Florence Marryat, Theatricality and Performativity

This article explores Victorian and modern ideas of theatricality and performativity by examining the work of the sensation novelist, actress, singer, lecturer and magazine-editor Florence Marryat (1833-1899). It uses Judith Butler's work to understand performativity as defining a self-conscious kind of acting or performance that seeks to foster an awareness of the state of performance from a readership or audience. Theatricality, on the other hand, denotes a kind of performance or writing that may question identity by its staginess or artificiality, but does not necessarily refute the idea of a 'true' identity behind that performance. Theatricality and performativity are pressed together in Marryat's writing and this article uses her work to probe the boundaries between the two definitions. To do so it focuses on the various self-constructions of Marryat's early career including her biography of her father, Captain Frederick Marryat, and her early sensation fiction, such as her best-selling Love's Conflict (1865). It also makes use of correspondence, recitation scripts and marketing material found in the Marryat archive in the Beinecke Library at Yale and in the British Library. Marryat's fiction and her self-constructions offer us ways of realising the complexity of ideas about authenticity, theatricality and performance operating within the realm of popular culture and sensational fiction in the nineteenth century.

2 her singing but rather through her early career as a self-promoting novelist. Her early career is marked by repeated and various self-constructions and her early fiction negotiates with gendered ideas of selfhood and the ways in which it might be constructed or performed.
Before discussing Marryat's work in detail I need to briefly foreground Judith Butler's conceptions of performativity and the ways in which Butler's work relates to nineteenthcentury ideas about theatricality. Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) have provided some of the most controversial and provocative formulations of the feminist challenge to the concept of a stable 'female' subject. Her work follows Foucault in examining the formation of the subject within its specific historical and discursive context but Butler's interest travels further to analyse the ways in which the subject is formed within gendered power structures. 4 In 1988 she writes, 'gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time -an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts'. 5 This gendered self is not prior to its acts and no performer exists before the performance. For Butler, acts constitute the actor and constitute the compulsion to believe in him or her. It is this absence of a preexisting or essential self in Butler's work, particularly Gender Trouble, which leaves room for the possibility that identities might be reconstructed or proliferated in subversive ways. She writes, 'woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing and discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification'. 6 She goes on to expand this idea in Bodies That Matter, where she writes, The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideals s/he is compelled to approximate. 7 The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the possibility of subversive repetition. Butler offers drag as one example of how this might be achieved: aberrant identities make clear the instability of the categories into which they will not fit and hint at the way in which all gender can be perceived as parodic.
For Butler, the body itself is never fixed or stable; it is constructed by discourse and can therefore be performative. It is understood as 'an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities'. 8 As Sarah Salih explains, the body in Butler's theory is 'the effect of desire rather than its cause'. 9 However, as she shows, it is impossible to exist outside of gender and outside of discourse. To appreciate the constructed nature of the subject and if possible re-do that construction is what Butler thinks can be done. This article uses Butler to understand performativity as defining a self-conscious kind of acting or performance (often, but not always, of gender) that is not limited to the stage but operates in all cultural and literary settings. In this definition, performative texts also seek to foster a conscious awareness of the state of performance from a readership or audience. In this article, theatricality, on the other hand, denotes a kind of performance or writing that may achieve the questioning of gendered identity by its staginess, artificiality or exaggerations, but does not necessarily refute the idea of a 'true' identity behind that performance. This version of theatricality need not conflict with the nineteenth-century notion put forward by G. H. Lewes in Actors and Acting (1875) that behaving artificially actually gives actors access to inner emotions or a truer self. Indeed, despite Lewes's insistence on an authentic self behind the actor's mask he too, as in the construction of performativity mapped above, stresses selfconsciousness. 10 Victorian and postmodern conceptions of performance and theatricality might be seen in relational rather than binary terms. Nina Auerbach's thesis that 'Reverent Victorians shunned theatricality as the ultimate, deceitful mobility' might be seen as relevant to cultural elites like those represented by Lewes, Eliot or Carlyle, but in need of complication when considering Marryat's multiple self-constructions. 11 In the first half of the article I will discuss Marryat's theatrical self-constructions, where she repeatedly seeks to show and convince readers of a true self, and in the second half I will discuss her performative sensation fiction which consciously performs gendered selfhood and asks the reader to question their conceptions of identity. I do not want to suggest that Marryat was aware of, or working with, postmodern Butlerian ideas about gender. I will, though, seek to probe the boundaries between these two definitions and formulate questions as to how useful postmodern theories can be for the reading of nineteenth-century texts. I Marryat, in her early career, was certainly attuned to the various identities that she would need to perform in order to gain a name in the literary marketplace and the ways in which she would need to make these identities seem authentic or true. As we see below, Marryat was a loving daughter, colonial authority, ingénue and sensation novelist and these selfconstructions were theatrical, even though, as yet, she had not begun to think of working in the theatre. An offer has been made me of £40 for Love's Conflict in which you still retain half copyright which will therefore give you £20 and which is to be repaid to me in three months time. At the same time I disposed of the Copyrights of your other novels which I possess so that you will shortly see yourself before the public in the gay uniform of the 1 or 2/-volume. 12 Bentley not only removes all decisions regarding publication from Marryat's power, but he also objectifies her, transforming her into an object for display and consumption. His possession of her 'Copyrights' seems tantamount to a possession of her self. It is not just her novels that she will see in 'gay uniform' (meaning the bright covers of the cheap editions) but her own body is coerced into Bentley's blithe metaphor. The rhetoric of jovial dominion by the male publisher does not necessarily mean that she was manipulated. At this point in her career, playing the role of the literary ingénue was helpful to her. It may even have made the risqué nature of her sensation fiction seem less worrying to Bentley if she convinced him that her true and feminine self was innocent regarding the commercial publishing world. As a fledgling novelist Marryat was not in an ideal position for asserting her authorial autonomy or her economic expectations. But by performing the role of the amenable young writer Marryat could work through it, analyse it and later even fictionalise it (in 1883 she published a short story called The Ghost of Charlotte Cray that dramatised the dangers of the calculating male publisher to the female writer). 13 In the early stages of her career, however, Marryat, at least outwardly, respected her publisher's advice. She seems to have played the role of literary ingénue willingly and fostered the idea of its authenticity; the Bentley correspondence implies a friendly relation between the two. led. The exaggerated and exotic incidents she recounts, often of a violent or vaguely erotic nature (her husband is attacked by a cheetah, and she is touched and leered at by a group of 'thrusting […] grinning and jabbering' men) construct her as an experienced and knowledgeable woman admirable for the self-control she displays in an environment painted as highly corrosive to Westerners. 14 Here, as in her correspondence with Bentley, she adopts and even exaggerates particular versions of her self, but simultaneously encourages her reader to see that self as authentic.
Her introduction to her bigamy novel Véronique, published in 1869, embroiders the self-confidence of the narrator of Gup into her previous literary modesty to construct another Marryat again. She diffidently thanks her 'true critics' -'The Reading Public' -for the cordial hand-grasp which from the first you have stretched out to me, and which, (though doubtless in a great measure given for my father's sake), has had more than the power to counterbalance such small disagreeables as a woman placed in my position must inevitably incur. 15 Performing the role of an innocently victimised woman gives her a position from which to attack the canting critics who have 'twisted [her work] from its original meaning' and therein wilfully misunderstood her status as a 'delineator of human passions'. Here, as in her correspondence with Bentley, it suits Marryat to construct herself in an almost passive position -she has been 'placed' as a novelist rather than worked to attain her reputation.
Marryat's language emphasises an active audience and gives her readers the lead role in As well as performing the role of literary acolyte in the Life, Marryat also ventriloquises her father's voice to endorse her own literary opinions. Most pertinently, she quotes a letter in which Captain Marryat asserts that 'the liberty of the press is so sacred that, rather than any interference should restrict it, it has been considered better that a little licentiousness should be passed over.' 19 This seemingly innocuous point offers a subtle riposte to the critics who had gloated over the contrast between her father's healthy morality and what they saw as his daughter's coarseness. Marryat's Life and Letters, while eulogising her father's life and work, also exploited the familial connection to confirm her own celebrity status. It publicised her name and raised her literary profile. It is clear that Marryat did not want her career to be an addendum to her father's and that by the 1870s she was well practised in the manipulation of her public identities and the strategies by which she might make those identities seem authentic.
The multiple self-performances making up Marryat's early career seem to lend themselves to a theorisation of the self, in Joseph Litvak's words, as 'a contingent cluster of theatrical roles'. In examining the trope of theatricality in self-representation, Litvak argues, 'it becomes possible to make a spectacle of the imperious domestic, sexual, and aesthetic ideologies for which, and in which, it is bound.' 20 This deconstructionist paradigm is useful for considering the ramifications, conscious and unconscious, of Marryat's self-constructions.
It allows us to realise these roles as constructed and also as interwoven with and contingent upon each other. However, as Lynn Voskuil has argued, this deconstruction does not adequately account for contemporary Victorian theories of an essential self. Neither does it explicate Marryat's apparent emphasis on the authentic amidst her theatrical and often exaggerated self-performances. Voskuil turns to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862) to argue that 'somatic fidelity' (the idea that the body indisputably displays its inner truths) was declining in value as cultural capital by the 1860s.
She shows how Lady Audley's performances pushed the logic of 'somatic fidelity' to breaking-point to expose the idea of innate goodness in women (or in the middle class) as at best a paradox and at worst a fallacy. Of course, Braddon's novel did not destroy the Victorian notion of the essential self but it does illustrate the way in which authenticity and theatricality could be considered in relational terms rather than as binary opposites. As Voskuil asserts, 'authenticity accommodates a range of shifting, sometimes rival meanings' in the nineteenth century as it does now. 21 Marryat's various early career self-constructions, then, need not be understood as contradictory. In each, she promotes a version of her writerly self as authentic, readable and trustworthy. She repeats her self-constructions with variations but (unlike the Butlerian model of performativity) this repetition does not undo ideas of an authentic self as that is precisely what Marryat wants to promote in order to garner a loyal and ongoing readership.
Voskuil's work alerts us to the fact that not just Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels, but popular sensation fiction in general, and particularly its heroines, activated contemporary anxieties regarding theatricality and authenticity, although these anxieties were primarily 8 located within the cultural and critical elites that felt threatened by sensation fiction's crossclass appeal. Sensation also, as Voskuil demonstrates, elicited reactions that were felt to be simultaneously authentic (in that a community of readers would share the same sensations on reading the same sensational texts) and yet also exaggerated or staged (in that readers knew what reactions might be expected of them and could perform the 'authentic' reaction as the text directed). Marryat, as a sensation writer, was alert to the potential her genre held for bringing the performed and the authentic into tense relation and this was played out in her sensational fiction in terms of theatricality and performativity. Love's Conflict eroticises the sensational tropes it enacts more explicitly than previous sensationalists had done and makes the performed nature of female sexuality more explicit than in previous sensational texts. 22 This would go some way to explaining why, despite her careful dedication of the book to her father and the publisher's insistence on the respectable family connection, many reviews, like the Spectator's, manifested anxiety towards Marryat's first work. 23 The self-performing and theatrical nature of female sexuality is key to Love's Conflict.
The narrator introduces us to the anti-heroine Nell, who, having been brought up in a simple fisherman's family, 'thinks of nothing but running after the men folks'. Left with the family as a baby, she is actually the daughter of a runaway marriage between a young lady and her dancing master. Marryat describes Nell as an 'arrant coquette' and when two men appear on the beach the narrator tells us that she twitched off the handkerchief she wore about her neck and throat, leaving them and part of her bosom -firm and plump, though tanned by exposure to the sunbare. Then she took off her clumsy shoes, stockings she never wore […] untied the coarse black string which confined her thick hair in a rude knot at the back of her head, and shook it down luxuriantly over her shoulders; and as she stepped upon the sands, still wet and glistening from the late receding tide, she caught up a bunch of seaweeds, common stuff enough, red, and green, and white, but uncommonly becoming, as she wreathed it about her dark tresses. 24 Marryat makes clear the specific steps Nell takes to transform from village girl into a fantasy of erotic mystery: disrobing, loosening and adorning. She constructs herself, not just as a desirable female object, but very knowingly as a romanticised version of the mysterious rustic (she is described as a 'mermaid' or a 'sea-nymph') which she knows would be appealing to refined city men (LC 11, 10). 25 The narrator tells us that Nell usually wears a handkerchief over her bosom, but also, contradictorily, that her chest is tanned by the sun. The contradiction suggests that this act may be one in an ongoing series of erotic performances by Nell.
Nell sells her kisses to William Treherne, one of the men on the beach, for two halfcrowns, and he makes it clear that he will return in the evening when he 'shall have some more'; the implication of 'more' being not only kisses but further sexual acts. The narrator unblinkingly tells us: 'She would have sold herself for money' (LC 11). This sexual trafficking is only prevented by the realisation that Nell is the lost heiress for whom William Treherne and the family lawyer have been looking. The Spectator wrote of this passage in wry understatement, 'No excellence of drawing can quite ennoble a novel in which the great scenes are a girl selling kisses for silver'. 26 It is not Marryat's depiction of Nell as sexually attractive that contemporaries found shocking. Rather, it is Nell's self-conscious and theatrical staging of her body to display her own sexual desire and elicit that of male strangers that, for some, represented new depths to which sensation could sink.
A more disturbing and unconscious acting out of sexual desire on the body comes when Marryat allows her heroine, Elfrida, to fall for her husband's cousin. Elfrida refuses his offer to elope, but the bodily effect of her struggle to stay with her abusive husband results in the premature birth of her baby, 'bent and twisted by some cruel accident of mind or body'.
Elfrida's illicit desire, as she imagines, has been acted out on her baby's body in the 'curved spine, the injured chest' and 'the tiny lungs […] unable to perform their work' (LC 288).
Elfrida knows, she says, 'my child was killed and crippled by my own wicked indulgence of feelings I ought never to have had' (LC 294). This part of the story deserves mention, not just because it enacts in shockingly emotive form the ways in which Marryat shows sexual desire to operate in exaggerated terms on the minds and bodies of her characters, but also because it re-enacts part of Marryat's own biography. On her return to England from India (and consequent split from her first husband), Marryat gave birth to a daughter whose severe physical disabilities meant she only lived for ten days. She later recalled the time as the 'greatest trouble of my life'. 27 As we saw in the prefaces and correspondence above, Marryat from her earliest writings acts out versions of her self, repackaging and re-presenting the most personal experiences in her fiction.
The introduction to Véronique confirms that Marryat sees her primary genre, sensation, as reliant on reconstructions of personal experience. The most sensational incidents in Véronique, 'the adventures on the Neilgherry Hills, and the wreck in the Chinese seas, have happened, and are drawn from [my] life', she affirms. Their 'appeal to your feelings' is interdependent with the readers' perception of these incidents as authentic experiences. 28 The authentic and the performed are frequently pressed together in Marryat's early works.
Paradoxically, as in the preface to Véronique, she uses each one to justify the presence of the other. With Nell, Marryat makes gender and sexuality theatrical and allows us to see them as constructed; though she also links various aspects of her sensation novels to authentic moments of her own life and links their authenticity to the power they have over her readership. We might read Love's Conflict as performative because it stages sexuality and gender as contingent on dress and performance. Keeping Butler in mind, Marryat's novel might also lead us to think of childbirth and the body itself as contingent and in process, even while Marryat seems to be presenting a version of her authentic experience at these moments.
The sensation genre was an ideal format for Marryat's performative strategies as it could be said to define its value in part through its repeated moments of tension and its continual deferral of the definite. Indeed, looking back at Marryat's earliest reviews we can see that sensation provided her with the potential for doubleness or deferral of a single static identity. The Athenaeum discusses her 'twofold character of a lady and a novice' in its review Everil marries Valence, but only realises she loves him when she is disgusted at the suggestion of her previous lover, Maurice Staunton, that they enact the plot of a French novel to poison her husband. The potential for a happy marriage, however, is already undermined.
Lord Valence is a spiritualist who has been heavily influenced by the visitations of a foreboding female spirit, Isola. Isola warns Valence that his life will end at a certain date in the near future and her prescience brings out psychosomatic symptoms that threaten to kill him. This spirit is actually Valence's sister-in-law, Agatha, disguised in 'diaphanous drapery -and a veil of flowing golden hair', who wants Valence's property and title for her son (26 December 1874, 537). Her ethereal performance, Agatha hopes, will bring tangible benefits.
Marryat, through Agatha, highlights the pervasive cultural alignment of femininity with the spiritual realm and allows us to see, literally, that identity as specious and constructed.
Spiritualism, as Marryat was finding throughout the 1870s when her interest in it was growing, made transgressions between the spiritual and the material world possible. 31 It therein questioned what Marlene Tromp calls 'the stability of the categories spiritual and material, proprietous and decorous -particularly as gender and sexuality were concerned'. 32 The medium, or in the case of Open! Sesame! the performing spirit, could shake off their own personality and take on others at will, and in doing so offered the possibility of reconceptualising identity. Sarah Wilburn goes as far as to assert that such mystical experiences 'changed the category of subjectivity' for some Victorian women. 'Not only', she writes, 'did they make a single identity impossible and replace it with a plural one, they also turned a person from an "is" to a "does" […]. A person became a process of exploring different identities within the one body'. 33  The narrative basically teaches Everil to dissemble but at the serial's denouement she explains the trick and returns to her honest self: '"I will try and make things plain to you. that female acting was often justified in the 1870s by conceptualising it as self-abnegation to a role rather than as emancipatory performance. 35 On the other hand, Lynn Voskuil, as we have seen, relies on Victorian elisions of the authentic and the theatrical in her rethinking of Judith Butler's notion of performativity. In Open! Sesame! female performance produces a thrilling kind of pleasurable and erotic excess, rather than anxiety, seen in the agency and confidence both women take on with their roles. Despite Everil's return to domesticity and Agatha's downfall seeming to contain excess and reinstate normative notions of wifehood, Marryat's novel remains performative in that it consciously stages conceptions of female identity, and, simultaneously, seeks to awaken in its readers a consciousness of the staged and contingent nature of those identities.
The sensation genre, in its excess, its hyperbole, its theatricality, its obsession with marital relations and its proximity to the supernatural, provided a set of styles and tropes with These theatrical performances, as Newey writes, enabled Marryat 'to develop her selfrepresentation through direct contact with her audience'. 36 Like Charles Dickens and actors such as Fanny Kemble and Sarah Siddons, Marryat also confirmed her own celebrity identity and supplemented her income with public readings and recitations. She also travelled in both Britain and America to take her share in 'these days of lecturings and readings'. 37  Unafraid to adopt and inhabit the identities of the most revered authors, poets and historians, she also frequently adapted them, often to include chunks of her own writing. One of her most popular performances though was her original piece entitled 'The Woman of the Future' in which Marryat, as 'Electra Thucydides, Senior Wrangler of St. Momus' delivers an address to women, now the ruling sex, on 'What shall we do with our Men?' She begins, As I speak to you, my words are conveyed by means of electronic communication to above 200 female audiences all anxiously waiting to know what farther steps we intend to take for the emancipation of these feeble creatures, who are dependent upon us, for example, protection & support.
Precisely and comically inverting the rhetoric in which the 'woman question' was being posed throughout the press in the later decades of the century, Electra admits that some men have a talent for music and drama, but asks 'How will the appearance of men on the boards or in the rehearsals of our theatres affect the natural modesty of these delicate minded creatures?' She concludes, 'Let our sex continue to do for them what it has done since the beginning of the world -sit on them!' 39 Here, and throughout her diverse career, performance gave Marryat opportunities to recognise, perform and parody gender hierarchies and the conventions associated with femininity. Many of her obituaries highlight her combination of various identities and careers. 40 Indeed Marryat's whole career might then be viewed through the lens of her theatrical and performative negotiations with female identity -she was always engaged in a process of making herself up.