Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 8-19-2006
Journal / Book Title
European Romantic Review
Abstract
This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions of French sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante) and experimentations with the evolving form of drama (drame). Inchbald’s adaptation of Gresset’s The Villain (Le Méchant) into a farce, Young Men and Old Women, demonstrates techniques applied to The Massacre and Every One Has His Fault. The paper concludes with a comparison of The Massacre to its source, Louis‐Sébastien Mercier’s drama, Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux (1773), the first documentation of this once‐uncertain genealogy. This comparative analysis shows that Inchbald’s tragedy critiques the comic improbability that women stand to lose their femininity if they involve themselves in public issues.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509580600816702
Book Publisher
Taylor and Francis
Journal ISSN / Book ISBN
1050-9585
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Nielsen, Wendy, "“A Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre and European Drama.” European Romantic Review 17.3 (Summer 2006): 275-88." (2006). Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 16.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/english-facpubs/16
Published Citation
“A Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre and European Drama.” European Romantic Review 17.3 (Summer 2006): 275-88.
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons