The Tender Mother and the Faithful Wife: Theater, Charity, and Female Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

THE TENDER MOTHER AND THE FAITHFUL WIFE: THEATER, CHARITY, AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND SUSAN HARRIS I. NO PLACE FOR A LADY in 1745, thanks largely to the efforts of Irish obstetrician Bartholomew Mosse, the first maternity hospital in the British Isles was established in Dublin. A few years later, realizing that the Lying-In Hospital was chronically short of cash, and yet unwilling to give up his dream of expanding it, Mosse devised a novel solution. In his design for the hospital’s new site on Great-Britain Street, which would finally open in 1757, Mosse combined the hospital buildings with an entertainment complex that began with a pleasure garden and eventually included a suite of assembly rooms and the Round Room for which the hospital was eventually renamed.1 Money generated by the concerts, balls, and assemblies that took place on one side of the complex would pay for the medical care given to the indigent mothers who were delivering their children on the other. For modern readers, the pains of childbirth and the pleasures of entertainment belong to different worlds; the juxtaposition achieved by the construction of the Rotunda Hospital seems, if not inappropriate, at least bizarre. But to Mosse’s contemporaries, the relationship would have seemed natural enough. Throughout the first half of the century, polite amusements such as music, opera, and the theater had played an important role in raising money for Dublin’s charities, including and especially its hospitals. By the time the Lying-In Hospital first opened, Mercer’s HosTHEATER , CHARITY, AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN 18TH-CENTURY IRELAND 207 1 Only the pleasure gardens were completed during Mosse’s lifetime; they were patterned after London’s Vauxhall Gardens and included a coffee stall and concert hall (Browne 7, 10). After Mosse’s death in 1759, his successor Fielding Ould, carrying out plans that had been “devised by Mosse,” supervised the renovation of the pleasure gardens and the construction of the assembly rooms and the Round Room, which was completed in 1767 (Browne 20). pital, the Charitable Infirmary, and the Hospital for Incurables were all regularly benefiting from money raised by concerts and plays. Through charity benefits, theater in Dublin contributed significantly to the creation and maintenance of the public buildings that housed Dublin’s “hospitals and institutions for poor relief, such as almshouses and orphanages” (Greene and Clark 44). Many of the hospitals supported by theater benefits were established in the 1730s and 1740s, just as Dublin’s theaters were beginning to compete successfully with London’s; charity benefits, which generally drew large and brilliant audiences, provided important financial and cultural support for both institutions.2 The construction of the Rotunda Hospital’s new site simply materialized an already intimate relationship between cultural production and charitable institutions. What Bartholomew Mosse envisioned, and what would eventually be constructed along Great-Britain Street, was a permanent charity benefit. This article is an attempt to unpack the cultural significance of the charity benefit—for Dublin, for Ireland, and for the legitimate theater, but most of all for the women who were caught up in it as benefactors and patients, spectators and actresses, patrons and “proper Objects.” The phenomenon of the Dublin charity benefit suggests that linking the two public institutions most closely associated with the city’s resident “ladies of quality”—charities and the legitimate theater—helped further the AngloIrish élite’s attempts to reproduce Ireland-the-savage-wilderness as Irelandthe -civilized-nation. The construction of the Rotunda complex indicates that this process of reproduction was both discursive and material. The collaboration between private entertainments and public charities could reshape not only the identities of Dublin’s inhabitants but also the city itself—a city that was much under construction during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. My discussion will be grounded in a reading of a specific charity benefit : a 25 April 1745 production of Ambrose Philips’s The Distrest Mother at the Theatre-Royal in Smock Alley for the benefit of the Lying-In Hospital , which had just opened on its original site—a building that had once THEATER, CHARITY, AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN 18TH-CENTURY IRELAND 208 2 The period...