Background Information

How Women Playwrights Were Erased, 1880s-1930s

Since the 1880s, students, directors, and academics have believed that Modern Drama was an exclusively male production. Henrik Ibsen, widely considered its "father," started Modern Drama, we are told, together with other male playwights--G. B. Shaw, August Strindberg, Eugene Brieux, Anton Chekhov, etc. Together they presented the Modern (or "New") Woman to the middle-class world for its judgement and approval. This woman, celebrated in characters like Ibsen's Nora, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Chekhov's Three Sisters, and Bernard Shaw's Vivie Warren, brought fame to these playwrights as modern culture watched with fascination her struggle for dignity and for autonomy.

At the same time, real women were also writing plays about women's struggle for citizenship, for individual choice, for professional recognition--and finding a rather different reception among reigning male critics. Brander Matthews, one of the most influential U.S. sponsors of the "new drama," devoted a chapter of his "A Book about the Theater" (1916) to the "problem" of women dramatists. Although successful as actors and novelists, women failed to write strong plays, said Matthews, because they lacked the "inexhaustible fund of information about life which is the common property of men." Not only did ignorance (an environmental factor) prevent women from writing important plays but also mysterious genetic factors inhibited their writing ability. Matthews explains, "We find in the works of female storytellers not only a lack of largeness in topic but also a lack of strictness in treatment." He traces this "lack" to "the relative incapacity of women to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose." Unaware of their environmental and genetic shortcomings, women continued with success to write scripts for commercial and for artistic theatres.

Did Women Write in A "Woman's Style"?

"Realisms" and "Departures"

Although as a class women were dismissed as serious playwrights, they did not as a class write like one another. There was no "woman's" way to write a play--they wrote in all the styles and genres written in by men: comedy, tragedy, realistic "thesis" drama, symbolist drama, morality drama, and so on. In recognition of this fact, I divided the twelve plays reproduced in this anthology into two major groups, "Realisms" and "Departures." Realist dramas made various use of similar conventions: often set inside middle-class homes, the characters in "realist" dramas tend to be preoccupied with making social and economic decisions involving marriage, career, money, and children. They tended to make conservative use of plot time and stage space, and to be written in dialogue similar to the speech of middle-class people.

Realist plays in the anthology include: Edgren's "True Women", Rosselli's "Her Soul", Bernstein's "Maria Arndt", Robins's "Votes for Women", Leneru's "Woman Triumphant," and Storni's "The Master of the World."

But just as novelists and poets were experimenting with different forms in the modernist period, so were playwrights. Those who rejected realism for political or aesthetic reasons tended to locate the representational center of writing in human consciousness rather than in the material environment contributing to consciousness. Some of the women playwrights included in this anthology chose to adopt the conventions of social comedy, symbolism, or morality drama to represent their commentary on gender. Hella Wuolijoki uses the conventions of romantic comedy to write her stage success, "Hulda Juurakko." "Hulda" tells the rags-to-riches story of a self-made country girl who, through native intelligence and determination, educates herself and eventually runs for a slot in Parliament, while fighting to overcome barriers of class and gender. Other plays adopt the conventions of symbolist drama--short, intensely psychological and suggestive actions accompanied by poetically styled dialogue and a distorted use of time and space. The symbolist dramas in this collection, Gippius's "Sacred Blood," Rachilde's "The Crystal Spider," and Barnes's "The Dove" all focus on female sexuality as the power to create and destroy. The collection's "modern" Kabuki drama, Hasegawa Shigure's "Wavering Traces," shifts the conventions of traditional Kabuki drama by placing the action's emotional emphasis upon the female character. Marita Bonner's morality drama, "The Purple Flower," allegorizes African-American liberation in a heightened style featuring a female character as its community speaker.

These plays are the beginnings of an effort to understand the fuller, cultural context of Modern Drama at the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the theatrical and literary expression of "modernism," the new drama participated in the shift towards greater professionalization of the arts and, consequently, towards a more rigid division between the "popular" and the "high" arts. The part women played in both forming and resisting that division is just now beginning to be discovered.
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