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COPYRIGHT 2006 Indiana University Press
Sometime in the early 1780s, a beautiful young woman stopped by the home of Thomas Harris, theater manager at Covent Garden. She was an actress in his company, and she had recently given him some plays that she hoped he would produce. Harris, it seems, had hopes of his own:
When the consultation was ended, Mr. Harris, who was a handsome man, and had found so little difficulty among the theatrical sisterhood under his government, thought that he might be equally successful in an attack on Mrs. Inchbald; but, instead of regular approaches, he attempted to take the fort by storm, and Mrs. Inchbald found no recourse but in seizing him by the hair, which she pulled with such violence that she forced him to desist. She then rushed out of the house, and proceeded in haste, and under great agitation, to the green-room of the theater, where the company were then rehearsing. She entered the room with so wild an air, and with such evident emotion, that all present were alarmed. She hastily related what had happened as far as her impediment [a recurrent stutter] would permit her, and concluded with the following exclamation: "Oh! If he had wo-wo-worn a wig, I had been ru-ruined!" (1)
John Taylor, a close friend of Elizabeth Inchbald, includes this story in his memoirs. Though scholars have questioned its veracity, the anecdote was widely circulated, and, legend or truth, it illustrates the singular challenges that faced actresses and hopeful female playwrights. As Taylor suggests, liaisons between theater managers and their "supporting casts" were common, expected, and accepted. The anecdote also indicates the characteristics that enabled Inchbald to overcome these obstacles and become one of the most successful playwrights, novelists, and drama critics of the late-eighteenth-century: her trademark toughness and persistence, her refusal to be controlled by a male superior, and her determination not to be silenced--despite her rather unique struggles for expression.
Inchbald occupies multiple roles in this encounter with Harris. She is at once playwright, victim, and--as indicated by her ability to deliver a comic punch line with theatrical presence--the consummate actress. Inchbald makes us want to laugh at what is obviously a frightening, distinctly un-funny experience; she performs her distress as a joke, and her stutter, which highlights her disturbance, also adds to the humor. Her speech impediment, an involuntary effect caused by and representative of "evident emotion," at once complicates the clear, discrete articulation of what her feelings may be and seems positioned voluntarily to highlight and heighten feelings of merriment surrounding this event. So what was Inchbald feeling? Fright? Rage? Relief? Amusement? Confidence? Her account makes it impossible for us to latch on to any one emotion; what it does convey is a sense that multiple feelings are being expressed simultaneously.
This feature of Taylor's anecdote is characteristic of Inchbald's treatment of emotions in her fiction: she repeatedly suggests that multiple emotions may be experienced and expressed all at once. Though this formulation may not sound so innovative to us today, it represents a very different understanding of emotions and expression from the one advocated by the eighteenth-century stage. Eighteenth-century actors and actresses relied on a semantics of gesture in which a specific pose signifies a specific emotion, so that emotions could be expressed and interpreted discretely, straightforwardly; Inchbald, as a prominent actress and playwright of the eighteenth century, is commonly assumed to have accepted and implemented these same conventions in her non-dramatic prose. For example, Nora Nachumi asserts that "[Inchbald's] knowledge of a widely recognized system of theatrical gesture manifests itself in her criticism and fiction" and concludes that Inchbald "repeatedly demonstrates that bodies express emotions more authentically and more persuasively than words alone" (318). Inchbald's first novel, A Simple Story, is considered to be especially reliant on these conventions. Gary Kelly maintains that "gestures tell more than speech" (86), and Candance Ward concludes that "body language ... does speak more truly than ... words" in this novel (6).
This essay, which consists of three related sections, will challenge such readings of A Simple Story. Moving from observations about the vexed expression of emotions in A Simple Story, to an examination of telling moments in Inchbald's dramatic works, career, and criticism, and then back to an account of the novel in their light, I will argue that Inchbald's practice unsettles our understanding of emotional experience in both the eighteenth-century novel and on the eighteenth-century stage. While the novel demonstrates how all characters rely heavily on body language, it does not depict characters' growing faith in or accurate interpretation of what critic Eleanor Ty calls "the pre-verbal, semiotic rhythms--gestures, looks, half-articulated utterances--which are associated with the feminine" (91); instead, it progressively destabilizes the silent gesture for both sexes and indicates that all characters experience multiple emotions simultaneously. Inchbald draws upon her extensive theatrical experience to revise, not reposition, dramatic conventions of the eighteenth century. A Simple Story portrays static, fixed gesture negatively, as she works against the contemporary theatrical understanding of gesture and emotion in which "nature" implies "stable relationships of eternal types" (Roach, "Darwin's Passion" 49) and undermines the straightforward iconography of theatrical gesture that encouraged audiences to read poses unambiguously. Inchbald instead presents emotions as constantly compounding and intertwining, impossible to express or experience discretely.
Inchbald's novel does show the influence of her theatrical background, but not in the way critics assume. Her dramatic writing and her conduct during theatrical performances reveal that Inchbald ironically brings the complicated experience and imprecise expression of emotions to her novel from her experiences on stage. Her plays, dramatic criticism, and performances also show that this concept of emotions has special relevance and use for the woman writer: Inchbald recasts "impediments" (such as her stutter) that prevent the discrete expression and straightforward interpretation of emotion as strategies that allow her to circumvent contemporary strictures on female emotional expression. (2) I move from Inchbald's presentation of emotion in A Simple Story to accounts of Inchbald's presentation of herself--as stuttering actress, playwright, and drama critic--to demonstrate that she encourages her audience to notice how and why it is impossible to interpret straightforwardly her authorial expressions. Her dramatic work and her own performances on stage suggest that a stutter may be feigned or involuntary. She purposefully presents her various public roles as quite distinct from each other and from the woman enacting them (she critiques her plays in the third person, for example) even though the connections between her roles were publicly acknowledged. In so doing, she creates an ambiguous space for the woman writer to express potentially transgressive thoughts and feelings, while reassuring her audience that these same expressions are merely part of her act.
The anecdotes from Inchbald's theatrical career that illustrate this process clarify in turn why the experience and expression of emotion are so vexed in her novel. Her characters, consciously and unconsciously, implement adopted roles that simultaneously express and conceal their emotions: a character such as Lord Elmwood, for example, adopts a very un-fatherly role that enables him to express feelings of paternal tenderness he seeks to deny. As ostensibly fictional roles become spaces for self-expression, the novel complicates certain contemporary assumptions about performance, for both Inchbald's fiction and her self-presentation as author of this fiction reveal and manipulate the audience expectation that performed emotions must be artificial, feigned. (3) By highlighting the way characters channel their feelings through intermediate roles, Inchbald encourages her audience to dismiss the feelings they express as "put on," even as she depicts performance as that which inevitably results in emotional expression. This tension in Inchbald's novel and in her career demonstrate why the interpretation of emotions must always be problematic, even as she exposes the general characteristic of all audiences to desire and assume the contrary: the common critical tendency to read gesture in A Simple Story as a straightforward indicator of character emotion is indicative of the way we, too, love to read this novel simplistically.
DESTABLIZING THE LANGUAGE OF GESTURE IN A SIMPLE STORY
A Simple Story features daring, transgressive subject matter for the time period: it tells the story of a beautiful ward (Miss Milner) who falls in love with her Catholic priest guardian (Dorriforth, later Lord Elmwood) and the effects of their love on the next generation. As Jane Spencer puts it in her introduction to the novel, "only Inchbald's extreme delicacy of handling could have made her theme acceptable to her readership" (xv). Inchbald achieves such delicacy because of what she does not say or describe: Spencer notes that "apart from the explicit moment of Miss Milner's passionate declaration of her love for Dorriforth, Inchbald renders desire sparingly and obliquely" (xv). In her own time, Inchbald's friend Maria Edgeworth writes her of the novel, "by the force that is necessary to repress feeling, we judge of the intensity of the feeling; and you always contrive to give us by intelligible but simple signs the measure of this force" (Boaden 2: 153). The terms of Edgeworth's praise highlight two key elements of the novel: Inchbald's refusal as author to specify the exact feelings of her characters (note that Edgeworth describes as intelligible the extent of the force exerted to control emotions, not the emotions themselves), and the characters' consistent efforts to suppress or limit their feelings.
The plot of A Simple Story necessitates such emotional repression; in the first half of the narrative Miss Milner must hide her blossoming love for her guardian, not merely because confessing her love would violate the codes of female modesty, but because the object of her affections is a Roman Catholic priest. For the latter reason especially her love is unspeakable, and when she does finally admit her love, violently, passionately, to her confidant Miss Woodley, her friend interrupts her horror-struck, with the command of "Silence!" (73). Their future interactions are marked by this order. When Miss Milner asks for her friend's advice, Miss Woodley can only sit, "still pale, and still silent" (73), and when they meet again later in the day "a silence ensued between her and Miss Woodley for...
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