Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Diego Saglia
University of Parma, Italy

Although published six years apart, these two volumes belong in the same multifaceted critical mosaic. Both studies address the distinctive concerns which have been central to Susan Wolfson’s critical practice since the 1980s—her preoccupation with gender, her focus on literary form, and her indefatigable search for an increasingly detailed, as well as historically attuned, approach to the stylistic materiality of literary works. As with her previous works, these books require us to read intensively into texts, and we cannot escape this demand as we gradually explore their largely shared literary terrain: Hemans and Byron, mostly, but also Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworths and Keats. Wollstonecraft, in particular, plays a major role in Wolfson’s presentation of her argument in the earlier Borderlines, and its discussion of the continuities and discontinuities within Romantic-period gender debates between the 1790s and the 1830s.

Both books perform a series of distinctive critical gestures to which the author has accustomed us over the years. They stand on solid, clearly laid out theoretical and methodological foundations, which Wolfson constantly tests, revises and updates. One of the mainstays in these volumes is, of course, the neo-formalist agenda that Wolfson has been promoting through such contributions as Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997) and “Reading for Form” (MLQ, 2007). Both books present repeated instances of what may be defined as an invigorating form of wrestling with different intersecting textual layers. In addition, these books convey a general impatience with established, conventional “Eng Lit” stylistic registers and lexicon. This translates into a penchant for neologisms which never allows us to sit back into the lull of ready-made phrases. In fact, some of these neologisms may not be to everyone’s liking, but they undoubtedly contribute to Wolfson’s corrective critical approach.

These volumes also share common structural features. Borderlines is divided into an introductory chapter; a section on women (Felicia Hemans; the “Masculine Woman”; Maria Jane Jewsbury); one on men (Byron and Keats); and a final coda on sex in souls. Romantic Interactions presents an introductory chapter; a section on women and poetry (Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith); one on the “two Wordsworths,” that is, on William’s and Dorothy’s “interactions”; and a third on Byron and those interactions in which he took part directly (in his own life and works), and those through which he influenced the lives and works of other (especially female) authors.

Wolfson locates both volumes within the narrative of her own development and growth as a critic. And more explicitly so in the preface to Borderlines, where she places herself and her book within the critical trajectory that gradually led to the renovation of Romantic-period scholarship in the US and Britain from the early 1980s on. This volume, in particular, makes plain Wolfson’s intention to take stock of this itinerary and reflect on its origins, current status, and further evolutions. Taking up the cumbersome inheritance of Romantic-period gender criticism in order to set it on a new course, Borderlines paints a panorama of interrelations between “he-texts” and “she-texts”. It delineates a map of shifting gender categories in order to cast new light on their textual manifestations and cultural significance. Wolfson’s aim is to capture the formally specific coordinates of these categories—their being-in-the-text—that enable us to perceive their presence and agency in their times, yet also to verify their continuing activity in our own. In this respect, Wollstonecraft stands at the beginning of a tradition of debate that her works continued to enrich well after the waning of 1790s radicalism. And Wolfson’s reconstruction and discussion of later reprises of Wollstonecraft is undoubtedly one of the most striking and valuable offerings in this book. Readers will be particularly delighted to find a chapter on the brilliant and combative Maria Jane Jewsbury, one of the most fascinating of Wollstonecraft’s disciples, as well as one of the most unjustly sidelined writers and intellectuals in the later Romantic period.
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Reviewed by
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
Texas A&M University

Daniel P. Watkins’s study of works by three major Romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats—examines the place of sexual roles and gendered struggles for power within a social and political landscape marked by profound economic change. Specifically, Watkins investigates the shift from an aristocratic, feudal economy to an emerging capitalism, and he points to gendered subjectivity as the primary experiential space through which anxieties over that shift were mediated. Posing the model of “sadeian logic” as the template for making sense of both social and interpersonal relations, Watkins reads a number of well-known Romantic works through the lenses of gender, class, and power finally to conclude that while the idealistic tendency of Romanticism remains compromised by the masculinist biases of its day, a feminist materialist investigation of the history and historicity of that dilemma—the very sort of project in which Watkins’ study participates—offers Romanticism its only way out of the convoluted patriarchalism that structured social, economic, and interpersonal relationships in the early nineteenth century.

Throughout his book, Watkins argues that “during the romantic period there are close relations between visionary idealism, patriarchy, and sadism” (60), and he demonstrates how “[the] three admittedly nonparallel categories of society, philosophy, and sexuality seem . . . to be crucial in the attempt to locate and explain, in historical terms, the romantic imagination and romantic textuality” (xvi). Anticipating skepticism about his subject and approach in the brief “Introduction” that opens the book, Watkins remarks that a central “problem” of Romanticism—in particular, how that movement’s ” . . . entanglement in the turbulent conditions of both feudalism and capitalism [and] its involvement with the declining energy of the Enlightenment project . . . [shapes] the romantic understanding and portrayal of gender” (xv)—”can be considered most usefully when gender is cast in its strongest possible form and then set in relation to other prominent, or constitutive, features of romanticism” (xvi). Indeed, for Watkins, the hallmarks of Romanticism—”[f]ragmentation, alienation, and reification”—are never overcome but, instead, are “pushed further down into the inner recesses of social life until they are almost hidden away in one of the most basic relations of human existence-sexuality” (120). Watkins offers the strongest support for his subject and methodology near the end of his chapter on Keats where he justifies the turn to sadeian logic by underscoring a phenomenological link between the almost simultaneous and, Watkins suggests, the contingent emergence of the works of Sade and the development of the Romantic attitude. Of the particular gender bias for which Romanticism has long been attacked, Watkins writes that “[i]t is important to call the logic of this masculinist poetic strategy sadeian because the word both suggests the severity of the poem’s portrayal of gender and helps to link various social and cultural energies of the age within a single historical and cultural framework” (123). Watkins concludes his study by pointing to the three ways in which such a project—which, he maintains, might seem to invalidate any reading of Romantic poetry as anything other than oppressive, particularly at the level of gender—remains useful to larger questions about Romanticism and its cultural moment. Specifically, Watkins argues that “feminism must explain the enabling logic and shaping conditions of violence if it is to be defused and its energies positively redirected”; that his project “calls attention to the historical field where oppression takes place and, therefore, where goal-oriented materialist feminism must always begin”; and that “feminist intervention . . . enables romanticism to be brought forward as history rather than as ideology or nostalgia, serving not only as a poetic expression of hope but also as a historical register of the real conditions of that hope” (129).

This reviewer’s lengthy focus on Watkins’ subject and methodology underscores the anxiety the author himself voices throughout Sexual Power and British Romantic Poetry; indeed, Watkins admits that his decision to focus on exclusively a few well-known works by canonical writers results from the fact that while he believes his model to hold true for the larger Romantic movement, these familiar and easily accessible texts function as test cases in which his theory may be satisfactorily investigated. Watkins begins with Wordsworth, whose own attitude about political revolution and whose plan for poetic revolution mark him as an important figure to consider in terms of the shifting climates that shaped the early portion of the Romantic age. Focusing on “Tintern Abbey,” “Nutting,” and the “stolen boat episode” from The Prelude, Watkins argues that Wordsworth’s meditations on the self and its place both in the narrow register of individual imagination and in the larger scheme of social relations demonstrate an obsession with emerging subjectivity, which Watkins ties to a cultural and economic shift from feudalism to capitalism. As a member of a developing capitalist society, Watkins argues, Wordsworth struggles to find a place for himself in an increasingly self-made world.
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Reviewed by
Julie A. Carlson
University of California, Santa Barbara

Those of us who attend developments in romantic drama and theater are happy to greet the appearance of Catherine Burrough’s Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. It advances this field in important respects by both focusing extensively on Baillie and providing some of the historical and theoretical contexts that help us to appreciate the power of Baillie’s work. The lead playwright of her age and considered by some of her peers to be the best playwright since Shakespeare, Baillie pretty much had fallen from view until roughly five years ago, when she became a rising star on conference and publishing circuits in romantic studies. A few scholars—especially Margaret Carhart and Joseph Donohue—had argued long before then for the importance of Baillie’s writings, but their comments fell on ears unreceptive to the drama of romantic theater or the women writing in the period. An appreciative audience for both now thrives, thanks to the many scholars whose work Burroughs generously acknowledges. It is some measure of the rapid popularity of both fields that people have been clamouring for a book on Baillie in the last years.

Closet Stages meets this demand in a partial respect and, by its own admission, serves mainly to set the stage for a full-scale treatment of Baillie’s career. In this, as in so many events associated with theater, Closet Stages may suffer from its perfect timing by not delivering exactly what audiences for romantic theater studies have been waiting to hear. For Burroughs’ focus is on Baillie as a theorist of theater, not as one of the most prolific playwrights of the period, whom she situates in the context of women writing for and about the London stage between 1790 and 1840. Clearly a valuable focus as well as an indispensable resource for further studies of female playwrights in this period, this emphasis feels at times both ahead and behind of current interest in Baillie. The interpretive frame of performance studies gets ahead of the groundwork still required to assess the nature of Baillie’s extraordinary accomplishments. Efforts to promote the importance of Baillie is somewhat behind the welcoming reception that already exists. Burroughs should not be faulted for the fact that the popularity of Baillie has superseded some aspects of her recovery in book form. And Burroughs deserves major credit for having prepared us to want more on Baillie from her book.

Analysis of Baillie’s “theory and dramaturgy” is one of four aims motivating Closet Stages. (“Dramaturgy” comprises analysis of the first three plays of Plays on the Passions.) The other aims provide a historical context for Baillie by featuring “women writers from the British Romantic era as theater theorists,” constructing a “female-authored theater theory before 1850,” and presenting “a picture of Romantic theater and drama from the perspective of women who performed on (and off) the London stage” (25, original emphasis). Its focus on women’s contributions to early nineteenth-century theater supplements Judith Pascoe’s Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Cornell, 1997) and Ellen Donkin’s Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–1829 (Routledge, 1995) by presenting them primarily as theorists of theater performance. Burroughs argues that the theoretical pronouncements of these women have been ignored because both theater theory and romantic closet drama have been treated as provinces of men. Allowing theater women into the theoretical picture entails expanding the venues and forms that count as “theory,” the advantages of which expansion are displayed in the second chapter, “Representing the Female Actor: Celebrity Narratives, Women’s Theories of Acting, and Social Theaters,” and the very helpful “Appendix: Selected List of Texts Containing Women’s Theater Theory Published in Great Britain (1790–1840).” Drawing on celebrity memoirs, autobiographies, interviews, play prefaces, advertisements, letters, journals, diaries, and dedicatory remarks, Burroughs uncovers fascinating material by Anne Mathews, Mary Berry, Anna Jameson, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Helen Maria Williams that should stimulate further work on these writers. Her situating women in the closet is even more productive for the recovery of nineteenth-century theater. It makes women’s place in the home “experimental theater” (11).

Burroughs’ challenge to the alleged antitheatricality of closet drama aligns Closet Stages with Michael Simpson’s Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (Stanford, 1997). Simpson stresses the potentiality of theater that closet drama, even as a form of reading, always implies by way of illustrating how Byron’s and Shelley’s plays keep radical tendencies alive. Burroughs emphasizes the actuality of theater in female closet spaces by way of underscoring women’s theatricalization of the private sphere. The projects investigated range from conventional to highly metaphorical understandings of theater, the benefits of which are perceived to be political as well as aesthetic. Endorsing the merger of social and theater stages advocated by performance theory, particularly its depiction of gender as act, Burroughs views the “small experimental theater” of the “female closet” as the space where “dramas and gendered identities were conceived and rehearsed, sometimes in preparation for public viewings, at other times for private or semiprivate readings and dramatizations” (11). The opportunities and difficulties of performing femininity, she contends, are negotiated through the kinds of theater to which such performances give rise. Plays by female playwrights of the period dramatize the constraints of femininity, even as they reinforce them, and depict the home as a theater of war. Private theatricals, in vogue from 1770 to 1810, provide women the opportunity to critique gender identity and the comforts of home, other benefits of which Gillian Russell has analyzed in The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society 1793–1815 (Clarendon Press, 1995). Theater theory by women underscores the anxiety of female playwrights and performers who struggle to maintain their respectability while taking the house by storm. In their own attempts to “conform to” and yet “experiment with” the “correct performance of feminine behavior” then, middle- and upper-class English women can be said to take actresses’ lead (28).

This recovery of the plays, theories, and Lives that came out of the female closet in the early nineteenth century should convince us of the illegitimacy of separating closet from stage. Maintaining the separation obscures our view of the number of women intimately concerned with theater practice in this period as well as the even larger numbers of them making theater in, and out of, their homes. The illegitimacy of this separation is all the more visible when considering the legitimate theater of Baillie, the topic of chapters three through five. Chapter three investigates Baillie’s prefaces “in the context of other female playwrights who contemplate their gendered position in public theater,” and chapters four and five portray Basil, De Monfort, and The Tryal as enacting theories of acting and of gender performance (73). Situating Baillie in this way highlights her distinction in failing to distinguish closet from stage, private from public, psychic from social, female from male. Baillie’s plays follow “the great man into his secret closet” but envision their analysis of passion as occurring in metropolitan, rather than mental, theaters, spaces which Baillie even redesigns as part of the interiorizing of drama.

The merging of private and public domains in the content of her plays confirms the applicability of performance theory to analysis of it. Public figures are portrayed in domestic settings which themselves house war, theater, elections, ghosts of history. Scripts are frequently metadramatic in their commentary on performance codes, and neither male nor female characters find the performance of gender all that satisfying. Characters are assessed in terms of their theatrical tendencies, where histrions like De Monfort, Rezenvelt, and Victoria are put in their place by the anti-theatrics of Jane de Monfort, Countess Albini, and Hargrave. Their place turns out to be the grave or the convent, but not while on stage—for Baillie also respects some differences between theater and life. Even the more contemporary connotations of the closet that Burroughs invokes are appropriate to the passion between Rezenvelt and De Monfort or Basil and Rosinberg. One could say that Baillie’s sustained attention to how passion undermines identity performs the social and psychoanalytic work of the performances in and of her plays.

But situating Baillie within a tradition of female theater theorists and in the terms of performance theory distorts her achievements too. Baillie is not alone in making theater out of the closet but, in my view, she is singular in her accomplishments as a theorist and playwright of closet-drama in this age. Asserting her singularity is meant less to maintain evaluative hierarchies than the distinctions that define what an artist has achieved. Not every thought is a theory, nor is every writer capable of producing one, for reasons that merit political and intellectual analysis. Nor is every performance of gender or theater worthy of review. We may still wish to distinguish storming the house through one’s depiction of victimized femininity from storming around the house as a victimized female. Particularly valuable is how Baillie’s plays anticipate the political ends of performance theory while remaining theater. This means that they explore gender and sexual identities as conventions that are tragic and comic and that cost some people more than others. Such insights, however, also spotlight the non-identity of early-nineteenth century and late-twentieth century closets. Queer performativity is hardly sanguine about the heterosexism of gender as a category of analysis, and it is even more suspicious of taking anyone at her word. In two regards, then, the framing chapters misconstrue their objects in my view. In attempting to record the “self-experience” of early-nineteenth century theater women, the second chapter wants a performative identity and an Authentic Life too (59). Introducing Baillie as part of a company of theater women paradoxically shows to what extent she is set apart. This may or may not be an intentional design of Closet Stages, but it deserves praise for facilitating the view. Closet Stages showcases Baillie and opens the door to further work on an exciting array of theatrical performances by early-nineteenth century women.