“A modest virgin hath no choice”: Joanna Baillie’s The Bride and the Staging of Foreclosure

Abstract

JOANNA BAILLIE'S THE BRIDE (1828) IS A STRANGE PLAY. IT WAS WRITTEN for a Sri Lankan audience by a playwright who sought all her life to have her works established in the English dramatic canon; it professes to bring this audience characters from its own history, yet knowingly mangles its source narratives; and its titular character is pivotal for every event in the drama, yet she is never named, and is effectively absent from the text except for a few brief scenes--a narrative technique almost unimaginable for a writer whose entire dramatic theory hinged on audiences forming empathic connections with the figures onstage. And yet it is precisely through being situated at the union of these paradoxes the play is able to step outside the boundaries of contemporary dramatic representation in order to showcase the limitations of Romantic theater, and of realist drama as a medium more broadly, to accurately depict the position of women. This essay argues The Bride represents intervention in a theatrical culture in which women were faced with a double bind: if they remained offstage, they were denied a voice; simultaneously, however, their representation on it functioned to contain and circumscribe them as well. To escape this catch-22, The Bride presents a new strategy for combating women's social subordination in the Romantic period: it employs a negative representation of its central figure the Bride, (1) dramatizing the preemptive closing off rather than the possibility of social advancement for women on the English stage. By being conspicuously removed from the stage, as the play as a whole is from England (both physically and in subject), the character of the Bride lays bare the subjections of English women in the Romantic theater and the mechanisms by which drama has the potential to silence even which it stages. Baillie wrote The Bride at the prompting of Sir Alexander Johnston, a British colonial official, who suggested she compose a drama to be translated into Cingalese and staged in Ceylon to serve for the moral improvement of the natives of the island. (2) Apparently spurred on by the success of her play The Martyr in production there two years earlier, she describes writing the play as a way of spreading Christianity to the country's inhabitants, the play being an instrument for their [the natives'] good by introducing to them, in dramatic form, that leading precept of the Christian religion which distinguishes it from all other religions, the forgiveness of injuries (v, viii). The Bride presents the story of a Sri Lankan family and its patriarch's insatiable pursuit of a second, younger wife. Before the play begins, Rasinga, a local chieftain, saw the face of a beautiful woman after it became uncovered while he was rescuing her father from a raid by bandits, and he instantly fell in love with her. However, Rasinga's current wife Artina objects fiercely to the idea of sharing her position with a second woman, as does Samarkoon, Artina's brother, who also saw the woman's face during the rescue and also desires her. Rasinga proceeds with his plans to marry the second woman despite Artina's protests, but is thwarted when Samarkoon steals her away with the help of a band of local highwaymen. After forcibly taking back the Bride and imprisoning Samarkoon and, later, Artina for trying to free her brother, Rasinga sentences both siblings to death and prepares to marry the younger woman. However, a combination of the intercession of a Spanish Christian, Dr. Juan De Creda, and the resolution of his own son Samar to die alongside his mother persuades him to be merciful. The play ends with Rasinga pardoning all, embracing Christianity, forgoing his claims to the Bride, and promising her to Samarkoon. The drama is explicit in its message of Christian forgiveness, insisting the only way to attain happiness is to show mercy toward others, and it concludes by neatly drawing all its plot threads together. …