fourth wall meaning: definition, etymology and quotations

fourth wall

noun

Etymology A reference to the three walls of a box set, with the fourth wall being the imaginary wall separating the performers from the audience. Coined by philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot in 1758 and thus a calque of French quatrième mur.

Idiomatic The imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.

Performing arts

This is a flat, unnecessary, and strangely disturbing denial of the fourth-wall convention, that unwritten agreement between playwright and playgoer whereby you think of yourself at the theatre as a privileged, exonerated, comfortably seated eavesdropper.1916 February 20, “Second Thoughts on First Nights”, in New York Times, page X7:
There's been a convention in the theater world to think of the division between audience and spectacle as a fourth wall, a wall that the playwright tries to eliminate through the force of his drama.2005 August 31, Philip Kennicott, “Our Aura of Security, Shattered Like Glass”, in Washington Post, page C01:

Broadly The boundary between the fiction and the audience.

Even though you, the author, may be maintaining a fourth wall between your characters and your readers, he, the narrator, is not keeping that fourth wall between himself and the audience he thinks he's telling the story to.1999, Orson Scott Card, (Please provide the book title or journal name):
The fourth wall is the imaginary barrier between the stage and the audience, and the phrase is a metaphor for the dramatic frame.2003, Robert Keith Sawyer, Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation, page 107:

3 more examples

As actors, we are still looking out into the imaginary fourth wall. The difference is that in film, the fourth wall is no longer fixed;2003, Cathy Haase, Acting for Film, page 92:
... removes the fourth wall of the nineteenth-century novel and, in doing so, eliminates the border between a fictional inside and a nonfictional outside.2004, Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, page 207:
I've saved the worst for last. The crudest scheme is to drop the fourth wall and advise players as to actions that are inhibiting2005, Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, page 208:

Derived terms: fourth wall joke, break the fourth wall