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White, Daniel E.
'Teaching De Monfort: Noble Simplicity and the Gothic.' British
Women Playwrights around 1800. 15 June 2004. 5 pars. <http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/essays/white_baillie.html>
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| 1. |
During the final weeks of a senior seminar, "Immoral and Profane? British Drama 1660-1798," taught at a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, my students
and I turned to a subject that eighteenth-century drama courses
tend to omit. Following Aphra Behn's The Rover, William Congreve's The Way of the World, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal, the gothic presented us with an opportunity to explore how writers for the
stage responded to the major popular genre of the early Romantic
period. After taking two weeks away from drama to read William
Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads—with its famous rejection of "frantic novels [and] sickly and stupid German Tragedies" (249)—and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, we ended the course with The Italian Monk, James Boaden's adaptation of Radcliffe's novel; Joanna Baillie's Introductory
Discourse from A Series of Plays: In Which It is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions
of the Mind (1798); and finally Baillie's De Monfort: A Tragedy, her play delineating the passion of hatred, accompanied by Jeffrey Cox's Introduction
to Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825 (1992) and selections from Catherine Burroughs' Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women
Writers (1997). |
| 2. |
Throughout the semester we considered the morality of the stage, both as perceived
by Restoration and eighteenth-century cultures at large and as
understood in and represented by the plays themselves. In our
earlier reading we had spent a good deal of time exploring the
ways in which an aristocratic ethos informs ideas of virtue,
from Willmore's cavalier inconstancy in The Rover and Macheath's parody of "the great man" in The Beggar's Opera to Charles Surface's conspicuous consumption and refusal to sell "Noll's picture" in The School for Scandal. In Radcliffe's novel we then found that aesthetic sensibility constitutes the
primary characteristic of an elevated soul as well as the main
index of morality. Whether or not one responds appropriately
to the beautiful and the sublime in nature corresponds to whether
or not one can react sympathetically to human joy or suffering.
Ellena and Vivaldi of course share this capacity, whereas Schedoni
and the inquisitors do not. Both the gothic novel and Boaden's
dramatic adaptation present a familiar association of moral and
aesthetic sensibilities, equating nobility of soul with sympathy
and taste. Baillie's play, set in a "Town in Germany" and concluding in "a Convent Chapel, of old Gothick architecture" (379), similarly aligns the genre with the literature of sensibility yet revises
aesthetic standards, providing a new kind of gothic sublimity
in the noble simplicity of Jane De Monfort, who, never frantic, "in the day of woe, ... ever rose / Upon the mind with added majesty, / As the
dark mountain more sublimely tow'rs / Mantled in clouds and storm" (405). |
| 3. |
Like Lyrical Ballads with its Preface, Baillie's Introductory Discourse and De Monfort, taken together, constitute a radical new aesthetic program that subverts received
tastes and overturns conventional expectations of high and low.
With a working knowledge of Restoration and eighteenth-century
drama and a familiarity with courtly culture and Augustan wit,
students readily grasp the novelty of a dramatic program that
seeks to offer "an unsophisticated genuine stroke of nature" (19). Echoing a sentiment that was frequently expressed in class, the Introductory
Discourse proposes that "the characters of the drama" should be "creatures like ourselves: and if they are untrue to nature, we feel that we are
imposed upon; as though the poet had introduced to us for brethren,
creatures of a different race, beings of another world" (25). De Monfort became particularly interesting, and challenging, for us in its Romantic insistence
on the aesthetic and social equation between nobility and artless
simplicity, on the one hand, along with its depiction of the
passion of hatred as ignoble because it is incompatible with
sensibility, kinship, and community. Like her "homely dress," Jane's (remarkably ungothic) name itself is "artless" and "nobly simple" (327); when she makes her entrance at the beginning of Act II, she thus represents
the antithesis of the "gay profusion" and "gaudy show" of the Countess Freberg's "magnificent" reception room (324). (This is a key part of the play's "investigation of 'Siddons-mania'" [53], as described by Jeffrey Cox.) And when De Monfort reveals that the "raging passion" that burns in his breast is "hate! black, lasting, deadly hate, / Which has thus driv'n me forth from kindred
peace, / From social pleasure, from my native home, / To be a
sullen wand'rer on the earth," Jane commands, "Strive with it, my brother! / ... 'Tis the degrader of a noble heart; / Curse
it, and bid it part" (338-39). |
| 4. |
Having been asked to come to class with a list of lines containing variants
of the word "noble" and notes on their range of meanings, students quickly saw that Jane possesses
a fascinating and unusual kind of power; Freberg's page describes
her "countenance" as "So queenly, so commanding, and so noble, / I shrunk at first in awe; but when
she smil'd, / ... Methought I could have compass'd sea and land
/ To do her bidding" (325). Her nobility is sublime, but, in keeping with Baillie's version of the
gothic, it is unsophisticated and genuine, first commanding awe
through her features and then obedience through her smile, not
the brooding frown or inquisitorial scowl that signifies depths
of passion and power in Radcliffe's and Boaden's works. Furthermore,
her nobility requires a kind of openness, of shared sensibility,
and thus when Freberg tells Jane that De Monfort "is suspicious grown" (326), Jane replies, "Not so, Count Freberg, Monfort is too noble. / Say rather, that he is a man in
grief" (327). Prepared to read the tensions between Jane and De Monfort as involving
the latter's moral failure to perform the role, as Catherine
Burroughs puts it, of "the politely aristocratic and emotionally repressed man" (119), students ultimately settled on an alternative interpretation. It is his
hatred, in fact, that demands emotional repression, preventing
him from unburdening his feelings, first to Freberg and then
to Jane. At the start of Act I, Scene II, De Monfort finds himself
unable to reveal his "secret troubles" to Jane, who asks, "What, must I, like a distant humble friend, / Observe thy restless eye ... /
In timid silence, whilst with yearning heart / I turn aside to
weep? O no! De Monfort! / A nobler task thy noble mind will give;
/ Thy true intrusted friend I still shall be" (335-36). A "noble mind" would open itself, giving Jane the "nobler task" of weeping with De Monfort as his "true intrusted friend" rather than turning aside, distantly, to weep alone. De Monfort's hatred is
thus ignoble and degrading precisely because it excludes him
from the simple reciprocity of shared feeling: the culmination
of hatred, murder, ultimately makes De Monfort "a man ... / Out from the pale of social kindred cast; / Nameless and horrible" (394). |
| 5. |
After considering Jane's nobility and the degrading hatred of De Monfort, we
concluded by trying to come to terms with the manner of De
Monfort's death. When the officer demands to know how he died,
Jane commands,
Tell them by whose authority you come,
He died that death which best becomes a man
Who is with keenest sense of conscious ill
And deep remorse assail'd, a wounded spirit.
A death that kills the noble and the brave,
And only them. He had no other wound. (410)
At this point we addressed two questions: "According to Jane, how did De Monfort die?" and "Why is it so important for Jane to assert that he died in this way?" These led us to a good discussion of the distinction she implies between violent
suicide (at the end of Act IV De Monfort has dashed his head
against the convent wall) and the death "that kills the noble and the brave," a death of the spirit, without any physical wound. The former, we proposed,
leaves the bloody body on display before its interment outside
the pale of hallowed ground. Jane's idea of De Monfort's death,
however, reveals only the remorseful spirit, returning it,
in a sense, to a moral order or community and allowing Jane
to request that she "within these sacred cloister walls / May raise a humble, nameless tomb to him,
/ Who, but for one dark passion, one dire deed, / Had claim'd
a record of as noble worth, / As e'er enrich'd the sculptur'd
pedestal" (411). Recalling Jane's first appearance on the stage, her "homely dress" ennobling the rich scenery—"A very splendid apartment in Count Freberg's house, fancifully decorated" (324)—the "humble" tomb in the midst of "old Gothick architecture" seemed to some like an emblem of the play itself.
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Daniel E. White
University of Toronto
Daniel E. White is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Toronto. He has published essays on Anna Barbauld, Mary Shelley,
Charlotte
Smith, and S. T. Coleridge, and is currently completing a
book entitled Religious
Dissent and the Poetics of Nonconformity in the Early Romantic
Period. |
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Baillie, Joanna. Introductory Discourse. A Series of Plays: In Which It is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions
of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy
and a Comedy. London, 1798. 1-72.
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---. De Monfort: A Tragedy. A Series of Plays. 302-411.
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Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Ed. Anne Russell. Orchard Park: Broadview, 1999.
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Boaden, James. The Italian Monk, a Play, in Three Acts. London, 1797.
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Burroughs, Catherine. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women
Writers. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. 74-109, 117-29.
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Congreve, William. The Way of the World. Ed. George H. Nettleton, Arthur E. Case, and George Winchester Stone. British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan. 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969. 307-47.
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Cox, Jeffrey. Introduction. Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992. 1-77.
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Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan. 528-65.
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Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
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Sheridan, Richard. The School for Scandal. British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan. 831-76.
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Wordsworth, William. Preface. Ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. Lyrical Ballads. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1991. 241-72.
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