Abstract
This article reassesses the masquerade trope as a catalyst for the development of characterisation in the eighteenth-century novel. The mask and costume not only protect one’s social identity from scrutiny and thereby enable subversion, as Terry Castle has argued. They also screen the mental worlds of those involved in the intrigues and revels. The masking of one’s intentions engenders struggles of cognitive superiority and embodied disorientation, and thereby the masquerade contributes to textual strategies of characterisation. Spotlight analyses of the masquerade scenes in Eliza Haywood’s The Masqueraders, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Amelia, and Frances Burney’s Cecilia show how the trope gives rise to textually rich encounters between fictional minds and their experience of the fictional world. By giving an occasion for mental struggles and cognitive complexities, the masquerade works as a catalyst of characterisation—it pushes characters from type to individual, and thereby forms part of a historical shift in narrative technique.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Azim, F. (1993). The colonial rise of the novel. London: Rutledge.
Ballaster, R. (1992). Seductive forms: Women’s amatory fiction 1684–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’? Cognition, 21, 37–46.
Benedict, B. M. (1993). Curiosity: A cultural history of early modern inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bolens, G. (2008). Le style des gestes: CorporÉitÉ et kinÉsie dans le rÉcit littÉraire. Éditions BHMS: Lausanne.
Brown, L. (1993). Ends of empire: Women and ideology in early modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Burney F. (1782/2008). P. Sabor, & M. A. Doody (Eds.) Cecilia, or, memoirs of an heiress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, J. (1995). Natural masques: Gender and identity in Fielding’s plays and novels. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Castle, T. (1986). Masquerade and civilization: The carnivalesque in eighteenth-century English culture and fiction. London: Methuen.
Colombetti, G. (2010). Enaction, sense-making and emotion. In J. Steward, O. Gapenne, & E. DiPaolo (Eds.), Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science (pp. 145–164). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Craft-Fairchild, C. (1993). Masquerade and gender: Disguise and female identity in eighteenth-century fictions by women. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Damasio, A. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. London: Vintage.
Defoe, D. (1724/2008). J. Mullan (Ed.) Roxana: The fortunate mistress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fielding, H. (1749/2008). J. Bender, & S. Stern (Eds.) Tom Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fielding, H (1751/1987). D. Blewett (Ed.) Amelia. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fielding, H. (1972). An essay on the knowledge of the characters of men. In H. K. Miller (Ed.), Miscellanies (Vol. 1). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fishelov, D. (1990). Types of character, characteristics of types. In Style, 24.3, pp. 422–439.
Flesch, W. (2007). Comeuppance: Costly signalling, altruistic punishment, and other biological components of fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Flynn, C. H. (1990). The body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freeman, L. (2002). Character’s theater: Genre and identity on the eighteenth-century English stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gallagher, C. (1994). Nobody’s story: The vanishing acts of women writers in the marketplace, 1670–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Harris, P. (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.
Haywood, E. (1724). The masquerades. Or, fatal curiosity. London: ECCO. Accessed 16 April 2012.
Haywood, E. (1744–1746/2001). The female spectator. Book I. In A. Pettit (Ed.), The selected works of Eliza Haywood, Vol. 2 (pp. 17–51). London: Pickering & Chatto.
Hunter, J. P. (1975). Occasional form: Henry Fielding and the chains of circumstance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jannidis, F. (1996).’Individuum est ineffabile’ Zur Veränderung der Individualitätssemantik im 18. Jahrhundert und ihrer Auswirkung auf die Figurenkonzeption im Roman. Aufklärung, 9.2, pp. 77–110.
Jannidis, F. (2004). Figur und Person. Beitrag zur historischen Narratologie. Berlin: deGruyter.
Jannidis, F. (2011). Character. In P. Hühn et al. The living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Web. Accessed 16 April 2012.
King, K. (1998). Spying upon the conjurer: Haywood, curiosity and the novel in the 1720s. Studies in the novel (Summer), pp. 172–193.
Kramnick, J. (2011). Against literary Darwinism. Critical inquiry, 37.2, pp. 315–347.
Kukkonen, K. (forthcoming). Flouting figures: Uncooperative narration in the fiction of Eliza Haywood. Language and Literature.
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of theory of mind. Psychological Review, 94(4), 412–426.
Leverage, P., Mancing, H., & Schweikert, R. (Eds.). (2011). Theory of mind and literature. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.
Lubey, K. (2006). Eliza Haywood’s amatory aesthetic. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39(3), 309–322.
Lynch, D. (1998). The economy of character: Novels, market culture, and the business of inner meaning. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
Margolin, U. (1983). Characterization in narrative. Some theoretical prolegoma. Neophilologus, 67(1), 1–14.
McKeon, M. (2000). Prose fiction: Great Britain. In M. McKeon (Ed.), Theory of the novel: A Historical Approach (pp. 600–612). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Oatley, K., Jenkins, J. M., & Stein, N. L. (2000). “History and culture” Human emotions: A reader. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Palmer, A. (2002). Fictional minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Perrault, C. (1668/2003). H. Tronc (Ed.) Contes. Paris: Gallimard.
Prince, G. (1982). Narratology: The form and function of narrative (p. 1982). Berlin: Mouton.
Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2008). Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions and emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schofield, M. A. (1990). Masking and unmasking the female mind: Disguising romances in feminine fiction, 1713–1799. Newark, London: University of Delaware Press.
Veblen, T. (1994). The theory of the leisure class. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Vermeule, B. (2010). Machiavellian narratives. In L. Zunshine (Ed.), Introduction to cognitive cultural studies (pp. 214–229). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wahrman, D. (2004). The making of the modern self: Identity and culture in eighteenth-century England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Watt, I. (1963). The rise of the novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Whiten, A. (1999). Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. In R. A. Wilson & F. Keil (Eds.), MIT encyclopedia of cognitive sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Zahavi, A., Zahavi, A., et al. (1999). The handicap principle: A missing piece of Darwin’s puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zunshine, L. (2007). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus: Ohio University Press.
Zunshine, L. (2011). Theory of mind and fictions of embodied transparency. In P. Leverage, et al. (Eds.), Theory of mind and literature (pp. 63–91). West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.
Zwaan, R., & Taylor, L. J. (2006). Seeing, acting, understanding: Motor resonance in language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 135(1), 1–11.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This article was written while the author was Balzan Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kukkonen, K. The Minds Behind the Mask: Reading for Character in the Masquerade. Neophilologus 98, 161–176 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-013-9361-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-013-9361-5