The Nineteenth-Century Home Theatre: Women and Material Space Ann Margaret Mazur Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania B.S. Mathematics and English, University of Notre Dame, 2007 M.A. English and American literature, University of Notre Dame, 2009 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May, 2014 © 2014 Ann M. Mazur Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………...…………………………………………………………..…..……i Dedication…………...……………………………………………………………………………ii Chapter 1 Introduction: The Home Theatre in Context……………………………………...………………1 Chapter 2 A Parlour Education: Reworking Gender and Domestic Space in Ladies’ and Children’s Theatricals...........................63 Chapter 3 Beyond the Home (Drama): Imperialism, Painting, and Adaptation in the Home Theatrical………………………………..126 Chapter 4 Props in Victorian Parlour Plays: the Periperformative, Private Objects, and Restructuring Material Space……………………..206 Chapter 5 Victorian Women, the Home Theatre, and the Cultural Potency of A Doll’s House……….….279 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………....…325 Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to the American Association of University Women for my 2013-2014 American Dissertation Fellowship, which provided valuable time as well as the financial means to complete The Nineteenth-Century Home Theatre: Women and Material Space over the past year. I wish to thank my dissertation director Alison Booth, whose support and advice has been tremendous throughout my entire writing process, and who has served as a wonderful mentor during my time as a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia. My dissertation truly began during an Independent Study on women in the Victorian theatre with Alison during Spring 2011. Karen Chase and John O’Brien, the two supporting members of what I have often called my dream dissertation committee, offered timely encouragement, refreshing insight on chapter drafts, and supported my vision for this genre recovery project. Thanks also go to Julian Connolly for his enthusiasm as the external reader for my dissertation. Cheers to the Victorian Theatrical Society of the University of Virginia for providing a unique opportunity to put on Victorian parlour plays and test out many a farce which has made it into the writing of my project. Thanks also go to those at Harvard’s Mellon Theater School 2013 who provided feedback on the beginning stages of my props chapter. I must thank all involved in the University of Virginia Department of English at large—faculty, fellow graduate students, and my own undergraduate students—for enriching the research process through their collegiality, intellectual curiosity, optimism, and zest for life and literature. Thanks to Phillip for keeping me company during many hours of writing, and making those hours between writing so much more happy. A heartfelt thanks to my swim coach, “Coach E.,” for being the best coach I have ever had and helping me so greatly during my athletic endeavors of the past couple years. Last but surely not least, thanks to my mom and dad for unwavering support during all my intellectual endeavors. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my three siblings, Jill, Mark, and Dan, because we acted out our own version of parlour plays as the “Make Me Laugh” game when we were younger at our grandpa’s house. We invented this simple but invigorating game which almost always pitted the girls against our two younger brothers. One pair would wait in the living room while the other pair planned and choreographed how to get the waiting two to laugh in a certain period of time (usually five minutes). You received one point per person who laughed, and first team to a pre- decided number won the overall game. While Mark and Dan’s team was at a distinct disadvantage because Dan was youngest and thus laughed much more easily, our game was also dependent upon props. The rules were that you were not allowed to touch someone (tickling was just unfair though you could still come obnoxiously close), and every object in the bedrooms of our grandpa’s house was fair game to incorporate into a skit. I vividly remember being excited about uncovering “fancy” vintage objects and clothing to incorporate—including old sequin dresses that I otherwise was not allowed to wear—but also the suspense of what objects would be used by the other team. Mark and Dan once came out as Batman and Robin, and used hair retrieved from a hairbrush as armpit hair. If I have infused even a small portion of that joy and laughter into this recovery of Victorian parlour theatre, then this is a happy future book indeed. ii Chapter 1 Introduction: The Home Theatre in Context The impact of women on Victorian culture and the public sphere is most often framed through the novel, and scholarship has been quick to emphasize—with good reason—the intensities of the novel-reading process within the imaginative lives of Victorian women. Yet, however intertwined feminist studies and the Victorian novel have grown, the neglected genre of drama offers a fascinating alternative through which to uncover the enormous social force of women, as both producers and consumers, within the nineteenth-century literary market. By bringing together the culturally meaningful spaces of theatre with the Victorian parlour, the home theatre provides a path from the most interior mental spaces of writing and reading to a type of “acting out” otherwise unavailable for its female writers and actresses. The most familiar example of a home theatrical for scholars today is likely the (rehearsed but thwarted) production of Lovers’ Vows by the characters of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, or the home play in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Indeed the overwhelming majority of home plays which literary critics do mention are examples of theatricals performed in novels, but not home plays themselves. In distinguishing home theatre as worthy of critical attention in its own respect, one should be wary of confusing parlour theatricals with home productions of tableaux, which represented static scenes or brief pre-cinematic “moving pictures”—such as the oft-noted example in which Daniel Deronda’s Gwendolen acts as Hermione from The Winter’s Tale. Nor are home theatricals an equivalent to charades, as occurs in Jane Eyre, in which the actors use a scene or scenes to act out a word or phrase guessed by the audience. Rather, home theatricals are true plays, though their time of representation, most often fifteen to forty minutes, was often 1 shorter than public stage drama.1 Indeed, T.H. Lacy’s extensive and often reprinted guide The Amateur’s Hand-Book and Guide to Home or Drawing Room Theatricals insists in his initial two pages that small casts, realistic acting, comedy, and shortness are essential to the successful parlour play: I know of no pleasanter evening’s amusement than is afforded by either witnessing, or assisting in, the performance of a sparkling one-act comedy, played by some six or seven intelligent ladies and gentlemen, who, if they have not professional experience, certainly understand and can appreciate the dialogue, and are utterly free from all those absurd professional conventionalities, redolent of anything but actual life, which unhappily are but too often met with on the public stage. On the other hand, I can conceive nothing more hopelessly dull and tiresome than to witness a number of amateurs enacting a long five-act play, more especially a tragedy.2 Lacy’s suggestive italicization of “ladies and gentlemen” reinforces an amateur’s ability to perform without compromising class status. Middle-class amateurs, according to Lacy, are perhaps the classiest actors. They occupy the position most conducive to realistic acting. Possessing the capacity, not found in the lower classes, to understand a drama in order to deliver their lines and actions with appropriate nuance, they are also unburdened by the conventional theatrical flourishes ingrained into professional actors. The rest of Lacy’s language concisely puts forth the comedic and realistic innovations of Victorian parlour theatre. 1. While most parlour plays had a short run-time, they were occasionally longer—at least in print. The longest home theatrical that I discovered was B.L.C. Griffith’s 1892 Between the Acts, which conveniently notes “TIME IN REPRESENTATION. [as] Two hours and a quarter” (4) for its actors on a prefatory page also listing costumes and properties. However, advice for amateurs often recommends performing shorter plays or cutting long ones. Many recommendations are similar to that found in C. Lang Neil’s 1904 Amateur Theatricals, A Practical Guide in Ch. II “The Choice of a Play,” that the chosen piece “should be new enough to interest, and not too long to tax the powers of the actors or the patience of the audience. Preference may be given to some of the many comediettas and one act plays which have been written, one might imagine, with the view of forming a repertoire for amateurs” (45). Harriet L. Childe Pemberton’s “Twenty Minutes” Drawing-Room Duologues, Etc., advertises its properly timed productions in its title, but also notes that “[t]he average time of performance of the duologues ia a quarter of an hour; the monologues would hardly take so long; and I do not think that “The Science of Advertisement” takes more than thirty-five minutes” (4). 2. T. H. Lacy, The Amateur’s Guide (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, November 1870), 6. 2 While thus far home theatricals have tended to be mere accoutrements to studies of fiction, Victorians themselves sometimes directly used home theatre as a way to extend the power of their novels, and at least a few thought of Austen, just as does the modern scholar, when contemplating home theatre. For instance, in 1895, Rosina Filippi wrote Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen, Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance.3 Filippi’s work indulges the Victorian amateur actress’s fantasy of being a character in an Austen novel.