ABSTRACT More than Metaphor: Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Browning, and the Rising Novel as Drama Rachel Kilgore, Ph.D. Mentor: Kristen Pond, Ph.D. In his 1749 novel, Tom Jones, Henry Fielding quips that “Every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ” (Fielding 83). It is the contention of this dissertation that though we have read the developing novel in contrast to epic, romance, and news, we have not yet read it in the theatrical spirit and dramatic manner in which it was “writ.” Yet the novelist’s training in the theatre, the novel’s slow usurpation of drama, and the novels’ own assumptions that they are drama, suggest that the comic eighteenth-century century stage is a neglected but rich precursor to the modern novel. This dissertation begins with the assumption that elements of the novel are inherited from drama, identifies four novels that call themselves drama, and then explores one theatrical element in each novel to understand how the novel functions as drama. Tom Jones considers, as Fielding says, “what few have yet considered… the audience at this great drama” (Fielding 211). The novel, aware of a plural, listening audience, casts itself in theatrical terms in response to that audience. Tristram Shandy’s mediating narrator stands on the apron of the novel, and in the space between the audience’s needs and the story’s truth, stages the plot. Mansfield Park captures the resulting staged plot, exploring the interaction between staged worlds and the “real” worlds they inhabit. Finally, The Ring and The Book, a verse novel by Robert Browning, traces the dramatized novel’s move to interiority; we must still “Let this old woe step on stage again” (Browning I.825), but in our mind’s ear and mind’s eye, imaginatively recreating the story-world backstage of the plot. Thus, as the study moves from Fielding’s raucous eighteenth-century audience to Sterne’s conversational apron, to the Austen’s intentional stages, to Browning’s imaginative story-world backstage of the plot, it develops a model of novel-reading based on the theatrical roots of the novel. More than Metaphor: Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Browning, and the Rising Novel as Drama by Rachel Kilgore, B.S., M.A. A Dissertation Approved by the Department of English Kevin J. Gardner, Ph.D., Chairperson Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by the Dissertation Committee Kristen Pond, Ph.D. Chairperson Joshua King, Ph.D. Joseph Stubenrauch, Ph.D. Luke Ferretter, Ph.D. Accepted by the Graduate School August 2020 J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School. Copyright © 2020 by Rachel Kilgore All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... viii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction: More than Metaphor.................................................................................. 1 Novel-Rise Theory ...................................................................................................... 2 The Eighteenth-Century Stage .................................................................................. 14 Current Critical Work on The Novel and Drama ...................................................... 22 Recasting Novel Reading .......................................................................................... 30 The Theatre’s Five Parts ........................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER TWO .............................................................................................................. 38 Fielding’s Audience: Casting the Plural Audience of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones .... 38 Fielding and the Eighteenth-Century Stage .............................................................. 39 The World’s Audience in Book VII .......................................................................... 41 The Powerfully Plural Audience ............................................................................... 46 More than Metaphor: True Story and the World’s Drama ....................................... 61 How the Novel is a Drama ........................................................................................ 68 How the Novel is Not a Drama ................................................................................. 79 Conclusion: Tangents to Dramatic Realism ............................................................. 87 CHAPTER THREE .......................................................................................................... 90 Sterne’s Apron: The Conversation that Builds the Theatre in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy ............................................................................................................ 90 Theatrical Tastes in Sterne and Shandy .................................................................... 92 Tension Generates Conversation: Reader’s World vs Story-World ......................... 95 Trim’s Trouble: the tension between audience needs and historical accuracy ......... 99 Conversation Casts the Readers as an Audience. ................................................... 114 Conversation Stages the Plot................................................................................... 119 Conversation Textures Backstage ........................................................................... 136 CHAPTER FOUR ........................................................................................................... 162 Austen’s Stage: The Drama of the Novel in Austen’s Mansfield Park ...................... 162 The Complex of Inset Stages .................................................................................. 165 Actors on the Stage: Character Orientation to Real and Staged Worlds ............... 175 Readers on the Stage: Orientation Tracks the Reading Type ................................. 189 How the Allied Reader Grows With Fanny ............................................................ 213 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 215 CHAPTER FIVE ............................................................................................................ 219 Browning’s Backstage: Resuscitating the “Old Woe” in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book ............................................................................................................... 219 Defining Backstage ................................................................................................. 221 v Context: Verse Novel to Embody Truth ................................................................. 224 Backstage in Practice .............................................................................................. 233 Conclusion: Complicating Narratology .................................................................. 269 CHAPTER SIX ............................................................................................................... 273 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 273 The Street: How the Novel as Drama Orients Theories, Traces a New Lineage, and Alters Pedagogy ............................................................................................... 273 Orients and Complicates Theories .......................................................................... 276 Traces a New Lineage for The Novel ..................................................................... 280 Alters Pedagogy ...................................................................................................... 284 Epilogue: The Novel As Drama .............................................................................. 286 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 289 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. William Hogarth’s “The Laughing Audience” ................................................17 Figure 1.2. Liebe’s “Mr. Garrick Als Hamlet” .................................................................20 Figure 1.3 “The Relaxed Reader” from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair .....................................31 Figure 1.4 William Hogarth’s “Corporal Trim Reading a Sermon” ..................................31 Figure 1.5 Seymour Joseph Guy’s “Story of Golden Locks” ............................................34 Figure 1.6 The Parts of the Theatre ...................................................................................37 Figure 3.1. Mr. Shandy on the Apron ................................................................................96 Figure 4.1. The Inset Stages of Mansfield Park ...............................................................165 Figure 5.1. The Ring and the Backstage ..........................................................................242 Figure 6.1. Seymour Joseph Guy’s “Story of Golden Locks” .........................................276