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Victorian Women's Fiction in Minor Theatres Doris Ann Frye Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Victorian Women's Fiction in Minor Theatres Doris Ann Frye Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Louisiana State University Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2013 "Vulgarized" : victorian women's fiction in minor theatres Doris Ann Frye Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Frye, Doris Ann, ""Vulgarized" : victorian women's fiction in minor theatres" (2013). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 170. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/170 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “VULGARIZED”: VICTORIAN WOMEN’S FICTION IN MINOR THEATRES A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Doris Ann Frye B.A., Saint Leo University, 2007 M.A. Louisiana State University, 2009 May 2013 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who read drafts, discussed ideas, and imparted boundless advice. These include Sharon Weltman, Elsie Michie, Meredith Veldman, John Fletcher, Kathryn Stasio, Catherine Riley, and David Riche. While all of these people and many more helped to ensure my success, Sharon Weltman deserves special thanks for her constant advice and support throughout the process. Thanks, too, to Kathryn Stasio who has provided guidance and encouragement throughout my undergraduate and graduate career. I would also like to thank my wonderful friends, especially Megan Dosé, Natasha Ruest, and Mark Palombo who were always willing to listen even when they had no idea what I was talking about. My family and in-laws also have my gratitude for all of their support. Finally, I thank my husband, Mitch Frye, for not only offering his love and encouragement but also for spurring me to work harder, longer, and with more dedication; his professionalism and commitment to scholarship provided me with a model that I strove to match. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWELDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………....ii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………...iv INTRODUCTION. THE “DISFIGURED” “SCRUFFY ORPHAN”: VICTORIAN THEATRE AND ADAPTATION……….………………………………………………......…...1 CHAPTER ONE. “A PATCHY AFFAIR”: PATERNALISM IN THE OLD VIC ADAPTATIONS OF JANE EYRE AND MARY BARTON……………………………………...18 CHAPTER TWO. A MULTIPLICITY OF AUDLEY’S: FRAMING THE LADY IN 1863…………………………………………………………………………………………...…58 CHAPTER THREE. A “GENTLEMAN OF THE RIGHT SORT”: UNSTABLE HIERARCHIES AND THE MINOR THEATRES OF THE 1870S AND 1880S ……………107 CONCLUSION. REASSESSING THE VALUE OF VICTORIAN THEATRE .......………...172 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………...176 APPENDIX. SUMMARIES…………………………………………………………………...187 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………………...194 iii ABSTRACT The theatre of the Victorian era is often ignored in literary studies or denigrated when it is discussed. This project, however, seeks to provide a framework within which we can explore the power of Victorian theatre as it responded to and shaped ideas in London between 1848 and 1882. Looking specifically at how these theatres adapted material already situated within the ideological context of the period, I argue that the adaptations of three major Victorian novels highlight the ways in which minor theatres engaged with the genres often considered high art and used that material to create new meanings for an often ignored sub group--the working class. In particular, I investigate multiple adaptations of Charltote Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret for what the adaptation can reveal about how these playwrights conceptualized class relations. These adaptations exist within a series of relations--to the original novel, to the history of the theatre, to the audience, and to the conversations occurring when they were performed. Some of the theatres were popular houses like the Old Victoria or the St. James, while others were relatively small and obscure like The Globe in Newcastle Street and the Queen’s, and each had a distinct relation to the larger society and social discourse of the era. I contend that these plays reveal the ways in which seemingly disparate conceptions of class in the Victorian era in fact interacted in these theatres as the playwrights appropriated the conversations concerning paternalism in the 1840s and 50s, the push for social reforms in the 1860s, and the ways in which society defined a “gentleman” in the latter part of the century in order to create new versions of class relations for the working classes. This project seeks to examine the voices speaking for and to the working classes in the theatrical conversations of the mid to late Victorian years and how these theatrical adaptations crafted narratives of the Victorians that worked in relation to but iv simultaneously against much of the public discourse concerning class and specifically the working class. v INTRODUCTION THE “DISFIGURED” “SCRUFFY ORPHAN”: VICTORIAN THEATRE AND ADAPTATION On January 31st of 1848, the first adaptation of Jane Eyre on a London stage opened at the Old Victoria theatre. Shortly thereafter, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her publisher William Smith Williams concerning this new version in a minor theatre, remarking that she felt any adaptation of Jane Eyre for this arena would be “woefully exaggerated and painfully vulgarized” (Smith 25). Brontë’s concern that the adaptation would “vulgariz[e]” her novel, reflects a tendency we see more broadly in modern scholarship concerning adaptation and Victorian theatre. Often simply ignored by literary scholars, when Victorian theatre does become the focal point of critical attention, critics often denigrate the form, seeing its popularity as a reflection of its low place on the culture spectrum. To return to Brontë, her terminology, “vulgarized,” can be connected to not only our modern desire to create hierarchies of art, but also marks a specific concern for the Victorians, the appropriation of material for or by the masses.1 This tension runs throughout the Victorian era and has much to do with the transition into a stratified class society rife with antagonism between the various social levels. An 1863 article, for example, satirically bemoans the ways in which the term “genteel” was losing its value because “it has…been vulgarized” or rather “passed on from Nob to Snob…until it is dragged in the kennels of the great unwashed” (Bede 138). Though the article certainly mocks what it calls “the genteel succles,” it nonetheless reflects the anxiety in the upper ranks of society regarding the ways in which the poor, the working class, the “great unwashed” were appropriating the ideas and modes of the “genteel” (138). What is at play here is the ways in which both the Victorians and modern scholars seek to classify various types of entertainment based on the social groups who are mostly likely to attend these amusements. At the apex, we find what 1 many refer to as “high culture,” the opera or literature for instance, and at the bottom rests those entertainments popular with the masses; today, this spot could arguably be assigned to reality television. In our consideration of the nineteenth century, however, this results in the dismissal of theatre as simply popular entertainment. When we dismiss this genre, though, we do more than suggest that material is less than literary. Pierre Bourdieu argues that within “the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools, periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of consumers” and further asserts, “this predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class’” (1-2). In this way, when the theatre is ignored the theatre, large sections of society that attended the theatre, for whom much of the theatrical material was crafted, especially in minor theatres, are also overlooked. To return to Brontë’s comments, her assessment of the minor theatres embodied a view of the theatrical world as some how inferior not simply for the sake of quality but inferior for its association with the “masses.” The distinction Brontë, and many others, make concerning what she views as the superiority of the novel and inferiority of the theatre obscures the ways in which “in nineteenth-century England, literature and the theatre were collaborative storytellers; they were the dominant media through which audiences understood the world” (Auerbach 4). By looking at the overlap of these two forms in the guise of theatrical adaptations of Victorian novels, I contend that we unveil a more complex and complete view of the ways in which the Victorians crafted images of themselves. This dissertation investigates the adaptations of three Victorian novels, Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Barton (1848), and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) for the London minor theatre stages from 1849-1882. While literary scholars today and members of Victorian society alike belittle the theatre, the plays produced for these minor theatre stages offer significant insight into the ways 2 in which an often neglected sub-set
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