Rebecca on "Embodiment"

            The transitive verb “embody” originated in the mid sixteenth century, with rather ghostly connotations. Per the OED’s earlier definitions: “To put into a body; to invest or clothe (a spirit) with a body,” or “To impart a material, corporeal, or sensual character to.” To embody is never a beginning, or an act of creation, but the joining of some physical or corporeal form to something – or, as in the invocation of spirits, someone – already there. That is, it is not a birth, but perhaps a kind of reincarnation, a granting of new form. Daniel Defoe evokes the act, as cited by the OED, in his “Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions”: “Whether are there any Spirits inhabiting the visible World, which have never yet been embodied” (sic). Embodiment gives us access to what, and especially to who, was once invisible.

It is not until the mid eighteenth century that “embody” takes on a more abstract form. The OED’s third definition states: “To give a concrete form to (what is abstract or ideal); to express (principles, thoughts, intentions) in an institution, work of art, action, definite form of words, etc,” of which the first example cites Samuel Johnson in 1750 describing poetry as “that force… which embodies sentiment.” As in Johnson’s suggestion, embodiment is caught up not only in the giving form to something wanting, but in the very act, and process of artistic representation (I will return to this shortly). Following this more figurative turn, the noun “embodiment” emerges in the nineteenth century, as in the OED’s earliest example, from Carlyle in 1828: “The most striking embodyment of a highly remarkable belief” (sic). “Embodiment” the noun refers either to: “The corporeal ‘vesture’ or ‘habitation’ of (a soul),” or “That in which (a principle, an abstract idea, etc.) is embodied, actualized, or concretely expressed.” The OED suggestively lists these seemingly very different meanings under the same numbered definition, and indeed, “embodiment” seems caught up in the intersections of ghostliness and representation. The embodiment of a spirit thus remains perhaps surprisingly close to the embodiment of an idea.

The process of adapting a text to a screen or a stage is intimately and necessarily engaged in the relationship of representation to physical bodies. As Marvin Carlson points out in the opening of his chapter “The Haunted Body” in The Haunted Stage: “text does not in fact become theater until it is embodied by an actor and presented to an audience” (52). Whereas the printed text of a play or a novel finds expression in ink and pages, the crucial medium of the theater is the living human body. Performance, moreover, involves three distinct sets of bodies: it is created by the bodies of writers, through the bodies of actors, and for the bodies of the audience. And as Carlson demonstrates, the bodies onstage inevitably come with various sources of their own baggage, from the reputation and previous roles of the actor in question, to the “ghosts” of previous performances of the same role, as any actor playing Hamlet is haunted by the ghosts of countless former Danish princes. A role we see performed in the theater is shaped by both the artistic skill and interpretation of the actor, and by the independent life that comes with the body onstage (however skillfully that actor may hide it). In the act of embodiment, a character from a text is fundamentally and irrevocably transformed. For while interpretations and understandings of a role can shift from one representation to another, once a literary character has been complicated by living bodies, we can never quite return to an untainted original; that is, we can no longer imagine a purely textual Hamlet.

I am reminded of a conversation I had in an undergraduate Dickens seminar about the BBC adaptation of Bleak House. After class one day, a number of students spoke positively about the production, praising the artistic decisions of its writers and directors, as well as the performances of its actors. And yet, when we asked my professor what she thought of the series, she told us she had no desire to see it. We were perplexed, and after a moment’s pause, moved to reassure her that it was actually quite good, having concluded that she might doubt the BBC’s ability to do justice to the original, or something of the sort. This did not turn out to be, however, a matter of quality. My professor explained that, as a rule, she didn’t watch film or television adaptations of the novels she loved because she wanted to preserve her ideas of the characters. Thus, while the lead actress in the BBC Bleak House might have indeed done a perfectly good job, she was not her Esther Summerson. She was resolved not to contaminate the Esther she imagined with someone – or somebody – else’s.

In the process of adapting a text to other mediums, embodiment is the attempt to bridge the gap between imagination and representation. It is the link between the readerly task of imagining how a literary character might look, speak, and act off the page, and the theatrical task of marrying one’s idea of Hamlet to an independent, preexisting body. In this way, embodiment gives rise to the uniquely personal and subjective encounter that takes place when the Esther Summerson of the imagination meets the Esther Summerson of the BBC. Such encounters are fraught not only with the baggage of characters and actors, but also with our own.

Sample Abstracts

and below are some sample abstracts (mine) 

This first abstract was submitted for a conference titled "What Signifies a Theatre?"  and the premise of the cfp (which I couldn't find, but wanted to summarize for you so you can see how I am trying to incorporate cfp language into my abstract) was to think about private theatricals and alternate theatrical experiences in the long eighteenth century (the conference title is taken from a Mansfield Park quotation re: private theatricals).

I'm trying below to give the organizers a sense of my topic and why it would be interesting to them; clearly, I hadn't at that point written the paper, but I'm trying to sketch out my plan of action.

"Sarah Siddons Offstage"

Sarah Siddons was best known in the eighteenth century for her commanding theatrical performances, yet she remained in the public eye for some time after her retirement from the stage.  Though she officially left the theater in 1812, with a performance of Lady Macbeth, she continued to appear onstage sporadically in command and benefit performances until 1819.  Starting in 1813, she also entertained audiences with public readings from Shakespeare at the Argyll Rooms, a privately owned venue on Little Argyll Street. 

This paper will focus on these under-analyzed staged readings.  Praise for Siddons in this context—at a time when she was starting to receive criticism for her acting onstage—contains fascinating observations about theatrical spaces, acting, and Siddons at the end of her career.  Take, for example, Joanna Baillie’s assertion that what Siddons does in this venue is “acting…rather than reading” and that she would rather see such a performance “once than go to three plays in a large Theatre where [Siddons] acted.”   Why did audiences come to prefer seeing Siddons in these public rooms? How do the unique requirements of the staged reading—that Siddons speak all the parts, that she stand much closer to her audience and under different lighting, that she abandon specific costume changes and rely merely on vocal intonation to convey character—shift the audience experience of theater?  In asking such questions, this paper will examine ideas about performance, characterization, and audience engagement surrounding early nineteenth-century drama.

And then this was an abstract I sent out in grad school; I am including the cover email I sent, too.  (Today, I'd probably make that email even a touch shorter.)  The MLA call has asked for abstracts btw. 250-500 words, so this one is a bit longer.  For our class abstracts,

I'm asking you to work within 250 words.

Dear Professor X,

Below you will find my abstract for the MLA panel on “New Directions in Drama, 1660-1740.”

As an advanced graduate student in English at Yale University, I am working with Professors Jill Campbell and Joseph Roach on a dissertation titled “Unspeakable Passions: Female Self-Expression in Eighteenth-Century Narrative and Performance.”  My work examines the way eighteenth-century female authors (specifically, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth) present performance as enabling female expression.   The authors in question all worked as both novelists and playwrights; therefore, I examine how they treat and understand eighteenth-century theatrical performance and stage mechanics, how they describe and implement theatrical performance in their novels, and how they stage examples of less literal, societal performance in both genres.

I appreciate your time and consideration, and I would be happy to provide any additional information if so desired.

            Best,

            Emily Hodgson Anderson

                        (e.anderson@yale.edu)

 Emily Hodgson Anderson

(e.anderson@yale.edu)

“A Dangerous Woman-Poet Wrote the Play”:

The Implications of Eliza Haywood’s Theatrical Career

While Eliza Haywood has been the subject of recent critical attention, most of it has been directed at either her early amorous fiction or later didactic novels.  Yet Haywood’s career as a novelist developed from within another, theatrical career; she acted intermittently from 1715 until 1737, wrote three plays and collaborated with William Hatchett on a fourth. Haywood’s extensive involvement in the theatrical community during the early part of the eighteenth century suggests that, had it not been for the Licensing Act of 1737, she would have continued to write for the stage. And an examination of Haywood’s dramatic work reveals the many ways in which her non-dramatic fiction is informed by her career as an actress and a playwright: in this paper, I provide a specific example of my methodology. I examine the ways in which  her 1723 comedy A Wife to be Lett stages problems of female expression and shows heroines solving these problems by engaging in various forms of premeditated performance.  I conclude by showing how the conflict and means of resolution presented in her early play reappear in her later novels.

In A Wife to be Lett, the mercenary and probably impotent Mr. Graspall agrees to let rakish Sir Harry Beaumont sleep with his wife for the bargain price of 2000 pounds; Mrs. Graspall, bound by Covert-Baron, can seemingly do or say little to affect his decision. Yet in a meta-theatrical moment at the end of the play, Mrs. Graspall stages a scene that ultimately enables her to reveal Mr. Graspall’s plan and subjects her husband to the criticism of his dinner guests.  Analysis of this scene reveals how Mrs. Graspall acts as both playwright and performer to articulate her objections and vindicate herself. I then discuss how Mrs. Graspall’s strategy of premeditated performance is repeated and applied by heroines such as Haywood’s rambunctious Fantomina, her much later Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and even, to a certain degree, by Haywood herself (who experienced an unfortunate marriage, lived apart from her husband, and who both created and performed the part of Mrs. Graspall not long after her separation supposedly occurred). 

This paper contributes to the conversation surrounding Haywood; any questions of performance in her non-dramatic texts (and there are many) need to be considered in light of her experience with eighteenth-century theater, as established by her work as playwright and her own performances onstage.  More broadly and more importantly, this paper examines an interplay between genres that has been overlooked for much too long. Haywood is only one of many eighteenth-century authors who worked as both a novelist and a playwright, yet until now most eighteenth-century criticism has taken an either / or approach, examining either the plays, or the novels of the author in question.  This paper represents a specific example of how and why a study of eighteenth-century drama must be included in any discussion of the eighteenth-century novel.   

Bibliography suggestion

Here is the Janet Adelman reference I mentioned yesterday:

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5630239.html

Amy's Keyword: LIVENESS

Keyword Presentation: Liveness

Try to recall a performance for someone who wasn’t there to see it live, and what you present is a shallow duplicate (or surrogate)—a hallow, flattened representation of not the performance exactly, but how the performance made you feel.  According to the Reason article, liveness is rendered meaningful by the process of putting that experience into language. Sure you might mention a few plot points or retell a joke, but what you’re really saying is, “I felt moved. I felt uncomfortable. For a second, I thought of death and the passage of time and I knew—in an uncanny way—the people around me felt it too. According to Sartre, each member of the audience asks himself what he thinks of the play at the same time asking what his neighbor is thinking.

Essentially, we ask each other, “what is it we just saw?”

Central to liveness is the centrality of shared memory—to see a comedian together is to share an inside joke—a private event in which intimacy is created. The feeling cannot be remanufactured through its mere explanation if one wasn’t there to begin with, much like love.

Also crucial to liveness is the potential for performance to go horribly wrong. To be present for a live performance of Saturday Night Live, let’s say, is to welcome the opportunity for an actor to forget their lines or blunder a joke in a way which seems impossible to recover from. For the audience member, a mistake like that would feel historical in its significance. What that audience member would retell her family or friends is not, ultimately, the wording of the joke that went wrong, but the terror she felt watching the blunder unfold. In a performance like SNL, the live studio audience is immediately implicated in the show’s success or failure. The performers on stage vie for that live audience’s laughter, the television audience at home is now only a distant, unformed idea—a memory from the last time an episode aired.

It is for this reason that watching improvisation is so often terrifying. The joy is watching performers save themselves—and each other—from embarrassment and ruin on stage, and it is for this reason that so much of the laughter has the pressure of relief behind it, as though you’ve shaken a soda can and waited for the contents to explode. It is sometimes with a shred of delight we watch a live performance crash and burn, another kind of relief—thank God it wasn’t us up there. As a live audience, we are the ultimate rubberneckers, we know we shouldn’t watch the crash from the side of the road, but after all, we drove cars or took Ubers to get here, perhaps we paid money to sit in these seat, and the seats are stiff and uncomfortable, how could we possibly look away? To see the failure live is to commit it to memory, a knock-on-wood gesture, now that we’ve seen it and we’ve felt grateful that it wasn’t us, we’ve made the silent prayer it never will be.

According to Phelan, performance becomes itself through disappearance. We don’t know the value of having been present until we are no longer present in that space—until our present-ness has become our past—until our moments spent among others in an audience have become the stuff of memory, already inaccurate, blurred by every other performance we’ve ever seen, and every time we’ve ever performed, and essentially, every moment we’ve ever lived before and since then.