Empty Houses: Thackeray's Theater of Interiority

The nineteenth century has long been justifiably regarded as the golden age of the realist novel, the period when long narrative fiction achieved undisputed cultural respectability and intellectual seriousness. But some of the most innovative recent critical work in Victorian studies has addressed the struggles and uncertainties attendant on the novel's quest for cultural hegemony. I'm thinking in particular of books like Emily Allen's Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and J. Jeffrey Franklin's Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. Despite the differing emphases and arguments of these works, they share an acute awareness of the theater's central role in nineteenth-century English culture. Allen and Franklin both argue that the novel consolidated its cultural centrality by means of a strenuous competition with its theatrical other.

Allen demonstrates, for example, that novelists conjured the image of theater to create distinctions between novels: the figure of theater drew off energies of embodiment, femininity, and mass entertainment that the serious novel needed to render abject in order to establish itself as a private, disembodied, respectable artistic object. Franklin's account similarly emphasizes a model of generic competition, whereby novelists like William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot discipline theatrical characters in order to supplant what Franklin calls "the subject of performance" with "the subject of reading" (126). Allen and Franklin are both drawing on and contributing to the important work of historians who have traced the transformations in dramatic culture over the course of the nineteenth century. A series of changes in theater architecture, playwriting, acting styles, and urban planning affected English theatergoing in profound ways that have been summed up as effecting a gradual "novelization" of the theater. The disappearance of the last big urban fairgrounds, the shortening of theatrical bills of fare to make evening entertainment coincide with the suburban commuter trains, the introduction of family-oriented matinees, the evaporation of the stage apron and thus the curtailing of interaction between actor and audience, the eventual triumph of the proscenium arch so that stage action receded and took on the air of a parallel reality, the increased emphasis on realism in stage design and on decorum and passivity in audiences, the developing interest in psychological realism in characterization: together, these developments transformed a theatrical and public culture to reflect the new prominence of the private, domestically oriented, psychologically absorbed form of the realist novel.¹

The critics I've mentioned have understandably argued that the major realist novelists are quite happy about, if not themselves complicit in, this disciplining of theatrical culture. As I've indicated, these critics assume that antagonism sets the terms for the relations among artistic forms: the decline of the theater coincides with the novel's victory. This model makes intuitive sense—and as I've suggested, it has brought a new dynamism to the study of the novel's evolution. But I would like to question the notion that the models of "contest" (Franklin 87) and "competition" (Allen 17) provide the only, or best, lens through which to comprehend the relations between genres. It seems important, for example, to recall that some of the writers most closely associated with the novel's cultural prestige, among them George Eliot, Henry James, and, later, James Joyce, attempted to write for the stage. Strangely—but not, I want to suggest, entirely coincidentally—these are also among the novelists we most associate with the refinement of techniques for representing consciousness. That these authors are frequently described as apostles of inwardness, and that they could be vocal about their distaste for the actual theater, should not blind us to the fact that at crucial moments in their novelistic careers, the theater seemed to hold a promise—occasionally financial, but also aesthetic and ethical—that the novel did not. The strange theatrical interludes in these exemplary novelistic careers, I'd suggest, should at the very least prompt us to reconsider the model of generic competition.

I'll focus on a revealing stretch in the career of Thackeray—a writer whose volubly expressed contempt for "sham...