Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort: A Crisis of Class Identity

Abstract

The late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries in Britain are characterised by socio-cultural and political turmoil and transformations specifically due to the impacts of the revolutions, the growth of the middle class and thus the changing class hierarchies. Within this chaotic socio-political atmosphere, the Gothic becomes a very dominant and popular genre projecting these transitions of this period. Joanna Baillie who is influenced by the Gothic craze of the age like many writers is regarded as one of the most significant playwrights of the period. In one of her well-known Gothic plays, De Monfort (1798), Baillie portrays the anxiety and fear of the loss of power and status by the aristocracy. Thus, she creates a Gothic atmosphere surrounded by claustrophobic and paranoid anxiety of De Monfort. De Monfort, who is also affected by fear and paranoia dominating the period as a result of the political sanctions, cannot adjust himself to the changing social structure. Considering the changing class hierarchies, particularly De Monfort’s attachment to his family name becomes the core of the play in terms of his fear of obliteration. In the context of the socio-cultural and political dynamics of the Romantic period, this study aims to argue how Baillie illustrates the shifting class dynamics and the anxieties of the period with reference to her Gothic play, De Monfort.