Scissors and Needles
Inchbald's Wives as They Were, Maids as They are and the Governance of Sexual Exchange
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4550256 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel O''Quinn, Daniel O’quinn (corresponding author), Daniel O'Quinn |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 105-125 |
| Publication date | 1999-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theatre Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0192-2882 • E-ISSN: 1086-332X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tj.1999.0032 |
| OpenAlex | W1972457089 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 7 |
Scissors and Needles: Inchbald’s Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are and the Governance of Sexual Exchange Daniel O’Quinn* (bio) Elizabeth Inchbald’s Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are opened on March 4, 1797 at Covent Garden to strong reviews and even stronger receipts, but I want to open this reading of Inchbald’s play in the other patent theatre. 1 Drury Lane audiences had a steady diet of suffering women whose ideological function had changed little since the Restoration and throughout Drury Lane’s 1796–97 season Sarah Siddons re-prised her famous performances in Jane Shore, Isabella, The Grecian Daughter, The Fair Penitent, and The Distressed Mother. 2 According to James L. Boaden, “in gentle domestic woe she had [End Page 105] no rival” 3 and Siddons’s impact, as Michael Booth emphasizes, was enormous: “men wept quietly, but women sobbed aloud, screamed, went into hysterics, and fainted.” 4 The distinction between men’s quiet tears and women’s screaming hysterics indicates that her performance of this ideological problematic was not only socially relevant, but also a site of gendered contestation. This contestation is made even more palpable when we leave Drury Lane and attend to the performances of Inchbald’s Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are at Covent Garden. On March 11, 1797 for instance, the London theatre-goer had to choose between Siddons’s presentation of heroic motherhood in The Grecian Daughter, or Inchbald’s witty critique of men’s self-serving attempts to control their wives and daughters. 5 In the end both evenings in the theatre consolidate heteronormative constructions of the family. Siddons’s performance as Euphrasia is a blend of filial care and Amazonian heroism that complements the she-tragedy tradition. 6 But Inchbald’s play uncovers the fantasies of gendered domination that define female sexuality and attaches them to specific instances of domestic governance and female commodification. The specific forms of cultural work manifested in Siddons’s performances provide the backdrop for Inchbald’s theatrical practice at Covent Garden, for Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are is not only a detailed critique of the main ideological effects of representations of female suffering, but also a substantial analysis of the effects of contemporary marriage law on the marriage market. Inchbald’s play critiques two different scenes of performance: one on the stage and one before the law. As Eve Tavor Bannet has recently demonstrated, the Marriage Act of 1753 fundamentally altered the status of the promise between man and woman in contracting a marriage. 7 Prior to 1753, “it was the private exchange of promises between a man and a woman to live together as man and wife which actually brought the marriage into being.” 8 Once the Marriage Act was passed, public ceremonial forms were required to legally form a marriage. The performance of marriage and the performance of female suffering come [End Page 106] under close scrutiny in Inchbald’s play, and she demonstrates that conventional representations of either are similarly deformed by unrestrained male homosocial desire. Inchbald’s examination of the homosocial relations which link Mr. Bronzely, Sir William and Lord Priory opens onto a consideration of the proper governance of sexual exchange both prior to and following the performance of the marriage vow. This meditation on governance explicitly argues that conceptions of sexuality and marriage based on escalating fantasies of masculine domination are not only mutually constitutive, but also dangerous to the consolidation of the middle class. In light of this spectre of class instability, the play posits a form of “milder government” more suited to bourgeois ascendancy. Further, Inchbald’s complex engagement with the links between sexual violence and domestic tyranny extends to how this deployment of sexuality impinges on the father-daughter bond. Inchbald argues that faulty paternality and sexual violence are different symptoms of the same pathological condition at the core of normative familial and sexual relations. As the deployments of familial alliance which structured the marriage market for much of the century are superseded by deployments of sexuality, this pathology at the core of heteronormativity is suddenly revealed and anatomized by Maria Dorillon’s juridical/economic
Art · Art history · Housewife · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Law · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2004 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |