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Witchcraft

MARJEAN D. PURINTON (ESSAY DATE 2001)

SOURCE: Purinton, Marjean D. "Socialized and Medicalized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie's Witchcraft." Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 9 (2001): 139-56.

In the following essay, Purinton analyzes Baillie's portrayal of what was often medically and scientifically sanctioned persecution of women in her drama Witchcraft.

Because many Romantic-period dramas are engaged with political frenzy following the French Revolution and are shaped by psychosocial issues associated with the Gothic, it is not unusual for us to see "madness," in various manifestations, playing a significant part on the stage. The physiology of excessive emotions had also become, by the end of the eighteenth century, a significant focus of scientific inquiry and discourse. By the early nineteenth-century, the prevailing medical opinion had gendered emotions so that women who exhibited...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Joanna Baillie (Essay Date 1798)
4. General Commentary
   1. E. J. Clery (Essay Date 2000)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Plays on the Passions
   2. Witchcraft
6. Further Reading