Tableaux Vivants: Female Identity Development Through Everyday Performance

By Theodore R. Hovet, Sr. and Grace Ann Hovet

Grace Ann Hovet contends in this study of novels written by middle-class white American women from 1850 to the contemporary period that their portrayals of the development of female identity adds a great deal of supporting evidence to the assertion of several influential psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers that, while identity is surely shaped in part by culture and social structures, it is also unique to each individual. In the words of Mark Tappan in Narratives and Story Telling, an inner self defines itself through an ongoing dialogue between the internally persuasive discourse of individual consciousness and the authoritarian enforced discourse of the dominant culture and institutions (1991, 18).
In the novels considered here, much of the inner discourse is performed. The female protagonist understands that she is expected to act out the accepted feminine role. As a consequence, the inner self expresses itself through the conscious manipulation of the image. For this reason, Professor Hovet argues that tableaux vivants provide an apt central metaphor for the development of female identity in these novels. These living pictures consist of individuals, usually women, carefully costumed and posed to replicate famous scenes from history and the arts. In the nineteenth century, these tableaux evolved in the United States into an extremely popular parlor game or entertainment interlude in middle-class social gatherings. In the novels, Lily Barts portrayal of Joshua Reynoldss Mrs. Lloyd in Edith Whartons The House of Mirth provides the most vivid example. But the novels also make it clear that tableaux vivants were a part of everyday life as young women learned to pose before others as the model of feminine beauty or as the angel in the house.
This study adds to those of Susan Fraiman, Lori Merish, and Nancy Armstrong that describe the relationship of novels to the development of middle-class subjectivity. In particular, it explains the process by which a female subjectivity evolved in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. Employing a historical continuum, Professor Hovet selected for study novels that she saw as most influential in the culture of the United States because of their ongoing popularity and continued presence in the culture. Literary historians consider Susan Warners The Wide, Wide World (1850) to be Americas first best seller. Little Women (1869) has been one of the most read and loved novels, at least among young female readers, for more than a century and has been made into at least four well-known movies with stars the caliber of Katherine Hepburn and Winona Ryder. Harriet Beecher Stowes My Wife and I (1871) was hugely successful in an intensely competitive serial fiction market. Kate Chopins The Awakening (1899) has become a mainstay in literature and womens studies classrooms and has been made into at least two movies, End of August and Grand Isle. Edith Whartons The House of Mirth (1905) was not only popular among middle-class readers of the time but has become known to mass culture through the 2000 movie version. Margaret Mitchells Gone with the Wind (1936) and its movie version generated the term blockbuster. Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird has been one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century, and the movie starring Gregory Peck is now a cultural icon. Marilyn Frenchs The Womens Room (1977) remains a cause celebre, and Mona Simpsons Anywhere But Here (1986) was reprinted six times within two months of its publication and became a movie starring Susan Sarandon.
The study also tries to show how depictions of female identity surfaced tensions and anxieties in the dominant social discourse. All the novels in this analysis are so-called crossover novels. The term crossover has become common in culture studies, particularly in analyses of the way some works reach a large enough audience to breach the walls that t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 26, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462817795

Theodore R. Hovet, Sr.

Grace Ann Hovet died March 15, 2008, shortly after completing the manuscript for Tableaux Vivants. She retired from the University of Northern Iowa in 1999 as professor emerita of English. She also founded successful programs in gender studies and leadership studies. During this time, she published articles on women in literature in major scholarly journals. In 1991 she received the Distinguished Faculty Award from the Iowa American Association of University Women. She is survived by her husband, Theodore, and son, Theodore Jr.

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Copyright © 2009 by Grace Ann Hovet with Theodore R. Hovet, Sr.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009904373

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4415-3453-8

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

AFTERWORD

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Dedication

Tableaux Vivants grew out of Grace Ann Hovet’s long study of women’s identity formation. She was particularly grateful for the encouragement and contribution of ideas from her son, Theodore Jr., and for the editorial assistance, theoretical ideas, and unstinting support of her husband, Theodore. She also frequently expressed her appreciation of the intellectual and emotional stimulation of two reading groups: the Iowa Research Support Group (Cheryl Jacobsen, Loree Rackstraw, Alice Swension, Ted Hovet) and the North Carolina Zen Group (Carol Herbert, Ted Hovet, Hugh and Elinor Knapp, Barbara Wilson).

INTRODUCTION

The notion of analyzing what has variously been called the identity quest, novel of development, novel of formation, apprentice novel, initiation story, or bildungsroman has been increasingly problematized in contemporary literary study because of the frequent assertion that individual identity is a cultural and social construction rather than, as most romantics and modernists believed, an inherent characteristic of human subjectivity. As Paula M. L. Moya points out, many theorists of the postmodern believe that to speak of identities as ‘real’ is to naturalize them and to disguise the structures of power involved in their production and maintenance (6). Identity becomes even more problematic when we look at it from the standpoint of gender. Influential social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler have pretty much established the principle that even something that seems as basic to identity as gender is actually a social and ideological construction rather than a characteristic based on natural difference (Reitter 29-40).

Nevertheless, a study of novels written by middle-class white American women from 1850 to the contemporary period adds a great deal of supporting evidence to the contention of several influential psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers that, while identity is surely shaped in part by culture and social structures, it is also unique to each individual. Among others, Mark Tappan, Efrat Tsëelon, Lyn Mikel Brown, and Carol Gilligan convincingly argue that identity is inherent as well as constructed, i. e., in the words of Tappan, an inner self defines itself through an ongoing dialogue between the internally persuasive discourse of individual consciousness and the authoritarian enforced discourse of the dominant culture and institutions (18).

In the novels considered here, much of the inner discourse is performed. The female protagonist understands that she expected to act out the expected feminine role. As a consequence, the inner self expresses itself through the conscious manipulation of the image. For this reason, tableaux vivants provide an apt central metaphor for the development of female identity in these novels. These living pictures consist of individuals, usually women, carefully costumed and posed to replicate famous scenes from history and the arts. In the nineteenth century, these tableaux evolved in the United States into an extremely popular parlor game or entertainment interlude in middle-class social gatherings. In the novels, Lily Bart’s portrayal of Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth provides the most vivid example. But the novels also make it clear that tableaux vivants were a part of everyday life as young women learned to pose before others as the model of feminine beauty or as the angel in the house.

Fictional depictions of female identity development not only provide a picture of women’s changing sense of self but also what these selves tell us about the evolution of white middle-class culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. As Robert Bellah and the other authors of the influential Habits of the Heart (1985) argue, For the past hundred years or so, the middle class, in the modern sense of the term, has so dominated our culture . . . that everyone in the United States thinks largely in middle-class categories, even when they are inappropriate (ix). Widely read fiction written by middle-class white women has been one of the key elements in the construction of these categories. Susan Fraiman, Lori Merish, and Nancy Armstrong, to name just a few analysts, have explained that this literature developed a conception of subjectivity on which middle-class identity [is] based (Fraiman 15). This study tries to deepen our understanding of how important the concept of an authentic female identity in novels written by American women was to middle-class subjectivity.

Employing a historical continuum, this study considers novels that, because of their popularity and ongoing presence in the culture, have been most influential in defining female subjectivity in American middle-class society. Literary historians consider Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) to be America’s first best seller, and it underwent a revival in the late 1980s; Little Women (1869) has been one of the most read and loved novels, at least among young female readers, for more than a century and has been made into at least four well-known movies with stars the caliber of Katharine Hepburn and Winona Ryder. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s My Wife and I (1871) was hugely successful in an intensely competitive serial fiction market and has become a punching bag for feminist literary critics. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) has become a mainstay in literature and women’s studies classrooms and has been made into at least two movies, End of August and Grand Isle. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) was not only popular among middle-class readers of the time but has become known to mass culture through the 2000 movie version. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) and its movie version generated the term blockbuster. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has been one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century, and the movie starring Gregory Peck is now a cultural icon. Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977) remains a cause celebre, and Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here (1986) was reprinted six times within two months of its publication and became a movie starring Susan Sarandon.

The study also tries to show how depictions of female identity surfaced tensions and anxieties in the dominant social discourse. All the novels in this analysis are so-called crossover novels. The term crossover has become common in culture studies, particularly in analyses of the way some works reach a large-enough audience to breach the walls that traditionally have separated high and popular culture and thereby achieve an active presence in the cultural history of the United States. Atticus Finch, for example, is probably more real to a large number of Americans than Clarence Darrow. Hovet contends, like Frederic Jameson and John Fiske, that the crossover phenomenon occurs when literary works, movies, or television programs adhere to dominant values and employ popular literary conventions while at the same time incorporating, to use Fiske’s phrase oppositional discourses. As he points out, for a work to be successful in popular culture, it must contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them, the opportunities to oppose them from subordinated, but not totally disempowered positions (25). Atticus Finch, for instance, has become a cultural icon not only because of his personification of racial justice but also because the coming-of-age female narrative voice presents him as representative of the failures of middle-class white Americans to address social injustice. To apply Fiske’s concept, Scout’s narrative supports her father’s liberal principles but at the same time voices opposition to—one might say belittles—his inability as a town leader and representative in the state legislature to initiate meaningful social reform. In so doing, she surfaces feelings of exclusion shared by a large number of Americans because of gender, class, or difference. After Lee’s novel, it becomes impossible to view racism as exclusively a Southern problem or to detach it from other kinds of injustice, particularly sexism and classism. This same process occurs in the other novels in this study. A female protagonist such as Scarlett O’Hara or Amy March, while generally reinforcing dominant social values concerning the position of women, also express oppositional views that invite readers to question that position and imagine alternatives.

The bifurcated voice characteristic of these novels—one registers reaffirming traditional literary formulas and conventional social values, the other subtly subverting the status quo—undoubtedly stems from the personal history of the authors. These women writers experienced firsthand the emotional and practical challenges of achieving professional success outside the domestic sphere. It entailed placating the male publishing establishment and the watchdogs of conventional values while at the same time affirming their own individual voices. Edith Wharton’s severe identity crisis, as R. W. B. Lewis calls it, brought on by her uncertainty as to whether she was a professional writer or a wife/hostess, (76) was experienced equally by most of the other writers in this study. This condition taught them to speak in a kind of coded literary form that seemed to uphold traditional views but which at the same time expressed anxieties and resentments experienced by large numbers of readers who felt marginalized by established society. For example, as Joan D. Hedrick has pointed out, Stowe, in order to communicate with a diverse audience, learned to speak in at least three narrative voices—the male Western pioneer, the domestic wife/mother, and the Christian spokesperson (133). This identification with the audience gives the novels an intensity that readers continue to find compelling. Anyone who has taught Gone with the Wind, to cite another instance of contrasting voices, is struck by the vehemence with which most young women today defend the vixen, Scarlett, for speaking for the new woman emerging in the 1920s and 1930s. In short, the narratives exemplify one of the important but often ignored functions of popular culture, namely, to quote Fredric Jameson, to transform social and political fantasies into some effective presence in the mass cultural text (25).

These crossover novels written by women also express another kind of dualism—the unabashed use of sentiment and melodrama along with the most startling realism. In the last half of the nineteenth century, realism like that associated with Henry James and William Dean Howells became the hallmark of what critics and editors of influential magazines like the Atlantic Monthly considered serious fiction. In contrast, the literary establishment increasingly characterized much of the fiction written by women as sentimental, melodramatic, and domestic, traits they associated with popular literature. Thus a hierarchy of discourse, to use Fiske’s term, was established in which masculine realism was placed at the top of literary values and domestic (read sentimental) fiction was located near the bottom. This aggressively gendered criticism, as Joan Hedrick characterizes it (351), continued with the modernist movement and the New Criticism in which, as Lawrence Rainey points out, popular culture is construed as a threat of encroaching formlessness, gendered as female (34).

One of the most significant aspects of the crossover novels written by women is how the narratives cross back and forth between the hard edges of social realism (Hedrick 314) and some of the formulas of popular literature. In other words, there are dual narrative conventions that parallel the dual voices. This braiding of seemingly disparate literary conventions is not the by-product of aesthetic carelessness, a charge frequently leveled against women novelists. It results from the authors’ relationship to their readers. In order to create convincing portraits of females and their social environments, they employ the techniques of realistic narrative. But in unabashedly appealing to a mass audience, they also use the nonrealistic popular formulas of romantic love, sentiment, and melodrama. Rather than viewing these formulas as a violation of realistic narration, critics and literary historians need to consider how such formulas provide a subversive view of the dominant patriarchal ideology. By openly embracing the popular, these writers challenge the hierarchy of discourse and assume a narrative position outside the dominant institutions and cultural values of elite culture. Thus we have the stereotypical helpless Southern belle, Scarlett, with tigerish joy blowing away the face of a Yankee cavalryman while another, the gentle Melanie, surveys the scene with a smile of fierce joy (308). So much for angels in the house.

The most important result of these dual voices and narratives is the establishment of an outsider position that formulates a story of female identity formation markedly different from the male narrative of the identity quest. American Romantic and Modernist writers picture identity as a sudden revelation that occurs when the individual breaks free from social structures and strips himself of social restraints, psychological inhibitions, and illusions (Trotter 94). As Richard Poirier notes, in male American literature there is a privileging of the environment of nakedness, where there is no encumbrance to the expression of the true inner self, over an environment of costume, of outer space occupied by society and its fabrications (30).

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance and Walt Whitman’s portrayals of the autonomous individual most eloquently formulated this identity quest. The Emersonian/Whitmanesque pursuit of individual freedom and authenticity can be characterized, to quote Jeffrey Steele, as one of the most compelling psychological myths invented in the nineteenth century (9). Despite postmodern uneasiness, the myth lives on. Ihab Hassan, for example, in his 1990 Selves at Risk, asserts that the male identity questor is the most developed and important human being in Western culture and, indeed, the vehicle to our modernity. He also proclaims that the story of the identity quest is the highest achievement of American literature (95, 6, 26). As Hassan’s gendered rhetoric makes clear, the identity quest is a masculine narrative. To use Gillian Brown’s frank language, the quest narrative is flight from the domestic shrew in order to establish and preserve the man’s authentic identity. Nevertheless, even critics with a feminist perspective find it difficult to resist the magnetic appeal of the quest metaphor. For example, Dana Heller, citing arguments voiced by Judith Christ and Annis Pratt, asserts that what feminists critics have discovered is an absence of a heroic female image and that they therefore should focus their attention on the quest motif . . . in the new literature written by women (8-9). In short, to quote from Habits of the Heart, The meaning of one’s life for most Americans is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself (82).

In contrast to the masculine culture of authenticity and the revelatory self, the women novelists in this study depict selfhood not as something buried deep within waiting to be liberated but as incremental. Identity is built up around an inward core with the materials of experience and knowledge attained within a domestic social environment dominated by social fabrications. The survival and growth of this cumulative self largely depends on the ability of the individual to find a voice for the inner self that can enter into a dialogue with the outside world. These narratives of incremental identity and the depiction of the importance of conversational exchange confirm and amplify influential psychological studies that unabashedly borrow literary theories of narrative to explain identity development. Most notably, Mark B. Tappan uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogical principle in the novel and the analyses of interview narratives by Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan to account for identity development that contrasts sharply with that depicted in the identity quest. Tappan argues that Bahktin’s description of the dialogical principal in the novel also applies to the development of selfhood. A unique identity evolves as the individual learns to separate her thoughts and feelings from the expectations circulating in the culture and social environment. Summarizing and quoting Bakhtin, Tappan argues, Consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it. A sense of self arises from the process of distinguishing between one’s own and another’s discourse, between one’s own and another’s thought (18).

If the development is sufficient to form a sense of self, an individual voice emerges out of a conversation and a negotiation between internally persuasive discourse and the external voices of authoritarian enforced discourse. Therefore, Tappan concludes, what "drives development . . . is clearly the experience of Dialogue (18). As a consequence, as Mary Field Belenky and her coauthors have concluded, women frequently employ the metaphor of voice to picture their developing sense of self" (18).

The women authors considered in this study not only arrived at a similar conclusion, some more than a hundred years before these current studies, but also articulated two important elements not considered by them. First of all, they present dialogue as more than a verbal exchange. It is also visual, i. e., the female protagonists speak with their bodies as well as their voice. Secondly, they structure desirable development into three psychological stages. Each stage is defined by voice and visual metaphors. The voice metaphors move from (1) silence to (2) monologue to (3) dialogue; the visual metaphors progress from (1) still life to (2) mask or masquerade to (3) unmasking. The first two stages constitute kinds of tableaux vivants, a visual presentation modeled after the popular parlor game in the nineteenth century in which individuals portrayed famous images drawn from art and history. Jennie A. Kassanoff has shown how these tableaux varied from rendering life still by unexpressive or guarded performers who position themselves within the constraints of a visual frame to actors stepping outside the frame and performing an image of living grace. So too images of the tableaux of the feminine in the novels vary from still life, like Miss Ellery in Stowe’s My Wife and I, displaying her statuesque beauty, to expressions of living grace performed by Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. But there is a third kind of tableaux vivants depicted in some of the novels, namely, performers who not only step outside the frame of the picture but also add dialogue to explain to others, particularly men, the constructedness of the feminine image. A good example of such unmasking occurs when Amy March in Little Women spells out for Laurie (and the reader) how she composed herself to look like a daughter of the gods. As we shall see, such scenes are critically important to female identity because they depict women who are able to break out of the culture of equivocation generated by masking. This feminine culture, born out of the necessity to meet expectations of what constitutes feminine behavior, will eventually freeze the inner core of selfhood if the individual cannot step outside of it.

In Little Women, My Wife and I, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Women’s Room, and Anywhere But Here, the authors create vivid portraits of women who achieve authentic individuality by advancing through these three stages of psychological development. They employ tableaux not only to assert the importance of female individuality but also lead us to recognize that authenticity necessitates the display of the unique characteristics of each individual. In other words, while individual identity can be considered a universal goal, the forms it takes are particular to each individual.

These same novels and the others in this study (The Wide, Wide World and The House of Mirth) also contain memorable portraits of women who are unable to crossover from stage two to stage three. By picturing such failures, the authors give us an understanding of the forces that prevent full female psychological development and an appreciation of how important women’s authentic individuality is. The failure of some, to put this more directly, is necessary for us to fully understand the nature of female identity in middle-class America and the way U.S. culture works against the true liberation of women.

The following is a fuller summary of the fictional portrayal of the three stages female psychological development and the embedded voice and visual metaphor.

Stage One: Silence and Still Life

In the novels that depict childhood, powerlessness so defines the position of the girl that she can barely distinguish herself from the expectations of others and thus remains voiceless and virtually immobile in the adult sphere. Children like Ellen Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World or Beth in Little Women represent this silent and static still life. They listen and obey the voices of those who want them to be a model of the obedient child and pretty girl in pink petticoats. In remaining silent, they experience a lack of connection between their feelings and thoughts and the outside world but have neither the desire nor the ability to voice this lack. In The Wide, Wide World, for example, Ellen as a child makes no effort to counter her situation as the darling possession of her guardians who have no interest in what she is thinking of or feeling (529). This silence, however, can become crucial to developing a sense of self because it doesn’t draw the attention of adults to feelings and thoughts that they would consider inappropriate and promptly squelch.

Stage Two: Monologue and Mask/Masquerade

As she matures, some girls in the novels start to develop a protesting inner voice, to borrow a phrase from Women’s Ways of Knowing, and to distinguish this internal monologue from external authoritative discourses (54). But they conceal the inner monologue by donning the mask and playing the role of a compliant child. To use Ellen as an example again, she reacts to her guardian’s criticism of her by saying to herself, ‘I shall do precisely what he tells me, of course, but there are some things he cannot command . . . I am glad of that!’ (510). Even the feisty Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird silences herself in order to avoid conflict with her teacher. Ellen and Scout’s mask of obedience constitutes a form of agency because they don it in order to hide the inner self and thus resist the total dominance by authority figures.

As girls and young women in these novels become more sure of themselves, the strongest of them find masking not only necessary to protect the inner self but also as a tool to explore and try out their emerging identity. As the sociologist Kathleen Woodward states in a study of identity at the end of the twentieth century, The ability to visualize ourselves and to represent ourselves gives us some degree of agency, although the repertoire of symbols upon which we can draw is always limited by the particular culture which we inhabit (13). In terms of narrative, a woman by donning mask and costume—by becoming a tableau vivant—becomes at least partially the actor and author of her own story, to use Dana Crowley Jack’s description of her real-life subjects. To use Poirier’s nakedness/costume metaphor again, the women novelists accept an environment of costume—both mask and masquerade—rather than seeking the environment of nakedness pursued by the Emersonian self-made man (29). The masked self in the crossover novels constitutes the essential and important difference between male and female concepts of identity. Rather than stripping away social conventions to reach an authentic self, the female protagonists utilize conventional gender roles to protect an individual identity and to test out the acceptability of kinds of female behavior.

Stage Three: Dialogue and Unmasking

Those who would cross the threshold into a mature individual identity must have the courage and the desire to move beyond monologue and mask by engaging the inner persuasive voice with the external authoritarian discourse. All the novels considered in this study that picture the third stage of development contain an episode in which a major female character steps outside of the frame of the feminine tableau to reveal its constructedness, thereby affirming her agency and revealing her individuality. She turns the feminine costume inside out so that the stitching shows, to use the apt image from Jane Gaines’s study of costuming in the movies (1). Amy March in Little Women, for example, shows Laurie how some tulle, flowers, and a pose create the illusion that she is a daughter of the gods (475), a revelation that gives her a delightful sense of power (472). As this scene makes clear, negotiation between the self and society is for the woman a process of moving from silence to voice, from concealment to revelation. However, it is very important to note that, unlike a radical feminist such as Audacia Dangyereyes in My Wife and I or Mira Ward in The Women’s Room, self-actualized women in the novels do not completely abandon feminine masking.