UC San Diego

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on theatricality and the Victorian novel. Through its examination of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this dissertation unpacks how the Victorian novel negotiates and shapes understandings of the theatre and theatricality. Focusing on melodrama, theatrical performances, the theatre, actors, and acting and paying particular attention to the bodies of Victorian actors, this dissertation argues that theatricality and the theatre serve as sources of profound cultural anxiety and imminent danger in the Victorian novel. Nicholas Nickleby, Vanity Fair, and Dorian Gray are not just about theatre and theatricality; they are theatre. Dorian Gray is structured like a play about three theatrical and theatre-going Victorian men and the melodramatic actress who briefly comes in-between them. Vanity Fair is a puppet play about two women, one of whom is a brilliant actress. Nicholas Nickleby features the archetypes of Victorian stage melodrama, a handsome actor as its protagonist, and a touring troupe of eccentric actors. Published in the early, mid, and late Victorian period respectively, these novels capture what is terrifying and tantalizing about the theatre and theatricality. Noting the symbiotic relationship between the Victorian theatre and the novel as well as historical and theoretical definitions of theatricality and performance, this dissertation contributes to Victorian studies and draws from scholarship on the Victorian theatre. Chapter 1 scrutinizes the exploited performing bodies of male child actors in Nicholas Nickleby. Chapter 2 analyzes how theatricality and the sexualized, animalized body of the Victorian actress in Vanity Fair are transgressive. Chapter 3 explores the threatening materiality of the theatre and the precariousness of theatrical performance in Dorian Gray. Through close readings of the seasoned performer in Vanity Fair, the tragic ingénue in Dorian Gray, and child actors in Nicholas Nickleby, this dissertation shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and Wilde frame theatricality and the theatre as dangerous and threatening. This dissertation tethers representations of theatricality in the Victorian novel to broader contentious debates in Victorian culture about the theatre, acting, actors, prostitution, professionalization, the nature of identity, role-playing, sexuality, authenticity, and vice.