Revisioning Responding: A second look at Women Playwrights Around 1800

When first invited by Tom Crochunis to be a respondent to the 1997 MLA session on women playwrights working around 1800, my initial response was, "But I know nothing about them!" Finally being persuaded by him that ignorance was no crime here, but perhaps even useful, I agreed and was thus introduced not only to women writers whose theatrical activities were unknown to me, but also given a chance to reconsider the theoretical and methodological issues which their lives and literary creations raise which are not tied to a particular historical moment. My first response was embarrassed surprise. I consider myself fairly well-educated and yet I knew nothing about women dramatists in this period apart from work done by my colleague Jeffrey Cox on Joanna Baillie and Gothic dramas. If I thought about it at all, I simply assumed more women writers were working with the novel than the stage. Even though my own work has focused on the recovery of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century women writers, I had gone through my academic life quite happily not knowing about the activities of women dramatists in this later period, or indeed even of their existence apart from one or two names. I suspect that many scholars who have devoted their intellectual lives to the Romantic period have likewise led equally satisfied and fulfilled lives not knowing about these women. The first question raised by these essays for the non-specialist is why has attention not been paid to the presence of these women in this particular aspect of literary culture? The second question is, having now noticed them, why should we care? I think the answers to these two questions, as seen in these essays, are related: the presence, voices, and performances of these women force us to reconsider our certainty about our historical knowledge and to reexamine the very premises on which we have traditionally organized knowledge about this period's literary and social dynamics. The essays as a group ask for a reconsideration of comfortably established paradigms through their examinations of the material circumstances of the authors' lives and the texts' performances rather than the plots or characters of the pieces. It strikes me, as an ignorant reader with no investment in preserving the status quo in nineteenth-century literary studies, how much of our academic understanding of the so-called Romantic period depends on our assumption that women living then did what they were supposed to do (or rather, what we believe they were supposed to do from our reading of literary texts such as conduct books and the ways in which their actions are represented in novels and on stage). We assume that they "acted appropriately" in their culturally defined roles. Heretofore, our attention has been on women novelists and the ways in which they created strategies for simultaneously infringing on masculine domains of public speech through print while preserving feminine decorum. We have assumed that the theatre, with its representation of strictly defined gender roles on stage, served to reinforce conduct book recipes for feminine behavior and to solidify the cultural barrier between the domestic, private space of women and the political, public arena of men. In doing so, we have seen the connection between the theatre and the novel from the perspective of the roles that both created for women characters. Nora Nachumi invites us to look again at the links between the stage and the novel. By examining the pragmatic, material circumstances of nineteenth-century women writers' involvement with the theatre, Nachumi moves us from the representations on the page to the roles played in lived experience; she reminds …