(Per)forming the Adaptive: Watts Phillips’s The Woman in Mauve (1864/65) and the Sensation Genre as Commodity

Abstract

This article examines how Victorian theatre anticipates theories of commodity culture from within. Using previously unseen material from the M. E. Braddon Archive at the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Christchurch Canterbury and Lacy’s Acting Editions, I argue that Watts Phillips’s The Woman in Mauve (1864/65) was symptomatic of a move beyond simple replications of familiar sensation genres to create a collaborative cultural space where ideas of intertextuality, influence and piracy converge. Assumed to be a parody, Phillips’s work is rather a response to how the sensation genre had become cultural capital. The play renegotiates the sensational tropes of authentic repetition as a self-referential theatricalised commodity. The result is an exercise in reproduction, where material practice is on show. As a critique of commodity culture, The Woman in Mauve becomes an intertheatrical text, layered with meanings which can only be relative.