Theatrical subjects: Performing on the margins in Hardy, Kipling, Wharton, and James.
Item
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Title
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Theatrical subjects: Performing on the margins in Hardy, Kipling, Wharton, and James.
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Identifier
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AAI9707132
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identifier
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9707132
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Creator
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Nakamura, Lisa Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, English | Literature, Comparative
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines four British and American novels written between 1787 and 1913, Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. These authors engaged in narrative strategies which utilize vocabulary and metaphors borrowed from the stage with which to describe new forms of female identity, subaltern identity, class identity, and personal identity. Writing about social life and its cultural matrix as if it were itself a stage and figuring identity as a performance-in-process afforded novelists a strategy for exploring the link between performance and identity.;Performances in which women pass as men, whites pass as natives, and members of the working class pass as upper class mark the place where categories of gender, race, and class become destabilized and reveal some of the tensions and ambiguities with which these categories were fraught during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century in America and England. These narratives do not write about femininity, race, and class as if they were stable and immutable identities, but rather as roles or masquerades which can be performed, parodied, and critiqued. This emphasis on gender, race, and class as a constructed and historically contingent role or act prefigures the concerns and critical vocabulary of anti-essentialist contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler.;These novels displace theatricality from the conventional dramatic stage to the social one. The authors utilize theatrical metaphors to describe identity and social behavior in their narratives to demonstrate how the mobility which performance affords can allow subjects to temporarily cross and challenge those social borders which differentiate male from female, white from non-white, lower from upper class, and inner self from social persona.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
