SOURCE: Franceschina, John. Introduction to Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British Women, 1790-1843, pp. 1-13. New York: Garland, 1997.

[In the following essay, Franceschina examines the contributions of female playwrights to the Gothic genre.]

Ha! eternal curses! still will I have revenge!

The Old Oak Chest II.v.

Confusion! foil'd again …

St. Clair of the Isles I.iv.

Aesthetically, melodrama is the dramatization of a dream world of absolutes “where virtue and vice coexist in pure whiteness and blackness” and where “life is uncomplicated, easy to understand, and immeasurably exciting” (Booth, English Melodrama 14). This world of certainty, in which character, conduct, and situation are extremely simple and clear, is realized in a dramatic form that “presented ‘ordinary’ people in domestic situations, strong plots, violence and broad humor, villainy confounded and happy endings” (Kilgarriff 16). In his Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Michael R. Booth defines the characteristics of melodrama:

[T]he concentration on externals, the emphasis on situation at the expense of motivation and characterization, the firm moral distinctions, the unchanging character stereotypes of hero, heroine, villain, comic man, comic woman, and good old man, physical sensation, spectacular effects (made possible by improvements in stage technology), marked musical accompaniment, the rewarding of virtue and punishing of vice, the rapid alternation between extremes of violence, pathos, and low comedy.

(25)

The first kind of English melodrama, the Gothic, developed in the 1790s and flourished for nearly fifty years before “withering away,” or, rather, yielding to the “sensation” melodramas of the second half of the nineteenth century (English Melodrama 67). Describing the Gothic tradition in literature, Ellen Moers concludes:

In Gothic writings fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare. Not, that is, to reach down into the depths of the soul and purge it with pity and terror (as we say tragedy does), but to get to the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear.

(90)¹

In his anthology entitled Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825, Jeffrey Cox suggests that the Gothic species of drama resides in ruined castles, dungeons, crypts, secret caves, and dark forests where the natural world meets the supernatural in an attempt to unveil or recover “some unmediated absolute that stands outside the boundaries of the natural and social orders” (7).² Citing Walpole's defense of the incest at the center of his Gothic play, The Mysterious Mother, and that author's description of characters who are good and evil simultaneously, Cox concludes that the Gothic implies a moral ambiguity, even an amorality that renders it particularly dangerous (14). In her Art of Darkness, A Poetics of Gothic, Anne Williams reminds us that Robert D. Hume took a similar position, arguing that “the Gothic remains mired in an indeterminate realm of moral ambiguity” and reflects not the “transcendent romantic imagination” but the lesser realm of “fancy” with which women writers were often associated in the nineteenth century (6-7).

Yet, according to the few critics who took the form seriously, melodramas were supposed to be moral.³ In Theories of the Theatre, Marvin Carlson cites Charles Nodier's introduction to the plays of the “Father of French melodrama,” Guilbert de Pixérécourt, in which he stressed “the moral function of the melodrama” and “its emphasis on justice and humanity.” Suggesting that melodrama has replaced the Church as the source of moral instruction, Nodier argued that the main difference between Romantic drama and melodrama was the former's amorality, and Pixérécourt himself condemned the Romantic drama for its lack of morality and interest in the lowest of vices: incest, patricide, rape, and prostitution (Carlson 214-215). There appears, then, to have been a formal distinction in the nineteenth century between Romantic drama and melodrama and between the Romantic and Gothic traditions. While critics such as Anne Williams argue against the distinction between Romantic and Gothic, the paradoxical nature of Gothic melodrama, simultaneously moral and amoral, was one of its chief attractions, and as such created the cynosure of escapist entertainment by reinscribing the contradictions of day-to-day existence into a larger-than-life formula of poetic justice.

Much has been written about women—both as author and audience—and the Gothic tradition.⁴ In her preface to Gothic (Re)Visions, Susan Wolstenholme explains why literary criticism over the past quarter of a century has inferred a special relationship between female and Gothic:

I contend that Gothic narrative has special potential to deal with the issues of writing and reading as a woman for formal reasons. Critics have often noted that Gothic-marked fiction particularly relies for its effect on the textual representation of a deliberately composed stage scene, which assumes an implied spectator, and also that these novels often allude to the theater and to individual plays. I believe that both this structure and these allusions participate in establishing “woman” as a textual position—or, to frame the issue in terms of a different discourse, that they suggest a meditation on the issue of writing as a woman—and that, recurring from text to text, they establish a pattern that becomes a recognizable symbolic code.

(xi)

Wolstenholme's allusion to the theatrical resonance of the Gothic is a significant one even though it is used only to explicate Gothic narrative fiction. In her Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism, Gayle Austin complains that “drama, not to mention the entire realm of live performance, has barely been tapped as a source of material by the field of women's studies” and itemizes the reasons why drama presents many obstacles as a field of study:

The writing of plays requires mastering to some degree a male-dominated, public production machinery, something that relatively few women have been able to do over the long history of the form, and consequently there is not as large a body of extant plays by women as there is of novels. Only a handful of plays by women have entered the canon of “approved” works that are published, anthologized, taught, and produced, so that we are not used to associating women with playwrighting.

(2)⁵

Yet, the rediscovery—and eventual recanonization—of women's plays is considered central to feminist scholarship. In her An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre, Elaine Aston argues that “feminist theatre history no longer accepts the concept of a theatrical tradition which either excludes women or considers them ‘lost’” and concludes that “bringing the ‘lost’ tradition of women's theatre history into view is an important political step if feminist theatre scholarship is to change the future history of the stage” (34).

It is therefore important to rescue from oblivion the work of “lost” women writers who have made significant contributions to the species of Gothic melodrama.⁶ Such a recovery necessitates a reexamination both of genre and historical perspective for, as Jill Dolan argues in her book, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, “fitting a woman's play into any canon—male or female—implies that it is acquiescent to the ideology perpetuated by that canon. Canons, by implication, exclude not only worthy plays but worthy spectators on the basis of their ideological perspectives” (40).

The melodramas in this anthology function as a kind of history of the form between 1790 (when mixed-genre plays were anticipating the formal elements of melodrama) and 1843 when the Theatre Regulation Act abolished the patent-house monopoly over regular drama and allowed any licensed theatre to perform drama of any type (Brockett 400).⁷ It must be remembered that during the first half of the nineteenth century, the melodrama was, by nature, a dangerous form of English theatre. It skirted the patent laws, aroused emotions through spectacular devices instead of poetry, and was unabashedly revolutionary in spirit and in practice (especially in challenging the hierarchy of dramatic types by mixing genres). Cox emphasizes the revolutionary aspect of Gothic drama (not specifically melodrama) by linking it to the fall of the Bastille and the defeat of Napoleon (8) while Nodier refers to melodrama specifically as embodying the “morality of the Revolution” (Carlson 214).

Just as women were actively involved in the storming of the Bastille, so were they major contributors to the genre of melodrama which, because of its highly structured conventions, provided them with opportunities for double-voicing, or reinscribing their ordinary experiences into romantic adventures in ways that were acceptable to a male-dominated art form.⁸ Concurrent with the development of Gothic melodrama was a growth in the number of women in the work force (Anderson and Zinsser 2: 253), an increase of educational opportunities for women (Anderson and Zinsser 2: 116), the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and the development of a new sense of respectability for the English actress (Richards 73).⁹ The heroine in Gothic melodrama, incarcerated but striving to get free, becomes the paradigm for the new spirit of female activity.¹⁰

Ellen Moers draws a similar conclusion in her discussion of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic novels:

For Mrs. Radcliffe, the Gothic novel was a device to send maidens on distant and exciting journeys without offending the proprieties. In the power of villains, her heroines are forced to do what they could never do alone, whatever their ambitions: scurry up the top of pasteboard Alps, spy out exotic vistas, penetrate bandit-infested forests. And indoors, inside Mrs. Radcliffe's castles, her heroines can scuttle miles along corridors, descend into dungeons, and explore secret chambers without a chaperone, because the Gothic castle, however much in ruins, is still an indoor and therefore freely female space.

(126)

While the possibility of female movement, inside and outside the castle, is highly attractive on the page, how much more effective is it when seen in a public arena, with flesh-and-blood actresses representing the romantic aspirations of the women in the audience. And how much more dangerous for the author. In his discussion of the English popular novel, J. M. S. Tompkins argues that, at the end of the eighteenth century, there were certain acceptable parameters within which a woman might exercise her “fancy.” She was permitted to write to amuse her leisure hours or instruct her sex but she was not allowed to be ambitious:

The proper attitude for a female talent was diffidence; the proper field of exercise, the narrow circle of her intimate friends; and if for any of the permitted reasons she stepped outside the circle, let her sedulously avoid the disgraceful imputation of assurance. … Anonymity was the great resource, and only by the most prudent degrees was the veil dropped.

(116-117)¹¹

The authors in this volume, writing publicly in a transgressive mode,¹² shunned anonymity, employing instead a variety of other devices to render themselves accepted by the theatrical public. Perhaps the mounting popularity of the romance novel and women's increased attendance at the theatre at the end of the eighteenth century gave the women melodramatists the incentive to pursue their muse.¹³

That the melodrama was particularly popular with women is clear from a critical observation made in the March 1818 edition of The Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror. Complaining about the audience that frequents the melodrama, the author concludes:

They are persons to whom any exertion of the intellect is absolute toil, and carefully to be avoided, who like to have their other faculties lulled into a slumber, whilst the imagination is excited and amused: this requires no species of exertion, and the sort of dream in which a person remains under the fascination of these amusements, is like that of an aerial castle-builder, the better half of the faculties are asleep, the imagination only in action. Such are romance readers, such are the admirers of melo-drama (italics mine). A world which is different from our own, characters claiming little affinity with humanity, striking, marvellous, and improbable incidents, and combinations, these are the leading features common to both.

(159-160)

The association of the melodrama with romantic fiction is significant not only in its delineation of a similar audience¹⁴ but it points to the precise approach taken in The Ward of the Castle, the first example of a Gothic melodrama written by a woman. Miss Burke's “comic opera” is the first example of a mixed-genre play by a woman that exhibits the characteristics of what will become Gothic melodrama.¹⁵ Performed in 1793, the year before Anne Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Ward of the Castle anticipates Colman the Younger's Feudal Times, a romantic melodrama produced at Drury Lane in 1799, that makes use of an identical plot, complete with the heroine's escape by boat.

Harriet Lee's The Mysterious Marriage, written in 1793 and published in 1798, characterizes the “castle-dungeon-ghost variety” of Gothic melodrama (English Melodrama 68), anticipating by a year the spectral effects in Boaden's Fountainville Forest (1794) and Monk Lewis's The Castle Spectre (1897), the play that popularized the melodramatic ghost, by four years.¹⁶ In addition, calling for the abolition of slavery and the development of a noble friendship between women, The Mysterious Marriage expresses a number of revolutionary sentiments that have hitherto escaped critical attention.¹⁷

Jane Scott's The Old Oak Chest, performed at the Sans Pareil Theatre in 1816, is characteristic of the “bandit-forest-cottage sort” of Gothic melodrama (English Melodrama 68). The most popular of melodramas written by women in the nineteenth century, it exhibits no pretentions whatsoever to literary merit. Rather, it appeals to the vulgar tastes of an audience demanding spectacle, low-comedy, and romance. Perhaps the most formulaic of the plays here represented (which accounts somewhat for its popularity), The Old Oak Chest was fashioned from bits and pieces of earlier Gothic plays. From O'Keefe's The Castle of Andalusia (1782), Scott borrows the Spanish setting and banditti; from Murphy's The Grecian Daughter (1772), she borrows the cavern scene; and from Dimond's The Foundling of the Forest, she takes the character of Florian, the burning castle motif, a mysterious cottage-dwelling female character, and the reunion—after great suffering—with the son, long believed dead.¹⁸ It appears that Jane Scott's method of finding acceptance in a male-dominated theatre was to borrow plots and themes from popular plays by men.

Margaret Harvey, a poet and scholar from Newcastle, turned to English history and her own epic poem, The Lay of the Minstrel's Daughter, to create Raymond de Percy, the first “historical” Gothic melodrama written by a woman to be performed. Produced at Sunderland in April 1822, at the height of melodrama's popularity, the play is typical of the “castle-dungeon-ghost variety” complete with a suit of armor that moves, an incident possibly borrowed from Jephson's The Count of Narbonne (1781) by way of The Castle Spectre. On first examination, Raymond de Percy may read as little more than an adaptation of Lewis's play. The characters of Percy, Motley, and Kenrick have the same names and functions in both plays.¹⁹ The villain in both has an obsessive desire to possess the hero's beloved and is tormented by guilt made manifest by the apparition of a ghost in a tomb. The similarities are great, to be sure, but the differences are even more substantial. Where The Castle Spectre was accused of having licentious dialogue and violently democratic sentiments (Cox 221-222), Raymond de Percy is perhaps the most conservatively moral play in this volume. Written by the headmistress of a girls' boarding school in Bishopwearmouth for a provincial audience of sailors and merchants, the play presents women in their most traditional role of long-suffering heroine, unable to act without the assistance of a man.²⁰

In contrast, St. Clair of the Isles, written by Elizabeth Polack for the Royal Victoria Theatre in 1838, portrays women as strong, active, and independent. The first Jewish woman to have melodramas produced on the London stage, Polack's play—an adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth Helme—is an example of “Scottish Gothic” which, according to Booth, “simply transplanted the usual characters and situations of melodrama, plus a dash of nationalism, to vaguely historical and strongly romantic Scottish settings” (English Melodrama 78). Unsatisfied with the typical heroines of melodrama, Polack found in Helme's romantic novel the opportunity to reinscribe the formula by replacing the traditional villain with a villainess whose evil machinations control the action of the play. What's more, the real hero of the play is not the leading man but a youth, played by a woman in pants. In all of her extant plays, Polack creates strong, heroic women characters who enact roles that are stereotypically male.²¹

Catherine Gore, among the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century, is represented by two plays, The Bond (1824), her first dramatic effort, and Dacre of the South (1840), her penultimate play, and last melodrama. Both are included in this volume to demonstrate the development of the author's approach to the Gothic, and to show the changes occurring in the melodrama midway through the nineteenth century when Romantic drama and melodrama appeared to merge as “Gentlemanly Melodrama” (Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre 45; Brockett 402). While Edward Bulwer-Lytton is usually credited with establishing a melodrama capable of attracting “gentlemen” back into the theatre (Brockett 402; Rahill 116-119), Catherine Gore emerges as his female equivalent, bridging the gap between melodramatic form and the issues and concerns of high society.

The Bond is Catherine Gore's version of Goethe's Faust Part I (1808) with the occasional borrowing from a variety of popular melodramas by men. Present are the traditional Gothic techniques—the suffering heroine, the demonic villain, the brooding, Byronic hero, castles, sensational effects, songs, and spectres—in three acts of blank verse. Absent only is the comic relief. Poetic justice is served in the punishment of vice and conservative morality upheld.²²

On the other hand, Dacre of the South (like Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons) is typical of the “gentlemanly” variety of melodramas. Defining this type of five-act “drama,” Rahill concludes:

Though they are written in blank verse and have no specifically comic characters, these plays are essentially melodramas, with their simplified character types, their flamboyant heroics, and their happy ends; and they were adopted enthusiastically into the melodramatic repertoire everywhere.

(119)²³

There is no evidence that Mrs. Gore ever sought to have the play produced. In 1840, the year it was published, Dacre was reviewed in The Athenaeum and judged unfit for serious drama:

Mrs. Gore, yielding to her dramatic propensities, here gives us a five-act drama, in blank verse, on the sad story of Thomas Fiennes, Lord Dacre, so strangely condemned in the year 1542. She has made the accusation brought against her hero turn on a boyish frolic of deer-stealing, into which he suffered himself to be entrapped;—too slight a charge to be accepted as the master-incident of a serious play—on which, as on a scaffold, a structure of passion, and agony, and death, is to be raised. To the poetry of the serious drama Mrs. Gore is wholly unequal.

(13-14)

As tragedy the play certainly fails. But as a melodrama self-consciously emphasizing the qualities of loyalty, freedom, class-distinction, family values, and conservative morality, the play stands as a significant example of the “gentlemanly” genre.²⁴

The women represented in this volume are but a few of the female writers of the nineteenth century who produced melodramas or mixed-genre plays. The works presented here were chosen because they are significant “firsts” or characteristic representations of the different varieties of Gothic melodrama, and have not been republished or anthologized in this century. All of the plays have been lost to both a reading and theatrical audience for at least a hundred years.²⁵ A complete list of plays by women authors who wrote at least one Gothic melodrama or mixed-genre play between 1790 and 1843 is supplied in Appendix C.²⁶

The plays in this collection are, for the most part, spectacular, hyper-thyroid, popular theatrical entertainments. They are hardly literary masterpieces, but they do exemplify what Davis and Joyce have determined to be the three types of dramatic literature produced by women until 1900: professional theatre, amateur theatricals, and closet drama. Professional theatre was that written and, often, acted by women from all levels of the middle and working classes (The Ward of the Castle, The Mysterious Marriage, The Old Oak Chest, and St. Clair of the Isles). Amateur, or home entertainment, was that type of theatrical activity written by middle-class women for their families and friends (Raymond de Percy). Closet drama, which included dramatic poetry and translations of plays by celebrated dramatists, was the name given to plays not intended for production, and practiced primarily by aristocrats and other women who were highly educated (The Bond, Dacre of the South) (xi).²⁷

I hope readers will relish the rediscovery of these “lost” melodramas by women and accept them, in the spirit in which they were written, not only as significant examples of nineteenth-century popular culture, but as hidden documents in the history of women.

Notes

1. In Ghosts of the Gothic, Judith Wilt expresses similar sentiments: “Dread is the father and mother of the Gothic. Dread begets rage and fright and cruel horror, or awe and worship and a shining standfastness—all of these have human features, but Dread has no face” (5).

2. Similarly, In his study of Gothic drama, Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast, Paul Ranger defines Gothic drama as “a reflection of the dark and wild side of human nature, mirrored in an equally violent natural world or in architectural settings which, in their ruinous state, spoke of human mortality. … The plays were subject to Germanic influences which queried the traditional eighteenth-century concepts of social hierarchy, sympathy and respectability” (18). The mention of Germanic influences is especially important given the popularity of the plays of August von Kotzebue in England. In his Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, Bertrand Evans suggests that “the year 1792 can be taken only as the date at which there might have occurred the earliest mingling of German and English horrific materials in Gothic plays” (90). If this is true, then the first two plays in this volume, both written in 1793, were quick to take advantage of the new development. See Rahill, The World of Melodrama passim, Ranger, Chapter 1, Booth, English Melodrama, Chapter 2, and Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest, Chapter 3, for detailed studies of the foreign influences on the Gothic tradition, both literary and theatrical, in England.

3. Evans seems to be addressing the apparent dichotomy between an amoral subject and a moral intent when he concludes that “Gothic drama—even plays like those by Lewis, which contain an elaborate diablerie—is thoroughly moral …” (45).

4. In her Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Anne Williams provides an exhaustive retrospective of recent academic research. See Bibliography for a list of titles consulted in this anthology.

5. In their introduction to Drama by Women to 1900, Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce add that “there is much to be done in reevaluating women dramatists. Current critical and scholarly resources do not cover the range of their activities. … There are few considerations of nineteenth-century women dramatists” (ix-x).

6. While Cox argues in favor of a reexamination of the Gothic because it “provides one central set of texts that challenge the controlling preconceptions about nineteenth-century drama” (4), he only discusses the work of one woman author, Joanna Baillie. Evans's discussion of women authors is, with the exception of Joanna Baillie, usually little more than a mention and stops at 1816. Ranger lists plays by women between 1750 and 1820 but comments on few of them in his text. In their respective analyses of melodrama in general, and the Gothic species in particular, Dye, Booth, Brockett, Kilgarriff, and Rahill mention no women writers at all. Women melodramatists have been neglected even by feminist scholars researching theatre and the “Female Gothic.” Case and Aston pass over the early nineteenth century in their historical surveys and Austin and Dolan focus essentially on the contemporary theatre. DeLamotte, Massé, Moers, Sedgwick, Williams and Wolstenholme have published important studies of Gothic novels written by women but have taken little notice of women's writing for the stage. Ellen Donkin's important study, Getting into the Act, describes the period between 1800 and 1830 as a low point in women's theatrical writing arguing that “there are occasional (italics mine) plays produced by women, but no one emerges to replace Elizabeth Inchbald or Hannah Cowley as a long-term professional until Catherine Gore in the 1830s” (31). Dismissing the minor houses as “not being genteel,” she concludes that “for many middle-class women, the reputations of the smaller houses precluded their serious consideration as places in which to produce” (32). While this was undoubtedly true for many women writers, it was not the case of the women who wrote melodramas for the minor theatres. Donkin fails to mention any of the women melodramatists even in passing. It is certainly time to challenge the preconception that nineteenth-century melodrama was exclusively a male form.

7. In his introduction to The Golden Age of Melodrama, Michael Kilgarriff cites the passage of the Theatre Regulation Act in 1843 as one of the causes of its “decline” in popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century (24). In her chapter on melodrama in Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura Mulvey concurs that 1843 was a turning point for melodrama because of the dissolution of the theatrical class structure brought about by the Theatre Regulation Act (66). Booth argues that Gothic melodrama continued into the 1870s (The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays xvi) but agrees that, by the middle of the century, it is “no longer profitable to conduct a separate examination of the melodramatic form” since Victorian “drama” is melodramatic to a great extent (Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre 45). Once melodrama no longer had to function as the “other” in the theatre, it became part of the establishment and, therefore, no longer transgressive. In his Recollections, J. R. Planché is especially vocal about the function of melodrama in the years preceding the Theatre Regulation Act:

   With these exceptions [Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket during summer seasons], no theatre within the bills of mortality was safe from the common informer, did its company venture to enact any drama in which there was not a certain quantity of vocal or instrumental music. The Lyceum, a new establishment, was specially licensed for the performance of English opera and musical dramas, and the Adelphi and Olympic Theatres had the Lord Chamberlain's license for the performance of burlettas only, by which description, after much controversy both in and out of court, we were desired to understand dramas containing not less than five pieces of vocal music in each act, and which were also, with one or two exceptions, not to be found in the repertoire of the patent houses [i.e., Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket]. All beside the above-named six theatres were positively out of the pale of the law. There was no Act of Parliament which empowered the magistrates to license a building for dramatic performances. Astley's, the Surrey, the Victoria, Sadler's Wells etc., had, in common with Vauxhall, a license “for music and dancing” only, by which was originally meant public concerts and balls, gradually permitted to extend to ballets and pantomimes and equestrian performances: but no one had a legal right to open his mouth on a stage unaccompanied by music; and the next step was to evade the law by the tinkling of a piano in the orchestra throughout the interdicted performances.

   (2: 70-76, qtd. Kilgarriff 483-484)

8. See Elaine Showalter's important essay, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” for a discussion of the nature of the female authorial voice in literature. Arguing that “all language is the language of the dominant order, and women, if they speak at all, must speak through it” (200), Showalter deduces that all women's writing is a “‘double-voiced discourse’ that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant” (201). See also Jeanine Dwinell's unpublished thesis, “Gender Issues in the Plays of Catherine Gore” for a critical application of Showalter's theories. Davis and Joyce agree that the theatre, especially in the nineteenth century, was a conservative forum used by women “to express their major concerns” (xviii).

9. See The Rise of the English Actress, Chapters 4 and 5. See also Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Britain, passim.

10. Gothic melodrama created a new aesthetic of the sensational and explored ways of representing ideological struggles without incurring censorship. Among the ideological concerns of the day was the growing activity among women in the workplace.

11. Mary Ellmann discusses a number of feminine stereotypes that have emerged in Western civilization in her book Thinking About Women. These include formlessness, passivity, instability, confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality, and compliancy—all of which support Tompkins's argument regarding attitudes toward women writers. For a complete discussion of these stereotypes, see Ellman, Chapter 3.

12. Though the melodrama was an exceptionally popular genre, it was maligned by classicists and romantics alike (Carlson 214). Even today, we tend to look upon melodrama as a highly inferior form of theatre.

13. In discussing the rise of women's dramatic writing at the end of the eighteenth century (virtually simultaneous with the rise of melodrama), Donkin credits women's attendance at plays with anchoring the idea of the woman playwright in the public imagination. She concludes:

    Everyone, but especially young women, could attend the theatre and see for themselves concrete evidence of other women's success and recognition. That had the potential for creating a momentum that made women playwrights slightly less dependent upon the chemistry or good will of any one particular manager, and more focused on taking their rightful place in the profession.

    (108)

14. See Blakey's The Minerva Press 1790-1820 and Summers's The Gothic Quest, Chapter 2, for extensive discussions of female readership of romantic fiction.

15. In his A Study of Melodrama in England from 1800-1840, Dye mentions only one earlier mixed-genre play by a woman, Hannah Cowley's A Day in Turkey; or the Russian Slaves, produced in 1791 (35). Cowley's play, a comedy interspersed with songs, does not exhibit the characteristics of the Gothic species. In Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast, Paul Ranger cites a number of earlier plays by women (175-176). While his examples exemplify the Gothic tradition, the plays themselves are bona fide tragedies, not mixed-genre pieces.

16. Bertrand Evans credits Boaden with creating the first melodramatic ghost (101). He neglects Lee's play entirely. Citing the ghost of the murdered Evelina in The Castle Spectre as a representative example, Booth concludes that “the frequency with which ghosts appear in Gothic melodrama also distinguishes it from the rest of its class. These ghosts are invariably on the side of goodness and often turn up at the worst possible moment for the villain; their arrival is accompanied by fitting effects” (English Melodrama 81). Booth fails to take notice of Lee's play.

17. No one has discussed the similarities between Figaro's famous tirade in The Marriage of Figaro and Rodolphus's speech: “I have somewhat here that tells me I was not born a slave, but a man—A poor one I must own, yet still a man: with feelings that will not be commanded, and opinions that are not to be bought” (III.iii.) Not even Janet Todd's excellent, Women's Friendship in Literature makes reference to the noble female relationship in this play. Given Lee's stature as a writer of fiction, such an omission is conspicuous.

18. There are a number of other thematic adaptations from earlier plays: Lewis's Adelmorn the Outlaw (1801) presents the rightful heir to a kingdom living as an outlaw because of an “alleged” crime; Arnold's The Woodman's Hut (1814) offers yet another version of the mysterious cottage-dwelling female; and Pocock's The Miller and His Men (1813) introduces the character of the miller who is really a bandit in disguise.

19. The hero, the fool, and the villain's henchman.

20. A comparison of the final moments of each play is indicative of their differences. In Harvey's melodrama, Conrade fights the hero, knowing that he will be defeated and thus punished for his crimes. Tormented by guilt, he welcomes the opportunity to give his life in reparation for the life he took. In Lewis's play, Osmond demonstrates no contrition whatsoever and continues his attempts at rape and murder until a ghostly apparition disarms him long enough for the heroine, Angela, to stab him in the chest. In both plays, the villain is allowed to live, but while Harvey's hero proclaims munificence (“the warrior's greatest conquest is to save”), Lewis's hero dismisses the act as unwarranted charity (“Though ill-deserved by his guilt, your generous pity is still amiable”).

21. See the introduction to St. Clair on page 227 for a discussion of the female characters in Esther, The Royal Jewess, an Eastern melodrama, and Woman's Revenge, a burletta. In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change, Kari J. Winter argues that “in Gothic novels written by men … innocent heroines are routinely raped, tortured, and killed. In Gothic novels written by women, innocent heroines are usually guided by the authors into an understanding of human evil, a knowledge that in many cases empowers them to survive and escape from the severe forms of victimization that male Gothic novelists delight in depicting” (78). In her melodramas, Polack goes beyond empowering women by knowledge. She gives them authority, stature, and money.

22. Like Goethe, Gore ends the play with “End of the First Part” as if to promise a second play. While Faust Part II was published in 1831, no second part of Gore's play was completed.

23. See Rahill's discussion of Bulwer-Lytton's melodramas in The World of Melodrama, Chapter 15, “Patent House Melodrama.” The plays discussed are The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Richelieu (1839).

24. In his introduction to The Lights o' London, Booth comments that Victorian drama, especially melodrama, is “riddled with class conflict” which provides not only a “forceful dramatic expression but also a significant aspect of Victorian society.” He also suggests the presence in Victorian melodrama of issues involving the nouveau riche versus the old landed gentry (xxv)—issues which were the concern of the “gentlemanly” audience. All of these themes are found in Dacre of the South.

25. Even the 1996 anthology Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century fails to include a single play by any of the authors discussed here.

26. I have not chosen to include Joanna Baillie, perhaps the most illustrious Gothic dramatist of the early nineteenth century, in this volume for several reasons. Scullion includes her The Family Legend in the anthology Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century; Cox recently reproduced her De Monfort in his anthology, Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825; and a facsimile edition of her plays was issued by Garland in 1977. Even though Evans argues that “of her twenty-six dramatic works, ten may be classified as predominantly Gothic, and all reveal conspicuous marks of the tradition” (200), given the fact that Baillie's plays are hardly “lost” and that, as an author, she is considered more as a writer of “verse tragedies” than melodramas (Moers 118), she was omitted from this collection.

27. In British Plays of the Nineteenth Century, J. O. Bailey suggests that “closet drama” was the locus for “the most radical experimentation with the romantic verse play” and “a third contender in the struggle for survival between the verse drama and the evolving melodrama” (26). While Bailey mentions Joanna Baillie's Orra in his discussion of Gothic melodrama (24), he fails to note Catherine Gore's experiments in closet drama.

Bibliography

Anderson, Bonnie D., and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Aston, Elaine. An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Austin, Gayle. Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Bailey, J. O. British Plays of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology to Illustrate the Evolution of the Drama. New York: The Odyssey Press, Inc., 1966.

Blakey, Dorothy, Ph.D. The Minerva Press 1790-1820. London: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographic Society, 1939.

Booth, Michael R. English Melodrama. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965.

———. Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press, n.d.

———, ed. The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays. The World's Classics, ed. by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and Martin Wiggins. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991.

Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New Directions in Theatre Series, ed. Julian Hilton. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988.

Cox, Jeffrey N., ed. Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992.

Davis, Gwenn, and Beverly A. Joyce. Drama by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers. London: Mansell, 1992.

Davis, Tracy C. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Britain. London: Routledge, 1991.

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991.

Donkin, Ellen. Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776-1829. London: Routledge, 1995.

Dwinell, Jeanine. “Gender Issues in the Plays of Catherine Gore.” Thesis. Florida State University, 1993.

Dye, William S., Jr. A Study of Melodrama in England from 1800-1840. State College, Pennsylvania: The Nittany Printing & Publishing Company, 1919.

Ellmann, Mary. Thinking About Women. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1968.

Evans, Bertrand. Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947.

Kilgarriff, Michael, ed. The Golden Age of Melodrama. London: Wolfe Publishing Limited, 1974.

Lewis, Matthew Gregory [“Monk”]. The Castle Spectre, in The New English Drama, with Prefatory Remarks, Biographical Sketches, and Notes, Critical and Explanatory; Being the Only Edition Existing which Is Faithfully Marked with the Stage Business, and Stage Directions, As Performed at the Theatres Royal. Ed. by W. Oxberry, Comedian. Vol. 4. London: W. Simpkin, and R. Marshall, 1819.

Massé, Michelle A. In The Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Language, Discourse, Society Series, eds. Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, and Denise Riley. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1989.

Planché, J. R. The Recollections and Reflections of James Robinson Planché. 2 vols. London: Tinsley Bros., 1872.

Rahill, Frank. The World of Melodrama. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967.

Ranger, Paul. Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991.

Richards, Sandra. The Rise of the English Actress. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Scullion, Adrienne, ed. Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century. The Everyman Library. London: J. M. Dent, 1996.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. Rev. ed. New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 179-205.

Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1964.

Todd, Janet. Women's Friendship in Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austin, Eliot, & Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.