“A Joy in Fear.

” The Passion of Fear in Joanna Baillie´ s Plays Orra and The Dream
Eva Čoupková

Masaryk University in Brno, Faculty of Science, Language Centre,

Kotlářská 2, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic. Email: coupkova@sci.muni.cz

ABSTRACT: This paper compares two tragedies in the third volume of Joanna Baillie’ s
Plays on the Passions in which the playwright explores the workings of fear on the minds of
two main protagonists. The title character of Orra is a woman driven to madness by her
superstitious fear of the supernatural, which is indicative of Baillie’s affiliation with the
Gothic. In The Dream, General Osterloo collapses dreading death, terrified of dying with a
guilty conscience. This paper discusses a new theory of theatre which Baillie herself
formulated, that of didacticism, and draws connections to Burke’s notion of the sublime,
stressing the importance of fear and terror for creating an aesthetic experience. The plays also
demonstrate a tendency to depict the psychology of characters, their suppressed feelings and
emotions.

KEYWORDS: fear; sublime; imagination; madness; theory of theatre; psychology

In 1812, the Scottish playwright and poet Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) published her third
volume of A Series of Plays on the Passions In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the
Stronger Passions of the Mind, containing two tragedies Orra, The Dream, a
comedy The Seige, and a musical The Beacon. Apart from the last
mentioned work whose principal passion is hope, her last volume of plays
is entirely devoted to the “passion” of fear.
Passions play an important role in all of the dramas by Baillie, since
she is mainly interested in the psychology of her characters, emotions
they are driven by, and the feelings that motivate their actions. Thus the
objective is being replaced by the subjective, with the characters and their
psychology being more important than the plot. Her view of tragedy as a
genre is first presented in the “Introductory discourse” which formed a
preface to the first volume of the Plays on the Passions. In it she wrote:

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 The task particularly belonging to tragedy is that of unveiling the human mind
under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions, which seemingly
unprovoked by outward circumstances, will, from small beginnings brood within
the breast, till all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne down
before them; those passions which conceal themselves from the observation of
men, which cannot unbosom themselves even to the dearest friend; and can,
oftentimes, only give their fullness vent in the lonely desert, or in the darkness of
midnight.1

Baillie tried to formulate a new theory of theatre, believing that it

need not serve merely as an entertainment, but that it could affect
people’s lives in a positive way. She expected her audience to learn from
the experience of dramatic characters, be able to control the emotions
which may destroy them by following their progress and gradual
development. She believed that all people are naturally interested in
emotions and what motivates the actions of other people, and that those
passions would be more interesting in a dramatic piece than a mere
spectacle.
In spite of the fact that Baillie intended her plays to be performed on
the stage, they were more popular as “closet dramas”, i.e. they were
widely read. Not many of her dramas were really acted, partly due to the
conditions of the theatres of her time, and also because
of hostile reactions of some critics and reviewers. 2 She was, nevertheless,
an important literary figure in the first half of the 19 th century, and she
counted among her friends many famous writers and poets. The recent
critical interest in Baillie stresses her importance as a female playwright,
one who dealt with issues like gender problems, patriarchal power, the
power of imagination, and the importance of psychology.
Orra is the first play in which Baillie explores the emotion of fear,
particularly that of the supernatural. This play is also unique among her
oeuvre in that it has a female protagonist - she mostly casts male heroes

1
Joanna Baillie, “Introductory Discourse”, The Complete Works of Joanna Baillie. (Philadelphia: Carey and
Lea, 1832), 16.
2
Christine A. Colón, “Introduction”, In Six Gothic Dramas, selected and introduced by Christine A. Colón.
(Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007), xv-xxii. Colón mentions especially the critic of the Edinburgh Review,
Francis Jeffrey.

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in her plays. Orra is a young woman, heiress to a family fortune, whose
guardian wants her to marry his son whom she loathes. She is a strong
woman able to resist pressures; longing to live independently, she has her
own plans and wants to be her own mistress, so that she may enjoy both
her power and her wealth. She knows that in the fourteenth century, when
the plot is set, the marriage of equals is almost impossible, thus she
chooses spinsterhood. She rejects the state of being just “that poor and
good-for nothing, helpless being…with all my lands and rights in the hands
of some proud man”. 3 She refuses to obey both her guardian’s demands
and her father’s last will. But she has one principal character flaw: like
Catherine Morland from Jane Austen’ s early novel, Northanger Abbey,
Orra is obsessed with Gothic stories. She reads them a lot and she also
likes her maid to tell her tales about the supernatural. Baillie criticizes the
audience response to the Gothic, but compared to Austen’s novel, Baillie’s
play lacks the irony of Austen’s narrative. Orra’s obsession is taken
seriously, and it leads to tragic consequences. When reading or listening
to a ghost story, she experiences both mental and physical delight. Orra is
completely absorbed in her experience, unable to confront reality. She
describes her feelings in this way:

When the cold blood shoots through every vein:

When every pore upon my shrunken skin,
A Knotted Knoll becomes, and to mine ears,
Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes,
Rush stranger tears, There is a joy in fear.4

So for Orra, fear is a pleasant sensation.

However, such a strong emotion can be easily used to the character’s
disadvantage, and that is exactly what happens to Orra. To terrorize her
into submission, her guardian and one treacherous count, who wants to
marry her instead of the guardian’ s son, decide to confine her to a castle
which is said to be haunted by a murdered knight. Both conspirators
arrange that Orra hears the story of the knight and learns that she is the
3
Joanna Baillie, Orra. A Series of Plays. Vol. III. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977), 10.
4
Baillie, Orra, 29.

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murderer’s relative. The scheme is seemingly perfect, Orra is confined to
the same chamber where the murder is said to have been committed, and
even on the same date, St. Michael’ s Eve. She spends the critical night
incarcerated in the chamber together with her maid, and even if she is
most horrified, she still wants to listen to the stories of the spectres, so
again, her passion is stronger than reason. She also repeatedly rejects the
advances of the treacherous count who tries to use her superstitious fear
to force her into a marriage with him. But Orra rejects him claiming that to
experience a night of terror is better than to become the wife of a “vile
reptile” 5, as she calls him.
The situation becomes more complicated when there appears a
rescuer: Theobald, a nobleman of reduced fortune, enters through an
underground passage leading to Orra’s chamber. Unfortunately, he enters
in the guise of the murdered “spectre-huntsman”, which is not a good
idea, because upon seeing him, Orra believes that she is being visited by
her murdered ancestor. She shrieks and falls senseless to the ground. Orra
never recovers - her strong emotion deprives her of sanity. Her madness is
seen as a liberation from social pressures, which is often the case with
Gothic heroines. She escapes matrimony, because a mad, even if a rich
wife, is not a desirable object. It was her superstitious fear which gave her
guardian and other men conspiring against her a certain amount of power
over her, which is now lost forever. Mad Orra declares: “I´ m strong and
terrible now: Mine eyes have looked upon all dreadful things.” 6 She feels
strong, but not strong enough to liberate herself from her paranoia. As
William D. Brewer observes, imagination can be both a liberating and
debilitating power. 7
The debilitating power of the imagination can be most strongly observed in the
protagonist of the second tragedy on fear, The Dream. The principal character of this tragedy
is a male, General Osterloo, a brave imperial warrior, whose principal weakness is the fear of
death with guilty conscience. Baillie challenges the traditional view that women are naturally

5
Baillie, Orra, 71.
6
Baillie, Orra, 99.
7
See William D. Brewer, “The Liberating and Debilitating Imagination in Joanna Baillie´ s Orra and The
Dream”, (In Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Utopianism and Joanna Baillie, edited by Orrin N.C. Wang, June
10, 2011, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/utopia/brewer/brewer.html.

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predisposed to succumb to fear, while men are not. In her address “To the Reader” she
explains why she wrote a second tragedy on fear with a male hero. Baillie was “unwilling to
appropriate this passion in a serious form to her own sex entirely, when the subjects of all
other passions hitherto delineated in [The Plays on the Passions] are men”. 8 Also in the play
one monk remarks to another, observing the pitiful state of mind of Osterloo awaiting
execution, that “fear will sometimes couch under the brazen helmet as well as the woolen
cowl.” 9
As in Orra, the world of The Dream is essentially a dark, Gothic, medieval nightmare.
The action takes place in a monastery where two monks are haunted by disturbing dreams in
which an opened tomb and a mysterious skeleton appear. In a nearby village, an unknown
pestilence is claiming the lives of many peasants. In the dreams it is revealed that a passing
knight should be chosen by lot to pay penance for a long-forgotten crime. Osterloo is the
chosen knight who is to undergo the test of fear to redeem the suffering community. As the
play progresses it turns out that Osterloo is a murderer who treacherously killed his rival in
love who happened to be the brother of the prior of the monastery. The prior now wants to
exact revenge and execute the knight. Osterloo is able to withstand physical torture since he is
a valiant soldier, but he is not prepared to face the reality of the crime he committed years
before, and is horrified of the eternal punishment awaiting him after death.
While awaiting execution, he quickly deteriorates from a macho domineering type
of a warrior into a feeble ruined man. As one monk sees him, “he seems broken and
haggarded with age, and his quenched eyes are fixed in their sockets, like one who walks in
sleep…”10 Similarly to Orra, there appears a brave rescuer who tries to save him, but this
time the gender roles are reversed and his old love, countess Leonora, enters a secret passage
leading to the monastery disguised as a monk. Unlike Osterloo, Leonora feels strong and full
of energy, which saves her from fear. But her attempt fails - she has been deceived by a monk
loyal to the prior and given a wrong key to the grated gate.
There is another chance for Osterloo when the king’ s ambassador enters the
execution chamber in the manner of the deus ex machina and orders the execution to stop at
the very moment the executioner’s axe is about to behead the general. But it is too late,
Osterloo is dead. The prior tells the ambassador to “return to Lewis of Bavaria your master

8
Baillie, The Complete Works, 246.
9
Baillie, The Dream, In Six Gothic Dramas, selected and introduced by Christine A. Colón. (Chicago:
Valancourt Books, 2007), 193.
10
Baillie, The Dream, 192.

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and tell him that his noble general, free from personal injury of any kind, died, within the
walls of this monastery, of fear.” 11
Both the characters of Orra and Osterloo share the same emotion of fear which is
“intensified to the point of hysteria by their strong imagination.”12 This character trait is quite
symptomatic of the genre and the period, and we can find it in many plays and novels. David
Punter in his Literature of Terror (1996) stresses the importance of fear as “not merely a
theme or an attitude, but a factor having its consequences in terms of form, style and social
relations of the texts.” 13
Orra´ s experience of joy united to fear reminds us of Edmund Burke who believed
that "terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime", and that “no
passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” 14
Burke also demonstrates the close connection between fear and pain in acting on body and
mind, and observes that fear causes “unnatural tension of the nerves, alternately accompanied
with unnatural strength which suddenly changes into an extraordinary weakness.” 15
These sudden changes can be seen both in Orra and Osterloo. Orra, when confined to
the haunted chamber, repeatedly and bravely resists the advances of her suitor, but when he
finally leaves her, she falls into utter despair. This tendency is more visible in Osterloo whose
transformations from a brave soldier into a helpless miser are even more surprising. When he
learns about the fate awaiting him, he desperately tries to free himself, exhibiting courage and
strength. Also when Leonora, his former love and present rescuer, enters his prison cell, she
hardly recognizes him, so changed is his appearance. But when she communicates to him the
chance of a rescue, he retains his old strength, claiming that he is strong enough to liberate
himself. When the attempt fails and the prior’ s soldiers try to detain them, Osterloo fights as
a lion, then, upon being secured, falls again into his former stupor. A soldier describes the
change in Osterloo: “Alas! His face has returned to its former colour, his head sinks on his
breast, and his limbs are again feeble and listless. I would rather see him fighting like a fiend
than see him thus.” 16
Burke mentions other concepts creating the effect of the sublime and affecting the
imagination. He concluded his treatise with a chapter on the influence of words on the

11
Baillie, The Dream, 197.
12
Brewer, “The Liberating and Debilitating Imagination,” 9.
13
David Punter, The Literature of Terror. (London: Longman, 1996), 18.
14
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In The
Works, Vol. I. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 88.
15
Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, 145.
16
Baillie, The Dream, 189.

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emotions. He states that eloquence and poetry are in many cases more capable than nature and
the other arts of creating deep and lively impressions. This is certainly true for Orra who
revels in ghost stories. The influence of words on Orra is clearly visible - she is flushed, then
turns deadly pale. And when she is confined to a haunted chamber with her maid who tells her
one more ghost story, the effects on Orra are clearly visible: ”Thy shrunk and sharpened
features, are of the corpse’ s colour, and thine eyes, are full of tears.” 17
Osterloo’ s imagination is less vivid because his fear rests mainly on the dread of the
unknown realms of the afterlife. This is also the concept Burke mentions when he speaks
about the fear connected to ideas of God, magnificence and infinity. Osterloo tells the prior
that anything that can be endured here is mercy compared to the dreadful things that come
after death. He is a sinner, so he believes that the dreadful tortures of hell will follow his
execution. He even loses his faith, as his imagination overpowers his devotion. He sees a
“terrible form that stalks forth to meet me! The stretching out of that hand! The greeting of
that horrible smile! And it is thou, who must lead me before the tremendous majesty of my
offended Maker!” 18
To conclude, Baillie in both plays depicts the emotion of fear and the power of
imagination as strong forces operating on the minds of the characters of Orra and Osterloo.
On the one hand, both protagonists experience the sense of the sublime as a strong aesthetic
experience, while fear awakens their perceptions and enhances their human qualities bringing
about the voice of conscience in the imperial general. On the other hand, their fearful
imaginations make them vulnerable as they can be easily manipulated, which eventually
brings about their destruction. Both plays, and in general most of Baillie’s plays, reflect this
tendency visible in the literature of the 19th century, a tendency to depict the psychology of
the characters, a concentration on their suppressed feelings and emotions. Another important
factor is the relationship between the imagination, reality and otherness, which in this period
shifts from readings of otherness as supernatural, which Tzvetan Todorov calls “the
marvelous”, and otherness as natural and subjectively generated, which is the category of “the
uncanny”. 19 There is no ghost of the dead knight in Orra, rather it is a real person, and the
ghost exists only in Orra’s vivid imagination. When encountering him Orra sees the image of
her dreams, not reality. Also the dreadful scenes of the afterlife are present only in Osterloo’s

17
Baillie, Orra, 74.
18
Baillie, The Dream, 187.
19
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by R. Howard.
(Ithaca: Cornell University, 1975).

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visions, but they are so strong that the boundaries of reality and dream, life and death collapse
for him. So there definitely can be “a joy in fear”, but the consequences can be less joyful
than the experience itself.

WORKS CITED
Austin, Jane. Northanger Abbey. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1906.
Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse.” In The Complete Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie.
Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832.
Baillie, Joanna. “To the Reader.” In The Complete Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie.
Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832.
Baillie, Joanna. Orra. In A Series of Plays. Vol. III. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,
1977.
Baillie, Joanna. The Dream. In Six Gothic Dramas, selected and introduced by Christine A.
Colón. Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007.
Brewer, William D. “The Liberating and Debilitating Imagination in Joanna Baillie´ s Orra
and The Dream.” In Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Utopianism and Joanna Baillie,
edited by Orrin N.C. Wang, June 10, 2011,
http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/utopia/brewer/brewer.html
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. In The Works, Vol. I. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854.
Colón, Christine A. “Introduction.” In Six Gothic Dramas, selected and introduced by
Christine A. Colón. Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1996.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by R.
Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1975.

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