Joanna Baillie's reflections on the passions: the "Introductory Discourse" and the properties of authorship.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-04

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IN 1800, SARAH SIDDONS PLAYED THE FEMALE LEAD, LADY JANE, IN JOANNA Baillie's new play, DeMonfort. This turn of events was no doubt gratifying to Baillie not only because of her friendship with Siddons, but because Siddons was the foremost actress of the turn-of-the-century English stage, the source of a veritable "Siddonsmania." Siddons was also the favorite of Edmund Burke, whose tearful spectatorship inspired him to write his infamously excessive idealization of Marie Antoinette in Reflections on the Revolution in France. (1) Yet, as Julie Carlson has argued, the extraordinary impact of Siddons' power, particularly her power over males in the audience, had at best equivocal effects on advancing the power of women more generally. (2) As the "incomparable" Siddons, she acted as an exception to common femininity rather than as an example for emulation.

And by many accounts, her performance of Lady Jane in De Monfort was a failure. As James Boaden, one of Siddons' biographers, asserts in an often-quoted review,

Mrs. Siddons did her utmost with the Countess Jane. But the basis of the tragedy was the passion of hatred, and the incidents were all gloomy, and dark, and deadly. On the stage, I believe, no spectator wished it a longer life, and it is to the last degree mortifying to have to exhibit so many proofs, that the talent of dramatic writing in its noblest branch was in fact dead among us. (3)

Historians of the theater have done much to complicate Boaden's verdict, though much of this work has acknowledged that Baillie's career, so promising in its heyday, was in the long term a historical failure. And this same work has offered explanations of this failure in terms of the erasure of women from the history of drama generally. I do not contest this approach, given Baillie's lapse into obscurity after the 1820s; I suspect that her disappearance until recently is indeed intertwined with what Anne K. Mellor calls Baillie's use of the theater "to restage and revise the social construction of gender"--an admittedly ambitious enterprise. (4) However, my purpose in this essay is to supplement the context of theater history through which much of the Baillie recovery has emerged. The theater is indeed a distinct problem in terms of authorship; Paulina Kewes, for example, describes in detail the particular barriers to originality posed by the material conditions of theatrical production in the latter half of the eighteenth century. (5) But I want to maintain a general focus on literary production in order to discuss relations between Baillie's position as a woman author and her primary purpose as an artist: representing the passions. I claim that Baillie not only uses the theater, but also uses her own powerful theoretical text, the "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays (1798), to attempt to construct authorship in a way that circumvents barriers--essentially, barriers of passion--that pose particular problems for women's authorship generally at the turn of the nineteenth century. These barriers are strongly suggested by the limits to female activity Carlson describes in the case of Siddons' career. Female power is a threat, contained by the language of exceptionalism-incomparability--which acts to block the exemplarity of women. Powerful women, that is to say, cannot be models, cannot circulate as objects of emulation beyond the surfaces of fashion. Such strictures certainly act as impediments to female authorship insofar as the "author," in the broad sense described by Foucault, constitutes a power over the circulation of texts, a reproductive power. The construction "female author" is a point of departure for an understanding of gender oppression insofar as the two terms of the phrase operate as an inhibition to reproduction--to emulation--by canceling out the woman writer as a productive example to either men or to women.

Siddons' devoted fan Edmund Burke theorized related gender barriers at length (although hardly as such) in his precocious aesthetic treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). For Burke, the attractive power of femininity, beauty, is utterly distinct from and not to be confused with the masculine power of power itself, the sublime. Baillie contests Burke's aesthetics--as I will show below-not because of its analysis of beauty per se but because of its equation of beauty with femininity, which functions as a proscription of female imitability, relegating women's influence to a form of power one would be loathe to propagate. Not only does the proscription on sublime women foreclose the productive energies of certain female characters, condenming them to the "unsexing" of Lady Macbeth (Siddons' most famous role), this proscription also places strictures on the influence of female authors with overly ambitious aspirations. Furthermore, the historical moment in which Baillie's "Discourse" put forth her authorial design was a particularly dynamic period in the notion of authorship. The turn of the century followed upon the previous fifty years' legal wrangle over authorship that climaxed in the landmark decision on legal copyright in Donaldson v. Becket in 1774, whereas Baillie's initial surge of notoriety preceded, for the most part, the influence of the high-Romantic revision of authorship that would mark the years to come. Baillie's views, I argue, constitute a liberal feminist plan for the most strategic way to define authorship for women at the turn of the century. Unfortunately, that strategy, so at odds with more modern-and Romantic--notions of authorship, is partly responsible for Baillie's historical interment. In order to support this claim, I explore, first, the relationship of Baillie's conception of the passions to Edmund Burke's gendered conception in terms of their respective implications for the circulation of women. Second, I explore Baillie's own notion of authorship as described in the "Introductory Discourse." Finally, I examine the relationship between these terms of authorship and the discourse of authorship emerging from the eighteenth-century debate on literary property.

I

Joanna Baillie has merited an explosion of critical attention in the last decade. (6) After all, she was the foremost British dramatist of the opening decades of the nineteenth century, highly acclaimed by both Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Much of the renewed interest in Baillie has consisted of work in cultural history, explicitly or implicitly aimed at explaining what changes might account for her disappearance, a fate she shares with so many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women artists. Yet perhaps owing to the very wealth of cultural detail recounted by contemporary literary historians, her connection to some of the great-looming and still-much-discussed figures and controversies of her day has yet to receive adequate attention. Actually, Baillie's dramatic theory, as outlined in the "Introductory Discourse" to the first volume of A Series of Plays on the Passions, is a work of monumental interest that needs no defense. It presents a provocative theory of the operation of the passions and the role of drama in the comprehension of emotion. At stake in Baillie's account of the passions is the educability of the individual as producer and receiver of social information, a crucial question not only in the history of gender oppression but also in the history of negotiating the respective demands of the society and the author in their claims to the fruits of artistic production.

Here I'll briefly consider Baillie's most developed statement of her artistic intentions in relation to what is perhaps the most well-known British work in eighteenth-century aesthetics, Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, particularly as those notions, though significantly revised, acquired express political force in the wake of his notorious Reflections on the Revolution in France. The primafacie grounds of this discussion are clear: both Baillie and Burke focus their work on the passions; both regard aesthetic experience as universal to humanity; and, Burke's idealization of Marie Antoinette notwithstanding, both evince a striking distrust of the beautiful--of refinement, luxury, and superficiality that become associated with aristocratic and foreign influence] But these common territories make differences all the more illuminating. Baillie contends with Burke on two major points: on the gendering of the two chief objects of passionate response, the beautiful and the sublime, and on the related issue of the passions' containment and control, that is to say, their reproduction. The implications of Baillie's divergences from Burke are emphatically political: Baillie's aesthetics attempts to lay foundations for a democratic art where artists, audience, and actors need not be confined to any particular ascribed social role--they may be women, aristocrats, or commoners. This freedom from ascription arises from Baillie's psychological theory, her notion of the subject as both an empirical and a legal subject, a self-possessed entity that successfully works and reflects upon itself. Burke shares many of these notions; his psychology, too, is universalizing and empiricist. But Baillie strongly contrasts Burke in that...

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