Self-making: Acts of performance in the Victorian novel

“Self-Making” combines an examination of the self-conscious, theatrical construction of identity with attention to the malleability of character attributed to socio-economic changes. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people migrated from their ancestral rural homes to expanding urban centres. While some saw this urbanization as a mark of the destabilization of the country and longed for a return to the relative stability of the pre-industrial past, many others used the opportunity to recreate their personal identities outside of the previously restrictive ties of family and home. Critics considered such self-creation dangerous, as it allowed for the blurring of historical boundaries of class and status. Supporters, however, saw the hypothetical ability of all men to form a self separate from an inherited identity as a great democratic advancement. This perspective gave rise to a series of self-help narratives in the Victorian period, both fictional and factual, which take their name from Samuel Smiles’s 1859 text, Self-Help. Smiles’s work documents a string of men whose respective talents and devotion to hard work allowed them to rise from lower-class beginnings to become leaders in the fields of industry, politics, and the military. The concept of “self-help” was primarily directed at men making their way in the world through a combination of hard work, temperance, and frugality. But many characters in novels of the period, both actors and non-actors, use explicitly theatrical techniques of self-invention. This is especially true of female characters, excluded as they are from most professional paths. Using the language of the stage and methods of characterization employed by nineteenth-century actresses, “Self-Making” applies the self-help narrative beyond the expected area of the economically self-made man. “Self-Making” posits theatrical technique as a female alternative to self-help, a method by which women in the nineteenth century could create viable social identities.I bookend and underscore my discussion of the fiction of the period by reading the parallel self-making evident in the autobiographical writings of nineteenth-century actresses, distilling from published writings and associated archival sources the performance theory practiced by each actress. The memoirs of Fanny Kemble, Marie Bancroft, Stella Campbell, and Elizabeth Robins chronicle the actresses’ respective stage careers, reflect on the development of the English stage, and illuminate their own theories of performance. Each of the actresses creates a written character by way of the same techniques she shows herself using on the stage. In their theatrical novels, Geraldine Jewsbury and Florence Marryat address the same anti-theatrical rhetoric which underlies Bancroft’s constructed self. Both novelists subvert an anti-theatrical hierarchy by identifying the stage as the sphere of innate authenticity, and society as dependent on deception. Wilkie Collins and Charlotte Brontë use the actress figure in their novels to comment on the performative nature of identity. They emphasize the necessity of adapting these characterizations to the requirements of diverse off-stage situations, anticipating Campbell’s theorization of performance as a collaboration between actor and audience. Elsewhere, Collins imbues his villainous female characters with the duality Kemble cites as necessary to any performance, as does Charles Dickens. Both novelists write characters generally treated as femme fatale figures; I argue that their villainy is instead a self-conscious act, performed to protect a private self. Throughout the nineteenth century, actresses and fictional characters separate performing and performed selves, allowing for the creation of a sustained public identity while preserving the privacy of the self. In doing so, these women generate a form of self-help beyond the expected masculine, economic practice

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