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O'Quinn, Daniel J. 'Elizabeth Inchbald's The Massacre: Tragedy, Violence and the Network of Political Fantasy.' British Women Playwrights around 1800. 1 June 1999. 8 pars. <http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/essays/oquinn_massacre.html>
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Copyright © Contributor, 1999-2008. This essay
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| 1. |
What are we to make of a cultural document such as Elizabeth Inchbald's The Massacre? Written in 1792, the play's obvious political topicality guaranteed that it
would not be staged. It was typeset for publication but withdrawn
on the advice of friends. The suppression of the print version
means that we are dealing with a political document which did
not enter the realm of public political discussion. Its political
effectivity therefore was confined to its private circulation
until James Boaden chose to include the play in his Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald of 1833. However, the specifics of the play's private circulation are notable.
Inchbald sent the play to both William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft
and there is every indication that the play may have been written
expressly to intervene in the private political discussions
of the Jacobin circle. I will try to outline the substance
and the limits of that intervention below, but first I want
to consider the import of Boaden's description of the play
as a 'curiosity' in his preliminary note.
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| 2. |
The Massacre is a curiosity in both of the word's primary eighteenth century usages. First,
it is unquestionably a 'rarity': it is Inchbald's only tragedy
and aside from its keen sense of the material possibilities
of the stage, it seems quite disconnected from the preoccupations
of both her farces and her more serious five act comedies of
the late 1790's. However, I will be arguing below that the
play is intimately related to the political if not the aesthetic
project of both her theatrical and novelistic production. Furthermore,
Inchbald's highly practical relation to the London stage means
that one finds very few plays that were 'never intended for
representation' in her oeuvre. Second, like a traditional curiosity
it is a textual object which prompts enquiry. As a cultural
fragment it seems to throw up a discrete set of historical
problematics which have the potential to substantially intervene
in the on-going re-formulation of Romantic Studies. Perhaps
most directly, it is crucial to the current critical discussion regarding the nature
of the 'closet' in Romantic drama. (1) It also poses key questions regarding the history of radical politics in Britain
in the late 1780's and early 1790's not only in its barely
veiled representation of events in France, but also in its
cogent gender critique of both Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin positions.
Furthermore, it gives us a brief glimpse into the problem of
gender privilege within the discourse network which linked
feminist thinkers to the public figures most commonly associated
with radical social reform in Britain. And finally, it poses
some intriguing questions regarding the theorization of tragedy
and its relation to political praxis at a particular moment
in the consolidation of the middle class. |
| 3. |
The title page of The Massacre states simply that the play is a tragedy of three acts taken from the French.
As far as I know there is no specific French source so the
suggestion that the play is somehow a translation needs careful
consideration. At one level, the gesture could be an attempt
to establish authenticity, but this seems highly unlikely
considering the vague quality of the historical events represented
in the play. A few footnotes attempt to ground the text in
accounts of St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, but it is clear
from Inchbald's own remarks in the 'Advertisement' that the
play is a meditation on 'the unhappy state of a neighbouring
nation' in its current time of crisis. It is much more likely
that the statement that the play is of French origin is a
generic specification that directly impinges on how one reads.
The play exhibits the generic hallmarks of French neo-classical
tragedy and by extension its Athenian forbears. It adheres
to the unity of time and place, it deploys minor characters as if they were a chorus, and it demonstrates
a crucial tragic reversal which directly critiques the actions
of the hero. And it explores the specific conflict between
individual desire and the desires of the state. It is illuminating
to consider Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet's
remarks on the social function of Athenian tragedy for they
resonate with Inchbald's practice in The Massacre:
Tragedy is not only an art form; it is also a social institution that the city...set
up alongside its political and legal institutions....In this
way [the city] turned itself into a theater. Its subject,
in a sense, was itself and it acted itself out before its
public. But although tragedy, more than any other genre of
literature, thus appears rooted in social reality, that does
not mean that it is a reflection of it. It does not reflect
that reality but calls it into question. By depicting it
rent and divided against itself, it turns it into a problem. (2)
This sense of tragedy exploring a problem in social reality is helpful for two
reasons. First, it prompts one to consider which social reality
is being reflected. It is clearly a problem to read the play
as an exploration of French politics either at the time of
its setting or its composition. The play is much more concerned
with problems in the social fabric of Britain as I will clarify
below. And second, it prevents one from making the mistakes
that William Godwin made when he read the text. In a fascinating
letter written in response to Godwin's critique of the tragedy
Inchbald thanks him for his critical acumen and then emphasizes
that his request for historical authenticity is aside from
the point. Furthermore, she responds to Godwin's concerns regarding
the play's political effects in a fashion that indicates how
she sees the play's political project:
There appears an inconsistency in my having said to you, 'I have no view to any
public good in this piece,' and afterwards alluding to its
preventing future massacres: to this I reply that it was
your hinting to me that it may do harm which gave me the
first idea that the play might do good. (3)
What kind of harm Godwin and Inchbald have in mind is debatable, but it appears
that Inchbald is responding to what all of her readers appear
to have felt was an excess of violence in the text. (4) Inchbald's response indicates that the play's political effectivity is tied
to its potential to 'do harm'. In light of the play's rigorous
exclusion of violent acts from the stage and its intense examination
of the signs of that violence it makes sense to understand
the harm discussed here in relation to the affect generated
by the violence of tragic reversal. |
| 4. |
As Paula Backscheider remarks, The Massacre is an extraordinarily violent text. (5) As the play loosely grafts events from the French revolution onto the events
of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, each of the tragedy's
three acts engages the representation of violence in a distinct
fashion. In Act I, Eusèbe Tricastin narrates, in the play's
longest speech, the assassination of his wife's family and
the proliferation of violence in the streets of Paris. Act
II's most resonant moment returns to the same events not through
verbal description but through the appearance of the dagger
which Eusèbe pulled from the breast of Mme. Tricastin's dying
mother. The shift from the verbal evocation of horror to the
concentration of horror in the physical object prepares us
for the incarnation of physical violence in Act III. After
a series of political negotiations between Eusèbe and different
insurgent factions, the murdered bodies of his wife and two
children are brought on stage upon a bier in what amounts to
an almost ceremonial presentation of tragic death. The play, therefore, starts with the verbal description of
family slaughter, passes on to the iconic manifestation of
that slaughter in the dagger stained with the mother's blood,
and finally rests on the presentation of the body of a second
murdered mother and her children. The movement brings one closer
and closer to the body and by extension to the physicality
of death. |
| 5. |
The sex of this body is far from incidental and constitutes the phantasmatic
core of the play's political intervention. At the basic
level of plot, Eusèbe survives the actions of the murderous
mob not once but twice; and in both instances the play
counters Eusèbe's good fortune with horrific descriptions
or embodiments of familial slaughter. Between these two
moments Inchbald presents Eusèbe covered in the blood of
his wife's mother and grasping the assailant's knife. The
force of the tragic action demands that one question the
relationship between Eusèbe and that knife, and by extension
the spilled blood of his wife and mother-in-law. Especially
since in Act I, Eusèbe emphasizes that the only reason
he escapes the mob is that 'my sword in my hand reeking
with blood, my hair dishevelled, and my frantic features
caused me to be mistaken for one of the murderers' (364).
I would argue that this ambiguous relation to the murderers
is crucial to Inchbald's critique of both Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin politics and cuts to the core
of the masculinization of public discourse and the feminization
of private space.
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| 6. |
The play explicitly links the political crisis it is analyzing to the sequestration
of women and children in ostensibly 'safe spaces'. This sequestration
allows the family and the political to become realms of exclusively
male homosocial transactions. That these transactions are
unable to protect mothers and children is an important critique
of late eighteenth century governmentality whether conceived
in terms of bourgeois hegemony grounded on the deployment
of sexuality or in terms of Burkean paternalism. In my opinion, The Massacre's importance lies in this political gesture for it explicitly argues a) that
it is women who primarily suffer the violence of male homosocial
relations and b) that this is a problem in the constitution
of politics itself. The play also insists that this gender
critique is not party specific but rather universal. The
trial which dominates Act III at first seems to be setting
up Glandeve's rational advocation of political difference
as the sign of true liberty. This re-establishment of civil
society is explicitly figured as the solution of the threat
of class warfare embodied by Dugas. However, Glandeve's simple
re-assertion of bourgeois dominance may save Eusèbe Tricastin
and his father, but does little for the preservation of his
wife and children. In this light, Glandeve's rational jurisprudence
begins to look like a salvage project in which bourgeois
and landed men are saving themselves from the tangible violence
instantiated by the social inequality which defines their privilege. Inchbald seems to be re-asserting the
cost of such a practice.
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7. |
However, this re-assertion has its own problems which come leaping forward in
the final speech of the tragedy. After the disclosure of
the dead body of Mme. Tricastin and her children, Glandeve
shifts from the discourse of rational jurisprudence to a
portentous amalgamation of religion and monstrous rhetoric:
Glan. My friends, I conjure you to take every care that the perpetrators of this
barbarous outrage are secured. This man [to Dugas] and his
followers shall be made prisoners till our researches prove
successful. Then, the good (of all parties) will conspire
to extirpate such monsters from the earth. It is not party
principles which cause this devastation; 'tis want of sense—'tis guilt—for the first precept in our Christian laws is charity—the next obligation to extend that charity EVEN TO OUR ENEMIES.
[The bier is carried off in slow procession—Tricastin and Eusèbe following as mourners, and the attendants singing a dirge]
I want to close this section with a somewhat tendentious reading of the shift
between the legal rhetoric of the first two sentences to the
normative rhetoric of the latter two. The horror elicited by
the presentation of the dead woman's body de-stabilizes Glandeve's
rhetoric such that his advocation of liberty, equality and
above all fraternity are superceded not only by the othering
of some of the insurgent lower orders as monstrous beings,
but also by the proclamation of Christian charity and obligation
as societal norms. Equality as it is presented by Glandeve
early in Act III is rightfully shown to be an assertion of
masculine privilege. But instead of solving the social inequality
which lies at the heart of the French Revolution and of the
violence portrayed in The Massacre, the cathartic force of Inchbald's gender critique opts instead for crucial
mechanisms of social control aimed at consolidating the middle
class. Inchbald's gender critique, therefore, is intimately
tied to an assertion of bourgeois privilege. And this assertion
leans toward the enculturation strategies of Maria Edgworth
or Hannah More rather than the rational liberalism of Mary
Wollstonecraft or Mary Hays. At one level Inchbald's prescient
feminist analysis of Jacobin rhetoric is at the same time a
class-based advocation of disciplinary technologies. (6) |
| 8. |
The complexity of Inchbald's political analysis here gains in intensity when
one recognizes that Inchbald used The Massacre to intervene in the discourse network of Jacobin aspirations in Britain. As
I have already noted above Inchbald circulated The Massacre, often in a package with A Simple Story, not only to Godwin, but also to Holcroft and less prominent members of Jacobin
circles. Interestingly, her remarks in the play's 'Advertisement'
provide a way of understanding why such a publicly oriented
document both in its concerns and its generic function may
have been composed as a means not only of entering but also
of altering a historically significant but unquestionably private
discourse network. Inchbald argues that The Massacre was never intended for production at one of the London theatres because, like
Horace Walpole's tragedy The Mysterious Mother, 'the subject matter is so horrid, that I thought it would shock, rather than
give satisfaction, to an audience' (353). This is an odd remark
because she also quotes Walpole's statement that he 'found
it so truly tragic in the essential springs of terror and pity, that I could not resist the impulse of adapting it to the scene' (353). This
seems to suggest that tragedy's elicitation of intense emotion,
which drives its political critique of social reality, no longer
has place in the public spaces of the late eighteenth century
theatre. This is more than a matter of social decorum. I would
suggest that it is precisely the category of intense affect
that poses irreducible problems for Godwin's political project
as expressed in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. It is an only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the privatization and minimization
of affect in each political subject constitutes both the ground
and the blind-spot of Godwin's political vision. For Inchbald
to privately send a tragedy which both generically and substantially
asserts the power of emotion in social relations elegantly
stages a problem in the separation of spheres that is shared
by the characters in the play and by what appears to be her
specific target audience. The containment of tragedy in the
act of reading like the sequestration of women in the private
sphere interferes with the political effectivity both of the
tragic critique of the social and of women as social subjects.
Entry into the discourse network requires the privatization
of a publicly-oriented aesthetic project—the tragedy abandons the staging of social action in favour of a readerly meditation
on the social. One could argue that a similar replacement of
social praxis by a theorization of the political is precisely
the limit of Godwin's politics. This seems remarkably similar
to the moment in Act III when Glandeve expatiates on things
as they should be at the same time that Mme. Tricastin and
her children are being murdered. In Inchbald's eyes, theorizing
the political at the very least must be accompanied by the
careful regulation of the eruption of anger instantiated by
social inequality otherwise women will continue to pay the
violent cost. This call for governance not only fractures her
relation to Godwin's rational anarchism, but also marks the
passage from one discourse network to another—from the realm of revolutionary activism to that of reformist enculturation. |
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Daniel J. O'Quinn
University of Guelph
Daniel J. O'Quinn is an Associate Professor in the School of Literatures
and Performance Studies in English at the University of Guelph.
His articles have appeared in ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, European Romantic Review and other journals. |
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Notes
1. Thomas C. Crochunis's recent 'The Act of Reading Drama: Women Writers, Dramatic
Closets, and Literary Studies' reads the play as 'the ne plus ultra of closet drama' and emphasizes its centrality to this discussion. I would like
to thank Prof. Crochunis for allowing me to read this unpublished
essay and for his comments on an early draft of this Introduction. (back)
2. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988) pp. 32-33. (back)
3. Quoted in Roger Manvell, Elizabeth Inchbald: A Biographical Study (Lanham: University Press of America, 1972) pp. 94-5. (back)
4. As is probably apparent, I am working inductively from Inchbald's letter to
establish Godwin's criticisms. A less charitable—and less supportable—reading of the Godwin's reservations about the play's harmful qualities would
be to suggest that the political critique embedded in The Massacre could do harm to his soon to be published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. (back)
5. Paula Backscheider, 'Introduction' to The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald vol.1 (New York: Garland P, 1980) p. xvi. (back)
6. For a more sustained consideration of this issue see my 'Scissors and Needles:
Inchbald's Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are,' Theatre Journal 51 (1999): 105-125, and 'Inchbald's Indies: Domestic and Dramatic Re-Orientations,' European Romantic Review 9.2 (Spring 1998): 217-230. (back) |
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