Staging the Invisible Reclaiming the Silenced Woman in Joanna Baillie’s The Bride

Abstract

Compared to Shakespeare by Walter Scott, and strongly admired by Lord Byron as one of the few women who would write tragedy, Joanna Baillie was also an acute theatre critic. In fact, she developed in the “Introduction” to her grand dramatic scheme, Plays on the Passions (1798-1812), an analysis of the theatre of her time, together with her notion of “sympathetic curiosity” (Baillie 1851, 2) and psychological exploration. Her drama becomes inscribed thus in the long (Scottish) tradition of moral philosophy, and the theories of affects and passions (Colon 2002, 164, 174; Judson 2006, 50, 64), while it also presents the feminine and domestic world of emotions, sympathy, empathy, family and personal conflicts as the core of human culture, even of its politics, while she gave it visibility on stage (Mellor 1994, 563). In that sense, Baillie herself proclaimed the social and moral role that playwrights held, reaching where historians could not, and educating their audiences (Baillie 1851, 5, 14). The present contribution approaches, first of all, Baillie’s dramatic theory and the reception of her work among the debate on women’s alledged appropriation of the stage, as well as the criticism she received for her unsexed writing. It presents Baillie as the creator of strong female characters that gives presence on stage to women and their plights, at the same time she develops a strong dramatic voice of her own. In addition, this paper will highlight the need to recover Baillie as one of the key voices and pens of her time, who also upheld the notion that ‘the personal is political’ and vindicated women’s visibility and freedom. Then, it discusses a little-known play, The Bride (1828), as a liminal text that is purposedly displaced from English soil, yet also set in what turns out to be an idealized or imagined colonized location, as a means to develop an alternative community in-between time and space, England and Ceylan, Catholism and Protestantism, so as to place a mirror not only to the Cingalese people, as Baillie claimed, but rather to the British population, exposing the colonial failings, the common humanity of peoples exposed by the practice of sympathy, and, in particular, the shared oppression of women within both cultures. Baillie’s play will, therefore, serve to discuss women’s (in)visibility, commodification and identification with the object to be consumed in the context of British Orientalism. In this sense, this controbution will, for the first time, analze the similarities between Baillie’s Bride and Aphra Behn’s Imoida (Oroonoko 1688), as exoticised women stading in-between two worlds and discourses, and how their authors employ these characters to highlight women’s silenced voices and their erased bodies in cultural and social history.