Textual Analysis- Elizabeth Inchbald, The Massacre (1792) (Lect 33)

The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald

Family Background:

• Elizabeth Inchbald was born on October 15, 1753, into a Roman Catholic family in East Smithfield, England. Her family maintained strong connections within local Catholic circles, which was significant at a time when Catholicism faced social and legal discrimination in England.

• Unlike her brother, who received a formal education, Elizabeth was educated at home and taught alongside her sisters. This difference significantly influenced her literary aspirations and beliefs regarding education. Elizabeth later remarked that the girls, but not their brother, learned to spell: this showed, she thought, that girls were more 'inclined to literature' (Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, (1833). Her speech difficulties sharpened her literary interests.

Literary Interests:

• Additionally, Elizabeth faced personal challenges with speech, including a stutter that she worked hard to overcome. This struggle not only intensified her desire to express herself through writing but also contributed to her empathy for marginalized characters in her later works.

Acting Aspirations:

• Fueled by ambition and a desire to act, Elizabeth dedicated herself to overcoming her speech difficulties. In 1770, she attempted to join the Norwich Theatre; however, she encountered significant discouragement from the theatre community, which was a common experience for women in the arts at that time.

• Her brother George became an actor in 1770. In April 1772 Elizabeth set off without permission for London, leaving her mother a note. Inchbald tried to get stage engagements but soon decided to stay with her sister for protection. She encountered harassment, including sexual advances, and within a couple of months, she agreed to marry the actor Joseph Inchbald (1735-1779), who had been courting her for a while.

• Boaden, Inchbald's biographer, remarks that he was not 'the object of her romantic love' (ibid.), and it is likely that she decided to marry as a way of gaining a protected entrance into the acting world. They were married in June 1772, immediately afterwards they went to Bristol, where her husband had acting engagements, and where she made her début as Cordelia to his Lear on 4 September.

Theatrical Life:

• Elizabeth and Joseph toured Scotland and various cities in England from 1772 to 1776, performing in numerous productions. Despite her efforts, she struggled to achieve significant success as an actress, facing the harsh realities of the competitive theatrical world, but she continued to perform a variety of roles and to supplement her wages by 'walking on' in the pantomime.

• Their marriage was fraught with difficulties, largely due to conflicts arising from her ambitions and his jealousy. The complexities of their relationship ultimately influenced her artistic perspective and writings.

Friendships and Writing:

• During her time in Liverpool, Elizabeth met renowned actress Sarah Siddons and actor John Philip Kemble. These relationships blossomed into deep friendships, which would greatly impact her writing journey and creative expression.
  Here Elizabeth met the actress Sarah Siddons, who became a lifelong friend, and her brother, the actor John Philip Kemble. Her friendship with Kemble was intense (some debate that she was in love with him), and sometimes quarrelsome; the relationship between the coquettish, passionate Miss Milner and her stern guardian in A Simple Story, her first novel, may be based in part on it.

• Elizabeth began drafting a novel and maintained correspondence with Kemble regarding her literary ambitions. However, she faced several challenges, particularly in securing publication for her works.

• Like her other friendships, it aroused her husband's jealousy.

• Siddons and Kemble seem to have been an intellectual stimulus to the incipient writer, who was educating herself during this period by reading in English, and in Latin literature in translation. She began writing a novel (possibly, but not certainly, an early version of A Simple Story) and corresponded with Kemble about it. She tried unsuccessfully to get this novel published in 1779.

• She enjoyed a lively social life, risking censorious comments on the one hand, and unwanted sexual attention on the other. Boaden recounts several proposals refused in these years. Inchbald acted for seventeen years, taking a great number of different roles in Shakespearian drama, seventeenth-century comedies and tragedies, and more recent plays.

• Following the death of her husband in 1779, Elizabeth continued performing, even though societal expectations posed significant obstacles for widows in the theatre industry.

Career Transition:

• Although her acting roles did not earn her acclaim, she started to actively consider writing as a more viable career path. She faced the challenge of balancing what were considered radical ideals with her desire for respectability in the eyes of society.

• A close friend of Holcroft and Godwin, Inchbald had very clear Jacobin inclinations, but her radicalism and temptation to rebel were always tempered by a peculiar moral attitude that makes her one of the most meaningful embodiments of the contradictory cultural tensions of her time.

• During our days, Elizabeth is viewed more as a playwright and a novelist rather than an actress.

• It is also undeniable that despite her prudence and caution:
  "implicit in Inchbald's plays is the argument that Britain is not the land of liberty it claims to be, that its wives are prisoners, its subjects the victims of an oppressive class system that sends many honest workers to debtors' prison, and its ruling classes the slaves of dissipation and folly"
  (A. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation).

Works:

Dramatist

Early Struggles:

• Elizabeth's initial forays into writing were met with limited success until the premiere of her play A Mogul Tale in 1784. She cleverly submitted this work under a pseudonym to avoid the prejudices that female playwrights faced.

• The play's unexpected success provided a significant boost to her career and ensured her financial stability in an otherwise precarious profession.

• The play was about three English characters flying to the Orient in a balloon; the topical interest in balloon (extremely fashionable at the time) ascents helped make the play popular, and it had a good run at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in July and August 1784. Inchbald acted in it herself — stammering with nerves on the first night — and, once its success was assured, declared her authorship and took applause for it from the stage.

Transition to Writing:

• Colman agreed to accept a comedy she had sent him previously, which he altered and put on at the Haymarket as I'll Tell You What in 1785. This five-act comedy of contemporary life was also a success, and as well as bringing her £300 for three benefit nights, it gave her fame which increased her value, and her wages, as an actress.
  !! the benefit night was perform to benefit the author or a particular actor of the play.

• From this time on Inchbald became a prolific and highly popular dramatist, whose most successful productions brought high financial rewards. She estimated her proceeds from Such Things Are (1787) as £900. By 1789, with an investment income of £58 a year, she was able to give up her acting engagement at Covent Garden and rely on her writing. Altogether nineteen of her comedies, sentimental dramas, and farces were performed at the London theatres between 1784 and 1805.

Themes and Styles:

Exploration of Social Themes:

• Some were original plots; others were translations or adaptations from French plays, which she read in the original, and German ones, which she had to approach through English translations. Her work ranged from broad farce such as Appearance is Against them (1785), to serious sentiment, as in Such Things Are. Like other dramatists of the time, Inchbald wrote comedies about marriage and its problems, and parent-child relations.

• Inchbald’s works often engaged with themes surrounding marriage, societal conventions, and the roles of women, addressing contentious issues such as divorce and female agency, and a favourite character type is the witty, irreverent young lady. Her notable play, Lover's Vows, plays, Lover's Vows (1798) from August Kotzebue's Das Kind der Liebe, gave sympathetic treatment to a 'fallen woman' and her illegitimate son, and has since become famous as the dangerous drama performed in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Critical Reception:

• Although Elizabeth often focused on maintaining social order, her plays subtly expressed political perspectives, carefully navigating the limitations imposed by popular theatre of her era to avoid overt controversy.

• However, there were strict limits to how far unconventionality could be explored in popular comedy at this time: All on a Summer's Day (1787) was hissed by the audience and criticized in the reviews for portraying a flirtatious, imprudent wife with sympathy. In general, Inchbald managed to please her audience by combining relatively liberal social views with the maintenance of social order, often through the actions of a benevolent male authority figure. Inchbald's social and political views were radical.

Inchbald as a novelist

• Her novel A Simple Story explores in much greater psychological depth issues and behavioural patterns that also preoccupied her in her plays: paternal authority as exercised by a stern father who rejects his dependents, and the challenge to that authority represented by a passionate and independent young woman.

• Miss Milner's desire for her guardian and tutor makes her a disturbing heroine, and though the novel concludes on a conventional note, its overall effect is to disturb eighteenth-century complacency about the benevolence of paternal power in a way Inchbald's drama did not. Her second and last novel, Nature and Art (1796), was openly critical of English social institutions and class structures.

Inchbald as a critic

• After her last comedy, To Marry or not to Marry, was performed at Covent Garden in 1805, Inchbald turned to critical and editorial work, producing The British Theatre, a twenty-five-volume collection of plays with critical introductions, in 1806-9; a seven-volume Collection of Farces and Afterpieces in

  1809; and ten volumes of The Modern Theatre in 1811.

For many years Inchbald was a well-known figure in London society, with a wide circle of friends and a lively social life. Her beauty was greatly admired and often painted. Her independent attitude, and her ability to nudge the limits of acceptable feminine behaviour without ever laying herself open to scandal, struck her contemporaries as remarkable.

• The Massacre is Inchbald's only tragedy; it differs quite remarkably from her farces and comedies of the late 1790's, The text was therefore confined to its private circulation until James Boaden, chose to include the play in his Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (1833).
  The subtitle of the tragedy reads as follows: "Taken from the French. A Tragedy in Three Acts",' a detail that confers a further element of interest and mystery, especially because our playwright never revealed the origin of this text, nor its supposed connection with a hypothetical French source. The validated sources are:

  
  1) Jean Hennuyer, Evêque de Lizieux (1772) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (set during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre);

  2) Charles IX (1788) by Marie-Joseph Chenier (also set during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre).
  

• What is certain is that Inchbald wanted to create a connection between her play and the tragic events of the French Revolution, and her intention becomes even clearer in the advertisement that precedes the play: "The writer of the following pages, in laying them before the public, imagines that no further reason requires to be alleged for their not having first been produced at one of our theatres, than the reason assigned by Mr Horace Walpole (now Lord Oxford) in the postscript to his much-admired tragedy, 'The Mysterious Mother,' which was never intended for representation……Having applied a paragraph of the noble author's above mentioned, to the present piece, the writer also avers, that the story of this play ....... is founded upon circumstances which have been related as facts, and which the unhappy state of a neighbouring nation does but too powerfully give reason to credit."

Textual Analysis: The Massacre (1792)

Political Context:

• The play was written in 1792, and its clear political subject guaranteed that it would not be staged. It was prepared for publication but withdrawn on the advice of friends. The suppression of the print version means that we are dealing with a political document which did not enter the realm of public political discussion. Inchbald, according to Boaden's biography, sent the play to the managers of Covent Garden (Thomas Harris) and Haymarket (George Colman), who both refused to stage "so disagreeable a subject". The play was also sent to both William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, who probably convinced Inchbald to suppress the print version.

Structural Characteristics:

• The play is structured into three acts and adheres to the classical unities of time and place. It incorporates a chorus-like use of minor characters to enhance the narrative framework. (note is different from classical units as it has only three acts instead of the normal five)

• The central narrative conveys the harrowing violence of a historical massacre, encapsulating

The acts

In Act I, Eusèbe Tricastin narrates, in the play's longest speech, the assassination of his wife's family and the proliferation of violence in the streets of Paris. Act Il's most relevant moment returns to the same events not through verbal description but through the appearance of the dagger which Eusèbe pulled from the breast of Mme.

Tricastin's dying mother. The shift from the verbal evocation of horror to the concentration of horror in the physical object prepares us for the incarnation of physical violence in Act Ill. After a series of political negotiations between Eusèbe and different factions, the murdered bodies of his wife and two children are brought on stage upon a bier.

Eusebe:
-By miracle—I fought with the assassins, and fell amongst my brethren—at that moment my senses left me. When they returned, and I put out my arms to embrace my fellow sufferers, I found I clasped nothing but dead bodies.—I rose from the horrid pile, and by a lamp discerned (all gashed with wounds) faces, that but a few hours before I had seen shine with health and benevolence. —Rushing from the ghastly (haunting) scene, I fled. I knew not where, about the town—my sword in my hand, reeking with blood, my hair dishevelled, and my frantic features caused me to be taken for one of the murderers, so I passed unmolested, once more to see the dearer part of my family.— But am I with them? really with them? My ideas are confused.-Poor helpless victims of ferocious vengeance, pale, convulsed with terror, and writhing under the ruffian's knife, pursue and surround me.—Am I, am I with my living family?

(Act I, scene I)

From the very beginning of the play, it becomes clear that Inchbald intended to concentrate the attention of the spectator/reader on two central elements: violence as a distinctive feature of revolution, and, directly opposed to this, the anguish and devotion of a defenceless woman who is terrified about her husband's life. These two elements emerge immediately when Madame Tricastin's fears are confirmed by the narration of the violent massacre that is taking place in the streets of Paris. The gravity of the situation becomes even more clear when Eusèbe. Once back home, narrates in every grim detail the tragic murder of her relatives:

• "No, I am not wounded-these stains came from the veins—of thy mother—thy uncles—thy sisters—and all of those, who clung fast round me, and I tried in vain to defend. [Wildly." (Act I, scene l)

• In The Massacre's longest monologue, Eusèbe narrates how he managed to escape from the violent fury of his enemies, in a climax of violence and awe.

• The entire tragedy is structured to show the increasing violence of the atrocities, and also to create suspense on Eusèbe's fate, thanks to the nervous apprehension of his wife.

• Madame Tricastin's generosity and altruism, who is only concerned about saving her husband's and her children's life are the real features that characterize the only heroine of the play.

• In Act I, Inchbald introduces her without giving her particular importance. She almost disappears behind the scenes, as if she were a minor or secondary character, as if she were relevant only to the narration of Eusèbe's story and uncertain fate.

• But from Act Il the focus of narrative shifts. An ironic and very interesting moment is represented by the scene in which Eusèbe doesn't want to give his wife a weapon to defend herself, because he prefers to preserve her innocence and female purity:

  
  No, by Heaven! So Sacred do I hold the delicacy of her sex, that could she with a breath lay all our enemies dead, I would not have her feminine virtues violated by the act. [Turning to his father.] More sorrow still!-Those relations, who were my dearest comfort, are now the source of all my affliction!— were it not for these, I would this moment rush amongst the enemy—but you, my father, weak by age, as she by nature, can I leave you behind?"

  (Act Il, scene I)
  

• Thus, in Act I violence is only evoked, in act Il it objectifies through the presence of the blood-soaked knife that has been used to kill Madame Tricastin's mother, and in act Ill it materializes in the slaughtered bodies of Madame Tricastin and her two children.

• In the end Eusèbe is released together with his father, while, off stage, Madame Tricastin is killed with her children. The massacre takes place off-stage, but it is narrated in all its appalling brutality:

«Here, close to the door of this hall, stretched on a bier, my soldiers, bear a lovely matron butchered, with her two children by her side - we snatched her from the hands of her assassins before her beauteous body was disfigured: and lest they should regain it from our possession, I ordered the corpse (followed by her mournful attendants) to be sorrounded by a party of our men, till we had leisure to deposit it, in the family burial place.»
(Act Ill, scene II)

• Here we witness how the violence in The Massacre reaches its climax with the assassination of the only female protagonist of the tragedy, a symbol of innocence and marital devotion; the only character that for the entire play didn't seem to be in real life danger.