VICTORIAN MELODRAMA AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POVERTY

Abstract

QUESTIONSABOUT THE PERFORMATIVE NATURE of Victorian culture have received extended attention in the past decade or so as critics have begun to examine the relationship between representation and subjectivity.1 By and large, such studies have fruitfully problematized our received assumptions about the private character of the Victorians. At the same time, however, they have also implicitly privileged the middle-class frames of reference that shape the distinction, for even as they complicate our understanding of performance by calling into question the distinction between public and private modes, critics who take up such issues tend not to question the stability of the categories of experience under scrutiny. As a result, while we gain important new insights into the cultural formation of identity or genre underwritten by the separation of public and private spheres, we also risk reading all Victorians as if their relationships to such ideological formations were identical with those of the emerging middle class.