Disturbing Surfaces: Representations of the Fragment in The School for Scandal

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Critical evaluations of the uses of the fragment in literature have tended to focus upon the ways the notion captured the attention of the Romantics and earned a prominent place in their poetry. ¹ However, in her recent analysis of the “unfinished manner,” Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues that serious interest in the fragment as a subject of aesthetic scrutiny predates Romanticism, and her book traces the development of conceptions of the fragment throughout literature and art of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Harries chooses to focus on works that are conceived of as fragmentary from the start; that is, on art that seems to be deliberately incomplete, the fragmentation itself a component of the authors’ designs. She investigates how “writers—novelists, philosophers, poets, essayists—insisted on presenting their finished texts as fragmentary.” ² Yet Harries’s study, like her subject, is incomplete. In pioneering and perceptive analyses of Sterne’s incorporation of fragments into Tristam Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, of the sentimental novelists’ use of the fragment, and of the fragment as it appears in artificial ruins of the period, she only just begins to explore the resonance of the incomplete in the later eighteenth century. Writing about the intentional fragment, Harries, perhaps also intentionally, provides a far from exhaustive consideration of the subject and makes it possible, in the tradition of the fragmentary compositions that are her subject, for others to take up where she leaves off.

Notions of the fragment do not merely limit themselves to the modes Harries considers. They extend beyond the scope of her argument, beyond the boundaries of the printed text itself, and into the drama of the Georgian era. If, as Harries rightfully asserts, eighteenth-century novelists, philosophers, poets, and essayists adopted a renewed appreciation for and celebration of the incomplete, then it would seem likely that dramatists, too, enacted in their plays a parallel shift toward the staging of fragmentation. This essay attempts to substantiate that claim through a reading of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, a play that seems at once a fundamental and problematic subject for this kind of study. It represents an essential choice because, as numerous critics have noted ever since the play premiered in May 1777, The School for Scandal stands as “the finest English comedy of the eighteenth century—a fit successor to The Way of the World and precursor of The Importance of Being Earnest.” ³ Any study of the fragmentary in Georgian drama would be foolish to overlook the significance of Sheridan’s play. But despite its obvious importance, the choice of the play still poses certain difficulties for an analysis of this nature. As many critics point out, the play appears a “finished theatrical masterpiece,” a balanced, seamless comic experience, and one that hence would appear precisely a bulwark against fragmentation. ⁴ Some of the same critics contend that The School for Scandal sets forth the argument that a polished surface may hide and falsify a more discordant interior. Rather than contest this popular claim, this essay suggests that The School for Scandal’s cautionary message about the misleading nature of appearances applies equally to the play’s own status as a “finished” dramatic work. Sheridan’s comedy seems only superficially “finished,” its surface revealing a seamlessness that its inner workings belie. Like its central, hypocritical figure of Joseph Surface, The School for Scandal appears to please on the outside, but simmers with disjunction and incongruity underneath.

As Harries makes clear, the very concept of the incomplete was a source of artistic vitality and a subject for close examination in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Although The School for Scandal, as a dramatic work, does not overtly incorporate literary fragments in the same ways that a novel such as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey does, the play nevertheless derives much of its strength from its own treatment of the conceptual fragment. While Sterne included literal “Fragments” in his incomplete text, so Sheridan brings the fragmentary to bear on different facets of theatrical performance. Indeed, the fragment shapes...