SOURCE: "Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie's DeMonfort," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 109–17.

Recent scholarly work on Romanticism and feminism has begun to bring Joanna Baillie back from the dead in literary history. For instance, as Stuart Curran states, "two years before Wordsworth's celebrated preface, [Joanna Baillie] had published her own seventy-two-page argument for naturalness of language and situation across all the literary genres," and, in her capacity as dramatist, she was often compared to Shakespeare.¹ Despite the efforts of Curran and a few other notable scholars, however, the hard labor of reviving and critically investigating Baillie's literary accomplishment, particularly her dramas, has barely begun. While the reason for this may be attributed to the masculine biases that continue to influence Romantic scholarship and criticism, Baillie herself has contributed to the difficulty of the critical task by writing plays that were failures on stage in her own day and that continue to baffle (and bore) many readers. Her plots are often embarrassingly simple, her characterizations subordinated to a fixed idea, her handling of emotion compromised by her commitment to cold logic. Such matters overwhelm critical efforts to place her alongside, say, Coleridge and Wordsworth as one of the great Romantic writers.²

These weaknesses notwithstanding, Joanna Baillie is one of the important writers of the Romantic period. For one thing, she displays what Curran, in "The I Altered" calls an "alienated sensibility" (203), which gives her critical imagination leverage in treating the social structures of value and belief. For example, while her major drmatic effort is suggested in the title of her Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, she does not treat human passion in the abstract. Rather she situated it among social and historical pressures of immense complexity: specific details and material situations disclose the inner workings of social life during the Romantic period. Further, despite her awareness of the limitations of theater in her day, she chooses drama to reveal, in ways that lyric poetry cannot, the ideological conflicts disturbing and shaping the passions that constitute her primary thematic and psychological interest. As a genre in decline, drama in the Romantic age is at once weighted with nostalgia and desire for the once-powerful and stable social world that had brought it to prominence, and, at the same time, pressured by the confidence, individualism, and sheer defiance of the social energies struggling to assert (like Keats's Apollo) their newfound power and authority. Baillie's imagination intervenes powerfully in this social, historical, and formal generic crisis, tracking the complex intersections of psychological, social, and imaginative motion at an intense moment of historical—specifically class and gender—anxiety, when one structure of authority and belief is on the verge of displacement by another.

DeMonfort (1798) provides an excellent introduction to the social and historical richness of Baillie's work, for it depicts in detail many of the social problems—ranging from class and domestic life to gender and law—caught in the crossfire of this certain and radical transformation of society. Written as a psychological drama about the workings of the passion of hatred, it is much more than this, as its psychological interests draw upon deeper and broader social, historical, and cultural realities that determine the specific contours of individual psychological turmoil. In Baillie's hands, hatred is more than a psychological, private, self-generating, or autonomous passion; it is an effect of large, if submerged, social forces and conditions. Nor is it a sign of the essential character of DeMonfort, the protagonist, but rather a symptom of a radically splintered self—a self that presumes social privilege and autonomy while suffering from claustrophobic social transformations that overwhelm, and are unresponsive to, that presumed privilege and autonomy. Thus even as DeMonfort claims to be the personal measure of human value in the world of the drama he experiences displacement of his personal and psychological authority. In exploring the deep turmoil between these two extremes, the drama discloses the contingent nature of hatred, illuminating its dependence upon antecedent material conditions (set down in the text of the drama itself) that constitute the ontological ground upon which psychological issues—however powerful, or expressive—must be situated.

The following pages investigate some of the social conditions that undergird the psychological interests of DeMonfort's character. While the logical and historical connections between these conditions are not fully elaborated in my argument, they are shown to be part of a common social reality within which characterization and dramatic action are situated, and from which these take their life and draw their credibility. After sketching these concerns, I shall return to a consideration of the psychological characterization of DeMonfort in an effort to socialize his isolation, alienation, and violence, and to show thereby that his troubles are not his alone, but those of his class.

The most severe crisis described in the drama, the one within which all other issues must be situated, is the transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois society. The primary spokespersons for these worlds in conflict are (respectively) DeMonfort and Rezenvelt, and in them can be seen, on the one hand, the anxieties and despair resulting from the loss of aristocratic social authority and, on the other, the energy and defiance arising from the acquisition of bourgeois social position. DeMonfort himself recognizes this social dimension of his personal affliction, as he describes for his sister how mere contempt for one of a lower social order transmogrifies over time into obsessive hatred when the lowly begin to advance socially:

… As we [DeMonfort and Rezenvelt] onward pass'd
From youth to man's estate, his narrow art,
And envious gibing malice, poorly veil'd
In the affected carelessness of mirth,
Still more detestable and odious grew.
There is no living being on this earth
Who can conceive the malice of his soul,
With all his gay and damned merriment,
To those, by fortune, or by merit plac'd
Above his paltry self. When, low in fortune,
He look'd upon the state of prosp'rous men,
As nightly birds, rous'd from their murky holes,
Do scowl and chatter at the light of day,
I could endure it: even as we bear
Th' impotent bite of some half-trodden worm,
I could endure it. But when honours came,
And wealth, and new not titles, fed his pride;
Whilst flatt'ring knaves did trumpte forth his praise,
And grov'ling idiots grinn'd applauses on him;
Oh! then I could no longer suffer it!
It drove me frantic—What, what would I give!
What would I give to crush the bloated toad,
So rankly do I loath him!
(2.2)

Later in the drama, this same story is related from the opposite perspective by Rezenvelt, who explains to Count Freberg that

… Though poor in fortune
I still would smile at vain-assuming wealth:
But when unlook'd for fate on me bestow'd
Riches and splendour equal to his own,
Thou I, in truth, despise such poor distinction,
Feeling inclin'd to be at peace with him,
And with all men beside, I curb'd my spirit,
And sought to sooth him.
(3.2)

The tension evident in these descriptions twice erupts in physical confrontation between the two men, with Rezenvelt each time disarming DeMonfort and sparing his life, a fact which both personally humiliates DeMonfort and reverses the social order of privilege, as DeMonfort comes to owe his life to Rezenvelt.

This purely personal dimension of the transformation of social life is given social significance by developing public responses to individual life, as is seen, for instance, in the fact that it is Rezenvelt, rather than DeMonfort, who is respected and lauded for social benevolence. While even DeMonfort's own servant, Manuel, is unhappy with his increasingly unpredictable master—" … for many times is he / So difficult, capricious, and distrustful, / He galls my nature" [1.1])—and while DeMonfort's peers, and even his sister, scold him for his personal conduct, the social elite commend the character, virtue, and generosity of Rezenvelt. As Count Freberg remarks to DeMonfort:

This knight is near a kin to Rezenvelt,
To whom an old relation, short while dead.
Beqeath'd a good estate, some leagues distant.
But Rezenvelt, now rich in fortune's store.
Disdain'd the sordid love of further gain.
And, gen'rously the rich bequest resign'd
To this young man, blood of the same degree
To the deceas'd, and low in fortune's gifts.
Who is from hence to take possession of it.
(2.2)

Such generosity inspires public celebration and respect among the aristocracy itself (excepting DeMonfort)—"For, on my honest, faith," Count Freburg says, "of living men / I know not one, for talents, honour, worth, / That I should rank superior to Rezenvelt" (2.2)—creating a social space of privilege and authority for an individual who was once on the margins of society. As this social space enlarges, DeMonfort knows, aristocracy weakens.

The class conflict exemplified in the tension between DeMonfort and Rezenvelt provides the structural center of the play. It is a conflict, as I have suggested, that depicts the inevitable demise of aristocracy and probable triumph (despite Rezenvelt's eventual death by murder) of the bourgeoisie. As such, it is a conflict that is constitutive of the social reality depicted in the drama, embracing and conditioning every characterization, thematic issue, episode, action, and expression of belief or value used to construct the dramatic action.

The pervasive rumblings in the social world of the drama can be glimpsed, initially, in two seemingly minor matters relating to the tone of the drama: anxiety and claustrophobia. Despite their immediate plot-level function as tonal details that deepen the psychological interest of DeMonfort's character, they connect to the class issues just sketched as signals of the social threat under which DeMonfort's character is drawn. For DeMonfort the world is unstable, broadening outward even to a small town in Germany, where he has sought escape; it no longer possesses a proper center. At the same time the world is closing in on him, denying him even air to breathe, as friends and foes alike pressure him conduct himself according to their expectations.

The most visible means by which anxiety functions in the plot of the drama is through knocking—real or imagined—on doors to rooms inhabited by DeMonfort, destroying his peace of mind, and on doors behind which are the spiritually pure. This is seen almost immediately in Act 1, after DeMonfort has arrived at old Jerome's apartments. At a serious moment, when DeMonfort is commiserating with his host, whose wife has died two years before, a loud knocking on the door so unsettles DeMonfort that he loses all composure: "What fool comes here, at such untimely hours, / to make this cursed noise?" (1.1). In the following scene, after a servant has announced that Rezenvelt has been seen nearby, Demontfort, enraged, denouncing his arch enemy, (calling him such names as "cursed reptile" [1.2]), hears a knocking at his door, jolting him from his frenzy. Later, after he has murdered Rezenvelt and the action of the drama has shifted to a convent, nuns and monks are interrupted twice from their prayers and conversation by loud knocking, knocking which brings news of Rezenvelt's murder.

Such knocking is complemented at various moments by DeMonfort's intense listening for activities just beyond his actual notice, or for events that he believes are about to occur. For instance, at one of the soireés he attends, in the middle of a lighthearted conversation, he stops abruptly, distracted by a noise the others do not hear:

Lady Freberg:

Praise us not rashly, 'tis not always so.

DeMonfort:

He does not rashly praise, who praises you;

For he were dull indeed—
[Stopping short, as if he heard something.

Lady Freberg:

How dull. indeed?

DeMonfort:

I should have said—It has escap'd me now.—

[Listening again, as if he heard something.

Jane:

What, hear you aught?

DeMonfort [Hastily]:

'Tis nothing.
(2.2)

What he hears—or imagines that he hears—of course, is the approach of Rezenvelt. The anxiety of this scene is repeated in a pathological manner later, just before the murder. Alone after dark on the barren path where Rezenvelt will soon pass, DeMonfort is described in a stage direction as "looking behind him, and bending his Ear to the Ground, as if he listened to something" (4.1). When Rezenvelt comes on stage, he too is described by the stage direction as wary, anxiety-ridden, listening: "Enter REZENVELT, and continues his way slowly across the Stage, but just as he is going off, the Owl screams, he stops and listens, and the Owl screams again" (4.1).

These details are meant to create suspense, or tension, on stage, though it is arguable that Baillie does not handle them as well as she might for this purpose. But whatever their success as devices of suspenseful theater, they effectively signal social-psychological instability. In the various exchanges just described we are reminded that retreat from one's community assures no protection from the troublesome crosscurrents of daily life; that the home itself is not safe from those crosscurrents; that public and festive exchange is burdened by external pressures; that nature is alive with the energies of human struggle and violence; that religious seclusion cannot keep the world at bay. In short, the personal anxiety seen on the surface of these details is saturated in the institutions and conduct of society itself, constituting a troubled stream that runs through a world that wants to be—and assumes that it can be—secure in its values, beliefs, and daily practices.

If the details of anxiety course through the many settings of the drama in a way that suggests the largeness of the world and the severity of its troubles, images of claustrophobia pull the opposite direction, suggesting that the world is not large enough to allow even a single individual free and comfortable breathing space. For example, near the beginning of the play, after learning of Rezenvelt's presence in the community, DeMonfort remarks to Freberg, "Come, let us move: / This chamber is confin'd and airless grown" (1.2). One act later, after agreeing to confess the source of his mental anguish to his sister Jane, DeMontford comments:

I'll tell thee all—but oh! thou wilt despise me,
For in my breast, a raging passion burns,
To which thy soul no sympathy will own.
A passion, which hath made my nightly couch
A place of torment; and the light of day,
With the gay intercourse of social man,
Feel like th' oppressive airless pestilence.
(2.2)

Still later, he responds to Freberg's story of Rezenvelt's enormous generosity with the comment. "This morning is oppressive, warm, and heavy: / There hangs a foggy closeness in the air; / Dost thou not feel it?" (2.2). Finally, upon being informed by Grimald that Rezenvelt is in love with Jane, DeMonfort responds: "'Tis false! 'tis basely false / What wretch could drop from his envenom'd tongue / A tale so damn'd?—It chokes my breath" (3.3). These statements are accompanied by less direct remarks that nonetheless suggest the stifling nature of DeMonfort's social environment. He tells Jane that Rezenvelt "presses me" (2.2); in describing his hatred for Rezenvelt, he likens himself to a plant "whose closing leaves do shrink / At hostile touch" (2.2); in promising to maintain a noble countenance in Rezenvelt's presence, he tells his sister: "The crooked curving lip, by instinct taught, / In imitation of disgustful things, / To pout and swell, I strictly will repress" (2.2).

The social and psychological point here of course is that because Rezenvelt is everywhere in society—from DeMonfort's home town to Amberg, where he has sought refuge, from DeMonfort's apartments to public gatherings, from the garden outside DeMonfort's window to the barren areas outside Amberg—there is literally nowhere for DeMonfort to situate himself that is free from his enemy's presence. The two, finally, are even laid side by side in death, a grimly ironic reminder of the extent to which Rezenvelt presses upon, and helps to define, every aspect of DeMonfort's existence. DeMonfort's claustrophobia is a psychological response, to be sure, but it reflects at the same time the literally shrinking world of the aristocracy, at least as that class is represented in its presumed superiority and autonomy by DeMonfort. As DeMonfort's world grows smaller, Rezenvelt's grows larger: Rezenvelt is literally everywhere that DeMonfort turns, a fact that ultimately produces a crisis subject to resolution only by passing through the tragic territories (DeMonfort believes) of violence and death.

If anxiety and claustrophobia are signs of tense psychological pressure produced by antagonistic class relations, the festivities described through much of the early part of the drama suggest one way that the aristocracy deals with that tension. These decadent pastimes constitute, moreover, an arena of social exchange in which both the downward negotiation of aristocratic social life and the upward motion of bourgeois respect and authority become visible.

In the opening scene, shortly after DeMonfort has arrived at Jerome's, Count and Lady Freberg enter unannounced, and at an extremely late hour, to welcome him to town. The Frebergs, DeMonfort is told, are on their return "from a midnight mask" (1.1). During their conversation, Count Freberg, sensing DeMonfort's melancholy humor, promises to "re-establish" his friend by making available to him the highest pleasure in life, partying: "Little time so spent, / Doth far outvalue all our life beside. / This is indeed our life, our waking life. / The rest dull breathing sleep" (1.1). Before the Frebergs leave, they make good their promise, inviting the morose DeMonfort to a party already set for the very next evening that they themselves will host. The anticipated pleasure of the evening is expressed confidently by Lady Freberg: "To-morrow night I open wide my doors / To all the fair and gay; beneath my roof / Music, and dance, and revelry shall reign" (1.1). Still later in the drama, shortly after the Freberg party, DeMonfort is invited to yet another festivity by Count Freberg, this one to be hosted by Old Count Waterlan in honor of Rezenvelt (see 2.2).

The repeated extravagant parties, and planning of future parties, define the public activity of the world of the drama, and thus they are a key to its values and direction of social meaning. Two social realities are fundamentally connected to the valorization of decadence. First, in the conduct of the Frebergs is seen the predictable last fling of a social class that has lost its central and authoritative role in society. If DeMonfort's extreme sullenness represents the dark, reactive personal side of class erosion, the Frebergs' party fever represents its cynically indulgent side. While Count Freberg's hedonistic commitments are in no way cold or malicious, neither are they attuned to social realities outside the scope of his personal pleasure. For him, a party, at its most serious and his personal sphere of experience, as is evidenced by his good-hearted yet dismally failed efforts to bring Rezenvelt and DeMonfort (who, in his view, possess "two minds so much refin'd" [3.2]) together in friendship. At its most common level of occurrence, the parties and festivities that seem to constitute the central portion of Freberg's life are a public display of obscene wealth and conspicuous consumption, an ugly gesture refusing all claims of the world beyond aristocratic self-gratification.

Second, the endless parties and plans for more parties provide interesting insight into the actual social and political compromises that necessarily accompany social transformation. The difficulty and complexity of these compromises are glimpsed most readily in the fact that one major difference between DeMonfort and Count Freberg is that the latter has accepted the rising Rezenvelt as an equal, and perhaps even as a superior, while the former detests Rezenvelt literally more than death itself. While the aristocratic DeMonfort denies completely the social position that has been accorded to Rezenvelt, thus assuring his increasing alienation from society, the aristocratic Freberg embraces it enthusiastically and publicly, displaying his acceptance of a new social arrangement in the many parties and social gatherings around which he has organized his life.

But Freberg's regard for Rezenvelt signals more than acceptance; it signals a far-reaching social compromise with presumed social payoffs for both the aristocracy and the inchoate bourgeoisie. The environment of the party is socially significant in this regard because in it the newly rich Rezenvelt finds public support and applause from a social class whose historical position has been characterized by cultural credibility and political authority; he finds himself, that is, meeting the approval not merely of individuals but of a long tradition of social and cultural privilege, as his leisure is their leisure, his pleasure their pleasure. The expensively clad and ostentatiously privileged aristocracy, on the other hand, welcome Rezenvelt into their company both because of what they perceive as his individual merit and because of his newly-acquired wealth, the latter of which, according Count Freberg, he possesses with all proper decorum. (see 3.1). The fact is, of course, that in honoring Rezenvelt, Count Freberg and his fellow aristocratic party-goers attach themselves to, and gain renewed social identity from, one whose privilege and recognition have surpassed their own. As Count Freberg says bluntly to DeMonfort: "I know not one, for talents, honour, worth, / That I should rank superior to Rezenvelt" (3.1).

The tensions, compromises, and negotiations caught up in radical transformation are seen at other levels of social life as well. One site upon which they receive their most interesting and compelling depiction is the female body. The social significance attached to women, and specifically to their physical features, appear in the comments of Lady Freberg's page about Lady Jane, who has just arrived at the Freberg residence, but who has not yet been introduced or identified. In this young man's eyes, the woman who turns out to be Lady Jane is a veritable goddess, one who is "So queenly, so commanding, and so noble, / I shrunk at first, in awe" (2.1). Such descriptions continue from the page's mouth with no sign of abating until Lady Freberg at last, in exasperation, interrupts him to say, "Thine eyes deceive thee, boy, / It is an apparition thou has seen" (2.1). When Count Freberg interjects that perhaps the page has not seen an apparition but rather Lady Jane. Lady Freberg coldly responds, "No; such description surely suits not her" (2.1). Lady Freberg's unease with Jane's presence is seen again moments later in Count Freberg's admiring comments about Lady Jane after she has left the room, which prompt Lady Freberg's cold response that what Count Freberg admires in Jane is in fact "pride" (2.1).

This small, lightly-humorous scene discloses competition between women for the attention and admiration of men. But the competition is by no means socially innocent. While Jane is "no doting mistress," and "No fond, distracted wife" (2.1.) of DeMonfort, she is nonetheless a competitor for his attention and affection, and for the attention and affection of other men. As such she threatens Lady Freberg's (ostensibly) secure position as preferred object of masculine admiration, a fact that raises the issue of the cultural value attached to the female body. Unlike the social position of men, determined largely by class (as in the conflict between Rezenvelt and DeMonfort), that of women is determined by patriarchy, irrespective of class. This means that both bourgeois and aristocratic men stand in positions of power with respect to women, and thus women in the world of the drama, as is most clearly seen in the various actions and comments of Lady Freberg, self-consciously transform themselves so that they might be objects of choice and thereby attach themselves to some sort of social authority, be it bourgeois or aristocratic. One sign of the ongoing and shaping power of patriarchy in the midst of class struggle can be found in Rezenvelt's lengthy, self-satisfied survey of the women at the Freberg's party:

… [M]en of ev'ry mind
May in that moving crowd some fair one find,
To suit their taste, though whimsical and strange,
As ever fancy own'd.
Beauty of every cast and shade is there,
From the perfection of a faultless form,
Down to the common, brown, unnoted maid,
Who looks but pretty in her Sunday gown.
…..
And if the liberality of nature,
Suffices not, there's store of grafted charms,
Blending in one, the sweets of many plants,
So obstinately, strangely opposite,
As would have well defy'd all other art
But female cultivation. Aged youth,
With borrow'd locks in rosy chaplets bound,
Clothes her dim eye, parch'd lip, and skinny cheek
In most unlovely softness.
And youthful age, with fat, round, trackless face.
The downcast look of contemplation deep.
Most pensively assumes.
Is it not even so? The native prude,
With forced laugh, and merriment uncouth.
Plays off the wild coquet's successful charms
With most unskilful pains; and the coquet.
In temporary crust of cold reserve,
Fixes her studied looks upon the ground
Forbiddingly demure.
…..
I'faith, the very dwarfs attempt to charm,
With lofty airs of puny majesty,
Whilst potent damselfs, of a portly make,
Totter like nurslings, and demand the aid
Of gentle sympathy.
From all those diverse modes of dire assault,
He owns a heart of hardest adamant,
Who shall escape to-night.
(2.1)

According to this cynical view, women are objects to be plucked by desiring men, and their value as objects is not in the least class specific, but rather form specific. From native prudes to coquets to damsels of a portly make, the women of whom Rezenvelt here speaks are varieties of Lady Freberg—women who seek to insert themselves into the arena of social value, and to hold their place in that arena, through the use of their bodies. In such a world, friendship and trust between women are impossible—as it is impossible between Lady Freberg and Lady Jane—as every woman is a threat to every other woman.

The most illuminating insight into the social and cultural significance of the female body, and into the workings of patriarchy, can be found in the scene describing Lady Jane's appearance in disguise at the Freberg party. In denying view of her face, the disguise both focuses attention on her physical form and inspires masculine fantasy to create a dream face for that form. As Rezenvelt comments: " … this way lies attraction" (2.1). Refused access to her face, he quickly, as does DeMonfort, imagines her as far superior to other women in her presence: "We bid you welcome, and our beauties here, / Will welcome you the more for such concealment" (2.1).

Beyond the obvious masculine erotic fantasies about the faceless (dehumanized) female body, however, is another, more delicate, matter of sexual politics, one still related to the cultural value of the female body but charged with a combined class and erotic interest—incest. The conversation between DeMonfort and his disguised sister approaches sexual longing, as Jane, protected by the veil that she wears, speaks freely of one "who has, alas! forsaken me" (2.1), of one who shared his life with her entirely: "Within our op'ning minds, with riper years / The love of praise, and gen'rous virtue sprung: / Through varied life our pride, our joys, were one" (2.1). DeMonfort, for his part, responds in kind, remarking first upon his sister's "virtuous worth," and then celebrating her unusual beauty, which, he says, is at least as great as that which he imagines lies behind the veil of his unknown companion: "And though behind those sable folds were hid / As fair a face as ever woman own'd, / Still would I say she is as fair as thee" (2.1). Furthermore, he remarks with considerable pride that his sister, in her younger years, declined the offers of many suitors, preferring to remain devoted to her brother (2.1).

Their relationship, as it is manifested in this exchange, is distinguished by DeMonfort's admiration for her beauty and virtue; by his recognition of her undying love for him; by Jane's view of the couple (at least in earlier days) as soul-mates with a single identity; and by their mutual sense of an absolute faithfulness to one another that overwhelms all other potential love interests.³ The details of this relationship develop within a complicated web of psychological and historical interest that charges incest with social significance. Perhaps most important to an understanding of the larger and determining contexts of the relationship is the fact that DeMonfort and Jane were left orphaned very early in life, compelling Jane not only towards close companionship with her brother, but also toward a role as mother to him. As DeMonfort puts it:

[W]ithin her house,
The virgin mother of an orphan race
Her dying parents left, this noble woman
Did, like a Roman matron, proudly sit,
Despising all the blandishments of love
(2.1)

In purely psychological terms, the relationship may thus be seen as reflecting Oedipal and pre-Oedipal desires that were interrupted by the death of the parents and then transferred to the sister, where they were allowed to flourish, as the law of the father had been effectively removed. This view is enforced by the descriptions of guilt that DeMonfort experiences—"My heart upbraids me with a crime like his" [2.1]—even as his love for Jane expands.

But their love is also socially formed, as the death of the parents is also, in the larger context of the drama, the death of the parent class. DeMonfort and Jane are an "orphan race," marginalized from the main flow of social life, as is evidenced in Demontfort's extreme alienation and in Jane's disguise. Their love is a kind of mutual support, a desperate defense against a changing world that has begun to displace their parents' authority, and even to isolate the orphaned children from one another. This movement toward isolation is suggested near the end of the disguise scene when Rezenvelt steps between Jane and DeMonfort as he moves to unveil her. It is emphatically depicted in subsequent scenes where rumours abound that Rezenvelt and Jane are planning to marry, which of course would sever the Jane-DeMonfort relationship. In these ways, the psychological explanations of the mutual affection between Jane and DeMonfort become mediated by historical and social considerations; the ostensibly self-generating and local Oedipal conflict modulates from an example of private psychological phenomena into an effect of public turmoil and pressure: the determinants of personal life, on this view, are to be found not only in the individual psyche but also in social and historical reality.

It should be clear from the cast of this argument that even at this level of personal and social life the female body, or at least the female person, is the site upon which the drama of masculine need, desire, and demand gets played out. Even as the relationship between Jane and DeMonfort is characterized by mutual affection, it is Jane's body and person—as ideal beauty and as mother—that are the repository of DeMonfort's desire. Her role as "Other" to a masculine "Subject" is consistent throughout the drama. Whether she appears disguised (as in this scene), or plainly dressed (as in the scene, described above, involving Lady Freberg's page), or troubled by deep grief (as in the final scenes following DeMonfort's death), she is made to bear the weight of masculine circumstance, to be formed at the pleasure of both aristocratic and bourgeois patriarchy. Even in the final scene, when she appears to display greatest nobility of character, she fulfills the role of "Roman matron" described earlier by DeMonfort; virtually all of the principal male characters gather around her (along with the Abbess and nuns), one supporting her, one embracing her knees, one holding her robe—her body is literally the focal point for the expression of collective emotion.

Two additional issues that are raised only briefly, religion and law, help to illuminate the social anxiety and historical crisis at the center of the dramatic action. Both of these issues appear only very late in the action, after the murder of Rezenvelt, and, in the context of that murder, they function emphatically as markers of the direction of social meaning, pointing up the social and ideological transformations symbolized by DeMonfort's tragic deeds.

Immediately after the murder of Rezenvelt, in Act 4, the scene shifts inside a convent chapel, providing the first clear glimpse of religion in the world of the drama. And, as will be the case nearly twenty years later, in Charles Robert Maturin's Bertram, the world of the monks and nuns is initially portrayed as suffering from the severe shock of a storm that "howls along the cloisters" (4.2). Amidst the seething and tumultuous energies of nature, the nuns and monks attempt to preserve the integrity of their religious practice, carrying out a solemn ritual for someone recently deceased. The ritual, however, is interrupted, first by a hysterical lay sister, who has heard a piercing human cry above the storm blast, and then by frantic knocking on the chapel door by a monk who has seen the murdered corpse of Rezenvelt just beyond the chapel. These disturbances are further compounded by the arrival of yet another shocked monk, who has seen the greatest horror of all: the person of DeMonfort, who, following his murderous deed, has come to resemble the living dead.

On one level, these frantic developments in the plot, shifted as they are onto the territory of institutional religion, suggest the threat under which traditional faith operates in a world marked increasingly by alienation, decadence, severe class conflict, and tragic violence. The anxiety that is felt by the religious themselves is pointed up in the fact that one nun sees revenge as the only proper response to the murder: "The good Saint Francis will direct their search: / The blood so near his holy convent shed, / For threefold vengeance calls" (4.3). This anxiety gradually modulates through the final scenes of the play into a morbid fascination with death and dying, as various nuns and monks gather outside DeMonfort's holding room in the convent, listening as the life of the despair-ridden murderer slowly slips away. Indeed, the sound of death echoes with growing resonance through the entire convent, disturbing the inhabitants with its nightmarish rumblings. Unable to sleep and wandering the halls of the convent, one lay sister remarks to the monk Bernard and several nuns, just outside DeMonfort's room:

I cannot rest. I hear such dismal sounds,
Such wailings in the air, such shrilly shrieks,
As though the cry of murder rose again
From the deep gloom of night. I cannot rest:
I pray you let me stay with you, good sisters.
(5.4)

The literal storm that so disturbed the nuns and monks when they were first introduced into the dramatic action has modulated into a psychological storm that disturbs their rest and threatens their very faith.

The unrest facing the institution of religion is set against the confident authority of the institution of law, which also appears in the final portions of the story. Though only briefly present, the officers of the law serve a clear and important function: they provide a stabilizing presence at a moment of growing instability, asserting firm control of a situation that is but confusingly handled by an uncertain and anxiety-riddled religion. Their power, as they themselves describe it, is absolute, a secular equivalent of—and replacement for—the Divine Law that, as we have seen, is under siege. As one officer states, in the very first pronouncement by a representative of law, "we are servants of the law, / And bear with us a power, which doth constrain / To bind with fetters this our prisoner" (5.2). The power he speaks of is never identified in practical social terms, except insofar as it is said to be bolstered by sacred custom, and yet this power is real, and an unmistakable sign that the world has changed; it is a sign of a world in which the aristocracy has been overthrown and its religion paralyzed, both replaced by a firmer and more vibrant authority.

That DeMonfort, at least on some level, recognizes the change signalled by the presence of a secular authority representing civil life is grimly and sarcastically shown in his submission to his accusers:

Here, officers of law, bind on those shackles,
And, if they are too light, bring heavier chains.
Add iron to iron, load, crush me to the ground;
Nay, heap ten thousand weight upon my breast,
For that were best of all.
(5.2)

DeMonfort's last best resistance, he knows, is a Manfredlike assertion of will and integrity followed shortly by death. Whatever triumph he might be said to enjoy over the ascendant bourgeoisie and its representatives of social authority must be understood within this purely negative context. When the officers of the law return in the final scene of the drama to bear DeMonfort away to punishment, they are told that he has died, and this news leaves them powerless and looking foolish: "I am an officer on duty call'd, / And have authority to say, how died?" (5.4). DeMonfort's death in the convent marks a personal victory and at the same time points to the much larger social defeat of the aristocracy and the institution of religion that once represented its highest values and strongest authority.

Before turning to a final set of comments about the social significance of DeMonfort's character, I want to touch once more upon the important role of Lady Jane, this time considering her character in terms of class as well as of patriarchy. It would seem, with the death of Rezenvelt and the ensuing despair of DeMonfort, that the bourgeois elements in the drama are successfully contained, and that aristocratic values, despite the actions of DeMonfort, come to be valorized, presented nostalgically in DeMonfort's final anguishing days as signs of the highest personal and social integrity. The descriptions of DeMonfort's death, however, are followed by an interesting portrayal of Jane suggesting that her character has changed through the course of the drama in ways that keep a bourgeois sensibility alive. Indeed, after Rezenvelt's murder and DeMonfort's death, Jane's character gradually begins to represent, in idealized form, an individualism and subjectivity over against aristocratic and religious structures of value—to display, that is, bourgeois sensibilities shorn of the ugliness associated with Rezenvelt's character. Rezenvelt, as one of the newly rich rubbing shoulders with the landed aristocracy through much of the play, must of course be seen as the public example of the embourgeoisment of society. But Jane comes to embody its personal integrity, its intensity of personal commitment, and its impeccable personal values. Rather than Count Freberg, or the Abbess, Jane becomes the focal point of social life—Count Freberg, the monks and nuns, and even the servants Jerome and Manuel defer to her. She is one whose "simple word" (5.4) carries the weight of truth, and whose simple conduct expresses respect for the long history of aristocratic hegemony, acceptance of a changed world, and recognition of the course that individual conduct must now take.

It is fitting that Jane becomes an example of bourgeois value, because, as I have argued, in the drama women are one primary locus of masculine power and desire, and hence of social meaning. If in the earlier scenes women were shown to be malleable, transformed in ways that reflected the direction of an essentially masculine reality, in the final scenes Jane is transformed once again, this time moving to the foreground of the dramatic action, not as a primary agent of social change, but rather as an idealized projection of change that has already occurred, symbolized in the ugly and physical struggles between Rezenvelt and DeMonfort. On such a view, the integrity evident in her final speeches is certainly her own, but the meaning of her comments and actions belongs to social currents that, historically, have positioned and valued women in quite specific ways.

I want now, finally, to consider briefly Baillie's portrayal of DeMonfort, and to propose that the deep psychological passions seen in his character are best understood against the trajectory of social transformation that has been sketched thus far. The psychological confusion and the passion of hatred seen in DeMonfort are, in the context of the dramatic action, signs of a radically divided subject. From the beginning, DeMonfort unyieldingly—and desperately—asserts the authority of an autonomous, stable subject, and he seeks a reflection of that stability and autonomy in the world around him. At both the biological and social levels, however, stability has been denied, as his parents' early death has left him orphaned, and as an emergent bourgeoisie has left him socially marginalized. Unable to discover the stability he desires, either in social life or in the personal world inhabited by himself and his sister (he fears that she plans to marry Rezenvelt), he is cast loose upon a stream of ever-changing personal and social events within which he, as subject, is repeatedly displaced and reconstituted—as generous master, as cold tyrant, as dignified aristocrat, as old friend, as arch-enemy, as caring brother, as betraying brother, as superior nobility, as murderer. The chain of this movement is suggested in DeMonfort's many literal changes of scene: upon arriving in Amberg, he is seen at various times in the meager apartments of old Jerome; in the ostentatious surroundings of the Freberg estate; in the barren wilderness outside Amberg; in the convent. With each new location his character modulates, changing according to the demands and possibilities of the world within which he moves.

Amidst these fluctuations of personal and social life, DeMonfort's character never approaches wholeness, or autonomy, despite his repeated claims that his life is under his command. One of the bleakest, and clearest, examples of the contradictions tearing at his character appears in the final scene, in which he gives himself over, as if by choice, to be placed in chains by the officers of the law. Even at this moment of absolute physical defeat he speaks from a position of apparent superiority, explicitly revealing what has been the case from the beginning: personal desire and need notwithstanding, his is a character entirely subject to social forces—Rezenvelt's money, the rumored pending marriage of Rezenvelt and Jane, Count Freberg's regard for Rezenvelt—that he has all along attempted to repress, but which always return to haunt him, and with increasing severity until, finally, he believes that the only way to free himself is through an act of extreme violence.

As this brief explanation makes clear, DeMonfort's troubles are involved with matters of passion and psychology. But passion and psychology are socially mediated. What might appear to be pure Oedipal and pre-Oedipal confusion is connected vitally to DeMonfort's overwhelming sense of alienation from the specific social configuration of the world around him; what we might prefer to see only as one man's personal quarrel with another derives fundamentally from the changing direction of wealth in society; what might be described, in pathological terms, as one lunatic's violent ambush of an innocent individual occurs necessarily alongside the demise of an entire social class. Thus DeMonfort's movements are never his alone; his is "the gait disturb'd of wealthy, honour'd men" (1.2.) generally in his world. While his specific actions are unique to his character, the passion of hatred that energizes those actions is fired in the oven of rapidly-increasing social change whose flames are felt not only by DeMonfort, but by everyone—from Count Freberg to Rezenvelt to Lady Jane to the nuns and monks in the convent.

That DeMonfort has been all but forgotten by literary history is no doubt partly attributable to shortcomings in the play itself—it is long, melodramatic, ill-suited for the popular stage. But the fate of the drama, and of Baillie's work generally, is also attributable to the inability—or unwillingness—of scholarship to probe the deeper structures of a work whose significance is barely glimpsed on its surface. Like many of Byron's dramas, which have hardly fared much better, DeMonfort works not so much through action and dialogue as through ideological disclosure, which Baillie achieves by focusing on social relations rather than individual events. This focus necessarily slows the pace of dramatic action—and thus damages stageability—but the payoff is a comprehensive and profound picture of personal life drenched in the many currents of social circumstance.

More than forty years ago, Bertrand Evans called for a complete revaluation of Joanna Baillie's works (200). When that revaluation comes—and the present discussion is meant to encourage it—it will best serve Baillie by recognizing and emphasizing that the strength of her dramatic imagination lies not so much in her probings of individual psychology, or in any narrowly-defined poetic beauties that she may have achieved, but rather in her wide and deep historical vision. Only through an exploration of the historical dimensions of her imagination can the considerable achievement of her dramatic works be recovered.

Notes

¹ Stuart Curran, "The I Altered," in Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism (1988), 185–86.

² For the typical critical attitude toward Baillie's work, see, for example, Om Prakash Mathur's remark that "She tends to forget the man in her passion, and so even within the limited range of passions she attempted to portray, the main characters seem to be in line with case-histories reported in medical bulletins rather than human beings with whom we come in contact every day." The Closet Drama of the Romantic Revival (1978), 315; or W. L. Renwick's dismissive comment that "No real dramatist would deliberately sit down to write a whole series of Plays on the Passions: English Literature 1789–1815 (1963), 232. For a more favorable assessment, see Bertram Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (1947), 200–15.

³ In these respects, the relationship between Jane and DeMonfort looks forward to the semi-incestuous relationships depicted in Byron's poetry, for example the Selim-Zuelika affair in The Bride of Abydos, or the Hugo-Parisina affair in Parisina. For a discussion of the social dimension of incest in these works, see Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron's Eastern Tales (1987), 51–52 and 134–35.