Joanna Baillie’s “Great Moving Picture” and the Ethics of the Gaze in De Monfort

Abstract

In this essay, I develop the implications of the spectatorial gaze that Joanna Baillie theorizes in her “Introductory Discourse” to the Plays on the Passions. I argue that while she explicitly idealizes a detached spectatorial position from which viewers can anatomize the characters they perceive, her plays in fact stage the impossibility of such a gaze, and foreground the act of looking by representing characters who observe each other from their own concretely embodied perspectives. Baillie’s tragedy on hatred, De Monfort, serves to illustrate this point, as it demonstrates that the act of looking does not simply lay bare the signs of passion but is itself intertwined with Gothically excessive passions. In this way, I build on contemporary criticism of Baillie, which has often observed the disjunctions between her theory and her practice, but argue that her work embodies a more radical ethics of representation in that it does not simply subvert Enlightenment philosophies of sympathy and passion by staging the unruly otherness of human nature but exposes the alterity inherent in the corporeal gaze itself.