SOURCE: Colón, Christine. “Christianity and Colonial Discourse in Joanna Baillie's The Bride.” Renascence 54, no. 3 (spring 2002): 163-76.

In the following essay, Colón argues that Baillie's rhetorical strategy in The Bride transforms the imperial endeavor of converting the natives of Sri Lanka into a revolutionary discourse on equality by presenting the issue of polygamy in a complex manner.

In the “Introductory Discourse” to her first volume of plays published in 1798, the British playwright Joanna Baillie carefully presents the project of reform that she was to continue for much of her career. She explains her plan to write a series of plays “in which the chief object should be to delineate the progress of the higher passions in the human breast” and deduces that “Tragedy, written upon this plan, is fitted to produce stronger moral effect than upon any other” (11).¹ Baillie's unique theatrical project has placed her in an...