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

The author reveals not only the surprising wealth of theatrical themes in the 19th-century English novel but also the complex politics of this theatricality. 19th-century fiction is typically understood as enshrining the bourgeois values of domesticity, subjectivity and sincerity. But the author demonstrates that private experience in Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Henry James in fact follows a rigorous public script that constructs gender, sexual and class identities. At the same time, however, the 19th-century novel erupts with extravagant theatrical forms like travesty, transvestism, charade and carnival. Theatricality not only enforces social norms but also provides novelists with ways of resisting them. The author thus challenges recent interpretations of the 19th-century novel as a disciplinary apparatus. Theatricality as deployed here encourages the rethinking of the 19th-century novel and its various cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence. This rethinking, moreover, yields not only a new interpretation of the 19th-century novel, but also a new, more frankly theatrical approach to interpretation itself.