Performing for the Reader: Dramatic Speech in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Abstract

Eighteenth-century novelists borrowed formal features from many earlier genres—journals, travelogues, epic poetry, medieval romance, to name only a few—but perhaps the most influential source that contributed to the novel’s development, drama, has yet to receive the sustained recognition or systematic analysis it deserves. This study contributes to a recent critical discourse that recognizes the considerable formal and thematic overlap between drama and the novel by exploring speech representation and metafiction as two important areas of generic transference. I argue that many dramatic speech forms, particularly asides and soliloquies, and metafictional structures that solicit audience participation, such as prologues, amount to a mediating communication system between dramatist and audience. These conventions appear frequently in Restoration and eighteenth-century plays and were assimilated into the novel by authors who worked in both media, thereby contributing to the novel’s development into a recognizable genre. By examining the plays and novels of Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Frances Burney, I identify and analyze dramatic methods of speech representation that early novelists incorporated into their novels, and also consider the ways in which these authors adapted dramatic metafictional devices to initiate conversations with readers.

The first chapter investigates the ways in which Aphra Behn dramatically stylized speech through modified prologues that deploy antagonism as a means of reader engagement within her novellas, and recreated the stylistic and thematic functions of a tragic chorus in Oroonoko by using a technique I call mass undifferentiated speech. The second chapter explores the extensive use of metafiction in Restoration drama and argues that two common features of this period’s dramatic metafiction, the rehearsal structure and internal literary criticism, were integrated into early novels, such as Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. The third chapter demonstrates that Oliver Goldsmith imported speech forms from sentimental comedy into his novel The Vicar of Wakefield as a means of benefiting from sentimentalism’s popularity while critiquing its core values, and argues that his return to Restoration dramaturgy in his play She Stoops to Conquer positions two highly artificial dramatic speech forms, the aside and soliloquy, as ideal vehicles for the expression of authentic emotion. The final chapter argues that Frances Burney attempted to recreate the direct address and proleptic defense characteristic of dramatic prologues in Evelina’s preliminary paratexts, and maintains that much of the novel’s character speech is dramatically presented. It also analyzes Burney’s manuscripts for evidence of her methodological processes, and determines that the qualitative difference between character speech in her novels and plays is likely due to compositional methods. Ultimately, the formal adaptations I identify suggest that highly conventional dramatic techniques were foundational to the novel’s development, which complicates our literary historical understanding of novelistic representational aims. By recognizing non-illusionistic techniques within early novels, we learn that literary realism was only one of the novel’s many aesthetic goals, rather than its normative mode.