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| Purinton, Marjean D. 'The Pedagological Plays of Hannah More, Jane Austen, and
Joanna Baillie: Ways of Teaching Dramas by Women Playwrights
around 1800.' British Women Playwrights around 1800. 15 February 2005. 13 pars. <http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/teaching/purinton_plays.html>
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Copyright © Contributor, 2005-2008. This essay
is protected under the copyright laws of the United States and
the Universal Copyright Convention. Publication (print or electronic)
or commercial use of any of the copyrighted materials without direct
authorization from the copyright holder is strictly prohibited.
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| 1. |
As scholars and teachers of Romantic literature, we well understand that the
period’s educational revolution staged consciousness-raising about
the gender bias operative in its prevailing theories and practices
of instruction. Educational change during the period came slowly,
however, as the 1836 short story “The History of a Child,” Letitia
Elizabeth Landon’s young female persona observes ways in which
she was short-changed by an educational system that devalued women:
“I was a clever, very clever child, but my mind was far beyond
my years, and it lacked the knowledge which alone can teach us
how to use it powers.”(1) L.E.L.’s persona demonstrates that pedagogical
praxis had not applied to female education the radically innovative
changes championed by its discourses. It is the male respondent
in Maria Edgeworth’s 1795 Letters for Literary Ladies, who claims
that female education should cultivate the general powers of the
mind so as to give women early “the habit of industry and attention,
the love of knowledge, and the power of reasoning: these will enable
[them] to attend to excellent in any pursuit to which [they] may
direct [their] talents.”2 The
often quoted passage of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1792) points out male privilege in pedagogy
against which women vainly struggled: “The education of women has,
of late, been more attended to than formerly; yet they are still
reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers
who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them.”3 Clever
women of the period, it seems, like L.E.L.’s persona, would need
to seek less conventional ways to instruct women and to offer alternative
ways of thinking and being to that which was inculcated by late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century patriarchy. |
| 2. |
In our own pedagogical preparations of Romantic-period materials, we have come
to recognize thoughtfully, regard critically, and teach regularly
the pedagogical, and in some instances didactic, nature of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century discourses, particularly those addressing
the emergent middle class, the working classes, and women. We have
also come to see the vital role played by British women playwrights
ever mindful of the limitations and obstacles of female education.
Recent work on Romantic drama by women has moreover considered
its pedagogical contribution to the period’s revolution in educational
theories and practices, as well as dramaturgical and literary histories,
nation and empire building, gender and familial dynamics. In an
article entitled “Revising Romanticism by Inscripting Women Playwrights”
that I wrote for Romanticism on the Net in 1998, I made the claim
that our understandings of Romanticism were significantly enriched
by the recovery and accessibility of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dramas by women.4 Since 1998, we have, in fact, witnessed
paradigmatic changes in Romantic-period studies as a result of
including dramas by women in our scholarship and in our classes. |
| 3. |
Newly published editions of Romantic drama, including that written by women,
as well as the hypertexts on the website British Women Playwrights
around 1800 have made it possible for us to integrate Romantic
drama into our syllabi.5 Finally, we have come to recognize in
this process that our own pedagogical strategies for presenting
Romantic women playwrights and their works have been informed by
the pedagogical nature of the very dramas they penned for reading
and for production during their day.6 The pedagogical nature of
women’s drama has impelled me, over the last few years, to become
more acutely aware of the pedagogical strategies I employ in teaching
Romantic literature generally and Romantic drama particularly.
My students’ analyses of the pedagogy in Romantic women’s dramas
have encouraged them, many of whom are aspiring teachers, to become
mindful of the multiple venues and practices in which public education
occurs, not only during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, but today as well. In other words, many Romantic dramas by women engage students at the level
of meta-pedagogical awareness and discussion. |
| 4. |
Our efforts at teaching Romantic drama by women will, I predict, increase with
the addition of this “teaching” section to the website British
Women Playwrights around 1800, a site already providing hypertexts
and critical materials. Here we can share the praxis of teaching
British women playwrights of the period, the practical experiments,
successes, and insights of individual efforts made manifest for
collective use, a staging, as it were, of pedagogical performances.
Here the pedagogical aspirations for which many Romantic women
playwrights sought have found contemporary restoration and revitalization.
In this, my own introductory offering to the teaching section of
British Women Playwrights around 1800, I wish to examine the multifaceted
pedagogical functions in Hannah More’s juvenile drama “The Search
After Happiness: A Pastoral Drama for Young Ladies” (1762) and
Sacred Dramas (1782); Jane Austen’s early dramatic efforts, although
fragmentary, “The Visit,” “The Mystery,” and “The First Act of
a Comedy” (1787-1790); and Joanna Baillie’s evangelical drama The Bride (1836). All of
these plays are explicitly pedagogical, intended for young audiences,
and latently radical, even as they purport to fulfill conventional
and Christian purposes. |
| 5. |
More’s and Baillie’s plays have generally been seen as examples of writing directed
toward conservative endorsements of patriarchal, Christian authority.
More’s and Austen’s early experiments with drama have also been
characterized as exercises in which both writers endeavored to
discover their appropriately “feminine” voices for their later
works. But I want to suggest alternative readings of these plays,
arguing that they reveal important engagements with issues and
controversies of the day, science and nationalism, class destabilizations,
and gendered behaviors, for example, which betray a radical ideology.
Furthermore, I assert that in exploring the pedagogical potential
of drama, each woman came to realize something about herself,
about her own “mind,” as L.E.L’s persona expresses it, recognitions
that are also shared with young, primarily female, audiences
who are impelled to experience a self-discovery process that
replicates fictionalized characters of the play as well as the
women playwrights themselves. These plays draw their young audiences into the meaning-making process
with their double voiced nature, what Mitzi Myers has identified
as “cross-writing,” a characteristic of all children’s literature
that deploys a dialogic mix of older and younger voices, or a
colloquy between a writer’s past and present selves.”7 In other
words, whether staged or read to young audiences, these dramas
address the child reader/performer and the adult reader/spectator
as well as the child reader/performer and child spectator—meanings
at multiple levels of reception and understanding. These dramas
also suggest that women playwrights, even a young Hannah More
and Jane Austen, were astutely concerned with issues of the day
and the pedagogical potential inherent in drama, enactments of
life’s lessons and critical thinking processes. At a metadramatic
level, furthermore, writing drama serves its own pedagogical
purpose in its generic demands for the embodiment and the enactment
of sensitive subject matters that must be rendered legitimate and authorized by women writers. Women playwrights interrupt
and therefore challenge the demarcation of private and public
spaces, female and male roles, decorum, and perceptions. Finally,
I want to suggest some ways in which our own teaching might incorporate
pedagogical plays of the period written by women as an avenue
for understanding educational issues and gender dynamics, including
female authority and agency.
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| 6. |
Despite the antitheatrical position of Evangelical Christianity, young Hannah
More perceived in drama the potential for teaching other women
like herself attitudes about the promise of expanded sense of
maternal duty that included philanthropic, educational, and social
work
beyond the home. She wrote “The Search After Happiness” as a
pedagogical pastoral play to be performed at girls’ boarding
schools, and although
Sacred Dramas was intended for private readings, it too was performed
by children at the Park Street girls’ school managed by Hannah
and her sister. Both Sacred Dramas and “The Search After Happiness”
deploy gender as a category through which to express the period’s
preoccupations with the supernatural and science. Cleora’s search
for happiness leads her to the study of science, which, as she
explains, seeks to limit her sex to matters of appearance and
beauty. She boldly ventures into those sciences promoted specifically
as
masculine: astronomy, math, philosophy, chemistry, and physics
and turns away from the conventionally gendered “feminine” sciences—poetical and taxonomical
botany, for example. She expresses her determination to learn
about the effects of natural phenomenon, the domain of male science:
The schoolmen’s systems now my mind employ’d,
Their crystal Spheres, their Atoms, and their Void;
Newton and Halley all my soul inspir’d,
And numbers less than calculations fir’d;
Decartes and Euclid, shar’d my varying breast,
And plans and problems all my soul possess’d.8
Cleora’s scientific inquiries, however, lead her to “think
like a man,” to use science as a vehicle for egotistical self-aggrandizement
rather than the means
through which humankind might be helped and reformed. Importantly, The danger
that More’s drama depicts is not science, but the application of science
toward masculinist goals and in male-centered ways. |
| 7. |
The soliloquy “Reflection of King Hezekiah in His Sickness,” an addendum to
Sacred Dramas, conflates gender with science linked to nationalism,
as King Hezekiah functions as a synecdoche for a sick and dying
nation. The diseased body was a metaphoric commonplace in discourses
about the French Revolution, but here More applies it to the
national crisis with which Britain was engaged, a diseased body
in need of female-derived reform as it antidote. Sickness was
something More knew first-hand as she suffered from headaches,
toothaches, severe fevers, and delirium throughout her life,
and so her diseased body metaphor was derived from the period’s
political discourse and from experiential knowledge of her own
body. Medicine and quackery, the scientific and the supernatural,
are conflated in another Sacred Drama “Belshazzar” also displaced
and articulated through gender. Belshazzar’s weak, feminine leadership
has been affected by the “magic poppies” of war whose “delicate
opiates” charm him into “fatal slumbers.”9 When supernatural, mysterious writing appears on the palace wall from a
shadowy hand, Belshazzar assumes he is hallucinating, dreaming,
or intoxicated, but then he calls upon his learned magicians
and sage astrologers to discern the mystic characters. When they
cannot make legible what is illegible, Belshazzar shouts, “Curse
on your shallow arts, your lying science!”10 and order their
executions. Both science and the supernatural are indicted in
Sacred Dramas as pretending to profess knowledge (culturally
gendered masculine) that gives power over those who do not possess
such knowledge (culturally gendered feminine). As science and
medicine became increasingly professionalized and masculinized
during the Romantic period, they too became public sites for
the assertion of male privilege and power, sites that More’s
dramas cast as provisionally strong, justified, and sanctioned
by the myths that they generate about themselves.
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| 8. |
Sacred Dramas also portray radical assertions of female agency as an essential
pedagogical force for Great Britain in its national and colonial
projects. Gender relationships serves as a trope for nationalism
centered in female connectedness. In the familiar story of “Moses
in the Bulrushes,” for example, More emphasizes the role that
the Egyptian princess comes to play in saving the Jewish people
and nation. This “sacred drama” instructs its young audience
not to accept a passive and weak femininity, but to act with
compassion and strength, a role that has the potential to change
human interactions so that they are more harmonious and less
destructive. In “David and Goliath,” gender-bending characterization
of a feminized David facilitates a similar message, for it is
in the gender-bending spaces where class and national issues
are staged. Against the background of male engendered war, we
discover David playing his harp and singing devotionals. When
David confronts the giant man, Goliath smirks: “Give me a man, if your effeminate band / A man can boast,” for he will not “war
with boys.”11 David does not allow Goliath’s insulting taunts,
brute strength, or enormous size to deter his rational and perceptive
intellect, for ultimately, David out-smarts and out-talks the
giant. The drama performs gender-bending as a site where gendered
qualities of leadership might be examined, even though it comes
up short in its endorsement of domestic leadership, for Saul
and David themselves fall victims to the imperialist and masculinist
ideology that their leadership had temporarily suspended. More
demonstrates to her audience how difficult it is for men to sustain
an alternative to the powerful status quo, but she nevertheless
challenges readers and spectators to entertain a different way
of thinking and behaving.
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| 9. |
Joanna Baillie’s Christian drama The Bride was commissioned by Sir Alexander
Johnston, President of His Majesty’s Council in Ceylon for the
expressed purpose of civilizing and Christianizing the people of
Ceylon. In the drama’s Preface, Baillie likens the people of Ceylon
to children who are being led from ignorance to enlightenment by
Western discourses such as her play: “To see the mind of a child
awakening by degrees from the dreamy indistinctness of infancy
to a clearer observation of what he beholds around, and a capacity
to compare and to reason on the differences and resemblances he
perceives, is a most pleasing and interesting sight; so in a far
greater degree does the rousing a race or nation from its infancy
of ignorance and delusion, interest and excite every mind of any
feeling or reflection.”12 |
| 10. |
The play condemns Ceylon’s practice of polygamy through Artina’s resistance to
her husband’s second wife, for which she is imprisoned, and an
alternative marital philosophy espoused by the Spanish physician
Juan de Creda. De Creda’s Christian message promotes mutual love
and forgiveness in heterosexual and monogamous relationships. Artina
is torn between two cultures (Eastern, its associations with heathenism,
and Western, its associations with European Christianity) that
seek to define her role in marriage and home. The Bride dramatizes
Christian ethos, but it also represents the paradigmatic civilizing
mission that characterized British imperialism of the nineteenth
century and therefore seems to participate pedagogically in the
process of British imperialism. More radically, however, The Bride
acts out oppositional thinking to expose the ways in which British
imperialism is rooted in an epistemology in which the culture with
the power, the “truth,” and the resources becomes that which teaches
and normalizes all others. Baillie’s Preface to The Bride reminds us that the play seeks
to promote critical thinking so the child-like audience may acquire
the capacity to compare and contrast ideas, to reason causal relations,
and, as L.E.L terms it, to use knowledge’s powers. Like the young
woman who is accidentally unveiled at the beginning of the play,
a critical reading of the subtext of The Bride that takes into
account its “cross-writing” and double-voiced qualities, unveils
the Christian myth as an appealing face whose function is not all
that it appears. For at least some readers or spectators, The Bride
points to the potential injuries inflicted on people entrapped
between cultures, both demanding conformity to one at the expense
of the other. |
| 11. |
Recent critical studies by Penny Gay and Paula Byrne entitled Jane Austen and
the Theatre detail the many ways in which Austen was engaged with
theatre culture throughout her life, reading diverse dramas, attending
play productions in London and Bath, participating in the family’s
private theatricals, and writing experimental drama.13 These studies
help us to see how much theatre is embedded in Austen’s novels,
and Austen’s fragmentary dramas reveal her sensitivity to the period’s
class and colonial issues. She envisioned “The Visit” to be a comedy
in two acts but completed only two scenes, both of which take place
at Lord Fitzgerald’s house, where guests discover that there is
never enough of anything. The beds are too short, and there are
insufficient chairs to accommodate everyone. For dinner, the Fitzgeralds
serve food and drink more suited to rustics than the landed gentry.
This satire on materialism also incorporates bourgeois interest
in possessing all things oriental. Lord Fitzgerald explains how his grandmother destroyed the hothouse “in order to build a receptable for
the Turkies with it’s materials.”14 “The Mystery,” another unfinished
comedy, is set in the home of the Humbugs, the family name being
an eighteenth-century slang term for someone who practices deception
or fraud, suggesting that the mystery at the center of the play
may have something to do with business transactions, family inheritance,
colonial trade, or property exchanges—including marital arrangements,
perhaps. The “mystery” of the Humbug household involves some secret
about a settlement, and while various characters speculate about
who might tell it, for the audience, it remains unrevealed. The
setting for “The First Act of a Comedy,” occurs at an inn seven
miles from London, where we find Chloe en route to the capital
to marry Strephon and unaware that Strephon occupies another room
at the inn, having been brought there from Staines, a village seventeen
miles southwest of London, in order to pay Postilion eighteen pence
which he owes. Rather than give Postilion a bad guinea, all the currency that
he has, Strephon offers an undirected letter, one hand-delivered
and without an address, that he had received from Chloe. As in
“The Mystery,” the fragmentary “First Act of a Comedy” hints at
transactions emphasizing exchangeable currencies, for it would
seem that Strephon will settle his account by passing a woman rather
than a coin to Postilion. All three of Austen’s fragmentary dramas
satirically hint at the period’s obsession with “getting and spending,
“ undeveloped pedagogical warnings for an emergent middle class
driven by a mercantile economy. |
| 12. |
How might we integrate pedagogical plays by Hannah More, Jane Austen, and Joanna
Baillie in our own Georgian and Romantic period courses? How might
we teach women’s teaching texts—especially to students who are
themselves undergoing teacher training? Because these dramas are
short, it is possible to reproduce them or to utilize a small segment
from the longer plays as complements to other “conduct” discourses
written during the period. These dramas facilitate the introduction
of students to units that feature educational discourses and children’s
literature, something of particular interest to my students pursuing
elementary and middle school language-arts education certifications.
The dramas’ double-voiced qualities also help students to discover
reading strategies useful in interpreting other Romantic texts
and genres—multiple voices and frameworks of reference, displaced
and latent content, cross-writing and parody, unreliable storytellers
and sources of stories. Students enjoy reading these dramas out loud or even enacting them as they might have been performed at girls’ boarding
schools, with girls cross-dressed for the male parts. Before we
teach a full-length drama from the period, we might utilize something
from these dramas as an introduction to the style and function
of Romantic drama; they effectively “set the stage” for full-length
plays by women. As we have seen, these dramas also introduce cultural
interests of the period, science and the supernatural, class and
colonial issues, nationalism and imperialism, gender dynamics and
familial relationships, courtship and marriage. These dramas represent
ways in which education itself was undergoing reforms and changes
and demonstrate how education was used as a tool and vehicle for
the inculcation of new ideas and rebellious ideologies. Finally,
these dramas illustrate ideological and practical obstacles women
playwrights of the period struggled to overcome, writing dramas
that radically challenge the gender roles that their dramas seemingly
and paradoxically reified. |
| 13. |
While we have often used Romantic women’s nonfiction and fiction as the context
in which to read dramas by Romantic women playwrights, as I did
at the beginning of this essay, I suggest that we might find it
equally enriching to read Romantic drama by women as a context
in which to examine other genres written by women of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. What a difference might students’
reading Austen’s fragmentary plays make to their understandings
of the social satire in her novels? Austen’s fragmentary dramas
reveal much about the theatricality of her fiction, all her novels
and not the obvious concerns with the private theatricals in Mansfield
Park. More’s Strictures on Female Education and Cheap Repository
Tracts might take on complexities rendered through readings informed
by her pastoral drama “The Search for Happiness” and her series
of Sacred Dramas. Baillie’s The Bride enriches and even confounds
our understandings of the female evangelical tradition from the
nineteenth century. Students can glean lessons about British commercialism and colonization by
reading More’s Sacred Dramas and Baillie’s The Bride in the context
of Elizabeth Inchbald’s play The Egyptian Boy (1790), another pedagogical
drama by a woman in which national and familial conflicts are played
out in terms of gender norms and the “othering” process.15 |
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Marjean Purinton
Texas Tech University
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Notes
1. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “The History of a Child,” Traits and Trials of Early Life, 1836, in British Literature 1780-1830, ed. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak (Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996), p. 1398. (back)
1
2. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, 1795 (London:
J.M. Dent, 1993), p. 20.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792,
in The Vindications, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough,
ON: Broadview, 1997), p. 112.
4. Marjean D. Purinton, “Revising Romanticism by Inscripting Women
Playwrights,” Romanticism on the Net 12 (November 1998) [19 July
2004] http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n12/005822ar.html
5. In particular, The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, ed.
Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview,
2003); The Siege of Valencia: A Parallel Text Edition, Felicia
Hemans, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Elizabeth Fay (Peterborough, ON:
Broadview, 2002); Plays on the Passions: Joanna Baillie, ed. Peter
Duthie (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001); Five Romantic Plays
1768-1821, ed Paul Baines and Edward Burns (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2000); Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Adrienne
Scullion (London: J.M. Dent, 1996) are affordable paperback editions
that make Romantic women playwrights accessible for our students.
6. See, for example, Marjean D. Purinton, “Pedagogy and Passions:
Teaching Joanna Baillie’s Dramas” in Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist:
Critical Essays, ed. Thomas C. Crochunis (London: Routledge, 2004),
pp. 221-240. This fall, I am teaching a Senior Seminar (the capstone
course for English majors) entitled “Literary Communities,” and
we will use Baillie’s Plays on the Passions as a “test case” for
their suitability in various literary contexts—teaching texts at
all levels, performance scripts for community-based or university
theatrical presentations, selections for general book clubs, manuscripts
worthy of graduate-level scholarship, Women’s Studies historical
artifacts, pedagogical models for educators. In other words, I
hope that my students will discover that Romantic drama by women
had, in its time, as it does potentially today, wide-range uses
and appeal for various audiences and cultural contexts.
7. Mitzi Myers [with U.C. Knoepflmacher], “From the Editors: ‘Cross-Writing’
and the Reconceptualizing of Children’s Literary Studies,” Children’s
Literature 25 (1997): vii.
8. Hannah More, “The Search After Happiness: A Pastoral Drama for
Young Ladies,” 1762, in The Complete Works of Hannah More (New
York: Haper, 1838), p. 114.
9. Hannah More, “Reflection of King Hezekiah in His Sickness,”
1782, in The Complete Works of Hannah More, p. 94.
10. Ibid., p. 98.
11. Hannah More, “David and Goliath,” Sacred Dramas, 1782, in The
Complete Works of Hannah More, p. 90.
12. Joanna Baillie, “Preface,” The Bride, 1836, in The Dramatic
and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, 2nd ed. (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), p. 665.
13. See Paula Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London: Hambledon
and London, 2002) and Penny Gay, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002).
14. Jane Austen, “The Visit: A Comedy in Two Acts,” 1787-1790,
in Minor Works, ed. R.W. Chapman, 1954, revised B.C. Southam (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1975), Act 2, Scene 2, p. 51.
15. See my forthcoming essay “Teaching Orientalism through British
Romantic Drama: Representations of Arabia” in Interrogating Orientalism(s):
Theories and Practices, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass
(Columbus: Ohio State UP). |
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