“Gender, consumption, and ideological ambiguity in David Garrick's production of The orphan of China (1759)” (Publication, 2008)
Year
2008
Text
Ou, Hsin-yun [Ou, Xinyun]. Gender, consumption, and ideological ambiguity in David Garrick's production of The orphan of China (1759). In : Theatre journal ; vol. 60, no 3 (2008). (Ou1)
Type
Publication
Mentioned People (1)
Murphy, Arthur
(Clooniquin, Roscommon, Irland 1727-1805 Knightsbridge, London) : Dramatiker, Schauspieler
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Great Britain : Theatre
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References / Sources
Chronology Entries (1)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1759 |
Murphy, Arthur. The orphan of China [ID D19836]. Arthur Murphy included a letter to Voltaire in the first and second editions of the play Orphan of China. To M. De Voltaire. Sir A letter to you from an English author will carry with it the appearance of corresponding with the enemy, not only as the two nations are at present involved in a difficult and important war, but also because in many of your late writings you seem determined to live in a state of hostility with the British nation… As I have attempted a Tragedy upon a subject that has exercised your excellent talents ; and thus have dared to try my strength in the Bow of Ulysses, I hold myself in some sort accountable to M. De Voltaire for the departure I have made from his plan, and the substitution of a new fable of my own. My first propensity to this story was occasioned by the remarks of an admirable critic of our own, upon the Orphan of the House of Chau, preserved to us by the industrious and sensible P. Du Halde, which, as our learned commentator observes, amidst great wildness and irregularity, has still some traces of resemblance to the beautiful models of antiquity… In this state of mind, Sir, I heard with pleasure that M. De Voltaire had produced at Paris his L'orphelin de la Chine : I ardently longed for a perusal of the piece, expecting that such a writer would certain.ly seize all the striking incidents which might naturally grow out of so pregnant a story, and that he would leave no source of passion unopened… A scantiness of interesting business seemed to me a primary defect in the construction of the French Orphan of China, and that I imagined had its source in the early date of your play… You will perceive, Sir, in the English Orphan some occasional insertions of sentiment from your elegant performance. For this I shall make no apology, either to the public or to you : none to the public, because they have applauded some strokes for which I am indebted to you ; and none certainly to you, because you are well aware I have in this instance followed the example of many admired writers… But whatever may be your opinion of it, I must beg that you will not make it the criterion by which you would decide concerning the taste of the English nation, or the present state of literature among us. What you have humbly said of yourself, in order to do honour to your nation, I can assert with truth of the author of the English Orphan, that he is one of the worst poets now in this country… One thing further I will assure you, in case you should discover any traces of barbarism in the style or fable, That if you had been present at the representation, you would have seen a theatrical splendor conducted with a bienseance unknown to the scene Françoise ; the performers of Zaphimri and Hamet, by their interesting manner, would have made you regret that you had not enriched your piece with two characters, to which a colourist, like you, would have given the most beautiful touches of the pencil, had the idea struck your fancy ; and, though a weak state of health deprived the play of so fine an actress as Mrs. Cibber, you would have beheld in Mandane a figure that would be an ornament to any state in Europe, and you would have acknowledged that her Acting promises to equal the elegance of her person : moreover, you would have seen a Zamti, whose exquisite powers are capable of adding Pathos and Harmony even to our great Shakespear[e], and have already been the chief support of some of your own scenes upon the English stage… Sekundärliteratur Yang Chi-ming : Murphy's Chinese tragedy opens with success at London's Drury Lane Theater. It receives detailed reviews in magazines of the day, and when it appears soon after in print, it is said that 'Every one has, by this time, seen or read, and most have applauded it. There are several reasons behind its success. First, it follows the impetus of Restoration tragedy, which banks on the 'remote regions of the world' – improbable, exotic – to further heighten the grandeur and drama surrounding ethical and emotional conflict and produce the distance between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Add to that England's proto-imperialist fascination with the large-scale founding and falling of past empires : China's history of conquest is popularized in the theatrical tradition of heroic conquest tragedies, modeled after epic poetry. The orphan of China is a mid-century melodrama which doesn't at first appear to fit within the genre and period of heroic virtue, action and stylistics. It does also draw from detailed ethno-histories of the Tartar-Chinese border wars and participate in the early modern imagining and re-imagining of China's invasions by the pseudo-mythic Tartary, long a symbol of ancient conquest and the permeability of borders between East and West. Liu Wu-chi : Murphy had already made his name as a writer of farces when he chose a Chinese theme for his first tragedy. He claimed that he had been attracted by Prémare's play, but, as a matter of fact, his play closely resembles Voltaire's L'orphelin, which was clearly its model. The interest in the Orient, aroused by Du Halde and Voltaire in France, had spread to England, where the performance of Murphy's play was a further stimulus. The delay between the writing of Orphan of China and its appearance at the Drury Lane Theater was occasioned by a long altercation between Murphy and David Garrick. The trouble was caused by the reluctance of Garrick to accept Murphy's play for Drury Lane and by his putting off the performance as long as possible. It appears that Garrick had long taken an interest in China as a theatrical possibility, and had been contemplating an adaptation from Voltaire when Murphy stole the thunder from him. But finally, with the support of Henry Fox, Horace Walpole and William Whitehead, Murphy succeeded in forcing Garrick to stage the play. In Murphy's Orphan was little of the morals of Confucius. Unlike Voltaire, he was not so much interested in proving the superiority of culture over barbarity as in presenting an effective, well-made play that would attract a large audience. Murphy based his Orphan upon Voltaire's ; but he made a number of important changes. In the main what he did was to drop the love story of the Tartar conqueror and give the orphan, Zaphimri, and active part in the drama. This hint he took from the Chinese play. In place of Voltaire's ending, Murphy reasserted the theme of revenge by making Zaphimri, a vigorous young man of twenty, the avenger of his family's and nation's wrongs. The play remains a tragedy with the death of Zamti and his wife Mandane. Though the story and the characters have been greatly altered, Murphy's Orphan retains as a whole the spirit of the Chinese tragedy and is closer to it than any other European adaptation. Ou Hsin-yun : In April 1759 Arthur Murphy's The orphan of China opened successfully at Drury Lane. Actor-manager David Garrick played the leading role of the Confucian patriot Zamti, with Mary Ann Yates as Mandane, his wife. Garrick was impressive as a national hero, but Mrs. Yates's performance as a brave mother also attracted considerable attention. Thanks to a large part to Marx. Yates's stage presence and Chinoiserie costume, the production may have been more remarkable than the dramatic text. Set amidst an Oriental setting and garbed in a fashionable Oriental costume, the body of the English actress was integrated into an exotic spectacle – a stage spectacle that both contrasted and mirrored the social situation of English women. The conflicts between Mandarins and Tartars in the play represent contemporaneous tensions between England and France ; that Mandane, who opposes her husband's absolutist patriotism and patriarchal authority, is the author's spokesperson against Chinese and French anti-egalitarianism ; and that the ideologically charged figure of Mrs. Yates may undercut Mandane's potency as an authorial voice. English society tended to associate consumer culture with women, and, although female consumption surely contributed to the expansion of the British economy, it may also have weakened patriarchal control of women. Thus the female body of an actress wearing Chinoiserie costuming might undermine the credibility of the heroine's political objectives. Murphy, who transformed French-inflected Chinese exoticism and absolutism into English aspirations for national liberty, also succeeded in rendering Mandane as a more sympathetic, self-determinate heroine. His departure from Voltaire's pseudo-Confucian ideas about women can be ascribed to an emerging intellectual trend that connected better treatment of women with social progress. The presence of a defiant Oriental heroine in Murphy's play echoes widespread debates about the role of women in an era when women's status was beginning to change, and suggests that Murphy also was aware of the role played by women in the construction of English national identity. By forgrounding Mandane's defense of individual rights, the play criticizes the Chinese (and implicitly the French) patriotic enthusiasm for absolutist monarchy. Mandane resists the socially prescribed absence of women from public affairs, thereby illuminating the idea that wives and mothers are also citizens of the nation. The play then, thus affirming the familial private space as no less important than the public sphere of national interest. Murphy turned the Tartar invasion of China into an allegory of French cultural incursions into England, which succeeded largely because of the English aristocracy's appetite for foreign goods. The epilogue, spoken by Mrs. Yates, apologizes for the play's use of fashionable Chinoiserie costume : 'Ladies, excuse my dress - 'this true Chinese'. This apology may allude to certain social and economic shifts during the eighteenth century, a period when acts of consumption were increasingly being gendered 'female'. Mrs. Yates, an English woman wearing foreign costumes that evoked British imperial trade, represents two figures of femininity associated with contemporary social concerns ; the elegant lady of quality as a mercantile consumer, and the frantic woman as a waster of colonial commerce. Mrs. Yates performed an image of femininity that supported overseas trade, thereby helping to create greater desire for exotic consumer goods. The World vehemently attacked Chinoiserie dresses for 'their red, their pompons, their scraps of dirty gauze, flimsy satins, and black calicoes'. The English aristocracy, whose members were hungry for French imported luxury goods, manners, and language, initiated the trend. Paradoxically, the firs production of The orphan of China not only exploited the vogue for Chinoiserie, but also fueled English national patriotism. Projecting English social progress onto its Oriental subject, the play employed gender and Orientalist discourses, not only as polemical mechanisms to investigate the relationship between man and woman or between the Occident and the Orient, but also as nationalistic propaganda to celebrate English national identity by arguing for English cultural superiority over France. Murphy's play refrained from glorifying the contemporary vogue for Chinese fashion, and transformed Chinese exoticism and French absolutism into English aspirations for national liberty. By rendering the Oriental heroine as a more sympathetic, self-assured character, Murphy departed from Voltaire's pseudo-Confucian ideas about women. Ou Hsin-yun : As Murphy's depiction of his Chinese heroine holds a mirror up to the shifting contemporary English views of women, Murphy's tragedy is a social, cultural and historical product of its own era and arena. It is therefore imperative to consider Murphy's theatrical adaption not only with the context of the European concepts of Chinese culture, but also in the specific social and theatrical contexts available to Murphy in mid-eighteenth-century London. In several points of the play, Murphy is keen to demonstrate his knowledge about Chinese cultural practices. The epilogue mentions Chinese 'taste and fashions', including women's confinement, foot-binding and the Chinese way of writing words. A tremendous amount of information about Confucianism was available in London long before Murphy wrote his play about China. Murphy's attitude towards Confucianism, is mitigated between contemporary European polarized views that celebrate or attack Confucian ethics. He depicts Zamti as a Confucian disciple who sometimes could turn into an unhumane patriarch, a 'marble-hearted father' as Mandane calls him. Mandane goes beyond the role of a conventional virtuous woman in Confucian terms, and is portrayed with sympathy as a woman who chooses her own role as an affectionate mother when she is unable to play simultaneously her other roles as an obedient wife and a loyal subject. This Chinese woman as envisioned by Murphy is far different from what most Confucian followers could have expected according to their gender notions. On the other hand, Murphy's presentation of his Chinese heroine reacts to the active contemporary English debates about gender roles, and echoes viewpoints expressed in his other writings. Murphy's view of woman differs from Confucian gender concepts, as Mandane embodies a resolute force against patriarchal domination. Murphy's authorial voice can be heard in Mandane when she convey his objection to either Zamti's Absolutist Monarchy or Timurkan's colonialism, and she has the sympathy of all the major Chinese characters at the end of the play. She challenges the masculine authorities in a play that is ostensibly a heroic tragedy, which usually centres on heroes of prowess and honour and heroine with unalloyed faithfulness to the heroes. Mandane's rebellion against Zamti's loyalty to an Absolutist Monarch, in accordance with the English political trend of Constitutional Monarchy, consolidates her position as representing a significant chorus figure of Murphy's play in reacting to the current social and political changes. Also, Mandane interrogates Zeami's authority as a patriarch in her family through her emphasis on contractual patriarchy, which requires a husband to abide by his martial vows before he can rightfully demand his wife's subjugation, much as the modified kingship under Constitutional Monarchy needs to observe constitutional duties to the people. Condemning Zamti's failure in his family duty to protect their son, Mandane places more emphasis on the notion of loyalty to one's family than to a monarch. Murphy's theme reconsiders the virtues of patriarchy and patriotism, while clearly directing these to notions of gender and nationalism in British society. Murphy's portrayal of Mandane's emotional outburst, exhibits irrational female passions that are dangerously subversive to a stable English society dominated by patriarchal patriotism. Mandane's fervour in defending her son's right to live, as well as her defiance against her husband's commands not to reveal their son's identity and not to commit suicide, designates a mode of rebellion that potentially jeopardizes the prospect of a nation founded on patriarchal rationality. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
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