Staging the Revolution: Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Sydney Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys

Sydney Owenson’s place in Irish literature in the Romantic period need not be defended; her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) remains a foundational iteration of the genre we know as the national tale. As Claire Connolly and others have shown, Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl occasioned an important cultural event that allowed its author “both the opportunity and the means to manipulate the culture market of early nineteenth-century Dublin.”¹ The success of The Wild Irish Girl, Julia Wright observes, establishes the dominant pattern that shapes Owenson’s career as a novelist and gives shape to the genre of the national tale.² The power of the national tale lies, in Ina Ferris’s words, in its “performative notion of itself: representation as less a portrayal of something than a presentation to someone.”³ In Ferris’s formulation, the national tale presents to the audience the “potential emergence of a new public,” which recalls April Alliston’s argument about the establishment of “fictional communities” that not only are imagined “as alternatives to both family and nation,” but more stridently understood to “specifically transgress and replace” those national bonds.⁴ This understanding of the national tale—as providing an alternative imagining of the community—raises two significant starting points that shape this argument. First, Ferris draws attention to the performativity of this representation, suggesting that the staging of the national community is powerful precisely because it enables an audience to imagine an alternative. Second, Alliston’s claims regarding a transgression and replacement of the nation enables a shift in our understanding of the national tale; we can understand it participating in, and offering a cosmopolitan alternative to, the strictures of the nation-state.

Highlighting the performative staging of an alternative to the nation-state calls attention to a characteristic concern shared in both Romantic national tales and in Romantic opera: the fundamental tension between “the personal sexual and affectional issues,” on the one hand, and the “setting of national struggle and ‘public duty,’” on the other.⁵ These twinned tensions between personal affection and public duty dominate such national tales as Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), The Missionary (1811), and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827). Similarly, in Romantic Operas like Bellini’s Norma (1831), Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and Rossini’s Mosé in Egitto (1818), Tancredi (1813), L’italiana in Algeri (1813), and, most notably, Rossini’s final opera, Guillaume Tell (1829).

Thematic and narrative similarities suggest that there is a relationship between novels and operas written in the early part of the nineteenth century that has, for the most part, gone unremarked upon by scholars of opera and literature. In both the Romantic national tale and the Romantic opera, there is a preoccupation with an attempt, to combine Ferris and Alliston, to present the potential alternative community based on a sympathetic relationship between the audience and the potential, transgressive alternative. This conception of a transgressive alternative mirrors the theatrical project of Denis Diderot, who argues, in his De la Poésie Dramatique (1758), that the audience “will escape the wicked men whose company they keep; . . . they will find those with whom they would live.”⁶ This conception of the theater “enables the formation of an idealized community,” bringing about a social alternative.⁷ The Romantic opera and the Romantic national tale both attempt to articulate and to stage alternative, transgressive, and cosmopolitan communities. Both of these aesthetic forms achieve this through the literary mechanism of sympathy, which in turn demands action. However, the privacy of the novel—in contrast to the shared space of the theater—ultimately troubles the polyvocal potentiality that characterises the Romantic opera’s presentation of the imagined community.

Notably, Owenson’s political commentary becomes more direct in her travelogues France (1817), Italy (1821), and France in 1829–30 (1830).⁸ Not only do these political and continental writing lay the groundwork for her final Irish...