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“A Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women In Elizabeth Inchbald’S The Massacre And European Drama.” European Romantic Review 17.3 (Summer 2006): 275-88., Wendy Nielsen

Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions …