In an influential essay on the place of autobiography in theatre history, Thomas Postlewait puts Fanny Kemble's memoirs at the crux of a historiographical problem. The literary sensibility of Kemble's work appears to Postlewait an instance of both the theatrical memoir's cultural richness and its limitations as biographical evidence: although Kemble's “epistolary mode of self-representation” gives her autobiography Records of a Girlhood “a documentary quality,” for example, even her “earliest letters reveal a calculated literary style” that signals her awareness of the “traits and conventions” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels.Footnote 1 In her consciousness of narrative trends, Kemble stands out as a particularly clear example of a general tendency in theatrical autobiographies of the period. As the nineteenth century's booming print market expanded the audience for stories about theatregoing, it also drew readers who were increasingly familiar with novelistic experiments in plotting, characterization, and point of view. This shared audience encouraged an exchange of discursive conventions across fictional and historical narratives, which makes memoirs a compelling but complicated source of historical data about nineteenth-century theatre. Indeed, the two-way influence between genres is so strong that Postlewait argues scholars “need to ask to what extent these autobiographies exist not only as historical records but as epistolary fictions.”Footnote 2
Since the publication of Postlewait's essay, theatrical memoirs have benefited from thoughtful investigations attentive to their narrative structures and representational complexity.Footnote 3 Yet most of these studies have analyzed autobiographies in their most immediate generic contexts. While there is much to be learned from examining life writing as a single tradition, I want to return to Postlewait's suggestion that fiction—and specifically epistolary fiction—is crucial to understanding narratives of performance. It is no accident, I argue, that Kemble and many other authors of the period chose to combine literary narrative, epistolary modes, and representations of the theatre. Reading together both fictional and historical texts that narrate theatrical experiences through letters, I demonstrate why epistolarity afforded distinct opportunities for representing the spatiotemporal liveness of performance.
My decision to read across genres is motivated in part by the reading and writing habits of the romantics and Victorians themselves, for whom, “stories about theatre” was a more capacious category than current divisions of critical study might suggest. Not only novels and autobiographies, but also reviews, essays, travelogues, and letters appeared side-by-side in nineteenth-century periodicals and print catalogues.Footnote 4 Many of the major authors of the period wrote broadly across all of these categories of text, and their audiences had the chance to browse a range of genres in close proximity. These “profligate” print networks helped create what theatre historian Katherine Newey calls the “fluid and almost unboundaried” archive of nineteenth-century performance.Footnote 5 I adopt a comparative method of reading as a way of registering the exchanges that constituted such a mixed textual field.
An intergeneric approach to performance writing also allows me to leverage literary methods of analysis and theories of epistolarity as a resource for theatre studies. Until now, most conversations about epistolary narrative have taken place among literary scholars, who have been drawn to its ambivalent relationship to presence. In one of the first full-length studies of the form, for example, Janet Altman outlines the epistolary narrator's investment in both the temporal present (as the letter writer, in the “now of narration,” stresses the moment of enunciation, “the pivotal yet impossible present” from which she narrates) and spatial presence (as the letter attempts to connect distant points, “neither totally separated nor totally united,” approximating presence while depending on distance).Footnote 6 This formal orientation toward what theatre scholars might call copresence makes epistolary narrative a particularly attractive tool for representing scenes of performance.Footnote 7 While few contemporary theatre historians, as Rebecca Schneider points out, would claim to write “up to the minute” of live performance, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary authors did attempt what Samuel Richardson called “writing to the moment” of production and reception.Footnote 8 Drawing on literary analyses of epistolary fiction, I demonstrate how epistolarity allows writers to reconstruct and remediate theatrical liveness through networks of textual reception that extend beyond the moment of performance.
In providing a bridge between a literary concept and a performance studies one, “epistolary liveness” also makes available some new insights into the formal texture of nineteenth-century novels. Usually associated with prose fiction before the rise of the realist novel, epistolary narrative has sometimes been viewed as a formal dead end or a curious cul-de-sac on the novel's road toward third-person realism. Recently, however, scholars like Joe Bray and Kate Thomas have pushed back against the critical tendency to treat epistolary fiction (or what Thomas distinguishes as “postal plots”)Footnote 9 as “an isolated, digressive episode in the history of the novel as a whole.”Footnote 10 Looking at historical narratives of performance, I argue, reveals one of the reasons that epistolarity not only persisted through the Victorian period but also enabled nineteenth-century fictional experiments with representing time and space. Especially when they appear as supplements to otherwise nonepistolary texts, epistolary interludes allow authors to capture the suspenseful precarity and relational intersubjectivity of the live event.
After briefly analyzing a series of theatrical letters to unpack how epistolarity allows historical spectators to construct textual versions of theatrical liveness, I explore in greater detail how two particular Victorian writers took advantage of these possibilities: Wilkie Collins, in his theatrical novel No Name (1862), and Fanny Kemble, in her memoir Records of a Girlhood (1878). While these texts belong to different genres, their authors often shared venues of publication, networks of theatergoing, and artistic circles.Footnote 11 It is perhaps thanks in part to their overlapping audiences that two of their key performance narratives engage with similarly hybrid techniques of epistolarity. Both No Name and Records of a Girlhood are framed as continuous, retrospective narratives (the kind of “coherent, unified, and teleological process” that Postlewait finds typical of theatrical memoirs).Footnote 12 Yet both authors use letters to represent key performance events. Epistolarity's vexed investment in presence, I argue, allows Collins and Kemble to interrupt narrative continuity and imbue scenes of performance with theatrical liveness, oriented toward a precarious future and an insecure collective.
Nor is such live uncertainty identity-neutral. Indeed, I argue that the techniques of epistolary fiction play a particularly crucial role in how both authors narrate the gendered performances of the nineteenth-century actress. While the decision to include letters in memoirs and novels is not unusual for the Victorian period, the moments when Collins and Kemble turn to epistolary narration are strikingly connected to scenes of feminine performance. Building on arguments by literary critics about epistolary fiction's historical relationship to middle-class femininity, I investigate these authors’ deployments of the letter form through the lenses of gender, class, and disability.Footnote 13 In his own discussion of actress autobiography, Postlewait suggests that many Victorian actresses downplay the dangers of feminine ambition by representing the start of their careers as a matter of luck and good fortune; but reading No Name and Records of a Girlhood together leads me to identify an alternative emphasis on impairment and constraint. By putting characters in precarious positions and employing the present-tense uncertainty of epistolary narrators, Collins and Kemble keep their readers in a state of suspense that emphasizes not only the actress's bodily vulnerability and financial precarity but also the physical force of her presence, the disordering pull that her performances exert on narrative time and space.Footnote 14
Epistolarity and Theatrical Copresence
Epistolary narratives, made possible by distance and absence, are heavily invested in presence and the present. Epistolary discourse, Altman explains,
is a discourse marked by hiatuses of all sorts: time lags between event and recording, between message transmission and reception; spatial separation between writer and addressee; blank spaces and lacunae in the manuscript. Yet it is also a language of gap closing, of writing to the moment, of speaking to the addressee as if he were present.Footnote 15
The epistolary urge to write “to the moment” and “as if … present” may help explain why the exchange of letters was such an important part of theatregoing in the nineteenth century. Letters offered Victorian spectators and actors a medium not only to represent the liveness of a communal theatre event but also to reenact it at a distance, building extended networks of spectator interaction through textual exchange and re-mediation. Examining a series of theatrical letters, I argue that three particular tensions inherent in epistolary narrative allowed nineteenth-century spectators to simulate and manipulate the spatiotemporality of live performance through acts of writing and reading: tensions between past–present–future, present–absent, and finished–continuous.
1. Past–Present–Future: The Pivotal, Impossible Now
Epistolary narratives reach toward a present tense at which they can never quite arrive. The opening lines of an 1839 letter from Fanny Kemble's younger sister and opera singer Adelaide Kemble are characteristic in their approach to a shared “now”: “[Y]our kind letter has this instant been brought to me,” Adelaide writes to her friend Therese Maria Anna van Thun, “and as you perceive I lose no time in answering it.”Footnote 16 Adelaide's opening lines claim that the two correspondents share the same “instant” of reception and perception. Yet she cannot actually avoid “los[ing] time” between the multiple live instants she narrates. The instant she receives her friend's letter is, of course, distinct from the instant in which she narrates receiving it; and the instant in which the Countess van Thun will “perceive” that Kemble has lost no time in answering lags far behind the moment of Kemble's writing.
This syncopated “instant” of reading and writing serves a particular turn for Kemble's representation of her performances in Milan, which she will present not as a discrete event but as a protracted series of trials and tribulations. If, as performance theorist Alice Rayner notes, theatrical time is “almost always ‘out of joint,’”Footnote 17 Kemble uses the pauses and breaks in epistolary performance time to render that disjointedness as an embodied experience of chronic pain:
don't think I did not write before because I am too vain to be able to speak of my failure here—that was not the reason—but because I was then working all day that I might fight well at night and that I was suffering too much … to dare write or speak about difficulties from which there was no escape and which I went through better in silence and alone than if I had had too much sympathy and pity bestowed on me—the Puritani has just been brought out and I have been getting a day or two's rest—but now that the necessity for being strong is over—I feel quite exhausted and incapable of any exertion mental or bodily.Footnote 18
This segment of the letter is nominally still written in the same “instant” as the opening—the moment in which Kemble received her friend's letter. Yet rather than writing to that moment, she creates a more complex temporality, during which a performance event—Kemble's “working,” “fight[ing],” and “suffering” onstage—is out of sync with its shared reception and perception—as Kemble is “silent,” “alone,” and “d[oes] not write.” Though the narrative of her artistic struggles does position her in the midst of a performing present (“now” that “the Puritani has just been brought out”), an inevitable interval (“a day or two's rest”) syncopates both epistolary and theatrical time. Kemble calls her performance a failure; but the letter's embodied point of view and weary, disjointed temporality also claim for her singing a particularly material stage presence. The liveness her narrative reenacts is not only the synchronicity of one moment, but also the lingering intervals of a chronically present corporeality.
2. Absent–Present: The Extended Collective
In epistolary narratives, audience reception is both discursively immediate—with the narrative “I” depending in unique ways on the “you” being addressed—and spatially distant—with physical separation a necessary precondition of address by letter.Footnote 19 Epistolarity's investment in creating collectivity at a distance makes it a helpful tool for spectators looking to narrativize experiences of copresence while also widening the reach of a performance's “audience” to include textual networks of reception. The actor-managers Marie and Squire Bancroft, for example, include audience letters in their memoir, Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft On and Off the Stage, which both construct the Bancrofts’ performances as vital (generating live, shared experiences for their spectators) and invite their present readers into the extended audience community made up by their admirers.
A letter from T. W. Robertson to Marie helps accomplish the former goal, as it injects into the Bancrofts’ account of their 1870 production of Ours a scene of live interaction:
Ours was acted so excellently last night that, as I may not see you for the next few days, I write to express the great gratification it gave me to see that the “light troupe” had distinguished themselves more than ever. You know that I am not given to flattery, and that my standard of taste for comedy is somewhat high. I was really charmed, and I was very ill the whole night, in discomfort and annoyance. The remark of every one I heard was, “What wonderfully good acting!” and I was pleased to find Boucicault descanting on it to a chosen few. He said that not only was the general acting of the piece equally admirable, but that he had never—including Paris—seen such refinement and effect combined as in the performance of the second act. He said, too, that the actors who had played in this piece before acted better than ever. I mention this because the same thing struck me. Bancroft was most excellent, and I have never seen him succeed in sinking his own identity so much as in the last act. For the first time in my life I felt grateful to the folks on the stage-side of the foot-lights, and I am not given to that sort of gratitude.Footnote 20
Robertson's letter is a narrative of copresence, both in form (as a discourse generated by the I–you relationship of his assertion “You know that I am”) and in content (as a representation of the copresence between the “folks on the stage-side of the foot-lights” and the audience). What begins in a two-way exchange, through which Robertson “express[es]” his personal responses to Marie Bancroft, soon widens to include a larger audience, as Robertson mimics the formal collectivity of the live audience. The collective processing that began in the theatre—as “The remark of every one [he] heard” agreed with his own impression, and as Dion Boucicault, “descanting … to a chosen few,” said “the same thing [that] struck [Robertson]” —extends into Robertson's epistolary conversation with the Bancrofts. The Bancrofts’ inclusion of such letters accordingly links the circulation of epistolary narratives about performance with interactive audience behaviors in the space of performance.
At the same time, however, Robertson's opening line also captures the spatial separation that necessitates letter writing: “as I may not see you for the next few days, I write.” These spaces of absence function not as gaps in which the live presentation vanishes, but as gaps that help generate a different kind of representational liveness. The Bancrofts include a letter from Wilkie Collins to Squire about their 1874 production of School for Scandal, for example, that names spatial “distance” as its point of inception:
I tried to call at Pleydell House yesterday, but the London distances—I was obliged to go first to South Kensington—were too much for me.
The get-up of the piece is simply wonderful; I never before saw anything, with the space, so beautiful and so complete: but the splendid costumes and scenery did not live in my memory as Mrs. Bancroft's acting does. I don't know when I have seen anything so fine as her playing of the great scene with Joseph; the truth and beauty of it, the marvellous play of expression in her face, the quiet and beautiful dignity of her repentance, are beyond all praise.
I cannot tell you or tell her how it delighted and affected me. You, too, played admirably. The “key” was, perhaps, a little too low; but the conception of the man's character I thought most excellent. I left my seat in a red-hot fever of enthusiasm. I have all sorts of things to say about the acting—which cannot be said here—when we next meet. I heartily congratulate you in the meantime.Footnote 21
The unbridgeability of “London distances” motivates Collins's letter to act as a bridge—as a communication “in the meantime” and in between “meet[ings].” Although the letter marks spatial and temporal limits to communication, it simultaneously attempts to communicate beyond them. “[T]he splendid costumes and scenery did not live in [Collins's] memory” after the time of performance, and yet he can still say that “[t]he get-up of the piece is simply wonderful.” The spatial limitations of a letter leave Collins with “all sorts of things to say about the acting—which cannot be said here,” and yet he has nonetheless filled the letter with descriptions of the acting. The “London distances” that prevent meeting in person thus enable a wider theatrical collective, extended through the circulation of letters.
3. Liveness and the Continuous Event
The epistolary text is never fully closed: although any letter might potentially be the last, every letter also seems to invite a continuation of the exchange.Footnote 22 This ambivalent orientation toward closure makes epistolary narrative a particularly expansive medium for representing performance as process. A series of letters from the actress Ellen Terry to her daughter (and fellow theatre artist) Edith Craig, for example, includes a narrative of Macbeth that encompasses not just one discrete performance event but an extended cycle of rehearsal, public performance, and audience reception. The relation of events concerning the Lyceum production of Macbeth stretches across four of Terry's letters, dating from 23 November 1888 to 3 January 1889; but the time of performance stretches even beyond the scope of these communications. The first letter, of 23 November, announces Macbeth as already in progress: “We are hard at Macbeth and I suppose it will be all right in the end—but I don't like myself at all so far—it's so hard to be sincere, from the time when the murder is done, on to the end of that act.”Footnote 23 Although almost every verb is in the present tense, the letter also extends the performance forward (to what “will be … in the end,” and “on to the end of that act”) and backward (“from the time when the murder is done,” the “so far” with which Terry is unsatisfied). Terry's language, in other words, leans into the unfinished form of the letter to represent Lady Macbeth as a character embodied by exertion over time. Just as Terry would begin her stage performance by reading a letter and wrestling with whether the future is already finished, she uses her epistolary account of Macbeth to present the play as a story of struggling through uncertain middles.Footnote 24
The temporality of Terry's Macbeth becomes even more complicated as spatial distances introduce gaps in reception. In the next letter in the series, dated 9 December, Terry acknowledges that she is writing from within a network of circulation that includes occasional lag times: “Your last letter written you sent [unclear] on Saturday when the Hollanders were writing [unclear], only reached me on Friday night,” she tells Craig, “although theirs came to me on Tuesday morning.” This pause in Terry's relation of and Craig's reception of Macbeth mirrors and reenacts the diegetic pauses in the long, periodic Macbeth she narrates. The cast is hard at work on the performance, Terry writes in the same letter, “every day—every night—.” It is not a discrete or a continuous performance (as Terry might have suggested with phrases like “all at once” or “all the time”), but a process of repetitions and pauses, as Terry emphasizes through the use of “every” (which marks each individual period in a set, or something happening at particular intervals) and the inclusion of long dashes (which both create pauses and bridge gaps). Rebecca Schneider suggests that performance is made of such gaps: between “one instance in the theatre and the next” and between “one night before one audience and the next night before another audience.”Footnote 25 In its pattern of performance “— every night —,” Terry's letter both represents this syncopated liveness through narrative content and reenacts it through the embodied experience of reading: as Terry might pause onstage as Lady Macbeth reading her husband's letter, as Craig might pause her reading in the instants marked by the long em dashes, and as both mother and daughter pause to wait for letters “sent on Saturday” that “only reached [her] on Friday night.”
Terry's epistolary Macbeth seems, in other words, to have neither a clear beginning nor a continuous middle; and the end of the performance is no more definite. In her 9 December letter, Terry seems momentarily to suggest that Macbeth will be over after opening night, as she laments Craig's inability to be present for that particular live event: “I wish with all my heart that you were here for Macbeth, but that is quite impossible.” Yet in the very next sentence, she erases the end stop. “I'll surely send you the programme and all the papers,” she writes, “and of course you'll see it later on.” In the conjunction between the post and performance, Terry entertains an implicit connection between the persistence of Macbeth over multiple performances (which allows spectators to “see it later on”) and the recirculating activity of audience members (who extend the network of participants by “send[ing] … programme[s]” and “papers”). This suggestion is further developed in Terry's letter describing opening night, which she dates 3 January 1889:
I sent you yesterday a bundle of critiques upon Macbeth—It is a most tremendous success and the last 8 (?) days booking forward has been greater than ever was known, even at the Lyceum … the critics differ, and discuss it hotly, which, in itself, is my best success of all!!! Those who don't like me in it, are those who don't want, and don't like to read it fresh from Shakespeare, and who hold by the fiend reading of the character — the very best thing ever written on the subject I think is an essay I send you by Joe Carr—that is as hotly discussed as “the new Lady Macbeth,” all the best people agreeing with it—Oh, dear it is an exciting time at the Lyceum I tell you! How I wish you had been there!
Macbeth continues to unfold, not only in the work of the actors but also in that of its audience members: the piece is a success because it is being “book[ed] forward” by future spectators and circulated through the ongoing “discuss[ions]” of its past spectators. Craig, who will see the piece “later on,” is also made part of the present audience network, as Terry loops her into the circulation of the spectator narratives produced in “critiques” and “essay[s].” Terry's letter thus uses epistolarity's ambivalent closures to stretch the boundaries of the performance event—this “exciting time at the Lyceum”—to include repeat performances as well as ongoing reception by spatially and temporally dispersed audience members.
In these theatrical letters, actors and spectators use epistolary narrative's constitutive tensions to construct a collective “liveness”—both discursive and material—that extends beyond the time and space of staged performance. “If performance is always in the present,” Rayner points out, “it is not so easy for an audience to be in the present.”Footnote 26 The circulation of letters offered audiences a way to represent such ambivalent experiences of presence and to reproduce the pauses and gaps of reception in another medium. Turning now to a more sustained case study, I want to examine how such moments of epistolary liveness—those places where the open-ended spatiotemporality of epistolarity meets a narrative representation of performance events—enable live interruptions of otherwise retrospective texts. The insights generated in readings of Adelaide Kemble (and her embodied, painful temporal presence), the Bancrofts (with their extended and attenuated communities of circulation), and Ellen Terry (in her prolonged time of performance) will continue to permeate my analysis of Wilkie Collins' and Fanny Kemble's efforts to represent the liveness of their actress-protagonists.
Precarious Liveness: Wilkie Collins's No Name and Fanny Kemble's Records of a Girlhood
In his preface to No Name, Collins frames the novel as abandoning the suspense of The Woman in White for the pleasures of teleology: “all the main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed before they take place—my present design being to rouse the reader's interest in following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are brought about.”Footnote 27 The general trajectory of No Name’s plot—which involves Magdalen Vanstone's quest to avenge her own and her sister's disinheritance at the hands of her uncle; her moral decline into a life of deception through elaborate performances; and her eventual redemption through illness and romance—does not involve the plot twists or surprise reveals for which Collins is known. It is perhaps for this reason that No Name has seemed, in the words of Mark Ford, “the least characteristic, of the four great novels published by Wilkie Collins during the 1860s.”Footnote 28
Indeed, many of the events represented in No Name appear decidedly unepistolary. Collins's account of the rehearsals and performance for a private theatrical performance of Sheridan's The Rivals, for example, stands in contrast to Ellen Terry's episodic unfolding of Macbeth. While Terry, narrating from a series of present moments within the production of Macbeth, must “suppose it will be all right in the end,” Collins's third-person narrator displays the knowledge of future events made possible by retrospection:
the nominal master and mistress of the house fondly believed that their chief troubles were over. Innocent and fatal delusion! It is one thing in private society to set up the stage and choose the play—it is another thing altogether to find the actors. Hitherto, only the small preliminary annoyances proper to the occasion had shown themselves at Evergreen Lodge. The sound and serious troubles were all to come. (C.35)
Terry's letters keep time for Macbeth like a percussion instrument, with periodic, discrete beats of the present tense. The operation of Collins's narrator, on the other hand, is more like a bow across strings, as he saws back and forth across a chain of continuous events that link the “[h]itherto” and the “all to come.” From first rehearsal to the fall of the curtain, Collins creates a performance narrative that is not as much live as it is “foreseen.” The narrator continually points backward and forward, letting us know when “the event of the evening was still to come” (C.48), that Magdalen's talent “threatened serious future difficulties” (C.44), and that the narrator, at least, has already “seen the consequences in their true light” (C.50).
Yet the form of the novel is not nearly as continuous a “train of circumstances” as Collins's preface suggests. Instead, the author splits the narrative into eight “scenes,” each separated by segments “between the scenes,” which are narrated through letters and diary entries. Why, then, is this theatrical novel also so epistolary? I suggest that, despite his claim to have abandoned suspense, Collins uses No Name’s epistolary interludes to stage “live” events, narrated by characters who do not share the more omniscient narrator's foreknowledge of things to come, and that are thus oriented toward future precarity.
Intersections between epistolarity and performance in the novel are numerous, but they are perhaps nowhere clearer than in the second interlude “between the scenes,” which contains the account of Magdalen's stage career as recorded in the daily “chronicles” of her mentor in deception, Captain Wragge.Footnote 29 Not only are Wragge's entries epistolary in form, they also record the exchange of diegetic letters to create moments of insecurity. Before Magdalen's stage debut, for example, Captain Wragge worries about the possibility that Magdalen might lose her nerve to take the stage if she hears from her sister: “all my anxieties center in the fair performer … if the day's post is mischievous enough to upset her by a letter from her sister, I tremble for the consequences” (C.194). Wragge's entry ends on this “anxiety” about the future intersection of post and performance, so that the reader does not follow an omniscient narrator smoothly to the foreshadowed conclusion but instead pauses with Wragge in anticipation of unforeseeable consequences. The future orientation of Wragge's performance narrative thus puts the reader in the position of a spectator, for whom watching a live performance always includes the possibility of witnessing missed cues or dropped lines.
Collins heightens this spectatorial uncertainty by emphasizing the temporal and spatial gaps of epistolary narrative. This begins with the account of Magdalen's first performance, which Collins divides into two entries—one, quoted above, that looks forward to the debut and a second that narrates its success—so that Wragge's “trembl[ing]” anticipation spans the gap between them. These waiting periods become increasingly pronounced as Magdalen's willingness to keep performing becomes uncertain. In fact, the future of her stage career ends up hinging on the contents of a letter. She has written to her cousin, Noel, to see if he is more amenable than his uncle to redistributing the family fortune. If he will return her and her sister's portions willingly, Magdalen will have no further need to fund her revenge project and can quit the stage. In a series of dated entries, Captain Wragge waits to see whether Noel's generosity will spell the end of Magdalen's one-woman show:
21st.—She has written by to-day's post. A long letter, apparently—for she put two stamps on the envelope. (Private memorandum, addressed to myself. Wait for the answer.)
22d, 23d, 24th.—(Private memorandum continued. Wait for the answer.)
25th.—The answer has come. (C.204)
Here, Wragge's chronicle appears particularly epistolary. Dates mark the temporal hiatuses created by the spatial distance between Magdalen and Noel and suspend the reader in a period of waiting. And the curiously separate “private memorandum, addressed” to the “self” introduces (for the first time) the possibility that Wragge himself addresses other portions of his chronicle to an outside interlocutor, thus deepening the I–you relationship fundamental to epistolary discourse. The heightened epistolarity of this entry alerts readers to a turning point in the narrative. Although in other places Collins may use continuity to lead the reader toward foreshadowed events, here he crafts a temporally suspended narrative that emphasizes the epistolary narrator's uncertainty about the future. Wragge is stuck, as he writes in a later entry, in “the time being”: a live spectator, “helpless” before the “[un]expected” (C.204–5).
Fanny Kemble, too, often casts herself in the role of one powerless before the future. Among the many actors whose lives interested the Victorian public, Kemble is notable for the extent to which she took the representation of her career into her own hands.Footnote 30 Her decision to write Records of a Girlhood at the age of 70 (1878–9), for example, has interested critics as an act of extreme retrospective reconstruction.Footnote 31 Kemble's prefatory remarks situate her narrating self in the “remembering days,” from which she looks back to recall the events of her girlhood.Footnote 32 Yet if the temporality of the text as a whole is that of memory, letters are Kemble's aide-mémoire. Kemble wrote the memoir after her friend Harriet St. Leger returned the collected letters from their fifty-year correspondence. She draws on these texts to reconstruct earlier events and occasionally reprints them in their entirety. Most strikingly, when the time comes to narrate her decision to become a professional actress, Kemble lets letters do almost all of the talking. Facing the cultural stigma that threatened women in the theatre, Kemble was famously equivocal about her career, taking care to present herself as someone who acted out of duty rather than pleasure.Footnote 33 Reading Kemble's epistolary representation of her professional debut in conversation with the precarious liveness Collins constructs for Magdalen's acting, I reveal how Kemble uses epistolarity to highlight the future uncertainty and financial precarity that forced her on the stage and to claim a particularly nervous immediacy for her performances.
Although Kemble fills Record of a Girlhood with stories of her early talent for performance, she also attempts to construct a girlish turning point at which her pleasure in the pursuit definitively vanished—long before she reached the sexual maturity that would have complicated any delight in physical display. Employing the retrospective authority that helps Collins bolster his teleological narrative of Magdalen's fall and redemption, Kemble points to a schoolgirl performance of Andromaque as a point of no return for her theatrical innocence. The natural talent that she displayed on this occasion—like Magdalen's “electrif[ying],” “[un]adorned” performance (C.183)—“electrified the audience, my companions, and, still more, myself” (K.1: 113). Yet while she invites us to read this “general electrification” (K.1: 113) of the theatrical collective as a foreshadowing of her future theatrical success, Kemble is careful to delimit any stimulation of “[her]self” to just that evening:
Mrs. Rowden thought it wise and well to say to me, as she bade me good night, “Ah, my dear, I don't think your parents need ever anticipate your going on the stage; you would make but a poor actress.” And she was right enough. I did make but a poor actress, certainly, though that was not for want of natural talent for the purpose, but for want of cultivating it with due care and industry. At the time she made that comment upon my acting I felt very well convinced, and have since had good reason to know, that my school-mistress thought my performance a threat … of decided dramatic power, as I believe it was.
With this performance of “Andromaque,” however, all such taste, if it ever existed, evaporated, and though a few years afterward the stage became my profession, it was the very reverse of my inclination. I adopted the career of an actress with as strong a dislike to it as was compatible with my exercising it at all. (1: 113–14)
While Mrs. Rowden fails to read perfectly the ends immanent in Kemble's performance “[a]t the time,” Kemble herself can leverage the retrospective authority of the narrator who has “since had good reason to know.” From her position “afterward,” she pronounces that the “purpose” signaled by her “natural talent” for acting has been fulfilled, while her “taste” for it has “evaporated.” These carefully constructed, “reverse” trajectories allow Kemble to claim the “promise” of “decided dramatic skill,” while keeping her distance from the “threat” made against those who enjoy the “career of an actress.”
Yet Kemble abandons her retrospective authority when it comes time to discuss the period “a few years afterward” when “the stage became [her] profession,” choosing instead to narrate the progression of these events through the letters of a younger self who could not know the future. As in Wragge's chronicle, the uncertainty of Kemble's younger narrating self works with the gaps of epistolary narrative to imbue the progress of her career with the unpredictability of a live event (e.g., C.194). Though readers of the memoir would of course know that Kemble did eventually take the stage, she cultivates suspense about how and when the decision will occur by narrating its deliberations across the course of several letters. She first introduces the idea as an aside: “They are in sad want of a woman at both the theatres. I've half a mind to give Covent Garden one. Don't be surprised. I have something to say to you on this subject, but have not room for it in this letter” (K.1: 201). Though she cautions her friend not to be “surprised,” the cultivation of suspense seems one of the intended effects of narrating these developments through the younger Kemble's letters rather than in the more omniscient voice of the wider memoir. Just as Collins uses epistolary waiting periods to approximate the live spectator's “helpless[ness]” before the “[un]expected” (C.204–5), Kemble lengthens the period during which the start of her stage career feels insecure.
Readers must wait twenty pages, for example, for Kemble to enlarge upon the subject of her “surprise” stage career:
I confess I am disappointed, as far as I can be with a letter of yours, at finding you had not yet received my parcel, for my vanity has been in considerable anxiety respecting your judgment on my production… . Dearest H——, in my last letter want of time and room prevented my enlarging on my hint about the stage, but as far as my own determination goes at present, I think it is the course that I shall most likely pursue. (K.1: 219–20)
The “disappoint[ment]” and “anxiety” caused by the epistolary performance narrative's delayed moment of “rece[ption]” highlights the insecurity of liveness, in which there is only “time and room” for what and who is present. By thus choosing a narrator who knows only how the story “goes at present,” Kemble heightens the immediacy of this turning point in her narrative.
This uncertainty about the future direction of her narrative “course” allows Kemble to construct herself rather as a spectator to her father's struggling career than as the principal actor in her own. The epistolary sections of Kemble's narrative put emphasis on the spectator and reader's moment of reception, so that Kemble appears to be not so much actively pursuing a train of circumstances toward her own debut but rather waiting, like Wragge, for the receipt of letters and the outcome of performances beyond her control. This spectatorial posture lends a particular sense of urgency to her speculation about her financial future:
I do not think I am fit to marry, to make an obedient wife or affectionate mother; my imagination is paramount with me, and would disqualify me, I think, for the everyday, matter-of-fact cares and duties of the mistress of a household… . Now, if I do not marry, what is to become of me in the event of anything happening to my father? His property is almost all gone; I doubt if we shall ever receive one pound from it. (K.1: 220–1, emphasis mine)
As she watches her father's failing fortunes at Covent Garden, Kemble presents herself as once again anxious about the timing of reception. And here, the uncertainty she experiences while waiting for the progress of live “event[s]” is specifically gendered. Kemble's speculation about the “cares and duties of the mistress of a household” expresses a feminine precarity, one more akin to Magdalen's than Wragge's. Where the Captain wonders how to exploit Magdalen's performances, Kemble worries about how to survive without her father's. The letter form, which aids Kemble's efforts to position herself as one waiting to receive rather than resolving to act, also heightens the reader's sense of her uncertain, unresolved position.
At the same time, the representation of her youthful preference for a life of independent “imagination” over “everyday” feminine duties leads some of these epistolary passages to pull against the memoir's wider narrative. As with her earlier account of Andromaque, Kemble tries to contain the immediacy and anxiety of her letters by limiting their representational reach to the specific time and space in which they are written and read:
My own former fancy about going on the stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in which it had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mental effervescence which had subsided during my year's residence in Edinburgh… . The turn I had exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father's disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed. (K.1: 275)
The “passion” with which her younger self longed for “independence,” Kemble suggests, was spatially and temporally specific. By constructing her earlier epistolary expression as “effervescen[t],” Kemble claims that its liveness is one that “subsid[es]” and “die[s] away”; as Peggy Phelan might put it, its “only life is in the present.”Footnote 34 Yet this same passage also demonstrates that Kemble's epistolary performances have actually changed elements of the larger memoir frame. Her earlier claim that “all [her] taste” for acting, “if it ever existed, evaporated” after the performance of Andromaque (K.1: 113) has by now become the more cautious observation that the “turn [she] had exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated” (emphasis mine). The choice of “appeared” makes explicit the role of narrative mediation in constructing the presence or absence of Kemble's pleasure for her readers. The retrospective narrator may seek to present this pleasure as finished, yet the epistolary narratives open up spaces of surprise, immediacy, and precarity that fight against this closure.
As Kemble's hint at her father's failing health and fortunes suggests, the unfinished, precarious liveness that permeates both Record of a Girlhood and No Name derives not only from their epistolary narrators’ orientation toward uncertain futures, but also from their positions within insecure relational networks. In No Name, this appears most clearly in the changing qualities of Magdalen's stage presence. Just as epistolary narrative produces intimacy through distance, the immediacy of Magdalen's later performances is driven by the traumatic loss of her family and friends:
She tried hard to control herself; she forced back the sorrow—the innocent, natural, human sorrow for the absent and the dead—pleading hard with her for the tears that she refused. Resolutely, with cold, clenched hands, she tried to begin. As the first familiar words passed her lips, Frank came back to her from the sea, and the face of her dead father looked at her with the smile of happy old times. The voices of her mother and her sister talked gently in the fragrant country stillness, and the garden-walks at Combe-Raven opened once more on her view. With a faint, wailing cry, she dropped into a chair; her head fell forward on the table, and she burst passionately into tears.
Captain Wragge was on his feet in a moment. She shuddered as he came near her, and waved him back vehemently with her hand. “Leave me!” she said; “leave me a minute by myself!” The compliant Wragge retired to the front room; looked out of the window; and whistled under his breath. “The family spirit again!” he said. “Complicated by hysterics.” (C.183)
In the pivotal moment when “the first familiar words passed her lips,” “the absent and the dead” become the present and the live. Magdalen's acting conjures an audience with all the markers of physical copresence—convening bodies, communal space, and shared “view[s].” The energy created by this performance is a specifically “family spirit,” which links bodies present (“cold, clenched hands” and a falling “head”) with bodies past/absent (the “face[s]” and “voices” of the dead and the missing). Magdalen's performances, Collins suggests, are fundamentally relational. Yet unlike the wider networks of spatially distributed spectators imagined by the Bancrofts in their memoirs, Collins charges this present–absent collective with vulnerability: “sorrow,” “wailing,” “faint[ness],” and a loss of “control.”
This volatile “family spirit,” according to Wragge, is also accompanied “by hysterics”: a diagnosis that signals the important role that illness and impairment play in Collins's construction of his protagonist's gendered liveness.Footnote 35 In the “happy old times,” Magdalen's experiences of performance are painless. A late-night symphony that lays up the rest of the family with headaches, for example, leaves Magdalen almost excessively able-bodied:
“Suffering!” repeated Magdalen, recovering her breath, and the use of her tongue with it. “I don't know the meaning of the word: if there's anything the matter with me, I'm too well. Suffering! I'm ready for another concert to-night, and a ball to-morrow, and a play the day after” (C.10)
The future, here, is not uncertain but filled with “well[ness]” and “read[iness],” “concert[s]” and “play[s].” It is at this very breakfast, however, that Magdalen's imitation of a London postman will elicit a very different response from her father, as she delivers the fatal letter from New Orleans that reveals the insecurity of this family scene. Mr. Vanstone's “face change[s] colour the instant he read[s] the first lines; his cheeks fading to a dull, yellow-brown hue, which would have been ashy paleness in a less florid man; and his expression becom[es] saddened and overclouded in a moment” (C.12). This first collision of Magdalen's mimicry and epistolary exchange represents liveness as the transformation from “florid” health to “ashy paleness”: much as Adelaide Kemble's exhausting liveness causes her to lapse in correspondence, Mr. Vanstone's color “fad[es]” “the instant he read[s] the first lines,” and Magdalen herself will later grow “faint” “[a]s the first familiar words pass … her lips” (C.183).
Epistolarity allows Collins to use this association between liveness and illness to give Magdalen's performances of loss and absence a paradoxical presence and immediacy. On the one hand, Collins uses Magdalen's illness to differentiate her public stage appearances from her “better,” more “girlish” performances:
She dashed at it, with a mad defiance of herself—with a raised voice, and a glow like fever in her cheeks. All the artless, girlish charm of the performance in happier and better days was gone. The native dramatic capacity that was in her came, hard and bold, to the surface, stripped of every softening allurement which had once adorned it. She would have saddened and disappointed a man with any delicacy of feeling. She absolutely electrified Captain Wragge. (C.183)
Collins appears to set Magdalen's later acting in opposition to the open, “artless” spontaneity of her appearance in The Rivals. Yet he also characterizes her “hysteric[al]” acting as, in its own way, “[un]adorned,” “stripped” down, and “electrif[ying]”: all adjectives that point toward the performance's immediacy.
Indeed, in the novel's most epistolary representations of Magdalen's acting, these “mad,” “fever[ish]” performances, disabled by loss, have the power to affect the temporality of narration and reception. In Wragge's account of Magdalen's public debut, for example, Collins uses the uneven rhythm of the Captain's dispatches to signal the collective tug of her theatrical “mad dash[es].” Wragge has earlier explained to Magdalen that “it is [his] nature to be orderly”:
I must have everything down in black and white, or I should go mad! Here is my commercial library: Daybook, Ledger, Book of Districts, Book of Letters, Book of Remarks, and so on. Kindly throw your eye over any one of them. I flatter myself there is no such thing as a blot, or a careless entry in it, from the first page to the last. Look at this room—is there a chair out of place? Not if I know it! Look at me. Am I dusty? am I dirty? am I half shaved? Am I, in brief, a speckless pauper, or am I not? Mind! I take no credit to myself; the nature of the man, my dear girl—the nature of the man! (C.172)
Accordingly, Wragge begins his chronicle by keeping regular time, with an entry for each month. He increasingly finds it difficult to maintain a steady record, however, as Magdalen's own correspondence about her interests makes her continued performance uncertain. As her threat “to leave off at a week's notice” (C.191) becomes more pronounced, Wragge begins to represent the future as itself unwell, writing that Magdalen's changeability “looks ill for the future; it looks infernally ill for the future” (C.195). The shared “ill[ness]” of Magdalen's future soon becomes manifest in the uneven tempo of the Captain's entries. They shift from once a month to once a fortnight, back to once a month, then to once every two months (with one subheading for 31 April alone), then to an entry for June that contains separate headings for individual dates and even some individual times of day. The entry for 29 June, for example, is three times as long as many monthlong entries and contains separate sections for “Three o'clock” (C.206) and “Five o'clock” (C.208). Collins uses the disorder of Wragge's chronicle as a sort of irregular heartbeat, signaling the reader that Magdalen's unpredictable performances have disabled the Captain's ability to keep time. The Captain has gone “mad,” just as Magdalen dashes at her acting “with a mad defiance of herself” (C.183).
Fanny Kemble, too, uses epistolary distance to charge her performances with a particular presence. Like Magdalen's “story of her first step towards the stage” (C.182), Kemble's narrative of how she finally became a professional actress centers on her family life. After the “effervescence” of her earlier thoughts about going onstage, Kemble takes a long hiatus from the subject. When the idea reappears, at the start of the memoir's second volume, it does so with a sort of “family spirit,” which blurs presence and absence into a collective charged with vulnerability:
My life was rather sad at this time: my brother's failure at college was a source of disappointment and distress to my parents; and I, who admired him extremely, and believed in him implicitly, was grieved at his miscarriage and his absence from England; while the darkening prospects of the theatre threw a gloom over us all. My hitherto frequent interchange of letters with my dear friend H— S—, had become interrupted and almost suspended by the prolonged and dangerous illness of her brother; and I was thrown almost entirely upon myself, and was finding my life monotonously dreary, when events occurred that changed its whole tenor almost suddenly, and determined my future career with less of deliberation than would probably have satisfied either my parents or myself under less stringent circumstances. (K.2: 4–5)
The “absence” of family members, the “gloom” of unknown future “prospects,” and the “illness” of friends combine to create difficulties for epistolary presence: “interrupt[tion],” “suspen[sion],” and “prolonged” states of time that disrupt interpersonal relations and “throw[ ]” Kemble “almost entirely upon [her]self.”
Yet these absences enable unusually live “events” that occur “almost suddenly,” with an immediacy not possible “under less stringent circumstances.” The uncertainty and loss threatening her family—constructed through absence and sickness—become the forces that propel Kemble into a precarious present:
It was in the autumn of 1829, my father being then absent on a professional tour in Ireland, that my mother, coming in from walking one day, threw herself into a chair and burst into tears. She had been evidently much depressed for some time past, and I was alarmed at her distress, of which I begged her to tell me the cause. “Oh, it has come at last,” she answered; “our property is to be sold. I have seen that fine building all covered with placards and bills of sale; the theatre must be closed, and I know not how many hundred poor people will be turned adrift without employment!” … Seized with a sort of terror, like the Lady of Shallott, that “the curse had come upon me,” I comforted my mother with expressions of pity and affection, and, as soon as I left her, wrote a most urgent entreaty to my father that he would allow me to act for myself, and seek employment as a governess, so as to relieve him at once at least of the burden of my maintenance. I brought this letter to my mother, and begged her permission to send it, to which she consented; but, as I afterwards learnt, she wrote by the same post to my father, requesting him not to give a positive answer to my letter until his return to town. (K.2: 5–6)
A heightened threat of dissolution (the possibility that “property” will be “sold,” “closed,” and “people … turned adrift”) generates collective communications—Kemble's embodied “expressions of pity and affection” to her mother and both women's epistolary expressions to the absent father. In the unanswered letter that closes the passage, Kemble, like Collins, creates the intensity of copresence through the possibility of more permanent absences, marked here by “depress[ion],” “tears,” and being “seized with … terror,” just as Magdalen's performances generate “sorrow,” “wailing,” “faint[ness],” and loss of “control” (C.183).
Kemble's “seiz[ures],” moreover, operate like Magdalen's “hysterics”: a disordered embodiment that gives her performances a vulnerable but intense liveness. Her first performance in front of her family, for example, triggers a return of the terror and tears elicited by her conversation with her mother:
Meantime my father returned to town and my letter remained unanswered, and I was wondering in my mind what reply I should receive to my urgent entreaty, when one morning my mother told me she wished me to recite Juliet to my father; and so in the evening I stood up before them both, and with indescribable trepidation repeated my first lesson in tragedy.
They neither of them said anything beyond, “Very well,—very nice, my dear,” with many kisses and caresses, from which I escaped to sit down on the stairs half-way between the drawing-room and my bed-room, and get rid of the repressed nervous fear I had struggled with while reciting, in floods of tears. (K.2: 6–7)
Here we see a collision of performance and letter writing that mirrors the pivotal scene at the Vanstone breakfast table. In the case of Kemble's memoir, a performance of Juliet serves as the “reply” to Kemble's “unanswered” letter and gains “urgen[cy]” in the process. This is not, in fact, Kemble's “first lesson in tragedy,” as readers have already witnessed her in a scholastic production of Andromaque. Yet Kemble's illness—her “state of feverish excitement” in “one moment” and her “nervous … low-spirited” tears in “the next” —increases the sense that her performance is singular (K.1: 200–1). When, in her later attempt at reading onstage, she is “seized with the spirit of the thing,” this seizure, too, leads Kemble to “act[ ] Juliet as [she] do[es] not believe [she] ever acted it again” (K.2: 7–8).
If the urgency of an unanswered letter helps give Kemble's performances as Juliet a live, “nervous” quality, it is in this sense a microcosm of Records of a Girlhood, which consistently uses letters to connect performance, disorder, and illness. The pattern begins with Kemble's irregular build toward her artistic debut. With an elongated and arrhythmic pace reminiscent of the uneven dispatches from Captain Wragge, Kemble draws out the narrative of her interest in the stage over 105 pages spanning two of the three volumes, during which time she switches back and forth between epistolary and retrospective narration seven times. These transitions between narrative modes all occur when Kemble discusses her thoughts about becoming an actress (a topic that is almost always represented through letters), with one notable exception: a letter that serves as “record” of when she “fell ill of the measles” (K.1: 214). By using letters to represent both her sicknesses and her uncertain steps toward the stage, Kemble suggests that disability and performance have a similar relationship to the live presence highlighted by epistolary narrative.
Read in light of this configuration of epistolarity, performance, and disability, the letter in which Kemble announces her official debut betrays a more complicated, embodied investment in performance than Kemble's professed disinterest in her career would suggest. In her retrospective voice, Kemble reflects that:
My frame of mind under the preparations that were going forward for my début appears to me now curious enough. Though I had found out that I could act, and had acted with a sort of frenzy of passion and entire self-forgetfulness the first time I ever uttered the wonderful conception I had undertaken to represent, my going on the stage was absolutely an act of duty and conformity to the will of my parents, strengthened by my own conviction that I was bound to help them by every means in my power. (K.2: 13; italics in original)
From her relatively omniscient position “now,” Kemble claims “absolutely” to be guided by the kind of familial “restraint” she earlier feared (K.1: 220): she is “bound” to “conform” to the pressures threatening her family unit. Yet she also evokes the “frenzy of passion and entire self-forgetfulness” that makes her earlier “repressed nerv[es]” and “seiz[ures]” (K.2: 7) so immediately present. This impaired performance present complicates the “absolute[ness]” of the retrospective, as becomes clear when she turns, just a page later, to a “letter written at this time” (K.2: 14; emphasis mine). She claims this letter “shows how comparatively small a part [her] approaching ordeal engrossed of [her] thoughts,” since the passage discussing her debut takes up little space relative to discussions of family illnesses (K.2: 14). As Kemble has worked to connect illness and performance through the “anxiety” of a precarious liveness, however, the letter also represents a collective temporal uncertainty. In the first part of the letter, Kemble establishes a synchronicity between her correspondent's “terrible anxiety” for her “brother's serious illness” (K.2: 14–15) and her parents’ “bodily suffering and mental anxiety” after having been “very unwell”: creating a mutual “anxiety” that translates the liveness of future precarity into a shared state (K.2: 16).
It is within this collective illness that the reader encounters the account of her upcoming Juliet, which, framed by reciprocal uncertainty about the future, seems more urgent than Kemble would allow. After a report on the family, Kemble announces:
My dear H—, I am going on the stage: the nearest period talked of for my début is the first of October, at the opening of the theatre; the furthest, November; but I almost think I should prefer the nearest, for it is a very serious trial to look forward to, and I wish it were over… . I do not enter more fully upon this, because I know how few things can be of interest to you in your present state of feeling, but I wished you not to find the first notice of my entrance on the stage of life in a newspaper. (K.2: 16)
The anxiety of liveness—a “present state of feeling” “look[ing] forward” to an uncertain future—refers now both to the precarity of serious illness and the “serious trial” of “entrance on the stage of life.” The desire to narrativize her debut through a letter (rather than through the third-person report of the newspaper) makes this stage fright into a temporality that, like the anxiety of illness, is relational. The immediacy and reciprocity of epistolary narrative represent a Kemble more “engrossed” in the live anticipation of “[her] approaching ordeal” than her framing material would suggest.
By constructing the performances and performance narratives of her youth as embodied and vulnerable, Kemble thus charges them with vitality even while seeming to deny their seriousness:
This is the reason why, with an unusual gift and many unusual advantages for it, I did really so little; why my performances were always uneven in themselves and perfectly unequal with each other, never complete as a whole, however striking in occasional parts, and never at the same level two nights together; depending for their effect upon the state of my nerves and spirits, instead of being the result of deliberate thought and consideration,—study, in short, carefully and conscientiously applied to my work; the permanent element which preserves the artist, however inevitably he must feel the influence of moods of mind and body, from ever being at their mercy. (K.2: 14)
Epistolarity allows Kemble to disavow the deliberate career of an actress while still claiming for her performances a “striking” liveness produced by insecurity and disability—“uneven,” “occasional,” and “at the[ ] mercy” of “nerves” and seizure by “spirits.” By constructing a narrative that is not “complete as a whole” but rather “in occasional parts … never at the same level two nights together,” Kemble uses the patchwork qualities of epistolary mosaic to claim a feminine power produced by vulnerability rather than the ambitious, masculine-coded language of ability.
• • •
For Collins and Kemble, the particular relationship of performance to presence was not a limit value but a representational opportunity. I read in their narratives not a lament for lost copresence but a canny reconstruction of it—a strategic use of epistolary tools to reenact and readapt theatrical liveness as what Philip Auslander calls “a historically variable effect of mediatization,” or what I might call a historically specific quality of narrative mediation.Footnote 36 Rebecca Schneider describes the work of performance theory as an articulation of, “the ways in which performance … begins again and again” as something repeated “in the ears of a confidante, an audience member, a witness.”Footnote 37 Such confidential repetitions—rendered in narrative, circulated and recirculated through networks of print—are what this essay has attempted to track. I take letters not only as records of past liveness but also as a way of beginning the shared reception of performance again, elsewhere, and in new media. And while discursive texts may sometimes figure as conceptual opposites to the embodied presence of performance, the epistolary narratives considered here lean into rather than away from the contingencies of bodily difference. Weary disjointedness, hysterics, seizures, and the financial and relational vulnerability of a nineteenth-century woman who performs in public rather than following the marriage plot: these are the qualities of liveness that emerge from engaging with the specific narrative strategies of Victorian theatre writing.
Paying attention to particular discursive modes of audience participation may thus also offer a way to complicate the largely patriarchal scene of dramatic criticism and to privilege alternative strands of performance practice. While “epistolary liveness” as illuminated in these case studies is a concept of especial interest to scholars of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatre, the essay's intergeneric approach to narratives of performance also opens up methodological possibilities for studying theatre writing in other periods. By looking to narrative genres and media that, like the nineteenth-century letter, are coded feminine or imbricated in networks of relationality, scholars might find strands of performance writing that interrupt the continuity of established trajectories or that disorder a normative sense of bodily presence. A feminist theatre history, in other words, may turn out to be a tale told, “between the scenes,” in the “progress of the story through the post” (C.135).
