ABSTRACT
Charlotte Smith’s comedy What Is She? (pub. 1799) is a once popular but now neglected play that performs an acute and complex awareness of the white displaced body’s experience of surveillance. Set against the backdrop of tumultuous French Revolution politics, Smith’s play dramatises the way in which Continental European women who settled in Britain attracted a communal, surveillant gaze. Much as the sexually active women of Chapter 1 and the non-dichotomous bodies of Chapter 2 became both subject and object of surveillance machinery, so Smith’s protagonist Mrs Derville is subjected to relentless and asymmetric scrutiny when she refuses to explain her ‘mystery’ after she settles in a remote part of Wales. Smith is celebrated today for writing about the plight of such women in her poem The Emigrants – but her dramatic work displays an equally prescient consciousness of the ways in which displacement draws to it particularly intrusive modes of gendered surveillance (in this case lateral, intra-communal modes of inspection).
