The Novel Stage

Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen

Marcie Frank

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684481699
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Marcie Frank's study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel's narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

1

GENRE, MEDIA, AND THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL

QUINTESSENTIALLY MODERN, the novel was the first print-born genre of literature; epic, drama, and lyric were originally oral forms. Famously new, or “novel,” it arrived late to the literary field that was identified throughout the Renaissance and eighteenth century as “Poetry.” Its appearance began to destabilize an organization that relied on the neoclassical classifications of genre along the axis of ancient/modern.¹ By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the field of literary production became recognizable as the suprageneric “Literature,” now dominated by other distinctions, including serious/popular and print/performance. In classic accounts of the novel, this backdrop motivates its identification with modernity itself, but because they blur its generic specificity by treating it as sui generis, or as incorporating or subsuming other genres, such accounts cannot understand its contributions to either the changing function of the category of genre or the axes along which literature was reorganized.² In these operations, the novel did not work alone; nor were its accomplishments due solely to print.

Theater, the default aesthetic experience of the long eighteenth century, brought genres including tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama to life. Each of these genres helped to shape the novel; each was also reshaped not only as but also by prose narrative. Together, not only did the representational possibilities of the novel and the theater refine these genres; but, as they did so, they also realigned the genre system by helping to produce the two oppositions, serious/popular and print/performance, that granted media an emphasis retained to this day, even if the term “media” was not then in use. The historical relations of the novel to the theater loosen the novel’s overly narrow identification with realism, making it possible to reframe its status as one genre among others, with consequences for the history of its emergence and our account of its formal characteristics. The relations between the categories of genre and media across the media of print and performance also help to determine the applicability of the media concept in literary analysis more generally.

The experience of theater included the reading, writing, and/or reading aloud of drama, and the attendance of (and/or participation in professional or amateur) performance; theater thereby offered a range of intermediations of engagement, both individual and collective, private and public, with literature. Going back to antiquity, meanwhile, drama had supplied the key terms—comedy and tragedy—for organizing the literary genres in Poetry, including those that were not performed. Though immersed in the earlier system, these terms were carried over and applied regularly to the novel; drama thus enables a reconsideration of the genre concept in the history of the novel. With theater’s existence across the media of performance and print, and as a significant influence on the development of the novel, theater refines applications of the media concept to it. In fact, the novel’s relation to the theater, including drama, requires a theorization of the intersections of genre and media.

The novel’s great success has been crucial to its status as a supergenre, a status that has discouraged cross-genre and cross-media comparison. Its aesthetic value, moreover, has been located in its representational achievements in realism; being identified with realism has served further to obscure its status as one of many genres in the modern literary system. Recognizing, in order to suspend, the powerful association of the novel with modernization and observing that genre studies “has embraced the assumption that all genres are already mixed,” Wolfram Schmidgen has called for “a fully historicized and theorized understanding of how mixture works” in the history of the novel.³ By tethering the category of genre more firmly to that of media, the history of the novel’s relation to the theater answers this call by prohibiting the media blindness, or exclusive orientation to print, that has dominated other accounts. Yet neither media-oriented work in scholarship in the history of the book nor new media theory has had much to do with genre, the former because its interests in print go beyond the bounds of literature, a category about which it also has had surprisingly little to say, and the latter because generic mediation has come to be subsumed under the category of media. Indeed, genre seems also to have been relegated to the back seat in a new formalism that privileges the single rubric of “form.”⁴ Histories of the novel, histories of the theater, and studies of their intersections, furthermore, have assumed an opposition of print to performance in which we see one of the ways genre’s subsumption into media has been naturalized. In the intersection of genre and media, however, the history of the novel’s relation to the theater discloses a crucial matrix in the modern organization of literature for which a literary history then becomes possible.

This chapter explores the concepts of genre and media by examining the problems their relationship can resolve as a way to introduce the more specific genre- and author-oriented chapters that follow. I begin with their specific convergence in Aphra Behn’s use of tragicomedy in two pieces of her short prose fiction, a conjunction that lays bare the main reason the history of the novel has not properly incorporated her contributions: realism is not her aesthetic goal. Behn also introduces the key place occupied by women writers in the rest of this book. Tuning into the differences gender makes, especially to representations of marriage as a telos in female development in both novels and plays, I pay attention to, but do not segregate, a female and feminist literary tradition. Instead, Behn’s channeling of tragicomedy for prose fiction introduces a more free-ranging discussion of the place of genre in the organization of literature as it changed over the course of the long eighteenth century. This place is best described when the default assumption that the novel was opposed to the theater is called into question; its consequences for writers across the board militate against the collation of genre with gender.

The more specific and more general discussions of genre in the first and second sections are followed in the third and fourth sections by a more specific and a more general discussion of media. The first explores the history of the relations between print and performance as it can be tracked through a brief reception of Shakespeare that exposes how they came to be understood as opposing terms. The second looks at what thinking the categories of genre and media together means for the literary history of the novel.

GENRE 1: BEHN AND TRAGICOMEDY

What will it take to consolidate Aphra Behn’s place in literary history as the first novelist in English? Answering this question involves probing the intersections among the categories of genre, gender, media, and the history of the novel; it thus has heuristic value even if “firstness,” tied too closely to the heroism of the individual literary career, ultimately cannot be a productive term in a literary history interested in the organization of literature as a system. In 1989, the feminist scholar Judith Kegan Gardiner advocated for granting the position of the first English novel to Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684), Behn’s three-volume experiment with rendering a scandalous roman à clef in the epistolary style.⁵ Sadly, however, it remains out of print. Canonical status was granted instead to the significantly shorter Oroonoko (1688).

Yet for all the attention Oroonoko has received, its narrative form has yet to be elucidated. Critics have persuasively analyzed Behn’s use of the trope of “true history,” her experimentation with the “as told to” features of prose romance and its function as political allegory, but it has not yet been recognized that in Oroonoko, as in some of her other short prose fiction, Behn channeled tragicomedy.⁶ Behn had turned to prose fiction out of financial need in the 1680s when the collapse of theatrical competition led to a decline in new productions, but the importance of tragicomedy can be seen across her career. Her three earliest plays, The Young King (probably first performed in 1679), The Forc’d Marriage (1670), and The Amorous Prince (1671), were tragicomedies, as was her last play, The Widdow Ranter (1687 or 1688).⁷ Both Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt (1688) are tragicomedies in the sense that they each contain two narrative lines that are harmonized differently, even if incompletely so, by being presented sequentially.

Whereas tragicomedy will not explain those features of Behn’s prose that derive from romance, scandal chronicle, and journalistic political writing, on the basis of which other critics have situated her within the history of the novel, it proves to be the missing link that explains the level of coherence that these narratives do (or do not) obtain. Behn’s contribution to the history of the novel is more readily comprehended in terms of intermediality than has been recognized in those histories of the genre that oppose the novel to the stage by default. For that reason, she demands a specific kind of literary history, one located at the intersection of genre and media that invites us, furthermore, to re-evaluate these categories as they have (or have not) been applied to the novel itself.⁸

In 1995, Catherine Gallagher made an important case for the signal contributions of women writers to the establishment of the literary marketplace. Women writers, she argued in Nobody’s Story, were ideally positioned to represent virtual embodiment in fungible ways because as women, they had to negotiate the marriage market controlled by men.⁹ Their bodies served as objects of exchange, which equipped them more readily to understand and innovate the textualization of embodiment on which the novel relies. Behn, who fashioned herself, or actually was, a widow, controlled the disposal of her own body, and her body of work, by the adoption of two authorial personae, the “newfangled whore” and the “author-monarch.” As Gallagher’s inaugural example, Behn was accorded two chapters, one for her plays and one for her prose fiction, with the latter focusing on Oroonoko.

Gallagher initially paid scrupulous attention to the different contributions the theater and the novel made to the literary marketplace. She applied the possibilities for actual embodied performance onstage to the virtual embodiment offered by print on the basis of Behn’s sustained exploration of the conditions of female embodiment across her writing. Virtuality was critical to the novel’s capacity to abstract from the referential real as it became “nobody’s story.” But as the novel developed into an increasingly sophisticated delivery system for realism, Gallagher moved the medium of performance into the metaphorical register despite its having been empowered at first by the literary relations between actual and virtual embodiment. After Behn, the significance, and signifying potential, of drama disappeared from her account even though the rest of her authors—Delarivier Manley, Frances Burney, Charlotte Lennox, and Maria Edgeworth—all wrote plays. The distinctive contributions that drama, read, written, or performed, made to the novel were thereby effaced, subsumed into a fictionality that was to be identified with the novel itself.¹⁰

With fictionality, Gallagher moved away from prose fiction or the novel as a genre, seeing it instead as a force field that registered the workings of capitalism in the joint registers of economic speculation and fictional representation, yet this move is costly to literary history.¹¹ It occludes the fictional status of literature in the other genres, including drama; perhaps more problematically, as an expansion of the novel, Gallagher’s fictionality smuggles in realism, making it more central to literary analysis than it needs to be and at the expense of other representational or aesthetic goals—even those of some novels. Behn’s aesthetic goal, however, was not realism. Critics struggle to account for the many improbable episodes in her fiction, including Isabella’s murder of her two husbands in History of the Nun, Oroonoko’s adventures hunting the tiger, the story that brings Prince Henrick to the monastery in The Fair Jilt, none of which can be reconciled with or assimilated to the novel form as it has been understood. Their place and function, however, are accommodated by tragicomedy. Recognizing in Behn’s work the contributions of tragicomedy to narrative form thus launches a history of the novel whose generic development can be understood otherwise.

Michael McKeon’s more recent treatment of Behn illustrates a different problem with the intersection of the novel and the categories of genre and media. He granted Behn’s Love Letters a central place in The Secret History of Domesticity for two reasons: it offered a microcosm of his larger argument, that the separation of private matters from public ones is crucial to the creation of the category of modern knowledge; and it illustrated the transformation of the secret history into the domestic novel as the key epistemic and aesthetic achievement of the early modern period.¹² Though McKeon here made a sophisticated case for the significance of Behn to the history of the novel, his uptake of the secret history is not shared by other literary scholars who grant it a generic history of its own, one that overlaps, but is not perfectly congruent, with that of the novel.¹³ This lack of agreement over the generic status of the secret history points to a deeper problem with McKeon’s application of the genre concept: his portrait of the secret history as handmaiden to the construction of the category of modern knowledge widened the scope of the argument he had made for the novel’s generic subsumption of romance in Origins of the English Novel, by means of which it consolidated the aesthetics of realism. This widening exacerbated the loss of capacity to register the ongoing significance of generic distinction already present in his earlier history of the novel.¹⁴

Acutely attentive to the dynamics of subsumption, McKeon discussed tragicomedy in The Secret History, locating it among other mixed modes as a conflation of its elements, tragedy and comedy, that had been defined in opposition to each other. He portrayed it as a dialectical recapitulation that contributed to making private domestic matters into matters of public national significance but fell short of fully realizing the formal domestication delivered by the secret history.¹⁵ This account of the features of tragicomedy independent of its orientation toward performance granted it a minor role in the media-blind forward march of the genres but suggested that the theater got left...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Genre, Media, and the Theory of the Novel
• 2. The Reform of the Rake from Rochester to Inchbald
• 3. Performing Reading in Richardson and Fielding
• 4. The Promise of Embarrassment: Frances Burney’s Theater of Shame
• 5. Melodrama in Inchbald and Austen
• Coda: The Melodramatic Address
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author