ABSTRACT
The fin de siècle saw a remarkable proliferation of theatre-novels and stories. While this development can be partly attributed to a decline of moralistic resistance to the stage and its people, my second chapter explores the connection between theatre-fiction and resistance to theatre on aesthetic grounds. Evoking the work of theorists Martin Puchner and Nicholas Ridout, my term “stage-frightened theatre-fiction” gestures to the paradoxical ways in which desire for theatrical success in writers such as Henry James is combined with deep anxieties about elements of theatre’s mediality including its reliance on collective reception and collaborative production. Such concerns link James with diverse theatre-novelists from Émile Zola to Leonard Merrick and Gaston Leroux, and I explore the paradoxically creative role of these tensions in theatre-fiction’s development. Focussing on James’s The Tragic Muse and “Nona Vincent,” I consider theatre-novels and stories as an intermedial “compromise-formation,” simultaneously and partially satisfying both the desire for theatre and the defence against it. I locate James’s most provocative contribution to the genre in his configuration of these tensions through theatre’s intersection with sexual relationships—sites of vulnerable exposure, of disparity between vision and corporeal actualization, but also of alluring potential and seductive possibility.
