her divine inspiration is particularly evident when she discusses her public preaching with Reverend Irwine, the local Anglican vicar who represents the official Church of England (but never actually preaches in the novel). As she observes, her vocation as a woman preacher is the result of the overriding power of God: “It isn’t for men to make channels for God’s Spirit, as they make channels for the water-courses and say, ‘Flow here, but flow not there’” (Eliot 1996: 89). In order to further validate her preaching, she goes on to describe the involuntary manner in which she was initially interpellated by the voice of God: […] sometimes it seemed as if speech came to me without any will of my own, and words were given to me that came out as tears come, because our hearts are full and we can’t help it. And those were always times of great blessing, though I had never thought it could be so with me before a congregation of people. (Eliot 1996: 90).

 Interestingly, the example that Althusser uses in order to explain how interpellation works is Christian religious ideology. As Althusser points out, Christian religious ideology is “addressed to individuals, in order to ‘transform them into subjects’, by interpellating the individual [by his name] in order to make him a subject, free to obey or disobey the appeal, i. e. God’s commandments […]” (Althusser 1971: 178). Interpellated in this way, the individual subjects recognize that they really occupy the place, role and identity designated for them by religious ideology. Althusser further explains the concept of interpellation by quoting the exchange between God and Moses, albeit “not to the letter but ‘in spirit and truth’” (1971: 179). When God interpellates Moses by his name, Moses replies “‘It is (really) I! I am Moses thy servant, speak and I shall listen!’ […] And Moses, interpellated-called by his Name [sic], having recognized that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God […]. The proof: he obeys him, and makes his people obey God’s Commandments” (Althusser 1971: 179).

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As Dinah emphasizes in this passage, her initial inspiration resembled the uncontrolled shedding of tears and did not translate into public preaching in the beginning. Yet her interpellation as a divine voice comes full circle when she literally responds to the divine call and begins to preach in public. According to her narrative, the critical moment of her birth as a preacher occurred when she stepped in for an old indisposed male preacher by praying with and reading to his congregation. It was at this point that she found herself all of a sudden under a divine injunction to address the congregation as a preacher: […] I felt a great movement in my soul, and I trembled as if I was shaken by a strong spirit entering into my weak body. And I went to where the little flock of people was gathered together, and stepped on the low wall that was built against the green hill-side, and I spoke the words that were given to me abundantly. And they all came round me out of all the cottages, and many wept over their sins and have since been joined to the Lord. That was the beginning of my preaching […] and I’ve preached ever since. (Eliot 1996: 91)

The quasi-accidental beginning of Dinah’s preaching career recalls the by-now familiar trajectory whereby a theatrical understudy and newcomer to the stage rises to prominence by acting in the place of an established star. However, even more important for our discussion of religious preaching is the fact that Dinah’s description of the divine spirit entering her “weak body” (Eliot 1996: 91) not only invokes the Bible in its diction but also forms a direct allusion to the biblical prophets and the often involuntary manner in which they turn into vessels of the Word of God. The biblical figuration of the prophet provides Dinah with a powerful rhetoric. According to a familiar pattern in the Prophetic Books in the Old Testament already mentioned earlier in this chapter, the individual future prophet receives a divine call to become a voice of the divine law, often against his initial will. Much like the Old Testament prophets, who assume the authority to speak in God’s name to his people, Dinah’s self-presentation refers to the unintentional element in her speech and, at the same time, claims spiritual authority. Configured as a voice that is spoken by the divine law and simultaneously leads others as a representative of that law, Dinah and her religious vocation sharply contrast with the tradition of the ancient female oracles, who are ventriloquized by a divine voice and whose frenzied utterances are subject to the interpretation of male religious authorities. In a marked departure from this classic figuration of feminine spirituality, Eliot’s preacher is not only firmly anchored in the register of symbolic language but she also occupies a religious leadership role. Owing to her divine inspiration, Dinah’s voice is both inspired and authorized by a divine source. However, Eliot’s preacher is not presented as a passive and/or trans-

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parent medium, nor does she efface herself to be subsumed under a voice other than her own. Rather, her subjection to the divine call empowers her voice by giving her not only the duty to spread the Word but also the authority to interpret its meaning. Dinah’s vocation literally gives her a voice as a speaking subject. Legitimized by her divine call, she appropriates scripture and inflects its spiritual traditions in her own tone.²⁶ As the two key passages mentioned above suggest, her religious speaking covers a range of different modes of articulation. She feminizes religious discourse when she comforts and consoles troubled and/or bereaved individuals like the condemned Hetty Sorrel, or Lisbeth Bede, Adam’s mother, in mourning over the death of her husband. Yet as shown by her address of Bessy Cranage on the village green, she also utters serious exhortations, issues warnings and visionary promises. By preaching to her surroundings, Eliot’s religious orator intrudes not just into the predominantly masculine domain of public speaking. At the same time, she also draws on and inscribes herself into a religious tradition that is patriarchal at heart. While Dinah Morris herself is empowered by the voice of God, the scene of her visit in the prison stages her empowerment of another female voice. As already mentioned before, in contrast to the early evening sun that shines during Dinah’s enthusiastic public preaching on the village green, the far more intimate scene in the prison takes us into a space of deep nocturnal darkness. When Dinah enters Hetty’s unlit cell, the remaining light of the evening sky is only just sufficient for human faces to be discerned. “The two pale faces were looking at each other: one with a wild hard despair in it, the other full of sad, yearning love” (Eliot 1996: 447). The fact that the light soon fades into the darkness of the night can be taken to reflect the spiritual anguish in which Hetty finds herself as she is “sinking helpless in a dark gulf” (Eliot 1996: 447). Yet the nocturnal setting is also significant because, by literally blacking out the visual field, the scene comes to be focused entirely on touch and voice. As well as describing the bodily  Her sermon on the village green, for instance, opens with her discussion of the symbolically charged passage in the Gospel of John about the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well (John 4:5 – 42). As is well known, the woman initially questions Jesus before she becomes convinced that he is the Messiah. It is because the nameless woman returns to her town and tells everybody about him that many Samaritans come to believe in Jesus. By choosing to talk about the conversion of the Samaritan woman at the beginning of her sermon, Dinah makes a strong statement about the role of women in religion. Her presentation of the biblical episode may not explicitly underline that the woman has a voice both because she first enters into a debate with Jesus and then proclaims her faith. But the opening of her sermon suggests that she invokes the Samaritan woman as her model and appropriates the religious discourse of the Bible in order to stake out a feminine speaking position in what is a predominantly masculine tradition.

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contact of the two young women, the passage centres on the dialogue between Dinah and Hetty and foregrounds the change in vocal sound and mood qualities by alternating between the comforting voice of Dinah and the despairing one of Hetty, between complete silence, whispering, crying, sobbing and praying. It is because Dinah speaks in the dark space of the prison cell that her voice and its spiritually visionary speech ultimately enable Hetty to articulate her secret story. Initially, Hetty reacts only slowly to Dinah’s voice by rising from the floor and letting herself be embraced. After a long silence, Dinah begins to engage Hetty in a soothing conversation. She refers to the salvific presence of God and asks Hetty to confess and repent. Unable to feel “the Divine Presence” (Eliot 1996: 448) sensed by Dinah, Hetty beseeches Dinah to help her. Dinah begins to pray and eventually Hetty breaks down in tears. After another interval of silence, she finally finds her voice. Alternating between silence, whispering and “a louder, pleading tone” (Eliot 1996: 451), Hetty gradually tells Dinah her story. She speaks about how her pregnancy and inability to find help from Arthur Donnithorne plunged her into acute despair and a critical, suicidal state, and how she could not bring herself to commit suicide because of her lingering thirst for life. She also talks about her longing to return home and her simultaneous fear of suffering public shame in Hayslope. Finally, she explains how after giving birth, she could think of no other solution than hiding her child in a hole next to a tree in the wood, and how the crying of the abandoned baby has haunted her ever since. What is important about this intimate exchange between the two women is not so much the fact that, from a religious standpoint, Hetty’s soul is saved because she makes her confession, inspired by Dinah’s compassionate speech. Rather, the crucial point of this scene is the manner in which silent Hetty is given a voice. It is because Dinah encourages her to tell her story – something Hetty could not do in the courtroom – that her perspective comes to be articulated and heard. What is enacted in the scene in the prison, which Eliot describes as the “climax” (Eliot 1996: 542) of the novel, is thus the liberation of a voice by another voice, the liberation, moreover, of a suppressed voice that could not make itself heard elsewhere. Moving beyond her evangelical discourse of religious repentance and conversion, Eliot’s preacher grants Hetty a voice with which to tell her story in her own words and thus get a voice in her history (see Cavell 1996: 58, 134). Dinah empowers the voice of the ‘fallen’ woman, which both indicts patriarchal power structures and comes to speak for itself. Hetty has been victimized by the patriarchal system in general and Arthur’s seduction in particular. But her belated acquisition of a voice means that she assumes responsibility for her actions as a mature self. By giving her a voice, the text also draws attention to the necessity of attending to the woman’s side

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of the story (Cunningham 1996: xviii). Whereas in the legal setting of the courtroom Hetty remains mute – she only lets out her “piercing shriek” as the judge formally addresses “Hester Sorrel” and sentences her to death (Eliot 1996: 436) – the far more intimate scene in the prison cell marks a different sort of interpellation. Responding to the voice of Dinah, who reaches out to her in the deep darkness of the night, Hetty can experience herself as the author of her own story.²⁷ Paradoxically, Hetty gains a voice of her own at precisely the point when she is about to lose her life. By inspiring Hetty’s voice through her sympathetic speech, Dinah encourages her cousin to tell her story and, in the words of Foucault, to speak “so as not to die” (1980: 53). Through her attainment and exercising of her voice, her story will survive – just as Mary Voce’s story lived on in the memory of Eliot’s aunt. The proximity between George Eliot, the implied author, and Dinah Morris, her fictional character, is never more pronounced than in this scene, in which the preacher liberates Hetty’s soul and above all her voice. The author and her preacher both empathize with others and respect their points of view despite the fact that these perspectives may radically differ from their own. Dinah Morris, who is defined by her spiritual voice, could hardly be more unlike Hetty Sorrel, her sensuously embodied cousin, who identifies herself as an object of the gaze of others. Despite their differences, Dinah offers Hetty her friendship and encourages her to tell her story in her own words. Like the fictional preacher, the implied author Eliot does not share the values of narcissistic Hetty, but she wants the reader to imagine her plight and to “realize what it is, or what it might be, to be a woman in a society and cultural context that values certain kinds of women, and condones certain kinds of behaviour and condemns others” (Reynolds 2008: xix). In analogy to Dinah, who enables Hetty to articulate her story in the darkness of the prison cell after her perspective could not find its way into the public records of the official legal system, Eliot creates the nocturnal dialogue of the two cousins in order to give voice to Hetty in and through the aesthetic text of her novel.²⁸ By the time Eliot wrote Adam Bede, she had long lost her youthful evangelical faith. Yet she uses Dinah’s religious voice and the spiritual experience it in-

 The idea that the scene allows Hetty to experience herself as the author of her narrative is inspired by Christine Krueger’s reading of the novel (1992: 253).  Christine Krueger makes a very similar point when she argues that “[t]he story that never found its way into the public record of Hetty’s trial enters the novel thanks to the discourse of repentance” (1992: 254). Also note that although Eliot’s text is far from making Hetty its principal focalizer, the novel does adopt her point of view in the important chapter describing her “Journey in Despair” (Eliot 1996: 378, 378 – 389).

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spires in Hetty’s prison cell to make a moral point. Indeed, it is in the dialogue between the dissimilar voices of the two cousins that the ethical project Eliot pursues as a novelist becomes most palpable. In one of her best-known essays, she describes the moral project of her realist writing as “the extension of our sympathies”: “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (Eliot 2000a: 520).²⁹ The scene in the prison in which Dinah reaches out to her cousin Hetty refers us to the moral imagination of George Eliot’s fiction; if she preaches a secular gospel as a writer, it is to make the reader aware of the importance of listening to other voices and sympathizing with them, even though their positions may radically differ from our own. In fact, this is Eliot’s particular form of heteroglossia. Like other novelists, she confronts readers with different positions through her treatment of different character voices. But this is not all. As is suggested by the prison scene, in which Dinah extends her sympathy and compassion to Hetty, Eliot calls on us to empathize with positions that are fundamentally different from our own. In paying close attention to Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel, we have noted the voice that both women gain in the sense of agency. Moreover, we have seen that these character voices play a pivotal role in Eliot’s authorial transformation as well as in the moral imagination of her writing. Given the central importance that the voices of Dinah and Hetty have in the narrative, it is all the more astonishing that both characters should fall silent in the end. Hetty suffers a particularly abrupt dismissal from the text. After her vocal empowerment in the prison cell and immediately after her cart ride to the execution place, she disappears for  The larger context of this passage from the essay entitled “The Natural History of German Life” and published in The Westminster Review in July 1856 reads as follows: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. […] Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People” (Eliot 2000a: 520). In Chapter 5, we will see how in Daniel Deronda, the implied author Eliot treats the figure of Alcharisi with respect even though she marks a position of radical alterity. In his discussion of Adam Bede, Valentine Cunningham suggests that Eliot aims at “a writing driven by a moral obligation to avoid foregone conclusions, narrow prejudice, professionally driven ideologies”, and a writing, moreover, that is characterized by a regard for “the otherness of the other person” (Cunningham 1996: xii, xiii). For a discussion of compassion in relation to Hetty Sorrel, see Neil Hertz’s essay “Poor Hetty” (2004).

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good as she is transported to the colonies and dies shortly before being released. What is even more stupefying is Dinah’s eventual silence as a preacher, especially if we consider the independent public career she has been following as a voice inspired by and speaking for the divine law. At several points in the novel, Eliot’s preacher uses her vocation to justify her unconventional way of life, including the alternative bonds she forges outside the heterosexual matrix as she presents herself as a spiritual sister and daughter to the individuals to whom she ministers. However, despite the novel’s unorthodox characterization of Dinah, she is eventually absorbed into marriage with Adam Bede. Initially, she rejects his proposal by using her vocation as an argument against domestication (Krueger 1992: 261).³⁰ She not only explains that duty and desire are mutually exclusive, but with her language she also suggests that her love for Adam threatens “her desire for authority” (Krueger 1992: 260): “[…] the thought of you had taken hold of me, so that my soul had lost its freedom, and was becoming enslaved to an earthly affection” (Eliot 1996: 509). With her desire for autonomy, Dinah anticipates Alcharisi, the fictional singer in Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda, whose radical independence and rejection of all forms of bonds will be discussed in Chapter 5. Yet in a surprising turn, Dinah eventually agrees to become Mrs Adam Bede; she effaces her name, which earlier in the text she pronounced with her typical selfconfidence and, at the same time, renounces her identity as female preacher. By changing her name and identity, Eliot’s preacher simultaneously gives up her voice as a public speaker. Indeed, the novel has her marriage coincide with the historical ban imposed by Wesleyan Methodism on female preaching. Seth Bede, the other important Methodist figure in the text, who is both Dinah’s

 At the beginning of the novel, Dinah Morris already rejects a marriage proposal by pointing out that “my heart is not free to marry. […] God has called me to minister to others, not to have joys or sorrows of my own, but to rejoice with them that do rejoice, and to weep with those that weep. He has called me to speak his word, and he has greatly owned my work. […] My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world. […] our marriage is not God’s will – he draws my heart another way. I desire to live and die without husband or children” (Eliot 1996: 35). Towards the end of the novel, she makes almost the same argument when she first rejects Adam’s proposal in the following way: “I know marriage is a holy state for those who are truly called to it, and have no other drawing; but from my childhood upward I have been led toward another path; all my peace and my joy have come from having no life of my own, no wants, no wishes for myself, and living only in God and those of his creatures whose sorrows and joys he has given me to know. Those have been very blessed years to me, and I feel that if I was to listen to any voice that would draw me aside from that path, I should be turning my back on the light that has shone upon me, and darkness and doubt would take hold of me” (Eliot 1996: 508).

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first suitor and Adam’s younger brother, points out that Dinah could continue to preach if she joined another religious sect.³¹ Yet even though she could sustain her public religious voice in this way, Adam agrees with her decision to go along with the edict and give up her preaching except for what he circumscribes as “talking to the people a bit in their houses” (Eliot 1996: 539). As he argues, most women preachers do more harm than good because they lack Dinah’s extraordinary spiritual gift: “[…] she’s seen that, and she thought it right to set th’ example o’ submitting, for she’s not held from other sort o’ teaching. And I agree with her, and approve o’ what she did” (Eliot 1996: 539). While the text never specifies the reason for the authority Adam has in the text, Dinah’s marriage to him effectively subsumes her under his patriarchal voice. This raises the question why Eliot’s text eventually grants so much weight to Adam. What prevents the novel from letting Dinah explain her decision to step down from the pulpit instead of having her husband speak in her place? In a more general sense, we have to ask ourselves why the novel puts so much emphasis on traditional social and literary conventions. Why does Dinah need to be silenced by virtue of a patriarchal romance plot? How are we to account for the shift from her self-authorization as a public preacher to the effacement of both her name and voice? And why, finally, does Eliot’s novel, after having constructed such an unconventional preacher figure as the principal character voice, eventually adopt a conservative tone by foregrounding the patriarchal voice of Adam Bede? Dinah Morris’s decision to leave her makeshift pulpit, from which she speaks as an itinerant preacher, is not merely out of character, but the loss of her public voice also forms a curious reversal of the authorial voice George Eliot gains with her novel. In fact, I interpret Dinah’s voluntary self-silencing not so much as a self-undermining gesture on the part of the successful and self-confident working-class preacher. Rather, I read the novel’s ending as an articulation of Eliot’s conflicted attitude towards feminine public expression. Although Eliot wished, as a novelist, to address the reading public from a position of cultural authority, she felt deeply ambivalent about becoming a figure of public attention. Eliot’s own biography was unconventional in many ways. As one of the leading intellectuals of her time, she operated in a predominantly masculine realm, and her liaison with Henry George Lewes, whom she regarded as her husband, could not be legalized by marriage. Her decision to live with the already-married

 Seth’s remark can be seen to refer to the historical fact that after the Methodist Convention in 1803, a number of historical women continued to preach in several of the Methodist sects that were founded in response to the ban on women preachers (Steinbach 2005: 164– 166).

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Lewes cost her many social and family ties and meant living a socially censured life. As Margaret Reynolds puts it, George Eliot was “a radical thinker, though one rather more hampered by the conventional strictures which bound respectable women’s behaviour” (Reynolds 2008: xiii). As a result, Eliot felt anxious about her public position, which became an inevitable part of her authorship when her pseudonym was disclosed and the identity of the person behind her nom de plume revealed soon after the publication of her novel. Adam Bede overlaps with Geraldine Jewsbury’s stage performer novel The Half Sisters, which was discussed in the previous chapter, in revealing a similar nervousness regarding feminine narcissistic self-display. The scene of Dinah’s sermon on the village green is explicitly modelled on Corinne’s public triumph and coronation on the Capitol in Germaine de Staël’s novel. Like Corinne, Dinah is introduced in the text by other character voices, who exchange rumours, stories and opinions before she makes her first appearance; the cart which she uses as a makeshift pulpit on the village green reminds us of the chariot in which Corinne is brought to the Capitol; her sermon is a spontaneous performance, just like Corinne’s improvisation; and in both novels, the public appearance of the performer is witnessed by a stranger who serves as the central focalizer of the respective scene. However, while the passage in Adam Bede explicitly refers to Staël’s text and the theatrical mise-en-scène of its star performer, what Eliot’s version of the scene seems to aim at is a curious negation of self-performance. Particularly in this scene but also in others, the novel works hard to clear its preacher from any theatrical elements. She is said to dispense with all bodily gestures and work with the modulation of her voice alone. Her modest appearance is underlined by “the simple line of her black stuff dress” (Eliot 1996: 22), and the preacher seems to have almost no physicality except for her “smooth locks of pale reddish hair” (Eliot 1996: 23). In the novel, her face is repeatedly described as pale and transparent. At one point, the text even compares her to “a lovely corpse into which the soul has returned charged with sublimer secrets and a sublimer love” (Eliot 1996: 159).³² As a counterfigure to the frivolous self-performer Hetty, who appears fully embodied by virtue of her flushed cheeks and dimples, her dark curly hair

 Also note the larger context of this passage in the chapter entitled “The Two Bed-Rooms”, which describes and juxtaposes the bodiliness and the spirituality of the two cousins in the following way: “What a strange contrast the two figures made! […] Hetty, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glistening from her imaginary drama, her beautiful neck and arms bare, her hair hanging in a curly tangle down her back, and the baubles in her ears. Dinah, covered with her long white dress, her pale face full of subdued emotion, almost like a lovely corpse into which the soul has returned charged with sublimer secrets and a sublimer love” (Eliot 1996: 159).

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and her sparkling eyes, Dinah is presented as a voice and nothing more. It is as though the emphasis on her spirituality requires a complete dissolution of her body into spirit, breath, voice, and tone. Nevertheless, the public performance of her voice remains haunted by the spectre of theatricality. Her conversion of Bessy Cranage in front of the large audience plays itself out in highly dramatic terms, as does her far more intimate dialogue with Hetty. Moreover, since the text works against the expectations of feminine histrionics entertained by the anonymous stranger, who serves as an important focalizer, theatricality is implicitly evoked in its constant negation.³³ As the narratorial voice points out, “Dinah walked as simply as if she were going to market, and seemed as unconscious of her outward appearance as a little boy” (Eliot 1996: 22). The text emphasizes her undramatic demeanour precisely because the setting – the big audience on the village green with the cart doubling as a makeshift pulpit – would seem to invite theatricality.³⁴ As well as articulating reservations about public self-exposure, the novel explores the dilemma of the female public voice that speaks in and for a tradition that remains essentially patriarchal despite the deft appropriation of its discourses by the female preacher. Alcharisi, the singer in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, rejects the very idea of heritage and tradition because she recognizes them to be deeply patriarchal. By contrast, in Adam Bede, Eliot’s first novel, Dinah Morris gains the respect of all the key patriarchal figures. Despite her non-conformist interpretation of religious traditions and social conventions, her preaching voice is respected for its beneficial effects by Reverend Irwine and Magistrate Townley, who represent the official church and the legal system respectively, and towards the end of the novel, even the misogynist schoolteacher Bartle Massey admits that he likes her

 As Dinah makes her appearance, the stranger is “struck with surprise” (Eliot 1996: 22) on finding none of the theatricality he associates with Methodist women preachers in “the total absence of self-consciousness in her demeanour” (Eliot 1996: 22). Before the preacher preaches from the cart on the village green, the stranger “had made up his mind to see her advance with a measured step, and a demure solemnity of countenance; he had felt sure that her face would be mantled with the smile of conscious saintship, or else charged with denunciatory bitterness. He knew but two types of Methodists – the ecstatic and the bilious” (Eliot 1996: 22). Having invoked these notions of religious peformance, the text erases them by stressing Dinah’s non-theatrical appearance and demeanour.  Another theatrical element is in fact suggested by the aesthetic enjoyment of Dinah Morris’s voice as pure sound. Despite his initial scepticism regarding the female preacher, the anonymous stranger is “chained to the spot against his will by the charm of Dinah’s mellow treble tones, which had a variety of modulation like that of a fine instrument touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct” (Eliot 1996: 27).

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voice (Eliot 1996: 524). Although her public preaching is debated by some of the other character voices, Dinah Morris’s voice appears to be far less controversial within the text than that of Jewsbury’s professional actress. However, because she speaks for tradition and community, Dinah Morris can sustain her voice only as long as the institutional framework of her Methodist denomination sanctions women’s preaching. The confident working-class preacher derives both divine guidance and individual confidence from her direct access to the Word of God. In the end, however, she cannot escape, and remains subject to, the confinement and regulation of patriarchal society. By launching her literary career as a novelist with a female preacher figure, George Eliot reflects on her own conflictedness with regard to public female articulation that would accompany her throughout her work as a literary author. As suggested by the cultural voice she created for herself as social critic and novelist, she found the symbolic position and the cultural authority of the preacher immensely attractive.³⁵ At the same time, her self-authorization as a public voice was never as unproblematic or straightforward as it is for her self-confident, working-class preacher, who legitimizes her public voice through her extraordinary divine call. In retrospect, George Eliot seems torn between progressive and conservative views. Although she had established herself as a radical thinker, she still thought that she needed a male pseudonym and male mentors, including George Henry Lewes, who acted as an intermediary and arranged the publication of her first literary texts. For Eliot the patriarchal constraints of her culture meant that she would always remain deeply ambivalent about the exposure of her public persona. On the one hand, her writing gained her respect as a public voice, while on the other hand, her liaison with the already married Lewes rendered her a ‘fallen’ woman in the public eye and the language of nineteenth-century culture.³⁶ Although she felt ambivalent about her public voice from the very beginning, she embarked on her career as author and entered the literary public stage by creating an unconventional public female performer figure. The fact that Eliot’s preacher novel forms a singular case in the landscape of nineteenth-century narrative fiction, where no other significant female preacher can be found, goes to indicate just how unorthodox Dinah Morris and the claims of her voice are. In

 The scope of the present study does not allow me to explore the question of how the voice of the fictional preacher Dinah Morris and the authorial self-fashioning of George Eliot relate to the narratorial voice(s) in the novels written after Adam Bede. Christine Krueger suggests that in Eliot’s subsequent novels, “[t]he preacher’s role is returned to male characters and is eventually taken over almost entirely by the narrator” (Krueger 1992: 263).  Eliot’s self-fashioning and self-understanding will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 5.

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the end, however, George Eliot sees no other solution than to silence the voice of her exceptional surrogate in the novel text. Never again in her entire oeuvre does she create another female figure who speaks with comparable public authority. In contrast to Dinah Morris, her fictional preacher, George Eliot, the real author, does preserve her public voice, but as we will see in the discussion of Daniel Deronda, her last novel, in Chapter 5, she continues to problematize the social position that women performers occupy as public figures.

3.2 The Divine Self: Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) While George Eliot, the British Victorian novelist, emphasizes the non-theatrical appearance of her preacher and eventually has her leave the public stage altogether, Margaret Fuller, the American Romantic essayist, fashions and projects herself as an unconflicted public voice and performer. Believing in a divine centre within the individual, she goes as far as to make her individuality into an integral part of her spiritual feminism. As we have just seen, the ending of Adam Bede traces the silencing of the female preacher by patriarchal institutions. By contrast, Fuller’s most influential text, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, analyses the social norms that thwart women in their self-expression and goes on to propose a process of radical social reform. That is, at the same time that Fuller criticizes an imperfect social order, her feminist manifesto calls for cultural and political change. This change, she suggests, will be initiated once women experience a spiritual rebirth and begin to articulate themselves as self-reliant voices. Although Margaret Fuller was not a preacher in the literal sense of the word, she is included in this chapter on female preaching because she fuses her feminist project with an individual spirituality. While several male members of the Transcendentalist circle, with which she was closely associated, started out as ministers in the Unitarian Church, women could not be ordained as priests. However, Fuller’s manifesto draws on her idiosyncratic version of Transcendentalism and its Puritan foundations. Harking back to the Puritan tradition in which the individual stands in a direct relation to God and thus is in no need of any mediation by the church, Fuller believes in “a divine centre within the self”, which has “the potential to authorize independent action” (Steele 1998: 296). This belief allows her to construct for herself a position of cultural authority in which she is independent of the type of patriarchal institution that eventually silences Dinah Morris in Eliot’s novel.

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Woman in the Nineteenth Century makes the prophetic promise that the spiritual rebirth of women will lead to social and political change. The fusion of religious and political registers characterizing Fuller’s text harks back to the way in which America and its exceptionalist project were, from the very beginning, founded on biblical texts.³⁷ More specifically, Fuller’s spiritual feminism can be seen to draw on a tradition, almost as old as the first Puritan settlements, in which women made reference to transcendence in order to challenge social hierarchies and ground their political claims in the spiritual equality of the sexes. In 1634, only a few years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been founded, the newly immigrated Anne Hutchinson became a dissident minister. She began to conduct informal group meetings for women, and later also men, in the Boston area to discuss and question religious beliefs as they were promulgated by official church representatives. Her intervention in early American religious culture was imbued by her conviction that individuals had direct access to God – a belief that challenged official theology. This was also how Hutchinson, who spoke as a divinely inspired prophet, legitimized the fact that she proposed unorthodox readings of the Bible, articulated social concerns and, in so doing, levelled her protest against religious and worldly authorities alike.³⁸ In a manner reminiscent of Hutchinson and her religious discussion groups, Fuller organized and led a series of seminars, which came to be known as her ‘Conversations’. These classes, which took place “on Saturday mornings for two ten-week sessions a year between 1839 and 1844” (Gustafson 1995: 45), ad Note for example “A Modell of Christian Charity”, the most famous sermon by John Winthrop, the leader of an expedition of Puritan immigrants to the New World. Already on their voyage on the ship Arbella, Winthrop admonishes his fellow travellers that the holy community of their colony in Massachusetts Bay will be a moral example to the rest of the world. Borrowing from a statement of Christ in Matthew 5:14, he proclaims: “[…] wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us […]” (in Warner 1999: 42). Fuller’s idea of a spiritual rebirth is also deeply steeped in the language of American religiosity, notably its use as a term describing the overpowering experience of conversion in the series of protestant revivals called the Great Awakening (c. 1740 – 1760) and the Second Awakening (c. 1800 – 1840), which were later followed by the so-called Third Great Awakening (1880 – 1910). Likewise, her Transcendentalist emphasis on the divine identity of the individual is reminiscent of the concept of the ‘inner light’ in Quakerism, which refers to God’s presence within the individual person and puts emphasis on a direct and personal experience of the divine.  Hutchinson’s declarations of dissent did not go unpunished. She was brought to civil trial by a court presided over by John Winthrop. Condemned as a heretic and exiled together with her family from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Hutchinson became one of the co-founders of the religiously liberal colony of Rhode Island. On the parallel between Hutchinson and Fuller, see Gustafson (1995: 45, 50, 51, 57) and Schulz (1997: 95 – 96).

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dressed well-educated women and covered a wide range of topics – among them Greek mythology, education, ethics, fine arts, philosophy and religion – all of which clustered around an overarching interest in female identity. The fundamental question of human destiny – “What were we born to do? and how shall we do it?” (Fuller 1998: 173) – together with the special significance it holds for women was just the first of the many issues discussed in Fuller’s ‘Conversations’. By creating an alternative semi-public space for women, her classes recalled Hutchinson’s controversial discussion groups and, at the same time, anticipated the feminist notion of ‘consciousness-raising’, which would be practised much later by second-wave feminists in the 1960s and the 1970s. As Sandra Gustafson points out, Fuller’s ‘Conversations’ were characterized by a performative quality: Fuller sought to dazzle and inspire; she provided her listeners with a role model who radiated both glamour and warmth. […] Fuller’s appearance at these meetings was much observed. Often participants noted her rich dress; many others commented on “her beautiful looks”. (Gustafson 1995: 48)

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, for example, who hosted the ‘Conversations’, along with their more than forty participants in her bookshop and home parlour, notes that “Margaret used to come to the conversations very well dressed, and, altogether, looked sumptuously” (quoted in Gustafson 1995: 47). Yet Peabody also emphasizes in her transcriptions of the classes that “Miss Fuller guarded against the idea that she was to teach any thing. She merely wanted to be the nucleus of conversation” (Peabody 1998: 175; original emphasis). Although Fuller was the primary speaker and leader of the discussions, her pedagogical experiment was to foster critical self-reflection in a congenial dialogic setting. Her ‘Conversations’ were in part inspired by the salons of two of her role models, Germaine de Staël and Bettina von Arnim. Much like these two salonnières, she impressed her students with her eloquence and magnetic personality. At the same time, she also identified with Aspasia, the Greek philosopher and contemporary of Socrates, and having read Plato’s Socratic dialogues in preparation for her seminars, she often pretended to know less than she actually did so as to elicit contributions from other group members. Owing to her dialogic method, the ‘Conversations’ encouraged and enabled women to think and speak for themselves. They literally enacted and put into practice Fuller’s interest in feminine self-development and self-expression. By conversing with an all-female audience in her seminars, Margaret Fuller is reminiscent of Dinah Morris in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, whose spiritual speech finds particular resonance in other female characters. As well as en-

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gaging women from the Boston intellectual elite in conversation, Fuller’s interest in female self-development and social reform also led her to visit Sing Sing prison, where she stayed overnight and interviewed the female inmates. In other words, both Fuller and Eliot’s Methodist preacher create dialogic situations in which they enter into sympathetic communion with other women. Yet, at the same time, there are also crucial differences in the positions and articulations of these two voices, one of them a fictional character in a novel, the other a prominent intellectual in cultural history. In Eliot’s text, Dinah Morris’s compassionate conversation enables Hetty Sorrel to articulate her feminine point of view in a prison cell, the Foucauldian heterotopic space for bodies expelled and excluded from the ‘normal’ space of the social community. In contrast to the individual ministry which Dinah offers to Hetty in her isolated prison cell, Margaret Fuller’s discussion meetings not only cultivated a sociable form of conversation in a circle of women intellectuals. They also gave rise to and inspired her most famous text, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).³⁹ Fuller’s treatise is the first significant feminist manifesto written in America and the text in which she both appropriates and rethinks the Transcendentalist notion of individual self-reliance in order to formulate her programme of spiritual growth and social reform centred on women. Whereas Eliot builds her novel around the crucial narrative scene in which Dinah alleviates the spiritual distress her cousin suffers after having been victimized by patriarchal power structures, Fuller uses the genre of the essay in order to formulate her explicit feminist social critique and intervene in the public debate over the role of women. Woman in the Nineteenth Century both analyses the predicament in which she and her female contemporaries find themselves as a result of an imperfect social order and sets down her agenda of a spiritual feminism promising social and political change. Or, as George Eliot puts it in her favourable discussion of Fuller’s text, the manifesto makes “a calm plea for the removal of unjust laws and artificial restrictions, so that the possibilities of [woman’s] nature may have room for full development […]” (Eliot 1998: 233). Margaret Fuller deals with issues of feminine expression, a core concern narrativized by the performer novels discussed in this book, from the perspective of the social critic and feminist thinker. At the same time, her essay raises the question of the type of voice Fuller herself has as the foremost woman intellectual in  A first version of the text entitled The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women was published in 1843 in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, which was edited by Fuller. Encouraged by others, she expanded the text into Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Published in book form in February 1845, the manifesto sold out an edition of one thousands copies within a single week (Madsen 2000: 4).

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nineteenth-century America. How can we describe the textual voice effects she produces in Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as the place her voice occupies in American cultural history? Although her feminist manifesto does not include any actual performance situation, the text is pertinent to the discussion of this study because of its conversational character, namely the direct way in which Fuller addresses her readers and the way this allows her to dramatize herself as a textual speaker. It is through Woman in the Nineteenth Century that Fuller constructs herself as an influential public voice. At the same time that she creates and adopts a position of cultural authority, she argues that women in general are in need of a voice because the promise of the principles on which America was founded can only be fulfilled if they attain equality. Fuller’s treatise harks back both to the thematic concern and the discursive mode of her seminars. As in the ‘Conversations’, Fuller’s primary focus in the essay is on questions of feminine expression understood in the widest sense, namely as the unfolding and articulation of women’s potential in all social and cultural domains. The questions she asks all centre around the social and psychic conditions facing women in the nineteenth century. What are the social norms and prejudices that keep women’s souls from expanding and thus thwart them in their development into independent individuals? How will spiritual selfperfection and social reform work hand in hand to enable women to fully express and realize their inner resources? An important aspect in the construction of Fuller’s voice in her manifesto is the fact that the mode in which her essay discusses these and related questions seems to issue directly from her group discussions. As has been pointed out by contemporaries and critics alike, Woman in the Nineteenth Century bears a striking resemblance to a “long talk” (Kolodny 1994: 357). Indeed, Fuller simulates spoken discourse by using a personal tone usually associated with conversational modes of communication, and she creates an effect of dialogue by ‘speaking’ through many different textual voices. Given their dialogic mode and conversational spirit, Fuller’s manifesto and seminars depart from the more traditional rhetorical forms of public speech usually deployed and dominated by her male contemporaries. In antebellum America, adult education and public life in general were to a large extent organized around the genre of the public lecture, which foregrounded a single speaker. Several members of the Transcendentalist circle pursued careers as public lecturers, most prominent among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. A number of male Transcendentalists, Emerson included, started out as ordained ministers of the Unitarian Church. For women, however, professional preaching and speaking from public platforms for money were not deemed respectable. On the other hand, they could speak, and earn an income, if they addressed an audience of women while seated. This is what Fuller did in her ‘Conversations’,

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which allowed her to earn a living as an intellectual (Bean 1997: 30). Her seminars functioned also as a form of preaching insofar as Fuller called on the participants (as she would later on the readers of her manifesto) to draw upon their spiritual resources as divine individuals. However, the cultural norms governing feminine public articulation were not her primary reason for cultivating a dialogic mode instead of adopting a more monologic voice both in her seminars and manifesto.⁴⁰ Widely regarded as the preeminent female intellectual in nineteenth-century America, Fuller simultaneously enjoyed the reputation of the most brilliant conversationalist of her time. In his diary, Emerson credits her with “a silver eloquence” as well as “the most entertaining conversation in America” (Emerson 1998: 191). Fuller herself observed, “Conversation is my natural element”, and added: “I need to be called out, and never think alone, without imagining some companion” (quoted in Buell 2006: 297). Similarly, Woman in the Nineteenth Century develops an intertextual dialogue which underlines that it is by conversing with a myriad of texts and other interlocutors that Margaret Fuller constructs her vibrant voice, and that the dialogic selfhood she creates in this way forms an integral part of her spiritual feminism. In her discussion of marriage and its need for equality between the sexes, for instance, she quotes a speech by John Quincy Adams, in which he refers to his mother, Abigail Adams (who in one of her letters famously urged her husband John Adams to “remember the ladies” (Adams 2004: 148) while drafting the “Declaration of Independence”), and talks about how he has been taught not to flatter but “to love and revere the female sex” (Fuller 1992a: 326). Following this quotation, Fuller adds that all she wants in the relationship between the sexes can be found in “the two epithets” Milton’s Adam uses for his wife: “accomplished Eve” and “immortal Eve” (Fuller 1992a: 328). “What majesty in the cadence of the line”, she exclaims enthusiastically, “what dignity, what reverence in the attitude, both of giver and receiver!” (Fuller 1992a: 328). What this example shows is how Fuller develops her argument by quoting other voices which are themselves already in conversation with other voices (John Quincy Adams with Abigail Adams, his mother, and Milton’s Adam with Eve). The effect of dialogue and debate in Fuller’s essay is created by a plethora of quotations and allusions to other texts, dramatic dialogues with fictitious interlocutors, both hostile and sympathetic to its radical project, as well as frequent  Trained in the classical rhetorical tradition, Fuller took a keen interest in contemporary oratory and attended a wide variety of lectures, including some by her friend Emerson (Kolodny 1994: 363). It was against the backdrop of a profound familiarity with various modes of public speaking that she developed her own dialogic practice.

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instances of direct reader address. Time and again Fuller makes appeals to her readers and entreats them to put her visionary proposals into action. “Let us be wise and not impede the soul”, Fuller urges us in a passage in which she stresses the importance of the spiritual development and expansion of all individuals, regardless of sex and race. “Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white” (Fuller 1992a: 311). Elsewhere she singles out the women among her readers. “If you have a power, it is a moral power” (Fuller 1992a: 341), she tells the female recipients of her text and, in so doing, calls on them to launch the spiritual regeneration which, she believes, women are in the best position to lead and which, according to her conviction, will transform America into a great moral example.⁴¹ Finally, at the close of her text, she merges with her readers by invoking a spiritual voice that exhorts them all to take their most ambitious hopes as their guiding principle: “Always the soul says to us all: Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action. Such shall be the effectual fervent means to their fulfilment […]” (Fuller 1992a: 348). As the ‘spoken’ quality of these examples suggests, Fuller’s appeals to her readers produce an effect of spontaneous immediacy, intimate rapport and vocal presence. The manifesto constructs the voice of a person speaking her mind since, in the course of the text, Fuller’s ‘speech’ shifts and alternates between a whole range of moods and affects, ranging from exuberant optimism, enthusiasm and excitement to pressing urgency, impatience and anger. The immediacy thus generated by Fuller’s writing serves as a powerful means of conveying her spiritual vision and her political call to action. It is through her personal tone – her emotional frankness and direct address to her readers – that she draws us into her argument. Fuller creates her distinct voice by frequently using

 Fuller points out that by Americans, “as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, every thing has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of heaven from its fulfilment” (Fuller 1992a: 253). She writes how freedom and equality, the very cornerstones of the “Declaration of Independence”, have been compromised by slavery and the crimes committed against Native Americans as well as the inequality between the sexes. It is against the backdrop of both the promise of America’s democracy and its compromised state that she develops her prophetic vision: “Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede. Only seemingly, and whatever to the contrary, this country is as surely destined to elucidate a great moral law, as Europe was to promote the mental culture of man” (Fuller 1992a: 253; my emphasis).

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the personal pronoun ‘I’ and thus evokes an effect of directness in her ‘speech’. Likewise, she establishes a close rapport with her readership by including her readers in the first person plural and aligning them with her perspective: “Without enrolling ourselves at once on either side, let us look upon the subject from the best point of view which to-day offers” (Fuller 1992a: 257). However, interestingly enough, she repeatedly singles out the women among her readers as if to create an imagined community through her specific address of them: “O men! I speak not to you. […] But to you, women, American women, a few words may not be addressed in vain. One here and there may listen” (Fuller 1992a: 320). It is in her direct allocution to her female readers and her urgent tone – “Think of this well! I entreat you, I conjure you, before it is too late” (Fuller 1992a: 342) – that she reminds us of the voice of a preacher. Like Eliot’s Dinah Morris, who singles out Bessy Cranage from the congregation on the village green and reprimands her for her vanity, Fuller also makes exhortations, issues warnings and gives advice. At one point, for instance, she warns the “women of America” (Fuller 1992a: 325) against premature marriages based on flattery and vanity instead of equality and “intellectual companionship” (Fuller 1992a: 287): To you, women of America, it is more specifically my business to address myself […], and my advice may be classed under three heads: Clear your souls from the taint of vanity. Do not rejoice in conquests, either that your power to allure may be seen by other women, or for the pleasure of rousing passionate feelings that gratify your love of excitement. […] Pure love, inspired by a worthy object, must ennoble and bless, whether mutual or not; but that which is excited by coquettish attraction of any grade of refinement, must cause bitterness and doubt […] so soon as the flush of passion is over. And that you may avoid all taste for these false pleasures ‘Steep the soul In one pure love, and it will last thee long.’ (Fuller 1992a: 325)

Similar to Dinah Morris, who preaches directly to Bessy Cranage, Fuller addresses the “women of America” (Fuller 1992a: 325) to convey her advice specifically to them. At the same time, it is important to note that, rather than speaking in one single voice, Fuller speaks in several voices. Her essay constantly highlights its status as a text that is composed of many different ‘voices’, that is, a plethora

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of intertexts and imagined interlocutors.⁴² The heteroglossia that is produced by her myriad textual allusions and its dramatic dialogues – including a dispute with the fictional figure of an irritated slave trader, who complains that “the national union” (Fuller 1992a: 255) is threatened by both the anti-slavery and the women’s movement – recalls the give-and-take of heated debate.⁴³ Fuller guides the essay’s discussion by orchestrating different voices and conflicting positions similar to the way in which the implied author of a novel might organize the relation between various narrator and character voices. Much like the pedagogical experiment of her seminars, which promoted the independent thinking of individuals in a process of collaborative intellectual exchange, the many voices composing the text invite readers to think through different ideological viewpoints.⁴⁴ Rather than adopting a dogmatic stance and imposing her view on the readers, Fuller develops her argument by speaking through a conglomerate of non-hierarchical voices. In so doing, she is deliberately multi-vocal.⁴⁵ In fact, her text’s incorporation of various ideological positions reflects, and simultaneously dramatizes, the cultural debate and controversy in which Fuller intervenes in her dual public role as social critic and visionary preacher.

 As Cynthia Davis notes, Woman in the Nineteenth Century is “famously ambiguous about who is speaking” (Davis 2000: 51).  The fictional dispute between Fuller’s narrator and the slave trader confronts two diametrically opposed views regarding women and their emancipation: “‘It is not enough,’ cries the irritated trader, ‘that you have done all you could to break up the national union, and thus destroy the prosperity of our country, but now you must be trying to break up family union, to take my wife away from the cradle and the kitchen hearth to vote at polls, and preach from the pulpit?’” (Fuller 1992a: 255). The trader argues that his wife is happy with her leisured domestic existence and does not wish “to step beyond the sphere of her sex” (Fuller 1992a: 256). Moreover, he “will never consent to have our peace disturbed by any such discussions” (Fuller 1992a: 256). As the narrator points out, neither can the trader speak for his wife, nor is it “consent from you that is in question, it is assent from your wife” (Fuller 1992a: 256). Asked by the trader whether he is not “the head of my house”, the narrator emphatically underscores woman’s independence: “You are not the head of your wife. God has given her a mind of her own” (Fuller 1992a: 256). “Thus vaguely”, the narrator concludes, “are these questions proposed and discussed at present” (Fuller 1992a: 256).  Note, for instance, how having presented an idea, Fuller invokes an opposing opinion – “That can never be necessary, cry the other side” – before she gives her own counter-argument “But if in reply […]” (Fuller 1992a: 259).  In her survey of various approaches to Fuller, Bell Gale Chevigny refers to two readings of Summer on the Lakes that use Bakhtinian notions of voice and reader response theory respectively: “[…] Stephen Adams shows how the fragmentary structure of Summer on the Lakes calls forth the reader’s creative collaboration, while William Stowe delineates in this text a non-hierarchical polyvocal discourse” (Chevigny 1994: xxviii).

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The way in which Margaret Fuller constructs her voice through the heteroglossia of her text closely resembles Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic selfhood, that is a concept of individual consciousness which is defined by the relation between self and other. Rather than constituting a self-sufficient entity, the self combines many discourses. As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson write about Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic character of consciousness, “selfhood is not a particular voice within, but a particular way of combining many voices within. Consciousness takes shape, and never stops taking shape, as a process of interaction among authoritative and innerly persuasive discourses” (Morson and Emerson 1990: 221). Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic self is particularly pertinent to a discussion of Fuller as a public performer who develops her feminist spiritual position in explicit exchange with other cultural voices. It is because of her conversation with these voices that she can be regarded as a “novelistic self” (Morson and Emerson 1990: 218) even though her essay does not belong to the genre of the novel. If in Fuller’s ‘Conversations’ dialogue triggers a process of collaborative thinking, her manifesto presents the inner dialogue of a consciousness that is produced by the relation between self and other, between the speaker in the text and her imagined interlocutors, between her textual voice and the voices of other texts. Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and the novelistic individual as a subject combining many discursive voices allows us to trace how Fuller, as a feminist thinker, conceives of the relation between the self and the world. How does her essay describe the relation between female individuals on the one hand and the social context of cultural norms and representations of femininity on the other? What is the connection between individual development and social reform? How does her spiritual vision, inspired by Romantic literature and Transcendentalist philosophy, correlate with her feminist political commitment? And how is the otherworldly realm of her spiritual preaching linked to the social landscape of her worldly concerns? As we examine the construction and position of her voice, it is important to bear in mind that Margaret Fuller was one of the most erudite and widely read persons of her time. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a politician and lawyer who was familiar with A Vindication of the Rights of Women, decided to act on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment feminist agenda and instructed his daughter from an early age. In so doing, he gave her a rigorous academic education, which was usually denied to women since they were barred from attending university.⁴⁶

 In her “Autobiographical Romance”, Fuller retrospectively criticizes her father for overworking her mind and overstimulating her nerves through the rigid discipline of his instruction. “The

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In her study of several languages and literatures – Latin, Greek, French, Italian and German (Chevigny 1998: 260) – Fuller absorbed a vast archive of texts, which came to shape both her writing and her self-presentation. Similar to Germaine de Staël, who founded a comparative approach through her study De l’Allemagne (1813), Fuller effectively introduced German Romanticism into American culture in her work as a literary critic. As the most cosmopolitan figure of the Transcendentalist circle, she worked on but never completed a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; she reviewed German authors for an American audience and translated a number texts such as, for instance, Goethe’s conversations with his confidant Johann Peter Eckermann and Günderrode (1840), the epistolary novel and literary memorial which Bettina von Arnim created to commemorate her dead friend Karoline von Günderrode.⁴⁷ As well as nourishing American Transcendentalism through her translations, Fuller absorbed a host of texts for her own self-fashioning. “In her late teens and early twenties”, David Watson notes in his biography, “Fuller developed a series of role models derived directly from her reading” (Watson 1988: 55). Similarly, Julie Ellison observes that “[t]here is never a time when her reading is not fundamentally about constructing her own subjectivity” (Ellison 1990: 229). As already mentioned, among the figures Fuller modelled herself on are historical women, including the Greek philosopher Aspasia and the German Romantic writers Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Günderrode, as well as literary heroines such as Staël’s Corinne. In fact, not only Margaret Fuller’s self-fashioning is textual but also her conceptualization of her inner life. In her correspondence, she once refers to what she aptly calls the “text of my inward life” (Fuller 1987: 271), which suggests that her relation to her inner life resembles both a reader’s interpretation and a writer’s composition of a text. Although Fuller was uninterested in organized

consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a ‘youthful prodigy’ by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections of all kinds” (Fuller 1992c: 26). The scope of this study does not allow me to discuss the ways in which Fuller defines herself against the rigid discipline and pedagogy of her father’s neo-classical training. What is important for our context is the fact that Fuller’s cultural knowledge was extensive and exceeded the academic education her male contemporaries received at Harvard.  In her role as a literary critic, translator, journalist and editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, Margaret Fuller reminds us of George Eliot, who translated Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss, contributed essays to various periodicals and wrote hundreds of book reviews for the Westminster Review, the learned journal for which she also worked as an editor (and which had formerly been edited by John Stuart Mill).

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religious belief, her text clearly draws on a Protestant-Puritan tradition which stands for an inward turn and regards individual introspection as the focus of spiritual life. Moreover, Fuller reformulates this religious tradition by splicing it together with idealist philosophy, notably American Transcendentalism, which puts the individual and his or her consciousness at the centre of the spiritual universe. Woman in the Nineteenth Century can be seen as a textualization of her “inward life” (Fuller 1987: 271) because it sets out to analyse feminine subjectivity and because, in order to do so, Fuller invokes myriad cultural representations of women and, at the same time, develops a series of textual personae representing various aspects of her psyche. The result of this simultaneous introspection and self-revelation is a complex dialogue between text and self. The monumental catalogue of textual women portraits which Fuller assembles in Woman in the Nineteenth Century includes mythological figures like Isis and Eurydice alongside biblical ones such as Eve and the Virgin Mary, historical personages such as Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I alongside literary characters from, for example, Spenser, Shakespeare, Schiller and Goethe. Although these figures are not given a voice in the form of direct speech, Fuller is interested in the ‘voice’ each represents in the cultural imagination. In keeping with her interest in women’s potential and its cultural articulation, her pantheon of representative women takes into account exemplary cases of feminine self-expression alongside the obstacles women encounter in their self-realization. Thus, for instance, she isolates single women, among them religious visionaries such as Michelangelo’s Sybil or the figure of Saint Teresa, who enjoy personal independence and agency because they are “undistracted by other relationships” (Fuller 1992a: 298). Then again she portrays Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand and argues that what renders unconventional women like them transgressive in the public view are repressive gender norms. “Such beings as these, rich in genius […]”, she argues, “ought not to find themselves, by birth, in a place so narrow, that, in breaking bonds, they become outlaws” (Fuller 1992a: 284). As these examples suggest, the aim Fuller pursues in her analysis of cultural representations of women is twofold. On the one hand, she isolates role models that can serve as a source of inspiration for women and their selfdefinition, while on the other she demonstrates how women are hampered in their self-articulation by cultural norms.⁴⁸ Writing about female geniuses who  Following Jeffrey Steele’s suggestion that Fuller’s “conversational excess and textual vagrancy” produce “a new rhetoric of transformation” (Steele 1998: 297, 296), one could say that the sheer number of her examples fulfils an important function. One of her key arguments is that in order to allow the individual to realize her potential, the possibilities and channels for women need to be expanded; women need “a much greater range of occupation than they

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possess an “electrical” and “magnetic” energy (Fuller 1992a: 302), she notes that these women are not properly understood because of their unconventional character: They see too much to act in conformity with those around them, and their quick impulses seem folly to those who do not discern the motives. This is an [sic] usual effect of the apparition of genius, whether in man or woman, but it is more frequent with regard to the latter, because a harmony, an obvious order and self-restraining decorum, is most expected from her. (Fuller 1992a: 302)

In its portrayal of female geniuses, Fuller’s text explores the potential of feminine self-expression together with the obstacles women face in the form of repressive gender norms. Fuller – who was sometimes called the “Yankee Corinna” (Blanchard 1987: 42) – not only fashions herself through her dialogue with these feminine ‘voices’, but she also creates several literary personae in order to represent herself. The story of Mariana in her travelogue Summer on the Lakes, for instance, is in part based on her experience at school and narrates the tragic fate of a gifted and eccentric young woman. Mariana’s “love of wild dance and sudden song, her freaks of passion and of wit” (Fuller 1992b: 118) initially find an outlet in her theatrical performances and improvisations, reminiscent of Fuller’s role model Corinne, but such behaviours clash with the rigid rules of her boarding school and, with her energy stifled by her surroundings, she eventually dies. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the personae of the Muse, Minerva, Cassandra and Miranda all relate to different facets of Margaret Fuller herself and are simultaneously used to illustrate the position and psychology of any ‘woman in the nineteenth century’ in an exemplary way. Similar to Mariana in Summer on the Lakes, the figure of Cassandra, the Greek prophet, represents the case of an “over-charged existence” whose “impassioned sensibility” (Fuller 1992a: 303, 302) cannot find an appropriate form of expression because of cultural prejudice, namely society’s unwillingness to acknowledge and listen to women possessing “prophetic gifts” (Fuller 1992a: 304). As Fuller notes, partly in reference to herself, “Women who combine this organization with creative genius, are very commonly unhappy at present. […] Yet, allow room enough, and the electric fluid will be found to invigorate and embellish, not destroy have, to rouse their latent powers” (Fuller 1992a: 345 – 346). In keeping with her demand, which culminates in her famous statement “if you ask me what offices they [women] may fill; I reply – any. […] let them be sea-captains, if you will” (Fuller 1992a: 345), her cascade of examples demonstrates a multiplication of possible identities and subject positions, thus exploding the narrow circumscription of nineteenth-century gender roles.

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life” (1992a: 302– 303). While Fuller considers intuition, prophecy and poetry to be part of what she calls the feminine principle, embodied by her Muse figure, she simultaneously argues that present conditions require that a greater emphasis be put on the masculine principle of intellect, represented by Minerva.⁴⁹ By mythologizing her subjectivity in this way, Fuller presents a complex dialogue between self and text. Her self is shaped by a myriad of cultural texts, and she also needs to draw on texts in order to represent herself. This also holds in the case of Miranda, the character who resembles her most and who can perhaps be read as her fictional alter ego. Like Fuller, and similar to her namesake in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda is brought up by her father, who “cherished […] a firm belief in the equality of the sexes” (Fuller 1992a: 261). Indeed, it is because her father treats her as an equal companion, “a living mind”, a “temple of immortal intellect” that Miranda is able to develop a “dignified sense of self-dependence” (Fuller 1992a: 261). However, what is also important is the fact that Miranda not only embodies but also gives voice to Fuller’s ideals. As Miranda observes in the dramatic dialogue recounted by Fuller’s narrator, “Religion was early awakened in my soul, a sense that what the soul is capable to ask it must attain, and that, though I might be aided and instructed by others, I must depend on myself as the only constant friend” (Fuller 1992a: 262). Fuller’s fictional alter ego then goes on to offer a general analysis of feminine self-reliance and observes that “[t]his self-dependence, which was honored in me, is deprecated as a fault in most women. They are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within” (Fuller 1992a: 262). By having Miranda express the core idea of her treatise, Fuller achieves a compelling dramatization of her dialogic self. Instead of being forced into social conformity, Miranda argues, women must be allowed to develop their spiritual potential and work out their own destiny. Miranda is the only Fuller persona to talk in direct speech. This means not only that her statement is foregrounded in a powerful way but also that Fuller, rather than using direct narratorial comment, has her fundamental tenet presented by another voice. At the same time, Fuller’s dialogue with her self-reliant heroine constitutes a compelling instance of self-reflection: By having her narrator converse with a persona that forms an idealized portrait of an earlier version of herself, Fuller contemplates and performs herself as other. It is by virtue of her creation of Miranda and other textual personae that she can represent her introspection. The use of her literary

 Although at times Fuller’s discussion seems to essentialize women and their ‘nature’, other parts of her argument anticipate poststructuralist approaches, notably their distinction between sex and gender.

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personae renders her psychology representative of feminine subjectivity and ensures that her self-examination and self-disclosure will resonate with other women. Fuller’s self-dramatization in Woman in the Nineteenth Century can be seen in relation to two very different cultural traditions. On the one hand, her treatment of her textual personifications harks back to both the representational mode and spiritual heritage of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). John Bunyan’s classic Puritan allegory traces the spiritual struggle of the everyman character of Christian as he interacts with a host of allegorical personifications – characters such as Obstinate and Pliable, Faithful and Hopeful, who are named according to the traits they represent – on his journey to heaven. Similar personifications can also be found in Summer on the Lakes, where Fuller constructs a fictional dialogue between Emerson, thinly disguised as “Self-Poise”, and her own persona “Free Hope” (Fuller 1992b: 145 – 150). On the other hand, the externalization of her “inward life” (Fuller 1984: 271) can also be seen to anticipate the notion and practice of ‘consciousness-raising’ developed much later by second-wave feminism.⁵⁰ In the late 1960s, second-wave feminists began to meet in groups and discuss their personal experiences in order to foster awareness of how these experiences were linked to structural forms of oppression, proposing the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Indeed, Fuller’s text prefigures several aspects of twentieth-century women and gender studies. Her analysis of women figures anticipates both the reconstruction of feminine cultural traditions and the analysis of cultural representations of femininity launched in the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, she distinguishes between the categories of sex and gender when she writes that individuals combine feminine and masculine gender aspects regardless of their sex: “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (Fuller

 See for example Betty Friedan, who in The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, sets out to raise consciousness of the situation American women in the mid-twentieth century find themselves in: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone” (Friedan 1984: 15). In her final chapter, Friedan invokes the idea of an inner voice reminiscent of Fuller when she emphasizes that “there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself. […] When society asks so little of women, every woman has to listen to her own inner voice to find her identity in this changing world. She must create, out of her own needs and abilities, a new life plan […]” (Friedan 1984: 338).

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1992a: 310).⁵¹ Moreover, Fuller’s discussion of masculinity and femininity, the masculine principle of Minerva and the feminine principle of the Muse, anticipates Virginia Woolf’s discussion of the “androgynous mind” in A Room of One’s Own, written almost a century after Fuller’s manifesto. “[I]n each of us two powers preside”, Woolf writes, one male and one female […]. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. […] the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; […] it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. (Woolf 2001: 84– 85)

In keeping with the ideas of Fuller, Woolf adds later in her essay that “[i]t is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or manwomanly” (Woolf 2001: 90). An important contemporaneous reference point for Fuller’s spiritual feminism is Transcendentalist philosophy. It is in close exchange with her intellectual interlocutor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson that Margaret Fuller develops her vision of feminine individual expression, which forms the linchpin of her manifesto and finds its most powerful portrayal in her self-reliant heroine Miranda. Her text picks up on the idea of the divine character of the individual, which is a central Transcendentalist notion derived in part from Puritanism and in part from Romantic philosophy. At the same time, her feminist manifesto offers a feminist rethinking of Emerson’s notion of self-reliance. In his best-known essays, “Nature” (1836), “The American Scholar” (1837) and “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson repeatedly highlights the importance of finding a voice. Writing against imitation, conformity, and America’s cultural and intellectual dependence on Europe, he instead advocates self-trust and heroic genius. Our self-reliant voices, he claims, can be heard “in solitude” but they “grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world” (Emerson 2006c: 212). Because of the secondhand nature of social life, any reform, whether individual or social, must begin with “the infinitude of the private man” (Emerson quoted in Buell 2006: 208). The driving force of self-reliance, according to Emerson, is the divine spirit inherent in the individual. As he famously notes in one of his best-known passages, it is in solitude that the individual may fathom the divine: Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.

 For a detailed discussion of the remarkably modern and progressive aspects of Fuller’s gender theory, see Cynthia Davis (2000).

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The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. (Emerson 2006a: 35 – 36)

It is in a solitary state in the presence of nature alone that the individual experiences and indeed merges with the divine spirit. Like Emerson, Fuller emphasizes the divine character of the individual and argues that it is our divine spirit that nourishes our self-reliance. As is suggested by Fuller’s dialogue with Miranda – who unfolds from within rather than being determined from without – individuals become self-reliant by turning away from repressive social norms and towards unrestricted spiritual expansion. In the spiritual vision of her treatise, the individual appears as a divine “messenger” (Fuller 1992a: 245) or “angelic minister” (Fuller 1992a: 247), and it is through the constant development of their souls that human beings bring the world in “harmony” with the “universe-spirit” (Fuller 1992a: 247) and thus “make the earth a part of heaven” (Fuller 1992a: 245). However, what radicalizes Fuller’s discussion is the fact that she applies the Transcendentalist notion of the infinite worth of the spiritual individual to the situation of women. Writing in a social context in which women were neither educated as independent selves nor treated by the law and in politics as citizens in their own right, she claims that they are divine individuals and able to accomplish great things. Or, to use Stanley Cavell’s critical terminology (1996: 58, 134), her manifesto emphasizes that women (ought to) have a voice in their own history. In Fuller’s text this means that they should be in a position not only to work out their individual destiny but also to shape America as a nation by becoming part of a larger cultural and political discussion. Fuller frames the beginning and end of her treatise with references to the genre of the sermon and argues that the only sermons to have a fundamental lasting effect are those that deal with self-perfection (Fuller 1992a: 249 – 250, 342). In so doing, she not only categorizes her text as a sermon but also identifies the exhortation “Be ye perfect” (Fuller 1992a: 249 – 250), a direct allusion to an almost identical passage in the Gospel of Matthew (5:48), as her sermon topic.⁵² In fact, in the overall argument of her text, moral (self‐)perfectionism

 Interestingly, Fuller omits the continuation of the original passage in the Gospel of Matthew (5:48), which reads: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” The reference to the “Father which is in heaven” is left out, perhaps because the idea of a paternal God does not fit Fuller’s spiritual feminism. While many critics have claimed that as a repetitive, associative and accumulative text, Woman in the Nineteenth Century does not follow any discernible structure, Marie Mitchell

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forms both the aim and means of her spiritual feminism. On the one hand, the social order is imperfect and in need of reform because its social norms and conditions do not allow women to grow into self-reliant individuals, despite the fact that America’s democracy was founded and built on cultural values of equality. That is, American society must be changed in such a way as to allow women to work towards their self-perfection. On the other hand, it is women’s striving for their moral self-perfection that will inspire and advance social reform, thus giving them an important ‘voice’ in the collective destiny of the nation. What Fuller envisions is, therefore, a mutual reinforcement of the spiritual growth of the individual woman and a fundamental renewal of the social order at large. “[T]hen and only then”, Fuller points out, “will mankind be ripe for this [ravishing harmony of the spheres], when inward and outward freedom for woman as much as man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession” (Fuller 1992a: 260 – 261). Blending the spiritual and the political both in her language and her project, Fuller’s manifesto makes a number of concrete proposals at a practical level to transform social public space into an arena of potential feminine expression. As well as calling for women’s right to speak for themselves by voting and holding public office, Fuller argues that in order for the individual woman to realize and fulfil her potential, the sphere of activity for women needs to be expanded. “[L]et them be sea-captains” (Fuller 1992a: 345), she famously writes, pointing to their potential leadership qualities, adding in more general terms that women need “a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers” (Fuller 1992a: 346). In a similar vein, she encourages women to get involved in reform movements, to petition and speak in public. However, while she urges women to step forward and become active in the public sphere, Fuller also calls on women to mobilize their individual inner potential. As well as arguing for a social regeneration at a national level, she calls for an individual spiritual rebirth. She insists that women must stop being influenced by men and instead retire within themselves, and explore the groundwork of life till they find their peculiar secret. Then, when they come forth again, renovated and baptized, they will know how to turn all dross to gold, and will be rich and free though they live in a hut, tranquil, if in a crowd. Then their sweet singing shall not be from passionate impulse, but the lyrical overflow of a divine rapture, and a new music shall be evolved from this many-chorded world. (1992: 313)

Olesen Urbanski (1980: 128 – 145) shows that despite its loose and episodic construction, Fuller’s argument adheres to the classic rhetorical form of a sermon or oration.

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Using highly metaphorical language, this passage underlines that women need to turn to and examine their inner spiritual resources so as to find the divine element in their own individual selves (“their peculiar secret”). After their spiritual rebirth or “inward baptism” (Fuller 1992a: 325), they will return to society as truly independent subjects (“rich and free though they live in a hut, tranquil, if in a crowd”). And it is their independent spiritual agency that will allow them to transform and improve the world – or as Fuller puts it “turn all dross to gold”. The passage further suggests that women’s transformation of both themselves and the world will make the latter more multi-vocal (“many-chorded”) because women will contribute and shape the world. Rather than resulting from uncontrolled “passionate impulse”, their expression will be motivated by their spirituality (“divine rapture”) and produce a new harmonious order (“a new music”). In short, once women find something in themselves that enables them to achieve spiritual self-reliance, they will be in a position to change and perfect the world. Fuller’s feminist appropriation of Emerson’s notion of self-reliance preserves the spiritual dimension and simultaneously traces the political consequences of his Transcendentalist ideal.⁵³ Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball” experience mentioned above highlights a mystical moment in which the material world, and especially social reality, seem to evaporate. As David Robinson notes, there is a strand in Transcendentalism and its embrace of the solitary individual that can appear asocial and apolitical in the way in which it valorizes “a monistic vision of one mind constituting the universe” (Robinson 1982: 95).⁵⁴ By contrast,

 See Tiffany K. Wayne (2008) for a discussion of how Transcendentalism offered a language women could use to formulate their feminist ideas.  Fuller’s journal and letters repeatedly make reference to heightened spiritual moments. In a journal entry written in 1840, for instance, she recalls a mystical experience she had at the age of twenty-one (Fuller 1992c: 10 – 12). However, while the idea of spiritual retreat is important to her, the role it plays in her argument is different from the significance Emerson places on his “transparent eye-ball” experience. Fuller often presents herself as a solitary individual; the following quotation from her Memoirs, put together after her death by Ralph Waldo Emerson in collaboration with William Henry Channing (a Unitarian preacher, Trancendentalist philosopher and activist in the women’s movement) and James Freeman Clark (also a Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, a professor of theology and human rights advocate), is just one of many examples. However, as her self-presentation in this passage suggests, the reason for her solitary state is not so much a desire to absent herself from society but the sense that there are no preexisting social models for exceptional women like her. “From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn; that I should be a pilgrim and sojourner on earth, and that the birds and foxes would be surer of a place to lay the head than I. […] / This thought, all whose bearings I did not, indeed, understand, affected me sometimes with sadness, sometimes with pride. I

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Fuller is interested in an engagement in and with the social and political sphere when she emphasizes how the spiritual growth of individual consciousness may effect change in the material world, and how women in particular may gain a voice as agents of social and political change.⁵⁵ While Emerson suggests that our self-reliant voices “grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world” (Emerson 2006c: 212), Fuller’s tropes in the passage cited above direct attention to what will happen when women, having become self-reliant, “come forth again” in order to become part of “a many-chorded world” (Fuller 1992a: 313). Dialogue is a useful term to describe Fuller’s textual self-construction – the way in which she writes, or ‘speaks’, the self into being through a myriad of other texts and voices – and it is equally applicable to her spiritual feminism and its emphasis on the relation between self and other(s), individuals and the world.⁵⁶ While Emerson dismissed Fuller’s ‘Conversations’ as her “parlatorio” (quoted in Chevigny 1998: 261), the seminars both discussed and practiced the type of feminine self-development that was to become key to Fuller’s vision in her manifesto of how the material conditions of women’s existence might be transformed. As well as training participants in systematic thought and expression and bringing together a group of intellectual women, many of whom were to become leading activists, the collaborative dialogic exchange of the ‘Conversations’ revolved around women’s cultural position and the roles they might play in the world as self-reliant individuals. In much the same way, Fuller’s treatise represents a

mourned that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full riches of my being; I was proud that I was to test myself in the sternest way, that I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife. All this I did not understand as I do now; but this destiny of the thinker, and (shall I dare to say it?) of the poetic priestess, sibylline, dwelling in the cave or amid the Lybian [sic] sands, lay yet enfolded in my mind. […] / A sister I have truly been to many, – a brother to more, – a fostering nurse to, oh how many! The bridal hour of many a spirit, when first it was wed, I have shared, but said adieu before the wine was poured out at the banquet. […] those who live would scarcely consider that I am among the living, – and I am isolated, as you say. / My dear –, all is well; all has helped me to decipher the great poem of the universe. I can hardly describe to you the happiness which floods my solitary hours” (Fuller 1972: 98 – 100).  In a review of Emerson’s essays, Fuller foregrounds her interest in the material world by inquiring whether Emerson’s rejection of the flat horizontal of his world was well-advised: “We doubt this friend raised himself too early to the perpendicular and did not lie along the ground long enough to hear the secret whispers of our parent life. We could wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers” (Fuller 1992d: 383).  Fuller’s impatience with unity made her joke in 1844 about Emerson’s retreat in the small town and Transcendentalist centre of Concord: “[…] the fates which gave this place Concord, took away the animating influences of Discord” (quoted in Chevigny 1998: 263).

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search for “a social philosophy of self-dependence” (Kolodny 1994: 376). While her essay’s discussion emphasizes spiritual self-development, she always sees the individual in relation to and in dialogue with the world and asks how subjectivity develops and unfolds in the larger context of a community. What the passage quoted above also evokes is a compelling vision of how women’s self-reliant voices may work in ‘concert’ with each other. “[T]heir sweet singing”, Fuller writes about women, “shall not be from passionate impulse, but the lyrical overflow of a divine rapture, and a new music shall be evolved from this many-chorded world” (Fuller 1992a: 313). The musical metaphors Fuller uses in this passage resonate with the emphasis Emerson puts on the importance of finding a voice; the “sweet singing” women will produce once they have given rebirth to themselves as self-reliant individuals with a voice of their own is not the result of an “passionate impulse” (Fuller 1992a: 313) but is inspired by the spiritual self-expression they are now capable of. Moreover, the passage suggests that what Fuller strives for is a harmonious state that is produced by many different voices. The harmony of their “sweet singing”, which signifies the transformed state of the world, enhances each individual voice without denying those voices’ uniqueness. Indeed, as Fuller’s word choice underlines, this “new music” is produced by a “many-chorded world” (Fuller 1992a: 313). Given its invocation of a concert of different voices, the passage is again reminiscent of the ‘Conversations’. Similar to Fuller’s seminars, which fostered the development of independent voices through dialogic exchange, her manifesto aims at a world in which women have individual voices enabling them to actively shape and transform the world. Indeed, Fuller’s manifesto departs from contemporaneous discourses according to which women have a softening influence as moral guardians and spiritual custodians in the domestic sphere, rather than participating in the harsh reality of politics and other areas of public life. By emphasizing the transformative power of women’s self-reliance, her spiritual feminism aims to give women an important role in the social and political sphere. In contrast to the narrative closure offered by Eliot, who has her preacher withdraw from the public arena, Woman in the Nineteenth Century defies closure and instead ends with a promise. In so doing, Fuller’s manifesto underlines that the promise of her vision is yet to be fulfilled, that change is yet to come. In one of the last paragraphs, she impatiently invokes the advent of a female messiah figure: “And will not she soon appear? The woman who shall vindicate their birthright for all women; who shall teach them what to claim, and how to use

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what they obtain?” (Fuller 1992a: 347).⁵⁷ Despite her impatient restlessness, her narrating voice seems hopeful. Speaking from her autobiographical position as a woman approaching middle age, and also referring to America as a maturing nation, Fuller points out that neither deluded by youthful naivety (“the dews of morning”) nor softened by age (“the shadows of evening”) she stands “in the sunny noon of life”, and several of her ideals have been broken and/or tarnished. “Yet enough is left, even by experience”, she insists, “to point to the glories of that destiny; faint, but not to be mistaken streaks of the future day” (Fuller 1992a: 348). Fuller’s poem which concludes the text gestures towards a future fulfilment of the promise outlined in her treatise: “For the Power to whom we bow / Has given its pledge that, if not now, / They of pure and stedfast [sic] mind, / By faith exalted, truth refined, / Shall hear all music loud and clear, / Whose first notes they venture here” (Fuller 1992a: 348; original emphasis). The speaker then goes on to encourage the reader to persist in her quest even though she may meet with opposition: “Though rabble rout may rush between, / Beat thee senseless to the ground, / In the dark beset thee round” (Fuller 1992a: 348 – 349). Indeed, the reader must never stop looking for perfection: “Persist to ask and it will come, / Seek not for rest in humbler home; / So shalt thou see what few have seen, / The palace home of King and Queen” (Fuller 1992a: 349). As mentioned earlier, Fuller’s fusion of religious and political discourse harks back to much earlier traditions, notably Anne Hutchinson’s radical dissent. In the nineteenth century, the convergence of spiritual transcendence and political activism became a powerful rhetorical motor in both the abolitionist movement and the women’s movement. Fuller herself posits the liberation and emancipation of women as a moral imperative by embedding her discussion in a universal narrative of perfection. As she argues, “It is not woman, but the law of right, the law of growth, that speaks in us, and demands the perfection of each being in its kind, apple as apple, woman as woman” (Fuller 1992a: 348). Like Fuller, many nineteenth-century women activists and reformers invoked religious categories in order to stress the spiritual equality of all human beings and to ask that moral principles be realized in the political organization of society. Among Fuller’s contemporaries who couched their political claims in a religious language were, for instance, the abolitionist and feminist reformers Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott as well as Sarah and  Also note Florence Nightingale’s feminist essay Cassandra, written in 1852, which ends with a reference to a female messiah-figure. Recognizing the position of powerlessness women in the nineteenth century face, she looks for a future leader speculating that “[t]he next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ” (Nightingale 1979: 14).

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Angelina Grimké.⁵⁸ One of Lucretia Mott’s sermons, entitled “Abuses and Uses of the Bible” and delivered four years after the publication of Fuller’s manifesto, demonstrates for instance how religion has been used to suppress women and, in turn, suggests a feminist reappropriation – “another reading of the Scriptures” (Mott 1999: 634) – which empowers women in their struggle for social equality.⁵⁹ Fuller’s socially committed spirituality thus contributes to and partakes in a culturally vibrant discourse. Fuller offers the first sustained analysis of women’s position in culture and society and makes a pioneering case for their self-realization by writing the first feminist manifesto published in America. But what fundamentally distinguishes Margaret Fuller from many of her female contemporaries addressing audiences as religious and/or political speakers is the self-assured way in which she constructs and projects herself as a public figure. Fuller promulgated her spiritual politics without ever speaking from a platform. Like Eliot, she never exposed herself as a public speaker. However, the type of voice she constructs in her manifesto implies a powerful foregrounding of her assured selfhood that does not show the type of ambivalence with which Eliot regards her public position as an author. In contrast to many women preachers who argue that they are legitimized in their public speech by the inspiration of a divine voice, Fuller author-

 Note for instance the “Declaration of Sentiments”, which was written at the Seneca Falls Convention under the guidance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and in deliberate imitation of the “Declaration of Independence”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness […]” (in Campbell 1989b: 34). Picking up on the religious idiom of the original document, one of the resolutions of the feminist “Declaration” reads: “Resolved, That woman is man’s equal – was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such” (in Campbell 1989b: 37– 38). Also note my discussion of American political speakers in the next chapter.  Lucretia Mott was active in the anti-slavery movement and one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention. As an officially recognized Quaker preacher and minister, Mott was certainly much closer to organized belief than Fuller. However, in passages such as the following one, her sermon is reminiscent of Fuller’s spiritual feminism, notably her argument that the social situation of women ought to be remedied by intellectual and spiritual growth. Mott emphasizes that “woman must avail herself of the increasing means of intelligence, education and knowledge. She must rise also in a higher sphere of spiritual existence and suffer her moral nature to be developed, her mind to be made right in the sight of God. Then will the time speedily come when the influence of the clergy shall be taken off of woman, when the monopoly of the pulpit shall no more oppress her, when marriage shall not be a means of rendering her noble nature subsidiary to man, when there shall be no assumed authority on the one part nor admitted inferiority or subjection on the other” (Mott 1999: 638).

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izes herself by declaring herself as divine. It is possible that her self-presentation as a divine character serves rhetorical purposes. However, what is certain is the high level of self-confidence that characterizes her textual personage. As a Transcendentalist thinker, Fuller goes as far as to place her divine identity at the centre of her spiritual universe. In contrast to Eliot’s Methodist preacher, who is inspired and interpellated by the voice of God, Fuller finds divine inspiration within herself. When she fashions herself in the mould of the ancient sibyls and oracles, which she often does, this is to not to refer to their inspiration by a divine voice other than their own, but to emphasize her feminine spiritual authority. In fact, both her mythopoetic self-fashioning and her emphasis on the individual as the locus of a divine power bear a close resemblance to Corinne and her divinatory insight. Like Staël’s Romantic heroine, the textual personage of Fuller has access to a spiritual truth and is able to transmit her prophetic vision to her audience because of her divine genius. Moreover, her emphasis on self-perfection in general and her self-mythology in particular suggest a belief in the power of self-creation. Reminiscent of Corinne, who is muse, artist and artwork at one and the same time, Fuller is at once the divine creator of herself and the prophet who tells other women about their own spiritual potential in her role as a quasi-preacher. Instead of being dependent on the divine inspiration of another voice (as is the case with Eliot’s Dinah Morris), the self-animating poetprophetess Fuller carries the spirit of the divine pneuma in herself. As suggested by the close resemblance that she bears to Corinne, what distinguishes Fuller from other contemporaneous prophets and preachers is her Romantic self-projection. Rather than confining herself to analysis and commentary, she actually ‘invents’ herself as a self-reliant heroine, thus setting a strong example to other women. Contemporaries frequently commented on the theatrical or even operatic quality of Fuller. Horace Greely, the editor of America’s then-leading liberal newspaper the New York Tribune, who hired her as a literary critic and social reporter after she had completed her manifesto, went as far as to suggest that had Fuller “condescended to appear before the footlights, she would have been recognized as the first actress of the Nineteenth Century” (quoted in Urbanski 1980: 22).⁶⁰ Fuller’s manifesto and ‘Conversations’ both entail a theatrical and performative dimension: In her seminars, Fuller inspired her students with her strong presence and spirited energy, much like the performer and  Also note Robert Hudspeth’s comments on the theatrical character of Fuller’s life: “From her childhood on, Fuller was fond of dramatizing her life, and it is not too much to say that she lived with an eye to heightening the drama” (Hudspeth in Fuller 1983: 32). Later he adds, “An actress who wrote her scripts, she knew how to be commanding and interesting. […] Thus life became a stage” (Hudspeth in Fuller 1983: 51, 54).

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improviser Corinne, while in her essay, she projects herself as a figure by assuming and acting the part of several personae. Edgar Allan Poe points out that in the case of Fuller, the boundaries between self, text and performance are constantly blurred. In order to illustrate how the performer Fuller merges with her texts and vice versa, Poe quotes a passage from Fuller’s writing and then offers a detailed description of “the personal woman” – “a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, for love – when moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity of this expression” – before he invites us to imagine how the person he has just described delivers the passage in question, “speaking in a high key, but musically” (Poe 1998: 226; original emphasis). The purpose of this mental exercise, according to Poe, is to demonstrate that “her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing” (Poe 1998: 226). Reading woman and text as coterminous with each other, Poe’s suggests not only that Fuller fashions herself as a literary figure, but also that what legitimizes her as an author is the effect of personal immediacy she generates through her performance of a complex dialogic selfhood. As Bell Gale Chevigny (1994: xxxii) suggests, Fuller’s theatrical self-performance provides her with a means of expression and, even more importantly, with a way of finding out – and acting out – who she is and/or might be.⁶¹ The theatricality of Fuller’s self-construction is closely connected with the attempt of this pioneer to create a self without recourse to viable pre-existing models. Her selfperformance, which always pivoted on a performance of texts and a performance of her life as a text, was never more strikingly pronounced, never more melodramatic, than in the last few years of her relatively short life, when she lived overseas.⁶² In 1846, one year after the publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller became one of America’s first foreign correspondents and sailed for Europe, where she met several of the writers and intellectuals with whom she had been ‘conversing’ in her writings, including George Sand, Elizabeth Bar-

 “For Fuller theatricality was not only a resource for resistant female expression and communion with other women, but heuristic, a means of finding out who she was or might be” (Chevigny 1994: xxxii).  Turning to Fuller’s biography is of course not unproblematic. Fuller studies often tend to concentrate on her life instead of her work. However, in contrast to purely biographical approaches, I regard her final years in Europe as a continuation of her textual self-performance in a different key. Like her journey in the Great Lakes region, which gave rise to her travelogue Summer on the Lakes, her years in Europe can be seen in relation to the Romantic notion of travel as a means of self-culture.

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rett Browning, William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. After her travels in England, Scotland and France, where her analysis of social conditions politicized and radicalized her even further, she visited Italy, the country which inspired her with a sense of belonging she experienced nowhere else.⁶³ For Fuller, Italy played a crucial role both as a literary space and a political arena. Given her self-identification with Staël’s Romantic heroine Corinne, her visit was effectively a return to the cultural space of her literary role model. What is more, as a friend and confidante of Giuseppe Mazzini, founder of the ‘Young Italy’ movement, she directly witnessed and participated in the revolution in Rome, which formed part of the first war of the Risorgimento. Here, she worked both as a journalistic commentator, sending dispatches to America, and as the director of a hospital tending those who were wounded in defending the newly founded Roman Republic against the French troops. As a result, Fuller not only visited Italy as the cultural space which allowed Staël’s Corinne to express herself through its culture, but she also radicalized her predecessor’s invocation of a national culture by becoming actively involved in its political struggle. As often pointed out by critics, it was in Italy that Fuller found happiness and self-fulfilment, both personally and politically (Steele 1992: xli–xlii). Rome was attractive to her as an enthusiastic reader of the texts Staël and Goethe had written about Italy. Yet the Eternal City also became the stage on which she was able to enact her most heroic scenario. As Chapter 5 will show, George Meredith’s novel Vittoria, written some twenty years after Fuller’s participation in the first war of the Risorgimento, treats the struggle for national independence and individual self-determination as parallel layers of one and the same narrative. In a gesture which, in retrospect, anticipates the operatic plot enacted by Meredith’s singer Vittoria, Fuller appears to have realized her visionary scenario of individual self-reliance against the background of a political striving for national independence. Only, in her case, Margaret Fuller the individual was not absorbed into the larger cause as Vittoria’s voice is in Meredith’s novel. On the contrary, the grand political struggle in which she participated represented the stage for the climactic enactment of all those values – self-growth, self-perfection, self-determination – she had written about in her manifesto and aspired to in her self-performance. As she observes in one of her letters written in Italy, “All these things [the country, the people, the spectacles] are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life” (Fuller 1987: 271). Rather

 “Italy”, she wrote in a letter in September 1847, “receives me as a long lost child and I feel myself at home here” (Fuller 1987: 293).

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than presenting her spiritual rebirth as a mere trope for the cultural and political renewal of Italy, her formulation relegates the country to an instance of self-commentary. Like a gloss added in “the margin” of a piece of writing, Italy “illuminate[s]” the “text” of her subjectivity.⁶⁴ Like Corinne, who feels stifled and cannot express her genius in provincial England, Fuller never felt entirely at ease in her native New England, which she associated with a Puritanical cultural climate and a general hostility to intellectual women (Showalter 2002a: 42). Instead she came to enact her personal revolution and independence, which had been shaped by America, its political history and cultural values, on foreign shores. Given the transformative experience of her transatlantic crossing, there seems to be a certain logic in the fact that Fuller was never to return to her homeland in person, although it would be cynical to suggest that her tragic demise was part of her self-invention. Fuller planned her return journey after the first war of the Risorgimento had failed and the Roman Republic had been defeated. Although she had misgivings about returning to America and a superstitious fear of the sea voyage, Fuller, her son and his father Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, an impoverished Italian nobleman and revolutionary who was either her lover or husband, embarked on the Elizabeth, which was to bring them to America. In the early hours of 19th July 1850, two months after they had left Europe, a storm drove the ship with its heavy cargo of Carrara marble into a sand bar off Fire Island, New York. With the break of day, the shipwrecked passengers could make out the American shore beyond the roiling waves less than a hundred yards away. Yet Fuller refused to be separated from her family by leaving the shipwreck. Having stayed on the shipwreck, foundered in immediate proximity to her homeland, Fuller was finally swept out into the sea. After the tragic accident, Henry David Thoreau and others scoured the coast, but neither Fuller’s body nor her manuscript “History of the Late Revolutionary Movements in Italy”, which she considered her masterpiece, could ever be found. Although Margaret Fuller, a fundamentally American thinker, never returned to her homeland alive, her voice and spirit – together with the spiritual feminism she had been preaching – came to enjoy a cultural afterlife reminiscent to that of Corinne. As the “Yankee Corinna”, Fuller not only modelled herself in analogy to Staël’s heroine, but she also resembles her predecessor in the way in which her figure survives in the textual production of others and in cultural history in gen-

 Discussing this sentence, John Paul Russo notes that “the spiritual self as text is read like a sacred word, which the travels and commentaries in the ‘margin’ help to interpret and ‘illuminate’” (Russo 2007: 143).

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eral. In Geraldine Jewsbury’s novel The Half Sisters, discussed in the previous chapter on the professional Victorian actress, Staël’s heroine resurfaces as an aftereffect, rearticulating questions concerning the social position of women at the time when the organized women’s movement emerged in Britain. This chapter has been concerned with the ways in which female preachers draw on and refigure religious traditions and also how their voices enter into dialogue with other women characters. As seen at the beginning of the chapter, the spirit of Corinne as a divine performer survives in the character of her half-sister Lucile, her niece Juliette and the young woman who performs her last poem. Corinne inspires these women and gives a voice to her niece and the young woman. This theme of feminine inspiration developed by Staël’s novel survives in the manner in which Fuller and Eliot’s Dinah Morris talk with other women and, in so doing, give them a voice. Fuller’s feminism became a crucial influence for the American women’s movement, which only began to emerge when she wrote her manifesto. Indeed, her resemblance to Corinne as a figure of feminine inspiration became even stronger after her death when other women began to converse with the voice of their dead predecessor both in their public speeches and writing. When the founding moment of the Seneca Falls Convention took place in 1848, Fuller was already away in Italy. When the first national women’s rights convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850, only a few months after Fuller’s death, delegates observed a minute of silence, and the president Paulina Wright Davis recalled later that “we were left to mourn her guiding hand – her royal presence” (quoted in Showalter 2002a: 58). Looking back on the struggle of the nineteenth-century women’s movement in their monumental History of Woman Suffrage (1881– 1922), Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony come to the conclusion that Margaret Fuller “possessed more influence upon the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time” (quoted in Steele 1992: xlvi). Although it is doubtful whether Fuller would have assumed a leading role in the organized women’s movement had she survived the shipwreck of the Elizabeth, she gave women activists a voice through her call for unlimited feminine self-development. Her conversational strategies motivated leading women’s rights activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton included, to initiate discussion groups in conscious imitation of Fuller’s seminars (Kolodny 1994: 377). At the same time, Margaret Fuller represents an exceptional landmark figure because of her belief in the self and its divine identity. This meant that she was remarkably unconflicted about the voice she had as a public persona, combining many discourses and positions in her multiple roles as a visionary prophet, theatrical improviser and political revolutionary.

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Yet there is also another, more ambivalent strand in her cultural memory. Fuller may not have had any reservations about her public self-creation, but her voice does become an object of conflict and controversy as other writers use her ‘figure’ as a template and recreate her as a literary character in their texts. As the next chapter on American political speakers will show, both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Henry James’s The Bostonians refer to aspects of Fuller’s public persona in their characterization of Zenobia, Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor. By modelling these feminist women characters on Fuller’s persona and having them treated by other characters in highly aggressive ways, these texts use Fuller as a cipher to articulate a cultural ambivalence over the public female voice in general and the political claims of feminism in particular. Eliot articulates this ambivalence in the ways in which her novel constructs and eventually silences its female preacher. In the case of the self-assured performer Fuller, ambivalence comes into play in the ways in which feminists celebrate her as an inspirational figure and other writers recycle her memory in their own literary treatment of female performer figures. As late as 1903, more than half a century after Fuller’s death, Henry James referred to the “haunting Margaret-ghost” (quoted in Steele 1992: xlvi, Davis 2000: 50). Whether venerating her inspirational power or ridiculing her feminist vision, America, it seems, could not easily shake off the recalcitrant spirit of this self-determined voice.

4 American Political Speakers Feminist speakers such as Margaret Fuller, who featured in the previous chapter on visionary preaching, caused unease, even anxiety in their male contemporaries. Yet masculine anxieties over the public feminine voice also surface in literary texts about American political speakers. Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) both revolve around female political speakers and the powerful voices they have in the public domain. Following a historical overview of the particular significance oratory has in American culture, this chapter offers a close reading of these two novels written in and about nineteenth-century America in order to examine the hostility with which male characters react to the powerful public presence of feminist speakers. As we shall see, the male characters in question attempt to assert themselves and get a public voice of their own by effacing the vocal power of the female political speakers. The ending of Henry James’s The Bostonians illustrates this unease with a climactic scene of violent conflict. The charismatic young speaker Verena Tarrant is about to address a large audience that has gathered in the Boston Music Hall and awaits her highly advertised feminist lecture. The space of the auditorium is packed to full capacity, and vociferous boys are selling photographical portraits and a sketch of Verena’s life. Yet her appearance on the public platform is delayed by the argument that takes place in the wings. As the eager audience in the hall is growing impatient – the sound of several thousand stamping feet turns into more aggressive “cries and groans and hisses” (James 1998: 428) and eventually into an uproar – Verena receives Basil Ransom in her dressingroom. The conflict that unfolds on this second stage behind the scenes opposes Basil Ransom, Verena’s lover, and Olive Chancellor, her feminist mentor. Basil has a powerful hold over Verena and claims her for himself alone. Therefore, he seeks to prevent her from delivering her speech, while Olive wants her to go on stage and speak for the feminist cause. Basil and Olive not only argue their contrary positions, but they also physically grasp and seize Verena, who in turn is torn between protest and surrender to both of them. Eventually it is Basil who, “by muscular force, wrenche[s] her away” (James 1998: 434). In so doing, he literally wrests her from Olive and the public platform in order to lead her into marriage and domesticity. What is at stake in this curious battle over the voice of the female speaker? And how can we evaluate the violence with which it is fought? The struggle over Verena Tarrant’s voice, which is at the centre of the novel and comes to a head in this final scene of violence, is only in part motivated by the personal interests https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-005

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and desires of Basil Ransom, Olive Chancellor and of some other characters, all of whom seek to appropriate her voice, whether for financial, aesthetic, erotic and/or political reasons. What also comes to the fore in this fierce confrontation is a cultural conflict over the role and place of women in American culture. What is at issue in this conflict is the question of who ought to have a voice and be heard in the public sphere. It is no coincidence that the final scene of the novel plays itself out in the liminal space between the public platform, from which Verena is about to address her audience, on the one hand, and the domestic sphere, into which Basil wants to abduct her, on the other. Textually, the conflict over Verena is marked by the way in which Basil and Olive are set against each other, namely by the different attitudes they adopt towards her voice and its gripping effect on its listeners. These two characters, who are both determined to usurp Verena’s vocal power, stand for two opposing positions: Olive, the feminist activist, wishes to use Verena as a resonant mouthpiece for the promulgation of her own political convictions, while Basil, the reactionary Southerner, attempts to shut her up in public so as to be able to enjoy the irresistible sound of her voice in private. In a similar vein, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), the other example discussed in this chapter, can be seen to revolve around the antagonism between the magnificent female performer Zenobia and the character-narrator Miles Coverdale. If the former, an author of stories and feminist tracts, protests against the silence that society imposes on women, the latter seeks to contain and control the powerful voice of the performer by virtue of his erotic fantasies as well as his narrative voice. Against this background, Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of culture as a “battleground for […] oppositions” (“Kampfplätze der Gegensätze”) (Nietzsche 2008: 35) provides a useful theoretical framework to describe the struggle for power at issue in these novels. It also tackles the ideological tension between the different positions and voices these texts address. In his polemic 1887 text On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche emphasizes that what we understand as morals is in fact a way of dividing the world into opposing sets of values and interpretations. Moral and cultural values emerge as a result of a struggle between various positions. Culture, according to Nietzsche, must be understood as a process of interpretation, and any cultural system is defined by the values which triumph in the battle between different ways of describing the world.¹ However, having emerged  Presenting his genealogical approach to culture, Nietzsche argues that “anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it; that everything which happens in the organic world is part of a process of overpowering, mastering, and that, in

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out of conflict and having triumphed over another set of values, cultural interpretations are never stable, never static, never fixed. If culture is a perpetual “process of overpowering” (“Überwältigungsprozess”) (Nietzsche 2008: 57), triumphant power and predominant values can be overturned once another force becomes more powerful. This is because this violent “process of overpowering” is in constant movement due to the different descriptions and interpretations of the world competing against one another, insisting on dominance and seeking to overwhelm, subdue and vanquish each other. Because cultural codes and values emerge from processes in which they overpower and thus overcome other positions, all interpretations are violent.² Indeed, the central Denkfigur in Nietzsche’s conception of culture is one of antagonism, which turns culture into an arena of competing forces. This notion of culture has thematic and aesthetic significance in both The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians, the two American political speaker texts discussed in this chapter. Both novels revolve around the battle between different ideological positions, and this conflict is closely intertwined with the way in which the texts orchestrate the tension between the voice of the female political speaker and the other character voices, notably those of Miles Coverdale, the character-narrator in The Blithedale Romance, and Basil Ransom, the most important focalizer in The Bostonians. In keeping with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, the different textual voices refer us to the difference and disagreement between ideological viewpoints and positions. As the most topical and most overtly political texts in the oeuvres of both authors, the two novels invoke conflicting ideological attitudes in their character constellations. While The Blithedale Romance features a heterogeneous group of self-absorbed reformers, The Bostonians juxtaposes male and female, the South and the North, the binary opposites of a culture war that keeps haunting the restoration of the Union after the American Civil War. In these two texts, which were both

turn, all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation, in the course of which the previous ‘meaning’ and ‘aim’ must necessarily be obscured or completely effaced. […] all aims, all uses are merely signs indicating that a will to power has mastered something less powerful than itself and impressed the meaning of a function upon it in accordance with its own interests. So the entire history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a custom may take on the form of an extended chain of signs, of ever-new interpretations and manipulations […]” (Nietzsche 2008: 57– 58; original emphasis).  Also note Michel Foucault, who follows Nietzsche in emphasizing the violent character of interpretation. Conflict is inevitable because anything we interpret is already itself an interpretation so that any interpretative act will be an attack on a previous interpretation. In Foucault’s words, interpretation “can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer” (Foucault 2000: 275).

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written in the period leading up to and following the Civil War, the female performer voice is at the very centre of a struggle between different positions standing for opposing descriptions of the world and seeking to overpower each other. Both texts feature a feminist speaker who argues that women must be included in politics and given a ‘voice’ of their own. Furthermore, these texts revolve around a battle over the charismatic power of the performer voice itself, which, as the final passage of The Bostonians mentioned above suggests, plays itself out as a violent “Überwältigungsprozess”. In other words, what they foreground are performer voices that speak about the distribution of power and ‘voice’ in society, and thus about agency. At the same time, as we shall see, the novels orchestrate the various textual voices not just in order to foreground their ideological differences but also to enact a complex re-distribution of power among them.³ But why is it that American performer texts foreground the political domain to such an extent? The emphasis that Hawthorne’s and James’s novels put on political speech, I suggest, marks them as specifically American. It cannot be an accident that American performer texts initially focus on political speakers. The first British performer novels, by contrast, centre on professional theatre performers, while political speakers only feature in British novels written much later, namely in the so-called ‘suffrage novels’ at the turn of the century. This difference between the two traditions can hardly be explained by the historical development of the women’s movement in the two countries; women began to campaign for political rights at almost the same time on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead what appears to be significant is the important role political oratory plays in the United States. Political language and public speech are intricately linked with and form a crucial element of the United States and its national self-understanding. Because America was not founded on the basis of a shared history and/or a common ethnicity, Sandra Gustafson points out, “American identity derives important features from the symbolism of spoken and written language” (Gustafson 2000: 267).⁴ As a number of scholars have observed, a particularly powerful notion in America’s cultural self-imagination in the founding era was the idea that the nation was literally spoken into being. In his book Voicing America, Christopher Looby talks about how Americans in the new republic considered the  This idea is inspired by a formulation of Peter Gibian (2001: 36).  Sandra Gustafson also formulates this idea in the following way: “Lacking the common ethnicity, often marked by a distinctive language, that provided each European state with a sense of nationhood, Americans made the forms of language carry much of the burden of national union” (Gustafson 2000: 267).

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nascent nation as an effect of language (Looby 1996: 26). Jay Fliegelman (1993) discusses the nation’s act of self-declaring as performance and its independence as something that is rhetorically performed (also see Connor 2000: 4). Indeed, what makes the “Declaration of Independence” effective as a speech act is, as Jacques Derrida has famously highlighted, its paradoxical structure, namely the fact that it is simultaneously constative and performative. In a “fabulous retroactivity” (Derrida 1986: 10), America’s founding document brings forth the nation that states its independence. Or in Derrida’s words: “One cannot decide – and that’s the interesting thing, the force and the coup of force of such a declarative act – whether independence is stated or produced by this utterance” (Derrida 1986: 9). It is, however, not the nation’s abrupt fabrication alone that is performed as a rhetorical act. After its foundation, the nation continues to performatively reenact itself in and through political oratory. In his discussion of how nations consolidate themselves as imagined communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that it is writing, in the form of novels and newspapers, that provides the nation’s readers with an experience of synchronicity and hence with a sense of imagined connectedness. These two formats are, however, not the only verbal means which help forge imagined communities. In the United States an analogous effect is produced by political oratory. Both before and after the linguistic act of national self-creation, public speaking played a crucial role in America, and everyday social life was permeated by various modes of public speech. Whereas in the colonial period the most important form of public address was the sermon, during the Revolution the art of public eloquence became a major political medium (Gustafson 2000: xxiii). The halls of Congress were the most important arena of the republic’s government, and it was here that political oratory was institutionalized and that the first celebrity orators rose to fame (Gustafson 2000: xxiv). In the nineteenth century, however, political oratory also became an important cultural practice outside parliamentary assemblies. In fact, it assumed cultural centrality as “the spectacular mass entertainments of the day” (Gibian 2001: 19). Political speeches and rhetorical duels could attract huge crowds of tens of thousands of attentive listeners, and they could last several hours or even several days, all the while expounding vital national issues. Afterwards, important speeches were discussed in newspaper reviews, circulated in print, analysed in close study as well as recited from memory (Gibian 2001: 19, Baskerville 1979: 33 – 34). America’s obsession with public speaking in the mid-nineteenth-century was, as Peter Gibian emphasizes, characteristic of an era of national self-defini-

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tion. This self-definition must be achieved and defended through verbal performances of powerful speakers (Gibian 2001: 18).⁵ Discussing national issues, their orations also had a performative dimension, since they were speech events inspiring large masses of listeners with the sense of being part of a community. The “emotional collaboration”, as Gibian puts it, allowed the speaker and the audience to experience themselves as a united “body politic” (Gibian 2001: 19). This mode of public speech and the affective bond it inspires is reminiscent of what Benedict Anderson writes about the acts of reading of newspapers and novels and singing of national songs and anthems as communal practices: As such, they provide their participants with an experience of simultaneity and a sense of “unisonance” and “unisonality” (Anderson 1991: 145). Political oratory is thus what is imagined to bring the nation into existence and what allows individuals to come together as a group and experience themselves as members of a community. Political speech in nineteenth-century American culture was, however, also seen as a “battleground” (Gibian 2001: 19). The examples Gibian gives are the “epic oratorical duels between political campaigners or between verbal gladiators” struggling over “the most solemn and crucial questions of national vision” (Gibian 2001: 19). One of these battlegrounds is the one in which the speakers of the women’s movement launched a debate over the state of the nation from a feminist standpoint. As already seen in the previous chapter, Margaret Fuller, an important forerunner of American feminism, argued that the nation was still far from fulfilling its promise and in need of perfection. Often joining hands with the abolitionist movement, American nineteenth-century feminists criticized the contradiction in the founding document of the new nation. Invoking the existence of inalienable human rights as the basis on which the new nation and its democracy were founded, the “Declaration of Independence” at the same time excluded women, slaves and emancipated African-Americans from that principle of equality. The “Declaration of Sentiments”, the founding docu Similarly, Sandra Gustafson writes that Americans in the new republic regarded “the great address as a major ingredient of civil society” and “oratory as a vehicle of national embodiment” (Gustafson 2000: 267). On the role of the (male) orator in American culture, see Barnet Baskerville’s The People’s Voice: The Orator in American Society (1979). As Baskerville points out, nineteenth-century Americans considered political speeches as part of their national literature. “It seemed to them only natural that oratory, a form of literature native to republics, should have been the literary genre to receive the highest cultivation in this country” (Baskerville 1979: 83). For a selection of key speeches in American history, see the two-volume anthology American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War (2006a) and American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (2006b), edited by Ted Widmer for the Library of America.

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ment of the American women’s movement, which was composed at the Seneca Falls Convention under the guidance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, reformulates the “Declaration of Independence”, emphasizing the equality of the sexes: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal […]” (in Campbell 1989b: 34).⁶ The political struggle triggered by this fault line in the nation’s construction is precisely what The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians tap into with their figure of the political speaker. Like some of the British stage performer novels that will be discussed in Chapter 5, namely George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni and Vittoria, these novels by Hawthorne and James also foreground the relation between the female performer voice and the nation. Yet the American and British texts depict this relationship in different ways. In Meredith’s novels, Emilia (a.k.a. Vittoria) uses her singing in order to represent the nation which she hopes to help found in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. Meredith’s performer has a voice in public because she lends her voice to an idea, because her voice not only proleptically proclaims but also comes to allegorically stand in for Italy’s future national unity. This means that the female performer voice serves as an allegorical signifier for the nation, while the woman herself is given no voice of her own in the political entity for which she sings and speaks. The American texts discussed in this chapter clearly depart from this pattern. Rather than representing and unifying the nation as Meredith’s performer does, Zenobia and Verena Tarrant, the political speakers in Hawthorne and James, point to a conflict over the role and position of women in national politics. In fact, the relation between the various textual voices in The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians is more antagonistic and more openly hostile than in any other set of texts discussed in this book, and the cultural clash they mark is far more clearly gendered. Indeed, one can go as far as to say that these American texts imagine cultural conflict as a battle of the sexes. In The Blithedale Romance it is Miles Coverdale and in The Bostonians Basil Ransom who are fascinated and, at the same time, feel threatened by the power the female speaker

 For a discussion of the rhetoric of women orators in the reform movements, see volume I of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (1989a) and Lillian O’Connor’s Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (1954), itself a pioneering study. For historical overviews of the women’s rights movement in America, see Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick (1996) and Glenna Matthews’s The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Place in the United States 1630 – 1970 (1994). For a broad selection of documents surrounding the political struggle for women’s suffrage, see Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle (2005). Mary P. Ryan (1992), finally, discusses a range of outdoor political strategies that nineteenth-century American women utilized as they were excluded from official politics.

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has on her passive male listeners. Confronted by her powerful presence, Hawthorne’s character-narrator and James’s character-focalizer both fetishize the female performer voice as an erotic object. As we shall see, it is precisely by turning the woman into an erotic object that they seek to contain, appropriate and usurp the feminine voice. At the same time, the aesthetic brilliance of the two texts lies in the fact that in juxtaposing various textual voices, they do not privilege or take side with any one of these voices. While the novels imagine cultural and political conflict as a violent “Überwältigungsprozess”, a battle for power that they represent by means of complex voice effects, neither of the texts identifies a triumphant position and/or character. The satirical tone that emerges as a result of the way in which James orchestrates the various textual voices means that antagonism is sustained, and the same holds for Hawthorne’s ironical treatment of the various voices in his text. In both novels, the female performer voice is eventually silenced by drastic means. And yet in both texts, the feminine voice carries an element of excess that cannot be overpowered or usurped by the masculine characters. As in the British stage performer novel, politics and performance are closely connected in these texts. In my reading of Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, I demonstrated that the professional theatre not only forms a stage of aesthetic entertainment but can also be seen to serve as a site negotiating political values and issues. My discussion of the American examples in this chapter pursues an analogous idea, namely that the appearance of the political speaker in Hawthorne and James always includes theatrical aspects. As Barnet Baskerville points out, Americans in the nineteenth century regarded great orations as an aesthetic experience, which was to be enjoyed like a work of art (Baskerville 1979: 86). As a result, they approached political oratory in much the same way as stage performances: “People went to hear great speakers as they attended a concert or a play, hoping to be thrilled, enchanted, lifted out of themselves” (Baskerville 1979: 86). Their affective response and aesthetic appreciation in enjoying the sound of a speaker’s voice, its melody and dramatic moments appear to have resembled those of a concert and/or theatre audience. Drawing on this aesthetic approach to political oratory, the two novels merge the political and the theatrical in suggestive ways. In The Bostonians, Ransom, the male listener, tries to wilfully ignore the political semantics of Verena’s speech so as to focus instead on the sound of her voice as a purely aesthetic phenomenon. Yet even when stripped of its political message, the voice of Verena – who never stops performing, regardless of whether she finds herself in public or in private – maintains its captivating power thanks to its sheer sound. Unlike the meaning of her speech, the affective impact of her performing voice cannot be avoided and thus overwhelms its passive spellbound listener. Similarly, in The

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Blithedale Romance, Coverdale likes to think of himself as an observer who is able to rearrange the events and characters he perceives on his inner mental stage. However, the powerful performer Zenobia never stops haunting Coverdale. When he writes his narrative twelve years after her death, he still struggles to have a ‘voice’; overpowered by the memory of Zenobia’s presence and performance, he still fails to fully describe and interpret the impact she has on him. What is suggested by this conflict between the affective power of the performing voice, its aesthetic experience and its narrative description is again a violent “Überwältigungsprozess”. While the male figures attempt to overpower the female performers – whether by sheer physical force, or by means of the interpretations and descriptions they evoke in their narration and/or focalization – the performer voices effectively elude their grasp and, in turn, threaten to overwhelm them through their powerful effect. In short, what is crucial is the close relationship between voice and power at work in both of these texts. The female performers not only speak about the unequal distribution of ‘voice’ and power in the political domain, but they themselves have power because of the strong effect their voices have on their listeners. At the same time, some of these listeners – because they themselves lack comparable vocal power – seek to appropriate and usurp their powerful voices in their own will to power.

4.1 Haunted by the Perpetual Performer: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) When Zenobia, the brilliant feminist and public performer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), makes her first appearance in the text, she presents herself in grand theatrical fashion. Already her pseudonym forms part of her self-performance. Zenobia, a name that harks back to an ancient Syrian queen, is the nom de plume she has assumed as the author of magazine stories and feminist tracts and the nickname she encourages her friends to use as well. Miles Coverdale, the first-person narrator of The Blithedale Romance and a recent arrival to the utopian community of Blithedale, meets the wellknown public figure for the first time when she enters the scene by opening the parlour door. Her pseudonym, he notes, matches her queenly attitude and pride: “[…] it accorded well with something imperial which her friends attributed to this lady’s figure and deportment” (Hawthorne 1998: 13). Zenobia, he continues, has “as much native pride as any queen would have known what to do with” (Hawthorne 1998: 13). As if holding court, she welcomes the new members of the community and addresses them individually. In fact, Coverdale’s description of this moment suggests that on entering the drawing room at Blithedale

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Farm, Zenobia’s imperial attitude transforms the room into a theatrical stage and uses those present for her self-dramatization. But how does Coverdale’s narrative treat the voice Zenobia has as a performer? Before he goes on to describe any other of her characteristic features, Hawthorne’s first-person narrator points out that she speaks “in a fine, frank, mellow voice” (Hawthorne 1998: 14). Her voice is emphasized again when Zenobia tells the poet Coverdale that he will sometimes hear her sing his poetry. She then goes on to talk about the role of women in society in general and at Blithedale in particular. However, Coverdale’s attention quickly shifts focus from both the sound quality of her voice and the content of her speech to her distinctive appearance and the role the performer comes to play in his own fantasy realm. Giving in to an impulse of his imagination, which he himself admits is “hardly felt to be quite decorous”, he pictures her “fine, perfectly developed figure, in Eve’s earliest garment” (Hawthorne 1998: 17). As he notes in retrospect, Zenobia’s “free, careless, generous modes of expression often had this effect of creating images” (Hawthorne 1998: 17). In line with a cultural tradition in which female expression is regarded as indecent,⁷ Coverdale argues that her speech arouses erotic fantasies in him, seemingly against his will. But the shift in his narrative from her voice to an image evoked in his mind also allows for another reading of his sexual anxiety. By turning Zenobia into what Lauren Berlant in her reading of the novel calls a “sex effect” (Berlant 1989: 35), Coverdale reduces Zenobia’s complexity as a feminine subject, embodying a political position and a desire of her own, to an erotic image created in his mind. Indeed, it is precisely her complex feminine presence that is disturbing for Coverdale. This is why, in the parlour scene, he turns away from the dominant voice she has as a performer who dazzles her audience and instead seeks to transform her into a product of his own personal imagination. The shift in this passage from Zenobia’s concrete voice to Coverdale’s mental picture, from her semi-public theatrical performance to what he later calls his inner “private theatre” (Hawthorne 1998: 70), is crucial for a discussion of voice and the performer in The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne’s text can indeed be seen to revolve around the conflict between two different voices marking two different modes of articulation, namely the voice Zenobia projects as a public performer and the voice Coverdale wishes to have as narrator. As the scene suggests, the power of Zenobia’s voice lies in her self-presentation, the fact that she is able to transform the parlour into her own stage which is completely dominated by her self-performance. Coverdale’s imagination and narration, on the other

 For a reading of the novel that foregrounds this tradition, see Bardes and Gossett (1990: 59).

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hand, represent an attempt to reassert himself in the face of her overwhelming presence. While her sensuality triggers sexual fantasies and anxieties he would rather suppress, he simultaneously wishes to transform her into an erotic image shaped by the power of his own mind. By treating Zenobia as a product of his own imagination, he seeks to replace her disturbingly complex feminine presence with a representation of the performer he produces himself. Her embodied voice, in other words, is to be displaced by a disembodied image created in his mind. While Zenobia’s power is the immediate result of her performance and the impact she has on the characters around her, Coverdale turns to his image repertoire and writing in order to gain power and to reassert control over her embodied performance. Just like the erotic image he produces on first hearing and seeing her, his narrative – which constitutes the text of the novel and which he writes twelve years after the events at Blithedale – forms an attempt to read, describe and define Zenobia so as to eliminate her powerful effect. Coverdale seeks to come to grips with and dispel the powerful hold her performance has on him by positioning himself as a writer. Significantly, his narrative conceives of his conflict with Zenobia as a rivalry between writing and speaking, the textual and the oral. Although Zenobia is a writer, too, he dismisses her writing and claims that instead she is “made (among a thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump-oratress” (Hawthorne 1998: 44). At one point in the text, Zenobia makes an explicitly feminist speech, in which she calls for women to be given the right to articulate themselves in public. As noted by Coverdale, “she declaimed with great earnestness and passion, nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women, and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and in honor, and with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public” (Hawthorne 1998: 120). It is in her speech, which she delivers to the Blithedale community, that Zenobia is most clearly represented as an American political speaker. “‘It shall not always be so!’ cried she. ‘If I live another year, I will lift up my own voice, in [sic] behalf of women’s wider liberty’” (Hawthorne 1998: 120). Crucially, the text renders Zenobia’s call for feminine public articulation in direct speech, thus providing us with an immediate impression of her voice, both in the sense of her urgent manner of speech and the political position she represents: It is my belief – yes, and my prophecy, should I die before it happens – that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will be ten eloquent women, where there is now one eloquent man. Thus far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats! We mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects. But

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the pen is not for the woman. Her power is too natural and immediate. It is with the living voice, alone, that she can compel the world to recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart! (Hawthorne 1998: 120)

Zenobia’s speech calling for the inclusion of women, their vocal presence and participation in the political domain, is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the early feminist movement mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. However, while the feminists of the time argued for women’s need to participate in America’s political debate as Zenobia does in her speech, Hawthorne’s text uses relatively little political discourse. Apart from Zenobia’s political speech and the comments it provokes in her listeners, the cultural conflict concerning the woman’s voice is treated more obliquely most of the time. Considering the conflict between different political standpoints that is evoked in the text, one quickly realizes that the greatest ideological tension is not between Zenobia and Coverdale but between Zenobia and Hollingsworth, a former blacksmith who has also joined the Blithedale Farm community. Often giving speeches in front of community members (Hawthorne 1998: 119), Hollingsworth forms a counterpart to Zenobia as a charismatic public speaker who takes a diametrically opposed view of the role of women. In the debate sparked by Zenobia’s feminist speech, he goes as far as to make the drastic claim that if feminists were to attain their goals, “I would call upon my own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakeable evidence of sovereignty, to scourge them back within their proper bounds!” (Hawthorne 1998: 123). In contrast to Hollingsworth, who has a clear ideological position, Coverdale keeps shifting his attitude as a character and narrator in a chameleonic fashion. Just after Zenobia’s feminist speech, for instance, he supports her position and even affirms that he would “love dearly – for the next thousand years, at least – to have all government devolve into the hands of women” (Hawthorne 1998: 121). On the plot level, Hollingsworth influences the fate of several Blithedale community members in decisive ways. Zenobia in particular is strongly affected by him: Already fascinated by the voice he has as a public speaker (Hawthorne 1998: 21), she feels attracted to him despite his anti-feminist stance, and her eventual silencing is largely due to his behaviour towards her. By contrast, Coverdale is a peripheral observer who only obtains partial insights into the other characters and the events at Blithedale. Yet although Coverdale cannot shape the events that unfold around him, he does play a crucial role as narrator. It is in his narration that we can discern a battle over the question of female self-representation, which refigures the debate over the ‘Woman Question’ in an oblique way. What the text foregrounds is Zenobia’s self-performance and the reaction it provokes in Coverdale in his role as narrator. This raises the ques-

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tion of whether the performer can define herself through her self-presentations – whether she has a ‘voice’ in the sense of agency – or whether her self-definition is effaced by Coverdale’s narrative descriptions of her. From the moment of her first appearance, Zenobia radiates life, energy, vibrancy and sensuality. According to Coverdale’s narrative, what distinguishes her as “an admirable figure of a woman, just on the hither verge of her richest maturity” (Hawthorne 1998: 15), is her “bloom, health, and vigor, which she possessed in such overflow” (Hawthorne 1998: 16). While she is “dressed as simply as possible” (Hawthorne 1998: 15), her hair is “dark, glossy, and of singular abundance” (Hawthorne 1998: 15) as well as adorned by a single exotic flower which is “more indicative of the pride and pomp, which had luxuriant growth in Zenobia’s character, than if a great diamond had sparkled among her hair” (Hawthorne 1998: 15). Her entire appearance bespeaks her self-assurance as a consummate performer casting a powerful spell over her audience. Her performances include not just her theatrical productions but also her very self-presentation. As well as entertaining the Blithedale community with theatre performances, tableaux vivants, Shakespeare readings and her improvised oral storytelling, she also presents a series of extravagant gestures and melodramatic poses. She is the ultimate performer, continually staging her subjectivity and, as a self-proclaimed “tragedy-queen” (Hawthorne 1998: 142), increasingly transforming her suffering into performance. Zenobia the performer can thus be seen to both direct and enact a drama of her own. Yet where does this leave Coverdale? In contrast to Zenobia’s magnificent self-dramatization, the role Coverdale plays in Zenobia’s performance is a very limited one. The only part that is available to him in her presence is the restricted role of the passive spectator, the peripheral onlooker. Zenobia’s overwhelming self-dramatization provides him with no other option than to subject himself to her dazzling performances. Her mode of self-expression turns him into a mere witness and chronicler of her performance, in which he plays no actual role.⁸ Yet in his own imagination, Coverdale does not content himself with the insignificant position he is attributed by Zenobia. Instead he compares himself to “the Chorus in a classic play” (Hawthorne 1998: 97). As his comparison suggests, he does not regard himself as a passive witness but associates his role with that of the chorus in Greek tragedy as an instance that comments, interprets, judges and occasionally intervenes in the dramatic action of the charac-

 See Mary Suzanne Schriber, who writes: “Zenobia’s independence and seeming self-sufficiency give Coverdale, unimaginative and conventional as he is, no role to play in her presence” (Schriber 1982: 66).

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ters. Coverdale, the character-narrator, may seek to empower himself by speaking in the voice of the classic chorus, but the position he actually occupies is a different one. Rather than sharing the authoritative position of the classic chorus, Coverdale emerges as a voyeur trying to gain knowledge and power by virtue of his spying. Giving in to an impulse “to live in other lives” (Hawthorne 1998: 160), he constantly observes Zenobia while she is interacting with other characters. Because he is convinced that in her performance she always acts the part of an actress – “the stage would have been her proper sphere” (Hawthorne 1998: 44) – he seeks to unmask her. As he explains to Zenobia, who feels observed by him, what he wants to discover is “the mystery of [her] life” (Hawthorne 1998: 47). He attempts to read and ‘know’ her because this would allow him not only to tell a coherent story but also to judge and evaluate her as a person. At the same time, he also seeks to absorb her into his imagination, regarding her and the other characters as “actors in a drama” which unfolds on his “mental stage” (Hawthorne 1998: 156). Indeed, as is already suggested in the scene of their first encounter in the Blithedale parlour, Coverdale is not satisfied with merely witnessing her performance as a passive spectator. By mentally undressing the performer, he actually recreates and redefines her as an erotic object conjured up by his own imagination. In his imaginary striptease, the performer seemingly becomes an image he can himself shape and control. The novel’s juxtaposition of Zenobia’s self-presentation with Coverdale’s imaginary redefinition of her can be read along the lines of Nietzsche’s notion of culture as an arena of conflicting forces competing against one another in their strife for dominance. As was outlined at the beginning of this chapter, for Nietzsche cultural views and values always emerge from a violent struggle with other opposing ways of describing and interpreting the world. In The Blithedale Romance, the social microcosm of the utopian community evokes a host of visions, descriptions and interpretations by comprising different ideological positions. For example, while Zenobia’s feminist outlook is in tune with the overall reform project of the community, Coverdale remains altogether sceptical of human progress, let alone perfection. However, what is even more important than the content of the different political convictions and arguments depicted in the text is the question how Hawthorne’s novel – as the only nineteenth-century performer text discussed in this book that features a male characternarrator – addresses, and problematizes, the relation between voice and power through the struggle between two distinct modes of articulation.⁹ In

 Isak Dinesen’s modernist text “The Dreamers”, with which this study concludes, features sev-

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other words, how are questions regarding the political ‘voice’ and empowerment of women treated in terms of a struggle between opposing modes of expression? And how, in turn, does the struggle between the voice of the performer and the voice of the narrator again crystallize into a battle between opposing cultural views and values? What is deeply disturbing to Coverdale is not so much Zenobia’s argument that women suffer from social injustice and need to assert themselves in “the living voice” (Hawthorne 1998: 120), but the undeniable fact that she herself is (already) endowed with a powerful voice as a woman who has a position and a desire of her own. As a skilled performer, Zenobia is well aware of the fact that the power of her voice lies in the affective impact she has on her audience. Overwhelmed by the radiance and presence she has as a performer, Coverdale, in turn, tries to contain and control the powerful effect of her voice with his own interpretations and descriptions. The (highly political) issue this power struggle brings to the fore is whether woman can define herself, or whether she is subsumed under someone else’s fantasy and thus comes to be defined by another voice. By the time Coverdale composes his narrative, Zenobia has already been dead for twelve years. As the only surviving voice and narrator, he is, therefore, in a position in which he could theoretically present himself as the predominant voice. However, Hawthorne’s novel ironically highlights the discrepancy between Coverdale’s attempt to produce an interpretation of Zenobia and his failure to actually read her as a complex subject. This is also how Hawthorne inscribes the voice of the dead performer in the text: Even though the entire story is mediated by Coverdale as the sole narrator, Zenobia has an autonomous ‘voice’ in his narrative because she continues to elude his descriptions and interpretations. Indeed, what renders The Blithedale Romance such a compelling example for our discussion is the way in which the text marks the effects of Zenobia’s voice in Coverdale’s narrative, that is the way in which the performer’s voice inscribes itself in the narrative of another character’s voice. Zenobia eludes the grasp of Coverdale, the narrator, and because he cannot triumph over her, her ‘voice’ returns to speak through his text. As a brief summary of The Blithedale Romance will show, Coverdale has difficulty not only in reading Zenobia but also in figuring out the complex network of power relationships between her and all the other characters. The evening before he sets off to Blithedale, he attends a performance of the celebrated “Veiled Lady”, a spiritual medium who speaks under the influence of a mesmerist. Her

eral male character-narrators. The only female performer who is also a narrator in the performer narratives discussed in this study is Dora Chance in Angela Carter’s Wise Children.

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mysterious identity and her sibylline prophecy regarding the fate of the utopian project at Blithedale present Coverdale with an enigma. Shortly after his arrival at Blithedale, the former blacksmith Hollingsworth, who intends to become a philanthropist and reformer of criminals, brings Priscilla, “a slim and unsubstantial girl” (Hawthorne 1998: 26), to the community. As a figure possessing “hardly any physique” (Hawthorne 1998: 34), Priscilla stands in sharp contrast to the embodied presence of Zenobia. At the same time, Coverdale notices that the young girl appears to be drawn to the more mature woman by a “mysterious attraction” and “involuntary affection” (Hawthorne 1998: 49, 50). When Coverdale turns delirious with fever early in his stay at Blithedale Farm, he himself feels attracted to the voices of both Zenobia and Hollingsworth (Hawthorne 1998: 39, 44; see Gibian 2001: 40). His “feverish fantasies” (Hawthorne 1998: 45) circle around the exotic flower Zenobia wears in her hair and his speculation that she is ‘deflowered’ and hence a sexually experienced woman – “Zenobia has lived, and loved!” (Hawthorne 1998: 47). After his recovery, he continues to be obsessed with the enigmatic Zenobia and wonders why instead of caring for him, both Zenobia and Priscilla fall under the potent spell of Hollingsworth, a massive figure of rude strength, who believes that women must be ruled by men.¹⁰ Coverdale’s sense of mystery is heightened even further when he eavesdrops on Zenobia and Westervelt, her visitor, and hears her refer to a “miserable bond” (Hawthorne 1998: 104), but cannot figure out whether it ties her to Westervelt or to Priscilla. As part of her entertainment of the Blithedale community, Zenobia tells the legend of “The Silvery Veil”, a story about how the “Veiled Lady” came under the spell of a magician and implies that the person beneath the veil of this celebrity might be Priscilla. Hollingsworth, who has been trying to involve Coverdale in his project of criminal reform without success, wins over Zenobia, who has become his lover, and Coverdale wonders whether Hollingsworth instrumentalizes her in order to exploit her wealth. While temporarily staying in the city, Coverdale catches sight of and voyeuristically observes Zenobia, Westervelt and Priscilla in the fashionable boarding house across from his hotel. When they recognize him, Zenobia literally closes the curtain on him. Being “[t]hus excluded from everybody’s confidence” (Hawthorne 1998: 174) and driven by “an uncertain

 Hollingsworth even claims that without male guidance, women are monsters: “All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster – and, thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster – without man, as her acknowledged principal!” (Hawthorne 1998: 122– 123).

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sense of something hidden from me” (Hawthorne 1998: 174), Coverdale looks for old Moodie, an elderly impoverished man and former acquaintance, whom he gets to tell the story of his past. According to his account, which is embellished by Coverdale and integrated into his text as an embedded narrative like Zenobia’s legend of “The Silvery Veil”, old Moodie once lived a flamboyant but shallow life under the name of Fauntleroy and proudly loved his brilliant daughter Zenobia. When Fauntleroy, “a man of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure” (Hawthorne 1998: 182), was discovered to have committed a crime (possibly forgery), his former false existence – “a mere image, an optical delusion” (Hawthorne 1998: 183) – fell to pieces. After undergoing a radical change, the “poor, ruined man of show” (Hawthorne 1998: 184) married a seamstress who gave birth to his other daughter, Priscilla, a “pale and nervous child” (Hawthorne 1998: 185). While Zenobia was adopted by her uncle and grew up to be passionate, self-willed and imperious (Hawthorne 1998: 189) – a woman of brilliant beauty and ample wealth – Priscilla’s gift of prophecy and clairvoyance subjected her to the power of a wizard (Hawthorne 1998: 188). According to Coverdale’s reconstruction, it was on the very day on which old Moodie allowed Zenobia to keep her uncle’s inheritance on condition that she take care of her half-sister that Priscilla was either wilfully cast away by Zenobia or abducted by a third party. Several weeks after the conversation with old Moodie, Coverdale attends another performance of the Veiled Lady. This time he witnesses how Hollingsworth intervenes and whisks Priscilla off the stage in order to liberate her from her role as a mesmerized medium and take her away from the influence of Westervelt, the mesmerist, only to subject her to his own control. Back at Blithedale, Coverdale misses the crucial part of a confrontation in which Hollingsworth and Zenobia fall out with each other. Hollingsworth declares his love for Priscilla, while Zenobia accuses him of selfishness. Referring to herself as “a dethroned princess” (Hawthorne 1998: 219) and to her situation as “genuine tragedy” (Hawthorne 1998: 233), Zenobia offers several morals for the ballad she suggests that Coverdale should write about her fate and asks him to tell Hollingsworth that he has murdered her and that she will haunt him. At midnight, Hollingsworth and Coverdale begin their search for Zenobia. When they finally find her drowned body in a pool in the river, its pose of agony presents them with a spectacle of horror: “Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling” (Hawthorne 1998: 235) and, as if “in immitigable defiance” (Hawthorne 1998: 235), they cannot be rearranged into a more peaceful pose. Several years later, on visiting Priscilla and Hollingsworth in their cottage, Coverdale learns that Hollingsworth has given up his project of reforming criminals and instead has been “busy with a single murderer” (Hawthorne 1998: 243) ever since Zenobia’s death. Yet Cover-

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dale, too, appears to be haunted by the dead performer. By the time he writes his narrative, he has turned into a middle-aged bachelor who has given up his poetry and hence all his artistic creativity. He seems depleted and, at the same time, possessed by Zenobia, unable to figure out, let alone tell, the exact details of her history. What motivates and nourishes Coverdale’s narrative is his desire – and failure – to read Zenobia. Her complex subjectivity, which he can neither read nor acknowledge, forms both the absent cause and the vanishing point of his narration. Although he tries to decipher her in order to assert his power, she continually eludes his grasp, thus undermining, but also pushing, his narrative project. A key moment in this struggle between the narrator and the performer is the episode in which Coverdale spies on Zenobia from his hotel room in the city. What this scene illustrates is his inability to actually see and acknowledge that Zenobia is a person in her own right and independent of his imagination. During his temporary stay in the city, he repeatedly looks out of his rear window, overlooking gardens and a stylish boarding house right opposite his hotel. He begins by observing the inhabitants on the third and second floor, but on the first floor finds his view obstructed by curtains. The following night, he is plagued by dreams, including a dream sequence in which Priscilla observes Zenobia and Hollingsworth kissing each other. The next day the compulsive voyeur positions himself again at the window, and this time he has a full view of the first-floor windows. What he sees initially appears as though it were part of, or even projected by, his inner psychic theatre. Reminiscent of the position Priscilla occupies as the observer in his dream, he looks at the first floor and the figures that have appeared in his visual field as if called forth by his fantasy. After catching sight of a girl in the boudoir, who is later revealed to be Priscilla, he notices that the damask curtains in the drawing room are now displayed in heavy festoons. The presentiment Coverdale has is almost immediately confirmed: “I beheld – like a full-length picture, in the space between the heavy festoons of the window-curtains – no other than Zenobia!” (Hawthorne 1998: 155). As if watching a theatre performance or looking at a tableau vivant produced specially for him, Coverdale keeps gazing and notices that Zenobia is joined by Westervelt. When the characters who “had kept so long upon my mental stage, as actors in a drama” (Hawthorne 1998: 156) appear as flesh-and-blood figures in the window frame right opposite his hotel, Coverdale cannot but watch them “transfixed” (Hawthorne 1998: 157), trying to interpret the exact the nature of their relationship. The episode revolves around Coverdale’s desire to observe Zenobia in order to read and interpret her. But, at the same time, the passage also illustrates how she resists and rejects his prying intrusion. Coverdale is first recognized by

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Westervelt, but it is Zenobia who, by letting down a white linen curtain, makes sure that he can no longer observe them. As Coverdale comments, “It felt like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the interval between the acts” (Hawthorne 1998: 159). However, what Zenobia signals in closing the curtain is not an intermission. Despite his hopes, the drama Coverdale has been watching as if it were a theatre play is not resumed again. When he returns to the window later, the curtain remains closed. As a result, Coverdale finds himself barred from what is going on in Zenobia’s drawing room. In closing the curtain, Zenobia literally puts a limit to his voyeuristic gaze. Yet, in doing so, she also marks out, and denies access to, an interior space of her own. Her gesture protects both the privacy of her drawing room and the psychic scene of her desires, fantasies and motives, which throughout the text she is never willing to disclose. Most important of all, she insists on the agency she has as a perpetual performer who is in control of her performance and thus defines herself rather than being defined by others. Coverdale’s peculiar reaction, namely his feeling that Zenobia has insulted him by closing the curtain, underlines that he is incapable of comprehending the full import of her gesture. Although he has just been caught at his voyeuristic prying, Coverdale insists that he cannot understand why Zenobia does not appreciate and, in fact, crosses his attempt to read her character and the exact nature of her relationship to the other figures – “to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves” (Hawthorne 1998: 160). As Coverdale, the intruder, repeatedly asserts, it is his business and, in fact, his duty to read the puzzling situation at Blithedale Farm (Hawthorne 1998: 69, 170). Even while writing his narrative many years after the events, he remains convinced of “my fitness for the office” (Hawthorne 1998: 161) and keeps insisting that he is the right person to unravel the secrets surrounding Zenobia. However, it is precisely his intrusive curiosity that makes him blind to the fact that Zenobia is an independent individual, not a puzzle to be solved and explained. By attempting to discover Zenobia’s secret, he not only posits the existence of an enigma but also assumes that Zenobia can actually be read and deciphered by him like a riddle. This means that, rather than treating her as an individual with a subjectivity of her own, he regards her as a mystery to be solved and interpreted. His treatment of her as an enigma is tantamount to ignoring her as an independent subject with fantasies and desires of her own. What is crucial here is what Stanley Cavell would call Zenobia’s “separateness”. In his readings of Shakespearean tragedy, Cavell argues that Shakespeare’s tragic heroes tend to stave off their own finitude by positing the female other as a stake of perfection. Othello, for example, denies his imperfection and his inability to fully know the other by transforming Desdemona into an image of purity (Cavell 1987: 125 – 142). His disavowal and image-making eventually result in the production of a corpse.

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Moreover, his denial of his own imperfection means a failure to acknowledge the other in her radical separateness (see Cavell 1987: 138). In the Blithedale parlour scene, Coverdale seeks to transform Zenobia into an erotic image so as to block out her concrete voice as well as the metaphorical ‘voice’ she has in shaping her own self-performance. Indeed, the image he develops serves as a strategy not to recognize her as an independent individual. In the episode in which he watches her from the window of his hotel room, he again denies her ‘voice’ as he tries to read and define her instead of acknowledging her as a separate subject. It is precisely Zenobia’s separateness that constitutes her ‘voice’. Her perpetual self-performance allows her to define herself and thus underlines that she is a separate subject who cannot be subsumed under the images produced by Coverdale. In closing the curtain on Coverdale, she thwarts his voyeuristic desire and, at the same time, emphasizes the ‘voice’ she has as a result of her separateness. Zenobia always keeps performing, but her perpetual performance is a means of not only displaying herself as a public persona but also protecting her private interiority. As is indicated by her pseudonym, which is “merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes before the world” (Hawthorne 1998: 8), she defines how she wants to present herself in public. She constantly dramatizes herself but, in so doing, she also masks her inner self and desires (Levine 2004: 222). It is because she wants is to be in charge of her self-definition that she defends herself against the voyeur’s intrusiveness and desire to read her. By closing the curtain, she demonstrates that she is in control of her self-performance. As a result, the scene juxtaposes two diametrically opposed positions: The performer’s act of closing the curtain is pitted against Coverdale’s desire to disclose and discover her ‘true’ character. Zenobia’s intervention clearly plays itself out in the visual field. Rather than using her concrete voice, she counters Coverdale’s voyeurism by literally blocking his vision. Nevertheless, in so doing, she underlines that she has a ‘voice’ in a metaphorical sense because she is in control of the manner in which she can – or cannot – be perceived. While Coverdale wishes to decipher Zenobia because this might enable him to evaluate and judge her (Hawthorne 1998: 161), his cryptomania also protects him from the knowledge that, at least with respect to him, she is self-sufficient and, as a separate subject, has no need of him. Significantly, Zenobia never makes him her confidant and, therefore, never makes him privy to her feelings and desires, “her private imagination and history” (Levine 2004: 217). At the same time, Coverdale’s narrative points to the discrepancy between the all-important role Zenobia and her relationship to others occupy in his imagination and the completely insignificant part he plays in their lives. While he is completely obsessed with Zenobia and the nature of her relationships to others, notably Priscilla and Hollingsworth – they form “the vortex of my meditations

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around which they revolved, and witherward they too continually tended” (Hawthorne 1998: 70) – Coverdale describes himself as “at best but a secondary or tertiary personage with either of them” (Hawthorne 1998: 70). As well as being peripheral to Zenobia and her entourage, what disturbs Coverdale is the fact that he cannot read her feminine desire and sexuality. Anticipating Freud’s famous question “What does woman want?” (quoted by Jones 1955: 468), Coverdale’s sexual anxieties and speculations revolve around the question what Zenobia’s desire is, and why she does not desire him. If, as he declares at the close of his narrative, Coverdale has from the beginning been in love with Priscilla, this can be taken to suggest that he feels much more comfortable with the younger woman, who is far less dominant and who does not trigger the same sexual fantasies and anxieties in him. As a character, Priscilla may be enigmatic because of her obscure background; when Hollingsworth first brings her to Blithedale, no one knows where she comes from. The intricately hidden openings of the silk purses she sews form an allusion to the female sex, and on stage, she performs literally as the “Veiled Lady”. However, in the case of Priscilla, the text does not suggest the kind of inner life endowed with the private desires and motives that distinguish Zenobia. The near absence of any physicality in the ethereal Priscilla heightens and intensifies the vitality, sensuality and passion Zenobia appears to possess in abundance. Similarly, the power of Zenobia’s presence is put into sharp relief by Priscilla’s weakness, which renders her particularly vulnerable to the influence and manipulation of others (possibly including Zenobia’s).¹¹ Priscilla says of herself: “I am blown about like a leaf […]. I never have any free-will” (Hawthorne 1998: 171).¹² In contrast to Zenobia, who has a ‘voice’ of her own because she shapes her self-performances, Priscilla is a performer without any agency. As in her mesmerized state during her performances as the “Veiled Lady”, in which she is disconnected from her voice because she serves as a medium for Westervelt and hence for a voice other than her own, Priscilla is subjected to the control of others. By contrast, Zenobia is disturbing to Coverdale precisely because she is a female subject who has desires of her own.

 An important function of Priscilla as Zenobia’s performing half-sister is to serve as a contrasting foil, much like the secondary performers and/or the half-sisters featuring in other performer texts. Similar to Lucile, who represents the ordinary domestic counterpart of the extraordinary genius Corinne in Staël’s novel, and similar to Eliot’s Mirah in Daniel Deronda, whose modest voice does not claim the radical independence of Alcharisi, the ethereal Priscilla heightens the sensual presence as well as the psychic complexity of her elder half-sister.  Also note Coverdale’s related statement that “Priscilla was only a leaf, floating on the dark current of events, without influencing them by her own choice or plan […]” (Hawthorne 1998: 168).

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Indeed, what troubles Coverdale is the fact that she marks a subjectivity that is inaccessible. In a scene in the woods in which he eavesdrops on Zenobia and Westervelt, he hears Zenobia’s enigmatic statement that she wishes to be released from “this miserable bond” (Hawthorne 1998: 104). “And then”, he notes, “I heard her utter a helpless sort of moan; a sound which, struggling out of the heart of a person of her pride and strength, affected me more than if she had made the wood dolorously vocal with a thousand shrieks and wails” (Hawthorne 1998: 104). Both Zenobia’s mysterious conversation with Westervelt and her expression of pain underline the fact that she has a life and a past. As Coverdale notes earlier, in a passage already quoted above, “Zenobia has lived and loved!” (Hawthorne 1998: 47). Yet the scene also illustrates that Coverdale cannot decipher “the mystery of [her] life” (Hawthorne 1998: 47). When he returns to his hotel room after tea on the day of his observation of and discovery by Zenobia, Coverdale can see the light of a lamp shining through the white curtain but is unable to “read the hieroglyphic” (Hawthorne 1998: 162) of the moving shadows behind the curtain fabric. On a sudden impulse, he decides to visit his neighbour in her luxurious drawing room. Yet, significantly, he cannot read her during his visit either. Because of her powerful self-performance, Zenobia’s reception of Coverdale in her fashionable city drawing room echoes their first encounter in the much simpler parlour at Blithedale. Although the two rooms could hardly be more dissimilar, she is again in full control of the scene, and, as in the previous passage, Coverdale tries – in vain – to contain the powerful effect of her performance. As he is admitted to the house by a servant, Coverdale hears “a rich, and, as it were, triumphant burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zenobia’s character” (Hawthorne 1998: 162). Having welcomed him, she ironically comments on his intrusive curiosity: “‘Ah, Mr. Coverdale,’ said she, still smiling, but, as I thought, with a good deal of scornful anger underneath, ‘it has gratified me to see the interest which you continue to take in my affairs!’” (Hawthorne 1998: 162). In the ensuing exchange, she emphasizes her position as a separate subject in both her comments and demeanour. Indeed, she insists that she was in the right to block his view of her: “[…] I must still claim the liberty to drop the curtain” (Hawthorne 1998: 163). Yet she also makes him feel her separateness. As Coverdale notes, “her manner made me sensible that we stood upon no real terms of confidence” (Hawthorne 1998: 163). He tells her that “I scarcely feel […] as if we had ever met before” (Hawthorne 1998: 164), reminding her of their time at Blithedale, which now feels like a distant past to him. She responds “coldly” by saying that “[t]hose ideas have their time and place […]. But, I fancy, it must be a circumscribed mind that can find room for no others” (Hawthorne 1998: 164). Zenobia thus implies

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that in contrast to him, she has other ideas as well as a life and, at the same time, conveys that she is not going to share them with him. As in the parlour scene at Blithedale, Coverdale shifts attention from the vocal to the visual register. Like before, his emphasis on vision means a denial of Zenobia’s voice. By focusing on the visual register alone, he seeks for a way to disempower her. However, this time, the performer appears to be in full control of the visual realm as she fashions herself as a dazzling figure. Her exotic flower is now replaced by “a flower exquisitely imitated in jeweller’s work” (Hawthorne 1998: 164). Wearing “costly robes” and “flaming jewels” (Hawthorne 1998: 163), Zenobia presents herself like “a work of art” (Hawthorne 1998: 164). The rich decor of the room, brilliantly lit by the lights of a chandelier and separate radiant lamps, replete with expensive furniture, pictures and vases, seems to mirror the richness of her own appearance – “the redundance of personal ornament, which the largeness of her physical nature and the rich type of her beauty caused to seem so suitable” (Hawthorne 1998: 164– 165). Coverdale, who is “dazzled by the brilliancy” of the drawing room and presumably overwhelmed by “the proud figure” of Zenobia herself, recognizes in himself an “effort to bear up against the effect Zenobia sought to impose in me” (Hawthorne 1998: 164): “I reasoned against her, in my secret mind, and strove so to keep my footing” (Hawthorne 1998: 164). In an effort to gain an upper hand by dispelling the powerful effect she has on him, he tries to judge her by what he sees, that is by her excessively rich accoutrements. Whereas in the scene at Blithedale Coverdale seeks to contain the impact of her performance by transforming her into a titillating image created by his own erotic imagination, he now thinks that the richness of both her lodgings and her appearance in the town scene allow him to make out “the true character of the woman” and comes to the conclusion that she is “passionate, luxurious, lacking simplicity, not deeply refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste” (Hawthorne 1998: 165). However, his triumph in mentally condemning her is only brief. But, the next instant, she was too powerful for all my opposing struggles. I saw how fit it was that she should make herself as gorgeous as she pleased, and should do a thousand things that would have been ridiculous in the poor, thin, weakly characters of other women. (Hawthorne 1998: 165)

As Coverdale admits, his wish to judge Zenobia is almost immediately overruled by her magnificent self-performance. What needs to be highlighted here is again how the struggle between Zenobia and Coverdale is represented as the battle between two different ‘voices’ that articulate themselves in different modes, as well as the way in which the text

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marks their divergent positions. For even while Coverdale functions as the only narrator and the central focalizer in The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne’s novel constantly hints at the presence of another position and ‘voice’. Zenobia’s performances are always framed and mediated by Coverdale’s narration. The scene in the Blithedale parlour, the view from his hotel room and his visit to her luxurious living room in town are all narrated by Coverdale, and yet by presenting the events through his perspective, the text implicitly points to what he seeks to block out. In the Blithedale parlour scene, for instance, the text traces how he turns away from her concrete voice to an image that he creates of her in his mind. In doing so, the text shows how Coverdale denies her voice. In fact, it is precisely by highlighting the blindness (or rather deafness) of the poète manqué Coverdale that the text points to Zenobia and positions her as a ‘voice’ that neither his imagination nor his narrative can fully absorb. At one point in the text, Zenobia explicitly counters his conviction that he fulfils a duty in his attempt to decipher her: “Oh, this stale excuse of duty!” said Zenobia, in a whisper so full of scorn that it penetrated me like the hiss of a serpent. “I have often heard it before, from those who sought to interfere with me, and I know precisely what it signifies. Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one’s own; a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute one’s self in its awful place – out of these, and other motives as miserable as these, comes your idea of duty! But beware, sir! With all your fancied acuteness, you step blindfold into these affairs. For any mischief that may follow your interference, I hold you responsible!” (Hawthorne 1998: 170 – 171)

Because Coverdale is the narrator, we do not learn about Zenobia’s inner life. However, by having Zenobia object to his prying curiosity and by tracing how he seeks to obliterate her ‘voice’, the text points to a discrepancy between their positions and ‘voices’. It is in the Blithedale parlour that Coverdale’s desire to ‘know’ Zenobia first manifests itself as he seeks to lay her bare in a literal sense, but his mental striptease only refers him back to his own imagination and the fantasy images he himself produces. In the city he is confronted with another version of Zenobia’s selfconstruction and finds himself unable to determine which one is more truthful, her performance in the farmhouse parlour or the one in her luxurious urban lodgings. As he notes, her appearances have an artificial and theatrical character: “In both, there was something like the illusion which a great actress flings around her” (Hawthorne 1998: 165). However, instead of acknowledging that her theatricality is

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an inherent part of her self-presentation, he is irritated by her role-play and still harbours the fantasy of being able to unmask the performer: I determined to make proof if there were any spell that would exorcise her out of the part which she seemed to be acting. She should be compelled to give me a glimpse of something true; some nature, some passion, no matter whether right or wrong, provided it were real. (Hawthorne 1998: 165)

Yet the novel illustrates just how illusory this search for the real character of the performer is. By showing the discrepancy between Coverdale’s desire for ultimate knowledge and Zenobia’s constant self-performance, the text itself points to a barrier just like the curtain that the performer closes in full view of the observer. Hawthorne’s text signals that the performer always remains beyond Coverdale’s ken and reach. In the scene in her luxurious living room, Zenobia points to an entirely different existence in addition to the life she leads in Blithedale but chooses not to divulge any details to Coverdale. “Why should we be content with our homely life of a few months past, to the exclusion of all other modes? It was good; but there are other lives as good or better” (Hawthorne 1998: 165). The superlative obstacle to Coverdale’s attempt to read Zenobia is the performer’s death. On the one hand, her death marks her personal defeat, while on the other, it also cements her recalcitrant defiance. As her final confrontation with Hollingsworth makes clear, it is Zenobia who emerges from the power struggle between the personal interests of the community members as a tragic figure. In this scene, she is still wearing the costume of Queen Zenobia, which she has put on for a masque performed by the members of the Blithedale community, but now presents herself like a queen who has been removed from power.¹³ Having lost her lover Hollingsworth to her rival Priscilla, she accuses Hollingsworth of having used and exploited her and her wealth for his selfish reform project. At the same time, she offers once again a gesture that undermines Coverdale’s attempt to read her. Not even in this moment of pain caused by the loss of

 According to Coverdale’s description, Zenobia “appeared in a costume of fanciful magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what resembled a leafy crown, or coronet. She represented the Oriental princess, by whose name we were accustomed to know her. Her attitude was free and noble, yet, if a queen’s, it was not that of a queen triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for her life, or perchance, condemned, already” (Hawthorne 1998: 213). To Priscilla, she says, “You kneel to a dethroned princess” (Hawthorne 1998: 219). Later after Priscilla has left, she asks Coverdale to give her jewelled flower to Priscilla: “[…] she took the jewelled flower out of her hair; and it struck me as the act of a queen, when worsted in a combat, discrowning herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all her pride” (Hawthorne 1998: 226).

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her lover does she confide in Coverdale, who comes to the “battle-field” (Hawthorne 1998: 215) after the actual argument has taken place and who stays after Hollingsworth and Priscilla have left the scene of confrontation. Initially she sinks down and breaks out into convulsive sobs. “She was half prostrate, half kneeling, with her forehead […] pressed against the rock. Her sobs were the only sound; she did not groan, nor give any other utterance to her distress. It was all involuntary” (Hawthorne 1998: 223). When she realizes that Coverdale is present, she ironically mocks his observing gaze by commissioning him to write the narrative poem she assumes he is already preparing in his mind. Moreover, in suggesting that he turn “this whole affair into a ballad” (Hawthorne 1998: 223), she thwarts his hermeneutic desire to read her by offering two different morals at once – a socio-political reading according to which her fate confirms that a woman who transgresses social norms will be punished; and a romantic reading according to which a woman’s vulnerability in love is fatal.¹⁴ “Oh, a very old [moral] will serve the purpose,” she replied. “There are no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some. A moral? Why, this: – that in the battle-field of life, the downright stroke, that would fall only on a man’s steel head-piece, is sure to light on a woman’s heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict. Or this: – that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair’s breadth out of the beaten track. Yes; and add (for I may as well own it, now,) that, with that one hair’s breadth, she goes all astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect, afterwards!” (Hawthorne 1998: 224)

In her final self-dramatization, Zenobia thus offers Coverdale more than one meaning, knowing full well that he will not be able to interpret her tragedy. The following night Coverdale dreams about a “tragical catastrophe” (Hawthorne 1998: 228), which echoes his earlier longing for a catastrophic event that would release him from his obsession with the drama of Zenobia and the figures surrounding her.¹⁵ However, when together with Hollingsworth and Silas Foster, the farmer, he finds Zenobia’s corpse drowned in a pool in the river, “the perfect horror of the spectacle” (Hawthorne 1998: 235) exceeds that of his imagination. Her body is arrested in the stillness of one final rigid pose – “the marble image of

 Also see Elisabeth Bronfen’s reading of this moment in Hawthorne’s text (Bronfen 1992b: 243)  “I began to long for a catastrophe”, Coverdale observes at an earlier point in the text. “Let it all come! As for me, I would look on, as it seemed my part to do […]. The curtain fallen, I would pass on with my poor individual life, which was now attenuated of much of its proper substance, and diffused among many alien interests” (Hawthorne 1998: 157).

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a death agony” (Hawthorne 1998: 235) as Coverdale puts it. Her arms have “grown rigid in the act of struggling” (Hawthorne 1998: 235), and her legs, too, are bent. The performer has fallen silent for good, and yet her corpse presents itself as a site of struggle. Indeed, Zenobia cannot be put to rest. Silas Foster tries, without success, to rearrange her body into a more peaceful pose using sheer force. He endeavoured to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side. His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as before. He made another effort, with the same result. (Hawthorne 1998: 236)

As suggested by this passage, Zenobia’s rigid corpse seems to have a will of its own as it defies Foster’s endeavours in a grotesque manner. The constantly rising arms mark an excess that cannot be contained. In fact, the gesture of Zenobia’s dead body may be described as a ‘speaking’ gesture giving ‘voice’ to something, namely its resistance to being read. In a move that resembles the effort of Foster to contain Zenobia’s posthumous gesture, Coverdale would like to imagine that her pose signifies an attitude of prayer, suggesting that she has died “reconciled and penitent” (Hawthorne 1998: 235). But he finds his reading contradicted by her hands, which are “clenched in immitigable defiance” (Hawthorne 1998: 235). Her body yields neither to the manipulation of Foster’s physical pressure, nor can its outrageous posture be reconciled with Coverdale’s will to interpretation. On the contrary, the attitude in which her body has come to be arrested in its rigor mortis represents a grotesque refiguration of the tableaux vivants Zenobia used to perform for the Blithedale community and, in its unbearable grotesqueness, mocks the objectifying gaze of the men. In her death, the performer can no longer speak, but she is still an “agent of strife” (Bronfen 1992b: 245). The scene underlines just how violent and antagonistic the battle of the sexes is that The Blithedale Romance imagines between the female performer and the male narrator. On Zenobia’s side, it is the sheer physicality of her last spectacle, the “terrible inflexibility” (Hawthorne 1998: 235) of her dead body that calls into question Coverdale’s disembodying projections and puts up physical resistance to Foster’s vehement attempt to rearrange the horrific pose of her corpse. As well as pointing to the violating gesture of Foster in his endeavour to bring down the arms of the corpse, Coverdale’s description of the scene emphasizes the violence on the part of Hollingsworth. The former blacksmith has wounded her figuratively and literally – through the psychic pain he has inflicted on her by leaving her for Priscilla and the rake with which he has been poking

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about the river in search of her body and with which he turns out to have lacerated her breast. However, the interpretations and descriptions Coverdale attempts to impose on Zenobia both in her life and death are just as violent as Hollingsworth’s violations and Foster’s forcible manhandling of her corpse. As we have seen in the discussions of the scenes in the Blithedale parlour and the living room in town, Coverdale seeks to counteract Zenobia’s powerful presence by virtue of his interpretation and judgment of her. As explained before, his attempt to come up with a reading of her figure is tantamount to a denial of her subjectivity.¹⁶ What is important here is the violence with which Coverdale’s narrative voice seeks to contain the powerful effects of her ‘voice’ in order to reassert his power over her. If Foster uses bodily violence to transform the scandalous struggle of her corpse into a more peaceful pose by trying to bring down her arms, Coverdale uses equally drastic violence as he seeks to pin down and subdue the powerful effect of the performer and her grotesque corpse by turning her into an image, an aesthetic representation and narrative of his own. The great irony of Hawthorne’s text results from the fact that Coverdale’s voice is the only voice left to tell the story. When he writes his narrative, Zenobia has already been dead for twelve years – and yet her voice can (still) be discerned in the text. When Coverdale sees Zenobia for the last time, she asks him to convey the following message to Hollingsworth: “Tell him that he has murdered me! Tell him that I’ll haunt him!” As Coverdale’s narration underlines, “she spoke these words with the wildest energy” (Hawthorne 1998: 226). Several years after Zenobia’s death, Coverdale visits Hollingsworth and Priscilla and learns from the former that “[e]ver since we parted, I have been busy with a single murderer!” (Hawthorne 1998: 243). At this point, Coverdale recalls the earlier scene: […] I remembered the wild energy, the passionate shriek with which Zenobia had spoken these words – ‘Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I’ll haunt him!’ – and I knew what murderer he meant, and whose vindictive shadow dogged the side where Priscilla was not. (Hawthorne 1998: 243)

However, it is not just Hollingsworth who is haunted by Zenobia’s ghost. The fact that Coverdale feels compelled to write his text twelve years after the events at Blithedale suggests that he too is haunted by Zenobia. However, while Hollingsworth is haunted because he feels guilty of Zenobia’s death, Coverdale seems to

 This is in contrast to Foster, who responds to her tragic death by saying “I’m sorry for her!” (Hawthorne 1998: 235). As Robert Levine suggests, Foster’s sympathy forms an attractive alternative to Coverdale. He recognizes her pain without claiming to feel her pain (Levine 2004: 223).

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be haunted by the fact that he has never been able to read Zenobia because of her perpetual self-performance. What we have, therefore, is a curious battle between the voice of a surviving narrator and the ‘voice’ of a dead performer. In the end, the struggle between these opposing positions remains undecided because Hawthorne’s implied author refuses to take sides. On the level of the plot, Zenobia falls silent like many other female performer figures discussed in this study. Indeed, she suffers a tragic fate because she can sustain neither her vitality nor her voice through her living presence. Moreover, Hawthorne only gestures towards her psychic interiority; the novel never turns her into a focalizer and her voice can only be heard obliquely through Coverdale’s narrative. It is not through her complex feminine subjectivity but Coverdale’s troubled fantasies and anxieties that the novel is focalized. At the same time, it is remarkable that Coverdale fails to triumph over her although he remains the sole narrator and focalizer. It is precisely because Coverdale cannot subsume Zenobia under his fantasy that she keeps haunting him from beyond the grave. He seeks to possess her in the form of a fantasy image, an aesthetic text, in short, a representation he himself has created – “[…] I can now summon her up like a ghost […]” (Hawthorne 1998: 15) – but he is in turn possessed by her lingering presence. Paradoxically, her energy survives so that her feminine presence continues to both fascinate and disturb him. In Hawthorne’s satirical treatment of the Blithedale community, virtually all the relationships between characters are marked by powerful attractions and attempts at manipulation. The text emphasizes time and again that Hollingsworth has a powerful hold over Zenobia; Westervelt, the mesmerizer, controls Priscilla during her performances as the “Veiled Lady”; Zenobia, finally, fascinates Coverdale.¹⁷ Yet the power struggle that permeates the entire text is the conflict in which Coverdale’s will to interpretation is counteracted, if not overruled, by the powerful effect of Zenobia’s performance and presence. Interestingly, this power struggle is repeatedly represented in theatrical terms. Echoing the preface, where Hawthorne refers to his own experience in the reform community of Brook Farm as a way “merely to establish a theatre” (Hawthorne 1998: 1), Coverdale’s narrative makes frequent reference to theatre terminology. Yet, rather than being able to control Zenobia as a figure on his “mental stage” (Hawthorne 1998: 156) and in his “private theatre” (Hawthorne 1998: 70), his fantasy is dominated by the performer and her relationships both during her lifetime and after her demise. Rather than absorbing the per-

 Also see Gillian Brown’s reading of Hawthorne’s text in her chapter “The Mesmerized Spectator” (Brown 1992: 96 – 132).

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former into his fantasy, he cannot help but realize that he has been absorbed by Zenobia and the characters surrounding her. “Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These three had absorbed my life into themselves” (Hawthorne 1998: 194). What is at stake, therefore, is a curious reversal. While Coverdale presents himself as a compulsive observer who lives through others – he gives in to a compulsion “to live in other lives” (Hawthorne 1998: 160) – he cannot appropriate Zenobia and her vitality but is in fact depleted by her continuing (omni)presence – and by his own attempt to disembody her through the representational register of his aesthetic images. At the end of the text, we learn that Coverdale’s obsession has turned him into a bachelor who has neither a sexual life nor any creative power left. Turning to himself and his own life at the end of the text, he asks himself: “But what, after all, have I to tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing!” (Hawthorne 1998: 245). The text thus juxtaposes the depletion of Coverdale’s creativity with the survival of Zenobia’s energy. This means that in a paradoxical reversal of life and death, writing and speaking, Zenobia’s voice returns to haunt and speak through Coverdale’s text. Having “nothing” to tell about himself, he feels compelled to write about Zenobia and her entourage, by whom he still appears to be possessed. But Zenobia has signalled to him time and again that he will never be able to read her as a subject: “You know not what you do! It is dangerous, sir, believe me, to tamper thus with earnest human passions, out of your own mere idleness, and for your sport. I will endure it no longer! Take care that it does not happen again! I warn you!” (Hawthorne 1998: 170).

4.2 “Let her overflow”: Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) If the voice of Zenobia in her self-performances is consonant with her queenly attitude and deportment, Verena Tarrant, the young feminist speaker in Henry James’s The Bostonians, has a voice that is simultaneously charismatic and curiously impersonal. When she gives her first performance in the novel and addresses a gathering of New England reformers on the question of the emancipation of women, her voice has a powerful hold on her listeners, including Olive Chancellor, the refined Boston feminist, and Olive’s cousin Basil Ransom, the politically conservative lawyer and Civil War veteran from the South. Even before Verena begins her speech, Olive Chancellor cannot wait to hear her voice: “Please begin, please begin!” she exclaims. “A voice, a human voice, is what we want” (James 1998: 52). Afterwards, having listened to the speech, she is both “powerfully affected” and “agitated” (James 1998: 61, 62); the power of Verena’s voice “had moved her as she had never been moved” (James 1998:

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74). Basil Ransom, who, like Oswald in Staël’s novel, comes to the meeting of the New England reformers as an outsider and who like him also serves as the novel’s main character-focalizer, observes the scene of Verena’s public performance with initial scepticism. Yet, against his will, he finds himself increasingly fascinated by the young and pretty performer: […] at the end of ten minutes Ransom became aware that the whole audience – Mrs Farrinder, Miss Chancellor, and the tough subject from Mississippi were under the charm. I speak of ten minutes, but to tell the truth the young man lost all sense of time. He wondered afterwards how long she had spoken; then he counted that her strange, sweet, crude, absurd, enchanting improvisation must have lasted half an hour. It was not what she said; he didn’t care for that […]. The effect was not in what she said […] but in the picture and figure of the half-bedizened damsel […] Ransom thought that if [her discourse] had been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be fascinating. […] for himself all he could feel was that to his starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she uttered – the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes […]. It made no difference; she didn’t mean it, she didn’t know what she meant, she had been stuffed with this trash by her father […] the necessity of her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit those charming notes of her voice […]; he contented himself […] with regarding her as a vocalist of exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed, she made some of it sound! (James 1998: 55 – 57; original emphasis)

Ransom disapproves of the content of Verena’s speech, which he believes is “full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered eloquence”, but he does take pleasure in the “intensely personal exhibition” (James 1998: 56) of her person as well as “those charming notes of her voice” (James 1998: 57). Like Coverdale, James’s focalizer blocks out what he does not want to hear, namely her political message. But unlike Coverdale, who privileges seeing over hearing, Ransom delights in the charming sound of Verena’s voice. Rather than as a political event, he enjoys Verena’s speech as an aesthetic experience. Even while the irresistible appeal of her voice leaves her spellbound audience “exceedingly affected” (James 1998: 59), Verena herself neither assumes nor claims control over her gifted eloquence. She distances herself from her voice by repeatedly insisting that it is not she who is speaking: “It isn’t me […]. It is not me […]. Oh, it isn’t me, you know; it’s something outside” (James 1998: 50, 51, 74; original emphasis). In positioning Verena’s voice in this way, the novel refers us to Mladen Dolar’s argument (2006) that the voice is fundamentally acousmatic because it is the Other that speaks. Dolar’s point of departure is Jacques Derrida’s well-known critique of Western phonocentrism (1997). Ever since Plato, Derrida argues, the metaphysics of presence has founded itself

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on the voice. The individual who hears him- or herself speak serves as a metaphor of transparent meaning and self-presence, while writing is relegated to a mere supplement, secondary to the fullness of speech. However, as Dolar points out, there is an aspect of voice that disrupts, rather than supports, self-presence. Rather than forming a means of individual expression, Verena’s voice in The Bostonians seems to come from some external source of mysterious origin. In order to explain the extraordinary gift of their daughter and, at the same time, avert suspicion that their daughter may merely echo the will and opinion of others, her mother, Adeline Greenstreet, the descendant of an abolitionist family from Boston, and her father, Selah Tarrant, a dubious mesmeric healer, promote her speech as “inspirational” (James 1998: 43). As the father explains to the audience, speaking in his daughter’s stead, it is an impersonal force that inspires her: It was some power outside – it seemed to flow through her […]. When he just calmed her down by laying his hands on her a few moments, it seemed to come. […] the inspiration, if he might call it so, seemed just to flow in that channel. The voice that spoke through her lips seemed to want to take that form. It didn’t seem as if it could take any other. She let it come out just as it would – she didn’t pretend to have any control. (James 1998: 51; original emphasis)

Given the mysterious inspiration of Verena, it is not clear where her voice actually originates. On the one hand, it seems to come to her as an external power from outside, while on the other, she “let it come out just as it would” (James 1998: 51). In either case, she is ‘spoken’ by an impersonal voice that she does not control. The impersonal character of her voice is heightened even further by the fact that, as one character puts it, she “has to have her father to start her up” (James 1998: 49). Similar to George Du Maurier’s Trilby, the performer who will be discussed in Chapter 6, and who can only sing while hypnotized by her master Svengali, Verena needs to be touched by her father before she can launch into her passionate speech. The novel describes how the hands of Selah Tarrant, the mesmeric healer, work on her in order for her to be “stimulated” (James 1998: 51). It is only following the “grotesque manipulations” (James 1998: 55) of her father’s touch that Verena gradually finds her voice: She began incoherently, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking in a dream. […] She proceeded slowly, cautiously, as if she were listening for the prompter, catching, one by one, certain phrases that were whispered to her a great distance off, behind the scenes of the world. Then memory, or inspiration, returned to her, and presently she was in possession of her part. (James 1998: 55)

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As James’s description of how her father manipulates and stimulates her suggests, Verena Tarrant, the charismatic orator, needs to be literally prompted into her speech. This means that the mesmerizing speaker is herself mesmerized; while she exerts a powerful charm over her audience, she also seems to be subject to manipulations and spells herself. In this Verena is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s performers. On the one hand, she mesmerizes and powerfully affects her audience like Zenobia, who has a charismatic voice of her own, while on the other hand, she is herself mesmerized like Priscilla, who performs under the control of her mesmerist Westervelt.¹⁸ The Bostonians clearly puts its female performer figure centre stage and highlights the powerful effects of her voice. However, in foregrounding the ambiguity of a voice that has immense power but lacks individual agency, James raises the question of who has a voice in the text and, at a more fundamental level, what a voice is. How can we describe the effects of Verena Tarrant’s speaking? What is the status of her voice, and in what does its affective power reside? Who or what speaks through her? Does her impersonal voice relate to any notion of subjectivity, and if so, how is this subjectivity constituted? These are some of the fundamental issues that the text negotiates through its female political speaker. As we shall see, the novel proposes a close link between the strangely impersonal voice of its performer and the status of the public voice in modernity. In contrast to Hawthorne’s self-willed and outlandish Zenobia, whose ‘voice’ is defined by her independent subjectivity and her assured self-performance, James’s speaker Verena Tarrant has a voice but not a voice of her own. She has a concrete voice but no voice in the sense of agency. Already in her first public speech mentioned above, her voice is oddly divorced from her person. It is to an impersonal ‘it’ that both Verena and her father link her eloquent speech. The undefined character of her voice stands in stark opposition to the traditional notion of the voice as a privileged marker of individual selfhood. As mentioned before, the voice has often been understood as the key signature of the human individual par excellence, while Bakhtin (1986) puts emphasis on speech as

 During her performances, Priscilla seems to have even less control than Verena. Westervelt’s mesmerism puts her into an unconscious state, which means that she is completely unaware of what is happening around her (for a description of this state, see Hawthorne 1998: 201– 202). In this she resembles Du Maurier’s Trilby, the performer who sings while under hypnosis (to be discussed in Chapter 6). During a conversation with Coverdale, Priscilla is said to be “listening to a distant voice” (Hawthorne 1998: 74). This reminds us of the way in which Verena seems to be “listening for the prompter, catching, one by one, certain phrases that were whispered to her a great distance off, behind the scenes of the world” (James 1998: 55) before she can begin her speech.

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expression of human agency. Notably since the emergence of the modern self and its intimate interiority, the voice has come to be valorized as the privileged organ of authentic expression. Likewise, the voice often serves as a metaphorical trope for political agency and empowerment – a notion that is particularly important to emancipatory discourses, especially in their use of expressions such as ‘to gain a voice’ and ‘to make one’s voice heard’, demanding agency for those who have been voiceless. It is precisely this metaphorical notion of the voice and its association with political agency that Verena invokes in her feminist speeches. Wishing to speak on behalf of the women’s movement, she emphasizes that “I should like to raise my voice” (James 1998: 87).¹⁹ However, while James’s speaker lends her concrete voice to the emancipatory claim that women should have a figurative voice of their own, this argument, so central to the feminist agenda, is ironically undermined by the fact that Verena’s voice seems to be spoken from elsewhere. How then can we analyse Verena’s voice with its ambiguous status as a voice that has charismatic power but does not articulate an individual position – because its speaker has none? What are we to make of the fact that she seems to serve as a medium and instrument of others and is thus ‘spoken’ by voices other than her own? Similar to The Blithedale Romance, a text which James’s novel can be seen to rewrite in many respects, The Bostonians traces what, following Nietzsche, I have been calling an ‘Überwältigunsgprozess’. As in Hawthorne’s text, the performer stands at the centre of a power struggle, although in this case she forms a passive object rather than an active subject. Hawthorne’s text revolves around the struggle between the voice of the narrator and the voice of the performer, and it is the voice of Zenobia that returns to haunt and ‘speak’ through Coverdale’s narrative. In The Bostonians, a battle is waged between various characters – first and foremost Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom – who fight over the possession of the performer’s voice, which they seek to appropriate and absorb for their own individual interests and personal desires. As a brief summary of the novel shows, this complex “Überwältigungsprozess”, which revolves around the struggle for the voice and affections of Verena Tarrant, can be seen to shape the entire plot of The Bostonians. From the moment when she first speaks at the reform meeting, both the feminist Olive

 Also note the following passage from Verena’s first speech in which she describes her feminist vision of political change as a collective concert of voices: “It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would become the voice of universal peace!” (James 1998: 58).

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Chancellor and her reactionary cousin Basil Ransom are captivated by Verena’s voice. Soon afterwards her passionate speech comes to be scripted by Olive, who adopts the young gifted speaker as her protégée. “She tells me what to say” (James 1998: 215), Verena later confides to Basil. Olive, in fact, literally buys Verena from her parents so as to save the young woman from vulgar exploitation and exposure. Verena leaves her shabby parental home so as to move into Olive’s cultivated and tasteful house – only to be exploited by her feminist mentor. Under the guidance of Olive, who wants to further the feminist cause but cannot speak herself in public, Verena reads and studies in order to train for a career as a leading orator in the feminist movement. Olive fuses with Verena’s voice by absorbing her for her feminist agenda as well as her personal love and friendship in a “fine web of authority, of dependence” (James 1998: 160). Moreover, she makes her promise that she will never consider marriage although she has several admirers (James 1998: 128). Basil Ransom, who has a failing law practice in New York, returns to Boston for another visit. He would like to enter public life, but none of his articles promoting his conservative views on the role of women is accepted for publication. Instead he hears about Verena’s success as a feminist orator. As one of the reformers explains to him: “She has affected so many. […] She will affect you!” (James 1998: 211– 212; original emphasis). Attracted to Verena, Basil takes her on a secret walk during which she tells him: “Miss Chancellor has absorbed me” (James 1998: 219; original emphasis). When Verena is invited to give a speech at the fashionable New York residence of Mrs Burrage, a society lady and mother of an admirer, she secretly sends an invitation to Basil Ransom. During another clandestine walk, it becomes clear that his influence on her is growing and that she increasingly comes under his power. Although he criticizes her severely for speaking for the feminist cause and levels harsh criticism against its goals in general and her public career in particular, all the while attempting to force his position on her, she begins to be seduced by his Southern accent – “his deep, sweet, distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and mild, familiar laughs, which, as he leaned towards her, almost tickled her cheek and ear” (James 1998: 316).²⁰ His seductive voice works on her and, in doing so, foreshadows the physical force he will ultimately deploy in order to

 The way in which Verena is powerfully affected by Basil’s voice recalls the way in which Zenobia is fascinated by the voice Hollingsworth has as a public speaker: “What a voice he has! And what a man he is!” (Hawthorne 1998: 21).

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tear her away from Olive and the public platform, thus reinforcing the manipulation of her father’s touch.²¹ In order to prepare Verena’s speech for the huge audience at the Boston Music Hall, with which Olive intends to launch a grand lecture tour, the two women retreat to Cape Cod. With the intention “to take possession” (James 1998: 335) of Verena, Ransom stalks them and secretly listens to and is enthralled by Verena’s voice as she practices her important public speech. When Basil Ransom proposes marriage to Verena, she is helplessly torn between her reactionary suitor and her feminist friend and mentor. She seeks advice from Olive, who, in turn, suffers and becomes a tragic heroine as she realizes that she has been deceived by the secret exchange between her protégée and her antagonistic rival and cousin. Nevertheless, the preparations for the great Music Hall speech go ahead as planned until the actual performance. However, just as Verena is about to present herself on stage and address the mass audience that is already awaiting her speech, Basil gains access to her dressing room. After a prolonged argument in the wings, the novel concludes with Basil forcefully abducting the still conflicted Verena and the tragic figure of Olive rising to assume heroic stature as she appears on the platform in order to pacify the irritated crowd in the auditorium, thus presumably gaining a public voice of her own. As in The Blithedale Romance, where Coverdale attempts to gain power by reading and defining the ambiguous figure of Zenobia, who both fascinates and disturbs him, the “Überwältigungsprozess” in The Bostonians also revolves around the question of interpretation and definition. From the beginning, Verena’s voice serves as the central enigma which everyone in the text seeks to read and which continues to fascinate precisely because of its ambivalence and resistance to any unequivocal reading. Is Verena’s eloquence, which seems both spontaneous and rehearsed, a hoax or a miracle? Is she instrumentalized and ventriloquized in dubious ways, or is she the medium of an extraordinary inspiration? Is she otherworldly, or as vulgar as her family origins and

 Also note the following passage in which Verena reflects on the increasing influence Ransom has come to exert over her: “Formerly she had been convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person, and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed aghast at the colourless dust into which […] such a conviction as that could crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this spell was more than she could say – poor Verena, who up to so lately had flattered herself that she had a wizard’s wand in her pocket” (James 1998: 370 – 371). As suggested by this passage, the literal touch of Verena’s father is replaced by the “magical touch” of Ransom and his voice, which also displaces her own magical power.

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surroundings? Is she to go on and build a great career as a public speaker in the women’s movement, or is her voice to be limited to and thus contained in the domestic sphere? Finally, what are the roles women should play in America’s culture and nation at large? By raising these and related questions in the text, the vocal gift of James’s performer turns into an object of speculation. Verena is constantly read and interpreted – and, rendering the power interests at work even more palpable, she is also literally sold, bought and stolen (her parents accept the money Olive offers for her, and Basil forcefully abducts her in the end). Moreover, in the final scene, already described in some detail at the beginning of this chapter on American speakers, the physical touch of her father and the psychological pressure of her friend Olive are intensified by the coercive violence and “muscular force” (James 1998: 434) with which the reactionary Basil eventually tears her away from her feminist mentor and the public platform. Both in their interpretative readings and their literal appropriations, which make up the “Überwältigungsprozess” traced by the novel, various figures lay claim to Verena. In so doing, they seek to usurp her voice for their own descriptions and interpretations of the world. Already in The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale seeks to absorb the disturbing figure and voice of Zenobia into his narrative and, at the same time, attempts to assert his own view of the failed reform project at Blithedale. Similarly, in The Bostonians, the fight over the possession of Verena’s voice is effectively an argument over how the world in general and American culture in particular should be interpreted and shaped. What is at stake is both a struggle between various descriptions and interpretations and a fight for the literal ability to speak. Verena is the only character in the novel shown to be able to speak in public. What the other characters seek to possess is quite literally her public voice. As well as interpreting the world through their descriptions and definitions of the female performer, they seek to appropriate and absorb her vocal gift. They do this in order to acquire a public voice for themselves, whether literally or figuratively, by either silencing her and speaking in her place (Basil Ransom) or by using her as a medium through which they can ‘speak’ and promote their worldviews, positions and interests (Verena’s parents and Olive Chancellor). Basil Ransom would like to enjoy her beautiful voice in private, while trying to silence her in public and, at the same time, get his own articles published. Like Verena’s father, who literally manipulates his daughter into speech through the touch of his hands and, in so doing, uses her as a mouthpiece for his and his wife’s reformist views, Olive Chancellor wants her to deliver the feminist speeches that she herself cannot hold in public. Asked by Ransom whether Olive also makes speeches, Verena replies that she writes hers: “Well, she makes mine – or the best part of them. She tells me

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what to say – the real things, the strong things. It’s Miss Chancellor as much as me!” (James 1998: 215). The mesmeric healer Selah Tarrant, the feminist reformer Olive Chancellor, the reactionary Southerner Basil Ransom but also Matthias Pardon, a profit-driven journalist, all have a keen desire for influence in the public sphere. Significantly, however, none of them can articulate themselves in public. A former seller of pencils but no writer, a ticket-holder for lectures but no public speaker, Verena’s father Selah Tarrant is limited to the crude eloquence of his manual touch, with which he works on his daughter and his women clients; Olive “should like so to speak” for the feminist cause but, because of her cultivated restraint, she cannot bring herself to appear before public audiences – “I can’t talk to these people, I can’t!” (James 1998: 32); following his “desire for public life” (James 1998: 179), Basil Ransom writes articles but invariably meets with editorial rejection – it is only towards the end of the novel (and shortly before his eventual silencing of Verena’s public voice) that one of his texts is eventually accepted for publication; Matthias Pardon, finally, is a shrewd interviewer and journalist, but in order to capitalize on the machinery of the mass media and make a profit, he needs celebrities he can turn into news items and sell as commodities. What drives these characters in their struggle for Verena, in addition to their private desires, is their wish to have public and political influence as well as cultural authority. This is why they turn her into an object that comes to be exchanged in a complex chain of transfers and transactions, each of which represents a claim to a particular reading of the world. In this process, Verena herself, importantly enough, loses none of her ambiguity. Rather, as a voice that is used by others, she becomes ever more ambiguous as she changes hands and becomes subject to the manipulative spell and authority of her various mentors and ventriloquists. As already mentioned, Verena is increasingly torn between her close friendship with Olive and her growing attraction to Basil, and while she continues to live and collaborate together with her feminist friend, she falls ever more for her reactionary lover, who rejects the political project for which she speaks. “I like him, I can’t help it”, she confesses to Olive, who feels deceived by her friend and collaborator, “I do like him. I don’t want to marry him, I don’t want to embrace his ideas, which are unspeakably false and horrible; but I like him better than any gentleman I have seen” (James 1998: 361). Although she initially tries to resist him and his ideas, they eventually take hold of her: The change that had taken place in the object of Basil Ransom’s merciless devotion […] was, briefly, just this change – that the words he had spoken to her […] about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and

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her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her – these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation. (James 1998: 369 – 370)

The extreme susceptibility of Verena to external influences means that, similar to the way in which she was ‘spoken’ by her parents and Olive Chancellor, she now adopts the diametrically opposed views of Ransom. While all the other characters have opinions, ideas and interests but no voice to express them in public, Verena has a public voice but no convictions of her own.²² However, the power struggle traced by the The Bostonians turns out to be even more complex because the fight over the possession of Verena is simultaneously complicated by the affective power of her voice. Although the characters surrounding Verena try to assert their power by virtue of their exclusive interpretation, appropriation and possession of her voice, they are in turn overwhelmed by its affective impact. This effect of Verena’s voice can be related to Dolar’s notion (2006) that the voice forms a surplus or excess. There is a dimension of voice beyond verbal language. Voices do not only convey meaning, but they also harbour a disturbing surplus that exceeds verbal language. As already demonstrated by her first speech, Verena is not only mesmerized by the touch of her father but she herself has the power to mesmerize her listeners with the affective power of her voice. “What a power – what a power, Miss Tarrant!” (James 1998: 75) Olive Chancellor exclaims the next day, still affected by Verena’s first speech. On the one hand, if we read the novels of James and Hawthorne along each other, Verena can be compared to Priscilla who, as the weak-willed medium in The Blithedale Romance, is under Westervelt’s mesmeric control. Like her, Verena only wishes to please others, which is why she is so vulnerable to and indeed entranced by their influence. On the other hand, she also recalls Zenobia because although she represents the very opposite of the independent subjectivity embodied by Hawthorne’s performer, her voice points to an element of excess. Whether by the political content of her speech and/or the tone and timbre of her voice, her listeners are all powerfully affected. Similar to the excess of Zeno For Olive this discrepancy means that she and Verena complement each other in a highly effective way: “[…] after a short contact with the divine idea – Olive was always trying to flash it at [Verena], like a jewel in an uncovered case – she kindled, flamed up, took the words from her friend’s less persuasive lips, resolved herself into a magical voice, became again the pure sibyl. Then Olive perceived how fatally, without Verena’s tender notes, her crusade would lack sweetness […]; and on the other hand, how weak Verena would be on the statistical and logical side if she herself should not bring up the rear. Together, in short, they would have everything and together they would triumph” (James 1998: 150 – 151).

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bia’s voice, which manifests itself in the way in which she keeps her inner life secret and haunts Coverdale and his text after her death, the excessive effect of Verena has to do with the way in which the affective power of her voice can never fully be subsumed by any of the characters and thus always exceeds their interpretations as well as their struggle for power. Whereas Coverdale, the narrator in The Blithedale Romance, seeks to contain Zenobia’s excess by rendering her a mere image, The Bostonians places much greater emphasis on hearing. While hearing and seeing both operate on a principle of distance, hearing simultaneously resembles the contact senses – touch, smell, taste – together with their immediacy and their collapse of subject-object boundaries.²³ Vision allows subjects to objectify the world and transform what they see into objects, thus establishing a clear subject-object division. In contrast to the spectator, who occupies a certain distance from his or her objects of vision, the listener is literally penetrated by the sounds entering his or her ears. Although the characters in James’s novel do not hear Verena as an individual because she does not speak with a voice of her own, they are subjected to the sound of her voice. As I will later show in greater detail, Basil Ransom attempts to contain the power of her voice by aestheticizing its sound. Nevertheless, while Basil and the other characters seek to appropriate the performer’s voice and use her for their own interests, there is a dimension in the sheer sound of her voice and its affective impact on its listeners that remains elusive and thus undermines any attempt at possession. Having followed Verena and her friend Olive to Cape Cod, Ransom overhears Verena practise the speech she is scheduled to give at the novel’s decisive ending. While walking in the vicinity of her house, he hears the sound of her voice and, listening to it, “involuntarily” exclaims “Murder, what a lovely voice!” (James 1998: 342). Stalking the women in order “to take possession” (James 1998: 335) of Verena and wrest her away from Olive, he is possessed by the sound of her voice. While her listener seeks to take possession of her voice, that same voice in turn possesses him. In order to analyse in greater detail how the struggle over Verena and the effects of her voice play themselves out in the text, it is important to examine more closely what her voice resonates with and what resonances her voice has elsewhere, in those listening to its utterances. To be more precise, it is important to explore 1) the ‘voices’ that speak through Verena as she pursues her career as a public performer in a mass culture which is dominated by the mechanisms of publicity and celebrity, and 2) the powerful effects of her voice that make full

 See Jonathan Rée’s discussion of the relationship between voice, hearing and the other senses in his book I See a Voice (2000).

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appropriation by the other characters impossible. As we shall see, the public voice Verena has as a star performer can be seen to enact the predicaments of the subject in modern mass culture. At the same time, the coercion of Verena by other characters is undermined by the excessive dimension of her voice; their attempts to control and appropriate her vocal power can only succeed in part as something in her voice keeps eluding them. Verena’s voice reverberates with the will and opinion of those who have power over her. Especially her mentor and friend Olive appropriates Verena’s voice as she tells her protégée what to say and, in doing so, turns her into a celebrated voice of the women’s movement. However, it is not just that she is ventriloquized by individual characters such as her parents, Olive and Basil, but their public interests and political positions mean that as a subject, she is simultaneously ‘spoken’ by catchwords and phrases, by language in general and the American political discourses of the time in particular. In fact, one can go as far as to say that as a figure who is the product of language and discourses, she refers us to a dilemma of modern subjectivity. She has a voice that is heard in public for the reason that she subjects herself to the particular discourses that the other characters force onto her. Moreover, James’s text ironically underlines that it is a discourse promising emancipation and liberation that enslaves his female performer.²⁴ Over and beyond its satirizing of the feminist and other reform movements, James’s text can, however, also be seen to examine the discursive forces that shape the subject and trace the depletion of the individual person that public personalities face in an age of publicity. By claiming Verena for the feminist cause, Olive rejects the vulgar exposure and crude exhibition which her parents subject her to, and she also works against the commercial scheme which the astute and enterprising journalist Matthias Pardon envisions for her when he proposes that they manage Verena’s career together. Instead, wishing to appropriate Verena’s voice for her political project, Olive aims at a “partnership of their two minds”, “an organic whole”, in which her taste, her education and ideas complement the “magical voice” of the charismatic speaker (James 1998: 150). The intimate friendship they cultivate in Olive’s sophisticated home is to protect Verena’s voice from the machinery of mass culture. Moreover, Olive trains her student for a noble cause, which she believes is untainted by any contact with the vulgar world of entertainment geared to trivial divertissement. “Your mission”, she tells her protégée at an early

 See Philip Fisher (1986: 183 – 184), who points out that, paradoxically, Verena is mesmerized and thus prompted into speeches that turn on liberation and freedom.

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stage in their relationship, “is not to exhibit yourself as a pastime for individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of nations” (James 1998: 124).²⁵ However, despite Olive’s efforts, Verena’s voice cannot be protected from the paradigms of modern mass culture and instead merges with its mechanisms. From the moment of her first appearance in the text, the performer already presents herself as a voice that is eminently public. When Olive, already impatient, asks her to begin and literally calls for her voice – “Please begin, please begin! A voice, a human voice is what we want” (James 1998: 52) – this is not only a moment in which the voice comes to be performatively produced in the dialogue between speaker and audience. But the voice to be produced is simultaneously, and literally, called upon to lend itself to a larger movement. In fact, Verena’s public voice owes its resonance to an external relation, which is beyond the cultivated privacy of Olive, and which also dissolves the individual. By speaking for an anonymous mass of women which is never present as an entity except as the collective body both invoked and addressed in her speech, Verena engages in a public discourse that runs counter to the idea of individual self-expression. As the mouthpiece of the movement, she is a voice and nothing more. From the very beginning, Basil’s reading associates Verena with “a singular hollowness of character” (James 1998: 57). Later he impresses on her that this renders her a fraud, an automaton or, in his words, a “preposterous puppet” (James 1998: 326): You always want to please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as you did before to please your father and mother. It isn’t you, the least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in its way too), whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to efface yourself there. (James 1998: 325; original emphasis)

Yet it is precisely because Verena is empty that she can echo the myriad phrases that are grafted onto her public voice. As a figure who is simultaneously empty (because she has no position, no voice of her own) and full (because she repeats a myriad phrases), she resembles modern celebrities and stars, whose embodi-

 At the same time, Olive also appears to be remarkably attuned to the idea of fame and political celebrity: “She had never pretended to deny that the hope of fame, of the very highest distinction, was one of her strongest incitements; and she held that the most effective way of protesting against the state of bondage of women was for an individual member of the sex to become illustrious. A person who might have overheard some of the talk of this possibly infatuated pair would have been touched by their extreme familiarity with the idea of earthly glory” (James 1998: 150).

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ment of values and meanings also requires a certain depletion of the individual person.²⁶ In her repetition of phrases and discourses, Verena’s voice is indeed connected to “some power outside” (James 1998: 51). Her voice also resembles the glow and brightness, the radiance and luminosity with which she is repeatedly said to shine, but which rather than emanating from within Verena, surround her like an insubstantial immaterial effect (James 1998: 54, 214). Reminiscent of Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance, James’s performer is malleable and susceptible to external forces, to the suggestions of those characters who have power over her as well as the influences of her cultural surroundings in general. As Siri Hustvedt, the novelist, suggests in her essay on The Bostonians, “it is precisely this floating, externalized quality that makes her exceedingly vulnerable” (Hustvedt 2006: 144). Yet, at the same time, Verena’s voice is more than an echo. On the one hand, her voice may be ventriloquized by others and by culture at large. On the other hand, however, her voice does not simply echo other voices, but her ambiguous voice simultaneously defies control and possession by virtue of the strong affects she evokes in her audience. Among the scenes that foreground the affective power of Verena Tarrant’s voice in a particularly compelling way is Basil Ransom’s aural reunion with the sound of her voice on Cape Cod mentioned above. During his stroll in the neighbourhood of the house rented by the two women, “a sound came to his ear – a sound he knew already well which carried the accents of Verena Tarrant, in ample periods and cadences, out into the stillness of the August night” (James 1998: 341– 342). Remarkable in this passage are both the boundless expansion of Verena’s voice and the passive pleasure involved in Basil’s listening. The eavesdropper cannot help being enthralled by the tone and timbre of her voice filling the nocturnal space. Without access to the house, Basil cannot hear what she is saying. However, the fact that he cannot distinguish the words is precisely the point and pivot of his listening experience. Similar to Coverdale, who, on first meeting Zenobia, seeks to contain her overpowering presence by shifting attention from her voice to an erotic image of his own fashioning, Ransom tries to filter out the semantic content of Verena’s political speech and instead focuses on the seductive effect of her voice whenever he listens to her – whether at her public performances or on Cape Cod, where he literally cannot understand her politically charged words, which he claims he knows anyway. As he tells Verena in another scene, “I don’t listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice” (James 1998:

 For a discussion of the star as a modern figure, see Richard Dyer’s classic study Stars (1998 [1979]) as well as Elisabeth Bronfen and Barbara Straumann (2002).

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320). However, what cannot be shut out in listening are the disturbing aspects of the voice that reside precisely in its extra-verbal dimensions. Much like Coverdale, Basil seeks to control the powerful impact of the female performer’s presence and turns her voice into an object of his own erotic pleasure. Yet something in her voice resists being absorbed into this scenario of control. The sheer sound of Verena’s voice captivates Basil and, in doing so, enforces on him both the pleasure and passivity of hearing. Rather than having power over the performer, the passive listener is himself overpowered by the timbre of her voice. In this Basil again resembles Coverdale, who is forced to witness Zenobia’s self-performances in a passive manner. Moreover, Basil’s wish for control is also challenged by the public expansion of Verena’s voice. His attempt to claim her for his own individual enjoyment is also an attempt to limit her feminine voice to the private domain. However, Verena does not seem to know the difference between private and public speaking, and her vocalization blurs the boundaries between the private and the public sphere. As she is rehearsing her great public performance, her voice travels in the Cape Cod summer night to Basil’s individual ear and simultaneously projects a seemingly boundless space since she anticipates the huge auditorium of the Boston Music Hall. Earlier in the text, Basil is confounded to see her conversation “drop into oratory as a natural thing”, producing “the same turns and cadences, almost the same gestures, as though she had been on the platform” (James 1998: 217). As Verena explains to him, people “tell me I speak as I talk, so I suppose I talk as I speak” (James 1998: 217). While she speaks as if she were constantly on the orator’s platform, Basil seeks to counter this collapse of the private and the public by focusing on the beautiful sound of her voice, which he claims for his own private pleasure. Indeed, in proposing marriage to her, he attempts to reduce her vocal power to a domestic adornment.²⁷ The culturally and politically marginalized Southerner wishes to have a public voice of his own but, beset by reactionary resentment, he can tolerate neither feminine articulation nor women’s influence in the public sphere. At the end, he will seem triumphant; when he prevents Verena from addressing the Music Hall audience, he finally “shut[s] her up altogether” (James 1998: 301) as he had wished to do earlier. However, it remains highly doubtful whether he will ever be able to reproduce her vocal power for himself. The text emphasizes the coercive violence that is necessary to silence her: It is by sheer physical

 While courting Verena, Ransom tells her that there is no place for women in public, that instead “[m]y plan is to keep you at home and have a better time with you there than ever” (James 1998: 323).

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force that he separates her from Olive and the public platform. Although she professes to be “glad” about her abduction, Verena is in tears and, according to the novel’s closing sentence, she is likely to weep again because of the marriage into which Basil is leading her: “It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these [tears] were not the last she was destined to shed” (James 1998: 435). The violence Basil feels he needs to use in order to silence Verena is reminiscent of Hollingsworth’s threat that if women were to move out of their traditional sphere, he would call on his fellow men to use “physical force […] to scourge them back within their proper bounds!” (Hawthorne 1998: 123). Indeed, Basil’s violence suggests that there is an excessive aspect to Verena’s eminently public voice. Asked by Olive to define the success she hopes to achieve with her career, Verena uses a phrase she appears to have learnt by heart: “Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible” (James 1998: 139). Despite the “mechanical tone” (James 1998: 139) of her reply, the expression names precisely what her voice actually does. Her voice does have a powerful effect on her audiences and, in doing so, projects an affective space in which it finds resonance. At the same time, her voice also expands into the public sphere by virtue of the political message of her speeches. It is the “pressure” she thus produces affectively and politically that triggers Basil’s counter-pressure. What he acts, and reacts against, are effectively the cultural shifts of modernity, notably the rise of and growing connection between femininity, democracy and mass culture. In his view, the modern scenario brings an alleged threat of dissolution and non-differentiation, which he believes he can make out in Verena’s impersonal voice. When in his listening he suppresses the content of her politically charged speech, it is as if to curtail the influence she has as a woman in the public sphere. As he is attending her New York speech, for instance, “her meaning faded again into the agreeable vague, and he simply felt her presence, tasted her voice” (James 1998: 258).²⁸ By trying to shut out the meaning and message of her speech, his desire is for “a way to strike her dumb” (James 1998: 309) as her husband and to appropriate the sound of her voice for himself alone. Similar to Henry Burrage, the art collector, who showcases the feminist speaker on a platform in his mother’s ele-

 Caroline Field Levander discusses this figuration whereby attention is shifted from women’s political speech to the aesthetic quality of their voices as part of her larger study on the significance of women’s public speech for the emergence of nineteenth-century American middle-class culture. Both The Bostonians and Sarah J. Hales’s The Lecturess (1839), she writes, show “strategies by which rapt male listeners interpret women’s eloquent and politically charged talk in order to reinforce the ‘natural’ gender differences they assume to be innate in women’s speech” (Levander 1998: 7).

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gant New York mansion, Basil aestheticizes her tone and timbre.²⁹ While the text time and again emphasizes the boundless resonance of Verena’s impersonal voice, Basil works against its curiously and even uncannily floating character by joining its beautiful tone to the pretty performer.³⁰ By connecting the acousmatic origin of her impersonal voice to her body, he attempts to contain and confine its resonance, putting it, as Verena terms it in one of her speeches, into “the box” (James 1998: 257). Moreover, by sexualizing her voice and thus reducing it to an erotic object, he seeks to reinforce traditional gender boundaries, granting men, but not women, a public and political voice. He wishes to enjoy the beautiful sound of Verena’s voice in private but is not willing to listen to the performer as she is making herself heard in the public sphere. In his attempt to turn Verena’s voice into a private possession, Basil fights against a supposed flooding of the public sphere with feminine vocality. He contradicts the assertion of Verena’s New York speech that “there is not enough woman in our general life” (James 1998: 322). In fact, he makes the opposite claim that women have too much influence in a culture that has become thoroughly feminized. Due to “the most damnable feminization”, there is “a great deal too much” feminine presence and influence: “The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age […]” (James 1998: 322). What provokes anxiety in the Southern lawyer and would-be writer who cannot express himself in public because his articles meet with editorial rejection is the question of who has a public voice and can thus influence and shape the public domain at a moment when the prerogatives of male hegemony come to be challenged by modern democracy and mass culture. Finding it necessary to defend the “masculine character” – “that is what I want to preserve, or rather […] to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!” (James 1998: 322) – Basil appears to be troubled by the modern condition and the cultural shifts it brings. Following a widespread gendering which, as Andreas Huyssen (1986) has shown, informs modern mass culture, Basil encodes its effects as a surfeit of femininity in which the male individual is in danger of having his identity dissolved.³¹

 The fetishization of the voice as an aesthetic object will be discussed again in relation to George Du Maurier’s Trilby in Chapter 6.  See for instance the description of Ransom’s experience of and response to Verena’s first speech, which I quoted at the beginning of my discussion of The Bostonians (James 1998: 56 – 57).  Also see Ann Douglas’ classic study The Feminization of American Culture (1977), which discusses how, in the nineteenth century, women came to shape sentimental religious values which

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Henry James’s novel shows an ambivalent fascination with the feminine public voice that is closely related to the ambiguous status of the subject’s voice in modernity. Significantly, the tone of the overall text sustains this ambivalence throughout the narration and never comes down on any one side. James achieves this effect through his distanced treatment of all the different positions in the text. Despite the text’s satirical comment on the various reform movements, the only figure who is ascribed tragic and heroic stature is interestingly Olive in her personal suffering over the loss of Verena. Time and again the text evokes the culturally conservative rhetoric of Basil, the central characterfocalizer who also focalizes all of Verena’s public speeches. However, his railing against feminine articulation is marked as a form of male anxiety or, as Claire Kahane puts it in her reading, “male hysteria” (Kahane 1995: 64– 79). The text exposes both Basil’s reactionary judgment of the age – he “was very suspicious of the encroachment of modern democracy” (James 1998: 181) – and the physical violence in which his convictions become literally over-palpable.³² Where the text does converge with Basil is in its ambivalence over the impersonal character of its performer’s voice as well as the publicity that is deployed to market this voice and the ideas it promulgates. This becomes evident not least of all in the ways in which the novel in its description of characters and spaces emphasizes how divisions, contours and shapes are dissolved.³³

had a significant influence on literature and greatly contributed to modern mass culture. Indeed, as I have been arguing, in nineteenth-century culture, an important shift plays itself out in both the religious and the theatrical domain providing women with new opportunities of articulation. While religious discourse allows women to claim a position of moral influence, the theatre stage allows women to rise to prominence and turn into celebrities in a context of mass culture.  In the following passage, for instance, the narrator refers to Ransom’s reactionary attitude and, at the same time, distances himself from (or hides himself behind) his position, namely “his conviction […] that civilization itself would be in danger if it should fall into the power of a herd of vociferating women (I am but the reporter of his angry formulae) […]” (James 1998: 45; original emphasis).  The dissolution of boundaries and partitions is particularly pronounced in the residence of the old abolitionist, feminist and philanthropist Miss Birdseye. Her house is open to everyone, her face “looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent” (James 1998: 23) as well as in the loss of sexual difference and gender identity in her boarder Doctor Prance, who blurs masculine and feminine norms in her appearance, who cannot see any difference between men and women and defines herself entirely through her profession (James 1998: 36 – 37). For a more detailed analysis, see Lynn Wardley’s reading, which links James’s novel to the blurring of boundaries in modern urbanization, especially in the dissolution of private and public bodies, of interior and exterior spaces. Referring to James’s non-fiction texts on women’s voices, The Question of Our Speech (1905 [1905]) and The Speech and Manner of American Women (1973) [1906 – 1907], Wardley (1989) offers a compelling analysis of the novel

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The central trope of the dissolution of boundaries is, however, the voice. Verena’s voice functions as a medium that belongs to nobody – neither to herself nor any of her mentors or suitors – but affects everyone. In so doing, her speaking marks a complex dialectic between collective embodiment and individual disembodiment. As Christophe Den Tandt (1998: 165, 168) persuasively argues, Verena oscillates between, on the one hand, the incorporation into larger entities and bodies, most prominently in her intimate friendship with Olive and her heterosexual union with Basil, and, on the other hand, her relation to an exteriority: the audiences she addresses in her public appearance but also the abstract crowds she invokes in her speeches.³⁴ In spite of Olive’s and Basil’s attempts to control and manipulate her, Verena’s public impersonal voice escapes their will through its collective circulation of affects. On some level, the performer’s voice also eludes the text. Or rather, James represents the performer’s voice as elusive in order to emphasize the ambiguous effect of the modern public voice. The Bostonians shows both the impersonal character and the charismatic power of a voice that resonates with cultural phrases and, at the same time, finds powerful resonance in its audiences. It is this unresolvable ambiguity that renders Verena’s voice both ungraspable and fascinating for her listeners. Earlier in this chapter, we saw how Zenobia defies the gaze of Coverdale, who seeks to transform her into an image of his own creation. Similar to Zenobia’s recalcitrant excess, Verena remains characterized by her vocal ambiguity. Merging the individual and the collective, general ideas and a unique timbre, her voice and its diffusion undermine any stable categorization. However, it is not only Verena who dissolves as she “turn[s] herself inside out” (James 1998: 366) for others, but the fundamental passivity of hearing to which her listeners are subjected also troubles the individual boundaries of the listener, who is exposed to and penetrated by the sound of her voice. In fact, when Basil seeks to block out her words, he may well exchange the political threat of her voice for another danger. Because unless it is brought into aesthetic shape, the enjoyment of the voice object as pure sound entails a confrontation of radical otherness and a loss of self (see Poizat 1992, Dolar 2006). James’s use of a male focalizer reminds us of Staël’s use of Oswald. However, while Staël’s focalizer is reduced to a structural function, focusing the various feelings and responses Corinne evokes in her large audiences, Basil is and its treatment of the feminine voice and body in connection with the modern public sphere by arguing that the fear of feminization is connected to anxieties over urban modernization at large.  Note, for example, the first speech of Verena in the text, in which she refers to “the great sisterhood of women” (James 1998: 58).

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shown to intervene and engage in a relentless battle in which he attempts to gain control over the performer’s voice. In fact, remarkable about the American examples discussed in this chapter is the considerable power possessed by their female political speakers, together with the explicit hostility and violence that is meted out to them, especially by their male listeners. Indeed, because the force used to contain their voices is so excessive, this hostile energy drives home the point how powerful the voices of these American speakers actually are. As shown in this chapter, the American performer texts by Hawthorne and James revolve around an antagonistic relationship between the sexes. The femininity these texts foreground in their performers is highly disturbing for certain male characters precisely because they cannot contain these voices and subdue their feminine otherness through their attempt to read and interpret them. While Zenobia is characterized by her strong, but masked – and thus inaccessible – subjectivity, Verena Tarrant is marked by the complete diffusion of any sense of individuality. However, despite their extreme difference, they resemble each other in that they cannot be turned into a stable sign or image. They both constitute female performer voices that are utterly divisive. Nevertheless, their male listeners, driven by masculine anxiety, continue in their relentless attempts to reassert themselves by analysing, attacking or even silencing their public voices together with their oppositional stance. It is, however, important to emphasize that rather than putting closure to this struggle, both texts sustain their antagonistic tension. Although both performers eventually lose their voices – Zenobia’s powerful self-performance finds a morbid end and Verena, manhandled and muffled, is led into marriage (by a man called ‘Ransom’) – there is still a resistant remainder that cannot be silenced entirely. In both texts, the female performer voice is excessive in nature, because it cannot be contained by its male listeners and because it marks an undeniable presence in the public sphere – be this in the utopian community in The Blithedale Romance or a political celebrity culture promoted by the mass media as in The Bostonians. What clearly hovers over both of these texts is the ghost – or spirit – of Margaret Fuller, the visionary founding figure of American feminism discussed in the previous chapter. In the nineteenth century, Fuller was often seen as a controversial figure because of her feminist vision and above all because of the undeniable ‘voice’, influence and presence she herself had as one of the preeminent public intellectuals in nineteenth-century American culture. In other words, what the case of Fuller made clear is a cultural ambivalence over the public female voice, and it is precisely this ambivalence that comes to be refigured in the fictional representation of Zenobia, Verena Tarrant and, to some degree, Olive Chancellor. In a more general sense, however, their public voices can also be seen to refer to the strong feminine inflection of and influence

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in American culture. In her classic study The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas has shown how in nineteenth-century America, women shaped a sentimental discourse that continues to reverberate in contemporary mass culture. In The Female Complaint (2008), which forms part of her ‘national sentimentality’ project, Lauren Berlant traces the development of a mass-cultural ‘intimate public’ in the United States, a ‘woman’s culture’ that is shaped by the idea that women are in need of sharing intimate conversation with other women. In his influential text “Mass Culture as Woman”, Andreas Huyssen, finally, explores the notion which became increasingly influential in the course of nineteenth century that “mass culture is somehow associated with women” (Huyssen 1986: 47). The powerful voices that women had as a result of this cultural shift is already evident in the two texts under discussion. While Hawthorne’s portrayal of Zenobia refers to the leading ‘voice’ women had in the reform movements, James’s novel straddles both New England reform discourses and late nineteenth-century celebrity, publicity and mass culture. In attempting to silence Verena Tarrant, Basil Ransom reacts against what he regards as a feminine surfeit in modern mass culture and democracy. However, Verena’s impersonal voice is beyond the control of both speaker and listener and its excessive force cannot be stopped. The performer is repeatedly said to gush, to “overflow” (James 1998: 158), to have “poured out a stream of eloquence” (James 1998: 156). When Olive buys Verena from her parents with “a cheque for a very considerable amount” (James 1988: 158), she assures the concerned father that “[…] Verena’s development was the thing in the world in which she took most interest; she should have every opportunity for a free expansion” (James 1998: 158). “Yes, that’s the great thing”, responds the father, reassured by Olive’s formulations, which sound like a satirical refiguration on James’s part of Margaret Fuller’s manifesto, “let her act out her nature. […] just let her overflow!” (James 1998: 158). Indeed, as Tony Tanner points out, Verena’s family name ‘Tarrant’ implies a “torrent” (Tanner 1987: 153) ‘engulfing’ her listeners. Despite the eagerness with which Basil and Olive, both in their own way, seek to claim Verena for themselves, her voice resists full appropriation. In the last scene, the audience impatiently awaits Verena Tarrant’s widely advertised speech in the auditorium. “A general hubbub rose from the floor and the galleries of the hall – the sound of several thousand people stamping with their feet and rapping their umbrellas and sticks” (James 1998: 420 – 421). However, the performance continues to be delayed as Basil Ransom physically fights with Olive Chancellor over the possession of Verena: […] to put an end to the odious scene he would have seized Verena in his arms and broken away into the outer world, if Olive, who […] had sprung to her feet, had not at the same time

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thrown herself between them with a force which made the girl relinquish the grasp of Ransom’s hand. […] Her face and voice were terrible to Ransom; she had flung herself upon Verena and was holding her close, and he could see that her friend’s suffering was faint in comparison to her own. (James 1998: 427– 428)

Eventually Ransom gains the upper hand, with Verena yielding to his will, while Olive goes on stage to address the crowd of several thousand instead of the advertised performer. “‘Olive, Olive!’ Verena suddenly shrieked; and her piercing cry might have reached the front. But Ransom had already, by muscular force, wrenched her away, and was hurrying her out […]” (James 1998: 434). The performer is thus forcibly torn away from her public career, after the irresistible “pressure” of her voice (James 1998: 139), its political thrust and its phonic materiality have time and again been synaesthetically associated with the touch of her father’s manipulations and the muscular counter-pressure of Basil. However, it is doubtful whether by leading her into marriage, Basil will ever be able to take control over Verena’s voice and thus prevail over her in the “Überwältigungsprozess” traced by the novel. Perhaps Verena will never learn the difference between private expression and public speech and may thus continue to lecture her husband. Even as she is pulled away from the public platform by Basil, her vocal excess may thus well elude his grasp. The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians both underline the considerable anxiety surrounding female political speakers in American nineteenth-century literature and culture. Like the examples discussed in the preceding chapters, the performers in Hawthorne and James can also be seen as aftereffects of Staël’s Corinne, particularly in the way in which they claim the public sphere and seek to influence and transform the socio-political landscape of America through their speech. While he is listening to one of Verena Tarrant’s public talks, Basil Ransom, having read of “the improvisatrice of Italy”, regards her as “a chastened, modern, American version of the type, a New England Corinna, with a mission instead of a lyre” (James 1998: 253). However, in contrast to Staël’s Corinne and the British performers discussed so far, the political speakers in these two texts meet with far more vehement and, indeed, violent opposition on the part of their male audience. Indeed, it is because of this fierce conflict at the core of these American novels that I have invoked Nietzsche as my theoretical framework to describe the power struggle waged between the various textual voices. As we have seen, the antagonism in these texts can be described in terms of a Nietzschean process of overpowering, in which competing ideological positions and descriptions of the world struggle for dominance over one another. The female political speakers in Hawthorne and James are opposed so vehemently by male characters because their vocal presence is so strong. Although neither

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of them can sustain their public voice in the end, they are characterized by an excess that cannot be fully curtailed and contained and hence continues to provoke anxiety in their male listeners.

5 Acting Anxieties While Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Henry James’s The Bostonians foreground the male anxiety that is provoked by the political speaker, British novels allow us to trace the cultural nervousness that is caused by the acting of professional stage performers. Having focused on Hawthorne and James, we return to British texts featuring professional performers on the theatre stage. As we have seen, the American texts discussed in the previous chapter revolve around the struggle for public speech and cultural influence, and they represent this struggle for power as a battle of the sexes. In both examples, it is the fact that the female speaker has a powerful voice, expanding from the private sphere to the public, that evokes anxiety in male characters, who seek to overpower her. The anxieties in the British texts are not caused by the disquietude that the feminine voice triggers in individual male characters because of its cultural influence and power. Rather than marking the anxieties at stake as masculine anxieties, the texts articulate a more general cultural nervousness that draws on the ambivalence surrounding the female professional performer in nineteenth-century culture already discussed in Chapter 2 on “Corinne and Her Aftereffects on the British Stage”. Indeed, what triggers anxiety in the case of the novels about British stage performers is the figure of the woman who, following Corinne’s example, transforms herself into a public voice and defines herself through her public performance as an independent subject. In other words, what is potentially disturbing in these texts is the idea that, by inventing herself as a professional performer, the woman comes to speak for herself. As was already the case in Geraldine Jewsbury’s novel about a professional actress, The Half Sisters, which was discussed in Chapter 2, these texts also treat the theatre as a site of potential feminine selfexpression. What is problematized is not the aesthetic pleasure the audience takes in the performances of these figures, but the pleasure that the performer potentially derives from her own song and speech. Ultimately, this is what causes anxiety in these texts: the idea that, similar to Corinne, who revels in her own boundless speech, the professional performer relishes the powerful projection of her voice and, in so doing, speaks for herself alone. Like the American texts in the previous chapter, the examples in this chapter also highlight the relationship between the individual and the community, but they do so in different ways. While Hawthorne and James raise the question of whose voice defines and shapes the cultural and political landscape of America, the British texts use the relationship between the individual and the collective in order to foreground the question of whether the woman can (ever) speak for herhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-006

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self and if so, under what conditions. George Meredith’s novel Sandra Belloni (1864) and its sequel Vittoria (1867) feature a performer who enlists her voice in the battle for Italy’s unification and independence in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. Her song helps bring the Italian nation-state into existence. The singer has an important political role, but once national unification and independence have been achieved, she cannot sustain her public voice and instead falls silent for good at the end. While Meredith’s texts mitigate the anxieties surrounding the performer figure by allegorizing her as the voice of Italy and by thus absorbing her into the larger entity of the nation, George Eliot’s late Victorian novel Daniel Deronda (1876) features a singer who opposes both community and tradition by fashioning herself as a modern woman artist. As we shall see, Eliot’s cosmopolitan singer Alcharisi causes anxiety because she is entirely independent and always speaks for herself alone. Her utter self-absorption means that her voice cannot be absorbed by anyone else in any way. On the one hand, the anxiety provoked by her radical individualism means that she is demonized and symbolically punished by the text. On the other hand, her self-fashioning anticipates a modern feminine subjectivity defined by individual agency.

5.1 Singing in an Allegorical Voice: George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (1864) and Vittoria (1867) As in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, the focus of George Meredith’s two novels, Sandra Belloni (1864) and Vittoria (1867) is on yet another half-Italian and half-English performer. The first novel is set in England, whereas the second takes place in Italy. However, what links the two novels is the voice of Meredith’s singer protagonist. In both texts, her singing brings her listeners together as unified audiences. This cohesive effect is particularly pronounced in the second novel Vittoria, in which her song anticipates the political unification and independence of the Italian nation state, similar to the way in which Corinne addresses Italy as a single cultural space. By turning her into the collective voice of the Italian Risorgimento, which was the Italian unification movement in the mid-nineteenth century, the text provides its heroine with a spectacular public voice and a prominent political role in the struggle for Italy’s freedom and independence. But what does her transformation into the voice of Italy mean for her as an individual subject? Does she sing with a voice of her own? Or does she lose her individual voice, similar to Jewsbury’s Bianca Pazzi, as she sings for a larger entity, in this case a unified nation state? Meredith’s novels recall Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters in emphasizing the in-

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dividual’s development into a speaking (or singing) performer on the one hand and the role she plays in a larger project on the other. Meredith’s protagonist derives immense power from her ability to influence audiences and communities by means of her singing, while at the same time it is precisely the cohesive effect of her song that puts her individual voice in question. Sandra Belloni, which is set in England and which was originally published under the title Emilia in England, opens with a description of the heroine’s voice and characterizes its sound as being “wonderfully sweet and richly toned” (Meredith 1910: 1). This emphasis on Emilia’s voice at the beginning of the text indicates the key role that the singer’s beautiful voice plays in the narrative. Meredith’s female Künstlerroman traces the singer’s personal and artistic development and, in so doing, uses her voice as a trope of self-discovery. Having been introduced as a natural talent at the beginning of the novel, Emilia temporarily loses her singing voice when her lover abandons her for another woman. Later she regains her voice and realizes that she is meant to be an artist. At the end of the novel, she decides, therefore, to train as a professional singer in Italy. By the time the second novel Vittoria begins four years later, Meredith’s heroine has not only changed her name from Emilia Alessandra Belloni to Vittoria Campa, but she has also completed her musical training and is about to make her operatic debut at the opera house La Scala in Milan. Almost the entire first half of the novel revolves around Camilla, a new opera specifically composed for her debut. The libretto develops a political allegory arguing for the liberation of Italy, and when Vittoria appears in the central role of “Young Italy”, she is acclaimed as the new star of the opera.¹ After the actual performance, she sings an additional aria which is not included in the libretto and which serves as the call-to-arms for the revolutionary uprisings against the Austrian occupation in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. Even though Vittoria’s debut is a great success, her career never actually takes off because of the turmoil of war and revolution. The novel closes with a short epilogue describing Italy’s national unification several years later. Not only has Vittoria never appeared on stage since

 The detailed allegorical plot of the opera Camilla runs as follows: When she first appears on stage, Camilla (“Young Italy”) wonders whether her mother, appearing in her dream vision as a violated personification of Italy, is still alive. Count Orso (“Austria”), who has raised Camilla together with his daughter Michiella, gives her permission to marry Camillo. However, jealous Michiella (“Austria’s spirit of intrigue”) has Camilla exiled, and Camillo (“indolent Italy, amorous Italy, Italy aimless”) seeks a divorce to marry Michiella in her place but before long regrets having been blind to the purity and faithfulness of Camilla. Finally, at the wedding of Michiella and Camillo, “Young Italy” reappears – only to be stabbed by “Austria’s spirit of intrigue” (Meredith 1914: 218).

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making her debut in the role of “Young Italy”, but the ending suggests that she may never actually return to the opera as a professional singer. The unifying force of Emilia’s singing voice is already evident in Sandra Belloni, the first novel, in which she lives in England. Early on in the text, Meredith describes the noisy concert of an English lower-class musical club. After she has witnessed the disharmonious performance of the club members, she promises to sing for them in the evening. During her performance, they attentively listen to her Italian song with its foreign words and strange style, but their applause lacks enthusiasm. As soon as Emilia starts to sing a British song, however, her audience is enraptured: No sooner had Emilia struck a prelude of the well-known air, than the interior of the booth was transfigured; legs began to move, elbows jerked upwards, fingers filliped: the whole body of them were ready to duck and bow, dance, and do her bidding: she had fairly caught their hearts. For, besides the pleasure they had in their own familiar tune, it was wonderful to them that Emilia should know what they knew. This was the marvel, this the inspiration. […] the women and the men were alive, half-dancing, half-chorussing: here a baby was tossed, and there an old fellow’s elbow worked mutely, expressive of the rollicking gaiety within him: the whole length of the booth was in a pleasing simmer, ready to overboil with shouts humane and cheerful, while Emilia pitched her note and led; archly, and quite one with them all […]. (Meredith 1910: 78 – 79; my emphasis)

Taking pleasure in Emilia’s performance, the listeners are overcome by an impulse to dance and move along with her singing, and they also join in with her song. What this underlines is the harmonizing effect of Emilia’s voice. It is thanks to her singing that the lower-class musicians are all of a sudden capable of producing harmonious music instead of the cacophony generated earlier. At the same time, she inspires her listeners with a sense of unity as her voice merges with their voices; as the text makes clear, she is “quite one with them all” (Meredith 1910: 79). Her song creates a social unity as her voice unites the lower-class musicians as a group. The harmony called forth by her voice is sustained until her song is drowned by the noisy arrival of a competing musical club. As suggested by this episode, Meredith’s singer has the power to create temporary harmony out of a situation of disharmony. Moreover, by leading and fusing with the voices of others, her voice creates an acoustic community that is held together by her performance of a familiar song. The cohesion produced by her singing is even more prominent in the sequel Vittoria, in which she turns into the voice of Italy and sings for the liberation and unification of Italy as a nation state. By the beginning of the novel, Meredith’s singer has aptly renamed herself Vittoria, as if anticipating the ultimate victory of the political project in which she participates. The cultural affiliations and

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political sentiments of Meredith’s performer are, however, already evident in the first novel: Emilia is the daughter of a British mother and an Italian father who came to England as an impoverished political refugee and now works as first violinist at the Italian opera. Living in England, Meredith’s protagonist declares that “[…] I feel that I am much more Italian than English. How I long for Italy – like a thing underground!” (Meredith 1910: 31– 32), and in her revolutionary dreams, she sees herself marching with “the regiments of Italy, under the folds of her free banner” (Meredith 1910: 88) as well as singing “to the victorious army; waving the banner over them” (Meredith 1910: 88). Yet it is in the context of her operatic debut in the second novel that she actually becomes a collective voice singing for revolution and freedom. When she makes her first appearance in the allegorical opera Camilla, Vittoria’s part of “Young Italy” marks her as a personification of the future nation state. At the same time as she embodies the nationalistic project in allegorical form, the text’s detailed description of her first stage appearance also suggests that her audience is unified by her voice. In other words, not only does she represent Italy as an allegorical figure, but her singing also temporarily unites her listeners in an acoustic community, which anticipates the political unification at a national level Before the night of the opera performance, the revolutionaries quarrel about their strategy and whether Vittoria, as a woman, can be entrusted with the important task of giving the signal for the revolution. At the opera house, however, the Italian listeners are brought together by the allegorical subtext of the opera, which they immediately understand and, above all, by Vittoria. In fact, even before she makes her first operatic appearance, the various members of the audience are united by their shared expectation as they are all “waiting for the voice of the new prima donna” (Meredith 1914: 221). When she first appears on stage, the text focuses on her visual appearance, and already at this point, she is equated with Italy. Like Staël’s Corinne, who is compared to a series of paintings as she appears in the text for the first time, Vittoria is described with reference to paintings by Titian. “She moved as, after long gazing at a painting of a fair woman, we may have the vision of her moving from the frame” (Meredith 1914: 222). Both texts make reference to the artistic mode of painting as they seek to visually depict their heroines in the moments that precede their first vocal performances. At the same time, each refers to its heroine as the paradigmatic embodiment, the ‘image’ of Italy par excellence. In a speech honouring Corinne before her improvisation and coronation at the Capitol, she is described as “the common bond” that links the people of Rome as well as “the image of our beautiful Italy” (Staël 1987: 25; my emphasis). In an analogous manner, Vittoria’s visual appearance on stage is summed up as “an animated picture of ideal Italia” (Meredith 1914: 222; my emphasis). In Meredith’s novel, country

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and performer represent each other as in the Romantic predecessor text. Corinne speaks for a national culture avant-la-lettre and, at the same time, uses an entire cultural space for her self-presentation. Similarly, Vittoria has a prominent public voice and political role thanks to Italy, even though it does not exist yet as a unified country. As underlined by the text, her performance of the role of “Young Italy” is nourished by Italy’s struggle for freedom: “Within her was the struggle of Italy calling to Italy: Italy’s shame, her sadness, her tortures, her quenchless hope, and the view of Freedom” (Meredith 1914: 235). The function of Vittoria as a collective voice that sings and represents a national community is particularly tangible in her exchange with the opera audience and the way they validate her as the new prima donna. When she first enters the stage, Vittoria is compared to “a queen” (Meredith 1914: 221) who first has to win the loyalty of her subjects before they pay homage to her. Initially, the people in the opera house audience are sceptical. But, the moment she sings her first aria, she has them in raptures: The house rose, Italians and Germans together. Genius, music, and enthusiasm break the line of nationalities. A rain of nosegays fell about Vittoria; evvivas, bravas, shouts – all the outcries of delirious men surrounded her. Men and women, even among the hardened chorus, shook together and sobbed. (Meredith 1914: 224)

In a collective outbreak of enthusiasm and excitement, the audience calls the names of the composer, conductor and, above all, the singer: ‘Agostino!’ and ‘Rocco!’ were called; ‘Vittoria!’ ‘Vittoria!’ above all, with increasing thunder, like a storm rushing down a valley, striking in broad volume from rock to rock, humming remote, and bursting up again in the face of the vale. Her name was sung over and over – ‘Vittoria! Vittoria!’ as if the mouths were enamoured of it. ‘Evviva la Vittoria e l’Italia!’ was sung out from the body of the house. (Meredith 1914: 224)

Not only are the people in the audience united in calling Vittoria’s name, but they also explicitly connect her to Italy. As they cheer “‘Evviva la Vittoria e l’Italia!’” (Meredith 1914: 224), the audience, the singer and Italy all merge into a single entity. After this storm of enthusiasm, Vittoria returns to her dressing room and reflects on the fact that “she had won the public voice” (Meredith 1914: 230). Indeed, similar to the way in which a monarch is acclaimed by his or her people, the audience has accepted and applauded her as the new star of the opera. At the same time, their shared enthusiasm for her voice unites them and anticipates the national community that she attempts to sing into existence in her role as “Young Italy”. In fact, one can go as far as to say that the singer represents Italy not just aesthetically but also politically. As well as pro-

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leptically embodying the nation that is still yet to be founded, she stands in for and thus politically represents her audience by giving voice to their patriotic sentiments. It is when Vittoria sings her explicitly political aria following the actual opera performance that the capacity of her voice to unite her audience becomes particularly tangible. This part of the performance marks a transgressive moment; it has not been included in the libretto and has thus neither been submitted to the Austrian authorities nor passed their censorship. The effect of her voice is so powerful that, after the actual opera performance, “[t]he whole house had risen insurgent with cries of ‘Vittoria’” (Meredith 1914: 253). Although the Austrian authorities want to bring down the stage curtain, Vittoria remains on stage in order to sing her political aria. “She was seen, and she sang, and the whole house listened” (Meredith 1914: 253). Immediately after the opera performance, the members of the audience are united in calling her name, but now they are united by listening to her voice. As she is singing her unscripted aria and its recurring refrain “Italia, Italia shall be free!” (Meredith 1914: 254– 255; italics in the original), they act as though she were singing a national hymn: “The Italians present, one and all, rose up reverently and murmured the refrain” (Meredith 1914: 253). Even the Austrian members of the audience are said to be fascinated by her voice: “They, with the Italians, said: ‘Hear her! hear her!’” (Meredith 1914: 254). As in the scene in which she sings for the lower-class musical club in Sandra Belloni, the voice of Meredith’s singer has the power not only to hold the attention of her listeners but also to bring them together and turn them into an inspired, even enthusiastic community. The temporary social cohesion created by Vittoria’s aria recalls Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the role that songs and especially national anthems play in the formation of imagined communities. As Anderson argues, “there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity” (Anderson 1991: 145). Although we may not know the people with whom we are singing, the fact that we sing the same song(s) allows us to experience a sense of what Anderson calls “unisonance” and “unisonality” (Anderson 1991: 145). In the case of Meredith’s performer, the temporary unisonance, first seen among the audience members of the lower-class musical club and then in the opera house, is produced by the performer singing pieces with which her audiences identify – either because they recognize a familiar song, or because she presents them with a new piece inspiring everyone. Whether or not her audiences join in with her singing is not the decisive point; observation and participation can have the same effect of “unisonality” described by Anderson if the audience identifies with the song in question. In the opera house, the voice of the performer focuses the attention of all the individual listeners and binds them together as she herself

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turns into a collective voice, giving expression to their joint political project. The unifying effect of Vittoria’s voice – or its unisonality – is also underscored after the conclusion of her rousing aria, when her listeners again shout her name ‘Vittoria’ (meaning ‘victory’), and in doing so merge in a single monotonous sound: “Vittoria’s name was being shouted with that angry, sea-like, horrid monotony of iteration which is more suggestive of menacing impatience and the positive will of the people, than varied, sharp, imperative calls” (Meredith 1914: 256).² Vittoria’s performance of both her operatic role and her revolutionary aria mark the relatively brief period of time in the text which is characterized by a sense of unity. As mentioned before, the opera performance overrides the initial quarrels of the revolutionaries, and it is followed by the outbreak of war immediately after Vittoria has finished singing her inflammatory aria. The very moment the performer has to flee in order to escape imprisonment, the community called into existence by her singing falls apart. Yet the extended presentation of the opera performance taking up three chapters is also remarkable because of its aesthetic texture. In the comparatively long and detailed text passages Meredith devotes to Vittoria’s debut, the descriptions of the sound of her voice and of the music in general are interwoven with accounts of the responses they evoke in the entire audience but also in individual listeners. We witness how the rebels hold council among themselves, and how the authorities deliberate whether to take action and stop the performance of the provocative and subversive opera plot. Then, the attention is again shifted to the performance on stage by means of direct citations of long passages from the libretto and detailed paraphrases of the opera plot, often rendered in the present tense. By including these different modes of representation, the text not only presents the opera performance from various angles but it also closely connects the various participants and the different elements of the event to each other, thus producing unity at a textual level. At the same time, the alternation between these various modes creates a representational mode that is extremely lively. In fact, the text itself appears to gain an operatic quality. By instantly linking the live performance onstage with the reaction offstage, by quoting directly from the libretto and by often using the present tense in its rendition of the opera plot, the text creates an effect of immediacy, which makes the opera performance and also the text passage itself stand out as dramatic and spectacular. The display of high emotion on stage finds a correspondence in the equally intense emotional response on the part of the audience. Even the reader, while reading

 Also see Phyllis Weliver’s analysis of Meredith’s novels in her broader discussion of music and national unity (2006: 83 – 129).

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about this live event, is drawn into the novelistic text in analogy to the way in which the audience in the diegesis is drawn into the high passion of both the opera plot and its performance. In Vittoria, politics and theatre are linked in suggestive ways. The Italian audience immediately understands the political message of the allegorical opera plot. “Thenceforward the opera and the Italian audience were as one. All that was uttered had a meaning, and was sympathetically translated. […] The quick-witted Italians caught up the interpretation in a flash” (Meredith 1914: 218). Using the opera performance as the catalyst of real political action offstage, the novel doubtlessly alludes to the important role opera played in nineteenth-century political culture, especially during the period of the Italian Risorgimento.³ After Vittorio Emmanuele became King of Piedmont, the exclamation ‘Viva Verdi!’ expressed more than just the enthusiasm of the Italian public for Verdi’s operas, which lent themselves to allegorical readings because of “their inflammatory libretti and stirring music” (Huzzard 1959: 246). The name ‘Verdi’ was also used as a coded abbreviation for ‘Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia’ and thus as a political slogan for the unification of Italy under the King of Piedmont. In Meredith’s novel, politics and opera are linked in the direct way in which the allegorical opera Camilla theatricalizes the political struggle for freedom and independence on the operatic stage. Moreover, the text also traces how theatre is used in this revolutionary context as a means of producing and orchestrating collective emotion. It is once their patriotic passion has been stirred up at the opera that the Italians revolt against their Austrian oppressors. As is suggested by the prominent place Vittoria’s performance occupies in the novel, opera is crucial to the nationalist narrative developed by Meredith.⁴ But how does the relationship between music and nation present itself in nineteenth-century Britain? The importance of music for the imagination of an Italian culture avant-la-lettre is already emphasized in Staël’s novel. It is upon hearing a group of Italian musicians that Corinne decides to leave England for her maternal homeland, where she will produce her musical improvisations on Italian culture. While music and opera played a pivotal role in the nineteenth-century cul-

 For a discussion of the connections between opera and politics in nineteenth and twentiethcentury culture, see the essay collection Bühnen der Politik: Die Oper in euopäischen Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert edited by Sven Oliver Müller and Jutta Toelle (2008); for a discussion of the role played by La Scala in the context of the Risorgimento, see the chapter by Bruno Spaepen (2008: 177– 186) in the same volume.  For a general discussion of the relationship between opera and nationhood, see the volume The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference edited by Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin (1997).

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tural imagination of Italy, they did not hold the same significance for Great Britain and its national identity formation. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher, famously described Britain as the land with “no music” (Purchase 2006: 96). While the piano formed a constituent part of the middle- and upperclass household and an important means for women to display their refinement in domestic and semi-public contexts (Purchase 2006: 98, Weliver 2000: 1), music was often considered “an emasculating or debasing activity for men of the aspiring middle classes and nobility […]” (Weliver 2000: 19). In other words, the practice of music and particularly of opera, with its emphasis on the performance of a wide range of emotions, seemed to run counter to notions of (especially masculine) British identity. Already from the early eighteenth century onward, opera represented an art form that was largely imported from Italy, and most singers were of foreign extraction. It is not by accident, therefore, that British novels about professional singers usually provide their performers with a cosmopolitan background. However, although opera was not considered a British art form, it contributed to Britain’s national self-definition, albeit in a way that differs greatly from the revolutionary work to which opera was put in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. In contrast to Italy, which is yet to be founded as a nation when the opera Camilla is staged in Meredith’s novel, Great Britain had already asserted itself as an imperial power and continued to expand under the rule of Queen Victoria, who would assume the additional title of Empress of India in 1876. Rather than serving as a vehicle for a political fight for national independence as is the case in Vittoria, opera allowed Britain to constitute itself as a nation that “had the power and the means to bring in artefacts and treasures from diverse parts of the globe” (Kehler 2002: 1). As underlined by Grace Kehler, the “uses of opera and prima donna […] included the nation’s aesthetic performance of itself as an ever-expanding empire” (Kehler 2002: 19 – 20). In contrast to Vittoria, where the revolutionaries deploy opera in their political struggle against the Austrian oppressors, Britain uses opera as part of its self-definition as a nation dominating large parts of the world. But where does this leave the struggle for freedom and independence represented in Meredith’s novel from a British perspective? Although Vittoria depicts this political struggle in a national context that does not apply to Britain in the same way, the revolutionary uprising in the novel does resonate with radical movements in nineteenth-century Britain. Numerous political protests were waged by working-class activists and other reformist agitators in the trade unions and the Chartist movement, which aimed for democratic reform and universal suffrage, and, of course, the women’s movement, which argued that employment opportunities and women’s suffrage would provide women with

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more independence and agency.⁵ Indeed, in Vittoria, politics and theatre also intersect in the way in which the singer acquires a political voice. In the plot trajectory of the two novels, Meredith’s singer moves from predominantly private spaces into the public sphere. As Phyllis Weliver suggests, the first novel Sandra Belloni closes as the protagonist “embraces the public world in the form of her professional singing career and her Italian nationalist politics” (Weliver 2006: 94– 95). By making her professional debut in Vittoria, Meredith’s singer gains an eminently public role as a political leader figure. Her agency in this role is underlined by her political intervention, namely the fact that she decides on her own to go ahead and sing her unscripted aria. Before her operatic debut, several revolutionaries are sceptical of Vittoria’s role in the imminent revolution. But the text itself shows great sympathy for its performing heroine. It is not only the opera Camilla that is allegorical. The text itself appears to operate in an allegorical mode by having the political struggle for freedom and independence and the personal development of the singer and her voice represent each other. The theatrical role of “Young Italy”, which Vittoria embodies on the operatic stage, allows a powerful dramatization of the public voice and the political role of the singer. In fact, one might even go as far as to argue that the novel uses the political fight for national freedom and independence as a trope for feminine self-expression.⁶ The allegorical mode of the text, which has the political struggle represent the personal development of the singer and vice versa, has an empowering dimension. The political struggle for national independence is used by the text to represent the individual development of the professional singer and her voice. But the allegorical libretto of the opera Camilla also means that as an embodiment of Italy, Vittoria sings for Italy rather than herself. The magnificent

 For a brief outline of Victorian reform movements, see Sean Purchase (2006: 116 – 119) and Ella Dzelzainis (2012) for a discussion of the representation of radicalism and reform in the nineteenth-century novel. Also see Phyllis Weliver (2006: 86 – 88), who in her discussion of Meredith’s novels, provides an overview of the significant role that Italy and the Risorgimento played for radical politics and literature in nineteenth-century Britain.  Meredith, the real author, appears to have had considerable sympathy for his female heroines as well as the women’s movement. He praised John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which was published two years after Vittoria appeared as a novel, and like the philosopher Mill, he was an advocate of female suffrage. “I have not studied women more closely than I have men”, Meredith noted, “but with more affection, a deeper interest in their enfranchisement and development, being assured that women of the independent mind are needed for any sensible degree of progress” (quoted in Chislett 1966: 53). In his 1877 essay “On the Idea of Comedy, and the Uses of the Comic Spirit”, Meredith notes that in assessing a civilization, an important criterion is whether “men […] consent to talk on equal terms with their women” (Meredith 1998: 144).

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voice she has while playing the role of “Young Italy” is dependent on the nationalist project for which she is singing. Meredith gives his singer a spectacular role and a prominent political voice in the struggle for Italy’s freedom. At the same time, however, it seems that she can occupy this important political position only because she sings for a larger entity. Vittoria has a public voice because she devotes herself to the patriotic cause, because she lends her voice to a collective movement and a corporate national identity. She makes herself heard in public in a spectacular manner – but she can do so only as the allegorical voice of Italy.⁷ Ultimately, this means that, as a collective voice, she is subsumed under the imagined community that she has helped inspire in and through her song. The absorption of Vittoria’s voice into the larger national entity becomes particularly evident at the very end of the text. The novel closes with a short epilogue describing the national unification of Italy under “an Emperor and a King” (Meredith 1914: 629) several years later. This coda can be seen to repeat Vittoria’s operatic debut in a different key; the accession of the monarch to Italy’s throne at the close of the novel echoes the earlier scene in which the audience at La Scala applauds and acclaims the new prima donna. However, rather than by Vittoria, the female performer, Italy is now represented by Vittorio Emmanuele, the male monarch (although he is never explicitly named, it is clear that the text refers to him (Vittorio Emmanuele)). Not only does her male namesake replace her as the public figure signifying Italy’s unity, but once the national community for which Vittoria sings on the operatic stage has been realized under the new monarch, her voice comes to be muted and then superseded. The description of the proclamation highlights “a peal of voices” rendering “thanks to heaven for liberty” (Meredith 1914: 629). It is on this occasion that Vittoria is said to raise her voice for one last time: “And then once more, and but for once”, the text closes, “her voice was heard in Milan” (Meredith 1914: 629). Given the elliptical character of this last sentence, we do not learn whether her voice is heard as part of the collective concert of voices greeting liberty and acclaiming the new king, Vittorio Emmanuele, or whether she goes on to sing a final aria at the close of the acclamation ceremony. Nor do we know whether the singer will

 For a general discussion of the tendency in the Western cultural tradition to represent nations and other abstract concepts by means of female allegories, see Marina Warner (1987). Warner’s study focuses on visual examples and does not consider the allegorical role female voices can play. However, note that etymologically derived from the Greek allos (another, different) and agoreuein (speak), allegory literally means ‘speaking about something else’, which is precisely what the text has Vittoria do when she lends her voice to Italy rather than singing with a voice of her own.

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ever perform again in other places, or whether her public voice disappears for good. In both of Meredith’s novels, the singer has the ability to temporarily overcome dissonance and instead inspire harmony. But once the social cohesion for which she sings in her allegorical role as “Young Italy” has been established, she no longer seems to be heard. Vittoria may have a spectacular public voice thanks to her allegorical role, but in the end she has no individual voice of her own. The overall tone or ‘voice’ of Meredith’s text is remarkably attuned to the public voice of its heroine and supports her song of both individual and collective independence. The narrative exalts her by making her into the leading voice of a political movement and an entire national community. At the same time, however, her prominent role in the Risorgimento undermines her individual voice. Vittoria draws a great deal of its narrative momentum from the allegorical interplay between the political struggle for national independence and the singer’s individual striving for personal and artistic autonomy. Yet in the end, the singer seems to be reduced to her allegorical function. In contrast to Staël’s genius performer, who absorbs an entire cultural space for her own self-presentation, Meredith’s singer is herself absorbed by the unified nation-state. Similar to Jewsbury’s Bianca Pazzi, who serves the theatre in her attempt to elevate the stage and professional acting to a respectable and respected art form before she enters into marriage, Vittoria devotes herself to the larger cause of a nationalist project. It seems that these two professional Victorian performers are only able to perform because they do not speak and sing for themselves alone. There is something very expansive about the way in which Corinne absorbs Italy’s culture into her voice. By contrast, the voices of the two Victorian performers are much more distinctly channelled into other entities. The texts have them serve the theatre and the movement of the Risorgimento, as if to remove any suspicion or even anxiety that they might speak and sing for themselves alone. On the contrary, even when they take pleasure in performing in front of an audience, they are never shown to indulge in a narcissistic, self-absorbed mode of speaking or singing. On the one hand, these novels have their performers achieve a remarkable degree of professional independence, and their acting in the public domain clearly runs counter to the bourgeois ideology of the separate spheres. On the other hand, the two performers exhibit a selfless attitude that closely conforms to Victorian notions of femininity. The novels by Meredith combine the pleasure that his performer derives from speaking and singing in front of large audiences with her allegorical representation of larger entities, be it the social group of working-class musicians in Sandra Belloni or the collective sentiment that fuels the nascent nation state in Vittoria. The performer in these texts has a powerful public voice because (and as

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long as) she speaks and sings for a larger cause. In Sandra Belloni, Emilia focuses the attention of her audience on herself as long as she manages to unite them as a social group through her singing. As Vittoria, Meredith’s singer has a political voice because she sings for the liberation, freedom and independence of a unified Italian nation state. In both Meredith and Jewsbury, it is because the performer lends her voice to a larger entity that she gains a public voice. However, at the same time, these texts never have their performers speak or sing for themselves alone. This renders both the power and pleasure projected by their voices less vulnerable to criticism – after all they give expression to selftranscending interests. It is by thus curtailing and containing the individual feminine voice that these novels alleviate the cultural anxieties surrounding the professional performer.

5.2 Acknowledging the Monstrous Performer: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) These anxieties acquire an even more radical shape with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). Eliot’s last novel is not just the best-known text dealing with the feminine voice performing on the British stage. It also both continues and departs from the tradition and the aftereffects of Staël’s genius performer traced in Chapter 2, which makes it a particularly pertinent example to sum up and expand the argument developed in my reading of British stage performer novels. It is hardly by accident that the eponymous male protagonist of Eliot’s text should have inherited a fine singing voice from his unknown mother, the singer and actress Alcharisi. Daniel Deronda is a novel that is preoccupied with singing and acting, with performing voices and the question of vocation they raise.⁸ In fact, it is a novel that features several performing women. The English society girl Gwendolen Harleth showcases herself as the central figure in a tableau vivant, and the fact that she constantly playacts and presents herself as a visual spectacle to her social environment renders her a performer. Inspired by a feeling of superiority, she expects to be universally admired and imagines that she can become a professional actress and singer when her family falls on hard times. The selfless Jewish singer Mirah Lapidoth, on the other hand, is a genuine artist and abhors all manifestations of theatricality. Abducted by her father, a profit-driven and exploitative actor-manager, she was forced to appear and dis-

 Also see Delia da Sousa Correa (2014) on issues of voice and vocation in Eliot’s novels in general and in Daniel Deronda in particular.

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play herself on the theatrical stage despite her deep sense of revulsion at having to sing “for show” (Eliot 1986: 253). With the figure of Alcharisi, the novel finally also presents an exceptionally successful performer whose name, in her own words, “had magic wherever it was carried” (Eliot 1986: 697).⁹ Alcharisi is the only female figure in the novel who actually pursues a professional performing career as a singer.¹⁰ When Mirah’s exquisite voice turns out be too weak for public performances, this is fully consonant with her character and her inability to impersonate theatrical roles. The fact that Mirah “has no notion of being anybody but herself” (Eliot 1986: 253) suggests that she is no actress who takes on other roles, that her stage training has left no traces whatsoever. Gwendolen, on the other hand, wants to dazzle and, accordingly, embraces the register of theatrical artifice in her self-presentation in her everyday life. However, she never carries out her plan to enter the stage as a singer after she is told by one character, the musician Herr Klesmer, that because she lacks proper training and underestimates the hard work that goes into professional singing, she “will hardly achieve more than mediocrity” (Eliot 1986: 303). Alcharisi, however, merges Mirah’s artistic talent with Gwendolen’s penchant for selfdramatization. She violates the patriarchal authority of her Jewish father when she fashions herself as a public performer against his will. Using her exceptional singing voice, she radically reinvents herself as her own work of art. In doing so, she reminds us of the way in which Corinne separates herself from her family background and has herself buried in a mock funeral in order to fundamentally recreate herself. At the same time, Alcharisi also anticipates a model of the female self-fashioning artist that goes hand in hand with a modern feminine subjectivity, and that becomes more readily available in twentieth-century modern culture. In fact, what Eliot’s performer foreshadows is precisely the type of feminine self-authorship that is at the very centre of Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” (1934), the text that forms the final example with which this study concludes. Alcharisi appears in two chapters towards the end of the novel in which she tells her life story to her son Daniel Deronda. As she narrates her personal history in the two meetings to which she has summoned him, we learn that her father forced her into marriage with her cousin Ephraim Charisi. After the birth of her son at the height of her career and following the deaths of both her father and her husband, she realized that she had to free herself of her ob For a discussion of these three different female performers, also see Lynn Voskuil’s chapter on Daniel Deronda (Voskuil 2004: 95 – 139).  The novel features one further public performer, the German-Jewish musician Herr Klesmer. However, in contrast to Alcharisi, he does not perform as a singer – and is obviously not a woman.

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ligations as a mother so as to be able to continue as “the greatest lyric actress of Europe” (Eliot 1986: 703). “For nine years I was a queen” (Eliot 1986: 702), she tells her son, trying to explain why she abandoned him for her career, thus putting her artistic ambition above her role as a mother. By the time we encounter her as a character in the text, her career is long past. Yet although the former singer serves as a subsidiary figure and only makes two short appearances in the novel, her voice forms the very linchpin of the text and the way in which it orchestrates the various textual voices and their ideological positions. The performer, who abandoned her son as a small child in order to lead a life of freedom and independence, stands for a fundamental remaking of the self as an independent individual. “I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not be hampered with other lives” (Eliot 1986: 688), she explains to her son when she meets him as an adult. Having employed her brilliant voice to separate herself from her patriarchal Jewish family and establish herself as an independent artist, Alcharisi insists on her radical individuality. And it is precisely her insistence on her individual independence and self-authorship that is in conflict with the overall moral outlook of the novel. Although she is never shown in operatic performance, Eliot’s singer follows the tradition of the independent performer that begins with Staël’s Corinne. Like the novels by Jewsbury and Meredith, Daniel Deronda encodes the stage as a site of professional independence and artistic achievement. However, Eliot’s text is not attuned to its performer in the same way as the previous examples, which follow the genre of the Künstlerinnenroman and are thus primarily interested in the professional development of their performer protagonists. While the performers in these other British novels are shown to develop their artistic voices in order to speak and sing for a larger entity, Alcharisi always insists on her individual voice. In her singing, she always represents herself and no one else. Because of her self-assertion, she serves as a counterexample to the self-effacing character of Mirah, and in this she resembles another subsidiary performer figure, namely La Fornasari, the self-centred prima donna in Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, who also gives away her child and who is juxtaposed with the decidedly non-narcissistic protagonist performer, Bianca Pazzi. However, in contrast to La Fornasari, who merely serves as a negative foil to the impeccability of Bianca, Eliot’s Alcharisi occupies a far more complex role in the text. In highlighting both her ambition and self-assertion, Eliot’s novel passes severe moral judgement on Alcharisi’s voice and, in fact, quite literally destroys her. The absence of any personal aspiration in Mirah – “her nature”, Daniel Deronda explains, “is not given to make great claims” (Eliot 1986: 728) – is cause for idealization. Gwendolen’s greed, vanity and desire to dominate lead her to her disastrous marriage to the manipulative Grandcourt, but she meets

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with sympathy because of her eventual remorse and her tragic fate as a “crushed penitent” (Eliot 1986: 771). Yet to Alcharisi, who is clearly the most empowered female figure in the novel and “the one woman George Eliot created who is as gifted as her author” (Auerbach 1985: 256), the novel metes out severe punishment. According to her own narrative, her career as a celebrated performer came to an abrupt end. The former stage queen left the opera when she first noticed the appearance of a tendency in herself to sing out of tune and, growing afraid of losing her greatness, became the Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein through her marriage to a Russian aristocrat, with whom she then had five children despite her lack of motherly feelings. At the recovery of her voice, she bitterly regretted having given up her performing career. As if her premature exit from the stage were not enough, the former singer also finds herself on the verge of death, suffering from a terminal disease. Her impending death is the reason why she feels compelled to explain herself to her son and tell him about his Jewish legacy. The loss of her singing voice, her illness and her sense that the family tradition is catching up with her can all be read as symbolic punishment of the public performer who has violated the patriarchal law so as to insist on her individual voice.¹¹ By punishing its only professional performer in this drastic way, Eliot’s novel appears to vehemently reject the female vocal empowerment which her figure invokes. As noted by Paula Gillett (2000: 158), it is remarkable that in her portrayal of her most gifted female performer, Eliot should respond so harshly to a character achieving eminence in one of the very few cultural domains open to nineteenth-century women apart from her own métier as a novelist.¹² The gesture appears all the more paradoxical in view of the fact that the writer was a great admirer of the actress Helena Faucit and the singer Pauline Viardot.¹³ The para-

 During her first conversation with her son, the Princess explains her motivation to talk to him in the following way: “I obey something tyrannic […] I am forced to be withered, to feel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love that? Well, I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he commanded me to deliver” (Eliot 1986: 693). Later she adds, “My father is getting his way now” (Eliot 1986: 696).  Another example of an exceptionally gifted performer in Eliot’s oeuvre can be found in the dramatic poem “Armgart” (1871). The eponymous heroine, a great opera star, is first shown at the height of her professional success and triumph and then after the tragic loss of her singing voice, which seems to have been caused by her excessive ambition. Like Daniel Deronda, the text appears to be torn between its portrayal of a serious artist and its disapproval of the narcissistic pleasure she takes in her public singing. For readings of “Armgart”, see Rebecca Pope (1994) and Britta Zangen (2004).  See Christopher Kent (1977: 100) on Eliot’s admiration for Helena Faucit and Paula Gillett (2000: 264) on the writer’s regular attendance of Pauline Viardot’s soirées.

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dox of Eliot’s conservative treatment of Alcharisi and of other powerful women figures in her work has time and again been pointed out, often in relation to the divided role the author herself played as a female artist who wished for public attention and recognition and, at the same time, rejected the very idea of standing in the public limelight.¹⁴ Looking at the manner in which Alcharisi is treated in the text, one cannot avoid the impression that the performer figure relates to

 In her extended discussion of Eliot’s performing figures, Rosemarie Bodenheimer suggests that they represent a projection of the conflict Eliot herself experienced between her own ambition and presence in the public eye on the one hand, and her constant fear of the stigma of the “public woman” and “its automatic associations of self-display, working for money, and prostitution” (Bodenheimer 1990: 8) on the other. According to Bodenheimer, “even at the height of her fame, she fended off any shadow of acknowledgement that she might be regarded as an applauded public performer” (Bodenheimer 1990: 8). In the same vein, Paula Gillett observes that the frequent portrayals of talented women in Eliot’s writing “serve as a vehicle by which the author can, in disguised form, delve into the painful and unending conflicts she experienced over her own ambitions and the constant desire for the recognition of her own talents” (2000: 152). Exploring the fictional prima donna narrative, which can be traced back to Staël’s Corinne, Phyllis Weliver argues that this influential ‘script’ for nineteenth-century women’s lives not only shapes Eliot’s women characters, notably the three female performers in Daniel Deronda, but also impacts Eliot’s own life story. Embodying the singer’s story in her life as a both talented and unconventional woman, Eliot faced the same social ambivalence as the prima donna: “this double experience of the individual’s social identity as adulated and ostracized” (Weliver 2010: 104; original emphasis). Nina Auerbach, in her earlier discussion, draws attention to the theatricality that characterized the writer’s life and argues that her writing can be seen in reaction against her discomfort with her own existence as a quasi-actress and diva. Her “divided life”, Auerbach argues, exhibited “painful care for its own privacy and artistic attentiveness to the private consciousness of others” so as to fight “a hunger for self-dramatization and an irrepressible instinct for self-display” (Auerbach 1985: 253). In the course of her life and career, George Eliot used at least seven different names: Born as ‘Mary Ann Evans’, she called herself ‘Clematis’ in her religious correspondence, renamed herself ‘Mary Anne Evans’ after the death of her mother, had huge success as the editor Marian Evans of the Westminster Review, shocked society with her illicit relationship with George Lewes, which made her ‘Marian Evans Lewes’, achieved fame under her pseudonym ‘George Eliot’ and died as the respectable wife ‘Mary Ann Cross’. As Auerbach further suggests, by assuming shifting names and public roles as artist, fallen woman and oracle, Eliot revealed an “aptitude at self-transformation”, a penchant which she counteracted with “her novels’ hymns to the saving power of roots” (Auerbach 1985: 257). For an early discussion of the anxiety of female authorship in Eliot’s work in particular and women’s writing in general, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s classic feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (1984). A highly interesting discussion of Eliot’s fears of authorship is offered by Catherine Gallagher (1994). Gallagher’s New Historicist essay examines the Victorian metaphor of the author as a whore together with its overlaps with discourses surrounding the ‘prostitution’ of the female performer and uses it to interpret both Eliot’s career and her last novel Daniel Deronda.

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Eliot’s conflictedness about her own position as an author. For instance, like many other female novelists of the Victorian period, Eliot found it necessary to write and publish under a male pseudonym. The fact that Alcharisi, who authors herself as a brilliant artist, is so harshly punished seems to suggest that Eliot views her own female authorship, and especially the public voice that she herself has as a female published writer, as ambivalent. As discussed in Chapter 3, George Eliot establishes herself as a novelist through her first novel Adam Bede and the way in which she treats the voice of the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris in this text. The fact that the performer in this novel eventually leaves the pulpit can be read together with Eliot’s anxiety about her own public voice as an author. In her preaching, Dinah Morris is very much aligned with patriarchal tradition: Not only does she gain the respect of all the important patriarchal figures in the text, but when her church puts a ban on women’s public preaching, she gives up her life as an itinerant preacher instead of joining a dissenting sect. Whereas Dinah Morris preaches in public as long as her voice is sanctioned by the patriarchal order, the singer in Eliot’s last novel does the opposite. Alcharisi uses her voice in order to free herself from all bonds, rejecting the idea of heritage and tradition as deeply patriarchal and stifling for the development of her own subjectivity. While Dinah cannot sustain her public voice in the end because of patriarchal regulations, Alcharisi’s voice provokes a much greater anxiety: Her voice is transgressive because of her rejection of her family’s paternalistic tradition as well as her insistence on her self-fashioning as an independent individual. With the character of Alcharisi, Eliot anticipates a modern feminine subjectivity as well as a radical self-fashioning of the woman artist. However, she cannot yet promote them as valid models, let alone adopt them for herself as a female writer. What renders Alcharisi a modern figure is her radical individualism, the fact that her voice articulates her own dream and ambition as an independent subject and, as a result, cannot be made subservient to another cause. But instead of Alcharisi’s modern feminine self-authorship, the novel valorizes what will not survive in modernity, namely the paternalistic family model represented by Alcharisi’s father and her son. At the end of the novel, Daniel Deronda reinstates the paternalistic family tradition as he marries the selfless Mirah and seeks to found a Jewish homeland. What is crucial is the fact that Eliot’s novel points to the co-existence of and contradiction between different stories and trajectories, that is the patriarchal position of Alcharisi’s father and son and her life as an independent woman artist. Although the textual voices standing in for these different positions and perspectives – patriarchal tradition and female self-fashioning – may not be valued in the same way, they are all present in the text. Since Alcharisi cannot be absorbed into a larger cause (as is the case

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in the other British performer novels), her individual voice persists as an alien element in the text. By representing a modern cultural paradigm, her voice points to the limit of the ideological value system that still underpins Daniel Deronda as a late Victorian novel. At the same time, the character of Alcharisi also refers us to the conflictedness of both the novel and the implied author over feminine public self-assertion. As we shall see, Alcharisi may be demonized on one level of the text but on another, her voice has the greatest resonance. What distinguishes Alcharisi from Meredith’s Vittoria is her emphatic assertion of her radical independence as an individual. Unlike the singer in Meredith’s texts, she is not a socially cohesive voice that sings and/or speaks for the interests of a larger cultural community. On the contrary, she always speaks for herself alone. And, unlike the two performers in Jewsbury’s novel – Bianca Pazzi, who leaves the stage in order to become part of Lord Melton’s family, and La Fornasari, who is reunited with her abandoned child – Eliot’s former star does not want to be inscribed into the family network (even though as the Princess Halm-Eberstein she does give birth to five children after the end of her career). As she explains to Daniel Deronda, her performer voice was the very instrument that allowed her to liberate herself from the patriarchal tradition of her Jewish family. More than any of the other British stage performers, who are, as we have seen, all separated from their family and/or their cultural homeland, she regards all attachments and ties as a form of bondage and enslavement. About her family she says: “I was born amongst them without my will. I banished them as soon as I could” (Eliot 1986: 723). By becoming a performer, she defies the patriarchal voice of her father. Instead she chooses to be trained by her aunt Leonora, who was herself a singer and who teaches her similar to the way in which Corinne educates her niece Juliette.¹⁵ Yet Eliot’s performer also severs all ties in order to fashion herself as a completely free-floating figure, a cosmopolitan artist who continually transforms herself through her operatic roles. “I was living a myriad lives in one” (Eliot 1986: 689), she remarks early on in her first meeting with her son. Refusing to model herself on the domestic ideal of the Jewish wife and mother that her father tried to impose on her, she followed her ambition for a far more worldly existence. “I cared for the wide world, and

 A cinematic rewriting of the voice passed on from the aunt to the niece can be found in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), one of the core examples Stanley Cavell (1996) discusses in his work on the so-called Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman. Cukor’s melodrama turns around the question whether, following her aunt’s legacy by training as a singer, the young woman has a voice of her own (Cavell 1996: 135).

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all that I could represent in it” (Eliot 1986: 693), she observes, thus expressing her desire for an unfettered existence, liberated from her family roots. In the novel, her cosmopolitan self-fashioning is juxtaposed with all those values of affiliation and connectedness which she rejects and which are embodied by her father and above all her son.¹⁶ What defines Daniel Deronda is his family romance: Because his origin and mother are unknown to him, he continually fantasizes about them, and instead of identifying with the English aristocratic milieu of his guardian Sir Hugo Mallinger, he feels increasingly drawn to Jewish culture. When he learns from his mother that his family background is indeed Jewish, he can put an end to his longing to “compress his wandering energy” and be “an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit” (Eliot 1986: 413). As soon as he embarks on his Zionist project, Daniel Deronda’s individual family romance expands into the forging of a national bond. With his trajectory, Eliot mobilizes the notion of an imagined community, not unlike Staël and Meredith, both of whom invoke the formation of a cultural or political community as a means of restoring identity and power to a disenfranchised people.¹⁷ However, in contrast to the literal invocation of the nation through a feminine voice seen in the previous novels, the national community in Daniel Deronda is promoted not by the female performer but her son. Staël and Meredith both align their female performers with their respective collective communities and emphasize their parallel quests for liberation, freedom and independence in ways that resonate with emancipatory claims made by nineteenth-century feminism. By contrast, Eliot’s treatment of Daniel Deronda’s nation-building foregrounds a fantasy of affiliation, belonging and connectedness that is rooted in a patriarchal tradition.¹⁸ While Meredith’s performer oscillates between her individual articulation and the role she plays in the interest of a larger entity, Daniel Deronda divides this parallel trajectory into two different narrative strands and attributes them to two different characters so as to juxtapose the individual voice of the perform On the significant role played by “separateness and connectedness” in Daniel Deronda see also Rachel Brownstein (1995: 245).  “The idea I am possessed with”, Daniel Deronda explains at the end of the novel, “is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe” (Eliot 1986: 875).  Although Daniel Deronda develops a different notion of the nation, it does include a brief reference to the national struggle of Italy that resonates with Meredith’s Vittoria. At her private house concert, Mirah sings “O patria mia”, which is described as “Leopardi’s fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weeping)” (Eliot 1986: 619).

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er with the collective project of her son. This means that rather than enlisting the individual voice of the performer in a collective cause, the text creates an antagonism between two different ideological positions and voices. What is significant when Daniel Deronda, at the end of the novel, follows his vocation as spiritual leader is not just the fact that he embraces the Jewish family background from which his mother cut him off. By leaving England together with his wife Mirah Lapidoth and setting out to found the ideal Jewish homeland, he also commits himself to a larger undertaking and, in so doing, represents a collective interest. Daniel Deronda thus comes to serve the altruistic cause of his Zionist project, in contrast to his mother, who always remains exclusively interested in herself. Instead of speaking for others, she insists on her individual desire and personal ambition, which is what her son, the implied author and the text as a whole criticize her for. What renders her voice problematic in the moral imagination of the novel is, therefore, her ambitious self-assertion, the very characteristic that allowed her to become a great artist in the first place. By juxtaposing the position of Alcharisi with that of her son, the novel also offers two different Jewish narratives. Deronda and his father represent a paternalistic tradition that is based on religious texts and that puts emphasis on a separatist Jewish identity, holding itself apart from Gentile culture. By contrast, Alcharisi refers us to a cosmopolitan and secular Jewish identity that stands for cultural assimilation and active participation, especially in the arts, and that becomes particularly influential in and for modern culture. What is noteworthy is the fact that the novel presents both narratives, a patriarchal one that emphasizes affiliation and tradition, as well as a more modern one that is liberating for women. At the same time, the co-existence of these two conflicting narratives in the text raises the question why Eliot, the implied author, should privilege the patriarchal trajectory, in which women can only play a subordinate role (self-effacing Mirah is a case in point). By introducing Alcharisi’s cosmopolitan selffashioning as one of its narrative strands, the novel seems to anticipate the culture of modernity. At the same time, the text appears to be so steeped in traditional notions of rootedness and connectedness that individual self-assertion must be rejected, especially in a female character who fashions herself as a free-floating cosmopolitan artist. As a result, Eliot’s text supports values that keep it from embracing the more modern as well as more empowering model. The cosmopolitan self-fashioning of the modern female performer can be imagined but not accepted as a positive example.¹⁹

 Henry James seems to follow George Eliot in her scepticism vis-à-vis the cosmopolitan

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Whereas the earlier British performer texts by Jewsbury and Meredith emphasize feminine selflessness, Daniel Deronda accentuates the narcissistic desire of its performer. Unlike Jewsbury and Meredith, Eliot does not refer to any selftranscending cause that would render Alcharisi’s overt ambition more palatable. Instead the text emphasizes her unabashed self-interest and wish for dominance. In the previous British examples, the voice of the performer is eventually subsumed under a larger entity. If Staël’s Corinne absorbs an entire cultural space in her speaking and singing, Meredith’s Vittoria is ultimately absorbed into the national community for which she has been singing. Although her allegorical role as “Young Italy” does allow her for a brief moment to act politically, she cannot ultimately sustain her public voice. Similarly, Jewsbury’s performer relinquishes the professional stage and loses her public voice as she is absorbed into marriage. In contrast to these Victorian texts, Eliot’s late Victorian novel presents us with a performer voice that cannot be absorbed in any way. When she makes her appearance in the text, Alcharisi is married, like Bianca Pazzi at the end of Jewsbury’s novel, and on the verge of death, like Corinne towards the end of Staël’s text. As already mentioned, Alcharisi married and gave birth to five children after losing her voice as an exceptional singer. The unnamed illness from which she is suffering has made her age prematurely: “You see my grey hair, my worn look: it has all come fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain […]” (Eliot 1986: 699). However, in contrast to these other performers, who fall silent as a result of their marriage or death, Alcharisi appears in the text in order to tell her life story to her son and, in so doing, justify the choices and decisions she made in order to become a great performer. The two chapters in which Alcharisi makes her appearance include numerous descriptions of the various tones and moods of her voice. She is said to begin to speak “in a low melodious voice, with syllables which had what might be called a foreign but agreeable outline” (Eliot 1986: 687). Later, when she resumes her speech after a pause, “her voice had become more firmly resistant in its finely varied tones” (Eliot 1986: 690). In fact, the careful modulation of her voice is part and parcel of her self-performance during the two meetings: “The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered were as perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them” (Eliot 1986: 691). Then again, she “let her voice fall into muffled, rapid utterance” (Eliot 1986: 693), “began to speak again in a more veiled voice” (Eliot 1986: 698) or “leaned forward a little in her low-toned pleading, that seemed like a smothered cry”

woman who fashions herself if we consider his treatment of Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

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(Eliot 1986: 702).²⁰ The numerous descriptions of Alcharisi’s voice underline the great vocal presence she has in the text. What is remarkable about Eliot’s former singer is the fact that in contrast to the performers in the other novels, she continues to speak and assert herself in the text after the end of her career. In other words, she is not muted by marriage and death, the plot elements that silence the other performer figures. What is even more important is that her radically individual voice marks a position of alterity that can neither be absorbed nor erased by the text. Alcharisi herself is aware of her radical alterity and even underlines her position as an individual subject as she introduces herself to her son at the beginning of their first meeting. “I am your mother”, she says. “But you can have no love for me. […] I am not like what you thought I was” (Eliot 1986: 687). Just as she insists on her self-definition and refuses to be treated as a mother by her son, her radical individualism cannot be mitigated by the text although it runs counter to its ideological values. In fact, it is in her status as an alien element in the text that we can observe the most significant shift of Eliot’s novel. Despite the underlying conservative thrust of Daniel Deronda, the novel does not reject Alcharisi and her self-determined voice as straightforwardly as it may seem. Although the two scenes in which Eliot’s star performer makes her appearance occupy only a small fraction of the overall text, they are pivotal because they enact and crystallize the ideological tension at the core of the novel. It is in the two encounters the former singer arranges and stages between herself and her son that the ideological conflict of the novel comes to be played out. The two chapters highlight the dialogue and juxtaposition of their different voices speaking for radical independence and self-realization and for affiliation and tradition respectively. Rather than merely narrating the exchange between the singer and her son, Eliot adopts a quasi-dramatic mode. She presents the confrontation of the two character voices with each other in direct speech so as to stage a dialogue mostly uninterrupted by the narrator. Alcharisi’s statements are significantly longer than those of Deronda, and the narrator’s comments usually focus on the impact that Alcharisi’s speech has on Deronda.

 Further descriptions include references to “a passionate self-defence in her tone” (Eliot 1986: 689), “a ring of something like sarcastic scorn” (Eliot 1986: 691), her speaking “with rising passion”, “peremptorily […] with a touch of scorn” (Eliot 1986: 725), in a tone that was “abrupt and scornful” but also “slowly with a new kind of chest-voice” (Eliot 1986: 726), “in a low persuasive tone” (Eliot 1986: 727) and a “softer, mellower voice” (Eliot 1986: 724). The text also repeatedly refers to the sound of Daniel Deronda’s voice in the two encounters with his mother. However, because he does not get to speak as much and as often as Alcharisi, the text’s references to his voice are less frequent.

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Eliot reports all of Alcharisi’s articulations verbatim so that the performer tells her life story in her own words. Thanks to the direct rendition of her extended statements, the text foregrounds Alcharisi’s perspective. Deronda, on the other hand, can only react to her utterances. In fact, the two encounters resemble mini-theatricals that are both directed and performed by Alcharisi with Deronda cast in the role of spectator.²¹ This means that although Alcharisi’s position is repudiated by the implied author, the narrator, and the protagonist Daniel Deronda, her voice is granted significant space in the text. Instead of having to rely on summaries provided by the narrator, the reader is given a sense of Alcharisi’s voice from the way she speaks. Asked by her son why she has chosen to tell him her life story, she states her individualistic position and justifies her unconventional choices in the following assertive manner: ‘Oh – the reasons of our actions!’ said the Princess, with a ring of something like sarcastic scorn. ‘When you are as old as I am, it will not seem so simple a question – “Why did you do this?” People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel – or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. […] I will not deny anything I have done. I will not pretend to love where I have no love.’ (Eliot 1986: 691; original emphasis)

The uncompromising tone in this passage is characteristic of Alcharisi’s voice in the two meetings with her son. The fact that her voice should be given so much space in the text to present her perspective is all the more remarkable given the departure of her strong individualism from the novel’s ideological values. Because she is the principal speaker in the two encounters with her son, the former singer dominates the two chapters with her autobiography, which she tells in her own words. As a result of her strong vocal presence, Alcharisi’s position cannot easily be dismissed, let alone elided from the text. What is also significant for the conflict between the voice of the performer and her son is the fact that the two meetings are marked by real difference. In contrast to Mirah, who is constituted by Deronda’s projections (Gates 2001: 714), Alcharisi marks a position of alterity that eludes his fantasy realm altogether. As is suggested by the sound of her first name, Mirah is his perfect

 This scenario recalls the self-performances of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, discussed in the previous chapter, in which Coverdale is relegated to a passive spectator position.

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(acoustic) mirror (Gates 2001: 715).²² When Deronda, singing an aria while rowing on the Thames, first meets and rescues Mirah as she attempts to drown herself in the river because she has failed to locate and be reunited with her mother, he immediately compares her to his own mother, speculating that “perhaps my mother was like this one” (Eliot 1986: 231). His comparison is of course highly ironic since his actual mother Alcharisi will turn out to be the antithesis of Mirah (Gillett 2000: 157). Deronda and Mirah converge in their quests for their mothers, and they are also deeply connected by the Hebrew hymn her mother used to sing to her as a child (Eliot 1986: 251, 423). When she recreates the hymn for Deronda from her childhood memories, she cannot recall the real words and instead produces “syllables that really seemed childish lisping” (Eliot 1986: 423). Her song thus materializes the cultural fantasy of the maternal voice, which, according to Kaja Silverman (1988), echoes the prelinguistic babble of the infant and, in doing so, serves as an acoustic mirror for the child. It is onto this acoustic mirror provided by the fantasy of the maternal voice that Deronda “projects […] the traits he longs for in his own missing mother” (Kehler 2003: 136). For much of the novel, Daniel Deronda has been yearning for and fantasizing about his unknown mother. “He had often pictured her face in his imagination as one which had a likeness to his own […]” (Eliot 1986: 687). But when he meets her, he realizes how different she is from the fantasy he has been entertaining for years: “[…] he saw some of the likeness now, but amidst more striking differences” (Eliot 1986: 687). Indeed, when she presents herself as a separate voice and subject, he cannot read her. When he goes through her letter before their encounter, he finds himself confronted by a “veiled figure with enigmatic speech”, a figure, moreover, who “had thrust away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, his clinging thought had gradually modelled and made the possessor of his tenderness and duteous longing” (Eliot 1986: 681). During their actual encounters, Alcharisi remains remote not only because she speaks “with the manner of a queen rather than a mother (Eliot 1986: 723), but also because she is at once examining and unexaminable (see Gates 2001: 718): “[…] her eyes were piercing and her face so mobile that the next moment she might look like a different person” (Eliot 1986: 687). Rather than depicting the performer as a screen that can be filled by the projections of others, the novel emphasizes the elusiveness of her protean character as well as her separateness which emerges as a re Also note Grace Kehler, who points out that Deronda “uses Mirah to reflect back to him a perfected, utterly coherent image of his morals” (Kehler 2003: 134). His values, Kehler suggests further, are confirmed both by the purity of her selfless conduct and the “natural” perfection of her singing (Kehler 2003: 134).

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sult of the fact that she refuses to be defined by anyone except herself.²³ Here we can see a close resemblance to Hawthorne’s Zenobia, who seeks to define herself as a separate subject as well. However, while Zenobia’s self-performance is always rendered by the narrative voice of Coverdale, Alcharisi’s own voice is shown in her direct dialogue with her son. The texts reflects the confrontation between mother and son through the different ways in which their diverging points of view are presented. Whereas Alcharisi’s position is articulated through extended statements rendered in direct speech, Daniel Deronda’s perspective is conveyed by means of his role as main focalizer. In his response to the former singer, he oscillates between “impulsive opposition”, “mixed anger” and “intolerance” (Eliot 1986: 690) on the one hand, and “a reverential tenderness” (Eliot 1986: 697), “a disappointed yearning” (Eliot 1986: 703) and “compassion” (Eliot 1986: 728) on the other. The following passage is a typical example of the way in which the text describes the mixture of emotions that Alcharisi and her speech evoke in her son, who shifts between repulsion, indignation and fascination: Her son was listening to her with feelings more and more highly mixed: the first sense of being repelled by the frank coldness which had replaced all his preconceptions of a mother’s tender joy in the sight of him; the first impulses of indignation at what shocked his most cherished emotions and principles – all these busy elements of collision between them were subsiding for a time, and making more and more room for that effort at just allowance and that admiration of a nature whose errors lay along high pathways, which he would have felt if, instead of being his mother, she had been a stranger who appealed to his sympathy. Still it was impossible to be dispassionate: he trembled lest the next thing she had to say would be more repugnant to him than what had gone before: he was afraid of the strange coercion she seemed under to lay her mind bare: he almost wished he could say, ‘Tell me only what is necessary,’ and then again he felt the fascination that made him watch her and listen to her eagerly. (Eliot 1986: 695)

Not only do Deronda and Alcharisi have different ideological ‘voices’ but their voices also differ in terms of their presentational mode. Because Deronda is the main focalizer, the mood or ‘tone’ in the two encounters is strongly inflected by his affective response to Alcharisi’s voice. Consequently, he emerges as the sympathetic centre or, put differently, the reader is encouraged to join the narrator and implied author in adopting his point of view. Alcharisi, by contrast, is  Note in particular how she resists being defined by her father. According to her account, her father regarded her as a mere “instrument”: “Because I had wants outside his purpose, I was to be put in a frame and tortured” (Eliot 1986: 726). I use the term ‘separateness’ in Stanley Cavell’s sense (1987). A discussion of his concept of separateness can be found in my reading of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance in Chapter 4.

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almost entirely excluded from focalization, which emphasizes the inscrutable character of her subjectivity. Alcharisi opens their first meeting with the exclamation “You are a beautiful creature!” and adds, “I knew you would be” (Eliot 1986: 687). While Alcharisi formulates her impression of her son in direct speech, Deronda’s response is conveyed to the reader by means of focalization: “She was a remarkable-looking being. What was it that gave her son a painful sense of aloofness? – Her worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a human mother, but a Melusina, who had ties with some world which is independent of ours” (Eliot 1986: 687– 688). Focalized by her son, Alcharisi appears to be distant and strange – a nonhuman creature that he cannot reconcile with the image of his mother that he has been cultivating in his fantasy. Moreover, looking at the former singer through her son’s eyes, the narrator appears to share his view and, in fact, calls on the reader to do the same by declaring that she seems to have “ties with some world which is independent of ours” (Eliot 1986: 688; my emphasis).²⁴ The sympathy of the reader is thus directed towards the position occupied by Deronda and the narrator, while Alcharisi is not just seen to mark an inaccessible inner life but also to inhabit a radically different world. Because her radical alterity eludes Deronda’s projections, he cannot integrate her into the image of a human mother. “It seemed as if he were in the presence of a mysterious Fate rather than of the longed-for mother” (Eliot 1986: 688). Alcharisi, in turn, appears not just remote and harsh, but also unrelenting and uncompromising in her rejection of the role of mother. When Deronda offers her his affection, she neither declines nor reciprocates his gesture: “I reject nothing, but I have nothing to give” (Eliot 1986: 697). At the same time, she clearly refuses to be integrated into his family script. What she definitely rejects is being identified with the role of the “human mother” (Eliot 1986: 687– 688). “I am not a loving woman”, she says, underscoring that she considers love to be synonymous with ‘subjection’. “I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been subject to me” (Eliot 1986: 730). In her meetings with her son, Alcharisi literally has the last word, ending the second encounter by telling Deronda that they will never meet again. However, in order to support the close alignment of the implied author with Deronda’s perspective, the two scenes conclude with his affective response to their final separation, not hers (Zangen 2004: 84). The attunement of the text with his moral code is reinforced further by the fact that the aspects that are privileged and eventu-

 A similar passage can also be found at the beginning of the second encounter when the narrator notes: “You might have imagined her a sorceress […]” (Eliot 1986: 723; my emphasis).

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ally shown to be viable by the plot are not feminine independence and self-articulation but a recuperation of the religious family tradition and its consolidation through the founding of a new cultural and political homeland. At the same time, the two scenes and their mode of presentation harbour a paradox in granting significant space and presence to Alcharisi and her voice. As the principal speaker, especially in the first and longer encounter, she dominates the conversation with her discourse and her life story. Although her arrival in the text almost seems to be conjured up by Deronda’s desire to find his mother and to be Jewish (Brownstein 1995: 242), it is Alcharisi who figures as the director of her appearance and the performance she acts before an audience of one. The theatricality of her performance underlines that, even though the former stage queen has become a princess through her marriage, she has never stopped performing and continues to act with “a rare perfection of physiognomy, voice, and gesture” (Eliot 1986: 691): The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered were as perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them. The speech was in fact a piece of what may be called sincere acting: this woman’s nature was one in which all feeling – and all the more when it was tragic as well as real – immediately became a matter of conscious representation: experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own emotions. (Eliot 1986: 691)

Alcharisi may be ill with her fatal disease, but the “double consciousness” (Eliot 1986: 691) with which she transforms her own feelings into performance still makes her a powerfully self-controlled performer. The quasi-dramatic mode employed by Eliot means that although Alcharisi has lost her voice as a singer, the text nevertheless allows her to make herself heard through the voice she has in the text. Her strong vocal presence points to a contradiction, an ideological tension; in fact, it refers to the limitation of the traditional value system that underpins Eliot’s last novel. Alcharisi’s voice plays a crucial role in this late Victorian text and can be called modern insofar as it disrupts the idea of a homogeneous set of values and signals that it is no longer viable to uphold a single moral code.²⁵ It is the very presence of Alcharisi’s voice in the text that underscores the fact that there are several stories, positions and perspectives, even if not all of them meet with the approval of the implied author. Daniel Deronda can, therefore, be said to foreground its

 Jacqueline Rose (2005), focusing on the narrative strand of Gwendolen Harleth, also notes that there is a shift as we move from the Victorian mode of writing that shapes almost the entire oeuvre of Eliot on to her last novel.

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heteroglossia by virtue of these conflicting voices and ideological positions. At the same time, the text itself is conflicted regarding her radically different voice. Holding on to traditional Victorian values, Eliot, the implied author, must reject Alcharisi’s radical individuality. She can imagine Alcharisi’s position, but it is not a position she can embrace.²⁶ What renders Daniel Deronda so complex in its moral imagination is the fact that Eliot, as the implied author, recognizes Alcharisi in her radical difference. Indeed, she acknowledges the singer and her position even though her voice is not the one she prefers. By giving her child away and radically remaking herself as an independent woman artist, the performer violates the norms privileged by the text, and yet the former singer is given space to show that she is justified from her own point of view. “Every woman”, she observes, “is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel – or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others” (1986: 691). Alcharisi is aware that her deviation from traditional feminine gender norms makes her seem monstrous in the eyes of others, but she insists on her position and claims that her self-realization as an artist does not make her “a monster” (Eliot 1986: 691). What we can hear in Alcharisi’s speech is a powerful vindication of and argument for feminine independence and artistic articulation: Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father’s will was against it. My nature gave me a charter. (Eliot 1986: 728).

By highlighting her genius as an artist, Alcharisi insists on her right to artistic self-expression in a far more radical manner than Vittoria does as she sings for Italy’s freedom and independence. “I had a right to be free”, Alcharisi tells her son as she is talking about her separation from her family. “I had a right to seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated” (Eliot 1986: 689). Although she speaks from her position as an exceptional performer when she – against the authority of her father – insists on her right to develop her talent and realize

 By foregrounding the vocal presence of Alcharisi, I challenge Grace Kehler’s argument that the speech of the former singer is subsumed by the focalization of her son. “Though her direct speech to Daniel figures prominently in their meeting”, Kehler argues, “Daniel remains the focalizer and the interpreter of her words. In this way she is confined to the speculative and specular, which implicitly reinstate her in the role of the actress, minus the ‘magic’ of song” (Kehler 2003: 122).

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her potential as an artist, she makes an argument that overlaps with many of the demands made by the contemporaneous women’s movement.²⁷ By arguing for access to higher education and professional employment, for legal rights and political enfranchisement, Victorian feminists emphasized a subjectivity that was defined by the independence and self-development of women rather than by their relation to their fathers and husbands. In the other British stage performer novels, these political claims are enacted by the singing and/or speaking of their heroines on the public theatre stage. With her career long over, Alcharisi no longer performs in public. Yet in the two scenes in which she presents and justifies herself to Deronda, she formulates an acute analysis of the social norms that define and curtail femininity.²⁸ When her son expresses his sympathy for her position as an exceptionally gifted woman seeking to assert herself as an artist – “Though my own experience has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness of your struggle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced renunciation” (Eliot 1986: 694) – she argues that he will not be able to understand the predicament she faced, telling him: “You are not a woman. You may try – but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl” (Eliot 1986: 694). But although he will never be able to experience the plight of the talented woman and adopt her point of view, she asks him to acknowledge her in the position she has chosen to occupy. Alcharisi has lost her voice as a renowned singer, but she still has a powerful voice in the text. In the other stage performer novels discussed so far, the female

 Also note Rachel Brownstein, who reads Daniel Deronda as an aftereffect of Rachel Félix and suggests that via the Jewish tragedienne, “it is easy to slide from the Jewish Question to the Woman Question” before adding that “the earnestly pursued first Question may be something like a cover for the second” (Brownstein 1995: 245). Because the focus of my book is on voice and gender, I cannot sufficiently address the questions of ethnicity that are raised by the novels discussed in this chapter. The ethnic and cultural hybridity of British stage performers opens up a wide area of inquiry and, to a large extent, has to do with the strange ‘foreignness’ of the performer and her art to British middle-class culture and its notion of class hierarchy. On music, musicians and singers as alien to British national culture, see for instance Phyllis Weliver (2000: 19) and Grace Kehler (2003: 140). Moreover, as suggested in this chapter, issues of cultural identity in these novels are closely connected with the foundation of collective political entities.  Also note the following statement made by the Princess: “To have a pattern cut out – ‘this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt’. That was what my father wanted” (Eliot 1986: 694). Grace Kehler persuasively suggests: “It is not, Alcharisi insists, the woman who leaves the family who qualifies as a monster in gender performance; rather it is the family that creates deformities, women maimed by excessive and unnatural constrictions” (Kehler 2003: 124).

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performers all fall silent in the end: Approaching death, Corinne is unable to perform her swan song; Jewsbury’s actress leaves the professional stage in order to be married; Vittoria loses her political role and her voice as a professional singer once the nation state for which she has been singing has been founded. Eliot’s text takes up the tropes of these other novels and rewrites them in a different key. Like the other performers, Alcharisi has lost her professional voice, has entered into marriage and is on the verge of death, but in contrast to them, she does not fall silent. While the other performers seem to lose their voices as their professional careers come to an end, Alcharisi retains hers. Alcharisi insists that she has desires of her own both when she fashions herself as an independent artist against her father’s will and when she tells her life story to her son. This is what constitutes the power of her ‘voice’. In fact, the text emphasizes that she has a voice in her own history, both because she has shaped her life as a performer and because she tells her story in her own voice. The powerful character of Alcharisi’s voice becomes even more apparent as we juxtapose the singer with Gwendolen Harleth. As mentioned earlier, this other performer defines herself through her visual spectacle. Because Gwendolen dissolves into the images she performs for the gaze of others, she does not leave the same lasting impression as Alcharisi does with her resonant voice.²⁹ In contrast to Gwendolen and her visual self-presentation, Alcharisi is characterized first and foremost by her voice, which cannot be reified in the same way. Her vocal presence in the text indeed suggests that once a voice has articulated itself in a text, it can never fully be elided. After her two encounters with her son, Alcharisi disappears from the narrative, but her voice and the antagonism it points to cannot be written out of the text. Instead, her voice continues to resonate, radically different from and out of harmony with all the other textual voices. Eliot’s novel punishes her singer because she has a voice of her own, and yet despite her punishment, her voice has great resonance precisely because of Alcharisi’s radical alterity. Her self-centredness is at odds with all the other textual voices and the moral codes and values they represent. Yet it is because of her dissonant voice that she becomes audible in the text and can be heard to speak for herself. Eliot’s star performer may not be exalted in the manner of Corinne. As a matter of fact, she repeatedly describes herself as a “shattered woman” (Eliot 1986: 701, 727). But it is exactly because she is so un Also note an early passage in the novel, highlighted by Delia de Sousa Correa (2014: 112), in which Herr Klesmer comments on the visual rather than the auditory effect of Gwendolen’s singing. “It is always acceptable to see you sing” (Eliot 1986: 78; my emphasis), he says after one of her performances before he thwarts her ambition and advises her not to become a professional singer at a later point in the text.

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deniably vocal in her two appearances in the novel that the former queen of the stage radiates majestic dignity as well as tragic grandeur. Hence, the acting anxieties examined in this chapter receive different treatments: Meredith has his singer absorbed into the larger entity of the nation state, while Eliot’s far more radical vision uses the position of her ‘monstrous’ singer as a counterpoint in her late Victorian text prefiguring the direction in which modern culture will evolve once paternalistic models become obsolete. Like all the other performer novels discussed in this book, British stage performer novels form part of a tradition of female public articulation that has been inspired by Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy. What is celebrated by this Romantic text as a gesture of grand self-articulation – the pleasure that its performer takes in her seemingly boundless speech and her self-fashioning as an independent artist – becomes a cause for anxiety once we look at the Victorian texts. In Meredith’s novel Vittoria, the anxiety surrounding the performer is mitigated as her voice is subsumed under the nationalist project. In contrast to Staël’s text, where the dispersal of Corinne’s voice means that an entire cultural space comes to serve as a vehicle for her self-expression, Meredith’s Vittoria inverts this logic and has the woman’s voice allegorically represent the country. The singer plays an important political role in the founding of Italy as a nation state, but ultimately she has no voice of her own in the political entity which she sings into existence. By contrast, Eliot’s Alcharisi can be absorbed neither by the diegesis nor by the text itself. The singer is symbolically punished for her self-centredness, but the novel does not alleviate the anxiety that it evokes with her figure. On the contrary, the text reinforces the performer’s self-fashioning as we find it in Staël’s text by turning it into the radical individualism of its modern cosmopolitan woman artist. The figure of Alcharisi marks the limit of the paternalistic model privileged by the novel, and yet her position cannot be written out of the text. Instead, her radically self-determined voice remains disturbingly present.

6 Fin-de-Siècle Ventriloquism and Modernist Self-Authorship By exploring feminine voice and agency from Staël’s Corinne up to the female performers in late Victorian texts, we have seen how nineteenth-century narrative fiction uses the vocal and embodied performance on various public stages in order to reflect on the cultural and political position of women. This chapter concludes our discussion of literary female performer figures by juxtaposing two texts that are diametrically opposed in their treatment of the woman’s voice: George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894), written at the fin de siècle, and Isak Dinesen’s story “The Dreamers” (1934), which harks back to nineteenth-century female performer narratives so as to rework this tradition in a modernist fashion. These two particular examples further accentuate the core concern of this study, namely the question of how both the gain and loss of the performer’s voice are linked to feminine agency. By reading these two texts alongside each other, we continue the discussion of the previous chapter in showing how the anxiety surrounding the female stage performer results in the particularly drastic treatment of the ventriloquized singer in Trilby, and how the model of the independent self-fashioning of the performer as a modern woman artist succeeds in “The Dreamers”. Du Maurier’s Trilby revolves around a young woman who turns into an acclaimed singer when she is hypnotized by a male musical genius. As a performer whose singing voice is appropriated by a voice other than her own, the novel’s eponymous heroine serves as a mere instrument of Svengali, the brilliant musician. The ventriloquized voice of Du Maurier’s performer may evoke James’s Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians, who is accused by Basil Ransom of being ‘spoken’ by others, or Eliot’s Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, who legitimizes her public preaching by emphasizing that she is ‘spoken’ by the voice of God. Similarly, the usurpation of Trilby’s voice may bring to mind the way in which the British performer voices in the novels by Jewsbury and Meredith are eventually absorbed into larger entities. However, in all these other texts, the performer’s gain of a public voice invariably marks a moment of empowerment even if that public voice proves unsustainable. In contrast to all other performers in the British and American tradition discussed in the previous chapters, Du Maurier’s performer is completely unaware of her career as a singer. In fact, in a complete reversal of the performer’s treatment in all the other examples, the gain of an artistic voice in Trilby coincides with the utter loss of both self and agency. The second example, “The Dreamers”, forms part of Seven Gothic Tales, the story collection with which the Danish Baroness Karen Blixen transformed herself into an internationally renowned author, writing under the pseudonym of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-007

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‘Isak Dinesen’. Published four decades after the novel by the French-born British author and illustrator Du Maurier, “The Dreamers” can be read as a radical rewriting and a trenchant critique of Trilby. Indeed, in a fundamental departure from Du Maurier’s fin-de-siècle ventriloquism and its extreme expropriation of the woman’s voice, the modernist text foregrounds the self-creation of the female performer. Dinesen’s protagonist Pellegrina Leoni is a woman artist who fashions herself as her own work of art. In positioning its performer in this way, Dinesen’s story can be seen as a modern continuation of the British and American tradition of performer texts traced in this book. The clearest connection is to Eliot’s late Victorian performer Alcharisi, who cuts herself off from her family in order to fashion herself as a completely independent cosmopolitan artist. There is a fundamental difference between the two, however. Whereas Alcharisi cannot uphold her self-fashioning as an artist once she has to leave the operatic stage, Pellegrina Leoni experiences her forced exit from the professional theatre as a moment of true liberation. It is after she loses her singing voice as a result of an accident that Dinesen’s performer comes into her own and manages to continually recreate both herself and her own ‘voice’. The comparison of “The Dreamers” and Trilby in this final chapter will allow us not only to explore the diametrically opposed trajectories of these two texts but also to trace once again the close connection between voice and feminine agency that underpins performer texts written in the British and American tradition.

6.1 The Ventriloquized Voice: George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) Lying at the centre of Du Maurier’s Trilby is the fundamental transformation of its heroine and, above all, the fundamental makeover of her voice. Du Maurier’s fin-de-siècle text, which is set in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, provides its protagonist with a voice endowed with a most unusual sound. In fact, when Trilby O’Ferrall, the daughter of an Irishman and a Scotswoman raised in France and working as a model in various Paris art studios, makes her first appearance in the text, her voice is described before anything else. It is said to be “a portentous voice of great volume […] that might almost have belonged to any sex” (Du Maurier 1998: 12). Trilby speaks “in a voice so rich and deep and full as almost to suggest an incipient tenore robusto; and one felt instinctively that it was a real pity she wasn’t a boy, she would have made such a jolly one” (Du Maurier 1998: 13). That Trilby’s sexually ambiguous, deep contralto voice boasts immense “volume” becomes evident when she sings a song early on in the text. “From that capacious mouth and through that high-bridged bony nose there rolled a

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volume of breathy sound, not loud, but so immense that it seemed to come from all round, to be reverberated from every surface […]” (Du Maurier 1998: 18). Yet what is equally evident in her singing is her utter lack of musicality; because of her tone-deafness, her boundless voice is completely uncontrollable. “It was as though she could never once have deviated into tune, never once have hit upon a true note, even by a fluke – in fact, as though she were absolutely tone-deaf, and without ear […]” (Du Maurier 1998: 19). The scene of Trilby’s grotesque song is important because of the remarkable metamorphosis that transforms her voice later in the text. In a complete reversal of the unmusical song Trilby produces at the outset of the novel, we later get to hear a voice that has undergone a miraculous change. After her prolonged absence from the text, we encounter her again after she has become an internationally acclaimed singer called ‘La Svengali’. As before, her voice is voluminous, but she now sings her song with purity of tone. As the novel emphasizes in an extensive description of one of her concerts, La Svengali transports her audience to ecstatic rapture, inducing “astonishment, enthusiasm, ecstatic delight” (Du Maurier 1998: 215) in all those who hear her sublime voice. People are in “tears of sheer delight” (Du Maurier 1998: 212) as they give themselves up to her song. ¹ As if to mimetically convey the abandon with which they enjoy the sound of her voice, the text not only temporarily switches into the present tense but also repeatedly departs from regular syntax as it describes her singing: “Loud and shrill and sweet beyond compare – drowning the orchestra; of a piercing quality quite ineffable; a joy there is no telling […]” (Du Maurier 1998: 218). The passage describing La Svengali’s concert thus invites the readers to imagine and share the intense emotions that her song arouses in her audience. In its detailed description of La Svengali’s concert, Du Maurier’s text seeks to evoke the type of voice discussed by Michel Poizat (1992), namely a song that evokes an extreme form of jouissance and, in doing so, transcends verbal language – “a joy there is no telling” (Du Maurier 1998: 218).² Yet the text not  Already before the concert passage, the Jewish singer Glorioli characterizes La Svengali as a voice affording its listeners a singular pleasure. According to his description, La Svengali has “[e]very voice a mortal woman can have – three octaves – four! and of such quality that people who can’t tell one tune from another cry with pleasure at the mere sound of it directly they hear her […]” (Du Maurier 1998: 170; my emphasis).  As emphasized by Bruce Wyse (who offers a reading of Du Maurier’s novel through the lens of Mladen Dolar’s discussion of the voice), La Svengali’s extraordinary singing eludes representation, which is the reason why the text describes it indirectly through the emotions and affects it provokes in the audience: “While La Svengali’s vocal performance may be indefinable or untranslatable, the narrator is meticulous in registering the sensations it provokes and the emotions it elicits” (Wyse 2015: 117).

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only depicts the intense response of the audience, for example by saying about one character that “his joy was almost a pain!” (Du Maurier 1998: 213). La Svengali’s singing is also said to provide the listeners with an experience of spiritual transcendence – a “heavenly glimpse beyond the veil” (Du Maurier 1998: 214). The singer and her song are repeatedly linked to the heavenly and the divine. Initially, La Svengali, who is compared to a celestial figure, namely a “woman archangel” (Du Maurier 1998: 211), sings songs with lyrics, but her performance culminates in her rendition of Chopin’s Impromptu in A flat as a “wondrous song without words” (Du Maurier 1998: 218). Her vocalizing of pure sound beyond verbal language is said to create an experience that cannot be provided by any other medium: Every single phrase is a string of perfect gems, of purest ray serene, strung together on a loose golden thread! The higher and shriller she sings, the sweeter it is; higher and shriller than any woman had sung before. […] It is irresistible; it forces itself on you; no words, no pictures, could ever do the like! (Du Maurier 1998: 217– 218)

Marked as a moment of transcendence, the concert evokes a spiritual dimension reminiscent of the female preaching discussed in Chapter 3. However, while Margaret Fuller and George Eliot’s Dinah Morris both invoke the spiritual realm in order to claim cultural authority in their verbal preaching, the pure sound of La Svengali’s high-pitched voice stands for a traditional feminine vocality beyond verbal language as well as beyond her agency as a subject. Indeed, while to her audience La Svengali’s sublime singing is irresistible, Trilby’s actual ‘voice’ remains inaudible. As the readers gradually learn, Trilby transforms into a spectacular singer while under the hypnosis of the Jewish musician Svengali.³ It is only under his hypnotic control that she assumes the persona of La Svengali, the accomplished and acclaimed singer. Svengali usurps her voice because although he is a great artist, he does not have a singing voice of his own. “He had ardently wished to sing, and had studied hard to that end […]. But nature had been singularly harsh to him in this respect – inexorable. He was absolutely without voice, beyond the harsh, hoarse, weak raven’s croak he used to speak with […]” (Du Maurier 1998: 42). Because he lacks a singing voice that would permit him to express his musical genius, Svengali hypnotizes Trilby, ap-

 By hypnotizing Trilby, Svengali is reminiscent of Westervelt, who mesmerizes Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance, and Verena Tarrant’s father, who mesmerizes his daughter in The Bostonians. The nineteenth-century fascination with mesmerism and hypnosis has been examined in the medical context and beyond. See for example Alison Winter’s study Mesmerized (1998), which focuses on how the phenomenon played itself out in Victorian Britain.

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propriates her voice without her knowledge and, as it were, ‘sings’ through her. This means not only that Trilby’s grotesque song is superseded by the perfect pitch and immaculate song of La Svengali, but Trilby’s ‘voice’ in the sense of her individual agency is erased as well. Because she is hypnotized, Trilby cannot resist Svengali’s appropriation of her voice. She has no awareness of her vocal transformation and her stellar career. Instead, she is reduced to the literal instrument of another person. Describing the phenomenon of La Svengali, the Jewish singer Glorioli compares the singer to a beautiful angel and, at the same time, describes her as a stupid idiot: […] he’s an immense artist, and a great singing-master, to teach a woman like that! and such a woman! belle comme un ange – mais bête comme un pot. I tried to talk to her – all she can say is ‘ja wohl’, or ‘doch’, or ‘nein’, or ‘soh!’ not a word of English or French or Italian, though she sings them […]. (Du Maurier 1998: 170).

As Glorioli’s description suggests, the singer is nothing more than a mechanical automaton controlled by her master Svengali.⁴ However, Svengali is not alone in his instrumentalization of Trilby. The three British amateur artists Little Billee, Taffy and the Laird, who have devoted themselves to the study of art in Paris, all fall in love with the young woman and attempt to shape her according to their interests. Before she falls under Svengali’s spell, she serves as their model for their art. That is, similar to Svengali, they use her as a vehicle for their artistic self-expression. In the beginning, the three Britons appear fascinated by the bizarre appearance of the tall, almost gigantic Trilby, who at the opening of the novel wears the overcoat of a military uniform over her short underskirt as well as “a huge pair of male slippers” (Du Maurier 1998:13). When they encounter her for the first time, the text describes her as “a

 La Svengali’s sparse interjections mentioned by Glorioli are of course reminiscent of Olympia, the automaton in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816). Olympia, who plays the piano and “performed equally well a bravura aria in an almost piercingly clear, bell-like voice” (Hoffmann 2004: 113), can only sigh “Ah, ah!” and echo other voices. For Nathaniel, who is in love with her, this means that she turns into a perfect acoustic mirror: “[…] it seemed to him that what Olympia said of his work, of his poetic talent in general, came from the depths of his own being, that her voice was indeed the voice of those very depths themselves. And that must actually have been the case, for Olympia never said anything more than the words already mentioned” (Hoffmann 2004: 118). The absorption of La Svengali’s voice by her master is also underlined in the concert scene, in which she seems to be echoing a statement made earlier by Svengali: “[…] I am Svengali; and you shall hear nothing, see nothing, think of nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!” (Du Maurier 1998: 213).

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very tall and fully developed young female” (Du Maurier 1998: 12). Because of her large mouth and massive chin, her face violates conventional beauty norms, but “she would have made a singularly handsome boy” (Du Maurier 1998: 13). In addition to her gender ambivalence, her speech is hybrid, too, as she mixes her standard English with a slang version of French. However, under the influence of the Britons, the initially self-assured Trilby is gradually feminized and domesticated. Outwardly her transformation is reflected by her much thinner figure and her increasingly refined looks, which according to the text anticipate the ideal of beauty later developed by the English Pre-Raphaelites (Du Maurier 1998: 90). At the same time, the culturally hybrid Trilby drops her French slang and reads the British novels lent by the three artists. As the narrator affirmatively states and comments, “She grew more English every day; and that was a good thing” (Du Maurier 1998: 64). In other words, the three British amateur artists mould her in order to make her fit their norms of an ideal femininity defining a proper English lady. They transform her according to their ideas and wishes just as Svengali transforms her according to his.⁵ Since the three British artists and the Jewish musician all claim Trilby for themselves, we may well speak of a struggle between these different characters. The tension between the divergent positions becomes particularly manifest in a text passage towards the end of the novel in which a violinist explains the phenomenon of Trilby’s two disparate voices to one of the British artists: ‘There were two Trilbys. There was the Trilby you knew, who could not sing one single note in tune. […] She could no more sing than a fiddle can play itself! She could never tell one tune from another – one note from the next. […] Well, that was Trilby, your Trilby! that was my Trilby too […]. ‘But all at once – pr-r-r-out! presto! augenblick! … with one wave of his hand over her – with one look of his eye – with a word – Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby – and make her do whatever he liked …. You might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it …. ‘He had but to say “Dors!” and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds – just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else – and think his thoughts and wish his wishes – and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, factitious love … just his own love for himself turned inside out – á [sic] l’envers – and

 Also see Sarah Gracombe, who suggests that the novel stages a “battle over Trilby herself”: “Previous critics of Trilby have often focused upon the way that Svengali attempts to convert Trilby into his lover, his slave, his surrogate voice. But there is also a second and opposing conversion effort at work in the novel: Little Billee’s attempt to renovate Trilby into a model of Englishness” (Gracombe 2003: 80).

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reflected back on him, as from a mirror … un écho, un simulacre, quoi! pas autre chose! … […] ‘Well, that was the Trilby he taught how to sing […]. That Trilby was just a singing-machine – an organ to play upon – an instrument of music – a Stradivarius – a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood – a voice, and nothing more – just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with […]. ‘[…] When Svengali’s Trilby was being taught to sing … when Svengali’s Trilby was singing – or seemed to you as if she were singing – our Trilby had ceased to exist … our Trilby was fast asleep … in fact, our Trilby was dead …. (Du Maurier 1998: 298 – 299; original emphasis)

Explaining that Trilby could not sing in tune, the violinist immediately lays claim to this version of Trilby for the British artists and himself: “Well, that was Trilby, your Trilby! that was my Trilby too” (Du Maurier 1998: 298; my emphasis). However, while hypnotized by Svengali, their version of Trilby was erased: “[…] our Trilby had ceased to exist … our Trilby was fast asleep … in fact, our Trilby was dead …” (Du Maurier 1998: 298 – 299). In describing the disjunction of Trilby’s voice and self in this way, the violinist clearly sides with the three British artists. Indeed, as the narrative perspective of this passage suggests, the novel is by no means neutral in its orchestration of the various character voices. The implied author Du Maurier directs the readers’ sympathy unequivocally towards the three British artists. Svengali, the brilliant musician and eastern European Jew, on the other hand, is stereotyped in an anti-semitic manner. As a parasitic vampire figure, he haunts the British characters as a menacing alien threat coming from the East, not unlike Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel published three years later, Yet Trilby’s ‘voice’ is erased not just by Svengali. The three British artists privileged by the text also contribute to the silencing of the female voice. Their feminization of Trilby implicitly anticipates her passive state under Svengali’s hypnosis as well as her fading into physical weakness as a result of her exertions as a performer. ⁶ Likewise their enjoyment of La Svengali’s song reinforces the negation and ultimately the extinction of Trilby and her ‘voice’. When towards the end of the novel she lies dying, literally exhausted by having become the depleted vessel for and medium of another voice, Svengali’s photographic portrait arrives, sent according to his will after his death. By means of

 See the following passage in which Trilby’s figurative depletion as a medium of a voice other than her own is reflected by the physical wasting away of her prematurely aged body: “Her hands were almost transparent in their waxen whiteness; delicate little frosty wrinkles had gathered round her eyes; there were grey streaks in her hair; all strength and straightness and elasticity seemed to have gone out of her […]” (Du Maurier 1998: 261).

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his portrait, and from the grave as it were, Svengali hypnotizes Trilby one last time. Once again under his spell, she intones her swan song. What her deathbed scene thus illustrates is the fatal effect of Svengali; his vocal appropriation literally extinguishes Trilby. At the same time, the passage also shows that the three British artists are complicit in the expropriation of the female voice as they derive their highest enjoyment from a voice that is both aestheticized and usurped. Just as in the concert they attended earlier, they enjoy the sublime as well as perfect singing of the singer La Svengali, from which Trilby’s monstrously grotesque voice has been completely eliminated. What is even more, they are ecstatically moved to tears while Trilby is literally sung to death under Svengali’s hypnotic power: She hardly seemed to breathe as the notes came pouring out, without words – mere vocalising. It was as if breath were unnecessary for so little voice as she was using, though there was enough of it to fill the room – to fill the house – to drown her small audience in holy, heavenly sweetness. […] She sang [Chopin’s Impromptu in A flat] just as she had sung it at the Salle des Bashibazoucks, only it sounded still more ineffably seductive, as she was using less voice – using the essence of her voice, in fact – the pure spirit, the very cream of it. […] The usual effect was produced. Tears were streaming down the cheeks of […] Little Billee. Tears were in the Laird’s eyes, a tear on one of Taffy’s whiskers – tears of sheer delight. (Du Maurier 1998: 283)

According to the narrator, Trilby is buried as “the greatest pleasure-giver of our time” (Du Maurier 1998: 287). Indeed, as in the concert scene mentioned earlier, Trilby’s final performance on her deathbed evokes the type of song described by Poizat as a pure sound beyond symbolic language causing an extreme form of enjoyment. Using just “the pure spirit” of her voice, which seems already disembodied as it barely needs any breath, Trilby’s swan song envelopes her listeners “in holy, heavenly sweetness”, moving them to “tears of sheer delight”. However, rather than rupturing all symbolic and imaginary codes, the sound of Trilby’s voice is shown to be fetishized by her listeners. As a result, the potentially threatening effect of her wordless song as an articulation that goes beyond language is mitigated by its sublime beauty.⁷ Moreover, what the three artists enjoy is the

 Mladen Dolar makes the following observation about the ‘fetishization’ of the beautiful singing voice: “Expression beyond language is another highly sophisticated language; its acquisition demands a long technical training, reserved for the happy few, although it has the power to affect everyone universally. Yet singing, by focusing on the voice, actually runs the risk of losing the very thing it tries to worship and revere: it turns into a fetish object – we could say the highest rampart, the most formidable wall against the voice” (Dolar 2006: 30).

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voice ‘sung’ and dominated by Svengali. This means that they are just as complicit in the erasure of Trilby’s individual agency as her former master Svengali. The treatment of the feminine voice in Trilby can be seen to mark a turn to the modern. While in earlier texts the female performer needs to be able to say ‘I sing’ in order to affirm her agency, Trilby’s song evokes a scenario in which ‘it’ sings. Du Maurier’s singer thus refers to a specific notion of the modern subject, namely a subject whose speech (or rather song) is the result of cultural texts and discourses. In this sense, Trilby is also reminiscent of Henry James’s The Bostonians and the way in which Verena Tarrant seems to be ‘spoken’ by the cultural catchwords and phrases she hears from others. As we have seen in the discussion of James’s novel, Verena can make herself heard in public because she uses a particular political discourse in her speeches. Similarly, Trilby can be said to have a public voice because she (unconsciously) subjects herself to the musical ‘voice’ of Svengali.⁸ At the same time, Du Maurier’s blatantly sexist novel can be read against the grain. By having her gigantic figure tower over Svengali, Du Maurier’s original illustrations showing La Svengali in concert seem to suggest that the performer may well exceed and even elude the power and possession of her master. After all, he has no voice and can only ‘sing’ through his hypnotized medium. In fact, in their last concert, Svengali loses the control he once exerted over Trilby. Unable to conduct the orchestra because of an injury, he tries to hypnotize her from a box in the auditorium of the theatre. However, rather than producing the perfect song of La Svengali, Trilby reverts to her old manner of singing and offers “the most lamentably grotesque performance ever heard out of a human throat”

Also note how in the period leading up to Trilby’s death, the fatigued but still magnetic former singer is described as a ‘domesticated’ siren, who is alluring but not dangerous to her listeners: “Tuneless and insane, she was more of a siren than ever – a quite unconscious siren – without any guile, who appealed to the heart all the more directly and irresistibly that she could no longer stir the passions” (Du Maurier 1998: 261). A few paragraphs further down, one of the artists remembers her past temptation: “Oh, Circe, poor Circe, dear Circe, divine enchantress that you were!” (Du Maurier 1998: 262). Even after her career as a hypnotized singer has come to an end, Trilby is unaware of the effect she has on others, who can fantasize about her charm as an entirely passive figure without a desire of her own.  The ventriloquized voices of Trilby and Verena Tarrant resonate with Mladen Dolar’s argument that in every voice, there is an element of ventriloquism. “Every emission of the voice”, Dolar writes, “is by its very essence ventriloquism. Ventriloquism pertains to voice as such, to its inherently acousmatic character: the voice comes from inside the body, the belly, the stomach – from something incompatible with and irreducible to the activity of the mouth. The fact that we see the aperture does not demystify the voice; on the contrary, it enhances the enigma” (Dolar 2006: 70; original emphasis).

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Figure 8: Trilby and Svengali in concert, 1894, illustration by George Du Maurier from his novel

(Du Maurier 1998: 250). The whole theatre is in uproar because of her strange song, which is no longer controlled by her former master. As it turns out, the hypnotic spell of Svengali has been broken as Trilby, standing on the stage, witnessed the sudden death that he suffered while sitting in his theatre box. Nevertheless, the overall tone of the novel remains sexist. It is not just that, following the death of her master, Trilby fades away until she is brought under his control one last time and made to produce her sublime swan song in the superlative voice of La Svengali. What is even more important is the fact that although Svengali and the three British artists seem to have different interests in Trilby, they all meet in the appreciation of La Svengali’s song, which is coterminous with the erasure of Trilby’s ‘voice’. The text demonizes Svengali and sympathizes with the British artists, but there is no actual heteroglossia when it comes to the attitude of these characters and the implied author towards La Svengali’s sublime sound and the obliteration of Trilby’s agency this entails.

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The various characters and the implied author all equally enjoy La Svengali’s song at the expense of Trilby’s subjectivity. Du Maurier’s novel puts a feminine voice centre stage – only to strip it of any agency. In the course of the novel, the female protagonist becomes an internationally celebrated voice, but only as the instrument of a male genius figure. Instead of singing with her own artistic voice, Trilby fulfils the function of an acoustic mirror: La Svengali’s sublime singing both assures Svengali in his artistic self-expression and mirrors the desire and the enjoyment of the three British artists. Owing to the fact that Du Maurier’s performer is reduced to a signifier of the interests of others, the question of a female subjectivity is elided. What all women really want – or at least, so the novel suggests with its figure of the singer who unconsciously sings under hypnosis – is not just to sing, but to become the mechanical instrument and utterly selfless medium of another voice. The instrumentalization of Du Maurier’s performer thus resembles the figuration of the performer’s voice in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet discussed at the very beginning of this book. There is, however, a crucial difference. In contrast to Rushdie’s Vina Apsara, whose voice is artificially recreated by her lover after her death, Trilby is turned into a mechanical automaton during her lifetime. While Rushdie’s texts offers a critique of how, after her demise, Vina’s self-assured ‘voice’ is reduced to an acoustic mirror of the desires of her lover and fans, Du Maurier not only has his performer be utterly unaware of the stellar career that she has under hypnosis, but his text also underlines that she can sing only because of her total submission to a male artist and his ‘voice’. For her, being ‘sung’ by her master is the one and only way of singing on the public stage. While Rushdie’s postmodern novel uses the mechanized voice of its singer as a recycled theme, Trilby’s automaton voice is characterized by a far greater historical specificity since the mechanical voice of Du Maurier’s singer can be seen to anticipate modern sound media such as radio and sound film. At the same time, Du Maurier also draws on the context of late nineteenth-century media history and the development of new sound technologies in the decades preceding the publication of his novel. The invention of the telephone in 1876 made it possible to hear voices when the speaker was not present. The disembodiment of the human voice became even more pronounced with the phonograph, which was invented one year later to record and preserve sound as well as to reproduce sound recordings.⁹ Both the phonograph and its commercial suc-

 For a general discussion of how the voice was affected by these modern innovations, see Anne Karpf’s chapter “How Technology Has Transformed the Voice” (2006: 234– 254). For a theoretical discussion of the development of modern technical media and the cultural shifts they

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cessor, the gramophone, which was patented in 1887, could bring back the voices of persons who were absent or even dead. The new possibilities of these modern technical devices produced both fascination and fear. As Anne Karpf writes in her book The Human Voice, “The phonograph excited not only marvel but also, because of its associations with ghostliness, anxiety” (Karpf 2006: 237). However, it was not just the ghostly but also the mechanical quality of the recorded voice that triggered fears. On the one hand, the phonograph and the gramophone gained their commercial success almost entirely through recordings of music and the singing voice (Karpf 2006: 239), including their ability to preserve and immortalize a singer’s inimitable timbre. On the other hand, they also stood for the process of modern industrialization, as they were seen to render the individual human voice impersonal and mechanical.¹⁰ While these technical devices preserved the sound of individual human voices, they “seemed also to possess the power to efface the speaker” (Karpf 2006: 238). Lying on her deathbed and replaying the ‘voice’ of her dead master Svengali, Trilby reminds us of the automatic manner in which a phonograph or gramophone would reproduce a sound recording. In Rushdie’s novel, written more than a century after Trilby, the voice of Vina Apsara is effaced because her lover resuscitates her voice after her death through technological means and, in so doing, posthumously turns her into a machine reflecting his fantasy and desire. In contrast to The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Du Maurier’s novel has the fascination and anxiety regarding modern technology intersect with the fascination and anxiety surrounding feminine voice and agency at the time it was written. By turning its female performer into a “singing-machine” (Du Maurier 1998: 299), the novel points to the way in which modern technology appears to threaten human individuality. Yet the text also assuages fears surrounding the presence of women in the public sphere by erasing the individual agency of Trilby and turning her into an automaton that reproduces ‘her master’s voice’. Once again this underlines the cultural urgency of nineteenth-century performer texts: In contrast to the postmodern novel, where the mechanical female voice surfaces as a recycled theme, the fin-de-siècle novel intertwines the cultural ambivalence regarding modern technology with the cultural ambivalence surrounding the feminine voice. At the time of its publication, Du Maurier’s novel triggered a veritable ‘Trilbymania’, repeating the craze surrounding La Svengali in the diegesis. The imbring about, see Friedrich Kittler’s classic study Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1995) and his discussion in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999).  On the uncanny character of the impersonal and mechanically produced voice, see Mladen Dolar (2006: 22).

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mensely popular novel was immediately adapted for the stage, and both the novel and the play led to an early instance of merchandising with the sale of various consumer goods, including soap, ice cream and the so-called Trilby hat, which was used in the first London production of the play.¹¹ In fact, the commodification of Du Maurier’s novel and its spin-off products only reduplicated the treatment of the female performer within the text. Among the elements that underline the reification of the singer in Du Maurier’s novel are the fan pictures that display the star in ancient dress and in the pose of the Venus of Milo.¹² The photographic portrait of La Svengali, which is reproduced and offered for sale, refers us not only to the commodification of the female performer in the context of modern celebrity culture, but also to her instrumentalization as art material. Trilby may be able, under hypnosis, to transform well-known melodies into an endless series of variations.¹³ However, at the same time, the superlative song of La Svengali arrests her in a quasi-sculptural pose. As “an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds – just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else –” (Du Maurier 1998: 299), she is nothing more and nothing less than the artefact of a male artist. Published in 1894, Du Maurier’s novel and its immense success can also be read against the backdrop of the fears and anxieties surrounding the women’s movement in fin-de-siècle culture. By the end of the century, the women’s movement had gathered a lot of momentum. An increasing number of women actively contributed to public life as feminist activists, social reformers and writers, and on the professional theatre stage, the plays by Henrik Ibsen had come to provide actresses with more interesting roles. The last two decades of the century also saw the rise of the so-called ‘New Woman’. As Sally Ledger points out, the New Woman was above all a discursive construct created by the periodical press (1997: 2). The term ‘New Woman’, which was first used in 1894 (Legder 1997: 2), the year of Trilby’s publication, referred to the figure of the educated,

 See for instance Davison (2002: 73) and Gracombe (2003: 77).  Like the photograph of La Svengali mentioned in the text, Du Maurier’s original illustrations for the novel also depict the figure and pose of the singer in a manner that is strongly reminiscent of the iconography of ancient sculptures. Indeed, the figure of Svengali can be seen in the tradition of the ancient Pygmalion myth: He turns Trilby into the art figure of La Svengali similar to the way in which Pygmalion creates his Galatea. On the important role played by the Pygmalion myth and the sculptural pose on the Victorian stage, see Gail Marshall (1998). For a discussion of the Pygmalion myth in general, see Victor Stoichita’s The Pygmalion Effect (2008).  According to Nina Auerbach, the transformative power of Trilby’s voice can be read together with her characterization as a figure: “Her ability under hypnosis to ring endless variations upon familiar tunes is the power of her character to transform itself endlessly […]” (Auerbach 1981: 286).

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economically and sexually independent woman who questioned the idea of marriage being the only option for women (Showalter 1992: 38). As a quintessentially modern phenomenon, the New Woman was applauded for her progressive stance. At the same time, however, she was also the object of virulent attack and hostility. Not only did she challenge male supremacy in art and the professions (Showalter 1992: 38), but her professional and sexual independence also pointed to a crisis in the binary gender system of Victorian culture. Because she undermined Victorian gender norms, the New Woman provoked cultural fears as a transgressive and even anarchic figure.¹⁴ In Trilby, both the extreme expropriation of the woman’s ‘voice’ and the clear reinstallation of gender difference can be read as expressive of these anxieties surrounding femininity in fin-de-siècle culture. While in the beginning Trilby is characterized by her gender ambivalence, she becomes increasingly feminized under the influence of the three artists. Moreover, she is made to submit to a drastic form of masculine control as her uncontrollable and grotesque voice is superseded by the sublime song of La Svengali. By turning her into a heteronomous figure who ceases to exist as an individual subject, the text works against the figurative association of the voice with agency that underpins all the other examples discussed in this book. Rather than referring to the voice as a marker of the subject’s unique individuality, the narrative’s emphasis on the ventriloquized performer voice elides the very possibility of feminine agency. In addition, the text also negates feminine creativity by turning the performer into source material for male artistry. In so doing, Trilby refigures the tradition of the Künstlernovelle in German Romanticism, such, as for example, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Rat Krespel” (“Councillor Krespel”). In Hoffmann’s text, Krespel, a musician who, like Svengali, happens to have a disagreeable voice, forbids his daughter Antonie to sing. Instead, he plays the violin so that she can ‘sing’ through his play. His violin takes the place of her body and his play that of her song.¹⁵ Significantly, Du Maurier revives this tradition, otherwise absent in  For a discussion of the New Woman, see Sally Ledger’s The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (1997), Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1992: 38 – 58) and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2002b: 63 – 91) as well as the volume The New Woman in Fiction and Fact edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (2002). On the New Woman in America, see Martha Patterson (2005). Also see the New Woman Reader, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson (2001), which documents the public debate over the New Woman at the time. On fin-de-siècle misogyny, see the classic discussion by Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1988).  For a discussion of this tradition, see Corina Caduff (2003). Du Maurier’s Trilby can also be seen in the context of contemporaneous French novels such as Tomorrow’s Eve by Villiers de

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British and American narrative fiction, at a moment when the presence of women and the women’s movement in the public sphere were felt to be more threatening than ever before. His figure of the singer who performs in public without a ‘voice’ of her own appears to be a drastic way of appeasing the fears surrounding the modern figure of the New Woman.

6.2 “A strange sound”: Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” (1934) While Du Maurier’s late Victorian novel revolves around a sexist scenario of vocal expropriation and ventriloquism, Dinesen’s modern tale proposes an altogether different trajectory. Like Du Maurier’s text, Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” features an extraordinary female singer in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Yet in contrast to Du Maurier, who focuses on the female performer as the artistic medium and product of a male musician, Dinesen is interested in the self-fashioning of the female artist. By the time she wrote “The Dreamers”, in which she tells the story about the resilient self-creation of the performer Pellegrina Leoni, the women’s cause had made a lot of progress in the United States, Britain and in several other European countries, including Dinesen’s home country Denmark. Early in the century, the suffragettes had taken their struggle for the vote to the streets, where they expressed their concerns and demands both visibly and vocally in public speeches, mass meetings, marches and demonstrations.¹⁶ With these highly visible and vocal forms of protest, the suffragettes appropriated and occupied spaces in the public sphere and literally transformed streets and squares into a theatricalized stage in order to make themselves seen and heard. Since these non-violent protests did not lead to any palpable results, some groups resorted to ever more radical militant tactics including the violent damaging of property through window breaking, arson and bomb attacks. The suffragettes got into street fights with the police and were arrested in spectacular and media-effective ways. In prison, they continued to give physical expression

l’Isle-Adam (1886) and The Castle of the Carpathians by Jules Verne (1893), in which the female singer turns out to be a mechanical automaton. For an in-depth discussion of this figuration of the female performing voice, see Felicia Frank Miller’s The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (1995).  See, for example, Sandra Stanley Holton (1995), Mary Chapman and Barbara Green (2007), Melanie Phillips (2004), Lucinda Hawksley (2013), the essay collection edited by June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (2000) as well as the anthologies edited by Glenda Norquay (1995) and Joyce Marlow (2001) documenting the campaign of the suffragettes.

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to their political struggle by going on hunger strike, which meant that they were subjected to painful practices of forcible feeding. On 4th June 1913 at the Epsom Derby, Emily Davison went as far as to step out on to the racecourse in front of the King’s horse while holding a suffragette flag in her hands. Davison was knocked down in the collision with the racehorse in front of several running cameras and, fatally injured, died a few days later. As her coffin arrived in London, five thousand women formed a spectacular funeral procession, celebrating Davison as a modern-day martyr.

Figure 9: Christabel Pankhurst addressing a crowd in Trafalgar Square, London, 1908

Importantly, concerns that were previously negotiated by the textual voices in Victorian novels about female performers and formulated as part of a political campaign by earlier first-wave feminists were now literally given voice to and forcefully fought for in the public sphere. Rather than represented in the textual form of the novel and outlined in political petitions, they were now concretely embodied in the very corporeal struggle of the passionate and sometimes reckless suffragettes.¹⁷ In

 In one of her most famous speeches, delivered in Hartford, Connecticut, on 13th November 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the British suffragette movement, points out the importance of generating public and media attention in “the whole history of politics”: “You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody

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Figure 10: Anny Kenney being arrested, 1913

the United States and Britain, the campaign inspired several suffrage novels, including The Convert (1907) by the suffragette, actress and playwright Elizabeth Robins, The Sturdy Oak (1917) written by a collective of writers, Mary Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven (1917), Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) as well as Rebecca West’s The Judge (1922).¹⁸ Yet the very real battle was also recorded in a great number of documents, including speeches, pictures and film footage.¹⁹ During the First World War, the suffragettes’ both vocal and corporeal fight for the women’s vote else, you have to fill the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under” (2016: 24).  On literature inspired by the suffrage movement, see Elaine Showalter’s chapter “Women Writers and the Suffrage Movement” (1999: 216 – 239), Susan Carlson (2000) and Maia Joseph (2006).  See for instance the compilation of early films from the BFI National Archive Make More Noise! Suffragettes in Silent Film (2015), which includes newsreels of Emily Davison’s fatal intervention at the Epsom Derby and her funeral procession. Davison is also remembered in the contemporary film Suffragette (2015), which in addition to a scene in which Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) delivers a speech, includes the Epsom Derby episode and concludes with an original newsreel of Davison’s funeral procession.

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was largely halted in favour of their active help in the war effort, which gave women a certain degree of independence and empowerment. It was after the end of the war that women in many countries, including the United States and Great Britain, were enfranchised.²⁰ The political aim for which the suffragettes had fought in their relentless battle was achieved: After the long vocal struggle of the suffragettes, women finally got the political vote. The subsequent interwar period was marked by a liberal culture giving women unprecedented freedoms and providing them with new opportunities in their professional, intellectual and sexual development. It is this cultural climate Angela Carter captures in her postmodern novel Wise Children discussed at the very beginning of this study. Carter’s Chance Sisters revel in their illegitimacy and turn their erotic energy into the basis of their performing careers. In so doing, Carter’s heroines celebrate a form of liberation which would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century, and which had become possible thanks to new cultural models of femininity. When a second generation of New Women arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, they both challenged and redefined gender norms through the ways in which they fashioned themselves. The cultural phenomenon central for a contextualization of “The Dreamers” is precisely the self-creation that avant-garde women artists began to engage in during the interwar period.²¹ As mentioned before, in Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s Alcharisi anticipates a radical self-fashioning of the woman artist, but it is a model that Eliot, the author, could not yet imagine for herself. However, by the time Dinesen had fashioned herself into a writer, feminine self-creation had become a far more accessible artistic practice. This creative self-fashioning of the woman artist was embraced by Dinesen in her own self-presentation. When Baroness Karen Blixen reinvented herself as a professional writer in the mid-1930s and published her English texts under the masculine pen name Isak Dinesen, she crafted a highly artificial public persona, which she ostentatiously staged as a flamboyant mask and masquerade.²² In a

 In the United States, women were given the right to vote at the federal level in 1920. In Great Britain, the vote for women was introduced in two stages: In 1918, women over 30 were enfranchised, while in 1928 suffrage was extended to women over 21. In Dinesen’s native Denmark, the women’s vote was introduced a few years earlier, namely in 1915.  Examples include Edith Sitwell and Djuna Barnes in the area of literature and Vanessa Bell and Claude Cahun in the area of fine art.  Blixen’s pen name ‘Isak Dinesen’ is, strictly speaking, a half-pseudonym. Dinesen was her maiden name, while the assumed Hebrew name Isak means “the one who laughs”. Blixen had several nicknames such as Tanne and Tania and she acquired a number of other pseudonyms, including Osceola and Lord Byron. See Judith Thurman (1995: 5).

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photographic portrait from 1954, for example, the writer can be seen to wear a pierrot costume she already possessed in her youth (Figure 11).²³ She fixes the viewer with her alert look and smiles enigmatically. Her heavy make-up and the way she is lit underline the theatricality of Dinesen’s extravagant self-dramatization, while at the same time, her thin figure almost disappears under the ample folds of her white costume and the semi-transparent fabric framing her face. Her portrait and pseudonym both suggest a complex dialectic of self-presentation and self-masking, while also referring us to the multiple self-transformations that characterized her biography. It was after she had lost her African farm near the Ngong Hills in Kenya and was forced to return to her native Denmark that Blixen began to write professionally in her late forties. In 1934 she published her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, through which she established herself as the internationally renowned storyteller Isak Dinesen. As well as writing literary tales, Dinesen turned her own life into a fictional narrative. She fashioned herself as a fictionalized persona by claiming, for instance, that she was three thousand years old and had already dined with Socrates (Thurman 1995: 331, Brantly 2002: 66). As suggested by the various forms of her self-fashioning, masks and masquerades were crucial to Dinesen’s artistic self-expression. Although more could be said about Dinesen’s self-performance, this kind of self-fashioning can also be traced in her writing. Indeed, rather than with the biography of Blixen,²⁴ I am concerned with the poetics of Dinesen, who asserted that she had promised her soul to the devil so that she could turn her life into tales.²⁵ What is the cultural position of Dinesen’s voice as an author, writer and storyteller? How is her self-authorship reflected by her treatment of the performer voice in “The Dreamers”? The model Dinesen chose for herself as an artist was the storyteller Scheherazade. Scheherazade, in Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, manages to stave off death by entertaining the king with her stories. She forces him to postpone her execution by always interrupting her narration at dawn and resuming her tales the following night. Scheherazade’s storytelling, in other words, defies closure because ending the dialogue with the other, the king,

 Further photographs of Dinesen can be found in the richly illustrated biography by Frans Lasson and Clara Svendsen (1970).  For a detailed account of Blixen’s life, see Judith Thurman’s standard biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1995).  See Thurman (1995: 140, 258, 337) as well as Brantly (2002: 66). Blixen felt that she had been cut off from life after realizing that she had contracted a severe form of syphilis from her husband and after she lost both her farm and her friend and lover Denys Finch Hatton in Africa. It was against this backdrop that she turned to a second life in her writing and, as part of her artistic practice, fashioned herself as a living artefact.

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Figure 11: Karen Blixen posing in a pierrot costume, 1954, photograph by Rie Niessen

would be fatal. Instead, her constant caesurae allow her to survive by perpetually modulating her narrative role.²⁶ Moreover, Scheherazade enchants the king

 Note the following passage in Blixen’s 1937 memoir Out of Africa, in which she describes the importance storytelling had for her and her friend and lover Denys Finch Hatton: “Denys, who lived much by the ear, preferred hearing a tale told to reading it; when he came to the farm he would ask: ‘Have you got a story?’ I had been making up many while he had been away. In the evenings he made himself comfortable, spreading cushions like a couch in front of the fire, and with me sitting on the floor, cross-legged like Scheherazade herself, he would listen, clear-eyed, to a long tale, from when it began until it ended” (Blixen 2001: 194). Sydney Pollack’s biopic Out of Africa (1985) emphasizes Blixen’s live storytelling and, in so doing, suggests that it was Blixen’s narrative entertainment of and dialogue with Finch Hatton that brought out her imagination and talent as a storyteller. As mentioned by Thurman, the motto of Finch Hatton’s family was, fittingly enough, “Je responderai” (“I shall answer”) (Thurman 1995: 207). References to Dinesen’s artistic identification with the figure of Scheherazade as a storyteller are frequent

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with her voice in her oral storytelling. Today we remember Dinesen not so much in her role as an oral storyteller,²⁷ but as a writer of literary tales characterized by a highly complex textuality. Nevertheless, her writing is clearly inspired by Scheherazade’s narrative dialogue. For the strategic survival of the archetypal storyteller in Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, dialogue is literally vital, and it also plays a pivotal role for Dinesen’s voice as an artist. As a storyteller, she conceives of her art as fundamentally dialogical, that is, as a performance which addresses and thus creates the very audience by which it is also itself constituted. This fundamental dialogism becomes particularly palpable in “The Dreamers”, where the protagonist finds a variety of audiences for her self-performances. The narrative revolves around a spectacular soprano who loses her professional voice and role as a singer but who gains another form of self-expression. Her singing voice falls silent, but it is precisely this loss that allows her to create a ‘voice’ of her own. She gains agency because she can shape her own destiny as a modern woman artist who turns her everyday life into a form of art. But who is Pellegrina Leoni, the singer? How is her singing voice described? And how does she construct herself through her role as a performer? In contrast to Du Maurier’s Trilby, Pellegrina Leoni is not ‘sung’ by another voice but presents herself as a consummate artist in her own right. She does have a Jewish impresario called Marcus Cocoza, but rather than being controlled by him as Trilby is by Svengali, she is motivated by two passions, namely her obsession with her star persona and her attachment to her audience, which Marcus describes in the following way: ‘She had in her life two great, devouring passions, which meant everything to her proud heart. ‘The first was her passion for the great soprano, Pellegrina Leoni. […] In her relation to this idol she had no forbearance and no rest. […] She worked in the service of Pellegrina Leoni like a slave under the whip, weeping, dying at times, when it was demanded of her. ‘She was a devil to the other women of the opera, for she needs must have [sic] all the parts for Pellegrina. She was indignant because it was impossible for her to perform two rôles [sic] within the same opera. […]

in Dinesen criticism. See for example Elisabeth Bronfen (1986a, 1986b), Susan Brantly (2002) and Adriana Cavarero (2002).  Rather than reading her stories out in their written version, Dinesen liked to recite them from memory. Her image as a modern-day Scheherazade was further confirmed by the frequent appearances she made on the radio (Lasson and Svendsen 1970: 171, Thurman 1995: 347– 348). In one of her frequent and popular radio talks, Dinesen “told her audience what an immense pleasure it was ‘to be a voice and not a piece of printed matter’” (Thurman 1995: 348).

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‘And the other great passion […] of this great heart was her love for her audience. And that was not for the great people […] but for her galleries. Those poor people of the back streets and market places […] – she loved them beyond everything in the world. […] ‘[…] And she was adored by the people. (Dinesen 1969: 402– 405)

Driven by both her boundless love for her audience and her unconditional commitment to her star persona, Dinesen’s singer is ready to undergo any sacrifice in order to turn herself into an “idol” (Dinesen 1969: 402) to be revered and worshipped by her audience and herself alike. On the one hand, her voice is composite, multiple and plural because she performs various operatic roles. When necessary, that is “when it was demanded of her” (Dinesen 1969: 402) by the operatic scripts and scores, she will weep and die – only to constantly resurrect herself on stage. On the other hand, her voice is monologic because she privileges one single role. As mentioned by Marcus Cocoza, she wants to “have all the parts for Pellegrina” (Dinesen 1969: 402). Instead of actually transforming herself into various operatic figures and lending them her voice, she lays claim to all parts so as to use them as components of her own persona and subsume them under her one superlative role, “the great soprano, Pellegrina Leoni” (Dinesen 1969: 402). When a fire breaks out during a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the opera house in Milan, the singer is hit by a falling beam. She makes a narrow escape from death, but loses her singing voice as a result of the shock. How is this near-fatal accident to be read? Dinesen’s tale can be seen to rewrite precisely the type of nineteenth-century narratives traced in this book in which performers eventually lose their public voice. The episode in which Dinesen’s protagonist loses her professional voice refigures all the novels by Staël, Jewsbury, Meredith, Eliot, James and Hawthorne discussed in the previous chapters. Seemingly in this tradition, “The Dreamers” reverberates with a tragic sense of loss. The singer leaves the stage, never to be heard in public again. However, by using what would be a classic ending in a nineteenth-century text as her point of departure, Dinesen shifts the narrative argument. In fact, the accident can be seen to point to a problem in Pellegrina’s persona as a singer. Investing everything in one single role, the incident suggests, is fatal. While La Svengali is produced by her master as a singing automaton, “the great soprano” is created by the performer herself. But what Dinesen’s narrative actually suggests is that the star persona of her self-created “idol” (Dinesen 1969: 402) is too static, thus allowing her only a limited range of articulation. Dinesen’s protagonist loses her professional voice and her social role as a singer, but she gains a different form of self-expression. Similar to Staël’s Corinne, who stages a burial in order to recreate herself as an artificial figure, Pelle-

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grina Leoni has her star persona buried at a public fake funeral. Afterwards she explains to her former impresario: “There are many that I can be. […] I will not be one person again, Marcus, I will be always many persons from now. Never again will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman, to suffer so much” (Dinesen 1969: 417– 418). What Pellegrina opts for is a protean performance of the self. Realizing the lethal effects of a single self-construction, she fragments her former star persona into a myriad of masks and masquerades: “I will not be one person again” (Dinesen 1969: 418), and “[t]here are many that I can be” (Dinesen 1969: 417). Through her decision to never again be trapped in one single role, Pellegrina not only becomes a cosmopolitan traveller (like Eliot’s Alcharisi) but also adopts a new mask for each lover she encounters on her journey. To the Englishman Lincoln Forsner in Rome, she presents herself as the courtesan Olalla, to Friedrich Hohenemser in Lucerne as the milliner and revolutionary Madame Lola, and to Baron Guildenstern in Saumur as the saint Rosalba. This radical and resilient role-play suggests at once a critical distance from, and a vibrant expression of, the self. Compared to her static singer persona, her multiple masks and masquerades allow her to recreate herself in a far more mobile mode. The actual theatre may have burnt down, but for Pellegrina, the wanderer, all the world becomes a stage.²⁸ The multiple self-dramatizations on which she embarks after the symbolic burial of her singer persona follow a typically modernist project. By transposing her theatrical scenarios into social everyday life, she recreates herself as her own work of art. She is continually transforming herself, not unlike the protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), who turns into a purely aesthetic sign of writing and, in so doing, blurs any boundaries between text and self.²⁹ Although, or rather because Pellegrina has lost her voice as a singer, she now has a ‘voice’ of her own, and this time her self-expression is indeed multiple and dialogic. In each of her newly engendered roles and masks, she addresses her lovers in a different manner and seduces them through different cultural scripts. As the courtesan Olalla in Rome, for instance, she talks to Forsner in a vein similar to Staël’s Corinne, who guides Oswald through Italy and, in so doing, heightens his perception. “She was extraordinarily alive to all impressions”, Forsner says about Olalla. “Wherever we went together she would observe many more things than I did […]” (Dinesen 1969: 344). In the other roles she embodies, Pellegrina not only converses with her lovers but also addresses a

 Note that her name ‘Pellegrina’ evokes the Italian verb pellegrinare (‘to wander, go on a pilgrimage’).  See Elisabeth Bronfen’s reading of Woolf’s novel (Bronfen 2013: 414– 420).

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public audience. As the milliner and revolutionary Madame Lola, she uses her millinery atelier as a meeting place and, similar to Meredith’s Vittoria, calls her co-conspirators to action, “standing on the counter, discoursing and directing the people” (Dinesen 1969: 361). As the saint Rosalba, she entertains an aristocratic audience by describing one of her spiritual visions, thus recalling the semi-public ‘Conversations’ of the visionary Margaret Fuller. By adopting these cultural scripts, Dinesen’s heroine becomes purely textual and, in so doing, resembles Staël’s Corinne, who is composed of a myriad of texts. At the same time, she also gains a new voice. While Pellegrina has lost her voice as a singer, she is now able to talk in many different voices, as she is constantly appropriating different cultural scripts, roles and masks. However, what is even more important than her concrete voices in these roles is the metaphoric ‘voice’ she has in shaping her self-performances. Rather than subjecting herself to opera libretti and scores as a singer, she has a voice (in the sense of agency) because she now chooses the scripts she wants to perform. Pellegrina may not be a storyteller in the literal sense of the word, but like Dinesen’s model, Scheherazade, she creates a constant dialogue. Even though she no longer appears in the public arena of the professional theatre, her selfperformance still depends on the other. It is in dialogue with pre-existing cultural scripts and roles that she adopts and modulates her multiple masks, roles and disguises.³⁰ Likewise she creates and transforms herself by always addressing an audience. While displaying her masks and masquerades, she requires an addressee and, indeed, she presents each of her disguises to another lover, thus turning each of her lovers into an audience of one. At the same time, her dialogic self-stagings also resemble Scheherazade’s storytelling in hinging on a related principle of interruption. Whenever Pellegrina feels caught up in a particular role, Marcus helps her disappear without a trace and put on a new mask; she abruptly discontinues her performance in order to continue with another one. Scheherazade survives the next morning because of the cliffhangers she builds into her storytelling. In a similar vein, Pellegrina’s self-authorship is sustained by a continual reinvention and renewal. As a result, her self-performance is one of fleeting evanescence, of continual disappearance and re-emergence.

 “The Dreamers” can be seen to prefigure Judith Butler’s notion of identity as performance, that is the idea that identity is constituted by a whole series of performative acts in which cultural codes and norms are both cited and resignified (see Butler 1990). The appropriation of stereotypical images of femininity also resonates with Joan Rivière’s contemporaneous text entitled “Womanliness as a Masquerade” and published in 1929 (Rivière 1989).

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Pellegrina serves as a figure who reflects Dinesen’s poetics. She refers us to a voice that disappears and then resounds as pure text. This poetics can be related to Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the modern literary text. In “The Song of the Sirens”, Blanchot suggests that the sirens’ enchanting song guides the sailor to “a place where the only thing left was to disappear, because in this region of source and origin, music itself had disappeared more completely than in any other place of the world” (Blanchot 1999: 443). This place, paradoxically enough, marks both the origin and the disappearance of music. The sirens’ song comes from an abyss and, at the same time, opens an abyss in every utterance. As Blanchot writes, the sirens reproduce “the ordinary singing of mankind” and because as animals they can sing like human beings, they create “a suspicion that all human singing was really inhuman” (Blanchot 1999: 443). In other words, the inhuman song of the sirens refers to the presence of another, inhuman voice within the human voice and, in so doing, points to an uncanny strangeness in ordinary singing. Blanchot describes the sirens’s song in the following way: There was something marvelous about the song: it actually existed, it was ordinary and at the same time secret, a simple, everyday song […] sung in an unreal way by strange powers […]; it was a song from the abyss and once heard it opened an abyss in every utterance and powerfully enticed whoever heard it to disappear into that abyss. (Blanchot 1999: 443)

The strangeness that is evoked by the sirens’ song in every utterance can be related to the modern literary text, which like the encounter with the sirens is closely connected to an unreachable abyss marking at once its possibility and its vanishing point, its origin and its disappearance. Similar to the way in which the sirens’ song refers to an inhuman dimension in the human voice, modern literary writing according to Blanchot renders the author’s voice impersonal. Resembling Blanchot’s notion of the modern literary text, Pellegrina’s voice can no longer be attached to a person but instead dissolves into the pure textuality of writing. At the same time, it is important to note that the voice of Dinesen’s protagonist is refracted and mediated by the narration of other character voices. Her stellar career, the loss of her voice and her adoption of multiple roles are the chronological events of the story we can reconstruct once we reach the end of “The Dreamers”. The actual structure of the text, however, consists of several narratives that frame Pellegrina, who is almost the only figure not to tell a story: A first-level narrative of the authorial narrator frames a second-level narrative, that is, the story that Lincoln Forsner tells to the famous but weary storyteller Mira Jama on a full-moon night, whilst their ship is sailing off the African

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coast on the Indian Ocean. According to Lincoln, he was searching for the prostitute Olalla, who had made him a dreamer, when he met his two friends, Hohenemser and Guildenstern, who, in turn, told him their stories about Madame Lola and Rosalba. This complex narrative structure refers us to the voices in the text or, as Bakhtin would put it, its heteroglossia. As we have seen in our earlier discussions, to Bakhtin, narrative fiction is inherently dialogic. It stages the dissonance between various narrator and character voices as well as their different social positions, interests and accents. “The Dreamers” enacts a heightened form of heteroglossia because the tension is not just between the various character-narrators, namely Lincoln, Hohenemser and Guildenstern, all of whom derive a narcissistic sense of identity from their beloved object. The fiercest conflict can be observed between their narrative desire and Pellegrina’s protean performances. While Pellegrina keeps reinventing herself so as to avoid being read and appropriated, each of the three men seeks to reduce her to the particular role she plays in his respective story. This conflict comes to a climax on a stormy winter night. The three men have just finished telling each other their stories about Olalla, Madame Lola and Rosalba in a hotel in the Swiss Alps when, all of a sudden, they catch sight of a veiled woman. They all believe they recognize their respective object of desire and chase the woman as she is running away from them towards a mountain pass. Because Pellegrina escapes any one defining role or mask, the question Lincoln asks her when he finally catches up with her is inevitable. Yet it also turns out to be fatal. ‘[…] Who are you?’ She did not turn, or look at me. But the next moment she did what I had always feared that she might do: she spread out her wings and flew away. […] she threw herself from the earth clear into the abyss, and disappeared from our sight. […] I thought then of how it had been my question to her which had driven her into this great white full-moon death, in the end. (Dinesen 1969: 395 – 397)

Pellegrina refuses to answer and attempts to escape from this scene of symbolic interpellation, in which the men seek to pin her down to one single identity, by throwing herself into an abyss and disappearing from sight. Yet as suggested by the lethal injuries which she suffers in her failed flight, she is literally killed by the question which seeks to reduce her to a stable identity. What then is the voice of the text? By asking this question, I am not suggesting that the various textual voices are unified by a single voice. Rather, the question is one of tone – the tone that emerges as a result of the ways in which the

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implied author orchestrates the various voices in the text. The narrative mode of “The Dreamers” appears as ‘feminine’, or perhaps even as feminist, in the way in which it shows, and actually performs, the violence implicit in the narrative framing of the male figures. Significantly, it is only as the woman lies dying that Marcus mentions the name and story of the great soprano. In a deft gesture, Dinesen has his commentary on the stable persona of the singer coincide with the actual death of the woman. Or put differently, the text implies that death is brought about by a narrative desire that seeks to reduce her to one single role. Yet the feminine mode of Dinesen’s narration goes further than that. Shortly before Pellegrina’s death, her narrative containment is disrupted by a strange sound heralding her demise. Her whole body vibrated under her passion like the string of an instrument. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘look, look here! It is Pellegrina Leoni – it is she, it is she herself again – she is back. Pellegrina, the greatest singer, poor Pellegrina, she is on the stage again. To the honour of God, as before. Oh, she is here, it is she – Pellegrina, Pellegrina herself!’ It was unbelievable that, half dead as she was, she could house this storm of woe and triumph. It was, of course, her swan song. […] The old Jew was in a terrible state of pain and strain. […] Of a sudden he took up his little walking stick and struck three short strokes on the side of the stretcher. ‘Donna Pellegrina Leoni,’ he cried in a clear voice. ‘En scène pour le deux [sic].’ Like a soldier to the call, or a war horse to the blast of the trumpet, she collected herself at his words. Within the next minute she became quiet in a gallant and deadly calm. She gave him a glance from her enormous dark eyes. In one mighty movement, like that of a billow rising and sinking, she lifted the middle of her body. A strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal, came from her breast. Slowly the flames in her face sank, and an ashen grey covered it instead. Her body fell back, stretched itself out and lay quite still, and she was dead. (Dinesen 1969: 426 – 427)

Initially Pellegrina’s famous singer persona seems to be reconstituted by the cue given by her impresario. She slips into her former role, “the great soprano, Pellegrina Leoni” (Dinesen 1969: 402), ready to resume her part of Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at precisely the point at which she was interrupted by the near-fatal accident. The accumulation of the words “she”, “herself”, “Pellegrina Leoni” in her speech suggests unreserved identification with the role of the singer: “It is Pellegrina Leoni – it is she, it is she herself again […]. Oh, she is here, it is she – Pellegrina, Pellegrina herself!” (Dinesen 1969: 426; my emphasis). Yet ironically, the singer Leoni, a figure to whom she refers in the third person, is just as much a mask as all of her other roles. Rather than coming back on stage, she has

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in a sense never left the theatrical boards because she has never stopped performing. She was and continues to be nothing more than a performer, declaring her roles with her voice. And, indeed, while the other character voices seek to unmask Pellegrina, this last performance shows not just how fatal but also how impossible it is to lay bare and thus expose her identity. What is, however, even more disruptive is the culmination of Pellegrina’s swan song in a monstrous utterance towards the end of the passage – “a strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal” (Dinesen 1969: 427). Even though a written text cannot move beyond verbal language, the passage aesthetically evokes the effect of a voice beyond verbal meaning by comparing her articulation to a non-human utterance. In transcending language, this sound reminds us of Trilby’s sublime swan song. However, while the pure sound of Trilby’s final performance becomes a fetish object for her listeners, Pellegrina’s utterance resists being appropriated in this way. The sheer sound of her non-verbal voice subverts not just the narrative desire of the three men. It also undercuts all symbolic and imaginary codes – and hence all social roles. The sublime song Pellegrina produced as a singer allowed her and her audience to mirror themselves in each other. Her swan song articulates the very reverse: a voice of radical alterity. It is at this point that we can invoke Mladen Dolar’s notion of the voice as a surplus or excess (2006). As Dolar points out, there is an aspect of voice which disrupts rather than supports self-presence. Although the voice can inspire a reassuring sense of self-identity, there is a vocal dimension which moves us beyond symbolic and imaginary codes. The voice is uniquely familiar but also uniquely strange. What is, therefore, at stake in Dolar’s discussion is a fundamental ambivalence: the constitution and disruption of the self in and through the voice. Indeed, the passage in Dinesen’s text marks a moment where the voice expresses a radical subjectivity beyond cultural interpellation, thus allowing a part of the subject to be heard that is utterly singular and intimate. At the same time, this moment can also be linked to Blanchot’s discussion of the sirens’ song and his notion of the modern text. The strange, animal-like sound coming out of Pellegrina’s dying body is reminiscent of the inhuman song of the sirens and the strange dimension it opens in every human utterance. As in Blanchot’s notion of the modern text, the voice becomes completely impersonal. Indeed, the voice moves to the pure textuality of modern aesthetics. Moreover, the passage can once again be seen to underline the diametrically opposed ways in which the performer voice is treated in the texts by Dinesen and Du Maurier. In the scene of Trilby’s swan song, her ‘voice’ is completely erased as the three British artists enjoy the song of La Svengali, which is created by Svengali and is designed to literally sing her to death. By contrast, Pellegrina’s swan song is marked by real difference. The “strange sound” (Dinesen 1969:

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427) makes any appropriation of her voice impossible. Pellegrina’s three lovers can neither reduce her to the one role she occupies in their respective narrative nor can they enjoy her swan song because of this monstrous utterance. In contrast to Trilby, “The Dreamers” is a narrative text that is actually marked by heteroglossia. This is why I have been tracing the different voices that are foregrounded by Dinesen’s text: the voice Pellegrina has as a singer and the voice she has as a self-performer, the narrative voices of her lovers as well as the ‘voice’ of Dinesen’s text. Similar to concrete voices, which are shot through with various colours, affects, moods and intonations, textual voices also mark a surplus, namely in the form of a multi-layered complexity they introduce into a text. Important again is Bakhtin’s heteroglossia as a concept describing the discourse of narrative texts as a site where different voices can enter into conflict with each other. As has been mentioned at several points in this study, narrative fiction holds a special status as a literary genre and aesthetic medium because it juxtaposes various textual voices and hence confronts different social accents, positions and perspectives. It is through the ideological discord of various character voices and those of the narrator and the implied author that narrative fiction puts the multiplicity of textual voices centre stage. Moreover, we can speak of a ‘voice effect’ in analogy to what Shoshana Felman calls a “reading effect” (Felman 2007: 15 – 22). As Felman points out, the effect of a text lies not simply in its thematic aspects but also in the ways in which it speaks to its readers (Felman 2007: 18). Its effect resides in our relation to the text as well as the impact the text has on us. As readers and critics, we not only interpret but also actively reproduce the text (Felman 2007: 21). This is an idea that can be fruitfully transferred to the phenomenon of the voice because any voice in narrative fiction is entirely spectral and acousmatic, since it has to be evoked by the reader in the solitary act of reading. The ‘voice effect’, as I define it, also allows us to bring into play the ‘tone’ or ‘voice’ of a text as we pay attention to, and indeed foreground, the dialogue and potential dissonance between various textual voices. In fact, it is by examining the relation between the various voices that we can fill our reading of a text with our critical tone. The voice as an aesthetic category in the sense of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia is hence closely connected to a political dimension. Or put differently, the heteroglossia of a text involves us as readers and critics and refers us to the ethical aspect of literature. It is by discerning various voices that we lend our ears to the moral imagination of literature. Pellegrina may die and thus fall silent. Nevertheless it is her ‘voice’ that is ultimately granted the greatest resonance by Dinesen’s poetics. The complex orchestration of the various voices in “The Dreamers” can be seen to critique the way in which the female figure is reified. Dinesen’s text offers

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a literary critique not only of the cult surrounding the stage performer, but also of a concept of creativity in which feminine life and/or subjectivity are sacrificed in favour of masculine expression and art production, as is the case in Du Maurier’s novel.³¹ When Hannah Arendt reviewed a biography of Isak Dinesen for The New Yorker, she noted that, for Dinesen, “the chief trap in life is one’s own identity” (Arendt 1984: viii). As a quasi-manifesto of Dinesen’s poetics, “The Dreamers” demonstrates, and indeed performs, a radical dispersal of a self-identical role into a multiplicity of masks.³² Dinesen’s protagonist has a ‘voice’ although, or rather because, she has lost her concrete voice as a star singer. When her accident breaks open the static and confining character of her persona as a professional singer, she embarks on a self-staging that is both protean and evanescent. By suspending the boundary between life and art in a typically modernist gesture and by transposing her theatrical scenarios into everyday life, the former singer recreates herself, both as an artist and as her own work of art. Isak Dinesen’s text formulates an idea of modern feminine subjectivity which articulates itself in a two-fold manner: as a radical self-fashioning of the feminine artist who conceives of herself as her own work of art, and also as a radical alterity which eludes any appropriation. Dinesen’s performer dies as a result of her attempt to escape from her symbolic interpellation. However, like Staël, whose heroine is exalted to her great apotheosis in her death, Dinesen underlines that what is at stake is not a sad erasure of the woman’s voice. Similar to Corinne, whose disembodied voice will continue to inspire others after her death, Pellegrina as a performer is disembodied so that her voice can become pure textuality. Again there is a connection to Woolf’s Orlando (1928), which was published six years before Dinesen’s tale. Because the eponymous protagonist of the novel incessantly recreates him- and herself over the centuries and, in so doing, blurs any boundary between self and text, the figure of Orlando forms a pure aesthetic sign without any reference to a concrete world outside writing (Bronfen 2013: 414– 420). Following her death, Pellegrina turns into pure textuality in a similar way. The woman is dead, her body is gone, but the text keeps moving on. That Pellegrina keeps producing ever more text is underlined by the structure of Dinesen’s narrative; the entire text with all its complex narrative frames is in fact produced

 A detailed analysis of the ways in which art feeds on the cultural conjunction of death and femininity is offered by Elisabeth Bronfen in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992b). For related discussions also see Sigrid Weigel (1996) and Corina Caduff (2003).  As Kari E. Lokke puts it in her reading, Dinesen’s text “explodes, in explicit and spectacular fashion, all received notions of a coherent, individual self in favor of an imaginatively constructed collective selfhood that comes into being through performance” (Lokke 2004: 151).

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after her death.³³ The modernist writings of Woolf and Dinesen thus mark an important shift. Their texts emerge in a period in which women become part of a wider cultural sphere, not least of all because of the very corporeal battle waged by the suffragettes. In this context, the woman’s voice and agency no longer need to be embodied on the theatre stage; instead they shift into the aesthetic space of pure writing. In fact, similar to the way in which Du Maurier’s novel Trilby might be seen to anticipate modern voice media with its mechanical performer voice, Dinesen’s text replaces the concrete voice of the singer with the disembodied mode of her modernist writing. Towards the end of her life, Blixen (a.k.a. Dinesen) came to cultivate her legendary status and her iconic persona in an ever more conspicuous fashion. As Susan Hardy Aiken points out, the author’s fusion with her writing “was never more poignantly enacted” (Aiken 1990: 255) than in the last years of her life, when she seemed to literally die into her art as her already emaciated body withered to merely skeletal dimensions, as can be seen in photographs taken at the time. However, as we have seen, it is already in “The Dreamers”, the first tale written at the very beginning of her literary career, that she develops a poetics in which self-creation through performance and self-dissolution into text go hand in hand. Like her literary alter ego Pellegrina Leoni, whose voice disappears and resounds as pure textuality, Dinesen modulates her voice as a writer and storyteller by always speaking through her carefully crafted and consciously staged masks and personas. In contrast to George Eliot, who always remains ambivalent about Alcharisi, Isak Dinesen embraces the radical self-fashioning of the modern woman artist and, like Pellegrina, she merges with and dissolves into the textuality of her writing.

 Also note that in the closing narrative frame, Lincoln and Mira Jama keep telling each other stories about Pellegrina. They claim that she survives as a “pretty little jackal” and, in so doing, reasserts the potential of multiplicity and metamorphosis by barking “‘I am not one little jackal, not one; I am many little jackals.’ And pat! in a second she really is another, barking just behind you: ‘I am not one little jackal. Now I am another’” (Dinesen 1969: 429).

7 Conclusion In the BBC TV mini-series The Politician’s Husband (2013) written by Paula Milne, Emily Watson plays Freya Hoynes, a politician whose rise to power comes to overshadow the career of her husband Aiden Hoynes, who is also in politics. The series begins as Aiden resigns as a Senior Cabinet minister in order to make a leadership bid and become Prime Minister. He is supported in his political move by his wife Freya, who has had to put her own political career on hold in order to look after the children and assist her husband in his work. However, their coup backfires as they are let down and betrayed by Aiden’s political friend, the equally ambitious Cabinet minister Bruce Babbish (Ed Stoppard). Aiden is now an ordinary member of parliament and struggles with the fact that he has lost his former political influence. Freya, however, now comes into her own. When offered a Cabinet post, she accepts, having grown tired of waiting in the wings and serving as the ghostwriter of her husband’s speeches. When she is invited to drinks at 10 Downing Street shortly after her appointment as Cabinet minister, her will to power becomes evident in a scene in which she steals into the Cabinet Room and touches the backs of the chairs of the most powerful Cabinet members. In a gesture that illustrates both her strong investment in politics and her resolve to embark on her quest for power, she sits down on one of the chairs and puts her hands on the surface of the table with both sensual relish and decisive determination.

Figure 12: Freya Hoynes in the Cabinet Room in The Politician’s Husband, BBC, 2013 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-008

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Freya Hoynes has a meteoric political career. But surprisingly, the toughest power struggles she has to fight are not the ones in Westminster but the ones at home. The political and the personal come into conflict as her politically disempowered husband has difficulties accepting that his wife is now more successful and powerful. Desperate to salvage his career, Aiden not only devises an insidious plot leading to the forced resignation of his former friend Bruce, but he also tries to sabotage Freya in her political work. When Freya finds out about his deceitful activities which could also have ended her own political career, she prepares for him to move out of their family home. However, after a narrative prolepsis that brings us to the very end of the mini-series, we see the couple arriving six months later at 10 Downing Street, waving at the cheering crowd. They seem to have remained married for political reasons. Initially it appears as though Aiden has been elected Prime Minister with Freya as his Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary. However, as the final scene set in the Cabinet Room shows, it is Freya who takes the Prime Minister’s seat opposite Aiden. As the two stare at each other coldly and without emotion, the question of whether they are allies or opponents is left open. What is clear, however, is the fact that Freya fills her symbolic mandate as Prime Minister with visible self-assurance. “Let’s begin, shall we”, she says in the very last scene to the Cabinet members, who have just entered the room, ready to hold the reins of power in her own hands. What is significant about The Politician’s Husband – the British answer to other TV dramas about female politicians, such as the acclaimed Danish TV series Borgen (2010–) or the American mini-series Political Animals (2012) – is the fact that, as in these other contemporary shows, the woman is firmly emplaced in her symbolic role and mandate. Freya’s quest for power may make her appear opportunistic and even ruthless. She supports her husband’s leadership bid at the beginning only to publicly distance herself from his political position in a television interview shortly after she has become a Cabinet minister, and in the end, she makes him her Deputy Prime Minister although she has discovered his penchant for conspiracies. But what is crucial about this Westminster drama and Freya’s realpolitik is the obvious ease with which political power and femininity have come to be linked in contemporary culture. In the earlier BBC TV mini-series The Politician’s Wife from 1995, also written by Paula Milne, the woman’s role was to take public revenge on her husband, a politician who had betrayed her by having an affair. Two decades later, the paradigm has shifted. Now the woman herself is in a political key position, wedded to her symbolic mandate, ready to do what it takes in order to acquire and maintain her power in Whitehall. I invoke The Politician’s Husband to conclude this study on female performers because it allows me to illustrate the cultural shifts that have taken place be-

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tween the nineteenth century and today and to show why, in contemporary narrative fiction, the performance of the woman’s voice on the theatrical stage no longer has the same urgency. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the cultural debate has moved from the female performer and the concerns she negotiates in the nineteenth-century novel to the public positions women now occupy in their role as politicians. In The Politician’s Husband, the woman’s rise to political power does trigger a great deal of antipathy and even anxiety on the part of her husband. He has difficulty accepting her political empowerment because of his own political disempowerment. In one particularly disturbing scene, Aiden tries to reassert himself by raping Freya in their bedroom. However, the mini-series underlines that the anxiety is his, not that of the couple’s socio-political environment. Indeed, the culture depicted in the mini-series does not have any problem imagining women in powerful public positions. As demonstrated in my individual close readings, British and American narrative texts of the long nineteenth century use the figure of the female performer, her public performance and her concrete voice in order to negotiate questions of ‘voice’ in the sense of feminine agency. Since antiquity, there has been a close connection between femininity and vocality, whether in the mythopoetic traditions of the siren and the oracle or the concept of a pre-symbolic maternal voice. But while these figurations link the feminine voice to pure sound and excessive jouissance, the narrative texts discussed here point to an altogether different figuration in which the woman’s voice is far more clearly aligned with the symbolic than one might expect. It is not just that, in contrast to other literary traditions featuring feminine voices that have been turned into disembodied mechanical automata, the performer voices in British and American narrative fiction are clearly embodied in their public performances. Their presence and speech in the public sphere always also mean that these figures make a claim for a position in the cultural symbolic. In this, they are clear forerunners of figures such as Freya Hoynes, the high-profile politician who becomes the Prime Minister of Britain. The individual chapters of this study have examined a range of different scenarios. In the case of the British stage performer novel (Geraldine Jewsbury), the professional theatre serves a site of feminine self-development and economic independence even if the actress decides to leave the stage for good at the end. The preacher, by drawing on the rhetoric of the biblical prophets, legitimizes herself as a voice spoken by God, which allows her to occupy a position of spiritual authority (George Eliot), or she declares that it is the individual who is divine and that the development of women into self-reliant subjects will bring about a spiritual rebirth of the nation (Margaret Fuller). In either of these figurations of the preacher, what is remarkable is the fact that the voice of the female preacher cre-

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ates communities of women and encourages them to speak in their own voice. By contrast, the political speakers in the American texts meet with vehement and violent reactions on the part of their male audience (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James). This underlines the presence of their powerful voices and the anxiety they cause in male characters. It is not just that, compared to Aiden Hoynes in the TV series, these characters have even more trouble accepting the public presence of powerful women, but their anxiety points to a more pervasive cultural nervousness about female cultural influence. A related cultural uneasiness regarding feminine public self-assertion is explored by the chapter on “Acting Anxieties”, which illustrates two different textual treatments of the nervousness that is provoked by professional stage performers, namely the absorption of her individual voice into a collective entity (George Meredith) and the radical subjectivity of the self-fashioning modern woman artist, whose voice cannot be absorbed and hence remains as a disturbing presence (George Eliot). These two strands are modulated and accentuated even further in the final chapter, which looks at how the ventriloquized singer is used to mitigate fears surrounding the New Woman (George Du Maurier) and the way in which the voice of the self-fashioning performer leaves the actual theatre stage in order to dissolve into pure textuality (Isak Dinesen). As different as these scenarios may seem, they all foreground the public feminine voice and, in so doing, can be seen addressing issues that were discussed in the context of the so-called ‘Woman Question’. Not only were these narratives written in the period in which the women’s movement established itself and waged the eventually successful battle for women’s suffrage, but the texts also refer to the way in which emancipatory discourses have traditionally used ‘voice’ in a figurative sense in order to give agency to those unable to make themselves and their political positions heard. By foregrounding the concrete voice and public performance of their figures, the performer novels discussed in this book address women’s opportunities for self-development, their access to education and employment, their possibilities of economic independence as well as their cultural position and influence. Without any exceptions, all the performers in these novels eventually leave the public sphere and lose their voices as performers, either through marriage or death. However, despite the often tragic and/or conventional endings proposed by these narratives, what is significant is their vocal presence, the fact that as performers, they have made themselves heard in public. Indeed, most of them perform throughout the bulk of the narrative and only fall silent at the end. Moreover, textually their voices cannot be elided once they have left their mark on the text in question. This turns them into powerful voices despite their eventual silencing.

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The emphasis of my critical narrative has been on Victorian texts, where the figure of the woman with a public voice is surrounded by a great deal of cultural anxiety. It is because of this anxiety that the performer’s voice tends to be curtailed in more or less drastic ways, especially at the close of the texts. However, by framing the discussion of these texts with the optimism of Staël’s Romantic improviser Corinne and Dinesen’s modernist performer Pellegrina Leoni, I have highlighted the empowerment that many of the Victorian performers experience as they speak and sing in public. Although they cannot sustain their public voices in the end, many of them assert themselves in the positive manner of both Corinne and Pellegrina. Moreover, this critical narrative has also allowed us to isolate a trajectory of feminine self-fashioning reaching from Staël to Eliot and finally Dinesen. Severing herself from her family background and having herself symbolically buried, Corinne radically remakes herself as an independent artist who is also her own work of art. This is the figuration that Eliot both problematizes and radicalizes in her performer protagonist. While Corinne speaks for and merges with Italy, Alcharisi is even more focused on herself and her subjectivity, which makes her a disturbingly modern voice in Eliot’s late Victorian text. It is finally in Dinesen that the radical self-fashioning of the modern woman artist can become a positive model. Yet Dinesen allows us to see yet another shift. In contrast to the other performers discussed in this study, Pellegrina Leoni gains a ‘voice’ as she leaves the professional stage. Her voice as a singer disappears and resounds as the pure textuality of modernist writing. At the same time, what is also signalled by Pellegrina’s exit from the stage and her performance in a much larger social space is the fact that by the 1930s, women had become part of a far wider cultural and social sphere. By then, one of the key goals of the women’s movement – suffrage – had been attained. This also meant that women no longer experienced the ambivalence that had troubled Eliot in her public role as a writer and intellectual. This is evident in the matter-of-course manner in which figures such as Isak Dinesen, Virginia Woolf or the avant-garde poet and performer Edith Sitwell positioned themselves as public figures, artists and intellectuals. Given this cultural context, it became less urgent to stage women’s voices in performer novels. While our examples from the 1930s are all aesthetic, we can observe a distinct shift towards the political at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. In A Room of One’s Own from 1929, Virginia Woolf still writes that women often feel excluded from political institutions and by extension from the culture to which they actually belong: “[…] if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (Woolf 2001: 84).

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7 Conclusion

Today, women are positioned not as outsiders but as participants in institutional politics. Even though equality has not been achieved in all areas of public life yet, we have now moved towards a culture in which large parts of society have no difficulty respecting women in powerful political positions. The pleasure taken by the literary performer in the long nineteenth century in her public speech is now transformed into the pleasure we experience as we watch women in influential public roles dominate the TV screen. It is thanks to the types of struggles and shifts mapped by the female performer novels discussed in this study that figures such as Freya Hoynes have become conceivable today.

Figure 13: Female political empowerment in The Politician’s Husband, BBC, 2013

Illustration Credits Figure 1: Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 4:

Figure 5:

Figure 6: Figure 7: Figure 8:

Figure 9: Figure 10: Figure 11: Figure 12: Figure 13:

The Dolly Sisters in costume for their revue Paris-New York, Casino de Paris, 1927, by James Abbe; copyright: 2017 James Abbe Archive The advent of women at polls, 1929 (Two women arrive at a polling station where they will vote for the first time in the General Election of May 1929); copyright: Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Portrait of Germaine de Staël en Corinne au Cap Misène, 1809 by Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun (Paris, 1755 – Paris, 1842); reproduced courtesy of the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (donated by Mme Necker de Saussure, 1841) Miss Fanny Kemble in the character of Portia, tinsel print; published by M. & M Skelt in London in the early nineteenth century; copyright: Victoria and Albert Museum, London Charlotte and Susan Cushman as Romeo and Juliet, 1858; theatrical portrait prints (visual works) of women, c. 1700 – 1900; reproduced courtesy of the Harvard Collection/Houghton Library Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889 by J.S. Sargent (1856 – 1925); presented by Sir J.J. Duveen (1869 – 1939); copyright: Tate, London, 2017 Dinah Morris preaching on Hayslop Green, 1861 by Edward H. Corbould; Royal Collection Trust; copyright: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2017 Trilby (Trilby and Svengali in concert), 1894, illustration by George du Maurier from his much-celebrated work Trilby, 1894; copyright: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo Christabel Pankhurst, British suffragette, addressing a crowd in Trafalgar Square, London, 1908; copyright: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo Annie Kenney, British suffragette, arrested (during a demonstration), 1913; copyright: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Karen Blixen in a pierrot costume, 1954, photograph by Rie Niessen; copyright: 2017, ProLitteris, Zurich Freya Hoynes in the Cabinet room in The Politician’s Husband, BBC TV mini-series, 2013 Female political empowerment in The Politician’s Husband, BBC TV mini-series, 2013

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-009

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Index Abbate, Carolyn 34 abolitionist movement 44 acousmatic voices 37, 181 – 182 acoustic mirrors 5, 227 – 228, 246 acting profession 20, 58 – 59, 59 – 60, 61 actresses as working women 21, 75 – 76, 77, 81 Actresses’ Franchise League 57 African-American novels 44 – 45 agency of women – impersonal voices 183 – 184 – loss of 5 – 6, 171, 244, 247, 249 – public voices 28, 56 – speech and 38 – 39 – see also speaking for herself; voice of her own Aiken, Susan Hardy 266 allegory, uses of – female figures as countries 52 – 53, 70, 157, 207, 213 – 215 – in Italian opera 211 – plot of Camilla 205, 205n1, 207 Althusser, Louis 111n25 American identity 154 – 156 American star performers 45 – 46 Anderson, Benedict 41, 155, 156, 209 Anderson, Marian 45n46 Anthony, Susan B. 149 Arendt, Hannah 265 Auerbach, Nina 220n14 aunts and nieces 33n27, 72, 109 – 110, 222, 222n15 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10 – 11, 12, 28, 38, 39 – 40, 55, 131, 183 Barthes, Roland 40 Baskerville, Barnet 158 Bassnett, Susan 61 battle of the sexes 157, 177, 199, 203 Berlant, Lauren 160, 200 Blanchot, Maurice 260 Blixen, Karen, see Dinesen, Isak Bodenheimer, Rosemarie 220n14 Booth, Michael 61 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561043-011

British identity 212 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (1847) 83n32, 102n16 Brownstein, Rachel 233n27 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) 136 Callas, Maria 5 carnivalesque mode 10 – 11 Carter, Angela, Wise Children (1991) – gender issues 14 – 15 – heteroglossia of 12 – illegitimacy of performers 7 – 8, 9 – 19th-century tropes 12 – performer as narrator 6 – 8, 10 – 11 – randomness of lives 8 – 9 – social class and performers 6 – 7 Cavell, Stanley 33n27, 138, 169 celebrity culture 13 – 14, 248 Chevigny, Bell Gale 146 Christianity and women 97 – 99, 100 – 101, 109 Clément, Catherine 26 – 27 Connor, Steven 38 – 39, 47 consciousness-raising 124, 136, 136n50 cross-dressing roles 60, 61 cultural context of speech 39 – 40 cultural position of women 25, 269 – 272 culture as a battleground for oppositions 152 – 153 Davis, Paulina Wright 149 deaths – of actual performers 5 – of fictional performers 4, 72 – 73, 175 – 180, 243, 261 – 264, 265 – of young girls 102n16 Declaration of Independence 99n9, 128n41, 155, 156 Declaration of Sentiments 144n58, 156 – 157 Den Tandt, Christophe 198 Derrida, Jacques 33, 155, 181 – 182 dialogic character of novels 12, 18, 26, 28

Index

dialogic selfhood 127, 131, 135, 146 dialogic setting of performer voices 28, 38 – 39, 124 – 125, 126 – 128, 141, 256, 258 Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) 102n16 Dinesen, Isak 253 – 256, 255, 266 – role as storyteller 256 – self-fashioning of 253 – 254, 255 Dinesen, Isak, “The Dreamers” (1934) – death of Pellegrina 261 – 262, 265 – heteroglossia of 261, 264 – loss of voice by Pellegrina 257 – narrative structure 260 – 261 – self-fashioning of Pellegrina 237, 256 – 257, 258 – 259, 265 – swan song of Pellegrina 262 – 264 – voice as pure text 260 direct speech 78, 135, 161, 226 – 227, 229, 230 divine mediums 93 – 96, 98 – 99, 111 – 113, 123, 137 – 138, 144 – 145 Dolar, Mladen 34, 181 – 182, 189, 243n7, 244n8, 263 Dolly Sisters 15, 16 Douglas, Ann 200 Du Maurier, George, Trilby (1894) – appearance of Trilby 240 – 241 – change of Trilby’s voice 237 – 238 – death of Trilby 243 – description of Trilby’s voice 238 – 239 – different voices of Trilby 241 – 242 – hypnotic control of Trilby 239 – 240 – modern female voices 244 – popularity of 247 – 248 – recorded voices 247 – sexism of 244 – 246 – swan song of Trilby 242 – 243 – ventriloquized voice of Trilby 236, 249 eccentricity of performers 2, 9 education of women 80, 82, 88 – 89 Eliot, George – characters, sources for 109 – 110 – public voice of 118 – 119, 121 – role of the artist 220 – 221, 220n14 Eliot, George, Adam Bede (1859)

299

– author’s voice 106 – 107, 110, 115 – 116 – confession of Hetty 114 – 115 – Hetty as self-performer 107 – 108 – marriage of Dinah 117 – 118 – moral imagination 116, 116n29 – ordinary voices 105 – 106 – plot 107 – 109 – prophetic voices 99 – 100, 102 – 103 – sources for characters 109 – 110 – voice of Dinah 103 – 104, 105, 106, 110 – 115, 119 – 122, 221 Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (1876) – direct speech and focalization 229 – 230 – family romance of Deronda 223 – heteroglossia of 231 – 232 – ideological conflict 224, 226 – 227 – independence of Alcharisi 222 – 223, 224 – individualism of Alcharisi 218, 226, 228 – 229, 230, 232 – 233 – Jewish narratives 224 – modernness of Alcharisi 221 – 222 – narcissism of Alcharisi 225 – paternalistic family model 221 – professional singer, Alcharisi as 218 – 219, 221 – punishment of Alcharisi 219 – 221 – self-performance of Gwendolen 107n21, 217, 234 – voice of Alcharisi 28, 225 – 226, 227, 231 – 232, 234 – 235 Ellison, Julie 132 Emerson, Caryl 131 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 127, 137 – 138, 140, 141, 212 empowerment of women 20, 30, 91, 113 – 114, 184, 219 equality of women 97, 99n9, 123, 127, 143 ethnicity of stage performers 233n27 Evans, Elizabeth 109, 110 excessiveness of female performers 14, 21, 29, 189 – 190, 191, 199 Félix, Rachel 53 – 54, 62n16, 233n27 Felman, Shoshana 264 femininity – anxieties around 249 – ideal of 76 – 77, 79 – 80, 88 – 89

300

Index

– and masculinity 136 – 137 – and spirituality 100 – of voices 14, 23, 30, 32 feminism – of Florence Nightingale 82 – 84 – of Margaret Fuller 122 – 123, 125, 136 – 140, 142 – 143 – of Verena 184 – 185 – and voice 22 – 23 – of Zenobia 161 – 162 – see also women’s movement fetishization of voice 158, 195 – 196, 243, 243n7 Fleming, Renée 41n43 Fliegelman, Jay 155 Florence Foster Jenkins (2016, film), 2 Foucault, Michel 25, 69n23, 153n2 French novels 46 Friedan, Betty 136n50 Fuller, Margaret – Conversations (seminars) 123 – 124, 126 – 127, 141 – education and work 131 – 132 – influence after death 149 – 150 – inward life of 132 – 133 – Italian travels 147 – 148 – literary personae 134 – 136 – reputation 127 – self-fashioning of 132 – shipwreck of 148 – solitariness of 140n54 Fuller, Margaret, Summer on the Lakes (1844) 130n45, 134, 136 Fuller, Margaret, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) – author’s voice 125 – 126, 127 – 130, 134 – 136, 144 – 146 – feminist manifesto 122 – 123, 125, 136 – 140, 142 – 143 – masculinity and femininity 136 – 137 – prophetic voices 99 – 100, 103 – readers of 129 – role models 133 – 134 – self-perfection 138 – 139 – self-reliance 137 – 138, 140 – 142 – use of religious language 143 – 144

Gaslight (1944, film) 33n27 Gay, Delphine 53 gender norms – contemporary 13 – 14, 18 – feminine 19 – 20, 21, 61, 64, 88 – middle-class feminine 59, 82, 101 – motherhood 86 – 87, 218, 226, 228 – 230 – 19th-century 13 – and prophetic voice 98 genius figures 50, 53, 73, 90, 133 – 134 German novels 46 Gibian, Peter 155 – 156 Gillett, Paula 62, 64, 219, 220n14 Gothic fiction 46 – 47 Greely, Horace 145 Gustafson, Sandra 124, 154 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance (1852) – Coverdale’s desire to know Zenobia 160 – 161, 164 – 165, 168 – 175, 178, 179 – 180 – death of Zenobia 175 – 180 – feminist speech of Zenobia 161 – 162 – ideological tensions 162, 164, 166n10 – impact of female voice 159, 165 – narrator role 162 – 165, 168, 174, 179 – network of power relationships 165 – 166, 168, 170 – 171, 179 – plot 165 – 168 – Priscilla, contrasting role of 171 – self-dramatization of Zenobia 163, 170, 176 – self-performance of Zenobia 172 – 173 – separateness of Zenobia 169 – 170, 172 hearing, sense of 35, 190 heteroglossia – Bakhtin’s concept of 12, 19, 28, 36, 55, 153, 261 264 – contemporary fiction 12 – modernist writing 261, 264 – 19th-century texts 13, 19, 28, 55, 82, 116, 130 – 131, 153, 231 – 232, 245 – see also ideological positions, battles of heterotopias 25, 61, 125 Hoffmann, E.T.A., “Rat Krespel” (1819) 46n47, 249

Index

Hoffmann, E.T.A., “The Sandman” (1816) 240n4 Hustvedt, Siri 191 Hutchinson, Anne 123 Huyssen, Andreas 196, 200 hypnotized performers 171, 182 – 183, 183n18, 239 – 240, 243, 244 – 245 Ibsen, Henrik 57 ideological positions, battles of 18 – 19, 38, 130, 153 – 154, 156 – 158, 224, 226 – 227 – see also heteroglossia illegitimacy of performers 7 – 8, 9 indirect speech 67, 69 individuality of voice 39 intermediality of sound 35 – 36 interpellation 111, 111n25 interwar period 8, 15, 253 Italy – allegory in opera 211 – image of 207 – 208 – Margaret Fuller and 147 – 148 – unification, voice of 157, 204, 205 – 206, 207 – 210, 213 – 215 – voice of 50, 52 – 53, 69 – 71, 69n22, 90 Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) 44 James, Henry, The Bostonians (1886) – aesthetic appeal of Verena’s voice 181, 190, 196 – ambiguity of Verena’s voice 183, 188 – 189, 193, 198 – fetishization of voice 195 – 196 – impact of female voice 158, 189 – 190, 193 – 194, 195 – impersonal voice of Verena 180, 182, 183 – 184, 196, 197 – 198, 200 – masculine anxieties 151, 196, 197 – mesmerization 182 – 183 – plot 184 – 186 – power struggle 184, 186 – 188 – resonances of Verena’s voice 190 – 192, 198 – silencing of Verena 194 – 195, 200 – 201

301

Jewish characters 31n26, 216 – 217, 219, 223 – 224, 242 Jewsbury, Geraldine, The Half Sisters (1848) – actress as a working woman 75 – 76, 77, 81 – audiences 84 – domestic life 76, 77 – 78 – education of women 88 – 89 – empowerment of women 91 – historical background 32, 56 – 57 – ideal of femininity 76 – 77, 79 – 80 – idleness of upper-middle-class women 77, 81, 82 – 83 – moral influence of women 85 – 86 – narcissism of performers 86 – 87, 89 – performing voice of Bianca 78 – 79, 91 – plot 75 – 77 – power of performers 84 – 85 – prejudice against female performers 79 – 80, 87 – respectability of theatre 85 – 86, 88 – rights of women 80 – 81 – selflessness of women 86, 88, 90 Kahane, Claire 197 Karpf, Anne 247 Kehler, Grace 212, 228n22, 232n26, 233n28 Kittler, Friedrich A. 41 Kolesch, Doris 34, 37 Krämer, Sybille 34 languages, multiple 4, 6, 11 – 13 Laqueur, Thomas 18 Ledger, Sally 248 Leonardi, Susan J. 20 liberal interwar period 8, 15, 253 Lind, Jenny 63 – 64, 90 literary sound studies 35 – 36 Looby, Christopher 154 – 155 Macho, Thomas 41 male performers 31 – 32, 31n26, 61, 61n13 Malibran, Maria 5 Marx, Eleanor 61 – 62 masculine anxieties 151, 160 – 161, 165, 171 – 172, 179, 194, 196, 197, 199

302

Index

mass culture and female voices 191 – 192, 196, 199 – 200 Meredith, George, Sandra Belloni (1864) and Vittoria (1867) – Emilia’s background 206 – 207 – Emilia/Vittoria’s voice and Italian unification 157, 204, 205 – 206, 207 – 210, 213 – 215 – lack of individual voice 215 – 216 – opera performance, presentation of 210 – 211 – politics and theatre 211, 213 mesmerization of speakers 171, 182 – 183, 183n18, 239 – 240, 243, 244 – 245 messiahs, female 101, 142 – 143 Methodism 109 Mieszkowsi, Sylvia 35 Mill, John Stuart 56, 61 – 62 Milne, Paula, The Politician’s Husband (2013, TV mini-series) 267 – 268, 267, 269, 272 Milne, Paula, The Politician’s Wife (1995, TV mini-series) 268 modern female voices 39, 41, 184, 197, 221 – 222, 224, 244 modes of feminine articulation 74, 113, 160, 164 – 165 Moers, Ellen 51n3 mood of voices 27, 40, 225 moral influence of women 64, 85 – 86, 100 – 101, 116, 128, 138 – 139 moral values 152 – 153 Morson, Gary Saul 131 Moses 96, 111n25 mothers 86 – 87, 218, 226, 228 – 230 Mott, Lucretia 144, 144n59 multiplicity of voices 11 – 12, 38 music 31n26, 97, 212 – see also opera; opera singers; singing musical metaphors 142, 206 music hall 7 – 8 narcissism of performers 86 – 87, 89, 107n21, 225 narrators – and ideological positions 162

– male characters as 162 – 165, 168, 174, 179 – performers as 6 – 8, 10 – 11 – reduction of 65, 67, 78 – in works of George Eliot 121n35 national anthems 41 – 42, 156, 209 national self-definition 155 – 156, 212 negative foils 86, 87 New Woman 57, 248 – 249 Nietzsche, Friedrich 152 – 153 Nightingale, Florence 84, 89 – Cassandra (1852), 82 – 83 Olsen, Tillie 23 opera 26 – 27, 34, 210 – 212 opera singers 19, 41n43, 58, 61n13, 62, 90, 205 – 210 oracles 29 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer 124 performer novels 18 – 19, 43, 51n2 performer voices in the 19th century – dialogic settings 28, 38 – 39, 124 – 125, 126 – 128, 141 – feminism and voice 22 – 23 – gender norms 19 – 20, 21 – in literary texts 27 – 30 – loss of voice 21 – 22 – poststructuralist approaches 23 – public arenas for 24 – 25 – and public culture 32, 41 – 42 – related cultural areas 44 – 47 – related fields of study 26 – 27, 34 – 42 – social position of performers 7, 18 – 19, 26, 31 – 32, 63 – 64, 78 – 79 – voice of one’s own 32 – 33, 33n27, 43 – women’s suffrage 25 – 26 piety of women 102, 102n16 Poe, Edgar Allan 146 Poizat, Michel 31, 238 political oratory in the USA 154 – 157, 158, 199 political participation 52 – see also suffrage, women’s political power and femininity 268 politics and theatre 56, 57, 211, 213 politics and voice 41, 73

Index

polyphony of voices 55, 56 Pope, Rebecca A. 20 postmodern novels 2 – 3, 6, 11, 12, 13 – 14, 18 poststructuralist approaches 23 Powell, Kerry 62 power of performers 20, 37, 62, 64, 84 – 85, 189 – 190, 193 – 194 power struggles 153, 154, 158, 159, 165, 179, 184, 186, 187, 201 preachers 43, 44, 96 – 99, 101 – 104, 109 – 115, 117 – 121, 144 – 145, 221, 269 – 270 prejudice against female performers 71, 79 – 80, 87 prisons 113 – 114, 116, 125 prophetic voices 96 – 100, 102 – 103, 112 – 113 – see also spiritual voices prostitutes 21n10 psychoanalysis and voice 34 public arenas 24 – 25 public lectures 126 public man 21 public voices of women – agency of women 28, 56 – ambiguous status of 197 – 198 – attitudes towards 13, 19 – as collective voice 208, 213 – 214, 215 – of George Eliot 102 – 103, 118 – 119, 121 – loss of 78, 118, 225, 257 – of Margaret Fuller 126 – in mass culture 200 – as mouthpiece of others 192 – and politics 41, 73 – possession of by others 187 – in religious context 102 – 103, 110, 121 – silencing of 6, 21 – 22, 26 – as a trope 1, 31 public woman 21 punishment of public performers 26, 219 – 221 Puritanism 99n8, 122 – 123 Pygmalion myth 248n12 radical movements 212 – see also suffrage, women’s recorded voices 4, 5, 246 – 247

303

Reynolds, Margaret 119 rights of women 44, 52, 56, 80 – 81, 99n9 Robins, Elizabeth 57 Robinson, David 140 Rushdie, Salman, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) – death of Vina 4 – gender norms 13 – heteroglossia of 13 – multiple languages 4 – 19th-century tropes 12 – recorded voices 4, 5 – self-display of Vina 4 – silencing of female public voices 6 – voice of Vina 3 – 4 Schabert, Ina 99n8 Scheherazade 254 – 256, 259 self-assertion of women 15, 218, 224 self-display by women 4, 9, 86 – 88, 89, 108n22, 119, 225 self-dramatization – of Margaret Fuller 135 – 136 – of Zenobia 163, 170, 176 self-fashioning of women 132, 221, 223, 250, 253 – 254 selfhood 39, 98, 144, 183 – see also dialogic selfhood selflessness of women 64, 86, 88, 90 self-perfection 88, 138 – 139, 145 self-performance of women 107 – 108, 146, 170, 225 self-reliance of women 135, 137 – 138, 140 – 142 separate spheres 18, 20 sermons 104, 113n26, 119, 138 sexist novels 244 – 246 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 94 Silverman, Kaja 228 singers 19, 41n43, 58, 61n13, 62, 90, 205 – 210 singing – in church 97 – fascination with 30n23 – fatality of 5 – fetishization of 243, 243n7 – of national anthems 41 – 42

304

Index

– unifying effect of 206 – 207, 209 – 210, 213 – 214 – ventriloquized voices 236, 237 – 240, 242, 244n8, 246, 249 sirens 29, 42, 87, 260, 263 slave narratives 44 social position of performers 6 – 7, 18 – 21, 26, 31 – 32, 55, 63 – 64, 78 – 79 songs and imagined communities 41 – 42 sound of voices 27, 37, 40, 62, 105 – 106, 158, 160, 181, 190 – 191 sound studies 34 – 36 speaking for herself 203 – 204, 215 – 216, 234 – 235 – see also agency of women; voice of her own spiritual voices 93 – 96 – see also prophetic voices Staël, Germaine de, Corinne, or Italy (1807) – aftereffects of 50 – 51, 53 – apotheosis 54, 94 – 95 – audiences 68, 103 – composite figure of Corinne 65 – 67, 68 – death of Corinne 72 – 73 – elusiveness of Corinne 68 – 69 – fading of voice 50, 71 – 72 – historical background 52 – image of Italy 207 – 208 – importance of 50 – modes of feminine articulation 74 – ordinariness of male 72 – 73 – paradox of voice 71 – popularity of 53 – 54 – spiritual voice 93 – 95 – vocal expansion 67 – 68 – voice of Corinne 49 – 50, 91 – voice of Italy 50, 52 – 53, 69 – 71, 69n22, 90 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 149 star performers 14, 20, 45 – 46, 57 – 58, 62, 64 Stokes, John 61 storytelling 254 – 256 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) 102n16 subjectivity of Victorian women 233 suffragettes 250 – 253, 251 – 252

suffrage, women’s 15, 17, 25 – 26, 56 – 57 swan songs 242 – 243, 262 – 264 symbolic power of performers 20, 37, 62, 64 Tanner, Tony 200 Taylor, Helen 61 – 62 technology, threat of 247 temptation by women 87 theatre – and politics 56, 57, 211, 213 – respectability of 85 – 86, 88 theatre studies 36 – 37 timbre of voices 27 Transcendentalism 122, 126, 137, 138, 140 Truth, Sojourner 44 Überwältigungsprozess, see power struggles unisonance 41, 156, 209 – 210 ventriloquized voices – singers 236, 237 – 240, 242, 244n8, 246, 249 – speakers 39, 47, 112, 191 Victoria, Queen 62n17 vocal traditions 2 Voce, Mary 110 voice – and imagined communities 41, 155, 209 – as performative phenomenon 34 – and politics 41, 73 – as a surplus 263 voice effect 264 voice of her own 28, 32 – 33, 33n27, 42 – 43, 90, 115, 258 – see also agency of women; speaking for herself voices of women, see performer voices in the 19th century; public voices of women Watson, David 132 Weigel, Sigrid 41 Weliver, Phyllis 213, 220n14 Wilkes, Joanne 20

Index

women’s movement 25 – 26, 56 – 57, 99n9, 149, 156 – 157, 212 – 213, 213n6, 248, 270 – see also feminism

Woolf, Virginia – Orlando (1928) 23, 258, 265 – A Room of One’s Own (1929) 15 – 16, 17n8, 22 – 23, 29 – 30, 137, 271

305