Joanna Baillie and the re-staging of history and gender

Widely acclaimed as a towering genius in her own time — one of “the brightest luminaries of the present period,” according to The British Critic (“Miss J. Baillie's” 1802: 194) — Joanna Baillie has just begun to command due attention in recent critical work on Romantic era women writers. Her innovative engagements with a broad range of contemporary theatrical, medical, religious, and political contexts have inspired a number of new scholarly inquiries, among which debates about her drama's relationship to Romantic gender ideology have become particularly compelling. Anne Mellor argues, for instance, that Baillie constructs through her dramas of the mind a unique “counter-public sphere” of female subjectivity, anticipating the projects of current feminist epistemologists, in order to “re-stage and revise” her era's “social construction[s] of gender” (1994: 560–61). Catherine Burroughs expands on that argument with a sustained analysis of the ways in which Baillie's theatre theory and dramatic procedures “clear … public spaces for the foregrounding of women's realities” while critiquing established modes of gendering identity and power (1994: 274; 1997). ¹ Yet Burroughs complicates this assessment by noting Baillie's inclination, in letters and nonfiction prose, to cultivate a “conservative perspective on women's rights” (1997: 115). Terence Hoagwood has elaborated on that insight in a recent MLA presentation, emphasizing the overall conservatism of Baillie's politics and warning against hasty critical impositions of a putative feminism in her art.