Résumés
Abstract
This essay examines Joanna Baillie’s 1812 play, Orra, in order to interrogate the longstanding opposition between personification and romantic interiority. Since Wordsworth, the personified abstraction has been considered anathema to romantic conceptions of passionate or lyrical interiority. Drawing on recent critical discussions of the close relationship between passion, personification, and personhood, I suggest that Baillie’s play represents deep interiority via the most un-Wordsworthian figure imaginable: personified passion. In so doing, she employs a seemingly archaic, extravagant figure in order to stage the deep, unknowable interiors which are the ostensible hallmark of the modern individual.
Parties annexes
Bibliographie
- Baillie, Joanna. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie. 2nd Ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853.
- Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse.” The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie. 1-18.
- Baillie, Joanna. Orra. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie. 235-59.
- Baillie, Joanna. “Preface to Third Volume of Plays on the Passions.” The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie. 228-35.
- Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry. Ed. J.T. Boulton. London: Routledge, 1958.
- Burroughs, Catherine. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
- Burroughs, Catherine, ed. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, Society, 1790-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
- Burwick, Frederick. “Joanna Baillie, Matthew Baillie, and the Pathology of the Passions.” Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays. Ed. Thomas C. Crochunis. 48-68.
- Carlson, Julie. In The Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
- Carlson, Julie. “Baillie’s Orra: Shrinking in Fear.” Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays. Ed. Thomas C. Crochunis. 206-220.
- Carney, Sean. “The Passion of Joanna Baillie: Playwright as Martyr.” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 227-52.
- Crochunis, Thomas, ed. Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
- Ferguson, Frances. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.
- Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Forbes, Aileen. “‘Sympathetic Curiosity’ in Joanna Baillie’s Theater of the Passions.” European Romantic Review 14:1 (2003): 31-48.
- Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814. New Haven, Yale UP, 1964.
- Henderson, Andrea. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
- Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
- Jewett, William. Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.
- Judson, Barbara. “‘Sympathetic Curiosity’: The Theater of Joanna Baillie.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 25:1 (Spring 2006): 49-70.
- Keenleyside, Heather. “Personification for the People: On James Thomson’s The Seasons.” ELH 76 (2009): 447-72.
- Kelley, Theresa. “Wordsworth, Kant, and the Romantic Sublime.” Philological Quarterly 63.1 (1984): 130-40.
- Knapp, Steven. Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985.
- Knapp, Steven. “The Sublime, Self-Reference, and Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence.” MLN 99.5 (1984): 1007-22.
- Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Murray, Julie. “Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Utility.” ELH 70 (2003): 1043-65.
- Owen, W.J.B., and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
- Paxson, James J. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
- Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
- Potkay, Adam. “Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 390-404.
- Richardson, Alan. “A Neural Theatre: Joanna Baillie’s ‘Plays on the Passions.’” Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays. Ed. Thomas C. Crochunis. 130-45.
- Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
- Wasserman, Earl. “The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification.” PMLA 65 (1950): 435-63.
- Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
- Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W.J.B. Owen. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
- Wordsworth, William. “Appendix: Poetic Diction.” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W.J.B. Owen. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. 160-65.
- Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill. New York and London: Norton, 1979.