Dramatic Speech in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
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Performing for the Reader: Dramatic Speech in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel by Michelle Elizabeth Jacobson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Clement Hawes, Chair Professor Adela Pinch Professor David Porter Professor E.J. Westlake Michelle Elizabeth Jacobson [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6570-5138 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to those who supported me throughout my long, untraditional education. It would not have been possible without my parents, Roger and Cathy; my husband, Lee; my children, Wesley and Penelope; and my committee members, Clem, David, E.J. and Adela. I would like to express my fullest and most sincere gratitude to you all, but especially to my committee chair, Clem, whose profuse encouragement and unyielding patience enabled me to overcome numerous challenges to complete this project. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ ii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION: Staging Speech and Performing Authorship .................................................. 1 CHAPTER I: Performing in Prologues and Narration: Dramatic Features in Aphra Behn’s Prose Fiction ........................................................................................................................................... 36 CHAPTER II: Performing through Metafiction in Restoration and Eighteenth-century Plays and Novels ........................................................................................................................................... 80 CHAPTER III: Performing Sentiment in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer ....................................................................................................................... 125 CHAPTER IV: Performing Behind the Curtain: Frances Burney’s Evelina and Dramatic Works ..................................................................................................................................................... 173 CONCLUSION: From Drama to Novels, or Vice Versa ........................................................... 223 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................. 233 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Scene from Evelina (left) adapted for the stage (right)………………………………233 Figure 2: Adapted scene from Evelina (left) and scene I.i from A Busy Day (right)…….……..234 Figure 3: Scene from Evelina (left) adapted for the stage (right).……………………………...235 iv ABSTRACT Eighteenth-century novelists borrowed formal features from many earlier genres— journals, travelogues, epic poetry, medieval romance, to name only a few—but perhaps the most influential source that contributed to the novel’s development, drama, has yet to receive the sustained recognition or systematic analysis it deserves. This study contributes to a recent critical discourse that recognizes the considerable formal and thematic overlap between drama and the novel by exploring speech representation and metafiction as two important areas of generic transference. I argue that many dramatic speech forms, particularly asides and soliloquies, and metafictional structures that solicit audience participation, such as prologues, amount to a mediating communication system between dramatist and audience. These conventions appear frequently in Restoration and eighteenth-century plays and were assimilated into the novel by authors who worked in both media, thereby contributing to the novel’s development into a recognizable genre. By examining the plays and novels of Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Frances Burney, I identify and analyze dramatic methods of speech representation that early novelists incorporated into their novels, and also consider the ways in which these authors adapted dramatic metafictional devices to initiate conversations with readers. The first chapter investigates the ways in which Aphra Behn dramatically stylized speech through modified prologues that deploy antagonism as a means of reader engagement within her novellas, and recreated the stylistic and thematic functions of a tragic chorus in Oroonoko by v using a technique I call mass undifferentiated speech. The second chapter explores the extensive use of metafiction in Restoration drama and argues that two common features of this period’s dramatic metafiction, the rehearsal structure and internal literary criticism, were integrated into early novels, such as Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. The third chapter demonstrates that Oliver Goldsmith imported speech forms from sentimental comedy into his novel The Vicar of Wakefield as a means of benefiting from sentimentalism’s popularity while critiquing its core values, and argues that his return to Restoration dramaturgy in his play She Stoops to Conquer positions two highly artificial dramatic speech forms, the aside and soliloquy, as ideal vehicles for the expression of authentic emotion. The final chapter argues that Frances Burney attempted to recreate the direct address and proleptic defense characteristic of dramatic prologues in Evelina’s preliminary paratexts, and maintains that much of the novel’s character speech is dramatically presented. It also analyzes Burney’s manuscripts for evidence of her methodological processes, and determines that the qualitative difference between character speech in her novels and plays is likely due to compositional methods. Ultimately, the formal adaptations I identify suggest that highly conventional dramatic techniques were foundational to the novel’s development, which complicates our literary historical understanding of novelistic representational aims. By recognizing non-illusionistic techniques within early novels, we learn that literary realism was only one of the novel’s many aesthetic goals, rather than its normative mode. vi INTRODUCTION Staging Speech and Performing Authorship Drama in the Novel: An Emerging Subfield A fair amount of scholarship explores the ways in which eighteenth-century authors incorporated dramatic themes and forms in their novels. Recent work by Ann Widmayer, Francesca Saggini, and Emily Hodgson Anderson has shown this to be a fertile and rewarding area of analysis. Widmayer is particularly invested in demonstrating that theatrical stagecraft influenced the proximal and spatial relations of characters in novels composed during the early eighteenth-century. Her study builds on the work of earlier scholars, such as Francesca Saggini and Emily Hodgson Anderson, who have identified formal overlaps between drama and later eighteenth-century novels. Saggini’s extensive examination of Frances Burney’s engagement with theater in her novels posits several compelling theories about broader literary trends of dramatic transference, and she goes so far as to contend that “the eighteenth-century novel was a hybrid genre…with strong dramatic characteristics, in which narrative mimesis is often coupled with (and just as often replaced by) theatrical display” (5). Concentrating on female authors, in particular, Hodgson Anderson has shown many ways in which authorship can be configured as dramatic performance in women’s novelistic practice during the late eighteenth-century. Even before the recent spate of enthusiasm for the topic, though, critics had recognized trends in formal overlap. Ronald Paulson explored the manifestation of the theatrum mundi, or life-as- stage metaphor, in early novels and Kristiaan Aerck analyzed theatrical devices found in 1 seventeenth-century prose fiction. In the midst of this generative and illuminating body of work, however, the specific areas of cross-genre overlap remain to be identified and explored. Building on these critics’ work, in this study I will identify and examine two of these areas of generic transference: the representation of character speech and dramatic metafictional practices. This study has two major objectives: the first is to identify and analyze dramatic methods of speech representation that early novelists imported into their novels. I then consider the ways in which early novelists adapted metafictional devices from drama as a means to perform the social role of author and to initiate conversations with readers. From a macro-level perspective, I seek to situate these arguments historically as part of a more expansive phenomenon of the adaptation of theatrical forms within the nascent novel genre that contributed to its development as a recognizable literary genre. To achieve these aims, I apply the vocabulary and approach supplied by narratology, the systematic study of narrative’s formal structures that emerged from linguistic structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s. The narratological understanding of performativity, in particular, is foundational to this study. Conceived of as “modes of presenting or evoking actions,” the two forms of performativity both originate in drama: performativity in the sense of the embodied performance of narrative, that is, dramatic performance