Romantic Border Crossings

Larry Peer, Jeffrey Cass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754660514
• eBook ISBN: 9781317061595
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Romantic Border Crossings participates in the important movement towards 'otherness' in Romanticism, by uncovering the intellectual and disciplinary anxieties that surround comparative studies of British, American, and European literature and culture. As this diverse group of essays demonstrates, we can now speak of a global Romanticism that encompasses emerging critical categories such as Romantic pedagogy, transatlantic studies, and transnationalism, with the result that 'new' works by writers marginalized by class, gender, race, or geography are invited into the canon at the same time that fresh readings of traditional texts emerge. Exemplifying these developments, the authors and topics examined include Elizabeth Inchbald, Lord Byron, Gérard de Nerval, English Jacobinism, Goethe, the Gothic, Orientalism, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Anglo-American conflicts, manifest destiny, and teaching romanticism. The collection constitutes a powerful rethinking of the divisions that continue to haunt Romantic studies.

Part I British Border Crossings

Chapter 1 Gateway to Heterotopia: Elsewhere on Stage

Frederick Burwick

University of California, Los Angeles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606910-2

The most popular and familiar border crossings in the Romantic period were marked by the proscenium arch. Theater was at once an international venue and a showcase for national prejudice toward other countries and other customs. While much is revealed in the dramatic setting and the stage representation of foreign character and intrigue in plays by British writers, even more telling were their translations and adaptations from the drama of other countries. Robert Young, in White Mythologies (1990) argued that “the creation of the Orient … signifies the West's own dislocation from itself, something inside that is presented, narrativized, as being outside.” (139). While “arm-chair travelers” encountered vicariously the foreign and strange in their reading of travel narratives, the drama of the period enhanced such encounters through the vivid impact of theatrical setting and action. The inside/outside disjunctures of heterotopia nourished, and were nourished by, the growing consciousness of Empire in the Romantic period.

Defined as a room with the fourth wall missing, the stage may invite a voyeuristic curiosity about the events exposed within that room. Indeed, Joanna Baillie, in her “Introductory Discourse” to the Plays of the Passions (1798) makes that curiosity the motivating impulse in her theory of drama. One popular anecdote repeated by Denis Diderot in Les Bijoux indiscets (1748), as well as several other critics of the 18^th century, supposes a stranger from a remote culture brought for the first time within a theater, and informed that when the curtain is raised, according to local custom, the king's chambers will be exposed and will reveal the actual events in court. Would the stranger believe such a fiction? Not likely, answers Diderot, for even the most naive stranger would not fail to see the mannerisms and artifice that distinguish performance from reality.

Whatever is on stage is “other.” Even the sort of docu-drama that gained popularity in the Romantic period is marked by the inherent difference of the performative act. Wordsworth, as he related in The Prelude (1805 VII: 316–59), attended a performance of The Maid of Buttermere at Sadler's Wells in April 1803. The play brought to the stage a scandalous seduction that had occurred in Wordsworth's native Lakes six months earlier. Coleridge had reported the event in five articles for the Morning Post (Oct 11, 22; Nov. 5, 20; Dec. 31). John Hatfield, a notorious swindler, had seduced a nobleman's natural daughter, who bore him three daughters, and married his jailor's daughter, who helped obtain his release. Then, in the Fall of 1802, calling himself “The Hon. Augustus Hope, M.P.,” supposedly a brother to the Earl of Hopetown, he arrived in Buttermere, met Mary Robinson, the innkeeper's daughter, and persuaded her to marry him. His identity, his swindling schemes, and his bigamy were exposed. With his production of Edward and Susan: or, The Beauty of Buttermere, Charles Dibdin, Junior, sought to make the most of the scandal before the case even went to court. With no denigration of Dibdin's theatrical exploitation, Wordsworth simply declares that it shows

… how the spoiler came “a bold bad man,”

To God unfaithful, children, wife, and home,

And wooed the artless maiden of the hills.

And wedded her, in cruel mockery

Of love and marriage bonds. (III:321–6)

Yet Wordsworth also implies that the very theatrical transformation makes an artifice of sentiment, and thus teaches us “to slight the crimes/And sorrows of the world.” He recollects the fate of Mary Robinson, the real Maid of Buttermere, whose infant, conceived in false wedlock, had died at birth and was buried in the village churchyard. From the actress who performed her role on stage, he looked into the audience and sees a young mother, carrying her small child with her through the theater, as she plied her trade as prostitute (III:363–411). Were the emotions aroused by the theatrical representation not utterly shallow and ephemeral, there would be none in the audience who would not perceive the young mother as victim of like betrayal.

Another sensational documentary was The Gamblers, which opened at the Royal Coburg Theater on November 17, 1823,¹ and was brought onto stage as an exposé of an actual murder that had occurred on October 24, and only fourteen days after the murderer, John Thurtell, had been apprehended. Thurtell, who lost a large sum in gambling with William Weare, invited him to a country house and robbed and murdered him en route. The dramatization followed blow-by-blow the events in the crime. To insure the utmost realism, the coach and horse that the murderer had used to transport his victim were brought on stage in the appropriate scene. The set designers duplicated with utmost verisimilitude the gambling house, the inn where they stopped, the bye-way where the murders were committed, and the country house to which the corpse were delivered. In the final scene, Weare, not yet dead, revived long enough to accuse his murderer. This scene, the reviewer reports, was a deviation necessary to bring the play to a close, for in the actual case the accused was still on trial.²

¹ See Allardyce Nicoll, Early Nineteenth Century Drama, vol. 4, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900. In this list of plays by unknown authors, Nicoll notes that a play with the same title, The Gamblers, opened on the same date, Nov. 17, 1823, at the Surrey Theatre. If not the same play, this was most probably another dramatization of Thurtell's crime. ² See Times, Morning Chronicle and The Observer; Mannheimer Zeitung, no. 336 (4 Dec 1823); no. 342 (10 Dec. 1823).

The question that must be asked of The Beauty of Buttermere and The Gamblers, indeed of any documentary then or now, is not simply the extent to which the representation deviates from what is represented, but rather the extent to which that deviation is also a displacement of the social and ethical ground. What prevails in the theater is the very opposite of Kant's postulation of an aesthetics of disinterest (288). Successful box office is predicated on taking full advantage of whatever stirs popular interest. Their aestheticization as dramatic performance does not eliminate the various attributes of interest —morbid or libidinous curiosity, desire or fear. Instead, interests are rendered “other,” no longer constrained by the moral censorship and taboos that govern personal actions. The dramatization of John Thurtell's crimes plays to much the same interests that were addressed by Thomas De Quincey in his several essays on “Murder Considered as a Fine Art.”³ De Quincey repeatedly urged the principle of idem in alio —identity in alterity, sameness in difference—as crucial to artistic representation.⁴ In the enactment of idem in alio there resides a doubleness, a two-way interaction. What is familiar is rendered strange; what is strange is rendered familiar.

³ De Quincey's essays “On Murder Considered as a Fine Art” and “Peter Anthony Fonk” were both published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827, while his “Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1839. ⁴ For full discussion of this topic, see my essay, “Mimesis and the idem et alter.”

As examples of the broad range of “otherness,” The Beauty of Buttermere and The Gamblers provide reminders of how “otherness,” as Freud says of the Unheimliche, begins at home. A young women deluded by a rakish swindler, doubtless not a rare occurrence in actual domestic life, had been featured in numerous sentimental melodramas of the period. Dibdin, of course, had taken a case that was currently in the newspaper headlines. The documentary facts were well known to everyone in his audience. Dibdin's choice was to heighten the emotional impact of his subject by transforming Mary Robinson into an operatic heroine, pouring out the passion of her love and the agony of her betrayal in song.

In the opening scene of The Gamblers, Thurtell is shown at the gaming table with Weare; then there is a scene fellow gambler William Probert who agrees to Thurtell's plot to invite Weare to a country cottage, ostensibly for a weekend of gambling. In Act II, Thurtell's horse and gig are brought onto the stage in front of a façade of the Wagon and Horses Inn. The murder scene was gruesome in its detail: a pistol is fired at the victim's head, and there was a copious use of stage blood as the wounded Weare struggled to escape. The bullet had not killed him, so Thurtell now set about slitting Weare's throat, then clubbing him with the muzzle of the gun. The final Act, at Probert's cottage, depicted the murderer and his friend, attempting to dispose of the body by throwing it into a pond, when Weare rose up with a final cry of accusation before he died. Crafted in haste to bring the dramatization before an audience while interest in the murder still captured the public imagination, W.T. Moncrieff, the manager at the Coburg, sought the utmost realism in depicting the crime in all its gory details. The audience wept at Weare's agonies and applauded Thurtell's capture at the end. In spite of the “realism,” it was a show, and the audience responded accordingly, fully aware that what they had witnessed was “other,” a transformation of the actual crime.

As Michel Foucault has argued in Discipline and Punish, the attributes of performance and spectacle transform even the reality of public executions. When Thurtell was brought to London for his hanging on January 9, 1824, the event was played out as public act of expiation: As the prison bells tolled twelve noon, James Foxen, the hangman, led the prisoner from his cell to the gallows. Thurtell, for his part, was “elegantly attired in a brown great coat with a black velvet collar, light breeches and gaiters, and a fashionable waistcoat with gilt buttons.” The prison chaplain read the burial service. Thurtell mounted the five steps pf the gallows and positioned himself on the trap. As Foxen removed his cravat and loosened his collar, Thurtell prayed. Then Foxen placed the noose around his neck. Wilson, Governor of Hertford Gaol, shook hands with him and said, “Good bye Mr. Thurtell, may God Almighty bless you,” to which Thurtell replied “God bless you, Mr. Wilson, God bless you.” Wilson asked, “Do you consider that the laws of your country have been dealt to you fairly and justly?” Thurtell answered, “I admit that just has been done me – I am perfectly satisfied.” Foxen drew the bolts and Thurtell dropped through the trap with a crash. It was reported that his neck broke “with a sound like a pistol shot,” as if an echo of the crime.⁵ The hanging of Thurtell clearly substantiates Foucault's argument that public executions were ritualized. Ritual distances the immediate and lends a symbolic “otherness.” But even then, the performative value was not yet exhausted: a lifelike effigy of Thurtell was exhibited in Madame Tussaud's wax works.

⁵ Taken from both Charles Hindley, “The Confession and Execution of John Thurtell at Harford Gaol,” Curiosities of Street Literature, 187 and Richard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet.

These first two examples of idem in alio were selected precisely because the idem seems to be so powerfully present: real events, local events, currently occurring events.⁶ Not even the distance of place or time puts the The Beauty of Buttermere or The Gamblers at a distance from audience; nevertheless, the distance is there. The stage asserts representation in alio. Moncrieff's audience, no less than Dibdin's audience, is gathered at the accustomed site of artifice. Moncrieff's Thurtell, no less than Madame Tussaud's, is a representation wrought for display. And to grant Foucault his argument, even the Thurtell, who is brought to public execution, is no longer Thurtell the gambler, Thurtell the murderer, but a performer in a scripted act.

⁶ Even in responding to and replicating the sensationalism of newspaper and periodical journalism, the docu-drama of the Romantic stage could achieve a more powerful illusion of realism, but at the same time it constrained that realism within the accustomed artifices of theatrical performance. The actuality of headline news was converted into the alterity of dramatic art. Thus the news of The Battle of Leipzig (also known as “the Battle of the Nations”), 16–18 October 1813, was immediately adapted as Buonepart Burnt Out; or, The Allies Victorious in the extravaganza which opened at the Surrey on 18 October 1813. Or again, when Arthur Thistlewood, William Davidson, James Ings, Richard Tidd, and John Brunt were executed for high treason on 28 April 1820, the Royal Coburg used the occasion to draw in crowds to see a re-enactment of The Cato Street Conspiracy, showing the conspirators plotting in a hayloft, their arrest by the squad led by George Ruthven, Thistlewood firing his pistol point blank at Richard Smithers, the trial for treason and murder, and the comic-heroic scene on the gallows in which Ings was loudly singing Death or Liberty until Thistlewood told him, “Be quiet, Ings; we can die without all this noise.” The comic moment then turned grotesque when neither Ings nor Brunt would die when the platform dropped and they were left dangling in twitching convulsions at the end of the rope and several of the executioner's assistants had to pull on their legs until their agonies at last ended. See George Theodore Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy.

The examples that follow will examine the doubleness, the two-way interaction, of identity in alterity from the opposite perspective. These examples give primary emphasis not to the idem but to the aliter. The settings for these plays—France, Spain, and the Orient—exhibit the deceptive dimensions of “elsewhere.” In Elizabeth Inchbald's Animal Magnetism (1788), the place is ostensibly across the channel in present-day Paris. As the actual city in which Franz Anton Mesmer had established his practice during the previous decade, Paris is a likely and logical setting. But Inchbald's Parisian setting aptly suits, as well, her satire on the domestic constraints for a woman to choose her own husband or to control her own wealth and property. Her satire, of course, also responds to the contemporary controversy over the reputed charlatanry and sexual exploitation of female patients. By 1788, animal magnetism had already crossed the Channel and gained a following in England. Inchbald's script reveals her awareness of Pierre Yves Barré’s Les docteurs modernes, staged in Paris in 1784 and published in 1785. Setting her play in France, she nevertheless implicates similar trespasses that were already stirring a scandal in London. The plot involves a hoax perpetrated on an elderly doctor, who resorts to animal magnetism, in order to cast a spell on his young ward, Constance, who has rejected all his overtures to her. He is tricked into thinking that he has mastered the power of magnetism, but his spells all go awry. In the resulting confusion, Constance is able to meet with her lover, a handsome young nobleman, and the two manage to extort the doctor's permission to marry. Since “Paris” is revealed only from the interior of the doctor's house, it is little more than a reflection in a fun-house mirror. But “elsewhere” nevertheless has an important function. Where in the world might lecherous old doctors keep their beautiful young ward confined in the hopes of compelling their consent in marriage? In London? Heaven forbid! In Paris? Far too enlightened and sophisticated to tolerate such oppression. Where then? Spain! Lisette, maid and companion to Constance, laments their plight:

Lisette: [….]is it not a shame the Doctor should dare here in Paris to forbid both you and your servant to stir from home; lock us up, and treat us as women are treated in Spain? Constance: Never mind, Lisette, don't put yourself in a passion, for we can learn to plot and deceive, and treat him as men are treated in Spain. (I.i)

Whether true or not, it was certainly an established trope that Spain was the place of domestic oppression of women, but also the place where women had mastered the arts of intrigue. Animal Magnetism was performed frequently throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and when it was revived at Tavistock House in January 1857, Charles Dickens was apparently persuaded by the logic of the trope to move the setting from France to Spain. Paris, after all, had long since lost its relevance as the site of Mesmer's exploits. Dickens himself played the Doctor who is tricked into thinking that he can “magnetize,” with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth as his ward, and his mistress Ellen Ternan as her maid.⁷

⁷ The artist Augustus Egg played the rival lover, and the novelist Wilkie Collins played his rival's servant.

That same trope of oppression and intrigue informs the setting in Madrid for Hannah Cowley's A Bold Stroke for Husband (1783). The themes are those already observed in Inchbald's play and often repeated by other women authors of the age: the woman's right to choose her own ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Heterotopia and Romantic Border Crossings
• PART I: British Border Crossings
• PART II: Comparative Border Crossings
• PART III: Historical Border Crossings
• PART IV: Pedagogical Border Crossings
• PART V:  American and Transatlantic Border Crossings
• Works Cited
• Index