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‘The Great Moral Object’ in Joanna Baillie’s Drama

This chapter offers a new reading of Joanna Baillie’s path-breaking drama and dramatic theory, suggesting that it is working through the dialectical logic of improvement. Baillie attempts to counter what she finds to be pernicious aspects of commercial modernisation and politeness with an alternative vision of moral improvement. She presents the drama as uniquely placed to engender moral growth because of its capacity to invoke ‘sympathetick curiosity’ in reader or audience. This volatile force is explored in Count Basil (1798), read as a model example of historical dialectic; in The Family Legend (1810), an important approach to the ‘primitive’ past; and in The Alienated Manor (finally published in 1836), a satire of improvement’s pitfalls. With roots in the Enlightenment science of man, Baillie’s writings sustain a powerful sense of the individual’s contribution to networks of social power and the involvement of this contribution in grand narratives of improvement. Yet, while Baillie seeks to repurpose the enlarged patent theatres into instruments of moral improvement, the pessimism of her social diagnosis threatens to infect her didactic project.