Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist

Critical Essays

Thomas C. Crochunis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134422487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

This superb collection of new essays offers a unique insight into the work of a leading women dramatist of the Romantic era. Contributors offer:
*contextual material for those new to Baillie's work
*examinations of the relationships between her plays and the philosophical and scientific writing of the era
*discussion of Baillie's theatrical methods
*extended interpretations of individual plays.
Ending years of neglect of Baillie's crucial work, this volume is essential reading for those working on Romanticism, women's writing, or drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

1 Introduction The case of Joanna Baillie

Thomas C. Crochunis

DOI: 10.4324/9780203504451-1

What is the best way to make a case for the importance of Joanna Baillie's dramatic writing? Does such a case need to be made?

Among certain circles — certainly British Romanticists, perhaps feminist theatre historians, and most recently among theatre practitioners — Baillie has already been given serious consideration. The major publications in these fields — Studies in Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle, European Romantic Review, The Keats-Shelley Journal; Nineteenth Century Theatre, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal; and also Publications of the Modern Language Association — have published essays on Baillie. She has been featured in conference sessions and papers, and several recent collections of essays on women and theatre in her era have included essays entirely or in part about Baillie. In fact, Baillie has been a fit subject for professional publication and presentation for some time now. Beginning in the summer of 2003, performance practitioners significantly increased their engagement with Baillie's plays through public readings given as part of a series in New York City, “The First 100 Years: The Professional Female Playwright,” and through a performance of Basil staged at the 2003 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference at Fordham University.

More subtle has been a qualitative change in how people study and teach Baillie's plays. This change takes several forms that I have noticed. Baillie's plays, which began as an interesting sidelight for Romanticists, have increasingly become interesting to theatre historians, in part because her plays and their sparse production history raise important questions for feminist critics about the over reliance on unproblematic acceptance of theatrical production as the organizing principle of dramaturgical history. And, as a result of Baillie's role in raising questions about historiography, her work has become interesting in new ways in the context of women's studies more broadly. One further shift in how Baillie figures in the work of scholars and teachers is that, based on the anecdotal evidence I have collected over a few years, more people include Baillie's plays on their syllabi (perhaps spurred by Duthie's 2001 paperback edition of the Plays on the Passions), and more of those who do report pedagogical success as measured by student engagement and teacher perception that the plays helped them raise issues that fed other parts of the course. It seems that the time has come to explore the unusual case of Joanna Baillie's playwriting rather than to make a case for her importance.

And so, I will not base this introduction on a review of how the criticism that has already been published, cited frequently in the contributions to this volume, has made the case for Baillie's significance or interest. Each piece of that important past work on Baillie set its own terms, made its own kind of case, for Baillie's drama. The aim of this volume is to provide a number of different points of entry to the study of Baillie by building on a number of the directions taken in past scholarship and revisiting or pursuing them further. Collected together, these essays map a shared starting point for further exploration of Baillie through scholarship and teaching.

To examine the case of Baillie's importance now is different, of course, from studying her importance in her own time. While several essays in this volume provide valuable information on just how Baillie was regarded in the British eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we know — as she did — that her reputation then depended in part on how she performed her artistic identity in relationship to the beliefs and perceptions of her era. It is often noted that key figures in British Romanticism knew Baillie and regarded her highly, but this observation always seems to me a peculiar sort of affirmative action by Romantic ideology. While how Baillie was viewed in her own era by Scott, Byron, or Hemans can inform our contemporary historiographic inquiry, these judgments by her contemporaries, rather than representing definitive testimony to her importance, are yet another kind of information for us to consider in filling in the details of her case.

It is also wise for those of us still interested in making a case for Baillie now to be cautious about building our arguments on the aesthetic quality or cultural richness of her texts. While there are several essays in this volume that unfold the complexities of Baillie's plays, we need to pause to consider how much of our ideas of “aesthetic quality” or “cultural richness” are constituted by previous scholarly approaches that trace at least part of their epistemologies and methodologies back to elements of Romanticism or to reactions against its (multiple) ideologies. In fact, studying Baillie's plays gives us new opportunities to question our received dramaturgical standards and expectations. For example, we might find it hard to encounter Baillie's plays without first reconsidering our post-Ibsen, post high-realist assumptions. And yet Ibsen's dramaturgy was post-Romantic (in fact, some of his plays explored Romantic dramaturgical structures), while Baillie's were (perhaps) para-Romantic. How do we make sense of a writer like Baillie who was both engaged with the literature and theatre of her era and yet exploring alternatives to styles of her era that have, from an historiographic perspective, turned out to be the ones that underlie our own inherited dramatic aesthetics?

Similarly, to engage with Baillie's sources and influences is to rethink the fields of influence that matter to literary and cultural history. Although other writers who are already considered central to her era were influenced by medicine, science, and philosophy, Baillie's drama invites us to think about cross-fertilizing influences from these disciplines in somewhat different ways since her dramas make use of these disciplines differently from works in other genres — such as lyric poetry or the novel — that have constituted the British Romantic era's literary canon. Undoubtedly, the very paradigms we have at our immediate disposal for contextualizing a writer of Baillie's time are themselves influenced by legacies of the British Romantic era that live on in our scholarship and teaching in spite of continued attempts to question them. We need to bring varied methods and contexts to bear when investigating the case of Joanna Baillie at least in part because no writer of her era pursued a career-long project quite like hers.

For sheer quantity of highly crafted dramatic work produced she is unmatched in her era. Her collected plays represent a lifetime commitment to dramatic writing in pursuit of a cogently articulated aesthetic purpose. Baillie's dramas were, if not perfectly suited to the theatre institutions or audiences of their day, carefully structured and skillfully executed. In fact, she exhibited remarkable tenacity and a high degree of craft in writing for both stage and page, something often lost amidst quibbles over the stageability or unstageability of her plays. Baillie was nothing if not “a professional” in her approach to dramatic writing, even if her plays weren't professionally produced with any regularity. What might her presence as a cultural figure — a prolific woman dramatist, committed to writing for the stage and yet resiliently publishing a lifetime's worth of drama while enduring fifty years of sparse production — have meant to other women writers and theatre artists of her era?

We should test the contours of Baillie's dramatic career against our own scholarly and pedagogical paradigms by asking what challenges face us as we try to make a space for her within our existing curricula and histories of the Romantic era. Baillie is ill suited to become one of many other small figures in the newly open canon — the scale of her written production and sustained broad significance as a public figure hardly suit “minor writer status.” However, she would also be an odd candidate for a newly expanded major figures canon — she was a dramatist, an unmarried woman, a writer who made little compromise of her authorial purposes for the public and yet showed little disdain for those who received her work with hostility or indifference. So, although Baillie would be miscast as one of a chorus of minor writers of the period, she arrives too late — historiographically speaking — and is too odd in her professional orientations and style to become a major figure without scholars of the era undertaking some substantial rethinking of the cultural field. Furthermore, while Baillie has primarily received attention from scholars of British Romanticism, it would seem paltry to offer her no more than a place in some new version of this sub-discipline's canon, particularly when her potential significance within women's literary history or within dramaturgical history has yet to be sufficiently explored for reasons having to do with the paradigms and predilections that currently shape feminist literary history and dramaturgical history. Work on Baillie needs a bigger space than British Romanticism studies can provide, in part because of the expansiveness of Baillie's work and the wide influences she drew upon. Her peculiar situation in relation to our own era perhaps sheds light on her predicament in her own.

As this volume shows, Baillie's writing has strong connections to many significant discourses of her era. With her family background in medicine and physiological psychology, she writes dramas that merge the rhetorics of case study, clinical observation, and instruction. Widely read in eighteenth-century political and aesthetic philosophy, Baillie employs the figure of the stage — and hopes to employ the actual institution of the theatre — to enact characters, actions, and scenes that might engage the public and affect civic emotions and thought. Baillie's connection to these varied discourses offers us opportunities as scholars and teachers of British literature, theatre, and culture to embed our work with British Romantic texts, performance history, and public culture within a broader web-work of connections. In the essays in this volume, a series of Baillie scholars choose avenues of inquiry with dual purposes — they explore particular aspects of Joanna Baillie's career and fill in pieces of a complex jigsaw of contexts to inform further study of her works. These experiments in ways of knowing Joanna Baillie's drama provide both the evidence and the argument for Baillie's importance to our work.

In the first three chapters in the volume, contributors explore Baillie's life, influences, and contemporary reception. Judith Bailey Slagle, editor of Baillie's letters, gives a short biography of Baillie and an overview of the parts of the Baillie life story that can be found in existing correspondence and unpublished manuscripts. In addition, in her chapter “Evolution of a writer: Joanna Baillie's life in letters” Slagle traces some of the background to Baillie's literary career and touches upon the highlights of her literary relations. Bruce Graver takes Baillie's acquaintance and correspondence with an American diarist and professor as his subject in “Joanna Baillie and George Ticknor.” By tracing their knowledge of each other from a first meeting in July of 1835 to Baillie's sending a copy of her 1851 plays that arrived after her death, Graver reveals aspects of Baillie's reputation in America, showing how her plays were understood by many to be a touchstone of the era's literary dramaturgy. In his chapter, “Joanna Baillie, Matthew Baillie, and the pathology of the passions,” Frederick Burwick parallels Joanna Baillie's plays with two of her brother Matthew's works, the supplements to his book Morbid Anatomy and his Gulstonian Lectures. Burwick demonstrates that both Baillies give attention to the internal sources of the disorders of the mind, and through his comparison Burwick reveals that Baillie's plays were indeed based on a different set of assumptions than those of classical tragedy, a point that Baillie herself made in critical defenses of her plays during her career. By elaborating on different aspects of Baillie's life context, these chapters reposition Baillie's plays within her wide range of intellectual and social relationships.

The four chapters that follow apply a series of key contexts to Baillie's plays, showing how her dramaturgy and themes draw upon a number of influences and discourses of significance to her era. In “Unromantic Caledon: representing Scotland in The Family Legend, Metrical Legends, and Witchcraft,” Dorothy McMillan considers diverse facets of Baillie's “Scottishness” — from her accent to the possible significance of Baillie's Scottish plays — for our understanding of her personal and political values. Through close attention to Baillie's Scottish themes and their context, McMillan gives a sense of Baillie's responses to her British sociopolitical context, an important opening to further consideration of Baillie as a woman of her time. Victoria Myers extends the volume's discussion of Baillie's relationship to eighteenth-century writers on sympathy and politics such as Adam Smith and David Hume, showing that Baillie's use of the term “sympathetic curiosity” allows her to use representations of the passions for potent dramaturgical effects. In “Joanna Baillie's theatre of cruelty,” Myers provides us with a way to see Baillie's dramaturgy of the passions within the context of British discussions of political philosophy, discussions that Baillie's plays rewrite at a particularly complicated political moment in British culture. In his chapter “Joanna Baillie and the restaging of history and gender,” Greg Kucich connects Baillie's uses of history to the historiography of key women writers of the era — such as Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Catherine Macaulay — and to stagecraft, acting manuals, and the performances of Emma Hamilton. Kucich explains the sources and significance of the stagecraft of Baillie's complex tableaux that arrest the progress of historical narrative and expose the social dynamics of certain key moments in her plays. Drawing from a very different — but equally important — set of intellectual contexts, in “A neural theatre: Joanna Baillie's ‘Plays on the Passions’,” Alan Richardson both differentiates Baillie's dramatic writing from other examples of Romantic “mental theatre” and shows how her plays can enrich our understanding of Romanticism's relationship with its era's theories of the mind. Richardson focuses on the embodied nature of passion in Baillie's Count Basil, revealing how her dramaturgy makes bodily enactment of feeling both its means and its subject. These chapters provide examples of how Baillie's plays engage political, intellectual, and social concerns, showing how her works can provide a viable countertext to readings in the major historical issues of her time.

The next four chapters offer ways of interpreting the structures, strategies, and purposes of Baillie's plays. Jeffrey N. Cox explores the important role theatrical spectacle plays in Baillie's drama in his chapter “Staging Baillie.” Challenging the view that Baillie wrote for either the closet or an alternative more intimate theatre than the public theatres of her era, Cox explains that Baillie's use of spectacular scenes supports other elements of her dramaturgy — her emphasis on character rather than plot, for example — while also making it difficult for Baillie's plays to achieve their stated moral purposes. Carefully examining the production strategies used to mount De Monfort and The Family Legend, Cox explores the complex relationship between stage spectacle and authorial intent in the Romantic era. In my chapter, “Joanna Baillie's ambivalent dramaturgy,” I consider the mixture of desires at the heart of Baillie's drama for both page and stage. Questioning the historiographic need to resolve Baillie's ambivalence, I consider parallels between Baillie's mixed dramaturgy and the psychological structures of sexual ambivalence, and demonstrate how her dramaturgical strategies influenced the public's experience of her plays and the passions they dramatize. By placing Baillie's The Tryal within the context of women's private theatricals, Catherine B. Burroughs' “‘A reasonable woman's desire’: the private theatrical and Joanna Baillie's The Tryal” (reprinted with kind permission from Texas Studies in Literature and Language) invites us to read Baillie's play as an exploration of theatricality's potential for rewriting gender relations. Burroughs' interpretation of Baillie's first published comedy sheds light on women's reasons for participating in private theatricals and on domestic politics. In her chapter “Baillie's Orra: shrinking in fear,” Julie A. Carlson establishes Baillie's credentials as a “hauntologist,” showing that Baillie directly addresses societal ghosts that others would rather encounter second hand — in Orra patriarchy's pressure on women. Placing Baillie in the context of recent critical theory on the figure of the ghost in histories of oppression, Carlson offers a new way of parsing Baillie's trafficking with ghosts.

This collection concludes with two contributions that help scholars and teachers pursue further work on Baillie. Marjean D. Purinton, in “Pedagogy and passions: teaching Joanna Baillie's dramas,” looks at how we might teach Baillie, examining both what resources exist and how we might link Baillie to current themes in our curricula. Ken A. Bugajski's contribution to the volume, “Joanna Baillie: an annotated bibliography,” gathers together in one resource a wide range of citations that facilitate further study of Baillie. Bugajski's bibliography includes recent criticism, information about editions and reviews of Baillie's published works, and reviews of theatrical productions of her plays in her lifetime. Together, the collection's contributions take a wide range of theoretical and pedagogical approaches to Baillie, showing the multiple contexts and strategies that can be applied to her plays.

Exploring the case of Joanna Baillie can be both beneficial and challenging for contemporary scholar-teachers in British Romantic, theatre history, and women's history studies. Her plays provide us with both teachable content and examples of the complexity of one writer's engagement with the cultural venues of her era. Studying Baillie gives us every opportunity to rethink the paradigms that shape how we construct historiographically the meaning of literary publishing and theatre. To make space for Baillie in our thinking, we must shuttle between examining her life, works, and influences, and rethinking our own historiographic practices and beliefs. In effect, we learn about Baillie's potential importance to our fields of study by allowing ourselves to question our own assumptions, pedagogies, and historiographic methods — as we frequently must when considering her work.

For example, the odd relationship between Baillie's dramatic strategies and her “politics” (a subject both Jeffrey Cox and Victoria Myers illuminate in this volume) reminds us how “feminism,” as an orientation toward subjects of inquiry explored and kinds of influence sought, cuts across a wide spectrum of political positions on the public issues of Baillie's day. Greg Kucich (in this volume) invites us to ask whether, when it comes to gendered spheres of knowledge and action, Baillie's dramatic method is representational or guided by a theory of influence that hopes to change audience knowledge and action. For Baillie's era, however, her difference in method from comparable dramatists can rightly be termed “feminist” without having to claim that her writing aimed to serve a historically recognizable feminist politics in the public sphere. Through provocatively juxtaposing its particular chapters on Baillie, this volume seeks to raise these kinds of broader complications for our scholarship and teaching.

One cannot remain content with existing British dramaturgical histories or women's literary histories once one considers how Baillie's writing turns inside out our assumptions about what constitutes a good or stageable play or what motivated professional women writers. As scholars and thinkers, we need Joanna Baillie's drama before us as a challenge to our practices and beliefs. The case of Joanna Baillie lures us into putting at risk all that our disciplines and canons rely on in order to understand her work. This volume invites its readers to begin to take that irresistible risk.

2 Evolution of a writer Joanna Baillie's life in letters

Judith Bailey Slagle

DOI: 10.4324/9780203504451-2

The following biographical work on Joan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction The case of Joanna Baillie
• 2 Evolution of a writer Joanna Baillie's life in letters
• 3 Joanna Baillie and George Ticknor
• 4 Joanna Baillie, Matthew Baillie, and the pathology of the passions
• 5 Unromantic Caledon Representing Scotland in The Family Legend, Metrical Legends, and Witchcraft
• 6 Joanna Baillie's theatre of cruelty
• 7 Joanna Baillie and the re-staging of history and gender
• 8 A neural theatre Joanna Baillie's “Plays on the Passions”
• 9 Staging Baillie
• 10 Joanna Baillie's ambivalent dramaturgy
• 11 “A reasonable woman's desire” The private theatrical and Joanna Baillie's The Tryal
• 12 Baillie's Orra Shrinking in fear
• 13 Pedagogy and passions Teaching Joanna Baillie's dramas
• 14 Joanna Baillie An annotated bibliography
• reference
• Index