THADDEUS WAKEFIELD. THE FAMILY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. 117pp. ISBN 0-8204­6321-3.

I approached this book with some wariness. The author’s first sentence accurately establishes the potential scope of his study: “The central subject of American Drama is, arguably, the American family” (1). Yet, at 117 pages (actually, 96 pages of text and notes), his book seems slight for a subject so broad and rich. Further along in his introduction, Wakefield states that he will consider 14 plays, which, if I do the math correctly, comes to roughly seven pages per play, leaving not much room for deep analysis. Wakefield explains that he analyzes O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in three of the book’s chapters, an “honor” he gives no other play (totaling a little more than 12 pages), which seems to indicate that this author at least recognizes Long Day’s Journey’s status as the mother of all American family dramas. Then I realize, however, that his stated reason for discussing O’Neill’s play more than any other is that it is “uniquely suited to illuminate the impact of capitalism within the various filial relationships which define the traditional family” (4).

It quickly becomes clear, then, that this is a more narrowly focused study of American family drama than the book’s title suggests. Wakefield applies a sociological/Marxist approach to these 14 plays “in order to illustrate capitalism’s effect on the American family”(3). He organizes his approach around three intrafamilial relationships—one chapter each on husband-wife, father-child, and mother-child—and he devotes an additional chapter to exploring family dynamics within non-traditional families. The main point of his study is that the process of commodification within American capitalist society, in which “exchange-value” trumps “use-value,” corrupts all familial relationships: “family members are not valued in terms of their intrinsic worth, but rather as economic producers and consumers” (1).

This is certainly a valid lens through which to view all of the American families depicted in the plays Wakefield selects, and many others, as well. There is no doubt that Willie Loman fails as a father because of his obsession with the American Dream of financial success. Likewise, in The Little Foxes, members of the Hubbard family are undeniably driven by greed more than love, and in The Glass Menagerie, surely Amanda Wingfield worries more about who will take care of Laura than who will love her. Wakefield makes all of these observations, and more, which are interesting, but hardly seem revelatory, and are, ultimately, rather limiting. The limitations are nowhere more evident than in his “extended” commentary on Long Day ’s Journey into Night.”

In his chapter on “Marriage Relationships,” he comes down on the James Tyrone side of the “whom do you blame” debate; actually, Wakefield blames capitalist ideology, as he does in all the cases he studies. While there is some validity in his claim that Tyrone is “more interested in making money— through his acting jobs and buying land properties—than he is in taking care of his family,” to say that Tyrone “loves money more than he loves his wife” (13) is to miss the complexity of the character. Throughout his book, Wakefield reduces rich, conflicted, round characters to simple, unequivocal, flat representations of socioeconomic ideology. “In economic terms,” Wakefield asserts, “Mary has written her husband off as a casualty of a market­driven, greedy, capitalist society in which money is worshipped above all else” (14), a typical sentence in a book that sucks the blood right out of the fascinating flesh-and-blood characters dramatists have created for the stage.

In his chapter on “Father-Child Relationships,” Wakefield argues, justifiably, that James Tyrone is a “failing father.” Here, again, Wakefield accepts the accusations of Mary and her sons that their father, the miser, has been responsible (directly or indirectly) for most of their miseries, including Mary’s addiction, Jamie’s alcoholism, the death of baby Eugene, and now perhaps the continuing ill health, and perhaps ultimate death, of Edmund (if he refuses to pay for the best treatment possible). In truth, Tyrone is tortured by conflicting needs: saving his money and saving his family. A father who ignores his family does not have the kinds of confrontations with his sons that Tyrone has with Edmund and Jamie throughout the play, and especially in Act 4.

There is no question that money, and even capitalism, is an important factor in Tyrone’s complex relationships with his wife and sons, but in those relationships in the play that do not include James Tyrone, specifically the mother-child relationship, the role of money and capitalism is far less apparent, and Wakefield is on much shakier ground. It is abundantly clear that Mary falls miserably short in both categories Wakefield uses to measure maternal success; she fails as both “provider” and “nurturer.” In the final scene, when Mary returns downstairs in a drug-induced stupor, she has, indeed, cut herself off from her husband and sons, and O’Neill does indicate that she shows no more awareness of, or sensitivity to, them than she does to the furniture in the room. Wakefield’s thesis, however, is that the failure of characters to fulfill their familial duties is due, specifically, to American capitalist ideology, so he claims that Mary’s “blindness can be attributed to the capitalist society of twentieth century America which forces people to see themselves, and others, as things” (49). This claim comes out of nowhere, and Wakefield offers no textual evidence to support it. While there are good reasons to place O’Neill at the center of any discussion of the family in American Drama, there is no good reason to place Mary first in a chapter about American mothers whose failures are primarily attributable to the impact of capitalism. Amanda Wingfield, yes; Regina Hubbard Giddens, definitely; Lena Younger (Mama), certainly; but not Mary Tyrone.

Two glaring factual errors in this chapter of the book compound the limitations of its method. First, in his section on Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Wakefield refers to Leo as Ben’s son, whereas Leo is Oscar’s son (Wakefield himself acknowledges this on the very next page). In addition, when he introduces his discussion of The Glass Menagerie, he cites the year of Williams’s play as 1950, whereas it was first produced in 1944. Errors like these compromise the credibility of the author and his editors.

The book is not without its merits. For one thing, it includes a lengthy (especially given the length of the book itself) and comprehensive bibliography through the year 2000. Also, and not insignificantly, Wakefield certainly does establish an interesting, recurring connection between the dysfunction that plagues the family on the twentieth-century American stage and the forces of American capitalism. His one-note critical approach, however, becomes repetitive and reductive.

Wakefield justifiably calls Long Day’s Journey into Night the “quintessential twentieth century American play regarding the family” (10); as the only play that figures into more than one of his chapters, his treatment of it provides all the evidence needed to recognize the limitations of his study. Wakefield’s book would be more aptly entitled, “A Very Limited Marxist View of the Family in Twentieth-Century American Drama.”

Steven F. Bloom
Lasell College

 

CHERYL BLACK. THE WOMEN OF PROVINCETOWN, 1915-1922. Tuscaloosa:Univ. of Alabama Press, 2002. 245pp. ISBN 0-8173-1112-2.

In pointed contrast to Leona Rust Egan’s 1994 Provincetown as a Stage, which elaborated the traditional story of the Provincetown Players as the cradle of O’Neill’s birth as dramatist, Black presents this remarkable group of artists and activists as a utopian experiment in the reconstitution of gender. As a Third Wave feminist historiography of a First Wave feminist enterprise, Black’s The Women of Provincetown cuts directly against the grain of the O’Neill-centered narrative of this group and its era, arguing instead for its value as a laboratory, however short-lived, of sexual equity and exploration. If Provincetown was indeed a stage, in Black’s account it was a stage not just for O’Neill’s professional debut but for a social revolution in which gender roles—indeed, in Black’s phrase, “all human relationships”—could be fully rehearsed both in and beyond the theater.

Each of the book’s carefully documented chapters examines a particular area of women’s participation in the genesis, growth, and demise of the Provincetown Players, from the premise that it was Susan Glaspell, Ida Rauh, Neith Boyce, Louise Bryant, Edna Kenton, Mary Heaton Vorse, and other women who were most committed to social change. Its seven appendices offer detailed evidence of their full range of involvement. O’Neill, Jig Cook, Max Eastman, Hutchins Hapgood, and the other Provincetown men are presented as reverting quickly to prevailing notions of male dominance and a drive for success, abandoning the collaborative idealism with which the Players began. Black particularly questions the critical tradition of gendering O’Neill and Glaspell as the group’s archetypal male and female creative forces because this supposed complementarity tends to reinforce stereotypes and miss the decidedly feminist purpose of plays by Glaspell, Boyce, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and others.

Following a brisk account of the paths that led individual women to Greenwich Village and its radical cultural and political scene just after 1910, Black devotes five chapters to specific areas of theatrical production: management, writing, acting, directing, and designing. All of these are fully illustrated with portraits and production shots, and most feature bar graphs that show the percentage of the Provincetown plays in which women had a major creative role, and how these percentages changed from 1915 to 1922. Black succeeds in making the conclusion inescapable that without women in all these previously male-dominated areas, the Provincetown Players would have been a completely different enterprise, something more like what emerged in 1924 when O’Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Kenneth Macgowan formed the Experimental Theatre from the Provincetown’s remains.

Black is most successful when she treats the work of the Players on its own terms, less so when she tries to find parallels between, for example, the stage designs of Marguerite Zorach and the “new stagecraft” that was crossing the Atlantic from Europe to America at about this time. More compelling is Black’s insight that to understand the development of Glaspell as playwright we must also know more about her work as an actress, and appreciate the salutary effect for the Provincetown’s feminist playwrights of having available to them a corps of committed feminist actresses. The chapter on acting also presents Ida Rauh’s rejection of histrionic style for greater psychological realism as part of a larger trend in world theater, which seems a less useful perspective than its implicit challenge of an old-style theatricality (think James O’Neill) that supported the patriarchal status quo that the Provincetown women opposed. However, Rauh’s insistence when directing O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid in 1919 that black actors be cast instead of white actors in blackface does seem an important precedent in American theatrical practice, and no doubt an influence on the writing and casting of O’Neill’s own subsequent plays that featured black protagonists.

Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Black’s analysis is her exposé of the persistent sexism among the Provincetown men and the “shallowness” of their interest in the new social order for which the women saw themselves working. Though never questioning O’Neill’s artistic integrity, she sees him as complicit in a backlash against the group’s utopian goals of consensus and its resistance to hierarchy in governance. She quotes Edna Kenton’s assessment that the success of The Emperor Jones marked the end of Provincetown’s amateur idealism in favor of the kind of theatrical professionalism that brought out old gender prejudices and inequities. Though usually on firm ground in noting a split between the public radicalism and private sexism among the company’s men, Black at times overplays her evidence. For example, drawing on an account from Agnes Boulton, O’Neill’s wife during the Provincetown years, Black somewhat spuriously presents O’Neill’s physical abuse of Agnes as a metaphor of the persistent sexism that, among other forces, would lead to the group’s demise.

The Women of Provincetown offers a valuable new assessment of one of the most crucial enterprises in America’s cultural history. Black’s account of early idealism undermined by success is a plot rather like one of O’Neill’s own plays, except that here it is the destiny of women, and not the men whom they support and suffer for, that emerges as the primary animating force in a revolutionary moment which, if short-lived, set an inspiring standard for future women theater artists and collectives, with or without men.

Kurt Eisen
Tennessee Tech University

 

LINDA BEN-ZVI, EDITOR. SUSAN GLASPELL: ESSAYS ON HER THEATER AND FICTION. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 368pp. ISBN 0-472-08438-0.

The publication of the paperback edition of Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction serves as a reminder of the many gaps in Glaspell studies in the early 1990s and simultaneously attests to the continuing importance of many contributions to the collection. Ben-Zvi’s collection, primarily focused on Glaspell’s work for the theater, provides a wealth of critical material. The collection is divided into five parts, the first three dealing with Glaspell’s drama, the fourth with her position vis-à-vis Provincetown and the dramatic canon, and the fifth with her fiction. This last section feels a bit tacked on conceptually and is probably the least interesting for scholars of O’Neill and American theater.

The introduction, unfortunately not updated for this edition, situates the work within the state of Glaspell criticism in 1995 and argues for a methodology that attempts to “use critical approaches that allow works to emerge . . . in all their ‘otherness,’ not as ‘more of the same’” (6). One of the strengths of this book is that these essays speak to one another, though perhaps too often in agreement, and share methodological investments in historical contextualization and various feminisms. While this synergy makes the collection as a whole an important and useful introduction to Glaspell’s work, it also renders the possibility of implicitly narrowing the critical modes of Glaspell studies; a similar concern about the state of Glaspell studies was voiced by one of the contributors, J. Ellen Gainor, in the introduction to her recent critical study, Susan Glaspell in Context (2001).

Part One, on Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers,” provides a rich context for the teaching and study of both works. Linda Ben-Zvi’s groundbreaking essay, “‘Murder She Wrote’: The Genesis of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles,” examines the origins of the play in the 1901 murder of John Hossack, which Glaspell covered for the Des Moines Daily News. Providing the facts of the murder as well as Glaspell’s coverage and reproductions of the pen and ink drawings Glaspell contributed to her articles, Ben-Zvi makes a persuasive argument for Glaspell’s evolving and deepening relationship with the case based on her presumed visit to the Hossack farm. Her conclusion, however, clearly recognizes that Glaspell does not employ the material details in specific terms, and insists that the play’s themes are crucially located in both 1901 and 1916, and more invested in “legal and social empowerment” (39) than in “arguing sexual difference” (42). Elaine Hedges’s article, “Small Things Reconsidered,” another invaluable aid for teaching these texts, provides a rich contextual reading of the details in the short story version, offering a clear sense of the massive domestic labor involved in maintaining a household.

Part Two takes as its primary subject The Verge, a disturbing play whose protagonist, Claire, murders a potential lover to avoid derailing her botanical experiments, and one of two full-length works by Glaspell (Inheritors being the other) that have been restored to the canon of major American plays. The Verge lends itself easily to psychoanalytic and feminist readings and the contributions here are clearly locatable within those discourses. Liza Maeve Nelligan’s “Contextual Reading of Trifles and The Verge” places them within feminist discourses, arguing that the first play reaffirms an essential notion of woman while the second begins to present a more radical, individualized notion of woman’s life that rejected even the contemporary notion of companionate marriage. Barbara Ozieblo’s “Suppression and Society in Susan Glaspell’s Theater” surveys the popular misconceptions of psychoanalysis that enabled the writing of Suppressed Desires, but argues that The Verge reveals the playwright’s uncertainty as to the success of these methods. Marcia Noe’s essay subtitled “L’Ecriture Feminine at the Provincetown” parallels Claire’s intentions with Cixous’s language in “The Laugh of the Medusa” arguing that neither can “escape structures except through annihilation” (140). Though potentially powerful, this parallel reading is a bit schematic and consequently less elucidating than it could be.

Part Three, “Full-Length Female Figures,” focuses on Glaspell’s full­length dramas, reading them once again as feminist projects and providing historical contexts. A central trope in Glaspell, the absent central character is here presented as a way of articulating the difficulties of woman’s self­hood and rewriting the scripts for female subjectivity. The most interesting contributions to this section, however, are J. Ellen Gainor’s contextualization of Chains of Dew within the public and theatrical discourse around birth control and Katharine Rodier’s clarification of the cultural work accomplished by Alison’s House, the 1931 Pulitzer prize-winner often dismissed (both in her own time and ours), but “which framed for Glaspell both an interpretation of current quarrels over Emily Dickinson and an instance of self-definition” (197).

Perhaps most interesting for scholars of O’Neill is the fourth part, entitled “Re-Visioning the Dramatic Canon,” which situates Glaspell’s work within both micro- and macro-theatrical contexts: the other women who created plays for the Provincetown Players, and on the other hand, the larger picture of American drama. Judith Barlow’s essay “Susan’s Sisters” reminds us that “[m]ore than a third of the plays performed by the Provincetown were written or coauthored by women” (260), and, through brief readings of many of the plays, offers a glimpse not only into “the cross-fertilization that undoubtedly took place” (262) but also casts light on contributions by lesser­known women playwrights. Barlow’s intent is not necessarily to recuperate these works but rather to provide a richer context for the study of Glaspell and the Provincetown theater. Gerhard Bach’s intervention into the debates about canonicity provides a suggestive overview, arguing for a critical viewpoint that recognizes “that Susan Glaspell’s dramatic opus reflects, more so than the combined plays of any other American playwright of the early twentieth century, the development of modern American drama as an indigenous art” (240).

The visibility of its shortcomings are precisely a marker of the successes of Ben-Zvi’s volume, for subsequent studies of Glaspell and her contexts are clearly indebted to the rigorous and generous contextual work of this highly valuable collection.

Jon D. Rossini
University of California, Davis

 

RUPENDRA GUHA MAJUMDAR. CENTRAL MAN: THE PARADOX OF HEROISM IN MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003. 366 pp. ISBN 90-5201-978-9.

If one can fight through the highly abstract language of Majumdar’s study, one finds an interesting and challenging thesis. It is that the heroic idealism inherent in the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, supplemented by the religious pluralism of William James and by Frederick Jackson Turner’s theories about the frontier’s relationship to the American character, generated attitudes underlying early twentieth-century American drama which gradually deteriorated but were reborn in the drama of revolt, especially black drama, in the mid-to-later twentieth century.

Transcendentalist idealism, Majumdar suggests, is first recognizable in American drama in the early twentieth-century plays of William Vaughn Moody, whose The Great Divide deals with the heroism of the white settler contending with the opening of the American West, and Ridgely Torrence (like his friend Moody a Harvard-educated New Englander), whose Simon the Cyrenian and Granny Maumee signify the black man’s coming of age.

These plays are followed, however, by plays that suggest to Majumdar the “enervation” of the white hero, the “frontier Adam”: e. e. cummings’s him, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine. These plays apparently fit together for Majumdar in that some sort of idealism is compromised, but their respective heroes—the disillusioned modernist, the disgruntled old New England farmer, and the machine­dominated Mr. Zero—hardly seem of a piece. But it becomes clearer what Majumdar is after when he contrasts these figures with the central figures of the nascent black drama of the period: O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom, and Marita Bonner’s The Purple Flower, whose central figures in very different ways anticipate the more militant black drama of the 1960s. (Marita Bonner was a black school teacher of the 1920s to whom the later Lorraine Hansberry was especially indebted.)

The decline of the white hero really begins, says Majumdar, with O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions and The Iceman Cometh, in which O’Neill abandons his dream of saving philosophies and heroes through figures like Simon Harford in Mansions, who betrays his attempt to be another Thoreau to become instead a robber baron, and especially the infamous false savior Hickey of Iceman. These plays set the stage for the still more despair-ridden plays of Edward Albee, especially his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In turn, Majumdar also looks at Arthur Kopit’s shattering of the frontier myth in Indians, and drug-culture plays like Jack Gelber’s The Connection. (Majumdar never mentions Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead in this context, though it would certainly seem to fit.)

Concomitant with the decline of the white hero, Majumdar sees the beginnings of a new black hero in 1960’s plays inspired by Malcolm X, plays whose roots are to be found in Thoreau’s rebel idealism and Langston Hughes’s 1935 Mulatto. Majumdar follows the lead of Leroi Jones’s Dutchman and Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, plays which insist their central figures declare a heroism based on pride in their blackness and possibly violent discrediting of the white world in which they live. Majumdar also discusses Charles Marowitz’s variant of these ideas in An Othello, a play in which a “hip” Iago forces the Othello figure to acknowledge his blackness before being strangled by a whorish Desdemona.

In a free-wheeling final chapter, Majumdar looks forward to a new American dramatic hero through discussion of not only David Mamet and Sam Shepard but also Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty,” Camus’s Sisyphus, and Genet’s The Blacks. Majumdar here fancifully imagines a new fusion of black and white hero in the image of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, the abandoned and incurably wounded hero, who for Majumdar represents the American black who is finally understood and rescued by Neoptolemus (Achilles’s son), Majumdar’s representative of the new American white. Neoptolemus opposes and overcomes Odysseus, who for Majumdar represents the old American white who wants to do violence to the hero. If nothing else, this discussion reveals Majumdar’s optimism.