Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon

Abstract

Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon Katherine Mannheimer Doctor: What was that struck me? Scaramouch: Struck you, sir? Imagination. Doctor: Can my imagination feel, sirrah? Scaramouch: Oh, the most tenderly of any part about one, sir! The Emperor of the Moon, II.iii.103-6 This essay reads Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687) as a playful examination of two modes of representation: namely, theatrical and print-based fictions. In many ways the two modes seem to constitute two opposite epistemological approaches: theatricality is invested in public, performative, and communally-arrived-at methods of apprehending our world; while prose narrative prioritizes private, absorptive, and intensely individual forms of perception. Behn explores these contrasts but ultimately implies that the most internal, subjective forms of mental imaging—the kinds of enraptured fantasizing usually associated with acts of reading—can give rise to the most external, demonstrative forms of spectacle. Moreover, by thus obscuring the boundaries between the public and empirical on the one hand and the private and empathic on the other, The Emperor of the Moon begins to "re-gender" these modes of experience. I end the essay by exploring the literary-historical significance of the fact that Behn was detaching drama and print from the epistemological paradigms usually ascribed to each (and reconsidering the position of women within these) at just the moment when this female author—in tandem with larger literary-historical developments—was making a crucial move from stage to page. [End Page 39] I. Colliding Epistemologies: Theatrical Spectacle and Textual Interiority The Emperor of the Moon stands at the crossroads of two opposite trends in the history of representation. On the one hand, the play belonged to a series of productions known as the "Dorset Garden spectaculars," staged under the direction of Thomas Betterton between 1673 and 1692. Described by Judith Milhous as "extend[ing] the technical capacities of the Restoration theatre to their utmost," these works included the opera-versions of Macbeth and The Tempest, Thomas Shadwell's Psyche, Charles Davenant's Circe, and John Dryden's King Arthur. The trend could be said to have reached its height in the 1680s, with what Milhous calls the "machine-farce boom." This flowering of pageantry—in which Milhous sees Behn's Emperor as a key participant—was characterized by such productions as Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches and William Mountfort's Doctor Faustus. In its embrace of the supernatural, the trend pushed theatrical spectacle to phantasmagorical, cataclysmic extremes (Milhous 43). This increased emphasis on spectacle, however, seems to defy longer-term narratives of literary history. For during this same period, most scholars agree, theatre as a medium was gradually losing ground to prose fiction. J. Paul Hunter describes this transition as a "shift of artistic energy from dramatic to narrative modes": culturally, "communality" had become "thoroughly debased," and authors felt that "the route to influence" was instead "a private and subjective one, to be found only in private converse between a fixed book and the response of an individual reader, deciding silently and alone"("Stage and Closet" 286). Laura Brown, Rose Zimbardo, Ian Donaldson, John Loftis, and Julie Stone Peters chart similar transitions; thus Brown notes that once a new interest emerged in portraying "protagonists' gradually unfolding consciousnesses," prose fiction had an advantage: for such narrative "has easier access to the private life and to the interiority of its characters than does a verbal construct destined for the more public world of the stage"("Drama and Novel" 301). 1 When it came to seem that the movements of the individual mind might contain more "truth" than outward passions or political displays, the newer medium came to seem more relevant, more revealing. Less consensus has formed around the question of when exactly this reprioritizing occurred. Because Hunter is most interested in the moment at which prose fiction finally claimed dominance in the form of the novel, he calls it a "phenomenon of the 1740s"("Stage and Closet" 286). Other scholars have focused on the moment when the drama itself became "affective" or "interiorized" and have thus seen the watershed period as the 1690s, when playwrights like...