Durham E-Theses Spectacular drama in urban entertainment: the dramatisation of community in popular culture Chaney, David Christopher How to cite: Chaney, David Christopher (1985) Spectacular drama in urban entertainment: the dramatisation of community in popular culture, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10497/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Spectacular Drama in Urban Entertainment; the dramatisation of community in popular culture David Christopher Chaney ABSTRACT This is a study of some of the many types of entertainment that have been called spectacular, of the cultural significance of certain conventions in ways of transforming space and identity. Forms of spectacular drama both require and celebrate urban social relations, they constitute essential parts of the popular cultural landscape. They display an idealisation of ways of picturing collective experience. Although I note continuities in forms of spectacular drama through different eras, it is differences in the ways in which our sense of collective life or community is experienced and expressed that provide for very different understandings of forms of spectacular display. I describe and discuss forms of spectacular drama in the fifteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have chosen the fifteenth century as it was a period when there was a flourishing range of dramatic entertainment but no theatres. The principal features of the culture that I stress are the looseness of the dramatic frame. In contrast, the nineteenth century is a period of both urban expansion and theatrical supremacy. In the course of the century the population became urbanised and the growing cities became spectacular stages for new forms of social experience. I describe a broad framework of popular entertainment which provided many forms of spectacular experience, but concentrate upon the theatrical form of melodrama and forms of pictorial realism. In the chapter on the twentieth century I am principally concerned with the implications of processes of massification - both of society and culture. I argue that the democratic individualism of consumer culture and mass leisure has made the vocabulary of identity and community peculiarly problematic. The theme is that spectacular drama in contemporary culture has become more insistent and more public and yet our participation and response has been increasingly privatised. SPECTACULAR DRAMA IN URBAN ENTERTAINMENT: the dramatisation of community in popular culture DAVID CHRISTOPHER CHANEY Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Durham 1985 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. s4 IS APR. 1986 CONTENTS Page CHAPTER ONE Introduction; Spectacular Drama 1 CHAPTER TWO Spectacular Dramaturgy in a Culture Without Theatres 43 CHAPTER THREE The City Triumphant: The Nineteenth as a Spectacular 86 Century 122 Part One 142 Part Two 159 Part Three 181 Part Four 200 Part Five Part Six CHAPTER FOUR The City Dissolved; Spectacular Reality in Part One Mass Entertainment 2 36 Part Two 285 Part Three 324 CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion 373 Acknowledgements A number of people have helped me to write this thesis. Jim Beckford read the first complete draft and not only raised some very helpful points and questions but also gave some invaluable reassurance. Laurence Hazell has been more than a friend, and only he and I know how often in late-night discussions ideas have been found inter-related with values. Judith Chaney has consistently given love and consideration. Many others have helped and supported sometimes by discussing thoughtsand listening tolerantly, sometimes by simple encouragement and spiritual massage: Steve Hester, Annie Hudson, Mo Mowlam, Colin Painter, Mike Pickering, Dave Jost, Susan Williams and Robin Williams. A list is too bald but I hope that in each and every case, and with all my other firends, the person knows how much I have valued their friendship and help. While I have been writing this thesis I have been in love with Gillian Marrion, this, and she, have not helped my work except in the sense of some words by Hemingway which I have seen quoted: 'I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to make it absolutely perfect, or if not that then wonderful; then you write for who you love whether she can read it or not and whether she is alive or dead.1 Above all else I want to acknowledge all the ways in which being with Sophie have made it worthwhile - and dedicate it to her. None of the material contained in this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree in this or any other university. I am the sole author of all this thesis. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotations from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. CHAPTER ONE - Introduction: Spectacular Drama 'But it was wonderful only as a spectacle, since it meant nothing (Bowles 1982 p.313) -2- In this thesis I will suggest some ways in which forms of popular culture, in particular forms of entertainment which contemporaries could describe as spectacular, relate to differences in the experience of membership of different types of social formation. In this chapter I will clarify what is involved in conceptualising the project in this way. I shall begin by picking out some terms that are central to my account. A premis of my approach is that a major theme in human experience is the nature of the community to which individuals are primarily oriented. The web of personal relationships involving each individual can be unravelled through differences in degree and type of interlocking rights and obligations, but they also cohere through some sense of a world that is shared in common. The relationships between habitat and its inhabitants provide grounds for the cultural organisation and expression of collective identity. One example would be the ways in which we can read a landscape as an inscription of cumulative enterprise: 'A landscape is the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself We read upon the face of the landscape the pasts which it has borne in order to create our present.' (Inglis 1977 p.489). A central theme in the following work will be differences in ways of dramatising cultural as well as physical landscapes, and the imagery of community through contrasts in social and physical horizons. The ^emeinschaft-^essellschaft distinction is of course well established in the social-anthropological literature, and I do not intend to take any time exploring that original distinction or its later developments. I will, however, employ the moral sense of interdependence between types of experience of community and individuality postulated in that distinction to elucidate the presuppositions and rewards of dramatic representation. -3- An analogous theme, which has been privileged in Marxist perspectives, is that the organisation of productive relationships - the relationship between individual labour and the fruits of that labour - is of central significance in explaining human self-conception and structural relationships within a collectivity. I do not wish to pit this theme against my emphasis upon a sense of community and rank them in terms of significance, nor to suggest that they are the only two, but rather argue that sense of community is of particular significance in structuring images of desireable action. It is an integral part of this approach to argue that the language, in the widest possible sense, used to express the norms for and attitudes towards actions as members of communities is inherently political. This does not mean that the language must be associated with formally organised competing interest groups, and indeed may be associated with 'non-political' grounds for association such as religion, sex and age; but will be political in that it expresses competing views over possible tensions between the legitimate and the desireable. Of fundamental importance in patterning changes in the meaning of community has been the development of a distinction between public and private worlds, and this will be a persistent point of reference in my account. A second premis of my approach is that it is through dramatisation that the community as shared experience is most commonly articulated. I have mentioned the importance of landscape as one form of record of collective activity, and one way of understanding dramatic force is to see it as a social transformation of space: 'The art in the caves of southwest Europe and the stories of the Aborigines about the landmarks in their range are means of transforming natural spaces into cultural places: ways of making theatres.' (Schechner 1976 p.43). It is in the self- consciousness of drama that the raw materials of personal experience are -4- framed in ways that make them available for communal understanding: 'Just as a farm is a field where edible foods are grown, so a theatre is a place where transformations of time, place, and persons (human and nonhuman) are accomplished.' (Schechner op.