"Those Simple Signs": The Performance of Emotion in Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story

"Those Simple Signs": The Performance of Emotion in Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple StoryNora Nachumi In an oft-quoted letter to Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth analyses the emotional impact of A Simple Story. "I am of the opinion," she writes, that it is by leaving more than most other writers to the imagination that you succeed so eminently in affecting it. By the force it is necessary to repress feeling we judge of the intensity of that feeling and you always contrive to give us by intelligible but simple signs the measure of this force.1 Edgeworth's opinion about the power of silence and "simple signs" draws our attention to the way in which Inchbald dramatizes her characters' emotions through their bodies, a technique that points to an important 1 James Boaden, Memoirs ofMrs. Inchbald: Including her Familiar Correspondence with the Most DistinguishedPersonsofher Time.... (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 2:152-53. Unless otherwise noted, biographical material is based on information contained in Boaden's memoir. A friend of Inchbald's, Boaden had access to her papers, most of which were later lost or destroyed. For her PhD dissertation, "A Feeling Mind: TheEarly Career ofElizabeth Inchbald, 1753-1821" (Graduate Center ofthe City University ofNew York, 1984), Cecilia Macheski located halfa dozen Inchbald pocket memorandum books at the Folger Library. Roger Manvell's biography, Elizabeth Inchbald: England's Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent (Lanham, NY, and London: University Presses of America, 1987), focuses on her literary career. Important shorter pieces include Gary Kelly's chapter on Inchbald in The English Jacobin Novel: 1780-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) and Katherine Rogers, "Britain's First Woman Drama Critic: Elizabeth Inchbald," Curtain Calls: British and American Women in the Theatre, 1660-1820 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 277-90. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 318 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION connection between many eighteenth-century novels and the eighteenthcentury stage. By the end of the century, the novel was a literary form defined by distinct characteristics, including its ability to allow readers direct access into the interior lives ofits characters. As Michael Fried and Alan McKenzie have noted, however, many eighteenth-century novelists were profoundly influenced by other modes of representation, including painting and theatrical performance.2 Like her peers, Inchbald came of age at a time when these sister arts had trained audiences to recognize that every emotion "had its ... recognized manifestation in outward behavior."3 While all writers of the period were influenced by this cross-fertilization, the most obviously affected were those who, like Inchbald, began their careers upon the stage. In herplays, novels, and criticism, Inchbald repeatedly demonstrates that bodies express emotions more authentically and more persuasively than words alone. This essay looks at the way in which her knowledge of a widely recognized system oftheatrical gesture manifests itself in her criticism and fiction. An examination of gestures in her novels and plays shows that her theatrical imagination helped her to criticize contemporary notions of gender and power in ways that would have resonated with eighteenth-century readers. F 2 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age ofDiderot (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1980); Alan T. McKenzie, Certain Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990). Also see Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Janet Todd, Sensibility : An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986); and Edgar Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 3 Joseph Donohue, Theatre in the Age of'Kean (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 68. Historically, scholars have differentiated between acting styles popular during the century. See Lily Campbell, "The Rise of a Theory of Stage Presentation in England during the Eighteenth Century," PMLA 32 (1917), 163-200; and Alan Downer, "Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting," PMLA 58 (1943), 1002-37. Dene Barnett, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of Eighteenth-Century Acting (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1987), and Joseph Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), argue...