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4.Tales of the Culture Industry
- Ohio University Press
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In previous chapters, I have focused on the different ways the halls were represented in various media, in the pronouncements of journalists or on the correspondence page of daily papers. The controversy over the Empire demonstrated that urban spaces and heterosocial crowds were subject to heated public debate on their use and abuse. The stakes for these regulatory conflicts were high: to describe the Empire promenade as a male space could in effect determine how the space was utilized, or at the very least its discursive significance. This chapter examines the various representations of music hall provided in literary work at the end of the s. In a crucial particular , literary portrayals of the halls and their performers display Tales of the Culture Industry , , 4 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. a remarkable agreement: they all focus on the spectacle of women assuming new and powerful roles. By the s and s, the music hall had become a public space that was no longer subjected exclusively to a strict male control or dominance; as Judith Walkowitz details, the century’s close saw the end of male, middle-class hegemony over London’s public areas.1 Of the texts I examine, Walter Besant’s Dorothy Wallis () has the most optimistic, even meliorist tone; Besant propagates the message that it is possible for single working women to find both a career and vocation within the spaces of metropolitan London. Besant allows for the possibility that a woman might take to the stage and assume a major subject position in regard to the culture. Yet he remains markedly ambivalent as to whether middleclass professionalism, with its attendant emphasis on discipline and selfrestraint , can sustain itself against forces that compel performing women to lead disreputable lives and direct them back down the class ladder. In contrast , Hall Caine’s best-seller The Christian () works as a cautionary tale against public women like the novel’s heroine, Glory Quayle. The novel expresses overwhelming alarm in the face of the fact that women, potential dupes and stand-ins for consumer culture, might attain a measure of control outside traditional, patriarchal institutions. Hoping to bring Glory back under his paternalist solicitude, the protagonist John Storm actually attempts to murder the actress to prevent her final decline into vice. These writers encountered, and often conflated, two different but equally threatening forms of the “feminine” at music halls: the presence of strong female performers, many of them challenging male stereotypes through song, and the “feminizing” allure of mass culture itself.2 Andreas Huyssen details the ways in which popular entertainment was stigmatized by male observers as sentimental, hysterical, irrational—traits that “serious” male artists associated with women. The literature of the hall in the s is largely a reactive formation, a masculinist endeavor to take back a mass culture form to healthy, manly, and middle-class norms. The writers discussed below—Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson—attempt to dissuade women from a career at the halls, reducing them to largely subordinate roles. We will see that Nevinson concludes his music-hall fiction “Little Scotty” () with a powerful image of a new kind of expert: a working-class man who finds his identity, and his sovereignty, by taking to the stage. The stage also redeems working-class manhood from a supposedly degrading feminization. These music-hall fictions conceive the space of the halls both as a cultural site, where audiences are influenced and occasionally inflamed, and as a Tales of the Culture Industry You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. workplace. This dual focus presents intriguing problems both formally and in terms of content. The ideological content framed by these tales is double voiced, even when these authors endeavor to be programmatic. Besant and Caine both read the halls through the moral dilemmas posed by the figure of the actress; in this respect they share common ground with works more familiar to Victorian scholars: Henry James’s Tragic Muse (), Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray (), and, earlier, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (). Yet detailed comparisons between the novels are di...
