BARS Blog

Sarah Burdett is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at University College London; she will be joining the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge at the beginning of the new academic year. Her research focuses on Romantic-period women – writers, actors, playwrights, sportspeople and inspirations – and on the British stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her new book, The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815, which we discuss below, was published in June by Palgrave.

1) How did you first become interested in the figure of the arms-bearing woman?

Funnily enough, my motivation to study the figure was two-fold: part scholarly, part personal. At a scholarly level, it was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) which first did it for me; specifically, her adamance that she aims not to encourage women to turn their ‘distaff into a musket’. This image of women over-stepping the bounds of Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda by adopting military personas – and thereby, emulating men both mentally and physically – sparked an eagerness in me to learn more about arguments for women’s martial rights and perceived corporeal capacities, at a time when women across the Channel were creating uproar in Britain by partaking in armed violence en masse as part of the French Revolution. Turning my attention to the theatre really brought this project to life: reading about a female soldier is one thing, but seeing a woman perform impressive martial feats on stage is quite another. Coming from a literature background, I was fascinated to discover the extent to which the process of embodiment allowed the eighteenth-century actress to challenge gendered mores in ways that textual representations could not; and it was eye-opening to learn just how transformative performance contexts could be in transforming the female warrior’s identity on stage. I began looking into reviews of actresses including Sarah Siddons, Julia Glover and Fanny Kelly performing armed heroines in London, and before I knew it, I was hooked!

At a personal level, I was intrigued to find how many of the oppositional comments aimed at arms-bearing women and female soldiers (both real and fictional) in eighteenth-century British newspapers, periodicals and theatrical reviews correlated with misogynistic attitudes that I myself have tolerated in the past! I spent a decade playing football at club and county level and was so often being told (by the ill-informed, of course!) that my actions were ‘unfeminine’, ‘unsuited to my sex’, and even ‘dangerous’ for me to pursue (I very occasionally receive not dissimilar comments now about my continued lifestyle as a long-distance runner!). It felt oddly cathartic to pick apart the overt biases and political / ideological agendas prompting comparable criticisms of the eighteenth-century female solider: in a strange way, defending and celebrating the physical and mental capabilities of the women warrior felt like an inclusive defence and celebration of any woman who has ever been told that her lifestyle choice ought to be reserved exclusively for men. I hope that some of that comes across in the book!

2) What are the main trends you trace in representations of armed female combatants on stage between 1789 and 1815?

One of the key aims of my book is to dispel the outmoded scholarly consensus that the female warrior falls exclusively into one of two general camps on the eighteenth-century British stage: romantic and rewarded; or political and punished. These are certainly pervasive trends in eighteenth-century comedy: much has been written of the loving heroine who disguises herself as a solider in a ploy to reunite herself with her serving spouse before returning safely to the domestic realms, and scholars have also highlighted the replication on stage of the Harriet Freke-esque armed heroine who is mocked before being exiled from the narrative. However, my study looks to complicate the idea that the female warrior’s identity follows any kind of straightforward or stable pattern by magnifying the complex threads that interweave to shape and reshape her identity from one performance to the next. While I show the female combatant as becoming ripe for allegorical reappropriation across the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades, the events and people to which she (often very surprisingly) alludes vary from play to play, and are unforeseeably directed, and redirected, by contextual specificities including scenography, the actress performing the role, the venue at which the play is being performed, and materials circulating outside of the theatre. Despite this, there are certain epochal trends in the female warrior’s development towards which my book gestures: most notably, the emergence in the 1810s of a heroine whose degree of agency, heroism and destructiveness vastly surpasses that of her 1790s forerunner. The importation of new dramatic genres from Europe; the development of new stage technologies; and the progress of Napoleon’s campaign (most pertinently, his exploits in Spain) are all shown to accelerate the birth of a transcendently deadly armed heroine, whose startlingly devastating warfare becomes integral – peculiarly enough – to the triumph of virtue over vice.

3) To what extent do British theatrical representations of armed women draw on European and global histories, artistic traditions and political events?

A very large one! My book shows political and artistic developments occurring at home and abroad pivotally to impact British configurations of the stage amazon. I outline emphatically the extent to which Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German and Anglo-Spanish affairs bear upon the female warrior’s portrayal and reception, causing her theatrical reputation to fluctuate perpetually in accordance with shifting national and international relations. Artistic innovations imported from Europe are equally significant. My book juxtaposes representations of armed women offered in native sentimental dramas and tragedies of the early and mid-1790s with representations indebted to the German Sturm und Drang drama and the French-derived melodrama at the start of the 1800s: a period which saw plays styled on each of these continental models enjoying vast popularity in Britain. This comparison allows me to illustrate the crucial role played by European theatrical traditions in facilitating the emergence of a refashioned female warrior, whose ‘foreignness’ renders her a paradoxically dangerous and profitable intruder on Britain’s patent stage.

4) Which of the plays you examined for the project would you recommend most strongly to other scholars?

I’d recommend Samuel Arnold’s military melodrama Charles the Bold (1815). Not only does it feature a cannon-firing heroine (I mean, come on!) but it offers a great example, in my opinion, of melodrama’s complex interaction with revolutionary and Napoleonic activity, at both a literal and affective level. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the licensing manuscript is the only surviving version of the play (available via the excellent Adam Matthew Eighteenth Century Drama database), so you do need to put up with the occasional difficult-to-decipher-word or two. But it’s well worth the effort.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m now working on my second monograph project, provisionally titled Staging Hibernia and Caledonia: Gender, Theatre, and National Identity, 1770-1832. Theoretically-informed by the work of Edward Said, the study strives to unpack historical negotiations of Celtic identity by grappling with the extent to which theatrical exhibition served to manipulate British conceptions of Ireland and Scotland as sites of cultural ‘Otherness’ across an epoch crucial to the formation of a stable British self. I’m also currently writing a journal article on sporting women in late eighteenth-century fashionable society, which homes in on the troubling (yet enticing!) figure of the female equestrian and huntress, by exploring her representation in 1790s stage comedy.   

Yin Yuan is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work focuses on British Orientalism, Anglophone literature and East Asian popular culture; she has published articles on these topics in Studies in Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal and SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Her first monograph, Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East, which we discuss below, was published this month by Bucknell University Press.

1) How did you first become interested in edible things in the long eighteenth century?

I remember being taken by eighteenth-century literature’s tendency to exhaustively detail every item on the menu when it comes to the depiction of Oriental banquets. The Greek dinner scene in Lord Byron’s Don Juan, with which my book begins, is one of the more famous instances, but examples like it abound in literature from the period and trace back to the Arabian Nights story cycle. There had been critical work on the function of the epic catalogue in British Orientalism, but not as much (with the exception of Timothy Morton’s The Poetics of Spice) on the particular significance of the cataloging of edible things. On the one hand, these culinary lists provided readers with a sensory experience of the Orient. On the other hand, the conventionality of the rhetorical gesture seemed to subvert the very materiality invoked by the listing of edible things. This tension between words and things that the literary text itself was foregrounding, even interrogating, was what drove my interest. I think there is a scholarly tendency to see imperial commodities in literature as opaque archives that must be illuminated by the present-day critic, whose job it is to investigate the histories of production, distribution, and consumption of such commodities. But I found the representation of edible things in long eighteenth-century literature a lot more self-reflexive than hitherto acknowledged, and I began to wonder why, and to what end.  

2) How did you come to select tea and opium as the major foci for your book?

In the British context, tea and opium are arguably the two ingestible foreign commodities that underwent the most dramatic cultural transformation, so they foreground the kind of tension between the symbolic and the material that I am particularly interested in. Tea was the “China liquor” whose cultural taint British commentators worried about during the eighteenth century, but by the nineteenth century, it had become an icon of English national identity. Opium exhibited an inverse trajectory: while it was never domesticated, Thomas De Quincey could in the 1820s still paint a conceivable portrait of an English opium-eater, but as the century wore on, the drug was increasingly marked “Chinese” even though large amounts were produced in British India. There have of course been major studies on the material and literary circulations of each of these two commodities, but my book focuses on their symbolic entanglement and argues that the two need to be considered as a dialectical pair. Understood in relation to each other, the symbolic fluidities of tea and opium provide a paradigmatic framework for understanding how the consumption and reception of exotic edibles more broadly nurtured a self-reflexive Orientalism that was central to the formation of British imperial identity. 

3) Which tropes are most common in self-reflexive literary engagements with exotic ingestants, and what’s your favourite atypical example from your book?

Many of the scenes of ingestion I examine in the book equate edible things with inscriptions, stories, dreams, spells, fantasies, and other forms of meaning making. Literary treatments of tea, for instance, frequently entail discussions of gossip around the tea-table. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, “Bear’s claws” and “Birds nests” refer to specific dishes while also functioning as metaphors for exotic reading materials. In Walter Scott’s The Talisman, the eponymous “talisman” – defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as an occult object that derives magical power from the characters with which it is engraved – is used to name the opiate administered by Saladin. In each of these instances, the material effects of the edible thing are inseparable from the discursive apparatus that diagnoses or otherwise makes sense of those effects. One notable exception is Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, where Flora Finching’s imaginations of China are sharply contrasted with her hearty appetite. The novel makes a point of underscoring the gap between the material and the symbolic and suggests that imperial propaganda works by passing one off as the other. In my book, I explain what the atypical example of Little Dorrit tells us about the shift in British imaginations of the Orient (and of China more specifically). 

4) Your chapters trace a ‘historical narrative of Britain’s ongoing creation of imperial selfhood’.  What would you identify as the most crucial turning points in this narrative?

Historians have pointed to the crucial role that exotic commodities played in driving the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. My book argues that the intersection between literary Orientalism and exotic consumerism during this time created, among British writers, a self-reflexive engagement with the Orient that was central to the formation of Britain’s imperial identity. The two Opium Wars, beginning in 1839 and ending in 1860, marked a shift away from such self-reflexive engagements toward a more uncritical, xenophobic othering of the East that was further consolidated by mid-century exhibitions such as the 1851 Great Exhibition. Alongside the decline of such self-reflexivity, I noticed in British Orientalist texts a concomitant replacement of the ingestion trope with one of vision, which I connect to the emergence of the “Barbarian eye” as a salient figure in public discourse during the Opium Wars.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m continuing to think about the relationship between empire and culture, but have started developing these interests within the fields of media and contemporary popular culture. My current project focuses on South Korean popular culture, particularly what its global ascendency means for the creation of hybrid cultural identities. Recently, for Post45 Contemporaries, I edited a cluster of essays on the phenomenon of the Korean Wave and its implications for the development of a global cultural studies. I also have an article forthcoming with the International Journal of Communication that looks at Squid Game and Netflix in order to consider how alternative structures of feeling in South Korean television challenge American narrative ideologies. These inquiries form part of a broader book project on the cultural and transcultural logics of South Korean television and film genres.