English and Comparative Literary Studies

There is a tendency among literary scholars to confine presentations of armed women offered in British literature between 1793 and 1801 to a restrictive binary; the women are political, non-sentimental and condemned, or apolitical, excessively sentimental, and excused. This dissertation seeks to both explore, and repudiate, this binary, by revealing the existence of an idiosyncratic military heroine presented within literature of the age, who is political, rational, and heroic.
Chapter one focuses on portrayals of public and political military women within two anti-Jacobin novels published in 1795 and 1801 respectively. It identifies the way in which the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century novel, thoroughly devoted to domestic ideology, depicts women who favour the political and military sphere to the domestic, familial sphere, as monstrous and reprehensible. Chapter two analyses female warrior-ballads and historical narratives, and illuminates the way in which armed women exhibited in these genres are excused for their violence on account of their apolitical motives and sentimentalised portrayals, whilst arguing concurrently that the authors maintain a dissuasion of female militarism by delineating women as essentially unsuited to military activity, on account of the very characteristic which renders them virtuous; their delicacy. Chapter three, offering an analysis of literature produced by three radical authors, in 1799, 1796, and 1800, seeks to infer that, though indeed in the minority, anomalous depictions of armed women offered between 1793 and 1801, which conform to neither the political, monstrous, and condemned, nor the apolitical, sentimental and excused portrayal, did in fact exist. I reveal throughout this chapter the way in which the discussed radical authors grant their non-romanticised military women a heroic status, by intimating that it is the spirited armed woman, as opposed to the delicate, defenceless women, who is most capable of meliorating the nation.

On July 13th 1793, Charlotte Corday, a twenty five year old Republican woman from Caen, Normandy, stabbed and killed the tyrannical Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Marat, while he sat in his bath. Corday's crime shocked her contemporaries. By stabbing a political leader, Corday transgressed the boundaries of decorous feminine behaviour to an extreme degree; not only did she violate the public/private male/female divide, by rendering herself a political agent, but she countered concurrently the association of women with pacifism and empathy, by murdering a compatriot. Following her crime, Corday became a prominent figure within British literature, both factual and fictional. This paper explores the representation of Charlotte Corday offered in two British dramas; John Edmund Eyre's The Maid of Normandy or Death of the Queen of France, performed in 1794, and Matthew West's Female Heroism, a tragedy in five acts, founded on revolutionary events that occurred in 1793, published in 1803, and staged one year later. My paper explores the differing ways in which each playwright fictionalises the details of Corday's crime, and questions the motives behind each author's divergence from fact. It engages with debates regarding notions of female patriotism, the implied incongruence between femininity and universal benevolence, and the supposedly debilitating nature of women's acute emotionalism.

In 1803, Irish vicar and playwright Matthew West published a drama titled Female Heroism: a tragedy in five acts (1803), which was performed at the Crow Street theatre, Dublin, in 1804. The tragedy offers an account of Charlotte Corday's murder of Jean-Paul Marat, and was written in response to a drama on the same subject, titled The Maid of Normandy or Death of the Queen of France (1794), written by John Edmund Eyre, and performed in Dublin a decade previously. 
Scholars have paid little attention to West's drama in its own right, and tend to conflate their somewhat disengaged readings of Female Heroism with their more thorough analyses of Maid. Consequently, it is commonly hypothesised that both dramas would have prompted homogenous readings from their Irish audiences. To adopt this stance, however, is to ignore not only West's fundamental deviations from Eyre's script, but to disregard also the differing cultural contexts within which the plays were read and staged. It is to overlook, in particular, the way in which Ireland's relationship with England had altered in the interim between 1794 and 1803. Published just three years after the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, my paper illustrates the potential for West's tragedy to be interpreted as an anti-Union allegory. In contrast to prior scholars who have argued that, in accordance with Eyre, West dramatises Corday’s assassination of Marat as a pro-British event, I argue that, when situated firmly within its post-1800 context, West’s Corday can be seen to personify Irish independence, while the drama’s villain, Marat, acts as the embodiment of tyrannical British rule.