Empty Houses: Thackeray's Theater of Interiority

in Victorian studies has addressed the struggles and uncertainties attendant on the novel's quest for cultural hegemony. I'm thinking in particular of books like Emily Allen's Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and J. Jeffrey Franklin's Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. Despite the differing emphases and arguments of these works, they share an acute awareness of the theater's central role in nineteenth-century English culture. Allen and Franklin both argue that the novel consolidated its cultural centrality by means of a strenuous competition with its theatrical other. Allen demonstrates, for example, that novelists conjured the image of theater to create distinctions between novels: the figure of theater drew off energies of embodiment, femininity, and mass entertainment that the serious novel needed to render abject in order to establish itself as a private, disembodied, respectable artistic object. Franklin's account similarly emphasizes a model of generic competition, whereby novelists like William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot discipline theatrical characters in order to supplant what Franklin calls "the subject of performance" with "the subject of reading" (126). Allen and Franklin are both drawing on and contributing to the important work of historians who have traced the transformations in dramatic