The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815

Description

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.  Acknowledgements Contents List of Abbreviations List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: The Armed Woman Enters ‘An Unnatural and Monstrous Being’: British Responses to Arms-Bearing Women ‘To Shake or to Strengthen Existing Forms of Government’: British Theatre in the Age of Revolution Methodology, Objectives and Content Overview References Newspapers and Periodicals Primary and Secondary Works (Printed) Chapter 2: ‘Unbrutifying Man’: Armed Women and Male Reform in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Dramas ‘It’s Not Myself I’ll Kill:'Tis You’: Women, Pistols, and the Penitent Rake in Inchbald’s Next Door Neighbours ‘I Never Liked Jesting’: Adapting and Staging the Sentimental Comedy ‘An Instrument of Death to Defend Herself’: Women’s Martial Rights and the Turn from Stage to Page in The Massacre ‘The Mere de Famille’: Motherhood, Female Militancy, and Pauline Léon’s Petition ‘Feminine Virtues Violated’: Women and Weaponry in The Massacre and Jean Hennuyer ‘The Subject Is So Horrid’: The Massacre as Closet Drama ‘Maid'Gainst Man Is Most Uncivil War’: The Demise of Inchbald’s Armed Women References Newspapers and Periodicals Manuscript Collections Online Sources Primary and Secondary Sources (Printed) Chapter 3: ‘The Ruthless Queen’: Lady Macbeth and Margaret of Anjou on the Post-Reign of Terror London Stage ‘Tis Gallia’s Hopeless Queen!’: Resurrecting the Dead in Kemble’s Macbeth ‘Living Portraits’: Political Allegory and Shakespearean Ghosts Embodying Marie Antoinette: From Monster to Victim ‘Like an Apparition’: Lady Macbeth and the Ghost of Marie Antoinette ‘The Visionary Effects of a Guilty Conscience’ or a Call to ‘Mighty Vengeance’: Complicating Dramatic Closure ‘A Desp’rate Mother’: The Actress, The Amazon, and Francklin’s Earl of Warwick Sentimentalising the ‘She-Wolf’: Margaret of Anjou on the Eighteenth-Century Stage ‘A Most Shocking Circumstance’: A Murder and a Play ‘To You the Little Innocents Appeal’: Unfeminine Ambition and Maternal Duty ‘Weeping Mothers Shall Applaud’: Merging the Actress and the Amazon References Newspapers and Periodicals Online Collections Primary and Secondary Sources (Printed) Chapter 4: ‘The Merit of her Patriotism’: Charlotte Corday in British Drama, 1794–1804 ‘Throbs of Life-Consuming Anguish’: Royalist, Romantic and Sentimental Heroines in Eyre’s Maid of Normandy ‘Committed to a Mad House!’ Pathological Sensibility and the Loving Female Warrior ‘Banish’d Reason’: A Virtuous yet Frenzied Heroine ‘The Heroism that Distinguishes it’: Negotiating Female Heroism in West’s Female Heroism ‘Filial Love/Flies on the Wings of Duty’: Republican Heroism, Christian Duty, and Feminine Feeling ‘My Heart is Bursting’: The Sentimentalised Roman Protagonist on the early Nineteenth-Century Stage ‘Be Mine in Politics’: Irish Republicanism, the Act of Union, and Charlotte Corday on the Dublin Stage References Newspapers and Periodicals Manuscript Collections Primary and Secondary Works (Printed) Chapter 5: ‘I Drew my Knife and in his Bosom Stuck it’: Armed Heroines and the Anglo-German Drama Characters of a ‘Mingled Nature’: Romantic Europhobia and the Hybridised Anglo-German Heroine ‘Their Heroes and Heroines are Bedlamites’: Glorifying Vice in Sheridan’s Pizarro ‘I am a Woman Desperate’: Anglicising the Sword-Bearing German Heroine ‘To Have Leapt upon him with a Tiger’s Plunge’: The Schiller-esque Heroine of Coleridge’s Remorse ‘Mrs Glover’s Powerful Assistance’: Complicating Remorse’s Reception References Newspapers and Periodicals Online Collections Manuscript Collections Primary and Secondary Works (Printed) Chapter 6: ‘Yet Are Spain’s Maids No Race of Amazons’: Spain’s Female Warriors in Anglo-European Drama ‘The Oppressed Brethren of thy Blood Have Need of Such a Leader’: Coleridge’s Dramatic Intervention in the Anglo-Hispanic Debate ‘Assassination Is So Abhorrent’: Guerrilla Warfare and Anglophilia in Remorse ‘My Eye-Balls Burnt’: Spanishness and Gender in Remorse ‘Blown to Pieces by the Delicate Hand’: Charles the Bold, the Peninsular War and Early British Melodrama ‘Armed by Wild Despair’: Allegorising, Feminising and Melodramatising the Maid of Saragossa ‘The Explosion Immediately Takes Place’: Women, Firearms and Trauma in British Melodrama of the 1810s References Newspapers and Periodicals Online Collections Manuscript Collections Primary and Secondary Sources (Printed) Chapter 7: Epilogue: The Armed Woman Exits References Manuscript Collections Online Collections Primary and Secondary Sources (Printed) Index