The Liberating and Debilitating Imagination in Joanna Baillie’s Orra and The Dream

Notes

¹ Orra takes place “Towards the end of the 14th century” and is set in Switzerland and “on the Borders of the Black Forest in Suabia [Swabia],” a region in southwest Germany (Orra 134), and The Dream is set in “the middle of the 14th century” and in Switzerland (Dramatic and Poetical Works 260).  The exclamation “O!” and its homophone “Oh!” are, of course, common expressions of fear.
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² Regina Hewitt’s analyses of these two tragedies are atypical: she briefly discusses Orra after a more extended treatment of The Dream (78–86). Sean Carney’s examination of Adam Smith’s influence on Baillie’s plays contains the only recent extended comparison of Orra and The Dream (238–243). His analysis, unlike mine, does not consider the role of gender in the works.
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³ All quotations from Orra are taken from The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, ed. Cox and Gamer, rather than from The Dramatic and Poetical Works.  I have used The Broadview Anthology rather than Works for Orra because I prefer using a carefully edited version of the play with numbered lines (Works is a compilation rather than an edition and lines of verse are not numbered in it).  A modern scholarly edition of Baillie’s complete works is sorely needed.
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⁴ As Mark S. Micale explains, hyperemotionality and the “disease” of hysteria have been associated with femininity since ancient times (68–70).
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⁵ Baillie does not supply a rationale or evidence for her theory that women are more fearful than men of “uncertain danger.”  Possibly she believed that women are more prone to magnify potential danger through their imaginations, or that women are less sanguine than men regarding the outcomes of possible threats.  In her later play The Phantom:  A Musical Drama (1836) the heroine encounters a “real” ghost and conducts a somewhat nervous but rational conversation with her (1.4., Works 578-79).  This scene appears to contradict Baillie’s claims about the universal terror of ghosts in her 1812 address “To the Reader,” but it should be noted that the phantom is the heroine’s deceased friend and thus relatively unthreatening, and the heroine falls into a swoon when the spirit departs.
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⁶ Baillie’s character Bernardo asserts that “The bravest mind is capable of fear” (The Dream, 3.3.274).
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⁷ Baillie clearly had the French Revolution in mind when she wrote her address “To the Reader.”  To support her claim that Osterloo’s death from fear at the scaffold “is not entirely invention,” she cites “Miss Plumtre’s [sic] interesting account of the atrocities committed in Lyons by the revolutionary tribunals” (Works 230; see vol. 1 of Anne Plumptre’s A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France, 1802-5 [1810]).  For an account of Corday’s trial and execution, see Schama 737–741; for a brief description of the Queen’s execution, see Lever 304–305.
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⁸ Carlson points out that “Orra’s preference for ghosts expresses a feminist indictment of the inadequacies of living men who are inherently warlike and scheming, and contingently stupid (Glottenbal) and base (Rudigere)” (212).  Orra does not appear, however, to indict Theobald.
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⁹ As Diane Long Hoeveler notes, “The gender dynamics here have transformed a male victim into a female one” (121).
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¹⁰ Since The Dream is a prose drama, parenthetical citations will refer to act, scene, and page number from Works (rather than to line numbers).  Scenes 4 and 5 in Act 2 are misnumbered in Works as 3 and 4; my citations correct these errors.
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¹¹ Nathan Elliott writes that “Speech and sight are presented as useless in the last image of [Orra].” (99)
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¹² Bernardo notes that the dream was revealed by one monk to another, and the monk who originated the “dream” derived it from the deathbed confession of the man who buried the murder victim (2.2.266).
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¹³ For a discussion of the humanizing effect of Osterloo’s fearful imagination, see Hewitt 82–83.
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