ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the ways in which the work addresses curiosity to postulate the possibility of an independently defined female self. In the opening of Charlotte Smith's comedy What Is She? the maid Winifred describes the elusive character of her otherwise irreproachable mistress Mrs Derville. Placing Mrs Derville under the joint headings of mystery and secrecy, Smith increases her long list of suffering, persecuted female wanderers. The nefarious agency of curiosity takes visible form in the actions of the characters on stage. In this sense, because the emotional, performative and ideological centre of the play is built on one pivotal affect, the comedy is a case of heightened 'ostension'–that is, plain, unmediated 'showing'–aiming to affect the viewer by delivering its message in emphatically visual form. Performed at the chronological culmination of Smith's novelistic activity, the play evidently rehearses the complex ideological and thematic heritage.
