'Living Pictures': Women and Tableaux Vivants in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Culture

In 1839, an American magazine called the Knickerbocker published a short story, "Tableaux Vivantes 'Down East,'" about a spinster in rural New England who plans a party featuring a "special new amusement" which one of the guests attempts to describe: "'It was something,' he said, 'like a theatre.... But still [End Page 23] that wasn't the name; it sounded more like 'table'; perhaps they all mounted a table; at any rate, it was very intellectual, and all the rage in the city.'" 3