1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 217.

2. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977). Studies of the nineteenth-century novel that, variously inspired by Foucault, locate it in the history of privatization include Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

3. On theatricality in eighteenth-century fiction, see, for example, Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) and David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Nina Auerbach has made a case for the theatricality of nineteenth-century literature and culture, most recently in Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Auerbach’s approach to nineteenth-century theatricality is quite different from mine, as I suggest at several points in this book.

4. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200. That spectacle and surveillance are by no means incompatible is demonstrated at length in Seltzer, James and the Art of Power, pp. 25–58, and suggested briefly in Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” October 50 (Fall 1989): 105.

5. Building upon such works as Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1970) and Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977), these studies include Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985); Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

6. A work whose aims are in many ways congruent with those of the present study is Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), which offers an astute discussion of the relations between marital ideology and narrative form, with special emphasis on the nineteenth-century novel.

7. On the tension between phallocentric narrative and female spectacle, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), pp. 412–28. For a discussion of the narrative disruptions effected by the cinematic representation of the gay man, see Lee Edelman, “Imag(in)ing the Homosexual: Laura and the Other Face of Gender,” in his Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992). On subversive feminist and gay/lesbian theatricality, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 128–49.

8. On these intergeneric relations, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 43–69; Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” ibid., pp. 5–39; William Rothman, The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

9. On the etymological and conceptual connection between theory and theatricality, see Jane Gallop, “Keys to Dora,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 220, and Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

10. I am indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick for this insight.

11. Notable writing on theatricality includes, in addition to the works mentioned above, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribners, 1969); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). An interesting subgenre is the growing body of work on cross-dressing; see, for example, Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect: Or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Winter 1989): 7–29, and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1991). The beginnings of an analysis of criticism as performance may be observed in Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction and “The Gender Bind: Women and the Disciplines,” Genders 3 (Fall 1988): 1–23; Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56 (Winter 1989): 721–71; Miller, The Novel and the Police; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).