Women who act: Performance in Elizabeth Inchbald’s "Nature and Art" and Mary Robinson’s "The Natural Daughter"

Abstract

Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796) and Mary Robinson's The Natural Daughter (1799) reveal the preoccupation with distinguishing between "natural" feeling and social artifice in the late-eighteenth century. Their works, written as the novel was still in its early stages, show the importance of theatricality as a dominant mode of discourse, both on the stage and in the everyday experience of individuals in the culture of sentimentality. Inchbald and Robinson show this theatrical bodily expression of sentimentality through the bodily performances of their female characters. Using novelistic conventions such as narrative perspective and free indirect discourse, these authors stage performance scenes with the aim of moving their audiences to reflect on the society that misinterprets, misunderstands, and ignores the complicated bodily signs of women's culturally-constructed gendered performance.