‘Mere Lookers-On at Life’: Point of View and Spectator Narrative

Abstract

This essay develops a new approach to print narratives about theatregoing during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Immensely popular with contemporary readers, theatrical memoirs and diaries have been a boon to theatre historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but these texts have more often been studied in spite of their subjective perspectives than because of them. Building on work in theatre historiography and audience studies, this essay seeks to transform the spectator’s discursive acts of shaping, framing, and stressing from an obstacle into an opportunity. In order to resituate historical spectator narratives in a wider narrative context, I read diaries and essays by Henry Crabb Robinson and Lady Maud Tree in conversation with Charlotte Brontë’s fictional scenes of spectatorship in Villette. This intertextual approach, I suggest, yields a more complete understanding of how different points of view facilitated claims about performance. In particular, I explore how gender affected point of view. While male reviewers and diarists often employ a disinterested narrative persona that de-emphasises their own bodies, I argue that many actress autobiographies craft an alternative form of narrative authority that makes use of the limitations of embodiment – qualities like immobility, bodily sensation, and circumscribed vision.