Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians by Nina Auerbach (review)

Book Reviews249 lies in the works ofcanonical, professional writers). Still, Telling Lies is worth a look for students of autobiography as well as for students of the writers in question, if only to remind one of the many-layered complexity—and the dangers—involved in interpreting the story of a life. SUSAN H. SWETNAM Idaho State University NINA AUERBACH. Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. 132 p. Readers ofNina Auerbach's work expect her to deliver, with verve and grace, some striking aperçus into nineteenth-century literature and culture, and her new volume does not disappoint. Private Theatricals takes a less exclusively feminist approach to its subject than her earlier works, Woman and the Demon: The Life ofa Victorian Myth and Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, and its uncovering of further unexpected links between Victorians' lives and their art is, perhaps as a result, all the more insightful. Auerbach's thesis here is that in their pursuit of authenticity—what she calls their sanctification of sincerity—Victorians shunned as deceitful whatever smacked of theatricality, but at the same time found their private lives informed by a sense, often useful, oftheatre and role-playing. On the one hand, the transformations and multiplicity of selves involved in stagecraft threatened their core of identity, implying a dangerous fluidity, even a kind of decomposing, of the self and of reality. On the other hand, viewing different life stages in figurative theatrical terms provided a way of coping with the inescapable evidence of growth and decay in their own lives. Auerbach is obviously casting a wide net over some well charted seas, but by avoiding the temptation to plumb the depths of Victorian crises of faith and identity and instead concentrating on the odd specimen ofpopular art and behavior pattern that turns up in her net, she manages to say, in a small space, a remarkable number oforiginal and suggestive things about Victorian beliefs. Each of her book's three main sections (a division reflecting its origins as the three-part Christian Gauss Seminar held at Princeton in 1986) explores, largely by examples from literary works, a major point in the Victorian life cycle where, in Auerbach's words, "the self assumes its sacred nature" (17). The first two stages, of early childhood and passage into maturity, prove to be to the nineteenth-century mind as dominated by images of dying as the last stage, ofphysical death, and all three stages are inextricably bound up with images of theatricality. In describing the earliest stage (in a section entitled "Little Actors"), Auerbach attributes the popularity of fictional death scenes involving children—like those of Dickens' Little Nell and Willie Carlyle in East Lynne—to the Victorian beliefthat children's deaths represent "unbroken, self-complete, perfectly symmetrical circles of eternity," because "children on the edge of death have no time to forfeit their best selves" (21). Their state contrasts sharply with those children in novels who do not die early and hence must learn, in 250Rocky Mountain Review terror, of the vastnesses of their potentiality: Jane Eyre, for example, facing up to what lies in "the depths within" herself, and Pip threatened by the unboundedness that lies "beyond" himself. (In this perilous passage to maturity, as Auerbach acutely notes, it is only the rhetoric, not the experience itself, that is gender-differentiated.) The survivor's "conversion" to adulthood following on the loss of authority figures involves a little death-in-life in which the self is transformed into its own object of belief. Finally, the adult's dying provides the moment of supreme self-possession, life's sole experience of rest and integration. Death scenes in novels—whether of a saintly Mordecai or a demonic Heathcliff—show subjects who "do not quite die" (88) but rather realize themselves completely for the first time and even infuse their spirit into an alter ego who will complete their life work. For Auerbach this notion of death as life's ultimate triumph accounts for some ofthe stranger manifestations of late Victorian art and popular culture, from the doubles and ghouls ofStevenson and Stoker to the vividly self-realized ghosts of Dickens...