“THE STAGE! OH, FLORA, THE VERY IDEA FRIGHTENS ME!”: REPRESENTATIONS OF VICTORIAN PROFESSIONAL THEATRE IN RUPERT GODWIN AND A LOST EDEN

Abstract

... the world is essentially a stage to Miss Braddon, and all the men and women, the wives, the lovers, the villains, the seacaptains, the victims, the tragically jealous, the haters, the avengers, merely players. We could extract pages, fit, as they stand, for the different actors in a melodrama, vehemently and outrageously unnatural.1Poor little Rosie fancied herself a genius in those days. She mistook her love of dramatic art for capacity, and thought she had only to walk on to a stage in order to become a great actress, like the star she had seen at York. She did not know that the star was five-and-thirty, and had worked laboriously for ten years before audiences began to bow down to her.2With the publication of Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), Mary Elizabeth Braddon joined the company of writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood as a key producer of sensation fiction, one of the most popular and controversial Victorian genres. Braddon's writing career extended from the 1860s into the early decades of the twentieth century, eventually encompassing over eighty novels, short story collections and plays. One trait unifying many of these works beyond their sensational nature is her repeated incorporation of the professional stage and its practitioners, particularly female performers. Sometimes these characters occur as leads; sometimes they play bit parts in the novel and can be seen simply as part of the supporting cast. In addition to the frequency of their appearances, what makes these inclusions particularly significant to any discussion of the role of theatre in the Victorian novel and society is the fact that Braddon was writing about the stage from personal experience: before she rose to fame as a novelist and journalist, she supported herself and her mother with a nine-year theatrical career. Even after she left the stage as a performer, Braddon maintained her theatrical connections; throughout her life she wrote plays, and many of her novels - particularly Lady Audley 's Secret - reached the stage in dramatic form.One of her most recent biographers, Jennifer Carnell, argues that Braddon incorporates the world of the theatre, given its bad reputation and frequent association with criminality and immorality, into her novels as a way of heightening their sensational incidents and melodramatic situations. According to her and fellow scholar Graham Law, Braddon's main reason for including theatrical episodes is to entice her readers with glimpses of exotic settings and strange lives, and heighten the excitement induced by the novel's main foci - events such as bigamy, theft and murder.3 But, while I will concede that Braddon does use the theatre in part for atmosphere, to say she primarily incorporates the theatre for this reason may be an oversimplification of her work, as it does not take into account the author's very real knowledge of the stage and her affection for it. A more satisfying explanation is to consider Braddon's incorporation of the stage in relation to Victorian society's well-known anti-theatrical prejudice, the main sources of which were the period's obsession with the idea of a stable or real identity and the prevailing desire for a direct correlation between what people are on the inside and what they seem to be on the outside.4 Professional performance created anxiety for the Victorians because it indicated that perhaps identity was not an integral part of the individual, but could more accurately be paralleled to a changeable costume or a temporarily assumed and easily put off role. Therefore, many Victorians displaced their anxieties about the identities of those around them onto the stage itself.I would argue that Braddon incorporates the professional theatre and its performers into her works to highlight the hypocrisy of such prejudices, particularly regarding female performers who, judging from much of the periodic literature of the period, bore the brunt of society's criticism. …