ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three disparate prose texts from the 1890s to the early decades of the 20th century and brings out their intertextuality through the overarching metaphor of theatricality – of enacting the self in fantasy and for an imagined public. Each text foregrounds the spectatorial gaze, with or without attendant emotions, within and outside the proscenium theatre. The obsession with roop – meaning both beauty and outward form, or simply, the form and image – generates the movement within the texts, demarcating what I call ‘artful zones’ of urban morality. Rather than offering a chronological account of social reproduction and formation, the chapter explores the dimensions of communicative transaction, the determinants of various media and performance forms in their oblique mirroring structures. It tracks the female body in relation to space and objects and the interlocking gazes of a metropolitan mise en scène to propose a particular model of narcissism and voyeurism that is eventually ‘sublimated’ through transformative darshan.
