‘The Private Rooms and Public Haunts’: Theatricality and the City of London in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

Abstract

The Victorian period was a densely voyeuristic era in which visual forms of entertainment proliferated and the culture of spectacle stretched beyond the theatrical scene. The use of theatrical imagery for representing the city and the view of London as a stage has for centuries been a familiar concept. Today neo-Victorianism has turned the nineteenth century into a scene upon which present-day issues and concerns can be staged in Victorian guise. By incorporating the playfulness of neo-Victorian fiction to reimagine the past and give voice to the unheard, the view of urban life as a spectacle is intensified. In this chapter, I will examine the representation of London as a stage in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and pay special attention to the urban stroller, comparing male and female perspectives of the city. I will begin with a brief overview of neo-Victorianism in the twenty-first century and then consider the concept of theatricality in the nineteenth century — an idea I link to the neo-Victorian literary mode and subsequently use to approach Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.