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A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity Through Gothic Drama

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A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity Through Gothic Drama A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity through Gothic Drama Brian R. Gutiérrez A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Marshall Brown, Chair Juliet Shields Raimonda Modiano Program Authorized to Offer Degree Department of English 2 ©Copyright 2017 Brian R. Gutiérrez 3 University of Washington Abstract A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity through Gothic Drama Brian Robert Gutiérrez Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Emeritus Marshall Brown Comparative Literature Gothic drama reached a height of popularity in the 1790s, partly due to celebrity actors like Sarah Siddons. Yet we know very little about the relationship between the many writers of gothic dramas and the celebrity apparatus. Although critics such as Richard Schickel regard literary celebrity as strictly a twentieth century phenomenon, recently other scholars have been arguing for a broader historical view. Richard Salmon, for instance, has cited photography, investigative journalism, and the phenomenon of authors being interviewed at their homes as evidence of the machinery of celebrity culture operating in the 19th century; David Higgins and Frank Donoghue have argued for the importance of periodical writing in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Claire Brock and Judith Pascoe have pointed out the feminization of fame and public theatricality in the Romantic period. And Tom Mole, in addition to examining the career of Lord Byron in the context of celebrity culture, has recently edited a collection of essays on the material and discursive elements of celebrity culture from 1750 to 1850 to provide a “synoptic picture of celebrity.” 4 Yet the most popular and profitable literary genre of the Romantic era has remained a stepchild of criticism, the victim of a disjuncture between literary critical study of dramatic texts and historical study of performance culture. This dissertation aims to bridge the gap by examining gothic playwriting as a literary act that conjures the material and discursive elements of celebrity culture. I pivot away from analyzing the purely textual production to emphasize space as a distinctive object of study in a sometimes opaque cultural field. The study looks at three gothic dramas written by poets long before they achieved the stamp of critical recognition: William Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1797), Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort (1798), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse (1796/1813). It treats portraiture galleries, private parties, coffeehouses, and academic institutions as distinct nodes of the celebrity apparatus that shape the dramaturgy of those plays. The major critical perspective through which I take up the literature is geocriticism, a spatial humanities approach undergirded by human and critical geography that highlights the relation between capitalism and urban spaces, looking at celebrity spaces as pedagogical environments. By focusing on the gothic drama for its ties to celebrity as a transgressive identity and on spaces of cultural consumption, this dissertation concludes that not only did portraiture galleries, coffeehouses, and private parties influence the dramaturgical choices of these plays, but that these writers used the Gothic drama as a vehicle to perform their professional identities--through what I call a “poetics of publicity.” A range of political issues are illuminated by this topic, including the slave trade (Coleridge), gender constraints and mobility of economic power in public life (Baillie), and the vapid zeal for physiognomic approaches to aesthetic consumption that obscured the rise of poverty and homelessness in England during the early years with the war with France (Wordsworth). 5 This dissertation not only contributes to a growing critical interest in celebrity studies, but is equally compelling as it posits a geographical and temporal point of origin for the modern celebrity in British Romanticism. As Su Holmes and Sean Redmond say in the inaugural edition of the journal Celebrity Studies in 2010, the principal task of this type of investigation is “to defamiliarize the everyday” and thereby “to make apparent the cultural politics and power relations which sit at the center of ‘the taken for granted.” Indeed, investigating the powerful cultural forces that produce celebrity writers and actors impel us to confront how texts (and canons) are shaped by, and shape the discursive spaces in which society negotiated understandings of individuality. 6 Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...7 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..8 Introduction: A Hermeneutics of (Gothic) Intimacy…………………………………….10 Chapter One: The Hermeneutics of Heads and Tales…………………………………...31 Chapter Two: Remediating the “Tragic Muse”................................................................86 Chapter Three: Staging the Coffeehouse………………………………………………125 Chapter Four: The Geographies of Science and Celebrity………………………….....181 Coda……………………………………………………………………………………223 7 Dedication For my mother. 8 Acknowledgments I would like to begin by thanking, yet once again, my mother to whom this dissertation is dedicated. Without her unwavering support through my undergraduate and graduate education, this project would not have been possible. Next, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my lovely wife, Haley, for her patience, love, and support through the six years that were necessary to bring this project to fruition, especially in its last two years through the birth and raising of our amazing daughter, Isabella Rose. Your herculean efforts and selfless work-life juggling acts were truly an inspiration—our daughter is fortune to have you as a mother and role- model. I would also like to thank my sister Lisa and my father, and the rest of my family for their support and encouragement along the way. And, I would also like thank our beloved friend Annette Heide-Jessen and the excellent staff at Kaffeeklatsch for providing the space where yet another milestone for our family has been realized, as most of this dissertation was composed there. I am deeply indebted to my dissertation supervisor, Marshall Brown, for his guidance, support, and his generosity. Your keen insights, attention to detail, and direct yet deeply honest commentary are just but a few of the elements that make you an exceptional mentor. You have given me a model to strive for throughout my career. I would also like to thank the late Herbert Blau, who made the suggestion at the conclusion of his wonderful course on modern drama that I should investigate the genre of gothic drama for my dissertation project. Thank you, Herb. You are missed dearly. I am also deeply indebted to Juliet Shields for the time she took with me in an independent study course on gothic drama, which inevitably laid the groundwork for this project. Finally, I would like to thank the Department of English for their continued support beyond the average tenure of doctoral students. Also, I am very thankful for the support from the 9 Department of English for the Susannah J. McMurphy Dissertation Fellowship, Modern Language Quarterly for their generous Dissertation Fellowship, Kathy Woodward and the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities’s generous Summer Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, support from UW’s Textual Studies Research Grant, and UW’s Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP) for their generous financial support during the first year and the final quarter of my doctorate. 10 Introduction “Celebrity can in fact be through which a modernizing society communicates with its past.” —Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead “An individual is not distinct from his place; his is that place.” —Gabriel Marcel * * * * * In 1842 when William Wordsworth published his only drama, The Borderers, in Poems of Chiefly Early and Late Years, he was one of the most painted poets of his time. His image had been on display in galleries throughout London, Edinburgh, and Paris, and then the following year, he was named poet laureate. Clearly, Wordsworth had achieved a form of celebrity in his lifetime. And yet his prefatory remarks in Poems (1842) regarding the composition of this gothic drama speak to his aversion to the manner in which gothic dramas thrusted authors into the spotlight: For myself I had no hope nor even a wish (tho’ a successful Play would in the then state of my finances have been a most welcome piece of good fortune) that he [Richard Sheridan] should have accepted my performance so that I incurred no disappointment when the piece was judiciously returned as not calculated for the stage. In this judgment I entirely concurred, & had it been otherwise it was so natural for me to shrink from public notice that any hope I might have had of success would have reconciled me altogether to such an exhibition. (814)1 1 Wordsworth, William. The Borderers. Ed. Robert Osborn. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1982. Print. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850. Works. Selections. 1975. 11 Wordsworth was not alone in trying his hand at one of the most spectacular, popular, and profitable genres in the 1790s: an inordinate number of the early Romantic poets wrote gothic dramas, not as closet dramas or mental theater but with the hope that they would be staged, even though few actually did see the boards.2 Although the justification for each writer may differ, the act of playwriting conjures the cultural industry of theatrical celebrity. For example, evidence suggests that Joanna Baillie wrote De Monfort with the celebrity actress Sarah Siddons in mind for the lead role. And John Genest has suggested that Coleridge’s Remorse was substantially revised because London’s regency theaters had only “middling actors” on hand (38); in 1813 Siddons and her brother John Kemble had retired, and Edmund Kean would not take the London stage for another two years.3 Thus it is my contention that due to the celebrity power associated with the late Georgian stage, when composing a gothic drama, inevitably, writers wrote with the actors, the audiences, and the potentiality of fame in mind.
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