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O'Quinn, Daniel J. 'The Long Minuet as Danced at Coromandel: Character and the
Colonial Translation of Class Anxiety in Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace. ' British Women Playwrights around 1800. 1 September 2000. 27 pars. <http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/essays/oquinn_sword.html>
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Eliza.
Hail! hail! thou land of mercenary interest, where love of gold destroys its
thousands, where woman, for wealth and grandeur comes from far
to sacrifice beauty, health, happiness! receive one votary to
all-powerful love.
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| 1. |
Ever since Mariana Starke's extraordinary comedy The Sword of Peace; or a Voyage of Love was brought to my attention, the play has haunted my thinking not only on questions
of the representation of English India on the London stage,
but also on the concatenation of emergent constructions of
race, class and sexuality in the period following the American
revolution. (1) I use the phrase "haunted" advisedly for more than any other piece I know, the ghostly qualities of performance
that are only gestured toward in the printed version of the
play impinge forcefully on crucial questions of interpretation—so much so that one finds oneself choosing between critical reticence or wildly
idiosyncratic "historical" reconstitution. The fact that its print version both preserves a moment of performance
and forcefully emphasizes precisely the physical properties
of the theatre that disappear when performance ends only makes
matters more complex. This is of course one of the fundamental
historical problematics faced by students of the theatre, but
it seems to me that this play deserves particular notice for
a number of historical and textual anomalies which both incite
and exceed commentary. This tension between what may be an
idiosyncratic production of the late-eighteenth century theatre
and its potential ideological significance is itself of some
concern. Discussing this play with my colleague Donna Andrew,
it became clear that precisely those aspects of the play that
I was drawn to were also the least stable in the eyes of a
social historian whose criteria for evidence was oriented toward
effective corroboration. It was evident that I was reading
the play as a series of clues, a rebus whose gradual reconstitution would cut to the heart
of colonial representation and perhaps function as an exemplary
text for a broader critical agenda aimed at understanding the
relationship between class anxiety, racial construction and
the education of desire. What emerged from this conversation
was a heightened sense of the temptations of reading and a
chastening sense of unavoidable historical loss. |
| 2. |
This uneasy critical sense is partly brought on by the primary physical document
through which we have knowledge of Starke's play. The printed
version most easily available if not easily read is a Dublin
edition of 1790. The title page in a typical fashion records
that the play was "First Performed at The Theatre Royal, in the Hay-Market, On Saturday, August
the 5th, 1788", but immediately following the Dramatis Personae a brief note indicates that "The Lines in inverted Commas, are omitted in Representation". The document therefore purports to simultaneously record the public performance
script and provide a longer version suited to the private
act of reading. When one reads the play it is remarkable
not only how much of the text is destined solely for the
closet, but also how significant the omitted passages are
to the play's politics. However, before making the tempting
argumentative leap to establish the omissions as signs of
a complex act of censorship and suggesting that the printed
version has a certain authority, it is important to remember
that this act of censorship a) is retroactively constituted
from the print text, and b) does not correspond to the directorial
omissions or additions that may have occurred during the
play's production. With the play's political resonances so
tightly fitted to topical issues how are we to interpret
the differences between the performance and the reading text?
And how are we to interpret the reception of the play in its first run in the summer of 1788, its continuation in the summer
of 1789, and its reading anytime during or after these moments
of performance?
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Sex and the trials of empire
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| 3. |
The first hesitation is noteworthy because the play is first performed in the
lead up to the trial of Warren Hastings and is printed in
this edition well into the proceedings. The play features
a corrupt Resident who with the assistance of his servile
minion Supple abuses the power of his office to achieve personal
ends. The most telling of these corrupt actions is described
in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser's opening night review in some detail. In order to eliminate the Resident's
sexual rival in his pursuit of Eliza,
Supple suggests throwing Edwards into prison by prevailing on his Black Merchant
(to whom he knows him to be indebted) to arrest him instantly.
The Resident adopts the scheme and sends to Moujadee to
give him directions accordingly. The Black Merchant professes
a great regard for Edwards but is forced by the authority
of the Resident to fulfil his design and reluctantly retires
for that purpose. (2)
This scenario rehearses one of the most persistent concerns of those arguing
for Hastings's impeachment—i.e., that in the pursuit of personal gain, the British and Hastings in particular
were corrupting Indian society. (3) The scene in which Mazinghi Dowza is prevailed upon to go against his better
judgement and imprison Edwards carefully stages the avarice of
the Resident and Supple and then offers the Dowza's sentimental
concern in contrast. That everything turns on a loan made by
an Indian merchant to an English colonial has important ramifications,
for the Resident and Supple manipulate what is an otherwise legitimate
economic relationship. As Dowza states, "Massa Edwards was always good and civil—He alway pay me honest when he can, I sorry hurt him, good your honor's excellence" (38-9). The Resident's response is intriguing in light of the Hastings affair:
RES. Do you doubt my intelligence? Sure I ought to know best what's going on
here—an't I Resident? "I know what the scoundrel is about, I promise you—hesitate, therefore, not a moment, but arrest him—accept of nothing but the money, which I know he can't raise."—Throw him into prison, and I will support you if complaints are made.
SUP. Be sure you accept of no bail, nothing of any security whatever, for if
you do, you'll lose it all. The Resident knows what he's
about, and it's your duty to depend upon him....
MAZ. Me swear by the great Prophet, it make me heart ach.
[Exit MAZINGHI, putting his hand on his head in submission....]
As P.J. Marshall emphasizes in his recent survey of the shift from British trade
to dominion in the Asian subcontinent, the question of private
trade—i.e., commercial transactions between British individuals and wealthy Indian
merchants—generated considerable anxiety for it meant that British commerce and by extension
governance was intimately tied to Indian capital. (4) As Burke, Sheridan and others were quick to point out during the Impeachment
proceedings these relations, because they were built on maximizing
surplus value, were especially susceptible to corruption. And it
was precisely the corruption of his supposedly easily manipulable
minions that constituted one of Hastings's many crimes against
humanity.
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| 4. |
Dowza's combined expression of Moslem devotion and sentimental regard for Edwards
at the close of the above scene is part and parcel of a broader
discourse aimed at critiquing the despotism of the East India
Company. (5) As Kate Teltscher has persuasively argued this anti- Company discourse of the
1780s re-deployed many of the key tropes which surrounded the
Clive trial in the 1770s and ultimately formed the nucleus
of much of the rhetoric of the Hastings trial. Of particular
notice for our purposes is the construction of the foppish
nabob in William Mackintosh's Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa of 1782. The latter's satirical portrait of the indolence and extravagance of
the British in Calcutta had wide circulation and resonates
with much of Starke's representation of the Resident and of
Supple. Here is according to Mackintosh the typical morning
routine of a dissipated Company servant:
About the hour of seven in the morning, his durvan (porter or door-keeper) opens
the gate, and the viranda...is free to his circars..., peons...hacarrahs
...chubdars...huccabadars and consumas...writers and solicitors.
The head-bearer and jemmadar enter the hall, and his bed-room
at eight o'clock. A lady quits his side, and is conducted
by a private stair-case, either to her own apartment, or
out of the yard. The moment the master throws his legs out
of bed, the whole possé in waiting rush into his room, each making three salams, by bending the body
and head very low, and touching the forehead with the inside
of the fingers, and the floor with the back part. He condescends,
perhaps to nod or cast an eye towards the solicitors of his
favour and protection. In about half an hour after undoing
and taking off his long drawers, a clean shirt, breeches,
stockings, and slippers, are put upon his body, thighs, legs,
and feet, without any greater exertion on his own part, than
if he were a statue,.... (6)
Kate Teltscher's reading of this passage is extremely illuminating:
the passive master, compared to an inanimate statue seems sapped of all manly
vigour; a feminized figure who recalls Belinda in Pope's Rape of the Lock, pampered by maids at her toilet. The description of the servants' intimate
ministrations and the itemization of his garments and the
parts of his body carry a small but significant sensual charge....It
is interesting to note that at this point Mackintosh's grammar
begins to break down: there is no subject and the verb is
unexpectedly passive; a construction which serves to highlight
the sense of an unmanly loss of agency (162-3).
In The Sword of Peace, the Resident is repeatedly presented as overdressed and the very name of his
primary attendant, Supple, indicates that he is as slippery as
he is effete. As Teltscher argues, the feminization of the British
nabob in Mackintosh amounts to an Indianization that betrays a
palpable anxiety about Anglo-Indian relations both public and private.
With the Resident cast as the languid Company man, Dowza's emotional
regard for Edwards's honesty acts as a counter example. He becomes
an example of one forced to go against his better nature by virtue
of his political subservience while the Resident exemplifies one
whose masculinity and judgement have been perverted by an excess
of power. Dowza decides later in the play to go secretly against
the Resident's wishes by providing the money for Edwards's release.
The Resident for his part like Hastings is recalled from his post
and replaced by "one generous, exalted character...Mr. David Northcote—a more morally sound official modelled perhaps on Augustus Cleveland or Lord
Cornwallis or even his namesake Lord North. (7) |
| 5. |
The replacement of the Resident by Northcote poses significant problems for interpretation,
for Starke is stitching together bits and pieces of the doxa
surrounding not only the Hastings impeachment, but also the
earlier controversy surrounding Lord Clive. The passage from
Mackintosh quoted above provides a helpful guide to anti-Company
discourse in the 80s, but it is important to remember that
this is an extraordinarily tame version of the materials printed
in the early 1770s aimed at publicly shaming Clive. Representations
of Clive from this period incorporate every sexual excess imaginable.
According to the most vitriolic of these documents, Life of Lord Clive by Charles Carracioli and the anonymous The Intrigues of a Nabob, or Bengall the Fittest Soil for the Growth of Lust,
Injustice, and Dishonesty, Clive's sexual appetites were insatiable and he was represented in turns as
the King of Sodom, as the lover of any number of actresses
and prostitutes, as a pederast and as an compulsive onanist. (8) Anti-company discourse has its roots in the deeply factionalized political world
of the 1770s where pornographic excess was an active component
of political pamphleteering. |
| 6. |
One could argue that these strategies lurk behind almost all anti-Company discourse
and that if they don't actively emerge as they did in Burke's
famous catalogue of sexual violence perpetrated under Hastings's
rule, they are always present in potentia. (9) This helps to explain why the opening night review is at pains to argue that
the play is
devoid of all false attempts at wit, and of what is more unpardonable, though
we are sorry to say not unfrequent from the pens of female
authors, of allusions that partake of double-entendre; or are liable to a gross construction. The play was received, generally speaking
with applause. Some few of the auditors hissed during the
performance, but they must have been either peculiarly ill-natured,
or fuddled or foolish, because no one incident in the piece
deserved reprobation.
As the reviewer indicates, anti-Company discourse is a dangerous realm for female
authors because it historically partakes not only in sexual innuendo,
but also in direct scurrility. This, along with the general disapproval
of women writing directly on political matters, generates a series
of strategies which indirectly link the Resident to Clive and Hastings. |
| 7. |
At the risk of being overly speculative, I want to tease out a number of details
which subtly stitch the play to historical events and personages.
First, the play is set "on the Coast of Coromandel" thereby bringing the locus of action into the region most famously associated
with Clive. Beyond this spatial marker, the invocation of Clive
is achieved primarily through a web of references to the Resident's
character. Aside from the anti-Company discourse already mentioned,
Starke also deploys many of the moves used by Samuel Foote
in The Nabob to ridicule Clive. Most important of these is the double insinuation of effeminacy
and sexual predation. In The Nabob, the gambling scene is rife with double-entendres which cast Sir Matthew Mite
as a sodomite and the play's narrative turns on his attempt
to gain the hand of the Oldham's daughter through what amounts
to direct economic extortion. The Sword of Peace is much more tame, but travels related ground. Rather than insinuations of sodomy,
the Resident is figured in effeminate terms. But the question
of sexual predation is only slightly less overt. Starke chooses
to emphasize both the Resident's profligacy and his subservience
to his sexual desires late in Act I:
ELIZA: ...I wish not to infringe upon Mrs. Tartar's rights, or any one's, but
merely to assert my own.
RES. Oh! oh! oh! my little queens, don't mind her—every body here knows Mrs. Tartar's a vixen; but she shan't manage me, I can
tell her.
LOUISA: But yet, Sir, by her hints, she seems to have more right over you than
you chuse to avow.
RES. Oh! oh! no such thing—to be sure I—I don't deny but I have gallanted her a bit—and—and—and—been a little particular, and so forth—Tartar has a large fortune—and—women have been rather scarce here of late—and so—and so—but if I meet with another pleases me better—nay, you know—why (leering at ELIZA) an't I Resident? And sure hard, if so, I mayn't please myself, ha! ha!
ha!—Well—but—but do you intend to shut yourselves up here and see nobody? Or how—
ELIZA. Ah! Heavens forbid no, Sir, all extremes are dangerous. (12)
The combination of the Resident's nervous stutter and his confidence in the enactment
of his desires show the typical strategies of caricature. The interesting
questions are whether those audience members hissing at the play
were reacting to the further sexual connotations of this representation
and whether these are being attached to party politics. If it is
both, then Starke is infringing on the bounds of feminine propriety
in more ways than one. |
| 8. |
While the battle in the press during the 1770s and 80s deployed sexual tropes
to establish a pathology concomitant with charges of economic
and political wrongdoing, the Resident's corruption in The Sword of Peace has primarily sexual ends—i.e., he abuses his power to eliminate his chief sexual rival in the pursuit
of Eliza. This translation of political scandal into the realm
of private affairs is in itself intriguing for it not only
capitalizes on the sexualization of the discursive formation
at hand, but also opens the way for an allegorization of colonial
governance in terms of heterosexual relations. Since the construction
of gender and the deployment of sexuality are themselves in
a state of flux at this historical moment, Starke's rhetorical
strategy is extraordinarily volatile, but it allows her to
play out significant anxieties about colonial activity within
the generic confines of late-eighteenth century comedy. As
we will see this has important ramifications for how Starke
represents British women in India, but before entering this
aspect of my argument it is important to recognize another
important contextual matter. |
| 9. |
Beyond its indirect engagement with the Hastings affair, the play also thematizes
abolitionist concerns which are also coming into focus at this
particular historical moment. The Sword of Peace features an abolitionist sub-plot in which the servant Jeffreys buys one of
Mrs. Tartar's slaves in order to grant him his freedom. The
scenes between Jeffreys and Caesar are intriguing for at least
two reasons. First, they demonstrate that English notions of
liberty were so firmly ensconced that they could be the subject
of light satire. Jeffreys argues that English liberty consists
primarily of the right to assault a fellow Englishman:
JEF. And now you're free, d'ye mind, if I chuse to swear at you, and break your
head, I've a right to it; and may at me again, if you have spunk enough for it. But before when you were a poor handcuff'd
slave, I'd have knocked my own brains out before I'd have
touch'd you; for a true-born Englishman, if he provokes him,
damme, he'd knock his best friend's teeth down his throat,—[to be spoken quick]—but never lifts his hand against the oppress'd.
CESAR. But, Massa, do Englishmans always quarrel with his friend and fight him?
JEF. For my part, I never love my friend better than when I'm fighting with him.
Damme, if you han't spunk enough to quarrel with an Englishman,
he despises you.—"None of your damn'd congees for him—give him a knock o' the head and he opens his heart to you directly.... (30-1)
Oddly this passage may well be another indirect reference to the Hastings impeachment
because Caesar's question is one that was very much on the mind
of Persian chroniclers as they "watched Warren Hastings and his councillor Phillip Francis proceed from bad words
to duelling with pistols in 1780 over matters of state". (10) As Rajat Kanta Ray argues, Indian observers took the duel as a sign of political
weakness. For metropolitan viewers, the conflict between Hastings
and Francis was well known, but it is hard to imagine precisely
how Jeffrey's words would play. He is the play's only working class
character and his advocacy of violent conflict as the sine qua
non of English national character can be seen as a corruption of
the ideal of civil governance. Making the link between Jeffrey's
remarks and Hastings seems to imply that East India agents are
nothing more than a bunch of louts with pretensions to higher social
standing. This of course was a prominent feature of anti-Nabob
discourse and one that proved to be quite discursively useful for
Burke and Sheridan. |
| 10. |
This is an admittedly oblique reading but it is supported by George Colman's
remarkable epilogue to the play. The epilogue is quite complex
and I will be returning to it later in this essay. For our
purposes here it is enough to recognize the way in which it
refers to the intense factionalism which characterized both
the fall of Clive and the impeachment of Warren Hastings:
How prone is man to quarrel with plain sense!
Suspecting harmless words of foul offense.
Too soon, alas! our minds to frailty leaning,
Accuse the simple phrase of double meaning.
E'en the first man alive, with spleen devour'd,
His nice sweet temper with an apple sour'd,
Grew sulky with his friends,—a cross old sinner!—
If they but mention pippins after dinner.
Nay, in these days, there's scarce'a City Prig
Who dares confess his fondness for a wig;
Lest he shou'd find in this same touchy town,
Some angry tory who wou'd knock him down. (58)
The poem goes on to partially applaud the cessation of duelling and its replacement
by the current fashion for boxing over matters of honour.
The second verse paragraph becomes quite intriguing in light
of Jeffrey's remarks on the intimate relation between love
and fisticuffs for it directly condemns duelling, ridicules
boxing and then offers the satirical gibes of The Sword of Peace as a civil form of critique:
Speak not, ye beaux! we cannot move your passions;
The Sword with you has long been out of fashion.
For now each sparring beau in flannel stands;
To muffled gauntlets trusts his chicken hands;
Learns, generously, how to bruise,—not slay men!
And justifies his honour—on the dray-mue!
Soon shall we see, thank Heaven! The extirpation
Of barbarous duelling, throughout the nation;
Soon shall we read, instead of running through,
That, in Hyde-Park, two nobles have set to;
That Lord met Lord—that each, no Cesar bolder,
Brought a Right Honourable bottle-holder!
No carte and tierce—but bruise on bruise shall rise,
Till blows, not death, have clos'd the hero's eyes!—(59)
Extrapolating from the scene between Jeffreys and Cesar, Colman's fighting beaux
are men of fashion not unlike those in the audience. In this
play the sword is one of reconciliation and masculine conflict
is bathetically downgraded into a fashionable pursuit. If
we read the epilogue as a commentary on the conflict between
Hastings and Francis, the implication is that the duel and
the ensuing impeachment are reducible to deviant homosocial
relations which threaten the foundation of British imperial
power. (11) Significantly, the epilogue draws a comparison between aristocratic men fighting
in Hyde-Park and the bonds of friendship between Jeffreys
and Cesar. That the equation features signs of effeminacy
and dissipation on one side and interracial relations on
the other should give us pause, for these same terms surface
in the discursive construction of Hastings in the popular
press. Representations of Hastings at this time swerve between
signs of excessive gentility and Indianization. |
| 11. |
On a less speculative note, the scenes between Jeffreys and Caesar are also important
because the conjunction of abolitionist and anti-East India
Company rhetoric specifically locates the play's political
investment. As Kate Teltscher and P. J. Marshall remind us, "at the start of the [Hastings] impeachment India and the slave trade were linked,
both in parliament and outside, as issues which raised questions
about the morality of British policy overseas". (12) During the late 1780s the amount of public knowledge about colonial affairs
is not only expanding, but going through political convulsions,
and it is not uncommon to see abolitionist texts deploy figures
of Eastern despotism or anti-Company texts mobilizing figures
more traditionally associated with the campaign against the
slave trade. What appears on first glance to be an anomalous
conjunction of two strains of anti-colonial discourse is in
fact a well-travelled universalizaton that demonstrates Starke's
political affiliations with public figures such as Wilberforce,
Clarkeson and Burke. (13) |
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Character and the intricacies of the minuet
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| 12. |
What interests me is that this universalization is managed primarily through
a careful regulation of the line between character and caricature.
It is the careful reduction of the Nabob and the Creole or
of the Moslem and the African to a handful of discursive
or visual tags that enables them to be made equivalent. In
Starke's play, Louisa and Eliza Moreton, Edwards, Dormer
and Northcote can be described as characters whereas the
Resident, Supple, Caesar, Mazinghi Dowza, and the other British
women in India are active in an economy of caricature. In
the reviews, the former group of characters are all discussed
in terms of particular actors and actress's ability to bring
them "to life"—i.e. there is a close relationship between the performance and the verisimilitude
of the embodied character—whereas the latter group are consistently figured as "exhibitions of character":
The performers deserved great commendation for the powerful support they lent
this Comedy, Miss Farren, Mr. Bannister, and Mrs. Kemble
especially. Miss Farren [as Eliza] never displayed the gaiety
of a well-bred woman, whose chief characteristick was natural
vivacity, with a better grace; Mrs Kemble spoke interestingly,
and Bannister...made an excellent part of Jeffries. Baddeley
also played well [as Northcote], and Robert Palmer was extremely
happy in his manner of exhibiting the character of Supple;
nor should Palmer himself be forgotten; his governed style,
both of delivery and deportment, gave the characteristick
modesty of Dormer a fulness and force of effect, that it
could not have received from a less skilful comedian.
The difference being established here between the fullness of effect generated
by the governed style of delivery and deportment and the excessive
performance required to exhibit Supple's "character" is fundamentally tied to the social distinctions which structure the play. With
the distinctions of rank and respectability lying in the balance,
the performance of the subtle difference between "fullness" of character and characteristic excess carries immense significance. It is for
this reason that the print version of the play is so precise in
its stage directions. |
| 13. |
In contrast to the normative English characters, what the latter group of caricatures
all share is a certain alterity or hybridity: they are either
Indian, African or "Indianized" English men and women. In a sense the play merely continues the representational
economy of anti-Company discourse that we find from Mackintosh
through Burke. However, Deidre Lynch's discussion of the centrality
of this distinction between character and caricature in mid-
to late- eighteenth century cultural production clarifies some
of the play's more audacious strategies:
Whatever else they are doing in fleshing out their characters, the figures we
credit for the rise of the novel are also registering their
culture's investment in the eloquence of the material surface—the face of the page, the outside of the body—and their culture's idealization of what was graphically self-evident. Eighteenth-century
culture, we should remember, made person both a word for someone's physical appearance and a word for someone. It made trait cognate with words such as stroke or line—words for the graphic elements from which both pictorial and written representation
are composed and through which they are identified....Indeed,
the particular Englishness of the continuing national enthusiasm
for character owes much to the fact that the English...conceptualize
the characters they read about not as the French do, as "personnages" (that is, not as so many theatrical masks), but semiologically (as so many marks
in a book). (14)
In almost novelistic fashion, the print version of The Sword of Peace exhibits precisely this semiological conceptualization of character which makes
the surface of the body synonymous with personhood. For our purposes
here the question of quantity that so concerned Johnson, Reynolds
and others is registered at the material level of the text for The Sword of Peace contains remarkably excessive stage directions. Act III, scene 2 contains two
stage directions which more than anything else in the printed text
of the play instantiate the temptation to read in part because
they are so detailed, and in part because they act as exceedingly
complex tableaux from which one can make extensive interventions
in current discussions of race, sexuality and class in colonial
representation. If nothing else the opening direction for the scene
is notable for its sheer volume of information:
SCENE A Card Room discovered.
Three Tables on a Side, ranged with Gentlemen and Ladies at Cards. At the upper
End of the Stage a Door opens into a Ball-room, where
you see Couples standing cross the Door as dancing;
Music playing as at a distance, not too loud. At the
first Table, next the audience, on one side, Mrs. Garnish, with her natural brown complexion, her dark hair dressed out with a number of
Jewels, and her whole Dress as fine, and overloaded
with Finery as possible in the Indian Style, lolling
in her Chair, holding her Cards, and a black Slave
standing by her, playing them for her as she speaks
them, or points to them; taking up her Tricks, shuffling
and taking up the Cards, and dealing for her. Another
Slave by the side of another Lady does the same for
her. This other Lady to be a contrast to Mrs. Garnish in every Degree, looking pale and sick, peevish, ill natured and unhappy; dressed
fine and awkward. Mrs. Garnish all Spirits, Pride, Vulgarity, and Self- consequence. The other Table in front
of the opposite side. A great fat woman, very brown,
sitting full front to the Audience, as fine as can
be, but dressed as ridiculously as possible; this is Mrs. Gobble. The other Lady the Colour of Yarico. Miss Bronze dressed with elegance, in
a silver or gold Gauze, Flowers, Jewels, &c. a good Figure, and smart, with black slaves playing their Cards, as before.
Some of the men elegant and genteel; others brown,
sickly Skeletons; and the elderly men very Fat; as
these two extremes prevail most in India; and in general
an awkward, square Manner of holding their Shoulders
very high, and stooping their Heads. Some tables with
no Blacks attending, to show it is the Distinction
of Consequence and Grandeur; and the Blacks who thus
attend must be dressed finer and with more Attention
than the others, who are seen coming about with Refreshments.
The two Tables next to the Ball-room Door purposely
neglected, to show they are People to be known Nobodies;
where such Folks are generally placed to keep the Wind
off their Betters. The whole Group as much in the Bunbury
Stile as possible. (31-32)
The scenario is as much a visual tableaux of colonial excess as it is of metropolitan
class anxiety. The various tropes and figures which animate anti-Nabob
discourse are conveniently enacted and embodied for the audience.
The scene of gaming itself figures an anxiety regarding speculation
which since at least the time of the Clive trial runs through anti-Company
writings. (15) The fact that the card players are too indolent to even lift their cards to
the table replays the kind of over-attendance that so fascinates
the Mackintosh passage above. The description of extreme body types
is also a common gesture, as is the insinuation that India eats
away at one's bodily and moral constitution. The stage direction
is also remarkably precise about complexion although clothing operates
as an equally volatile political surface—the former speaks to emergent understandings of race and nationality, while the
latter is the locus of anxieties about rank. When Starke emphasizes
the "browness" of Mrs. Garnish and Mrs. Gobble, it is as much a sign of the women's Indianization
as it is of their failed pretension to gentility, and therefore
should be understood as the mark of suspect hybridity. I will argue
later that the extreme portraits of Mrs. Garnish and Mrs. Gobble
also incorporate suspect sexuality, but for the moment I want to
turn our attention to Miss Bronze. |
| 14. |
The flowers and gauze which adorn Miss Bronze as much as the suggestion that
she is the colour of Yarico mark her as a "country born" woman. (16) The comparison to Yarico is interesting for Colman's Inkle and Yarico is on the stage almost constantly in the season prior to The Sword of Peace. On first glance, it would appear that Starke is establishing a link between
British imperial domination in two spaces in much the same
fashion as Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. (17) However, Starke refrains from employing the sentimental strategies used by Colman
to gain sympathy for Yarico's predicament and opts instead
for a kind of racist containment which suggests that all the
suspect qualities of the nouveaux riches Mrs. Garnish and Mrs.
Gobble are being inculcated in the impressionable Hindu woman.
That this strategy can be employed with so little effort indicates
precisely how prevalent the figure of innocent and wronged
Yarico is in the mind of the theatre-going public at this historical
moment. The careful emphasis placed on her elegance and her
good figure implies that like Yarico in Colman's play her innocence
and her desirable femininity are in the process of being contaminated
by contact with the avarice of British subjects abroad. In
other words, the Indianization which Starke so readily invokes
is complemented by a kind of reverse contamination which threatens
the integrity of Hindu society. This two-fold romanticization
of Hindu feminine propriety and demonization of British governance is of course one of the
most famous elements of both Burke and Sheridan's rhetorical
assault on Warren Hastings. (18) |
| 15. |
But we can be much more specific about the play's semiological gestures and its
relation to the bristling market for satirical prints. The
final sentence of the stage direction is itself a direction
for reading, for the reference to the Bunbury Stile firmly
establishes the economy of caricature as one composed of visual
marks and lines. Henry Bunbury was the most highly regarded
caricaturist of his generation and his career was at its height
in 1787 and 88 when Starke's play is initially composed and
performed. Bunbury is a social caricaturist and his most famous
work is a seven-foot-long strip entitled The Long Minuet as Danced at Bath which was exhibited and reproduced in the months immediately preceding the play's
first performance. Bunbury's strip depicts a range of figures
all engaged in various aspects of the minuet. As David Kunzle
states, "The minuet was the most intricate and difficult of dances; Bath was the most
fashionable of all resorts, to which there flocked the nouveaux-riches
and social climbers....Bunbury seized with lightning brilliance
various attitudes expressing degrees of awkwardness, naive
enthusiasm, and even...a sly grace. Male and female dancers
are by no means uniformly ugly, but run the gamut of peculiarity
in expression and physiognomic type". (19) Bunbury's strip therefore targets with varying degrees of severity those who
are challenging the rigid boundaries of class propriety. Significantly,
Bunbury's satire emerges out of a certain anxiety regarding
the embodiment of class for the strip implies that the minuet
will act as a filter for class identity. Assuming that the
gentry have the grace and physical facility to perform the
dance, the strip focuses attention on the failure of the bodies
of the nouveaux-riches to accede to gentility. The volatility
of such an assumption is registered by the ambiguity of some
of the caricatures for the flip side of the satire is that
all it takes to accede to gentility is the right combination
of dress and accomplishments. |
| 16. |
Starke's Long Minuet as Danced at Coromandel performs a spatial substitution—India for Bath—but the critique of social climbing is if anything intensified. At one level
this is nothing but a continuation of the anti-Nabob discourse
that received its most famous treatment in Samuel Foote's The Nabob. And that discourse is itself a particular subset of the discursive assault
on luxury. (20) But this specific substitution resonates with the specifics of Clive's career
for after his return from India, Bath was a favourite place
of retirement. (21) Starke's stage direction deploys the Bunburian satire in surprising and innovative
ways. Instead of replicating Bunbury's minuet, Starke stages
her dance off-stage such that the card game becomes the object
of satirical representation. The card game is in a sense surrounded
both materially and culturally by a scene of dancing that nevertheless
remains unenacted on the stage. This is an interesting shift
because it resolves the key problem of the representation of
classed bodies highlighted by Bunbury's strip. When Eliza enters
midway through the scene, Supple's effusions on her dancing
simultaneously invoke the Bunburian scene and put it in abeyance:
ELIZA. I am glad we have left the ball-room; I declare, Resident, there's no
dancing a minuet here with any satisfaction; one's as much
crowded as at the ball at St. James on a birth night.
MISS BRONZE. (in a loud whisper to Mrs. Gobble) Do you think she was ever there!
RESIDENT. That was owing to your fine dancing Eliza, and not to the smallness
of the room.
SUP. "Oh! such a minuet! (turns to Mrs. Garnish in a lower voice) You never, Mrs. Garnish saw such dancing in your life"
MRS. GARN. What, so monstrous bad, hey?
ELIZA. (looking down at Mrs. Garnish with a smile of triumph) La! Mrs. Garnish, have you forgot me—I'm sure I shall never forget you—with your nice plumb cakes, so frosted and decorated; and your pies and your
puffs, and ices and creams, all so nice:—I used to buy of you in Oxford road. (33-4)
The minuet becomes a scene of interpretation and Starke's play performs a startling
reversal of the Bunburian glance. The audience of Bunbury's strip
is assumed to be capable of discerning the signs of gentility and
therefore able to judge the shortcomings of the nouveaux-riches.
In The Sword of Peace the audience watches the social climbers attempting to interpret the accomplishments
of the Miss Moreton's. The reversal instantiates a two-fold satire
for not only does Starke ridicule Supple, Garnish and Bronze's
excessive concern with Eliza's dancing skills, but she also subtly
introduces enough ambiguity into the scene of interpretation to
force the audience to consider the class identity of Eliza and
Louisa. This is important because Eliza and Louisa are themselves
extremely concerned that they not be lumped into the same category
as the other women in the play who have come to India in search
of monetary gain and class ascendancy through marriage. However,
the fact of the matter is that Eliza and Louisa are also on the
marriage market, but their search for husbands is as the play's
sub-title suggests "A Voyage of Love". The problem is that the interpretation of their motivation like their class
identity is not subject to clear determination. In a space where
class boundaries are fluid and money supercedes all matters of
sentiment, the representational economy promulgates confusion about
the fullness and veracity of character, reputation and ultimately
value in the sexual marketplace. |
| 17. |
This problematic is given ample consideration in the play's opening scene. Act
I scene 1 commences with Eliza trying to rally Louisa's spirits
for the difficult mission which awaits them. The opening night
review establishes the situation as follows:
By the will of Mr. Morton (who had obtained his fortune in the East Indies),
Eliza, his only daughter, is obliged to take a voyage to
the coast of Coromandel to receive her inheritance, and she
is accompanied by her cousin Louisa, who is commissioned
by Sir Thomas Clairville to endeavour to obtain from Lieutenant
Dormer the sword of young Clairville,...the intention of
Sir Thomas being to preserve it in the Clairville family,
as a monumental trophy in honour of the deceased. In order
to induce the lieutenant to part with it, Louisa is authorized
to tender 5000 L ...in exchange for the sword.
The only thing that stands in the way of Eliza's marriage to her beloved Edwards
is that his family thinks she is of insufficient fortune. Her voyage,
therefore, amounts to a double acquisition for her inheritance
will gain her the hand of Edwards. There is no doubt from her attempts
to alleviate Louisa's mortification that they have been placed
in the house of the termagant Mrs. Tartar, that Eliza not only
understands that voyages of love are financial affairs, but also
recognizes that such travels are a threat to her and Louisa's reputations:
LOUISA. I don't know what state your feelings are in but I'm sure mine have been
tortured from the first moment we set foot on land.
ELIZA. Why, I grant you, as fine ladies of delicate sentiments, and heroic modesty,
ours have been pretty [well tried!] (22), or rather, we have been struggling hard against the stream of prejudice, and
custom, to preserve ourselves from their effects.
LOUISA. And which is a point I still doubt; for our hostess—good, now, what think you of her?
ELIZA. Why, for our well-beloved lady hostess, dear Madam Tartar, I think we
shall find her blue-cast, or half-cast complexion, the fairest part of her composition. But not
withstanding her hauteur, I shall teach her the difference
between women who come here to make their fortunes, and
those who come to receive them.
LOUISA. If I cou'd have foreseen we should have been placed in the house of such
a being as Mrs. Tartar, I would have forfeited my fortune
according to the strange clause in your father's will
rather than have come after it.
ELIZA. No, no—a truce with your delicacies to such an extream! Money, girl, is the universal
good—and we cannot expect to attain it any more than others without difficulties.—My fate has already too severely prov'd what we are to expect without it! The
man of my tenderest approbation torn from me by his mercenary
rigid parents, and banish'd from his native home, because
they then thought me friendless—"penniless". (5-6) ["Penniless" is marked as text omitted in representation.]
Starke doesn't flinch from aligning Mrs. Tartar's immorality with her complexion
and the insinuation that she is of mixed race. The phrase "blue-cast" condenses class and racial hybridity into one figure. The racialization of the
line between making and receiving a fortune is crucial to the moral
economy of Starke's play for Mrs. Tartar is clearly below the line
of respectability. One could argue that the distinction is one
of agency—i.e. that a woman must appear to be the passive recipient of her fortune to be
truly modest and by extension truly white—but such an argument would downplay the degree to which Eliza and Louisa regulate
not only their circulation as sexual commodities, but also their
accession to bourgeois normativity. In a sense, it is their palpable
activity in the marketplace that makes them such a site of interpretive
anxiety for Starke. |
| 18. |
The ambiguities which trouble the interpretation of Eliza and Louisa's mission
at the play's outset are transferred to the intrepretation
of Eliza's dancing in Act III. These ambiguities are tempered
by the fact that Starke's caricature has already undercut the
reliability of witnesses such as Supple or Mrs. Garnish. But
the play is also subtle enough to realize that the performance
of the minuet on stage might create more problems than it would
solve. The minuet may constitute too much of a test to be allowed
into theatrical representation. Instead Eliza's class identity
is secured in part by her testimony of prior knowledge of Mrs
Garnish and in part by her dress. The following is Starke's
stage direction for Eliza and Louisa's entry into the scene
immediately prior to the interchange above:
Enter ELIZA and LOUISA from the Ball Room dress'd with the utmost Simplicity and Elegance of Taste and
Fashion; but their hair without powder, in Curls and Ringlets,
flowing in Abundance down their backs to the Bottom of
their Waists. Several Gentlemen with them; among the rest, MR. SUPPLE and the RESIDENT, over dressed, and very hot. As ELIZA and LOUISA advance, the Ladies all eye them, wink and make all sorts of rude Signs to one
another about them. As ELIZA advances towards MRS. GARNISH, she stares rudely and vulgarly in her Face and apparently examining her whole
Dress and Figure. ELIZA, with the utmost ease and Elegance, sees it, but looks at her with such Nonchalance,
and seems in high Spirits. LOUISA, all elegant softness on the other Side, seems disconcerted at their behaviour.
During this time Music. (33)
The stage direction explicitly contrasts the excessive qualities of Garnish,
Gobble and Bronze with the simplicity and lack of artifice in the
appearance of the Moreton sisters. In this representational economy "elegance" and "ease" are not only separated from luxury, but also attached to veracity of character.
In other words, the elegance of the Moreton sisters signifies that
they are who the seem to be. |
| 19. |
This is no small matter for normativity comes with the privilege of representational
lack. When one compares the description of Eliza and Louisa
to that of Mrs. Garnish, Mrs. Gobble and Miss Bronze it becomes
clear that the critique of luxury that runs through the play
extends to the economy of representation itself. Even at the
level of naming, the distinction between character and caricature
is manifest. Mrs. Garnish's name in contemporary usage means "tip" and carries with it the double connotation of corruption or bribery and implies
that she is a gratuity or a trophy bride. Mrs. Gobble clearly
connotes vulgar avarice and together they constitute a perfect
complement not only to the figure of the dissipated Company
man discussed earlier, but also to Foote's Nabob Matthew Mite.
Foote makes much of Mite's former career as a cheese-monger
and Starke plays out a similar gesture in her description of
Mrs. Garnish's baked goods. The degree to which the frostings
and creams figure Mrs. Garnish's body is perhaps debatable,
but such a figuration is in keeping with Starke's overall rhetorical
strategies for the caricature of Mrs. Garnish partakes in the
general discourse of prostitution. At one level, Starke provides
her audience with the perverse counterpart to the unmanly Company
servant for Mrs. Garnish and Mrs. Gobble are at once hypersexualized
and yet the epitome of indolence. The former process is explicit
in their critique of Eliza and Louisa's unwillingness to receive all the men of the Factory:
MRS. GOB. (bawling) Lord, Mrs. Garnish, why I hear they have received no company! There is not
a man in the rooms can tell me one word what they're like.
MRS. BRONZE. O Ma'am te, he, he, he! Mrs. Tartar was just now telling me the
ladies were so squeamish, truly! they wou'd not admit
the gentlemen to pay their compliments, for fear it should
be thought they came to get husbands. Te, he, he!
[The ladies at the tables laugh with affected airs.] (33)
The Morning Chronicle review takes special notice of this scene and singles out the laugh of Mrs.
Edwin, who played Mrs. Gobble, "in the scene of the Rout as well as her tone of conversation [as] highly comic
and [a] strong exemplification of character". |
| 20. |
Interestingly, Eliza's defense of her refusal to receive the men of the factory
in the play's first scene also raises the question of female
laughter but only after clarifying that she and Louisa will
only be commodified in very specific ways:
ELIZA. ...Mrs. Tartar's very angry with me, because I don't like to be—to be kissed by all the five hundred gentlemen belonging to your presidency here;
and—she says, you will make me.
RES. Ha, ha, ha! Why to be sure it's the usual form to receive visits of the
factory at Ladies first arrival; and who would not wish
to salute a pretty Lady, if he cou'd contrive it, you
know? adod, it makes me long for a kiss myself.
ELIZA. Very likely, but as it is your sex's privilege to ask, so it is our's to refuse; and to be oblig'd to be dress'd up in grand gala, stuck on a Sopha, at the
upper end of a room, for three nights running, to be
view'd at will—as who should say—what d'ye please to buy, gentlemen? Monstrous, and then submitting to the salute of every man that approaches one,
is such an indelicate custom.——(10-11)
In this defense of her sexual character, Eliza explicitly marks her two-fold
resistance both to Indianization and overt commodification. What
is more the two processes are understood to be indistinguishable—to be stuck on the sopha is to be brought to market. (23) But Eliza is also careful to emphasize that her critique here is not an absolute
refusal to circulate in the sexual marketplace:
ELIZA. Nay, now, good Mrs. Tartar, don't hurry yourself—you and I shall never agree on this subject: "for though I despise prudery, I cannot bear any thing which degrades my sex,"—No one has a greater flow of spirits, or more laughing chearfulness than myself,
by some ill-naturedly term'd coquetry....(11)
Eliza recognizes that limited circulation is crucial for the maintenance of her
value in the only marketplace she cares about—namely, the metropolitan marriage market. What I find interesting here is that
it is the quality of Eliza's laugh that simultaneously separates
her from the likes of Mrs. Gobble and Mrs. Garnish yet still
renders her susceptible to the charge of coquetry. Like the
minuet, the subtle gradations of bodily performance that
establish class distinction also require equally subtle skills
of interpretation from the viewer. The ascription of the
latter judgement to the "ill-natured" suggests that Starke not only advocates for a certain amount of sexual agency
for women, but also suggests that those viewers who are unable
to distinguish between degrees of performance are themselves
suspect. One could argue that Eliza and the Morning Chronicle are performing the same discursive containment of masculine critique for the
reviewer also uses the phrase "ill-natured" to describe the hissing auditors on opening night. |
| 21. |
If the vulgar laugh of Mrs. Gobble, Mrs. Garnish and Miss. Bronze is a sign of
too much sexual experience, then their actions at cards signify
in a similarly complex fashion. The fact that they are playing
cards at all weaves them into a discursive fabric that clothes
much of the writing on English India in the 70s and 80s. The
extraordinary financial gains which could be gained through
a successful Eastern career were frequently connected to the
overall rhetoric surrounding gaming in the period. Late in
the century gaming is perhaps the only libertine vice that
can be brought into representation and therefore it becomes
emblematic for excesses beyond those associated with luxury.
In other words, there is a sexual connotation active in the
discourse on gambling that surfaces quite palpably in Starke's
stage direction. (24) The details of the card games are quite interesting in this light. Mrs. Garnish
states that she "plays alone, in diamonds" thereby simultaneously linking her greed for jewels to a certain auto-eroticism
(32). Similarly, when Mrs. Gobble discovers that hearts are
trump she states "Ah, hearts! I like that—I have always so many of 'em.—My lead—play a club, Pompey" (32). The joke cuts in two directions at once for although she boasts of many
loves or hearts, she has only clubs or black cards to lead
with. It is difficult to say if the audience would have received
this as a racial joke or simply an expression of Mrs. Gobble's
palpable undesirability. The spectre of interracial sexuality
haunts the entire scene in much the same way that it infuses
Mackintosh's description of the company servant. The relationship
between Mrs. Garnish, Mrs. Gobble and their slaves clearly
translates the excessive bodily intimacy and laziness of the
earlier representations of male nabobs and with that translation
comes the implied charge of sexual impropriety of a quite specific
kind. If Mackintosh and Foote's nabobs are feminized, then
Starke's women are doubly perverse for they imitate a flawed
masculinity. The caricature is of women behaving as feminized
men. (25) |
| |
Sword play
|
| 22. |
However, it is precisely this economy of caricature which threatens the characterization
of Eliza and Louisa. As I have already argued, both the mission
and the actions of the Moreton cousins are susceptible to
charges of gender impropriety. In a sense, the excessive
caricature of Mrs. Garnish et al establishes the relative
normativity of Eliza and Louisa's character. The important
qualification here is the word "relative" for I would argue that Starke preserves a certain amount of agency for her characters
through this comparative excess. As Dror Wahrman has recently
argued the late 1780s sees a constitutive decline in gender
play on the stage as emergent forms of bourgeois sexuality
begin to more stringently regulate the scope of female agency. (26) Wahrman builds his argument from careful readings of Prologues and Epilogues
during the period, and I would argue that Colman's epilogue
deserves further consideration for it marks precisely what
must be contained in Eliza and Louisa's character for The Sword of Peace to avoid charges of impropriety. When Miss Farren comes on stage for the Epilogue,
she is still dressed as Eliza and hence she speaks with that
character's mildly coquettish demeanour. With this in mind
it is important to imagine the effect of a woman speaking
Colman's lines for the first verse paragraph ridicules excessive
factionalism in the realm of politics and the second ridicules
male homosocial violence in the realm of fashionable society.
In other words, the epilogue offers a critique of specific
forms of public masculinity that I would like to address
in turn before demonstrating the masculinization of Eliza
and Louisa. (27) |
| 23. |
Colman brings the critique of factionalism into the theatre by addressing the
male audience directly:
Are there not some among you, then, who cease
To smile, when hearing of a Sword of Peace?
Speak, ye Militia Captains! Train Bands, speak!
Think ye, 'gainst you our Author wrote in pique?—
Dumb! like your swords, unus'd to face the light!
Speak, then, Sir Matthew Plumb, the addressing Knight!
You who have seen the sword—ah, great beholder!
Have seen it, flaming, peaceful o'er your shoulder.
It is hard to determine if Colman is invoking Foote's Sir Matthew Mite—Plumb was frequently associated with nabobry—but the overall tone is quite aggressive. As a critique of those committed to
conflict for the sake of conflict—a group which may include not only the various factions of the East India Company
which scapegoated Clive, but also those who wish to isolate imperial
mismanagement in the person of Warren Hastings—the lines suggest that those who make a career of conflict like politicians and
soldiers do so in backrooms safe from the light of scrutiny. The
image of the sword behind the back implies that back-stabbing remains
an active and shameful part of metropolitan political life. |
| 24. |
In contrast The Sword of Peace, by nature of its publicity operates in a different fashion in part because
it is in the hands of a woman:
But that our Sword of Peace may frighten no man,
Know, brave gallants! 'tis wielded by a woman.
Let it not, then, with others, be abolish'd,
'Tis harmless, and, she hopes, not quite unpolish'd
Such as it is, we can't be apprehensive
That this, our Sword of Peace, will prove a sword offensive.
At one level, emphasizing the fact of female authorship is aimed at softening
the rhetoric of the play's critics, but such a reading underestimates
the degree to which the epilogue's anti-duelling rhetoric participates
in a larger cultural turn away from the intricate codes of honour
which V. G. Kiernan and others have argued are integral to aristocratic
self-stylization in the eighteenth century. At the time of Starke's
play, duelling is in disrepute and as Donna Andrew persuasively
argues "an outcome of the long struggle against duelling was the emergence of a body
of thinking, which, while at first identifying itself merely negatively,
that is, as against duelling, came to a new vision of society based
on reasonableness, Christianity and commerce, in which duelling
ceased to be practised simply because it appeared incongrous and
foolish." (28) This new vision of society was one suited to the ascendancy of the commercial
class. (29) Importantly, the disapprobation of duelling partook of the discourse of degeneracy
and monstrosity. In other words, the discourses of anti-duelling
and of anti-nabobry share rhetorical strategies. The epilogue's
second verse paragraph not only ridicules the down-grading of duelling
to fisticuffs, but also offers satirical comedy and specifically
Starke's play as a more socially appropriate mode of conflict resolution.
Rather than retiring to the field of honour the audience are encouraged
to attend the theatre. What interests me here is that Colman's
critique of boxing works primarily through the feminization of
his fighting Lords. For these men "The sword...has long been out of fashion" thereby leaving the sword to be taken up by the female knight. This implies
that Starke wields the sword and figuratively enters the masculinized
realm of publicity because men have failed to accede to their phallic
responsibilities. And this masculinization extends to or is rather
continuous not only with how the sword functions in the play, but
also with the limited masculinization of Eliza and Louisa which
relegates their characters to the near margin of feminine normativity. |
| 25. |
When first discussing The Sword of Peace with colleagues it became immediately apparent that the sword itself posed significant
problems for interpretation. First, Louisa's mission to recover
such an overtly phallic object raised questions regarding not
only her femininity, but also Starke's understanding of the
place of violence and honour in the colonial sphere. Significantly,
Louisa's task is consistently intertwined with notions of aristocratic
honour and the recovery of a failed masculinity:
ELIZA. ...you know, the generous Clairville, deserted by a father, through Sir
Thomas Clairville's generous assistance, sought a fortune
here, denied him by a parent. Death put a stop to the noble
youth's career, and has occasioned your commission of the
sword, for which I honour Sir Thomas with enthusiasm.
LOUISA. And he deserves it.—His nobly offering the legacy of Clairville's gratitude has left him, to purchase
the sword of the deceas'd youth, that he may preserve
it as a trophy of honor to his memory"—
ELIZA. An exertion of delicate, generous sensibility towards deceased merit,
that characterizes Sir Thomas in that glorious singularity
of an Englishmen, who repays with munificent gratitude
everlasting remembrance to the noble actions of their
deceas'd heroes.—Who would not sacrifice life to be thus gloriously remembered? (7)
As Starke is at pains to emphasize, Clairville's Eastern career is necessitated
by an act of paternal neglect that Louisa's embassy is designed
to set right. |
| 26. |
But it is clear that the sword is destined to commemorate a past not a present
glory. Significantly, the play's exemplary male character,
Mr. David Northcote performs none of the intricate codes of
aristocratic masculinity. Instead, his honor is a function
of his "generosity" and "benevolence":
NORTH: Yes, Mr. Resident, I feel for human nature, of whetever colour or description;
I feel for the name and character of an Englishman. "I feel neither the power of gold, prejudice, nor partiality: and where the lives
and properties, or even happiness, of others are concerned,
I have ever regarded the impulse of humanity." [The end of the speech is marked as a passage omitted in representation.] (51)
Northcote ends the play as the new Resident, but Starke is careful to distance
his humanity and his commitment to the rule of law from the sword.
Significantly, the accession of Northcote is represented not only
as necessary step towards hegemonic control of all sectors of the
population, but also as an event in which arms have a solely ceremonial
and therefore vestigial purpose:
JEF. ...—my dear sweet ladies alive, and Mr. Northcote made Resident—the whole place is run wild for joy, Sir—blacks and whites, masters and slaves, half casts and blue casts, Gentoos and
Mussulmen, Hindoos and Bramins, officers and soldiers, sailors
and captains—and if his honor the Resident don't stop them, they won't have an ounce of gunpowder
in the whole garrison. (57)
The fact that Northcote sees no reason for stopping the depletion of the garrison's
gunpowder is a sign of his confidence in the effectivity of British
justice practised without the corruption of his predecessors. This
subtle shift from gunpowder's role in military domination to its
expenditure as celebratory spectacle suggests a confident—and self-congratulatory—shift away from violent governance towards a kind of inculcation of acquiescence
among the colonial population that is modelled on the audience
consumption of theatrical effects. |
| 27. |
As in the epilogue, it would appear that the female figure whether it be Louisa
or Starke herself plays a mediating role between an outmoded
aristocratic code of masculine behaviour and an emergent form
of commercial civility exemplified by the space of the theatre
itself. In other words, Louisa is able to handle the sword
but only to discharge its phallic qualities in the present
so that it can take its place in the invention of tradition
so crucial to Britain's self-fashioning at this historical
moment. Could it be that a sword in any other hands than a
woman's threatens to weaken the very claims to civility which
are increasingly bearing the moral burden of the metropolitan
nation's just governance of colonial affairs? An affirmative
answer to this question underscores the importance of the kind
of femininity enacted by Eliza, Louisa and by Starke herself—a femininity that partakes of a limited amount of masculinized public agency
to dramatize the necessity of restraining male homosocial desires
in the realm of politics, of commerce and of love. |
| |
Daniel J. O'Quinn
University of Guelph
Daniel J. O'Quinn is an Assistant 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 , Theatre Journal, Studies in Romanticism,
and October.
|
| |
Notes
1. I am indebted to Marjean D. Purinton's unpublished essay "Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace: Staging the Myths of British Cultural Politics in India" for introducing me to the play. (back)
2. Morning Chronicle and Public Advertizer, Monday August 11, 1788. The character referred to as Moujadee in the review
goes by the name Mazinghi Dowza in the 1790 edition of the play. (back)
3. See P.J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: Oxford UP, 1965) for a detailed and succinct account of the complex
issues at stake in the impeachment. One of Burke's primary objectives in
his "Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill," The Complete Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1866) was "to awaken something of sympathy for the unfortunate natives". As Sara Suleri argues in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 24-36, the recognition of a relation of sympathy
is one of Burke's most important innovations in the discussion of imperial
culpability. (back)
4. See P.J. Marshall, "The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700-1765," The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2 The Eighteenth Century, Ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 494. Regulating private trade
and the circulation of bribes and gift proved to be a persistent problem
for colonial governance. (back)
5. Dowza's double expressions resonate with some aspects of Burke's assault on
the Hastings defence. Those defending Hastings argued that his actions
were justified because arbitrary power was the very substance of governmental
relations in Asia. Burke, however, suggested that Hastings misunderstood
the nature of Moslem governance by failing to recognize that Moslem law
is subject to divine authority. In other words, Dowza's expression of piety
indicates that he may be manipulable, but that he also knows that his actions
are wrong. This prepares the ground for his decision to secretly oppose
the Resident's designs. (back)
6. Quoted in Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995) 160. I am strongly indebted to Teltscher's analysis
of the contestation of this particular representation and of anti-Company
discourse in general. (back)
7. All three figures circulate as sober examples of civilized British governance.
During the trial of Clive, Lord North was portrayed as the Rat-catcher
who was responsible for cleaning up the Company. See Percival Spear, Master of Bengal: Clive and his India (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 187. As Teltscher argues, Augustus Cleveland
operated as the figure for the myth of benevolent British rule throughout
the 1780s and 90's (121-4). During the trial of Warren Hastings, Hastings's
defense frequently invoked the figure of Cleveland and the narrative of
civilizing rule in an exculpatory fashion through a series of Indian testimonials
(181). Cornwallis was frequently celebrated as a corrective to the excesses
of previous colonial administrators. (back)
8. For detailed accounts of these texts see Allen Edwardes, The Rape of India: A biography of Lord Clive and a sexual history of the conquest
of Hindustan, (New York: The Julian Press, 1966). Edwardes's analysis should be treated with
some skepticism, but unlike other biographers of Clive he provides copious
examples of the sexual discourse surrounding Clive. (back)
9. For a detailed analysis of the place of sexual violence in Burke's opening charge,
see Suleri 60-64. (back)
10. Rajat Kanta Ray, "Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765-1818" in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2 The Eighteenth Century. Ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 512. (back)
11. See Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 185-205, for an illuminating discussion of the
feminzation of the body politic and imperial degeneracy. (back)
12. Teltscher, 172. Marshall makes this point in India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment 1786-1788: The Writings and
Speeches of Edmund Burke vi (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 5. (back)
13. See Teltscher's discussion of Tea and Sugar, or the Nabob and the Creole, 172-4. (back)
14. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 38. (back)
15. The most famous cultural expression of this anxiety is the gambling scene in
Foote's The Nabob, but concern about excessive speculation was almost ubiquitous in the press
in the late 1760's and early 1770's when the East India Company's credit
failed. This failure actuated a collapse in the value of the East India
Company stock that generated comparisons to the infamous South Sea Bubble.
See Spear 186. (back)
16. For the use of the term "country-born" see Phoebe Gibbes, Hartly House Calcutta and Felicity Nussbaum's discussion of the novel in Torrid Zones: maternity, sexuality, and empire in Eighteenth-century English
narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 167-191. (back)
17. The play constantly verges on this kind of double critique, but Mrs. Bronze
is only fleetingly figured and the Inkle and Yarico allusion is never tied into the Jeffreys/Caesar subplot. (back)
18. Sheridan's speech on the Begums charge argues that Hastings pushed those in
his power into breaking the sacred bonds of filial piety on which Hindu
society is structured. Burke's suggestion that Britain is contaminating
an already structured Hindu socius and that this frequently involved infringements
on female propriety that rendered women without caste are recurring themes
in the opening speeches. (back)
19. David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet
from c. 1450-1825 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973), 360-1. (back)
20. For the most extensive post-colonial readings of The Nabob see Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1996), 60-76, and Renu Juneja, "The Native and the Nabob: Representations of the Indian Experience in Eighteenth-Century
English Literature," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992), 183-98. (back)
21. See Andrew Edwardes, 298. (back)
22. The Dublin edition is illegible at this point; inserted text is from the edition
on the BWP1800 site. (back)
23. This speech makes a link between the play's abolitionist rhetoric and its proto-feminist
critique of the marriage market. As Eliza states "I look upon [the practice of receiving all the men of the Factory] with the most sovereign contempt; 'and I sincerely hope the traffic will be abolished, as still more disgraceful to our sex than that of poor slaves to a nation'" (9). Interestingly, the direct invocation of the slave trade is relegated solely
to the closet and may be perceived as too inflammatory for the stage. (back)
24. Of course the sexualization of cards receives its canonical treatment in The Rape of the Lock. (back)
25. This is nowhere more evident than in the repeated assertion of Mrs. Tartar's
indolence. (back)
26. See Dror Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth- Century England," Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 113-160. (back)
27. Marjean Purinton examines the masculinization of Eliza and Louisa at the level
of the play's narrative specifically around their mission to acquire Clairville's
sword. As she states, "In seeking to disarm the lieutenant from his sword, Eliza encourages Louisa to
hide her feelings and to don the mask of masculinity...Eliza occupies the
masculine position of conquistador who offers, upon her arrival, homage
to a goddess, an embodied and idealized India who can, at least temporarily,
function in the gendered "other" position to Eliza's staged masculinity" (7). This analysis resonates with Balachandra Rajan's discussion in "Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India" of the feminization of Indian space in late eighteenth-century narrative representations
of India and constitutes an important area of consideration which lies
beyond the scope of this essay. See Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Duke: Duke UP, 1999), 118-38. (back)
28. "The code of honour and its critics: the opposition to duelling in England, 1700-1850" Social History 5 (1980): 411. (back)
29. As Andrew argues, "This new class...could and did reject the established norms of gentlemanliness,
which the code of honour represented, and substitute its own redefinition
of the term. Duelling ceased being described by its opponents as a practice
indulged in by the man of honour or fashion; duelling became represented
instead as a preoccupation of vicious indulgence of a class. Duelling was identified as a failing of the upper classes and, as such, roundly
condemned" (429). (back) |
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