Acting Like a 'lady': British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Over the past several years much work has been done on the way late eighteenth-century women novelists helped to create modern categories of gender. A considerable portion of this scholarship emphasizes the novel's link to conduct material and stresses the novel's didactic function. This essay focuses on another, less-discussed influence upon novels by women. Specifically, this essay proposes that the eighteenth-century theater helped shape the representation of gender by late eighteenth-century women novelists. Although, on one level, the theater helped reinforce conventional ideas about sexual difference, the theater also posed an implicit challenge to images of women found in conduct material. Consequently, I believe that images of the theater and allusions to it in novels by women often undermined contemporary ideas about women's nature and roles in ways that would have resonated with eighteenth-century readers. The Foucaultian view of the novel as developed by scholars like Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey contends that women novelists, influenced by conduct material, helped to naturalize and disseminate ideas about women that ultimately evolved into the Victorian "Angel in the House." Two crucial assumptions nourish this view. The first is Ian Watt's notion that the novel, as perfected by Fielding and Richardson, acted as a transparent window that gave readers direct access to characters' minds. The second is Foucault's recognition that the novel's apparent transparency effectively masked its role in disseminating ideology. Based on these assumptions, scholars like Armstrong and Poovey have argued that the eighteenth-century novel helped naturalize and disseminate a conduct-book notion of female nature that insisted on a direct correlation between a woman's exterior attributes and her quality of mind. Despite their strenuous efforts to illustrate how such a correlation indirectly empowered women, one conclusion is inescapable: the equation of a woman's countenance and character inevitably made her the object of surveillance. Simply put, to behave in an unfeminine or unlady-like way was to reveal some sort of essential difference in one's character that made a woman into something akin to a monster. Both Poovey and Armstrong consequently acknowledge that the assumption that a woman naturally behaved in a lady-like fashion encouraged women to conform to a standard of behavior that prohibited their direct participation in public and political life. The urge to prove one's autonomy is irresistible; at least it is to critics like Terry Castle, Catherine Craft Fairchild, Catherine Gallagher, Joseph Litvak and Ruth Yeazell, all of whom have persuasively argued that novels by women complicate, rather than disseminate, contemporary images of the feminine ideal. Although Litvak talks about theatricality and Castle and Fairchild discuss masquerade, work which actively engages with the conventions of the eighteenth-century stage needs to be done. After cross-referencing Gary Kelly's list of "Women Dramatists, 1790-1830," the Index to The London Stage, Dougald MacMillan's Catalogue of the Larpent Plays in the Huntington Library, Allardyce Nicoll's "Hand-List of Plays" from volumes three and four of A History of British Drama, Dale Spender's list of women writers in Mothers of the Novel, Janet Todd's Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, and Cheryl Turner's list of British women novelists from Living by the Pen, I have found that at least 45 or almost 30% of the 156 women novelists published between 1760 and 1818 were playwrights, actresses or closely associated with someone who worked in the professional theatre. The theatre was the predominant form of entertainment during the century and, if we take into account theatres outside of London, access to strolling companies of players, and participation in private theatricals, the number of female novelists who were regularly exposed to the …