Horror and Terror, Gender and Fear in Joanna Baillie’s Orra

Joanna Baillie’s play Orra, a tragedy focused on fear, was included in the third collection of A Series of Plays on the Passions (1812). This paper will argue that the play, while proposing a somewhat parodic view of the traditional gothic genre – putting into question its very theoretical principles – also dramatizes the psychological truth of gothic, in revealing the progressive decline of the willpower and the onset of mental disorder in the young protagonist, Orra. The consequences for the latter, in attempting to exercise her right to freedom, and in challenging the laws of the patriarchal order in which she lives, are as tragic as they are gender-biased. Baillie skillfully stages the psychological and physical reactions of the heroine, as she is victimized by the intrigues of the villain who segregates and terrifies her. In the meantime, the playwright offers her spectators unique insight into the inconsistencies that separate, but also superimpose, the two aesthetic categories theorized by Ann Radcliffe, namely horror and terror.