ABSTRACT
Scholars have rightly argued that plays composed between the Restoration and Romantic eras reveal an increasing priggishness about staging sexual conduct. Indeed, in only a short period of time, we can identify a tension that shapes female dramaturgy during the eighteenth century. Joanna Baillie’s The Bride (1828) suggests how the dramaturgy of even this 'model of an English gentlewoman', to use William Wordsworth’s phrase, attends to the era’s preoccupation with defloration. Explaining the circumstances of the play’s composition, Baillie tells Holford that the advocate-general of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnston, asked her ‘to write a Drama for the moral improvement of the Cyngalese, he furnishing me with a story characteristic of their own manners &c to work upon’. The connections between Baillie and Frances Anne Kemble are numerous and worth noting in light of the fact that both playwrights dramatize a domestic ‘erotics’ as an indirect way of confronting the sexual fantasies of their culture.
