Theatricality and its subsidiary metaphors have enjoyed considerable prominence in a number of recent, skeptically driven critical projects. Derrida’s delineation of “the scene of writing” and Foucault’s work on the (ostensibly nonspectacular) stagecraft of modern power are perhaps the most obvious examples of and models for the deployment of “theatricality” as a trope of demystification, whereby the apparently immediate and unproblematic can be resisted or preemptively framed on the grounds of its factitiousness or its unsuspected ideological complicity. In proposing to read Brontë’s fiction in the light of theatricality, I am not, however, merely seeking to add yet another supposedly invulnerable repository of truth and presence to the ever-growing list of compromised masterpieces. Not merely, since, if one hopes to do more than just repeat a by now familiar and even respectable critical gesture, one cannot simply dispense with it, as though supplementation equaled transcendence. If Jane Eyre and Villette are in some sense founding texts in the tradition of the novel, this is not for the reasons Williams and others adduce, but because they embody so graphically two apparently antithetical yet interdependent functions of the novel in modern culture: on the one hand, they represent a potent identification of novel-writing and novel-reading with the creation, consolidation, and safeguarding of an autonomous subjectivity; on the other hand, they situate that subjectivity in an inescapable, ever-menacing context of surveillance, suspicion, circumvention, and unmasking.^[5] That is, they dramatize the inevitability—for the author, for the protagonist, and, perhaps less saliently but no less crucially, for the critic—of a certain will to demystify: demystification is not what happens to the novel (although the critic may feel as if he or she were exercising that prerogative) but what happens in and through the novel. In her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, for example, Brontë admits that one of her aims has been “to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee,” “to scrutinize and expose, to raise the gilding and show base metal under it.”^[6] And if it still seems somewhat surprising that she should have seen Thackeray, of all contemporary novelists, as a kindred spirit (signaling her admiration by dedicating this edition to him), this improbable affinity points up the central imperative of truth-telling, satirical or otherwise, in Brontë’s fiction. More powerfully than Thackeray’s works, however, or than the somewhat later instances of the sensation novel and the detective novel, Brontë’s texts epitomize the contagious dialectic of evasion and exposure that will henceforth loom large in the novel, even (or especially) when it is less overtly “psychological” or “Romantic.”

For where the narrative of sensation or detection typically enacts a linear movement toward transparency and closure, the plots of Brontë’s novels notoriously refuse the comforts of linearity, intensifying the demand for demystification precisely by frustrating it.^[7] For all their vaunted commitment to direct communication, and despite their author’s reputation as one who “pours forth her feelings…without premeditation,”^[8] these novels virtually institutionalize the obstacles to unmediated and unpremeditated expression and understanding. If they stand out as emblematic demonstrations of the will to unveil, they do so because they install opacity as a permanent fixture of the novelistic world. In the veritable theater of self-fashioning that they constitute, theatricality-as-display and theatricality-as-deception articulate the conflictual masquerade of the modern novel, which seems, in its cult of interiority, to have left its theatrical prehistory far behind. Brontë’s novels stand as memorials to the process whereby the novel as cultural production absorbs and covers over the traces of its historically and politically supplementary relation to the theater, of its genealogy as repetition-in-difference. “The inscription of theatricality” denotes the ambiguity of this process: to inscribe theatricality is at once to replicate it and to displace it, incorporating this generic other and at the same time disguising it. In the nineteenth century, the novel becomes a crypt in which theatricality lies concealed, but only half-concealed, since this very encrypting bespeaks an intrinsically theatrical subterfuge.

But though one cannot, therefore, choose not to reenact the ritual of demystification, there is another, more interesting reason why I hope “not merely” to deconstruct Brontëan subjectivity. Mansfield Park shows that demystification, far from being a neutral cognitive process, in fact serves a highly coercive ideological purpose, however unpredictably or unreliably. For their part, Brontë’s novels extend this insight, by unfolding a multiplicity of dramas in which demystification turns out to have a specific, though often overdetermined, political and erotic agenda of its own. It is important to point out that this discovery does not necessarily discredit the diverse acts of unveiling at work in—or in response to—the text. What it does is to open up a range of performative possibilites behind a series of cognitive scenes, to present them as scenes, rather than as so many disinterested projects of reception taking place passively and invisibly out, as it were, in the audience.^[9]

Though the question of theatricality figures importantly in all of Brontë’s novels, I will be concerned here with only two—the most famous and the one most deadeningly pasteurized and homogenized for absorption into the collective unconscious, Jane Eyre, and the last and the one most bristlingly “textual” and “complex,” Villette (1853). Of these two, the latter would appear to be the logical place to begin showing how theatricality, as in Mansfield Park, spreads from the assigned locus of the literal stage to encompass not only spectators but participants in transactions—for example, reading, writing, teaching, lovemaking—supposedly untainted by theatrical obliquity. Villette, after all, thematizes theatrical issues overtly and recurrently, and, with its cosmopolitan, or at least Continental, setting, seems more likely than Jane Eyre to illustrate a suitably corrosive confrontation between the domestic, the private, and the inward—the world, in short, of “the governess”—and the foreign, the public, and the centrifugal—the world, in short, of “the actress.” But I want to discuss Jane Eyre first, not only in deference to chronology but also because this less obviously theatrical text has concomitantly more power to illustrate the ways in which theatricality gets camouflaged, in which the novelistic space denies its theatrical structure by internalizing it. In Villette, as we will see, the governess—a role that Brontë herself had of course played in real life—in fact turns into an actress; and if that progression, from one Victorian female paradigm to its apparent opposite, is not quite as definitive or as thematically coherent as it is in, say, Vanity Fair, its greater conspicuousness in relation to the economy of roles in Jane Eyre suggests that we may have more to learn, at least initially, from the governess whose acting is never even momentarily literal, but always furtively and disingenuously figurative—that is, highly characteristic of theatricality in the nineteenth-century novel.

Brontë may have disliked Austen—and she may not even have begun to read her until after Jane Eyre was published—but in one sense her novels seem oddly reminiscent of Mansfield Park: Fanny Price might well be seen as the precursor of Brontë’s “undelightful” heroines.^[10] Where Fanny insists, “No, indeed, I cannot act,” Jane Eyre rebuffs Rochester’s attempt to objectify her by warning him, “I will not be your English Céline Varens” (p. 298). Céline Varens, of course, is the French opera dancer with whom Rochester had the liaison that, to the dismay of many Victorian readers, he has recounted to Jane, and that, his rather half-hearted denials notwithstanding, has apparently resulted in the birth of little Adèle, Jane’s pupil at Thornfield Hall. And as in Mansfield Park, the use of theatrical themes and imagery in Jane Eyre seems mainly homeopathic. For, though Rochester’s theatrical escapade plays a paradoxically crucial role in the narrative insofar as it motivates Jane’s presence at Thornfield, and though one could argue that, as the “miniature” (p. 170) of her mother, Adèle introduces the “French” disease of theatricality into the domestic interior of the novel, Rochester provides more reassuring terms for the metaphorical recuperation of theatricality: “I…took the poor thing out of the slime and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden” (p. 176). As everyone knows, the climate of the house itself can hardly be called “wholesome”; but the force of passages such as this one is to suggest that whatever dangers are lurking nearby have nothing to do with the French connection: it is rather the much more fiery Spanish or Creole presence of Bertha Mason that should give us pause. This transplant or graft provides an exemplary graph of how a certain potentially hazardous foreign substance may be subsumed safely within a domestic order. Most references to theatricality in the novel have a similarly diminishing effect, as in the “miniaturization” of Adèle whereby we are invited to dismiss her, as Blanche Ingram does when she greets her with the exclamation, “Oh, what a little puppet!” (p. 202).

Unlike Mansfield Park, however, where the reduction of theatricality to convention becomes the normative, if covert, gesture of the novel itself, here the novel defines itself over and against that reduction. At the beginning of the novel, for example, when Mrs. Reed refuses to release Jane from the red-room, the heroine explains, “I was a precocious actress in her eyes” (p. 49); the implication is that Jane’s oppressor is too brutishly enslaved by commonplace assumptions about artifice and sincerity to understand her. Or when, in a more metacritical register, the narrator writes that “a new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play” (p. 125), the perfunctory, merely approximate character of that “something like” effectively empties the analogy of any disruptive potential. Indeed, the subsequent stage directions that tell us what to imagine in this “scene” underscore not the distractions of decor but the prevailing intimacy that obtains in the relationship between narrator and reader.^[11] The rhetorical parallel becomes a hygienic bar separating the novelistic from the theatrical. Thus, if a certain theatrical infection does take hold in Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre would appear to inoculate itself more consequentially: a conventionalizing rhetoric would render the text immune from that very conventionality, making this novelistic world safe for authenticity, freedom, and direct communication.

That a legitimate domain has been secured for the founding of a unitary, autonomous self is the enabling assumption of the most influential feminist reading of Jane Eyre. In the chapter that serves as the iconic centerpiece of The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar rechristen the narrative as “Plain Jane’s Progress,” as a “pilgrimage toward selfhood,” culminating in Jane’s exorcism of her “truest and darkest double,” the demonic Bertha Mason.^[12] But while the animalistic Bertha figures so centrally in this psychoanalytic allegory, any minatory allure that might attach to such culpably social female characters as Céline, Adèle, and Blanche gets minimized here: functioning merely as so many “important negative ‘role-models’ for Jane,” these characters “suggest problems she must overcome before she can reach the independent maturity which is the goal of her pilgrimage” (p. 350). The teleology of this interpretation privileges Jane’s “unseduceable independence in a world of self-marketing Célines and Blanches” (p. 353). Whatever their importance as “negative ‘role-models,’ ” these sexually commodified women never exceed the thematic determination of problems-to-be-overcome, and therefore never loom much larger than the puppet-like Adèle. Characterizing the latter, along with her mother and Blanche, as “denizen[s] of Vanity Fair” (p. 350), Gilbert and Gubar ask, “May not Adèle, the daughter of a ‘fallen woman,’ be the model female in a world of prostitutes?” (p. 350), but they see little likelihood of Jane’s taking this model seriously. If, on the one hand, these characters—to whose numbers we may add Jane’s frivolous, “stylish” cousin Georgiana, who is at one point compared to “waxwork” (p. 257); the hypocritically fashionable Brocklehurst women; and even the “coquettish” (p. 394) Rosamond Oliver—typify a certain proverbial construction of female sexuality in terms of both acting and prostitution,^[13] on the other, heavier hand, the very brittleness or blankness (Blanche-ness?) of the stereotype guarantees, as in the novel itself, that the woman who “sings and dances for her supper” will never turn into anything more subversive than “a clockwork temptress invented by E. T. A. Hoffmann” (p. 350). Insofar as Jane’s developmental drama is seen to center on her confrontation with the Madwoman in the Attic, not with the Dancer in the Boudoir or the Coquette in the Parlor, there is little reason to doubt her when she says, “I will not be your English Céline Varens.” Not only will Jane Eyre never turn into Becky Sharp, something of a “clockwork temptress” herself; more important, she is saved from the contemptible world of “social exchange” in which Jane Austen’s “elegant but confined” female characters are doomed to circulate.

But Brontë’s novel betrays a remarkable fascination with the very world and worldliness that she would soon patronize in Austen. Admittedly, Brontë seems to set up the “lady” merely to have Jane unmask her as already disreputably masked—to have Jane debunk her, that is, as her ostensible opposite, the “prostitute.” Yet if, in “plucking the mask,” Jane reveals not naked truth but another mask, however “base,” then the project of debunking—of “scrutinizing” and “exposing”—cannot be described as simply antitheatrical: it may in fact be impelled surreptitiously by something like a desire for theatricality. Precisely by encouraging us, for instance, to concur with Jane in her decision that Blanche Ingram is “beneath jealousy” (p. 215) because, though “very showy,” she is “not genuine” (p. 215), the narrative also compels us to join Jane in emulating the “ceaseless surveillance” (p. 215) to which Rochester subjects Blanche; and, as we discover, the act of surveillance seems almost inevitably to precipitate the would-be demystifier into a volatile state of both “ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint” (p. 216). Just as Fanny Price’s refusal to participate in the theatricals at Mansfield Park fails to exempt her from the theatrical dis-ease of mingled “longing and dreading,” so too does Jane discover the instability of the binary opposition between spectator and spectacle. Jane’s longish dramatization of her surveillance is all the more worth quoting because of its appropriately turbid logic.

“Why can she not influence [Rochester] more, when she is privileged to draw so near him?” I asked myself. “Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it—to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace—and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to please him when they are married? I do not think they will manage it; and yet it might be managed; and his wife might, I verily believe, be the very happiest woman the sun shines on.”

If it is not “jealousy” that troubles Jane, neither is it exactly altruistic sorrow on behalf of Rochester, destined though he appears to be for a loveless marriage. Instead, one gathers that Jane’s anxiety stems from the fact that only she seems to have recognized the disparity between her own superior “genuineness” on the one hand and Blanche’s “meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres” on the other. But though she knows that Blanche would do better by “merely sitting quietly at his side,” Jane is soon agitating herself by imagining how she might “manage” as Rochester’s wife. Indeed, the previous paragraph shows Jane vacillating between visions of out-Blancheing Blanche and of adopting an even subtler, more “pacifistic” strategy:

When she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester’s breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart—have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won.

These passages suggest that it is not enough merely to write Blanche off as a bad or insufficiently inspired actress, although—more accurately, because—the spectacle of her failure is gratifying indeed. As she keeps missing her target here, she exemplifies better than she knows the novel’s insistent formulation of theatricality as an endless, dizzying dialectic of power and subservience, whereby to act is to be simultaneously empowered and vulnerable. Commanding Rochester to sing for her, she adds, “If you don’t please me, I will shame you by showing you how such things should be done” (p. 208). Or again: “Both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors: she was evidently bent on striking them as something very dashing and daring indeed” (p. 208; emphasis added).

Blanche’s performance, of course, “excites” something other than “admiration” and “amazement”: its (unintended) effect is precisely the drama of “ceaseless excitation” traversing Jane Eyre, which excitation, merged with “ruthless restraint,” constitutes both an internalization and an intensification of the agonistic theatricality already demonstrated by Blanche. As we can see from the long passages in which Jane criticizes Blanche’s histrionic technique, Blanche’s punitive, self-aggrandizing, but also oddly self-abasing agenda in fact gets appropriated and enacted in the consciousness of her silent observer, the governess hiding “behind the window-curtain” (p. 205). Blanche boasts of how, as a child, she “took care to turn the tables” on such “nuisance[s]” (p. 206), but here it is rather Jane Eyre who turns the tables on her, for the ruthlessness of Jane’s self-restraint enables the ruthlessness of her rhetorical triumph over the hapless Blanche.

Indeed, the “ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint” that Blanche’s egregiously miscalculated assault on Rochester triggers in Jane represents a complicated, “striking” play not only of self-pity and envy (if not “jealousy”) but also of self-congratulation, disdain, and a vindictiveness whose voyeuristic pleasure is only barely moralized. Satirical demystification—the adversarial uncovering of Blanche’s inept theatrical “calculations” as such—emerges here as an ardent vicariousness that does not so much undermine as upstage it.^[14] The novel offers many such scenes of overdetermined spectatorship on Jane’s part, scenes that, far from constituting mere detours in her “pilgrimage toward selfhood,” both articulate that trajectory and provide the measure for the weight, volume, and density that define the “selfhood” in question. If the product of this narrative—the elaborated subjectivity named “Jane Eyre”—is in fact ultimately theatrical, that theatricality entails far more than the protagonist’s arriving at a proper stance toward the various “role models” placed in her way. To be sure, Jane Eyre’s selfhood is formed against the relatively flat backdrop composed by more conventionally theatrical characters like Blanche, Céline, and Adèle. This does not mean, however, that Jane is the “opposite” of those characters; rather, they serve as pretexts or contexts, enticingly pregnant blanks, in relation to which her “surveillance” manifests itself as a self-charging (“exciting”), at once sadistically and masochistically “ruthless,” performance in its own right. Nor does this performance occur only when Blanche, Céline, Adèle, or any other “merely” stylish woman is on stage. That, before her marriage to Rochester, Bertha Mason was “a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram” (p. 332), should point to an important link between Jane’s “truest and darkest double” and those blanched or whitened female characters whose worldly falseness and vacuity come laden with a paradoxical power to induce in the heroine extravagant spectacles of self-construction.^[15] The latter may be puppets, but, like their counterparts in Vanity Fair, they are all “magnified puppets” (p. 217), as Jane describes two other characters, and therefore “provoking puppet[s]” (p. 302) as well, as Rochester provokingly calls Jane herself. In appreciating Brontë’s impressive revision of the novel as a genre, we should not underestimate the role played in that revision by a vigorously magnified and repeatedly projected meretriciousness, saliently but not exclusively embodied in non-English women,^[16] and invested with a provocative (i.e., at once energizing and irritating) glamor and even pathos by virtue of its very contemptibility. The worse the acting—and, in Jane Eyre, almost all acting promises to be delectably “bad”—the better the show. Nothing succeeds (for Jane) like failure (on the part of her showy, worldly Others).