| This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. Spoilers abound in my discussion of these forgotten novels, and I discuss 18th-century attitudes which I do not necessarily endorse. |
CMP#251 “The vicious tendency of the German drama”
| “In discussing the use made of [Kotzebue’s play] Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park (1814), modern commentators sometimes underrate how notorious it was, how critics and satirists from The Anti-Jacobin on had made it a byword for moral and social subversion.” --Marilyn Butler |
The Menace across the Channel I first learned about the anti-Jacobins and the culture war that raged between supporters of the French Revolution versus the conservative old guard in Marilyn Butler’s important book, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975).
Jacobins were one of the revolutionary groups that turned France upside down during the Reign of Terror which followed the overthrow of the monarchy. The British establishment and of course, many ordinary patriotic Britons, were worried about revolutionary fervor spreading across the Channel. While progressives such as Tom Paine hailed the reform (or overthrow) of organized religion, primogeniture, and the aristocracy, conservative-minded folk also picked up their quill pens to defend the status quo. Some founded The Anti-Jacobin Review to warn about the dangers of political radicalism. This included castigating French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire, and German writers like Goethe and Kotzbue. Once you delve into the back and forth, there is a shock of recognition--it’s comparable to the cultural and political wars raging today.
Conservatives (and I am using the word as a descriptor, not a slur) saw not only a political threat but a threat to established social customs. They particularly feared any liberalization of divorce laws or any whiff of what today we would call feminism. Some authors used satire and ridicule to combat progressive ideas, notably Elizabeth Hamilton in her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). In the example below, the author of Scenes of Life used the direct attack to condemn the new radicalism and progressivism.
Jacobins were one of the revolutionary groups that turned France upside down during the Reign of Terror which followed the overthrow of the monarchy. The British establishment and of course, many ordinary patriotic Britons, were worried about revolutionary fervor spreading across the Channel. While progressives such as Tom Paine hailed the reform (or overthrow) of organized religion, primogeniture, and the aristocracy, conservative-minded folk also picked up their quill pens to defend the status quo. Some founded The Anti-Jacobin Review to warn about the dangers of political radicalism. This included castigating French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire, and German writers like Goethe and Kotzbue. Once you delve into the back and forth, there is a shock of recognition--it’s comparable to the cultural and political wars raging today.
Conservatives (and I am using the word as a descriptor, not a slur) saw not only a political threat but a threat to established social customs. They particularly feared any liberalization of divorce laws or any whiff of what today we would call feminism. Some authors used satire and ridicule to combat progressive ideas, notably Elizabeth Hamilton in her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). In the example below, the author of Scenes of Life used the direct attack to condemn the new radicalism and progressivism.
Maria and Henry interrupted "We have got a play"
First, to recap: in Mansfield Park, the young people decide to put on a play in the billiard room and choose the play Lovers’ Vows, much to the strait-laced Edmund Bertram’s consternation. Lovers' Vows was originally a German play, translated and revised for the English stage by Elizabeth Inchbald. Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford are cast as Agatha, a fallen but repentant woman, and Frederick, her illegitimate son, which draws them into a “dangerous intimacy.” The play ends happily with Agatha marrying the nobleman who seduced her years ago, and the nobleman’s sprightly daughter Amelia marries the poor but upright clergyman she loves. I give a more detailed synopsis of the play here.
Fanny Price, Mansfield Park’s heroine, is shocked that her cousins would select Lovers’ Vows to play: “Agatha and Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other, so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what they were engaging in.”
Leaving aside the brilliant use Austen makes of this play within Mansfield Park, let’s return to the fact that readers of Austen’s time would have understood that Lovers’ Vows, although popular, was a controversial play. They would have been familiar with its plot and themes and the commentary around it. I found a prime example in the most recent novel I reviewed, the 1805 novel Scenes of Life. It includes a lengthy diatribe against the dangerous and pernicious influence of the German drama. The character Mr. Darnley visits the the heroine and learns she has translated a play from the German with hopes of getting it produced on the London stage. Darnley excoriates August Kotzebue (author of Lovers’ Vows) and discussed his plays. First, The Stranger:
First, to recap: in Mansfield Park, the young people decide to put on a play in the billiard room and choose the play Lovers’ Vows, much to the strait-laced Edmund Bertram’s consternation. Lovers' Vows was originally a German play, translated and revised for the English stage by Elizabeth Inchbald. Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford are cast as Agatha, a fallen but repentant woman, and Frederick, her illegitimate son, which draws them into a “dangerous intimacy.” The play ends happily with Agatha marrying the nobleman who seduced her years ago, and the nobleman’s sprightly daughter Amelia marries the poor but upright clergyman she loves. I give a more detailed synopsis of the play here.
Fanny Price, Mansfield Park’s heroine, is shocked that her cousins would select Lovers’ Vows to play: “Agatha and Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other, so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what they were engaging in.”
Leaving aside the brilliant use Austen makes of this play within Mansfield Park, let’s return to the fact that readers of Austen’s time would have understood that Lovers’ Vows, although popular, was a controversial play. They would have been familiar with its plot and themes and the commentary around it. I found a prime example in the most recent novel I reviewed, the 1805 novel Scenes of Life. It includes a lengthy diatribe against the dangerous and pernicious influence of the German drama. The character Mr. Darnley visits the the heroine and learns she has translated a play from the German with hopes of getting it produced on the London stage. Darnley excoriates August Kotzebue (author of Lovers’ Vows) and discussed his plays. First, The Stranger:
| “What is the outline of The Stranger?.... [Mr. Darnley asks rhetorically]. “The wife of an amiable man is seduced by a contemptible coxcomb; and, as the lady herself gives us to understand, she yielded after a very little solicitation… “Is this a fit picture to be presented to a British audience? Is it a fit model to be exhibited before the British fair? English ladies are celebrated for chastity, and yet they press forward, in crowds, to behold and applaud these pernicious scenes… Ought a woman to be presented as an easy victim? Ought she to possess no sense of honour or of duty? –I can pity the innocent, unsuspecting girl, who falls into the snare of seduction—I can execrate the villain who betrays her! But can we feel the same emotions for the fall of a married woman, particularly when the temptation has been but slight? –No! gloating lust alone can urge her to the commission of a crime at which the face of heaven must blush… |  ChatGPT: Darnley harangues the ladies |
| [Darnley continues]: "Lovers’ Vows, by the same author, like most of his other pieces, is calculated to render the higher orders of society ridiculous and obnoxious in the eyes of the vulgar. The nobles of a country are represented as devoting themselves to criminal pursuits, while every virtue sparkles with the proudest lustre in the plebian bosom-- "As to its moral tendency, it is very near akin to The Stranger: --Frederick, an illegitimate son, a common soldier, the hero of the piece, is a pattern of every thing that is excellent. Count Cassel, a man of birth and fortune, everything odious and contemptible, is an admirable foil to set off, with tenfold lustre, the virtues of the humble Frederick. Agatha, too, is another easy victim to seductive eloquence. She expiates crime, it is true; but a seduced female should never be publicly exhibited but in terrorem to the spectators. "Why should we have these volumes of infamy obtruded upon us, when, in ourselves we possess an exhaustless mine of every excellence? Why should we thirst for deformed novelty, when we are in ample possession of native, standard beauty? There is but one good which can possibly result from the influx of this species of German literature: --it may stimulate some of our British bards to furnish something which may command support: which may chace the foreign monster from the stage, and convert our theatres into temples of loyalty, of virtue, and of honour.” |
More Criticism
A review of an 1804 production of Lovers’ Vows at Covent Garden drew praise for the principal actors, including Master Betty, a precocious youth playing the role of Frederick, but condemned the play: "The Play of Lovers’ Vows, drawn from the polluted sources of the German School, however it may occasionally strike upon our feelings, has no moral influence upon the heart, and leaves no permanent impression behind it. That it should have maintained a place among our acting plays, is a serious impeachment of the taste and judgment of the public... it has lost the temporary interest it obtained… we were, indeed, surprised to see a play so defective in the most essential points of dramatic excellence so well attended”…
An anonymous letter-writer, identifying herself as a concerned mother, wrote in to another periodical with the same message:
“...Plays and Operas, I blush to acknowledge it, are my delight; and yet I will never carry my daughters, or even go myself to see any of these unnatural, sophistical German Dramas (particularly alluding, it is supposed to those ridiculous and immoral plays, The Stranger, and Lovers Vows) however a Siddons or a Master Betty may dupe our understandings, and lead astray our noblest feelings by the bewitching display of those superior talents with which Heaven endowed them…”
For all I know, the author of Scenes of Life, the critical newspaper review, and the anonymous letter were one and the same person, but these examples provides plenty of evidence that Austen’s first readers would have understood the controversial reputation of Lovers' Vows.
The narrator's sympathies in Mansfield Park are with the judgement of Edmund and Fanny, in my opinion. The other young people were wrong to take up play-acting while their paterfamlias Sir Thomas was undergoing a hazardous ocean voyage home, and they should not have chosen that play. However, as has frequently been mentioned, Jane Austen's family participated in private theatricals, young Jane wrote dramatic sketches, and she loved attending the theatre when she could. It's not about private theatricals per se, it's this particular situation.
So, understanding the controversial nature of Lovers' Vows helps us answer the question, "What is the big deal about the private theatricals in Mansfield Park, anyway?"
Coming up: more anti-Jacobin novels, i.e., novels which push back against French revolutionaries and British freethinkers like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin.
Previous post: The Wife and the Mistress
A review of an 1804 production of Lovers’ Vows at Covent Garden drew praise for the principal actors, including Master Betty, a precocious youth playing the role of Frederick, but condemned the play: "The Play of Lovers’ Vows, drawn from the polluted sources of the German School, however it may occasionally strike upon our feelings, has no moral influence upon the heart, and leaves no permanent impression behind it. That it should have maintained a place among our acting plays, is a serious impeachment of the taste and judgment of the public... it has lost the temporary interest it obtained… we were, indeed, surprised to see a play so defective in the most essential points of dramatic excellence so well attended”…
An anonymous letter-writer, identifying herself as a concerned mother, wrote in to another periodical with the same message:
“...Plays and Operas, I blush to acknowledge it, are my delight; and yet I will never carry my daughters, or even go myself to see any of these unnatural, sophistical German Dramas (particularly alluding, it is supposed to those ridiculous and immoral plays, The Stranger, and Lovers Vows) however a Siddons or a Master Betty may dupe our understandings, and lead astray our noblest feelings by the bewitching display of those superior talents with which Heaven endowed them…”
For all I know, the author of Scenes of Life, the critical newspaper review, and the anonymous letter were one and the same person, but these examples provides plenty of evidence that Austen’s first readers would have understood the controversial reputation of Lovers' Vows.
The narrator's sympathies in Mansfield Park are with the judgement of Edmund and Fanny, in my opinion. The other young people were wrong to take up play-acting while their paterfamlias Sir Thomas was undergoing a hazardous ocean voyage home, and they should not have chosen that play. However, as has frequently been mentioned, Jane Austen's family participated in private theatricals, young Jane wrote dramatic sketches, and she loved attending the theatre when she could. It's not about private theatricals per se, it's this particular situation.
So, understanding the controversial nature of Lovers' Vows helps us answer the question, "What is the big deal about the private theatricals in Mansfield Park, anyway?"
Coming up: more anti-Jacobin novels, i.e., novels which push back against French revolutionaries and British freethinkers like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin.
Previous post: The Wife and the Mistress
 This blog gives more detail about Lovers' Vows as it was used in Mansfield Park, and provides details about its original author Kotzebue and its translator and adaptor, Elizabeth Inchbald. I'll add that Austen also uses the dialogue of Lovers' Vows to torture the heroine, Fanny Price. Fanny is forced to sit and watch the man she loves, Edmund, rehearse the part of Anhalt the clergyman with Mary Crawford, knowing that Edmund and Mary are falling in love with each other as they read Amelia's and Anhalt's lines about love and marriage. In my variation on Mansfield Park, a "contrary wind" keeps Sir Thomas from returning on the night of the dress rehearsal, but other event occur to explode Maria's engagement to Mr. Rushworth, and Fanny runs away from Mansfield Park to seek work as a governess. |
| Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Clarendon Press, 1975. |
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