Life as Journey and as Theater: Two Eighteenth-Century Narrative Structures

Abstract

M YTEXT WILL BE Spectator No. 219, in which Addison says that according to one metaphor, from Scripture, men are Strangers and Sojourners upon Earth, and Life a Pilgrimage, but according to another, Epictetus' metaphor, the world is A Theatre, where everyone has a Part allotted to him and is judged by how well he plays his part.1 Addison prefers the second, and I am going to show how his preference applies to a few narratives in the first half of the eighteenth century. These are narratives in that they connect two or more points in time, but they are, to be more precise, a spiritual autobiography, a ballad opera, a graphic series called a progress, and a comic epic in prose. I am proposing that in these works the metaphor of life as a journey, with its emphasis on sequential actions and a lone protagonist, began to be augmented and radically altered by the metaphor of life as a stage, in which a role-playing protagonist has to interact with other actors; and that this change is reflected in the major novels of the following decades. In the passage I have quoted, Addison uses the metaphors of journey and theater as alternative models of providential design. journey stresses teleology: whether the Christian pilgrimage or the epic journey, whether the travels of Adam or Odysseus or Aeneas, it must have a destination. aspects of divine providence Addison found in the theatrical metaphor were its apparent arbitrariness, inscrutability, and incalculable distance from our everyday concerns. This metaphor, he says, is wonderfully proper to incline to be satisfied with the Post in which Providence has placed us (Epictetus himself, he reminds us, was a slave), for there may well be a discrepancy between the way the drama ends or the fate of the dramatis personae and the fate of the actors who played them. When the play is over and the roles relinquished, the actors are all equal; or, as Addison suggests, there may be new roles assigned in heaven commensurate with our performance in the assigned roles on earth: The Great Duty which lies upon a Man is to act his Part in Perfection. We may, indeed, say that our Part does not suit us, and that we could act another better. But this (says the