This book is driven by a central question: why were women playwrights in
the Romantic period obsessed with silencing their female characters,
pushing them off the stage, and announcing the removal of their own
texts to the closet? These playwrights were some of the most well-known
and commercially successful writers of their era, but were paradoxically
also among its most marginalized figures: they were mocked by largely
conservative audiences, suffered intense criticism for placing their
works on display publically, and frequently found their plays rejected
by theater managers in favor of works by established male playwrights.
This marginalization has extended to the present as well: even while
lamenting the exclusion of these writers from the canon, modern critics
have implicitly or explicitly dismissed them as politically reactionary
and criticized them for failing to include positive representations of
women in their works and for abandoning progressive gender politics in
order to pander to their audiences. This book reorients this dominant
critical mode, arguing that these writers did not simply craft plays
that would please the crowd, but that they deftly incorporated the
suppressions and subjugations to which they were subject into their
works. It demonstrates that within their plays gaps in discourse and
representation contain a productive capacity, denoting spaces of
imaginative potential or drawing into focus the conditions by which such
silencing and erasure take place. The book argues that the long-standing
critical misapprehension of these works stems from precisely these
strategies of resistance, which of necessity took nontraditional forms
and thus have not been readily recognizable to audiences, then or now.
The author terms the structures that female playwrights created in
response to their paradoxical position as "negative spaces," areas in
which they conspicuously staged the failure of their contemporary
theater to adequately give voice to women writers and their concerns.
Thus, Joanna Baillie's The Bride depicts the forced silencing,
emotional effacement, and ultimate physical removal from the stage
entirely of its titular female character; Hannah Cowley displaces the
setting of her drama The Fate of Sparta into the distant past in order
to showcase the historic malleability of gender relations and imagine
alternative paths for them in the present; and Elizabeth Inchbald
highlights the censorship and muting that haunted women playwrights from
the period by removing her drama The Massacre from the stage into the
closet, and then publishing her account of the process. By foregrounding
the displacement of such central elements from their dramas, these
playwrights shed light on social, economic, and political issues that
would otherwise have remained invisible. Ultimately, the book finds that
in probing the limits of representation, women's playwriting shares a
central concern of Romantic literature more broadly, instanced in
Blake's lifelong struggle to depict the songs of the divine, Percy
Shelley's grappling with the sublime in "Mont Blanc," and Wordsworth's
belated realization that he has crossed the Alps unawares. While these
male canonical writers found such representational instability
threatening, their female contemporaries actualized its potential to
provide spaces to voice their concerns. Attention to these writers,
whose gender and genre have worked together to locate them outside the
traditional Romantic canon, thus lays bare the governing ideologies
within our construction of the period's literature as a whole.
