Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction

by Terry Castle

Public masquerades were a popular and controversial form of urban entertainment in England for most of the eighteenth century. They were held regularly in London and attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from all ranks of society who delighted in disguising themselves in fanciful costumes and masks and moving through crowds of strangers. The authors shows how the masquerade played a subversive role in the eighteenth-century imagination, and that it was persistently associated with the crossing of class and sexual boundaries, sexual freedom, the overthrow of decorum, and urban corruption. Authorities clearly saw it as a profound challenge to social order and persistently sought to suppress it. The book is in two parts. In the first, the author recreates the historical phenomenon of the English the makeup of the crowds, the symbolic language of costume, and the various codes of verbal exchange, gesture, and sexual behavior. The second part analyzes contemporary literary representations of the masquerade, using novels by Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Inchbald to show how the masquerade in fiction reflected the disruptive power it had in contemporary life. It also served as an indispensable plot-catalyst, generating the complications out of which the essential drama of the fiction emerged. An epilogue discusses the use of the masquerade as a literary device after the eighteenth century. The book contains some 40 illustrations.

Genres: History, Academic, Criticism

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Terry Castle was once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today." She is the author of seven books of criticism, including The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993) and Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women and Sex (2002). Her antholoy, The Literature of Lesbianism, won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award in 2003. She lives in San Franciso and is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though published in the mid-1980s, this study of the masquerade in ‘eighteenth-century English culture and literature’ remains the standard work and is still cited all over the place. I found it very worthwhile, although it is a bit of a strange mixture of very perceptive and very frustrating.

Masquerades were common public entertainments throughout the 1700s: big grown-up costume parties where everyone wore masks, drank too much, and flirted with other people's partners. They were notorious sites of misbehaviour, animadverted against by many a contemporary preacher, and used by novelists of the time as a handy shortcut to transgression and the usual mix-ups of identity.

Castle's book about them has three strands – a historical exploration of the phenomenon (which is extremely useful because no one else has bothered to do it); a critical-theoretical interpretation of what they meant (which is painful, but mercifully short); and a detailed study of four key novels which used masquerades as a theme. This last bit makes up the bulk of the book, and on the whole is very rewarding.

Two of Castle's case studies – Burney's Cecilia and Inchbald's A Simple Story – I read quite recently, so it was a pleasure to go through them again with such an interesting critic. She sees these novels in wonderfully political terms; for her, Cecilia is ‘an antilibertarian fable’ and Burney a ‘female apologist for the ancien régime’, while A Simple Story is by contrast ‘restlessly antiauthoritarian’. I found her analysis totally convincing, and she makes a great case for the importance of these books' masquerade scenes. Of the other two works she looks at, I haven't yet read Fielding's Amelia and I have no intention of reading Richardson's much-maligned sequel Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, but I still found her discussion of them interesting.

Sometimes, to be sure, you do have to wrestle needlessly with her language. Whenever a book starts making approving references to Foucault and other theorists, one waits with weary resignation to be told about how things have been ‘reified’, ‘problematised’ or ‘radically disaggregated’, and sure enough, you don't have to wait long here: Castle tends to see masquerades as ‘discourses’, ‘topoi’, or even as a ‘tropology’. Compounding such obfuscation is the fact that she's also very keen to show off her mastery of foreign jargon. Masquerade ‘offered a Spielraum’, ‘functioned as a communal sotie’, and ‘resolved into a mundus inversus’. It was a ‘bouleversement’, a ‘discordia concors’, an ‘imaginative donnée’, a ‘collective ilinx’. ‘The occasion was a jeu perhaps, but always a jeu sérieux.’ What utter, utter bullshit this is.

It's the kind of bullshit that has remained mystifyingly popular in American academia; I haven't read any of Castle's later stuff so I don't know if she always writes like this, or was just succumbing to its 80s trendiness. But if you are prepared to peel away this verbal packaging, the ideas and the research underneath are fresh and exciting.

[Wendelle]

was the masquerade in 18th-century England a conservative event, permitting brief cathartic exhalations of bacchanalia for a frigidly structured society, or a radical event, encouraging licentiousness and a communion among the social classes that had repercussions beyond the timeline of the masquerade? very interesting book

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brilliant in some areas, tone-deaf to the religious context of the 18c in others, this is nevertheless illuminating for its insights into identity and the carnivalesque. I must have first read this 2ish years ago for an essay on inchbald, but have revisited it for my phd on burney (and inchbald!).