A Trip to Scarborough or, How "to Undergo a Bungling Reformation"

Abstract

A Trip to Scarborough (1777), Sheridan's adaptation of Sir John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696), is marked by a number of textual strategies that silence Vanbrugh's radical insight into the dynamics of desire that erodes the monogamous ethics of marriage. Sheridan depoliticises the original by turning marital crisis in the face of illicit desire, that Vanbrugh perceives as endemic to marriage as an institution, into emotional conflict due to individual error. As such, the conflict that the play dramatises is resolved insofar as Sheridan sees marital relationships as strictly belonging in the personal; hence the closure in which the husband is reformed by his virtuous wife and the durability of the marital bond arises as a certainty. In this sense, A Trip to Scarborough inscribes the late eighteenth-century emerging notions of companionate marriage and domestic happiness, mediated by the novel and reinforced by sentimentalist ideologies of human reformability. In tune with these ideologies that privilege the personal and the private over the political and the public, A Trip to Scarborough masks the politics of power that marriage incorporates and reproduces.