| Popis: |
Charles Dickens often used theatrical metaphors to suggest artifice, posing, concealment — the problems of being overly self-conscious about an audience’s presence. But he also returned with fascination to the metaphor of the theatre as a special forum for revealing secrets about himself and his past. He posited an image of the theatre as a space set apart from the turmoil and consequences of the ordinary world, in which ‘actual truth’ could be performed without the normal constraints of repression, propriety, or authorial intervention. A study of the paradoxical uses of such a performative space and the limits on its liberating powers enhances our understanding of Dickens’s attitudes toward presentation of himself and his material, and of his involvement with his audience, both theatre-goers and reading public. But Dickens is also an exemplary figure whose use of theatrical metaphors illuminates more generally our desires to ‘play’ ourselves and to keep control of the production of play. Fascinated with himself to an extraordinary degree and eager to share with potential biographers his insights into what made him ‘inimitable’, Dickens struggled to articulate the contradictions of his theatrical experience. His refusal to ‘understand’ himself in a single autobiographical document makes his recursions to problematic issues of self-production particularly useful. This essay will examine Dickens’s powerful working-through of theatre as scene and metaphor in two novels — David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61) — and in his own intervening experience in the production of The Frozen Deep (1857). |
