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Theater Matters: Female Theatricality in Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, and James

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Theater Matters: Female Theatricality in Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, and James City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Theater Matters: Female Theatricality in Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, and James Keiko Miyajima Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1059 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Theater Matters: Female Theatricality in Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, and James by Keiko Miyajima A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 Copyright @ 2015 Keiko Miyajima ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Richard Kaye ___________________ ________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi ___________________ ________________________ Date Executive Officer David Reynolds Talia Schaffer Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Theater Matters: Female Theatricality in Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, and James By Keiko Miyajima Advisor: Professor Richard Kaye This dissertation examines the ways the novelists on both sides of the Atlantic use the figure of the theatrical woman to advance claims about the nature and role of women. Theater is a deeply paradoxical art form: Seen at once as socially constitutive and promoting mass conformity, it is also criticized as denaturalizing, decentering, etiolating, queering, feminizing. These anxieties coalesce around the image of the actress. In nineteenth century fiction, the image of a woman performing on stage is a powerful one, suggestive of ideal femininity, but also of negative traits including deception, artificiality and an unfeminine appetite for public attention. By examining nineteenth century depictions of the performing woman, I show these depictions as emblematic of society’s ambivalent attitudes in a time when women were demanding more of a public role. Nineteenth century ideology held that the woman’s ideal realm was in private, in the domestic sphere, and the ideal woman should be authentically chaste, loving and modest. However, the very existence of an ideal for women to emulate suggested that this set of traits was merely a role—an inauthentic performance that women could adopt and discard at will. The need to perform ideal womanhood placed particularly high demands on women in public life. Women in the arts and professions had to negotiate the demand that they be ladylike, attractive and genteel, performing feminine modesty in order to advance public careers. iv A host of novels problematize the public/private, authentic/artificial split by using female characters in public space to embody the powerful cultural shifts that modernity and rapid urbanization were bringing to the society. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Louisa May Alcott’s sensational works, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Henry James’s The Bostonians and The Tragic Muse use the figure of the female performer to address the changing roles of women along with wider issues of social performance, identity, subjectivity and sexuality. These novels feature scenes of female performance in particular because the figure of the performer encapsulates many of the traits of the self-fashioning modern woman, with her ability to manipulate conventions of feminine behavior while being placed between repressive “Victorian-ness” and the coming of the New Woman. v To My Family in Japan and in the U.S. and In Memory of Eve vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Richard Kaye, for providing the guidance, motivation, caring, insight, and encouragement that led me to the completion of this project. He literally saved me at my most difficult time. I would also like to thank my committee, Professors Talia Schaffer and David Reynolds, for their support and enthusiasm for my work. Finally, I would like to express my profound indebtedness to Professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was originally on my committee, for having been a source of inspiration and enlightenment to me for years, ever since I took her Queer Performativity course in my first year of graduate study. I would never have been able to bring my ideas to fruition without her example. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE “A Counterfeit Arcadia”: 16 Women and Theatricality in The Blithedale Romance CHAPTER TWO “If Actresses Ever Are Themselves”: 54 Female Performers in Louisa May Alcott’s Works CHAPTER THREE Acting Across Genders: 106 Performance and Gender Subversion in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette CHAPTER FOUR “If She Was Theatrical, She Was Naturally Theatrical”: 139 Female Performance and Queer Desires in The Bostonians CHAPTER FIVE “A Great Actress Can Never Be Anything But a Great 171 Vagabond”: Miriam Rooth’s Queer Identity and Performance in The Tragic Muse CONCLUSION 218 WORKS CITED 221 8 INTRODUCTION In Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work, the main character, Christie, quits a successful acting career after realizing that she is succumbing to the “temptations” of the acting life, “growing selfish, frivolous and vain” with “no care for any one but herself” (41). While she sees the world of theater as morally corrupting, her training will play a key role in her moral development, “giving her [the] self-possession, power of voice, and ease of gesture” to pursue a career as a feminist, pro-labor public speaker (332). This ambivalence about the actress’s power of voice and gesture is at the heart of many nineteenth-century portrayals of theater. In nineteenth-century fiction, the image of a woman performing on stage is a powerful one: suggestive of femininity and self-expression, but also of negative traits including deception, artificiality and an unfeminine appetite for public attention. In the late nineteenth century, a host of novels use the figure of the actress to address the changing roles of women along with wider issues of social performance, identity, subjectivity and sexuality. These novels problematize the public/private split by using female characters in public space to embody the powerful cultural shifts that modernity and rapid urbanization were bringing to society. Theater is a deeply paradoxical art form, seen at once as socially constitutive and promoting conformity, and as denaturalizing, decentering, etiolating, queering, feminizing. Nineteenth-century novels, placed between repressive “Victorian-ness” and the coming of the New Woman, often illustrate social activities in theatrical metaphors, while simultaneously making an effort to maintain those social norms by concealing the anxieties surrounding the stability of these norms, the anxieties which coalesce around scenes of theater and theatricality. In the following chapters, I will examine 1 the ways in which nineteenth-century novelists on both sides of the Atlantic use the figure of the theatrical woman to advance claims about the role of women. Theater and theatricality play important roles in the nineteenth-century literature of both England and America.1 These novels are preoccupied not only with metaphors of society as a “stage,” but also with actual scenes of theater and theatrical performance. Quite often, theater in the nineteenth-century novel exerts a seductive power, engrossing, and at times repulsing, the audience. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, a private theatrical performance captivates the performers, but is ultimately portrayed as a temptation to be resisted due to its ability to induce desire and prompt imitation of the characters. These concerns persisted throughout the century. The novels I will discuss—including Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Brontë’s Villette, Alcott’s Work, James’s The Bostonians and The Tragic Muse—similarly portray theater as fascinating, but at the same time dangerously provocative, in particular when women act on stage. The disturbing power ascribed to theater calls for critical attention. As I will discuss in Chapter Three, antitheatricalists have historically expressed anxieties about the disturbing relation between acting and gender. According to Jonas Barish, European and American moralists from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century express what he calls “antitheatrical prejudice” against actors and acting; since, for those polemicists, the impersonation of evil or inferior characters was morally harmful to the impersonator, endangering the integrity of the authentic self, or even signifying the absence of such integrity (307-10). The theater was 1 For example, Nina Auerbach, in her seminal work Private Theatricals, examines the impact of theater and theatricality in Victorian imagination and representations. Joseph Litvak’s Caught in the Act analyzes the at once subversive and conformist presence of theatricality in Victorian literature. Emily Allen’s Theater Figures also extensively analyzes the tense relation between the novel and theater in Victorian literature. In Portable Theater, Allan Ackerman investigates the cultural importance of theater and melodrama in nineteenth-century American literature. Randall Knoper,
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