Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Two of the most widely read Victorian novels, both written in 1847, likened fiction to theatrical performance. William Makepeace Thackeray's prefatory acknowledgment, “Before the Curtain,” in Vanity Fair is a famous and early Victorian example of a novelist using the metaphor of stage performance in order to express an awareness of audience. This self-consciousness about performance enables the author to address his audience directly and to acknowledge that fiction is constructed in order to entertain and please. Jane Eyre, dedicated by Charlotte Brontë to Thackeray, similarly uses a theatrical figure of speech in order to instruct the reading audience intimately: “A new chapter of a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote” (ch. 11). Thackeray's novel develops an ambivalent position toward dramatic performance: its heroine, the notoriously theatrical Becky Sharp, daughter of theatrical parents, is compellingly spunky and drives the novel's plot. But she is also meretricious, manipulative, and downright nasty. Jam Eyre disavows theatricality in the form of Rochester's former mistress, the inconstant French opera dancer Celine Varens, while valorizing a plain Jane, who insists, “I will not be your English Celine Varens” (ch. 24). These two works reveal not only how ... log in or subscribe to read full text