Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2012 Living Pictures: Performances of Jewishness in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Novels Nevena Stojanovic West Virginia University Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Stojanovic, Nevena, "Living Pictures: Performances of Jewishness in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Novels" (2012). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 4925. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/4925 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. 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Living Pictures: Performances of Jewishness in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Novels Nevena Stojanovic Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English John Ernest, Ph.D., Chair John Lamb, Ph.D. Kathleen Ryan, Ph.D. Michael Germana, Ph.D. Heidi Kaufman, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2012 Keywords: Tableaux Vivants; Jewishness; Performance; American Novels Copyright 2012 Nevena Stojanovic ABSTRACT Living Pictures: Performances of Jewishness in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Novels Nevena Stojanovic My dissertation examines the relationship between Jewish identity and performance in non- Jewish novelists’ portrayals of tableaux vivants, or living pictures. As a performance genre imported from Europe, the tableau vivant was a frequent element of nineteenth-century American fiction and a popular pastime of middle- and upper-class Americans in the 1800s. Since living pictures were ideologically coded—in general, designed to motivate viewers, mostly women, to adopt the patriarchal values invoked through the performance, such as chastity, purity, and piety—scholarship on the application of tableaux vivants primarily focuses on gender and class. My dissertation contributes to these discussions by highlighting the significance of ethnicity in this performance genre. Since the 1800s were the period of increased Jewish immigration to the United States, non-Jewish authors started exploring the Jewish presence on American soil in their fiction. The novels I examine are Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask, Henry James’s The Tragic Muse and The Golden Bowl, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Drawing from Michel de Certeau, I contend that the behavior of the dominant social order can be considered a series of strategies (policies and actions of the powerful) and that the behavior of Jewish women and non-Jewish women who perform Jewishness can be evaluated as a series of tactics (ruses of the powerless). These performances of Jewishness have the purpose of subverting, reshaping, and redefining the patriarchal and nationalist values of the dominant social order. I end this project with an analysis of the absence of living pictures in Jewish novelists’ portrayals of Jewishness, the silent film as a genre that surpassed the tableau vivant, and the role of Jewish silent films in the creation of Jewish American culture. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to my dedicated dissertation director, Dr. John Ernest, for his skillful guidance, sagacity, vigor, and support. I am also greatly indebted to his brilliant colleagues, Dr. John Lamb, Dr. Kathleen Ryan, Dr. Michael Germana, and Dr. Heidi Kaufman (University of Delaware). Their excellent feedback has enriched this project in numerous ways. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Dennis Allen, the Ph.D. program director, for his dedication to my academic happiness and progress towards the degree. I thank the Jackson Family Foundation and the English Department at West Virginia University for a dissertation fellowship in 2009-2010. This fellowship enabled me to devote my full attention to research and writing. Many thanks to Irina Rodimtseva, Doina Jikich, and Sujata Sengupta, whose warmth, affection, and friendship have made me so happy while I was in the Ph.D. program. I also thank all my peers for their camaraderie, encouragement, and constructive criticism over the years. Finally, I am especially grateful to my parents, Marica and Milan Stojanovic, my sister, Miljana Stojanovic, and my late grandparents, Milica and Zivko Ilic and Miljojka and Milivoje Stojanovic, for innumerable moments of happiness and for always having me in their hearts, thoughts, and prayers. Thank you for your endless love, devotion, understanding, and support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Introduction: Tableaux Vivants, Jewish Immigrants, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Margins and the Center ..................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: The Jewish Actress: Staging Power and Enacting Change in Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask................................................................................................................................54 CHAPTER 2: Remodeling the Nation: The “English Rachel” and the Vision of Anglo-America in Henry James’s The Tragic Muse ...............................................................................................89 CHAPTER 3: Acting, Matchmaking, and Jewishness in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth...........................................................................................138 Epilogue: From Living Pictures to Moving Pictures and the Jewish American Immigrant Novel: The Emergence of the Early Twentieth-Century Jewish American Culture ...............................192 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................228 1 Introduction Tableaux Vivants, Jewish Immigrants, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Margins and the Center My dissertation examines the relationship between Jewish identity and performance in non-Jewish novelists’ portrayals of tableaux vivants, or living pictures. As a performance genre imported from Europe, the tableau vivant was a frequent element of nineteenth-century American fiction and a popular pastime of middle- and upper-class Americans in the 1800s. Since living pictures were ideologically coded—in general, designed to motivate viewers, mostly women, to adopt the patriarchal values invoked through the performance, such as chastity, purity, and piety—scholarship on the application of tableaux vivants primarily focuses on gender and class. My dissertation contributes to these discussions by highlighting the significance of ethnicity, specifically Jewishness, in this performance genre. Since the 1800s were the period of increased Jewish immigration to the United States (the first immigration wave began in the 1820s and lasted through the 1840s, and the second one began in the 1880s and ended in the 1920s), non-Jewish authors started exploring the Jewish presence on American soil in their fiction, and some of them did so through scenes with tableaux vivants. Since such literary explorations began between the two waves of Jewish immigration, precisely during the Civil War, when the anti-Semitic prejudice proliferated in American society, and disappeared in the early 1900s, with the disappearance of tableaux vivants as a performance genre and before the passing of federal policies that limited Jewish immigration to the country, my dissertation examines novels by non-Jewish American authors published between 1866 and 1906. In the nineteenth-century non-Jewish literature the figure of the Jew is a receptacle for the dominant social order’s fears, anxieties, hopes, and desires. As Bryan Cheyette has convincingly argued, the Jew reflects “the possibility of a new redemptive order as well as the degeneration of 2 an untransfigured past” (Constructions of the ‘Jew’ 6). Very often the Jew can simultaneously belong to “both sides of a political or social or ideological divide” (9). Therefore, the image of the Jew is fluid. As Cheyette explains, “Even within the same ‘character,’ the otherness of ‘the Jew’ was such that s/he could be simultaneously ‘male’ and ‘female’ and ‘black’ and ‘white’ and ultimately . both ‘philosemitic’ and ‘antisemitic’ ” (Between ‘Race’ and Culture 11). Drawing from Zygmunt Bauman, Cheyette underlines the importance of “the term allo-semitism,” which encompasses “antisemitism