Jeanne-Marie A. Miller

SOURCE: "Images of Black Women in Plays By Black Playwrights," in CLA Journal Vol. XX, No. 4, June, 1977, pp. 494-507.

[In the following essay, Miller examines the attempts of African American playwrights after the 1950s to bring black female characters to the forefront in American drama.]

In 1933, in an essay entitled "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors," the brilliant scholar-critic Sterling A. Brown wrote that Blacks had met with as great injustice in the literature of America as they had in the life of their country. In American literature, then, including the drama, Blacks had been depicted most often as negative stereotypes: the contented slave, the wretched freeman, the comic Negro, the brute Negro, the tragic mulatto, the local color Negro, and the exotic primitive.¹Black female characters have been scarce in only one of these categories—the brute Negro. They have been most plentiful as the faithful servant. In American drama, where, seemingly, many more roles have been written for men than women, Black or white, it is the Black female character who has faced double discrimination—that of sex and race.

As early as the nineteenth century Black women have been written about by playwrights of their own race. Melinda, in William Wells Brown's The Escape, for example, is a mulatto who is not tragic,² and Rachel, in Angelina Grimke's early twentieth-century play of the same name, is a young, educated, middle-class Black woman who protests against the indignities suffered by her race.³ Though there were many plays written by Blacks after the dawn of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960's produced many new Black playwrights who brought to the stage their intimate inside visions of Black life and the role that Black women play in it.

Alice Childress, a veteran actress, director, and playwright, in several published plays, has placed a Black woman at the center. Childress noted early that the Black woman had been absent as an important subject in popular American drama except as an "empty and decharacterized faithful servant."⁴

Childress' Florence, a short one-act play, is set in a railroad station waiting room in a very small town in the South.⁵ The time of the play is the recent past. Emphasized is the misunderstanding by whites of Blacks, brought on by prejudice and laws that keep the two races apart. The rail separating the two races in the station is symbolic.

In the station a Black woman of little means, with a cardboard suitcase and her lunch in a shoebox, has a chance meeting with a white woman also bound for New York. In the conversation that takes place between them, the prejudices of the whites and their myths about Blacks are exposed, such as that of the tragic mulatto. Revealed also is the determination to keep Blacks in the places set aside for them by whites. Marge, the Black woman's daughter living at home, has accepted her place; Florence, the daughter seeking an acting career in New York, has not. Because of the revelations of the white woman, Florence's mother, enroute originally to bring her daughter home and end her fumbling New York career, changes her mind and instead mails the travel money to Florence so that she can remain where she is. Thus, a docile-appearing Black woman, who stays in her place in the South, acts to help her child transcend the barriers placed there by those trying to circumscribe her existence.

Childress' two-act comedy Trouble in Mind, while concentrating on discrimination in the American theatre, also brings into focus the troublesome racial conditions in the United States of the 1950's.⁶ The framework of Trouble in Mind is the rehearsal of the play "Chaos in Bellesville," a melodrama with an anti-lynching theme, in reality a white writer's distorted view of Blacks. The principal character, Wiletta Mayer, a middle-aged Black actress, a veteran of "colored" muscials, appears at first to have found a way to survive in the prejudiced world of the theatre. Coerced by the white director, however, she explodes and reveals her long pent-up frustrations. Specifically, Wiletta disagrees with the action of the character she is playing—a Black mother who sends her son out to be lynched by a mob seething with hatred because the Black man had tried to vote. Wiletta, alone among the play's interracial cast, demands script changes that will portray Black life realistically. Though she loses her job in the attempt, she in no way seems to regret the stand she has taken after a lifetime of acceptance.

In Wine in the Wilderness, Tommy Marie, a young Black woman from the ghetto, teaches real pride to her newly acquired middle-class acquaintances.⁷ This play is set during the Black revolutionary period of the 1960's. It is one of those Harlem summers popularly described as long and hot. A riot is taking place outside the apartment of Bill, a Black artist currently engaged in painting a triptych entitled "Wine in the Wilderness"—three images of Black womanhood. Two canvases have been completed: one depicting innocent Black girlhood and the other, perfect Black womanhood, an African queen, this artist's statement on what a Black woman should be. The third canvas is empty because Bill has not found a suitable model for the lost Black woman, the leavings of society. Unknown to Tommy, she has been picked out by two of Bill's friends to serve as the model for that hopeless creature. At first sight Tommy is unpolished and untutored but is essentially a warm, likeable human being. Once a live-in domestic and now a factory worker, at the present time she has been burned out and then locked out of her apartment as a result of the riot.

Later, dressed in an African throw cloth and with her cheap wig removed, Tommy undergoes a transformation as she overhears Bill, to whom she is attracted, describe his painting of the African queen. Believing that he is referring to her, she assumes the qualities he praises: "Regal . . . grand . . . magnificent, fantastic. . . . " For the first time she feels loved and admired. While Bill is trying to get into the mood to paint her, she recites the history of the Black Elks and the A. M. E. Zion Church, all part of her background. With her new look and the new knowledge he has gained about her, Bill cannot now paint Tommy as he had intended, for she no longer fits the image he sought.

The next day Oldtimer, a hanger-on, unthinkingly tells Tommy about the three-part painting and the unflattering role she was to play in it. She, in anger, teaches Bill and his middle-class friends about themselves—the hatred they have for "flesh and blood Blacks"—the masses, as if they, the others, have no problems. To the white racist, they are all "niggers" she tells them. But she has learned—she is "Wine in the Wilderness," "a woman that's a real one and a good one," not one on canvas that cannot talk back. The real thing is inside, she states.

Bill changes the thrust of his painting. Oldtimer—"the guy who was here before there were scholarships and grants and stuff like that, the guy they kept outta the schools, the man the factories wouldn't hire, the union wouldn't let him join . . ."—becomes one part of the painting; Bill's two friends—"Young Man and Woman workin' together to do our thing"—become another. Tommy, the model for the center canvas, is "Wine in the Wilderness," who has come "through the biggest riot of all, . . . 'Slavery'" and is still moving on against obstacles placed there by both whites and her own people. Bill's painting takes on flesh. Tommy has been the catalyst for change.

Unlike Childress' other plays, Wedding Band is set in an earlier period—South Carolina in 1918.⁸ The central character, Julia Augustine, the Black woman around whom the story revolves, is an attractive woman in her thirties. A talented seamstress, she has only an eighthgrade education. The play opens on the tenth anniversary of her ill-fated love affair with Herman, a white baker who has a small shop. This illegal love affair is the theme of the play. In direct violation of South Carolina's laws against miscegenation, the pair has been meeting and loving clandestinely for years. On this day, in celebration of their anniversary, Herman gives Julia a wedding band on a thin chain to be worn around her neck. This day, too, is the first that Julia has spent in this impoverished neighborhood. She has moved often because her forbidden love affair has caused her to be ostracized by both Blacks and whites.

A series of encounters clearly delineates the kind of woman Julia really is. Though she is lonely between Herman's visits and sometimes allows wine to fill in the void, she is a woman of strength. She endures the criticism of her affair. She is unselfish, warm, and forgiving. With compassion she reads a letter to a new neighbor who cannot read. Unknown to her lover's mother, Julia sews and shops for her. When confronted by this woman who hates her and whose rigid racism drives her to exclaim that she would rather be dead than disgraced, Julia rises to her full strength and spews out the hatred that momentarily engulfs her. And even in her sorrow she is able to give a Black soldier a fitting sendoff to the war and the promise that the world will be better for all Blacks after the war's termination. In the end, Julia forgives her weak, timid lover who is dying from influenza. He could never leave South Carolina for a region more suitable for their love and marriage, he explains, because he had to repay his mother the money she gave him for the bakery. In reality, history stands between Julia and Herman. South Carolina belongs to both of them, but together they could never openly share the state. The promised escape to the North and marriage never materialize. Julia stands at the end of a long line of Childress' strong Black women characters. In this backyard community setting of Wedding Band are other images of Black womanhood—the self-appointed representative of her race, the mother protecting her son from the dangers awaiting him in the white South, and the woman, abused by a previous husband, waiting loyally for the return of her thoughtful and kind merchant marine lover.

The promising talent of the late Lorraine Hansberry was perhaps best displayed in the well-known A Raisin in the Sun, which portrays an interesting variety of female characters, none more so than Lena Younger, who has grandeur, strength, patience, courage, and heroic faith.⁹ She is strong in the belief of her God who has sustained her throughout life. She mightily loves her family to whom she teaches self-respect, pride, and human dignity, protects them, sometimes meddles in their affairs, and does not always understand their needs and desires. Above all else, she wants a home for her family, a physical structure large enough to house them all comfortably. Acquiring this home would mean the realization of a long deferred dream. She wants, too, to help Beneatha, her daughter, fulfill her dream of being a medical doctor. But the attitudes of the younger generation Lena sometimes does not fathom—Beneatha's toward religion and Walter's toward money which to him symbolizes success. The wise, sensitive woman that she is, Lena Younger realizes before it is too late that her son, in desperation, is reaching out to manhood at the age of thirty-five, and she helps him by making him the head of the household over which she has presided since the death of her husband. Theirs is a household of working-class people struggling to survive with dignity.

Beneatha, young, spoiled, spirited, and sensitive, has social pride. Her ideas about women's liberation and her interest in her African heritage were to burst in full force in the decade that followed the production of A Raisin in the Sun.

Ruth, Lena's daughter-in-law, a gentle woman, weary with life, loves her husband, who at first falsely blames her for his lack of materialistic success. She wants him to have that chance to be a man. In this household Ruth acts as a peacemaker between the generations.

A Raisin in the Sun is a drama of affirmation. Man's possibilities are manifold, and in this work this family, with the help of the women, changes its world, if only a little.

Like Childress, Hansberry turned to the past for materials for one of her plays. In The Drinking Gourd, a drama about slavery, written for television, one of the principal characters is Rissa, a cook who is also one of the more privileged slaves on Hiram Sweet's plantation. 10 On the surface, she is like the cherished, fictionalized image of the Black mammy who philosophically accepts her status, showers love and devotion on her white master and his family, forgives her white family of all wrong-doing, and hums or sings away all personal pain and sorrow. But unlike that unrealistic mammy, Rissa is concerned about her own family. To make life easier for her son Hannibal, she obtains a place for him in the Big House, only to have him refuse the favor. Slavery to him in any form is repulsive. After Hannibal is brutally blinded at the order of the plantation owner's son—for daring to learn to read—Rissa seeks vengeance for the crime. Though the fate is unknown of one son, Isaiah, who ran away from slavery, she assists the blind Hannibal, his sweetheart Sarah, and Isaiah's son, Joshuah, in escaping from slavery to freedom. Moreover, for protection, she gives them a gun that she has stolen from Hiram Sweet's cabinet. Thus Rissa reverses the myth of the faithful, contented slave—faithful to her master and contented in her servitude. Unlike Carson McCuller's Berenice, who continues to care for her white charge while a mob seeks to murder one of her own family, Rissa rivets her attention on her son, while her white master, calling to her for help, dies outside her cabin.

J. E. Franklin's Black Girl, which takes place in the present in a small town in Texas, has several generations of Black female characters, all representing different types.¹¹ Two sisters, who have succumbed to the limiting factors of their ghetto environment and are locked into dreary marriages, work, sometimes with extreme measures, to prevent their half-sister, Billie Jean, from realizing her dream to become a dancer. Having failed themselves, they want her to fail. Billie Jean's aspirations are met with hostility.

Billie Jean wants to break out of her suffocating environment and seek her own identity. Her ambition far exceeds any that her family might have, a family of women, who, for the most part, have given up dreaming.

Mama Rosie, a strong, rough woman, the mother of the three young women, is undemonstrative in her love for them. Because of past bitterness, stemming perhaps from her relationships with her two former husbands, she finds it easier to believe in strangers—girls of no kin, whom she has taken into her home from time to time—than it is to believe in her own. In reality she is disappointed in her older daughters and does not understand her youngest. She is fearful that all of her children will end up like her. Her love for her children is buried so deep that she cannot express it. She holds up to them as an example to follow, Netta, one of the girls she has helped. She feels that Netta, who is now in college, will return after graduation and buy her a house. Mama Rosie's children, in turn, unify in their hatred for this young woman.

Mu' Dear, Mama Rosie's mother, who also lives in the home, acts with moral authority and helps Billie Jean break out of the stultifying environment. "God knows I ain't crazy about her wanting to be no dancer, either," she states, "but that's her life, Rosie. If she don't make nothing out-a it, it'll be her nothing. . . . She can't do no worse with her'n than you have done with your'n. None of you . . . Now, take your hands off-a that child and be quick about it." She also causes Mama Rosie finally to confess her love for her family.

Whereas the grandmother makes it possible for Billie Jean to break the home barriers around her, it is Netta, who inspires her to finish high school, enter college, and join the dance company that is going on a national tour. Like Beneatha Younger, Billie Jean has enthusiasm for a dream that will improve and enrich her life as well as that of others.

Ron Milner, in Who's Got His Own, one of the significant plays of the Black theatre in the 1960's, is concerned with a young, angry Black man who finds a positive channel for his agitation only after he reaches an understanding of his father whom he has hated most of his life.¹² It is the father's funeral that has brought the son home. The son, in gaining the knowledge he needs to help himself, forces revelations from his sister and mother.

The sister is a sympathetic character, a young woman who has rejected Black men because she associated with them the ugly brutality that she saw in her father. After a shattering experience with a young white man, she became a recluse. The confession, which her brother forces from her, gives her the desire to try life once again.

The son learns that his God-fearing mother protected her husband when he was alive. She placed herself between his rage and the white world and thus absorbed the violence he would have reeked on that world. In his childhood he had had the terrifying experience of seeing his own father lynched and burned for trying to protect his wife. It is the mother who explains the father to her children, and it is her daughter who endeavors to have them all look to the future. Yesterday is past, she tells them; yesterday is the place where they have been.

In a one-act play, The Warning—A Theme for Linda, the emphasis is on Black women, especially on Linda, who, while approaching womanhood, is trying to understand it.¹³ In a manless home, she is exposed to other women who have varying attitudes toward love: her younger sister and cousin who equate love with sex; her grandmother, whose experiences with her weak husband have left her bitter; and her own mother, whose affairs with several men have left her void of feeling. Linda concludes, especially after learning of her grandmother's relationship with her husband, that she will be a woman of strength and will demand strength from the man of her choice.

In both plays Milner's aim was to make his Black women characters complete human beings. Like the son in Who's Got His Own, Linda is made to define herself and thus live a fuller, more meaningful life. Milner's concern about the Black woman was continued in What the Wine Sellers Buy, a contemporary morality play, in which a flashy hoodlum attempts to ensnare the soul of a Black youth, whom he tries to turn into a pimp and the youth's pretty, young girl friend into his first commodity.¹⁴

In his plays Ed Bullins, one of Black America's most prolific playwrights, focuses mainly on Black folk in an urban setting. His female characters include a lesbian who protects her love affair in a South Philadelphia ghetto.¹⁵ A woman massive in size and strong in personality, she has accepted the rough life around her and has learned to cope with it. In comparison, the weak girl, whom she loves, wandered into this affair because she was not prepared for life by her family and was disappointed in an affair with a man. In another play, a woman tired of life's hardships turns to religion as an opiate, forsaking the ways of the world as well as her own son.¹⁶

In several of Bullins' full-length works—Goin a Buffalo, In the Wine Time, In New England Winter, The Duplex, and The Fabulous Miss Marie—strong dramas couched in tough ghetto terms, the characters, though hemmed in by their environment, fight to survive. They often hold on to the dream that the future will be better. In Goin' a Buffalo, whose major characters are petty underworld figures, Pandora turns over her earnings as a prostitute and a dancer to her husband to help them toward their move from Los Angeles to Buffalo, where their lives will improve.¹⁷ Pandora explains: "I'm just makin' this money so Curt and me can get on our feet. One day we gonna own property and maybe some businesses when we get straight . . . and out of this town." She believes in her husband—believes that they both can move up in the underworld or out of this world altogether whenever they choose. She does not see herself as a prostitute—just helping out until she and her husband can get something better. She works to help them realize a dream that proves in the end to be elusive. Lou, in In the Wine Time, wants to protect her nephew whom she took into her home when his mother died.¹⁸ Her husband Cliff, who sometimes abuses her, will not accept the menial labor reserved for Black men. She stays with him, and, at times, speaks her mind. In In New England Winter, Steve, Cliff's half brother, commits a robbery in order to get money to return to New England where Liz, the half-mad girl he loves, still lives.¹⁹ When he last saw her, because of suspicions about him planted in her mind by his rival, her mind had snapped. In The Duplex: A Black Love Fable, Steve now in California has a protective love for his landlady Velma, who, brutalized by her husband, reaches out to her tenant for the fulfillment denied to her in marriage.²⁰ Velma always wanted her own home—away from the farm where she lived with her parents. She and her husband came to the city, where he went to school and then obtained a good job. Velma got her home, but lost her husband. Bullins, in The Fabulous Miss Marie, focuses on a group of superficial middleclass types, who, symbolized by the fortyish Marie, live a life filled with parties replete with drinking, sex, and vulgar conversations.²¹ Pretense is the order of the day, and realities, often painful, are buried, temporarily, in the endless round of social gatherings.

In addition to his realistic plays about some aspects of Black urban life, Bullins wrote plays with a polemical thrust, many of them influenced by the Black Revolutionary Theatre of the 1960's. In one of these plays, The Gentleman Caller, a one-act play whose framework is symbolic, a seemingly stereotypical Black maid, dependable and faithful, murders her white employers and then calls for the unity of Black people and the destruction of the oppressor.²²

From the middle to the late 1960's, perhaps the best known Black American playwright was Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), who wrote plays calling for a revolutionary change among Black people. He was the prime mover of the Black Revolutionary Theatre, which, he wrote, should force change as well as be change. Black audiences must be cleansed of their ugliness. They must be forced to see their beauty—the strength in their minds and in their bodies. It must take dreams and give them a reality. It was to show what the world is and what it should be.²³

Black women played only minor roles in many of the published plays of Baraka, for the 1960's was a time when the Black man, oppressed by many years of slavery and Post Civil War prejudice, was asserting himself and reclaiming his manhood. The Black woman was to be his helpmate, so to speak. Thus Black female characters in the plays growing out of the Black Revolutionary Theatre were sometimes negative types to be shunned or virtuous paragons to be emulated.

In A Black Mass, set early in history, at a time when life was pure, a Black woman, virtuous in nature, becomes the innocent victim of a white monster, an evil thing, a product of the only one of the original Black magicians who creates for creation's sake.²⁴ At the end of the play, she is white in color and imitates the repulsive actions of her defiler. In Experimental Death Unit #1, which takes place in modern times, during a war between whites and Blacks, a Black revolutionary army murders a vulgar Black woman of the streets and the two white men who have had sex with her.²⁵ Types repugnant to Black revolutionary aims are to be annihilated.²⁶ In a fourth one-act play, Madheart: A Morality Play, two Black women, a mother and her daughter, who have spent their lives worshipping the foul white Devil Woman, are held up as types to be scorned or changed.²⁷ Because of their adoration of this creature, they have become materialistic and have turned to prostitution and alcoholism. Continuing to instruct Black women in what they should not be, the playwright, through another character, teaches a lesson in feminine submission. In an article entitled "Black Woman," Baraka once wrote that in contributing to the development of the Black nation, the Black woman must inspire, submit to, compliment, and praise her Black man. Once separated by physical and then by mental slavery, the Black man and the Black woman must now reach out for each other—not as equals but she as "the single element in the universe that perfectly completes [his] essence."²⁸

Unlike the majority of Black American playwrights, who use realism in dramatizing their ideas, Adrienne Kennedy, an avant gardist, experiments with expressionism and surrealism. A poet of the theatre, she uses impressions and images rather than treat plot and character in a traditional manner. Despite the mode of treatment Kennedy draws her material from the Black experience. Her female character Sarah, in Funnyhouse of a Negro, is a young, tortured Black woman who has nightmarish agonies about being Black.²⁹ The action takes place on the last day in her life—before she commits suicide. The fantasy characters, all well known historical figures—Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus—represent the various selves of Sarah. In a monologue she reveals pertinent information about herself. The daughter of a light-skinned mother and a dark-skinned father, she spends some of her time writing poetry. She also spends time with a Jewish poet interested in Blacks. Because of guilt feelings about her treatment of her father, whose black skin she abhors, she imagines that she has killed him with an ebony mask and believes, at other times, that he committed suicide when Lumumba was murdered. After her own suicide, it is revealed by her Jewish lover that, in reality, Sarah's father is married to a white whore. The material possessions he has are those which Sarah herself craved—European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, oriental carpets, and a white glass table on which he eats his meals. The pressures of being Black in America are the subject of this work. These pressures, in turn, have produced madness in this sensitive Black woman who has an identity problem as well as a problem with love, God, and parents.

In a second play by Kennedy, The Owl Answers, the racial identity problem is repeated.³⁰ The scenes, a New York subway, the Tower of London, a Harlem hotel room, and St. Peter's, are fantasies in the mind of the principal character, a Black woman named She Who Is. Her mother, a cook, was impregnated by a white man of English ancestry, who declared the child a bastard. But the child, now a woman, dreams about her white father's world. The English ancestors, whom she claims—Shakespeare, William the Conqueror, Chaucer, and Anne Boleyn—in rejecting her, jeer her. She cannot find her place in either the Black or white world.

Thus Black women in the plays of many Black playwrights receive varied treatment, and their images, for the most part, are positive. The women often have great moral strength. In contrast to many of the white-authored dramas in which Black women have appeared, usually as servants dedicated to the families for whom they work, in the plays of Black writers, these women's concerns are for what interests them, mainly their own families. In many of these plays it is their lives that are on stage. In Black-authored dramas depicting ghetto lifestyles, Black women hold on to life, however harsh it may be, and sometimes work for a better future. In the dramas written by women, except in the plays of Kennedy, Black women often look to the future with optimism. Even Childress' Julia Augustine's plans for a move to the North with her lover terminate only with his death. In the plays written by Black males, Black women's happiness or "completeness" in life depends upon strong Black men. Thus Black playwrights bring to their works their vision, however different, of what Black women are or what they should be. Missing, however, is a wealth of dramas with positive images of Black middle-class women, Black middle-class women who work to improve the quality of life for themselves, their families, their race—the Mary McLeod Bethunes, the Mary Church Terrells, and the unsung Black women who help to improve the world, if only a little.

NOTES

¹The Journal of Negro Education, 2 (April 1933), 179-203.

²The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1858).

³Rachel (Boston: The Cornhill Company, 1920).

⁴ "A Woman Playwright Speaks Her Mind," Anthology of the American Negro in the Theatre: A Critical Approach, ed. Lindsay Patterson (New York: Publishers Company, Inc., 1969), pp. pp. 75-79.

⁵Masses and Mainstream, 3 (October 1950), 34-47.

⁶Black Theater, ed. Lindsay Patterson (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), pp. 135-174.

⁷Wine in the Wilderness (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1969).

⁸Wedding Band (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1972).

⁹Black Theater, ed. Lindsay Patterson, pp. 221-276.

¹⁰Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 217-313.

¹¹Black Girl (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1971).

¹²Black Drama Anthology, ed. Woodie King and Ron Milner (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 89-145.

¹³A Black Quartet (New York: New American Library, 1970), pp. 37-114.

¹⁴What the Wine-Sellers Buy (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1974).

¹⁵ "Clara's Ole Man," Five Plays by Ed Bullins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968), pp. 249-282.

¹⁶ "A Son, Come Home," Five Plays by Ed Bullins, pp. 185-213.

¹⁷New Black Playwrights, ed. William Couch, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), pp. 155-216.

¹⁸Black Theater, ed. Lindsay Patterson, pp. 379-406.

¹⁹New Plays from the Black Theatre, ed. Ed Bullins (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 129-174.

²⁰The Duplex: A Black Love Fable (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1971).

²¹Scripts, 1 (February 1972), 56-80.

²²Contemporary Black Drama, ed. Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), pp. 365-380.

²³ "The Revolutionary Theatre," Home (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1966), pp. 211-213.

²⁴Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Company, 1969), pp. 17-39.

²⁵Four Black Revolutionary Plays, pp. 1-15.

²⁶ See Sonia Sanchez' "The Bronx Is Next," The Drama Review, 12 (Summer 1968), 77-83 and Jimmy Garrett's "We Own the Night: A Play of Blackness," Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1968), pp. 527-540.

²⁷Four Black Revolutionary Plays, pp. 65-87.

²⁸Black World, 19 (July 1970), 8-9.

²⁹Contemporary Black Drama, ed. Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills, pp. 187-205.

³⁰Cities in Bezique (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1969), pp. 3-29.

Cynthia Sutherland

SOURCE: "American Women Playwrights as Mediators and the Woman Problem," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXI, No. 3, September, 1978, pp. 319-36.

[In the following essay, Sutherland argues that early twentieth-century American women playwrights openly addressed women 's issues such as divorce, careers, and sexual expression, while women in the suffrage movement became notably more conservative about such concerns.]

Ibsen's Nora shut the door of her "doll's house" in 1879. Among the generation of American women born in the 1870's and 1880's, Zona Gale, Zoe Akins, and Susan Glaspell all won Pulitzer Prizes. Rachel Crothers, the successful dramatist who wrote more than three dozen plays, characterized her own work as "a sort of Comédie Humaine de la Femme." In an interview in 1931 she said: "With few exceptions, every one of my plays has been a social attitude toward women at the moment I wrote it. . . . I [do not] go out stalking the footsteps of women's progress. It is something that comes to me subconsciously. I may say that I sense the trend even before I have hearsay or direct knowledge of it."¹ During a period in which most American playwrights confined their work to representations of the middle class, these women were distinctive because they created principal roles for female characters whose rhetoric thinly veiled a sense of uneasiness with what Eva Figes and others more recently have called "patriarchal attitudes."

By the turn of the century, the mostly "abolitionist" women who had originated the battle tor suffrage in the 1840's and 1850's were either dead or retired, and a new generation of leaders was attempting to expand popular support through the use of muted political rhetoric which intentionally avoided controversy.² The majority of women resisted arguments advocating changes in sex roles on the grounds that their inherent femininity would be diminished and their homes threatened. In the Ladies' Home Journal, Jane Addams argued benignly that a woman who wanted to "keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children" ought to "have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside her immediate household."³ The conciliatory strategy of feminist leaders like Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt exalted the family, motherhood, and domestic values, minimized conflicts between self-realization and inhibiting social conditions, and often disregarded the arguments of radical feminists who insisted that only basic alterations in the organization of the family and sexual relationships could effect substantive changes in women's lives.

For many members of audiences, political issues continued to be dissociated from personal lives in which an equator divided the world of human activity marking "homemaking" and "breadwinning" as hemispheres. In 1924, a study of a fairly large group of young girls indicated that a substantial number planned to choose marriage over a "career" and that few had developed alternative goals. Asked to "name the four heroines in history or fiction whom [they] would most like to resemble," only two of 347 chose women identified chiefly or even at all with feminist causes.⁴ They elected, rather, to live vicariously through husbands and children, accepting the traditional sex-role differentiation in which "instrumental/task functions are assigned to males, and expressive/social functions to females."⁵

Glaspell, Akins, Gale, and Crothers chronicled the increasingly noticeable effects of free love, trial marriage, the "double standard," career, divorce, and war on women's lives. Public rhetoric generally subsumed private sexual rhetoric in the theatre during this period, and dramatic discourse tended to mediate conflicting views of women's "legitimate" place in society more often than it intensified dispute. Although the sector of life subtended by domesticity was being steadily decreased by technological and economic developments in the early years of the century, feminist leaders, artists, and housewives shared the common inability to suggest an alternative social structure through which discontent might be alleviated.⁶ To the extent that female characters on the stage accepted the traditional sex role, a diminished state of consciousness manifested itself in language that avoided strong or forceful statements, evinced conformity, consisted of euphemism and question-begging,⁷ and celebrated the processes which safely domesticated erotic pleasure.⁸ As contemporary critics, we tend to be disappointed by portrayals of women who cannot express, much less resolve, their problems. Yet, here, precisely, I believe, is the reason for the popular success and the "critical" failure of many of these plays. The spectacle of dramatic characters conducting themselves in the ironic guise of people only half aware of conflicts between individuation and primary sex role has usually been interpreted as trivial, the result of mediocre artistry, rather than what it is—the theatrical encoding of a "genderlect," or to put it another way, a language that reflects the internalizing by members of society of a particular system of sex differentiation and values.

However, during the period before the thirty-sixth state ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, a significant number of plays did present exceptionally articulate female artists as figures incarnating the dilemma of people torn by the conflicting demands of sex role and career.⁹ In A Man's World (National Theatre, Washington, D.C., October 18, 1909), Rachel Crothers's protagonist Frank Ware is a novelist who oversees a club for girls who "need another chance."¹⁰ She has published anonymously a defense of women's rights which even her friends—themselves painters, writers, and musicians—agree is much too good to have been written by a woman. After accidentally discovering that her fiancé, Malcolm Gaskell, has fathered her adopted seven-yearold son (the deserted mother had been her friend and died in childbirth), she renounces him. Avoiding a facile reconciliation, Crothers chose rather to stress Frank's abhorrence of her lover's complacent refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the deplorable consequences of his own sexual license. In the final curtain scene, their relationship is abruptly severed:

FRANK. Oh, I want to forgive you. . . . tell me you know it was wrong—that you'd give your life to make it right. Say that you know this thing is a crime.

GASKELL. No! Don't try to hold me to account by a standard that doesn't exist. Don't measure me by your theories. If you love me you'll stand on that and forget everything else.

FRANK. I can't. I can't.¹¹

In He and She (Poughkeepsie, 1911), Crothers again explored the dilemma of a woman who must decide between sex role and career, in this instance, motherhood or sculpting. Ann Herford surrenders the commission she has won in a national competition to her husband, Tom, who has been openly skeptical that his wife could do "anything for a scheme as big" as the project required for the contest. When he wins only the second prize, his ego is badly shaken, and he retrenches to the familiar rhetorical stance of chief breadwinner. Reconciliation comes only after Ann abandons her prize in response to the needs of her teenage daughter. Crothers, although she shows a woman conceding final "victory" to her primary sex role, allows her character to voice bitterness and disappointment:

TOM. . . . you've not only beaten me—you've won over the biggest men in the field—with your own brain and your own hands; in a fair, fine hard fight. . . . there'll be times when you['ll] eat your heart out to be at work on it—when the artist in you will yell to be let out.

ANN. 1 know. . . . And I'll hate you because you're doing it—and I'll hate myself because I gave it up—and I'll almost—hate—her . . . my heart has almost burst with pride—not so much that / had done it—but for all women. . . . then the door opened—and Millicent [their daughter] came in. There isn't any choice Tom—she's part of my body—part of my soul.¹²

Ann's uneasy capitulation to the obligations of motherhood is carefully orchestrated by the simplistic attitudes of two women who are in love with her husband's close friend, a partially caricatured "male chauvinist" hardliner; one woman accepts a promotion in her job rather than tolerate what she views as his suffocating demands, the other chases him because she believes that "all the brains a woman's got [are]—to make a home—to bring up children—and to keep a man's love."¹³ That Tom and Ann might exchange roles, he taking over as parent temporarily while she carves her frieze, is outside the realm of dramatic choice, because, in Crothers's dialectical structure, the men and women are shown to be incapable of conceiving this as an alternative.¹⁴ General expectations that a shift towards a more egalitarian society would lead to personal and social enfranchisement in the progressive era as middle-class women moved in the direction of greater self-consciousness are clearly undercut in the endings of Crothers's plays.¹⁵

A vastly more imaginative if less independent playwright, Susan Glaspell both directed and acted in her own plays. From 1913 until 1922, she worked with the Provincetown Players.¹⁶ A sounding board for new ideas, the Provincetown group produced plays that sometimes spoofed feminist excesses, yet usually respected the seriousness of the "movement's" political aims.¹⁷ In Suppressed Desires (Wharf Theatre, Provincetown, Summer, 1915),¹⁸ Glaspell ridiculed a woman who nearly wrecks her marriage by testing psychoanalytic theories on her sister and husband, and in Close the Book (Playwright's Theatre, 1917), she poked fun at a liberated girl who naively insists, "Hand on heart, " that she is "not respectable."¹⁹ In Woman's Honor (Playwright's Theatre, 1918), she presents a satiric sketch of the effects of the "double standard." A young man accused of murder refuses to provide himself with an alibi by identifying his married mistress. He is beleaguered by a bevy of volunteers, each of whom wants to sacrifice her own "honor" to save him by claiming that she has been the anonymous lover. The women are comic types with predictable opinions about female honor: "The Shielded One," "The Motherly One," "The Silly One," "The Mercenary One," and "The Scornful One."²⁰ The last of these expresses her resentment of society's definition of "woman's honor": "Did it ever strike you as funny that woman's honor is only about one thing, and that man's honor is about everything but that thing?" With amusing logic, she tells the prisoner that since "woman's honor means woman's virtue," the lady for whom he "propose[s] to die has no virtue" (p. 134). Caught in the midst of chatter, he resigns himself: "Oh, hell, I'll plead guilty " (p. 156), rather than be faced by another speechifying female.

But in her most famous play, Trifles (Wharf Theatre, Provincetown, Summer, 1916), Glaspell began to explore seriously the more violent psychological aspects of women trapped in loveless marriages. Minnie Wright has strangled her husband. The wives of the sheriff and a neighbor have come to her home to collect a few things to make her more comfortable in jail.²¹ As their husbands search for evidence that would provide a motive, the women discover among Minnie's "trifles" a canary's carcass and decide to defy the law by concealing it, guessing that her husband "wrung—its neck. . . . Wright wouldn't like the bird—a thing that sang—She used to sing. He killed that, too" (p. 25). The neighbor expresses her regret: "I might have known [Minnie] needed help! I know how things can be—for women. . . . We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing" (p. 27). As they leave, the women explain to the men who have ridiculed Minnie's "trifles" that she was going to "knot" her quilt, a subdued, ironic, and grisly reminder of the manner in which a stifled wife has enacted her desperate retaliation. In the theatre of the next decade, the motifs of the caged bird and the lost singing voice were to become the hallmarks of numerous "domesticated" women who abandoned careers.

In Trifles, Glaspell had negotiated that portrayal of a woman's violent repudiation of her husband's narrow notion of sex role by removing her from the sight of the audience (a technique she later was to repeat in Bernice and Allison's House).²² But the play in which she confronted most vehemently the sex-role imprisonment of women is The Verge, first performed by the Playwright's Theatre in its last season (November 14, 1921). Claire Archer rejects her daughter and murders her lover. Her insane passion to breed a fresh botanical species which she calls "Breath of Life," one which may be "less beautiful—less sound—than the plants from which [it] diverged,"²³ expresses her radical rejection of biological and cultural inheritance—she is identified as the "flower of New England . . . what came of men who made the laws that made . . . [the] culture" (pp. 18-19). She has divorced a "stick-in-the-mud artist and married—[a] man of flight" (p. 32), who she has hoped will "smash something," but who also has turned out to be baldly conventional. The son who had shared her vision of transcendence is dead. Driven by frustration and disappointment, in a terrifying scene, she strikes her daughter across the face with the roots of an "Edge Vine," believing that both the girl and the plant are incurable conformists. Her words echo horribly those of familiar mythic murderesses: "To think that object ever moved in my belly and sucked my breast" (p. 56). When the lover who has rejected her frenetic sexual advances returns because he wants to keep her "safe" from harm, she strangles him as a "gift" to the plant, choosing to break "life to pieces in the struggle" to cast free from traditional sex role. A demented Demeter, Claire has been mesmerized by an apocalyptic vision: "Plants . . . explode their species—because something in them knows they've gone as far as they can go. Something in them knows they're shut in. So [they] go mad—that life may not be imprisoned. Break themselves up—into crazy things—into lesser things, and from the pieces—may come one sliver of life with vitality to find the future. How beautiful. How brave, (p. 34) Glaspell's representation of a failed Goddess-Mother was treated respectfully by reviewers in England, but in this country it was largely misunderstood or ignored.²⁴

Written a year earlier, another study of a woman's plight, Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett, opened at the Belmont Theatre on December 27, 1920 and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize.²⁵ Like Rachel Crothers and Susan Glaspell, Zona Gale had come to New York from the Midwest and was sympathetic to feminist causes despite her mother's caveat to shun radical politics and women's groups—"I would let that mess of women alone!" she had advised her daughter.²⁶ The novel on which Gale had based her play had been immediately successful, and in eight days, she had hastily, though with considerable dramatic skill, adapted it for production.²⁷ Even though Miss Lulu Bett did not present a threatening subject (for "old maids" were commonly seen not as electing spinsterhood but as having had it thrust upon them by faithless lovers or deprivation),²⁸ strong critical pressure influenced Gale to alter the last act, in which, like Ibsen's Nora, Lulu walks out of the house in which she has been a virtual servant to become an independent woman.²⁹ Gale rewrote the last act so that it conformed more closely to her popular novel, which concluded with Lulu comfortably established as a respectable wife.³⁰ This story of a drab but resourceful and dry-witted woman—whom Fannie Hurst called a "shining star" reflected in "greasy reality"³¹—ran for 186 performances. Such capitulation to public opinion evident in the modification of the ending by a writer who had supported the Woman's Peace Union, the Woman's Peace Party (Wisconsin), Jane Addams and the Hull-House workers, and who later helped to write the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law,³² has considerable significance. It anticipated the new style of mediation used by playwrights who continued to dramatize aspects of the "woman problem" in the 1920's.

After World War I and the extension of the franchise, the momentum towards fully equal status for women slowed considerably. One of Rachel Crothers's characters sees herself as an exception to what was to become an increasingly regressive trend: "I haven't slipped back one inch since the war. Most women who sort of rose to something then have slumped into themselves again, but I've gone on. My life gets much fuller and wider all the time. There's no room for men. Why, why should I give up my own personal life—or let it be changed in the slightest degree for a man?"³³ But the woman who speaks these somewhat fatuous lines will, during the course of the dramatic action, reveal her disingenuousness by seducing a member of the British upper class so that her "personal life" and career are, in fact, exchanged for marriage.

Statistics on employment indicate that the percentage of females in the total labor force had decreased from 20.9 in 1910 to 20.4 in 1920.³⁴ Among women, the proportion of the total college enrollment dropped-three of every four new professionals chose traditionally female-dominated fields, and the number of doctors decreased by nearly one-third. Female architects and lawyers continued at less than three percent, and attendance at professional schools increased only slightly.³⁵ When members of Pruette's test group were questioned, only thirty-two percent indicated that they would like to be successful themselves in "some chosen work"; the remainder opted for success "through" husband and family.³⁶ The choice between marriage and career continued to be polarized;³⁷ and the divorce rate rose steadily.³⁸ By 1929, Suzanne la Follette was to comment that "the traditional relations of the sexes is far from being reversed in this country, [but] . . . has shifted away enough to cause alarm among those to whom it seems the right and inevitable relation because it is conventional."³⁹ Many of the changes affecting women's lives were seen as detrimental to their femininity. George Jean Nathan opined that " . . . women more and more have ceased to be the figures of man's illusion and more and more have become superficially indistinguishable from man himself in his less illusory moments. In sport, in business, in drinking, in politics, in sexual freedom, in conversation, in sophistication and even in dress, women have come closer and closer to men's level and, with the coming, the purple allure of distance has vamoosed."⁴⁰ The plays of this period characterize masculine responses that range from reactionary to adjustive but are rarely innovative. Crothers spoofs (or does she?) a gentleman's overreaction to a woman who aggressively courts him: " . . . it seems to be awfully important . . . nowadays to be a woman . . . I'm not criticizing. Men are totally unnecessary, I s'pose, except for breeding purposes. And we go on taking ourselves for granted in the same old relationships with women. Stupid of us, isn't it?"⁴¹

Early in the 1920's, the struggle against social oppression had shifted towards a rebellion against convention in which the manipulation of style was both means and end. The flapper was sometimes a flamboyant flouter, as Zelda Fitzgerald's life apparently proved, but she generally strayed only temporarily from acceptable patterns of conduct, because her values were essentially the same as those of her parents.

⁴² Cocktail in one hand and cigarette in the other, she made an avocational pretense of "rebellion" that was quite compatible with middle-class wisdom, as she mimicked the demands of earlier feminists for sexual equality.

The plays that Crothers wrote in the 1920's signal her own ambivalence toward the contrived stance of young women whose gold-plated philosophy was an amalgam of "free-thinking" writers like Ellen Key, Mona Cairn, Havelock and Edith Ellis. Like Congreve's Millamant, they were choosing to "dwindle into a wife" rather than persevere in a search for practical alternatives. Crothers's formulaic plot for flappers continued to have the staple elements described by Clara Claibourne Park in her study of the young women in Shakespeare's comedies: "Invent a girl of charm and intellect; allow her ego a brief premarital flourishing; make clear that it is soon to subside into voluntarily assumed subordination; make sure that it is mediated by love."⁴³ But Crothers's perspective is ironic, because she juxtaposes romantic courtship and the harsh antagonisms that often grow between marriage partners. The plays she wrote during these years strongly emphasized deteriorating sexual relationships over a period of time, thus undermining the power of the traditional plot to sustain communal custom through ritual reenactment. In Mary the Third (Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, February 5, 1925), the playwright presented three generations of women in the throes of choosing mates. The grandmother, Mary the First, traps a mate with flirtation in 1870; the mother, Mary the Second, yields to the proposal of her most vigorous but most unsuitable lover in 1897. These two women are seen as mere anachronisms by Mary the Third, in 1923, who fecklessly flaunts convention by insisting that she will choose her mate only after going off to the country on an experimental trip with two men and another woman to "live naturally and freely for two weeks—doing a thing we know in the bottom of our souls is right, and knowing perfectly well the whole town is going to explode with horror."⁴⁴ However, after only a few hours, Mary rationalizes her own lack of persistence, deciding to be "magnanimous" to the "deep prejudices" of her parents. She returns home. Fearful of being scolded, she and her brother hide and are horrified when they accidentally overhear their parents in a fight (reminiscent of Strindberg and foreshadowing Albee) that shaves off the thin skin concealing the bleeding tissue of their marriage. They hear their father tell their mother: "I'm flabbergasted at you. You seem to have lost what sense you did have. .. . I can't count on you. You aren't there. Sometimes I think you aren't the woman I married at all," and their mother's even more devastating reply: "And sometimes I think you're a man I couldn't have married. Sometimes I loathe everything you think and say and do. When you grind out that old stuff I could shriek. I can't breathe in the same room with you. The very sound of your voice drives me insane. When you tell me how right you are—I could strike you."⁴⁵ The fate of the marriage of Mary the Second is left unresolved at the conclusion. Even though Mary the Third has seen her mother's agonized entrapment and recognized its partial basis in her inability to earn an independent income, the daughter herself yields to the pressures of convention and enters marriage knowing just as little about her future husband as her grandmother and mother had known of theirs. Self-deceived, she has only partly digested the teachings of those writers who had argued for new kinds of marriages:⁴⁶ " . . . you ought to be able to [make your own living]. .. . I shall have my own money. I'll make it. I shall live with a man because I love him and only as long as I love him. I shall be able to take care of myself and my children if necessary. Anything else gives the man a horrible advantage, of course. It makes the woman a kept woman." (p. 92) Significantly, Mary has rejected an intelligent suitor who has warned her that "unless we change the entire attitude of men and women towards each other—there won't be any marriage in the future" (p. 96), and disregarded the fact that she is as ill-trained to support herself as her mother had been.

Crothers's plays signal changes in the treatment of the "woman problem" in the theatre during the twenties. The dialectic between the "new woman" and her "old-fashioned" relatives increasingly undercut conventional comic endings as reconciliation with older patterns became a hollow act. In a series of skillfully constructed one-act plays, Crothers continued her mordant comment by creating the character of a successful but shallow politician, Nancy Marshall, whose words expose a growing "tokenism" in the feminist views of many of her contemporaries:

We women must be considerate of each other. If I am nominated I'm going to be awfully strong for that. . . . Men have made a mess of it—that's all. The idea that there aren't enough houses in New York to go 'round. What nonsense! .. . All those awful people with money who never had any before in their lives ought not to be allowed to crowd other people out. It's Bolshevism—just Bolshevism. . . . And not enough school teachers to go 'round. . . . People ought simply to be made to teach school, whether they want to or not. . . . I can't teach school. God knows I'd be glad to—and just show them if my hands weren't so full now of—I'm going to have awful circles under my eyes from standing so long.⁴⁷

She contrasts her own knowledge of the nuances of political style with her female opponent's corpulent presence on the hustings: "She is so unpopular I should think she'd withdraw from sheer embarrassment . . . she is so unattractive. That's why the men have put her up . . . they're not afraid of her because they know she'll never get anywhere." (pp. 19-20) The sheer vacuousness of Nancy Marshall's political views elicits the response from her best friend that "Between you and her I'd vote for the best man going," and comes into sharp relief when compared to the comment of Mary Dewson, director of women's work for the Democratic party, after the election of 1932: " . . . we did not make the old-fashioned plea that our candidate was charming, .. . we appealed to the intelligence of the country's women."⁴⁸

In a one-act sequel, after the same friend calls her an "old maid," Nancy Marshall suddenly comprehends the real "importance of being a woman" and hastily puts on a proper gown for the purpose of attracting a proposal of marriage. The customary import of the courtship scene is compromised, because the gentleman of her choice has been rejected, in an earlier scene, by Patti Pitt, a young woman who sees herself as public property (she is an entertainer!), but who actually has meant it when she said "It's power, . . . I've got it and I mustn't throw it away. . . . Any woman can get married, but I have something more important to do" (The Importance of Being a Woman, p. 77). The satiric treatment of both women by Crothers indicates that she was sensitive to the processes of rationalization used by women confronted by the choice between career and marriage, and had identified in those who opted for the latter an erosion of energy that was to continue to perpetuate, for a number of years in the theatre, the prominence of the "feminine mystique."

In the 1930's, Clare Boothe's satire, The Women (Ethel Barrymore Theatre, December 26, 1936), slashed at materialistic Park Avenue matrons, but also reflected an underside of the cultural milieu as female characters turned increasingly to divorces, affairs, and sometimes to temporary careers. In a late play by Crothers, When Ladies Meet (Royale Theatre, October 6, 1932), the scenario of the struggle of female characters for economic and moral independence receives less emphasis than the failing and futile relationships all the women have with the men. Mary, a writer, and Claire, a wife, are both in love with the latter's philandering husband. Mary has continued to reject the persistent courtship of good-natured Jimmie, a friend who puts women "in pigeon holes and tab[s] them—[according to] a man's idea of women."⁴⁹ Jimmie shrewdly arranges a meeting of mistress and wife at a mutual friend's country house. The play's title is drawn from a remarkable scene that occurs "when ladies meet" to discuss the fictional case in Mary's novel in which a mistress tells her lover's wife that she wants to live for a year with him on a trial basis. Claire's comments on the verisimilitude of Mary's novel barely conceal her response to her own situation:

I suppose any married woman thinks the other woman ought to know enough not to believe a married man—if he's making love to her. .. . I happen to be married to a man who can no more help attracting women than he can help breathing. And of course each one thinks she is the love of his life and that he is going to divorce me. But he doesn't seem to .. . I can always tell when an affair is waning. He turns back to the old comfortable institution of marriage as naturally as a baby turns to the warm bottle .. . I'd say [to the mistress] of course something new is interesting. Of course I look the same old way—and sound the same old way—and eat the same old way and walk the same old way—and so will you—after awhile. I'd say of course I can understand his loving you—but are you prepared to stand up to the job of loving him? Most of the things you find so irresistible in him are terribly hard to live with. You must love him so abjectly that you're glad to play second fiddle just to keep the music going for him. (pp. 109-13)

When her husband unexpectedly blunders into the room, fiction becomes reality—true to Claire's prediction—he begs to return, but she rejects him with a newly discovered decisiveness: "You can't conceive that I could stop loving you. It happened in just one second—I think—when I saw what you'd done to [Mary]. . . . I'm not going home—now—or ever." (p. 135) Mary will continue to write and to live alone. The theme of the emotional consequences of both disintegrating marriages and the pursuit of careers had been introduced earlier in the play by their hostess, who diagnoses women's restlessness as due to a far-reaching lack of fulfillment in either institution: "Men mean a great deal more to women than women do to men. .. . I don't care what strong women—like Mary tell you about loving their work and their freedom—it's all slush. Women have got to be loved. That's why they're breaking out so. . . . They're daring to have lovers—good women—because they just can't stand being alone." (p. 64)

Crothers had managed to write, on the average, a play a year since 1904. The incipient thirty-year-long quietism in feminist activities produced by apathy, factionalism, and personal loneliness is evident in the uneasy resignation of her later female characters. The playwright's response to a reporter, in 1941, revealed her final alienation from feminist causes and repeated her earlier assertion that her plays had mirrored, mutatis mutandis, the social evolution of sex roles: "What a picayune, self-conscious side all this woman business has to it. . . . I've been told that my plays are a long procession reflecting the changing attitudes of the world toward women. If they are, that was completely unconscious on my part. Any change like that, that gets on to the stage, has already happened in life. Even the most vulgar things, that people object to with so much excitement, wouldn't be in the theatre at all if they hadn't already become a part of life.">⁵⁰

In 1931, the Pulitzer Prize was given to Susan Glaspell, the first woman to win it in a decade.⁵¹ In Alison's House (Civic Repertory Theatre, December 1, 1930), her last play, she again returned to the dramatic techniques she had used during her years with the Provincetown a decade earlier. Zoe Akins won the Prize, in 1935, for The Old Maid (Empire Theatre, January 7, 1935),

⁵² but her skillful dramatic adaptation (like Edith Wharton's novelette published eleven years earlier) is set back in time. Both prize-winning plays safely distanced controversial feminist issues by presenting women tethered by Edwardian proprieties rather than more immediately recognizable topical restraints. It is possibly worth pointing out that the plays for which American women have won Pulitzer Prizes deal essentially with the "old maid" figure in whom the threat of sex-role conflict is "neutralized," as did the near-winner, Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (Maxine Elliott Theatre, November 20, 1934), which dealt with the cruel ostracism of suspected lesbians.⁵³

The efforts of women to understand and determine their own lives, their failure to develop effective strategies for the realization of personal gratification, their continuing attachment to the perimeters of capitalism were portrayed by Glaspell, Gale, Crothers, and Akins less as a passionate subjugation than as the restless sojourn of half-articulate captives in a land that seemed alien to them. Marriage continued to be the first choice and a career the second of most women, as their enrollment percentage in colleges continued to drop steadily from 40.3 in 1930 to 30.2 in 1950.⁵⁴ In the theatre, divorcees and professional women continued to be perceived as "threats" to the institution of marriage, because they personified women's fulfillment through chosen alternative social roles.⁵⁵ Not until the late 1950's would public attention again focus on the issues probed so searchingly by this generation of playwrights. Certainly, isolated expressions of "feminist" theatre, like Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (Plymouth Theatre, September 7, 1928), had continued, but they were generally short-lived, and for a quarter of a century, there was no reappearance of the serious concern with the "woman problem" that had characterized the work of America's women playwrights from the Midwest.

My comments have been limited to plays written by middle-class women who bring to issue kinship rules and incest taboos in which primary sex role determines generic restrictions for dramatic action. A thoroughgoing analysis would have included, among others, the ordinary females and heteroclites created by Clare Kummer, Rose Pastor Stokes, Alice Gerstenberg, Alice Brown, Sophie Treadwell, Rita Wellman, Neith Boyce, Lula Vollmer, Maurine Watkins, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Julie Herne. Nor have I mentioned Edward Sheldon, George Middleton, Bayard Veiller, Sidney Howard, George Kelly, Eugene O'Neill, and S. N. Behrman, who were remarkably sensitive to the predicaments of female characters and deserve to be reevaluated in this light.

As theatre historians and critics, we must now attempt to refine our working lexicon. Beyond female roles dictated by kinship structures (e.g., wife, mother, daughter, sister, bride, mother-in-law, widow, grandmother), there exist other roles which are more or less independent (e.g., coquette, ingénue, soubrette, career woman, servant, shaman, witch, bawd, whore) as well as interdependent roles (e.g., the other woman, mulatto). Only by developing descriptive categories with some historical precision can we hope to account for both formulaic successes and changes in dramatic modes. A more accurate vocabulary for female "dramatis personae" could help us to understand the inter-relationships between the theatre and evolving social milieus in this and other periods.

NOTES

¹ Interview with Henry Albert Phillips, March 15, 1931; Scrapbook III, p. 59. Quoted by Irving Abramson, "The Career of Rachel Crothers in the American Drama" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1956), p. 193. Also see, Lois C. Gottlieb, "Obstacles to Feminism in the Early Plays of Rachel Crothers," University of Michigan Papers in Women's Studies I (June 1975), 71-84.

²Cf. Deborah S. Kolb, "The Rise and Fall of the New Woman in American Drama," ETJ 27 (1975), 149-60. Also see, William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 19201970 (London and New York, 1972), pp. 3-22; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 1890-1920 (New York, 1965); William L. O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago, 1969); June Sochen, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 ([Chicago], 1973).

³ Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote," Ladies' Home Journal 27 (1910). Also see, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York, 1902), passim.

⁴ Lorine Pruette, Women and Leisure: A Study of Social Waste (New York, 1924), pp. 123, 138, passim. Jane Addams was chosen once, Frances Willard twice. Pruette's figures actually do not indicate clearly if the same person chose both women, so that it is possible that three girls were involved.

⁵ See David Tresemer and Joseph Pleck, "Sex-Role Boundaries and Resistance to Sex-Role Change," Women Studies 2 (1974), 72. Tresemer and Pleck acknowledge their indebtedness to T. Parsons and R. F. Bales's Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process (Glencoe, Ill., 1955). See also, Harriet Holier, Sex Roles and Social Structure (Oslo, 1970).

⁶ A notable exception, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, had written original and pithy sociology in works like Women and Economics (1898), The Home, Its Work and Influence (1903), and His Religion and Hers (1923). However, in her plays, she relied heavily on "romance" to mitigate feminist political content. See, for example, Three Women (1911) and Something to Vote For (1911), published in The Forerunner.

⁷ The "reduced state of consciousness" that is "favorable to political conformity" and its manifestation in the "decline of language" is elegantly described by George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language," in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), pp. 162-77.

⁸ My generalization here is based, of course, on Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. ed., trans. Bell, Sturnes, and Needham (Boston, 1969) and Georges Betaille's Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and Taboo (New York, 1969).

⁹ In Crother's earliest full-length play, The Three of Us (Madison Square Theatre, October 17, 1906), the heroine is an independent woman who breaks horses, runs a gold mine, and raises two orphaned younger brothers in California. Rhy McChesney goes alone at night to her wouldbe seducer's lodgings to ask that he release her from a promise of silence concerning a business deal. Discovered in a "compromising situation" by her future fiancé, she defends her honor, and her freedom to come and go as she wishes. The play's formulaic ending resolves problems on the basis of mutual faith.

¹⁰ Arthur Hobson Quinn judges A Man's World to be "one of the most significant dramas of the decade." A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day, rev. ed. (New York, 1936), 2: 52. Unless otherwise noted, dates of first performances are those listed in Quinn's "Bibliography and Play List." Also see, Phyllis Marschall Fergusson, "Women Dramatists in the American Theatre, 1901-1940" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1957).

¹¹A Man's World (Boston, 1915), p. 112. A contemporary reviewer praised Crothers for facing the "consequences of the premises without hesitation or faltering." The Nation 90 (February 10, 1910), 146. Cf., Eleanor Flexner, American Playwrights 1918-1938 (New York, 1938), p. 240.

¹²He and She, in Representative American Playwrights, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn, 7th rev. ed. (New York, 1953), p. 928. The play was also produced as The Herfords (Plymouth Theatre, January 12, 1912). It was revived in New York (The Little Theatre, February 12, 1920). Significant revisions, in Crothers's handwriting, appear in the typescript in the New York Public Library.

¹³Ibid., p. 916. In his review of a performance in New York, Alexander Wollcott aptly observed that "He and She seems peopled less with folks than with embodied points of view, and the play seems less a dramatic story than a symposium." New York Times (February 13, 1920), 16: 3.

¹⁴ Sixteen years later, Crothers's play Venus (Masquerade Theatre, December 26, 1927) presented people on an interplanetary flight reversing their masculine and feminine characteristics under the influence of a compound. The play folded (not surprisingly) after only eight performances. See Abramson, p. 378. Brooks Atkinsons's review (New York Times [December 26, 1927], 23: 26) suggests a number of reasons why the play failed. No one has located the play text.

¹⁵ Heywood Broun denounced the ending when the play was finally acted in New York: "The play espouses a side of the feminist question with which we are in the most complete disagreement. We have always found that the soup tastes just the same whether it is opened with loving care or by the hired help. Nor are we convinced that young daughters tend to become entangled in unfortunate love affairs the instant a mother begins to paint a picture or deliver a series of lectures or write short stories for the magazines." New York Tribune (February 13, 1920), 11. Although Broun's point is one with which today's feminists might well agree, a glance at the headline on the front page reveals a political context for his stance: "Arizona Ratifies Suffrage Amendment, Is the 31st State, Only 5 More Needed."

¹⁶ Henrietta Rodman's Little Theatre and the Washington Square Players had been performing in Greenwich Village since 1912. For an account of feminist activity in the Village, see June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 ([Chicago], 1972).

¹⁷ Henrietta Rodman, however, was ruffled by Floyd Dell's comic treatment of women's suffrage in What Eight Million Women Want, and called a meeting of the Liberal Club to protest it. See Dell's Homecoming (New York, 1933), pp. 260-66; and Sochen, The New Woman, p. 85. Crothers shared Glaspell's more relaxed view of what was fair game for the comic artist: "Why on earth shouldn't the same person write a comedy satire on advanced feminism and a serious play which is based on the plea for a double standard. . . . Surely the most militant feminist can't fail to see that if some of her radical ideas were at once adopted and acted upon they'd be very funny and would produce chaotic results." New York City Sun (January, 1914), quoted by Abramson, p. 216.

¹⁸ Glaspell had read some of Freud's works after his visit to the United States in 1909 had "literally caused an earthquake in public opinion." Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America: Ideas on the March (New York, 1941), p. 601. Another "Village" manifestation of contemporary awareness of Freudian theory was Alice Gerstenberg's expressionistic play Overtones (Washington Square Players, 1915), in which two women are portrayed simultaneously as primitive selves and socialized personae.

¹⁹ Susan Glaspell, Plays (Boston, 1920), p. 84. All subsequent quotations from her work will be identified in the text in parentheses.

²⁰ The part was acted by Ida Rauh, who was arrested for distributing birth control pamphlets with Rose Pastor Stokes. See Sochen, The New Woman, pp. 65-66; also the Boston American (May 6, 1916). In 1916, the first birth control clinic had opened in New York. See David Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, 1970).

²¹ The theme of imprisonment appears again in Glaspell's first full-length play, Bernice (Playwright's Theatre, March 21, 1919), in The Inheritors (Playwright's Theatre, March 21, 1921), and in Alison's House ( (Civic Repertory Theatre, December 1, 1930).

²²Enemies, written by Glaspell's friends Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood for the Provincetown Players in the same year, presents a clash between husband and wife which ends in an uneasy truce rather than murder, but which confronts an audience with the unmediated raw threat of the wife's version of a Shavian "life force": "You, on account of your love for me, have tyrannized over me, bothered me, badgered me, nagged me, for fifteen years, . . . Men and women are natural enemies, like cat and dog—only more so. They are forced to live together for a time, or this wonderful race couldn't go on. . . . The shock and flame of two hostile temperaments meeting is what produces fine children." Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood, Enemies, in The Provincetown Plays, edd. George Cram Cook and Frank Shay (Cincinnati [1921]), p. 130. The play, in addition to its obvious debt to Man and Superman (1903), dramatizes a marital argument less vicious than but remarkably similar to the one shown by Strindberg in The Dance of Death (1901) and its dramatic "progeny."

²³The Verge: A Play in Three Acts (Boston, 1922), p. 52.

²⁴ The Berg Collection in the New York Public Library is the repository of reviews which the playwright had received through a clipping service.

²⁵ The premiere had been presented by David Belasco at Sing Sing, December 26th, on a portable stage. See Jane F. Bonin, Prizewinning American Drama (Metuchen, N. J., 1973), p. 8.

²⁶ August Derleth, Still Small Voice: The Biography of Zona Gale (New York, 1940), p. 100. "Zona was already at that time heart and soul with the feminist movements of her time, and was particularly interested in suffrage for women, going so far as to speak on the subject on several occasions to gatherings." (p. 101)

²⁷ The other play under consideration was a domestic comedy by Frank Craven, The First Year. The jury, consisting of Hamlin Garland, William Lyon Phelps, and Richard Burton elected to waive the requirement that the play be an "original" American drama. Garland wrote to Frank Fackenthal: "Feeling that it would be a handsome thing to give the prize to a woman, Burton will join Phelps and me in giving the award to Lulu Bett" John Hohenberg, The Pulitzer Prizes: A History of the Awards in Books, Drama, Music, and Journalism Based on the Private Files Over Six Decades (New York, 1974), pp. 50-1. Also see, Harold P. Simonson, Zona Gale (New York, 1962), p. 79.

²⁸ See Dorothy Deegan, The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Novels (New York, 1951; rpt. 1969).

²⁹ Ludwig Lewisohn, "Native Plays," The Nation 112 (February 2, 1921), 189. Lewisohn preferred the original ending, which, he argued, had "turned [Gale's] original fable into a play and had given it a weightier and severer ending. .. . the most inevitable that we recall in the work of any American Playwright/'

³⁰ In the revised third act, Lulu's "husband's" missing first wife is discovered to have died, a circumstance making his second marriage legal. In the novel, Lulu had married another less attractive but more stable suitor. See Simonson, pp. 85-6.

³¹Ibid., p. 82; letter from Fannie Hurst to Zona Gale, n. d.

³²Ibid., pp. 64-5; Derleth, pp. 45-6, 211, 261. Also see, Zona Gale, "What Women Won in Wisconsin," The Nation 115 (August 23, 1922), 184-85.

³³The Importance of Being a Woman, in Six One-Act Plays (Boston, 1925), p. 71.

³⁴ Chafe, p. 53.

³⁵Ibid., p. 58. Also see Elizabeth K. Nottingham, "Toward an Analysis of the Effects of Two World Wars on the Role and Status of Middle-Class Women in the English Speaking World," American Sociological Review 12 (1947), 666-75; Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education (New York, 1959).

³⁶ Pruett, pp. 132-33. Also see, O'Neill, pp. 251-52.

³⁷ See Margaret Mead, "Sex and Achievement," Forum 94 (1935), 301-3.

³⁸ See Sochen, pp. 27-8, 102.

³⁹ Quoted in Anne Firor Scott, ed., Women in American Life: Selected Readings (Boston and New York, 1970), p. 130.

⁴⁰ "Clinical Notes," American Mercury 19 (1930), 242. Cf. H. L. Mencken's In Defense of Women (Garden City, N.Y., [1922]), a clever plea for old-fashioned "femininity": ".. . all of the ladies to [sic] take to this political immolation seem to me to be frightfully plain. . . . there were not five women at either national convention who could have embraced me in camera without first giving me chloral." (p. 132)

⁴¹The Importance of Being a Woman, p. 87.

⁴² Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York, 1970); Sochen, pp. 98-9; Chafe, pp. 94-8.

⁴³ "As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular," American Scholar 42 (1973), 275.

⁴⁴Mary the Third (Boston, 1925), pp. 35-6. Crothers puts a damper on her daring when Mary specifies that their relationships will be platonic.

⁴⁵ The quarrel between the father and mother had been published earlier as a one-act play with the title What They Think. Ludwig Lewisohn saw Mary the Third as "a blanket attack on marriage and nearly everything connected with it." The Nation 116 (March 7, 1923), 278.

⁴⁶ See William L. O'Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1967); Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals and Sex in America (New York, 1953; rept. 1969).

⁴⁷The Importance of Being Clothed, in Six One-Act Plays, pp. 18-19.

⁴⁸Buffalo Evening News (January 12, 1933) clipping, Dewson Papers, SL, Box 1; quoted by Chafe, p. 40.

⁴⁹When Ladies Meet (New York, 1932), p. 13.

⁵⁰ Interview with Catherine Hughes, "Women Playmakers," New York Times Magazine (May 4, 1941), 10, 27. Zoe Akins, Rose Franken, and Lillian Hellman are quoted as sharing these opinions.

⁵¹ "There was more disagreement than usual over the award . . . [for] Alison's House is what drama critics most frequently describe as a literary play." Burns Mantle, ed., The Best Plays of 1930-31 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York, 1931), pp. 222-23. Also see, Hohenberg, pp. 105-6.

⁵² Like the other playwrights, Akins had Midwest origins. Born in the "heart of the Ozarks," Humansville, Missouri, in 1886, she had travelled widely. Between 1916 and 1947, she produced well over two dozen plays and filmscripts.

⁵³ See Richard Moody's Lillian Hellman (New York, 1972), Chapter IV, pp. 36-61, for a full account of the dramatist's imaginative adaptation of William Roughead's story "Closed Doors; or, The Great Drumsheugh Case" from his collection of crime stories in Bad Companions.

⁵⁴ Newcomer, p. 46.

⁵⁵Cf. Donald Nelson Koster, "The Theme of Divorce in American Drama, 1871-1939," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1942).

Susan L. Carlson

SOURCE: "Two Genres and Their Women: The Problem Play and the Comedy of Manners in the Edwardian Theatre," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Summer, 1985, pp. 413-24.

[In the following essay, Carlson considers whether the Edwardian problem play and comedy of manners contain relevant truths despite their sexual stereotypes.]

Mrs. Lucy Dane, the "problem" in Henry Arthur Jones's Mrs. Dane's Defense, is a typical Edwardian problemplay woman. She is intelligent, graceful, sensitive, and sensual. She has a dangerous, though exciting ebullience and an admirable tenacity. And she is just enough unacceptably déclassé so that audiences can pity her while accepting her final banishment as a necessary relief. The conflicting response of other characters to her type is also typical. On the one hand, and most prominently, Sir Daniel Carteret righteously and religiously condemns her for her affront to moral categories. Lady Eastney, on the other hand, sympathizes with Mrs. Dane and seethes at the injustice of a double standard that condemns "problem" women like Mrs. Dane. These antithetical responses understandably have opened the door to similarly irreconcilable critical responses. Critics who decry problem plays like Mrs. Dane complain of the outdated, almost laughable rigidity of a Sir Daniel; critics who defend problem plays praise the enduring human flexibility the plays offer in a Lady Eastney.

Who is right? Do problem plays endorse the preachings of Sir Daniel or the tolerance of Lady Eastney? Are they lifeless, laughable period pieces or can they still be viable social commentary?

To answer these questions and explain the paradoxical responses, I want to dissect the Edwardian problem play along side its contemporary comedies of manners. It is easy to overlook how much the two types of play share—their attention to sexual stereotypes and double standards and their heady atmospheres of social art and artifice—because the two conclude so differently. That is, in comedies of manners, society is a school in which women learn about themselves and gain power; and in problem plays, this same society not only denies women power, but also destroys them. Yet these nearly opposite endings emphasize differences that are not as significant as the similarities between the two dramatic worlds. In both, social portraits are distorted by conflicting responses to social problems. Problems are studied in both and solved in neither.

Consider first how in Mrs. Dane Jones attempts to balance the two very different responses his problem "Mrs. Dane" elicits. As I began by suggesting, Lucy Dane is the stereotypical "problem" woman. With her conniving she has lured away young Lionel's heart, attracted the attention of every man in the play (excepting only butlers), gained the sympathy of good women, and almost fooled the great Sir Daniel. But her trickery marks her moral weakness, not any social cleverness. She has broken Sir Daniel's hard rules by having an affair and an illegitimate baby with a married man and cannot be tolerated at Sunningwater. As society's sanctioned judge and jury, the formidable Sir Daniel uses absolutes to brand her "wrong," and others "right."

Nevertheless, as Jones intends, we retain a measure of sympathy for Mrs. Dane, a result of the double standard she suffers from. The similarities between her past and Sir Daniel's are striking; he was once in love with a married woman and made plans to run off with her, plans she broke, not he. Striking too are the nearly opposite social attitudes to the two cases of indiscretion. Sir Daniel has no qualms about telling his story; he tells it, in fact, to the woman he wants to marry, to convince her that he's a good, loving man. Mrs. Dane, on the other hand, maintains a false identity out of a well-founded fear of revealing her past. Through Lionel and Lady Eastney especially, Jones registers his abhorence of the double standard that condemns Mrs. Dane while letting Sir Daniel prosper. But Jones also accepts the double standard. The "problem" in this play is clear; a transgressing woman is caught in the bind of a harsh double standard. One response (ultimately the one Jones favors) to the problem is equally clear; the double standard is unfair, but it is the best society has, the accepted social convention people have agreed to live by. Mrs. Dane is not a solution to the "woman problem" and offers none. As she cowers under the rules, she accepts Sir Daniel's moralistic, rigid world. She remains a problem.

A possible solution to the "woman problem" is, however, outlined in Lady Eastney. She is everything Mrs. Dane is supposed to be, but is not: a graceful, charming, intelligent, sensitive, and wise widow. Like Mrs. Dane's, her life is a calculated response to a society where the ideal is upheld that appearances and manners are true indicators of individual worth. And for Lady Eastney, the mannered world does work as a flexible yet moral one where witty conversation and occasional masks are gracious and successful ways to deal with others while protecting one's vulnerabilities. Lady Eastney is very much like the comedy of manners heroine who glides successfully and thoughtfully through her dangerous world. Both Lady Eastney and Mrs. Dane have gained a social power by learning to convert an awareness of double standards to indirect control. But the fact that Lady Eastney has not transgressed makes all the difference in her exercise of power and our attitude to it. What has deteriorated to lying and conniving for Mrs. Dane remains studied, controlled, and graceful interaction for Lady Eastney. Not only has Lady Eastney accepted the existence of the double standard, but she has also learned to use it to her advantage. And at the end of the play, for example, she brilliantly displays her power over people and events. By remaining in the system and playing by the rules, she gains the chance to triumph, she gains the opportunity to condemn the double standard and its disastrous effect on Mrs. Dane, and she retains about her an aura—what amounts to a social armour—that promises she could change things. In this problem play about women and a double standard, she represents much more of a solution to the "woman problem" than Mrs. Dane can. We are not to accept her answers, however. She is to act as a palliative to lure those of us who agree with her into accepting Sir Daniel's very different conclusions.

While Mrs. Dane, vintage 1900, houses these two contradictory responses to the "woman problem" at the beginning of the Edwardian decade, Maugham's Penelope, Pinero's Mid-Channel, and Granville-Barker's The Madras House illustrate similar dramatic tensions at the end of the decade. Penelope and Mid-Channel are evidence of the continuing dissonance of Mrs. Dane's antithetical responses to the woman problem. The Madras House towers above them all as a breakthrough revision of the problem play, its women, and its world.

W. S. Maugham's Penelope is a light, bright, frollicksome comedy of manners. It is not divorced from the social relevance of a play like Mrs. Dane, however, nor from its problem women; its social commentary is simply more oblique. This comedy, like most, forces a crisis on its characters, in effect taunting them to use their time-tested system of rules and manners to cope with rule-breakers and role reversals. Its issues are those of the problem play: how does society deal with transgressors? how do people deal with problematic social codes? how does one cope with a double standard? how are matters of right and wrong determined? Its answers are those of Lady Eastney: some ingenuity and a generous dose of accommodation can almost always set things right.

Maugham's titular character, Penelope, faces the dilemma of dealing with a philandering husband. While she rushes to the conclusion that divorce is her salvation, her father, Professor Golightly, shows her the comic way back to happiness in saving her marriage, using social rules and codes that one need not break since they can so conveniently be bent. If Penelope had divorced Dickie, her action would be an acknowledgment that the system does fail, and the play would conceivably enter the realm of the problem play. But her father's social wisdom saves Pen from that fate and preserves a comic realm.

Like Mrs. Dane's Defense, this play studies social rights and wrongs. When Professor Golightly suggests to Pen that she play along with Dickie's affair, both Pen and Mrs. Golightly charge him with immorality, presumably because his advice counsels the breaking of rules. However, the rest of the play proves that their charges are irrational and that Professor Golightly has not only pragmatic but also very moral solutions to social dilemmas. He shows his family that accommodating supposed immoralities is a very moral art, a key to comedy's resilience.

As Maugham's spokesperson in this study of Edwardian value systems, Professor Golightly teaches Pen, Mrs. Golightly, and eventually Dickie that, for all their protestations, they do not believe in a system of well-defined rules. Rather, they believe in somewhat elastic social codes which can let them welcome back Dickie when he sees he has been wrong, and which can allow them to accept and live with the human frailty that could next time be their own.

Maugham intensifies his message about the need for social flexibility by making Pen—a woman—its main receptor. In this comic world as in the world of the problem play, women are most likely to need an understanding of social mores, because in a system full of sexual double standards they are most likely to suffer. As Lady Eastney shows and Pen learns, an added knowledge often gives women a way to by-pass double standards and offers them a makeshift equality. Yet although Pen gains the upper hand in her marriage, there is a paradox in her reconciliation with Dickie. To assert her new power over Dickie she must leave him at the end of the play. And to keep him, Pen must cease to be only herself and wear the masks of "half a dozen different women." Even with her new understanding, Pen, like Mrs. Dane and Lady Eastney, will continue to live in a world where she is at an automatic disadvantage as a woman.

In the end, for all its promise as a purveyor of solutions to women's problems, this comedy—like Mrs. Dane—stops short of endorsing its pragmatic, flexible solutions. Pen controls her life and warms us with laughter as Mrs. Dane and Lady Eastney could not. But the seemingly joyous end of Maugham's play is compromised by Pen's step back to the unresolved double standards of marriage, in her acceptance of a social system she suffers in. Although Penelope is not about the "woman problem" in the obvious way Mrs. Dane is, it shows how useless even the compromise of comedy is to solve "woman" problems. We do not suspect Professor Golightly's good-natured pronouncements in the same way we suspect Sir Daniel's, but our lack of suspicion should not blind us to the way this play, like Mrs. Dane, undermines its own criticism. For all of its talk about social change and moral flexibility, this play counsels acceptance of the status quo. It is simply less ashamed than a problem play to admit it. Maugham shows that simple comedy is not the way out of the selfdefeating paradox of the problem play.

In A. W. Pinero's Mid-Channel, these paradoxical attitudes reappear in their problem-play form. Centering on the Blundell marriage, this is a mechanical play full of dated melodrama, hideous images, and predictable characters. When Theo and Zoe Blundell separate and each conducts a love affair, the double standard becomes the issue of their failing marriage, and the play. Zoe may take her friend Leonard Ferris as her lover out of desperation and loneliness, but in doing so she still breaks the rules. When she returns from her European tour in Act II, her body shows signs of her transgression. She is "wan and there are dark circles around her eyes."

Theo has suffered too with his "bad color." However, his suffering is comparable to Zoe's only until their friend Peter Mottram brings the two sinners together. Theo confesses his affair and painlessly clears his conscience; much like Sir Daniel, he uses his confession to prove his love. In turn, he perfunctorily asks Zoe to confess, assuming that she'll have nothing to admit. He is unable to accept it when she does. From her he expects accommodation; for her he has only hard, unbending rules: "it's impossible for us ever to live under the same roof again under any conditions. .. . I couldn't stoop to that." Like Mrs. Dane and Pen, Zoe is the victim of a double standard.

The end result of the rules Theo pronounces is Zoe's suicide. Realizing that she is not a fit wife for Theo and certainly too tarnished for young Leonard, Zoe disposes of herself. Pinero has presented the "problem" of a young woman caught in the double standard, but he has not solved it any more than Jones did. Even his echo of the comic voice in Peter Mottram is more destructive than comforting. Like Mrs. Dane, Mid-Channel paradoxically exposes, indicts, and then accepts a society which bases its sexual relationships on a double standard.

Despite their better intentions, Jones and Pinero signal us in their problem plays that no alternative to the sad end for women like Mrs. Dane and Zoe exists. Lady Eastney and Peter Mottram remain as spectres of comic solutions neither the authors nor their characters can fully accept, but Penelope suggests how finally fruitless even their solutions are. Only in The Madras House does Harley Granville-Barker show that the alternatives his fellow authors flirt with but always reject could work, but perhaps only in a changed world and a changed drama. Recognizing the paradox that stymies the others, he begins to move beyond it.

While The Madras House is ostensibly about Philip Madras's move from industrial mogul to civil servant, Philip's most important role is to act as tour-guide for our journey through an Edwardian world obsessed with defining its changing sexual roles. There is no "problem woman," but through its groupings of women on stage, the play makes several clear, condemning statements about the way Edwardian society treats its women. In Act I the six grown, unmarried Huxtable sisters are a haunting reminder of the pitiable uselessness of unmarried upper-middle-class women. The tenacious wives and lonesome lovers of Act II and the ghostly living mannequins of Act III further documents the range of problematic roles Edwardian women fill. Curiously, the men in the play, not such sympathetic women, do the talking about the "problem" all of these women represent.

Constantine Madras defines the problems of Edwardian womanhood, castigating his fellow men throughout Act III for allowing women to be no more than sex objects. His solution to the problem is a hard-to-swallow sexist escape to his Mohammedan lifestyle where women admittedly are domestic objects. Yet his observations remain as undeniable as they are lucid. Unlike Sir Daniel, who ended up living a paradox, Constantine acknowledges the double standard for what it is and brazenly but honestly takes advantage of it. Constantine pinpoints Edwardian hypocrisy about women. His son Philip does something about it.

Sensitive to the nuances of the woman question, Philip realizes how the objectification of women his father decries is the result of men's social dominance, and in the course of the play he offers his support to the various women suffering from their dependence on men—his Huxtable cousins, his mother, Miss Yates, and his wife Jessica. Yet during the long, discursive third act he is largely silent, seemingly unresponsive to his father's perorations. His silence is not acquiescence, however, but contemplation, the results of which he expresses in Granville-Barker's experimental fourth act.

Acts I through III are Granville-Barker's complex statement of the "woman problem." His statement includes the range of failed Edwardian dramatic answers we've seen bounded by Pen's compromise and Zoe's suicide. In Act IV, Philip searches for a solution to the problem beyond the ineffective accommodation of his comic predecessors, Lady Eastney, Professor Golightly, Pen and Peter, as he considers social change, a solution to a problem.

In his final conversation with Jessica in Act IV, Philip extends his play-long trail-blazing search for a world free of double standards to his own marriage. Unlike his predecessors in the drama, he looks for a solution which changes the existence of both women and men. First, Philip realizes that to clear the way for such change he must give up the mannered, cultured world so dear to him. He must deny a world premised on the rules of Mrs. Dane's Defense or Mid-Channel or Penelope. Second, he realizes that women will have to pay a price for the change they need, as he warns his wife: "There's a price to be paid for free womanhood, I think . . . and how many of you ladies are willing to pay it?" The play ends with Jessica agreeing to meet him "halfway" to build a new society with the egalitarian rules Philip describes: "And I want an art and a culture that shan't be just a veneer on savagery .. . but it must spring in good time from the happiness of a whole people." This utopia is no fait accompli, of course, as Granville-Barker's intentionally tentative ending reminds us with Jessica's witness to a tenacious double standard and the author's concluding words that "there is no end to the subject." Yet for the first time, social change is a viable alternative. Theatrically, Granville-Barker's final act may be weak, but its theoretical conversation confronts and dissects the paradox of social attitudes that rendered other similar plays gutless.

Granville-Barker labels his innovative play a "comedy." But it rarely resembles the form of comedy in Penelope or the comic tone of Lady Eastney. Neither is it a problem play in the Jones-Pinero tradition. Granville-Barker has realized that to find a dramatic world free from the double standard strangling men and women in problem plays and comedies, he must find a form—as well as a content—that questions the status quo. In three acts of self-conscious study of the antithetical responses to "problem" women in both problem plays and comedies, he clears the way for the refreshing open-endedness of his final act. In Mrs. Dane's Defense and Mid-Channel personal tragedy was the result of unbendable rules, yet the rules remained intact. In Penelope, the comic atmosphere was right for social questioning, but the results of that questioning were circumscribed by the very accommodation that is comedy's strength. In problem plays as in comedies a play's ending returns us to established social order and belief. Only Granville-Barker pens the social commentary that his fellow Edwardian playwrights set out to write, because he consciously rejects the inherent limits both the problem play and the comedy of manners impose on women characters.

Problem plays by both Jones and Pinero and comedies by Maugham have not often been revived in the last 70 years. Ironically, Granville-Barker's plays, which never enjoyed the initial popular success of the others, have much more potential for our contemporary stage. The Madras House was, in fact, done in London in 1977-78. Because they defy not only Edwardian standards but also Edwardian dramatic forms, Granville-Barker's plays have the potential of explaining to us our own social problems and revolutions, not just Edwardian ones. "Problem women" do not exist for us as they did for the Edwardians, but their problems of combatting a stolid social order do. For the "problem women" of the problem play and their sisters in comedy we can extend our sympathy from a comfortable distance. We are asked to do no more; solutions are implied in the statements of the problems. But faced with the "problem women" of Granville-Barker, we are challenged to join in the fray. We want to do so because there is hope of change.