|
COPYRIGHT 2007 ELT Press
THE PLAYWRIGHT and activist Elizabeth Robins concluded Way Stations (1913), a collection of her various suffrage writings, with a tale of how a suffragette drags herself from her sickbed to submit an article explaining the rationale of window breaking and civil disobedience, only to have the article rejected by an outraged editor. The suffragette sits dejected in a tearoom, despairing of her militant message ever reaching those who need it, like the pretty young shop girl opposite, flirting with a forty-year-old, thick-necked man "of a superior class." (1) The sixteen-year-old is "plainly marked out for treading the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire," but the suffragettes' message has reached her nonetheless; she suddenly responds to the man's insinuating offer of protection by declaring that if women can break windows she can look after herself. A suffragette's stone thrown through a Bond Street window, shattering the display of jewels and silk, offers her a glimpse of "a courage she would never know." Robins resigns the shop girl to her inevitable fate: "I am afraid the women in Holloway, or out, were too late to save that girl. But the women in Holloway had given her a glimpse, at least of a possible defiance hurled at evil--one flash of that bright weapon in the air before the dark of yielding." (2) This is a new telling of an old story; uneducated and lowly paid, the shop girl is bound to fall victim to the lure of jewels and silk, but a violent vision of stone throwing offers the possibility of some day rewriting the predestined ending. The tale Robins tells in her article was enacted repeatedly in suffrage theatre, as feminist playwrights sought to disrupt the narrative of women's sexual subjection with the disturbing possibility of female agency.
The Women Writers' Suffrage League (WWSL) and the Actresses' Franchise League (AFL) were founded in 1908 with the express purpose of supporting the suffrage campaign with propaganda, plays, sketches and performances. Other sources of feminist theatre included the Woman's Theatre, formed in 1913 by Inez Bensusan "to give woman her proper chance in dramatic art, both as professional artist and as typical specimen of her sex reflected in the drama," and Edith Craig's Pioneer Players, a company formed in 1911 whose objectives included producing plays in support of contemporary movements. (3) Between them these companies produced over twenty plays that centred on women's sexual "sin" and judgement, from poverty-driven prostitution to sexual harassment, seduction and royal adultery. (4) New plays were produced and old plays were revived, from Paphnutius by Hrotsvit, a tenth-century nun, which depicted a courtesan's conversion and penance, to Bernard Shaw's controversial and unlicensed Mrs. Warren's Profession. (5)
The proliferation of plays dealing with women's sexuality is surprising on a number of grounds. The AFL and the Pioneer Players aimed to produce plays that could serve the suffrage cause as a whole, regardless of the political divisions between the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), for example, but few subjects were as divisive as that of sexual morality. Feminist views on sexuality ranged from the doctrine of free love espoused by the Freewoman and its advocates, to the careful conservatism of Millicent Fawcett, requesting that Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy resign from the Married Women's Property Committee lest the scandal attached to her having legitimised her child after its birth should tar the campaign. (6) The sexual theme of these suffrage plays is also unexpected in the light of suffragists' desire to challenge the doctrine that, as Christabel Pankhurst put it, "woman is sex and beyond that nothing." (7) Plots centring on seduction, pregnancy and commercial sex not only concentrated attention on women's physical relation to men, but also brought actresses back to the roles they played in box-office favourites such as Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Henry Arthur Jones's Mrs. Dane's Defence and J. B. Fagan's Bella Donna, which focused on the heroine's fallen sexuality and thus, inevitably, the actress's body. (8)
As critics of Edwardian feminist theatre agree, a vital propagandist method for many playwrights was to mimic and then undermine established theatrical genres, challenging the assumptions that underlay conventional plot structures. As Sheila Stowell has noted, "realism (in the form of naturalism) was championed as a means of challenging the ideological assumptions imbedded in melodrama and the well-made-play." (9) A number of these suffrage plays rewrite theatrical conventions of the fallen woman by emphasising the economic and social conditions that force women into selling their bodies, thus challenging the romantic model of the well-made play, wherein women were most often tempted from the path of virtue by moral weakness, emotional impulsiveness, vanity or misplaced notions of sexual equality. (10)
Feminist works such as Cicely Hamilton's Marriage as a Trade (1909) argued that, without decent employment opportunities or training, women were left no option but to trade their bodies for a living, whether in marriage or on the streets. (11) The problem in translating such socially determinist arguments into drama was that it could produce a depressingly defeatist work, in which women were denied an active role, being reduced to powerless victims of a vicious social system. In John Galsworthy's The Fugitive (1913) Clare leaves the sexual bondage of a loveless marriage, only to find herself unable to earn a decent living and the play ends with her taking poison rather than face prostituting herself night after night. In La Femme Seule (1912) by Eugene Brieux, chosen by the Woman's Theatre as an opening production, Therese undergoes a similar journey. Orphaned and penniless, she refuses to marry her fiance without his parents' consent and instead attempts to earn her own living, but she loses her job at a feminist newspaper after being sexually harassed, and is driven out of her next job at a workshop by angry male workers after she founds a women's trade union. Left jobless, she heads to the railway station to rejoin her fiance, implicitly to accept defeat and live with him as his mistress. (12) Reviews in the suffrage press applauded the feminist sympathies that lay behind the plays' depictions of the job market, but several reviewers were troubled by their pessimism. "With all M. Brieux's earnestness and high ideals, I cannot look upon such a false and pessimistic presentment of woman in the labour-market as desirable propaganda for the Feminist cause," declared a reviewer in the Suffragette. (13) A reviewer in Votes for Women similarly castigated the "fastidious weakness" of Galsworthy's heroine and criticised both plays for assuming love to be every woman's ultimate goal, concluding of La Femme Seule that "the whole thing is rather a statement of difficulty than a solution, and, though M. Brieux has attempted to state it honestly, there is over all a sense of hindrance and defeat." (14) Both reviewers clearly favour plays that, while depicting the obstacles that confront women, allow the possibility of women successfully overcoming them.
Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), the first play in this mode, was hardly optimistic, ending with the New Woman, Vivie, retiring in relief to the simplicity of accountancy in the face of the vast social corruption revealed to her, while her mother, the indefatigable Mrs. Warren, has made a fortune by joining the system she cannot beat. (15) There was a clear suffragist preference for plays that celebrated female action and allowed the possibility of change. Yet, while defeatism was unattractive, if escape was possible for one woman, why not for the rest? To allow the possibility of one woman defeating the odds and escaping sexual degradation implied that others' failure to do so must in some way relate to their particular personality--an implication which came dangerously close to a conventional emphasis on the fallen woman's essentially flawed character.
The novelty of naturalism, as Raymond Williams has defined it, was "its demonstration of the production of character or action by a powerful natural or social environment." The limits of naturalism, Williams argues, are tested by the attempt to depict character not only shaped by environment but in turn shaping it: "to see environment actively--not as a passive determining force, but as a dynamic history and Society--needed the new and more mobile conventions of social expressionism." (16) This neatly articulates the challenge that a number of feminist playwrights faced: offering a naturalistic depiction of social forces while preserving the possibility of individual action bringing about social change.
Elizabeth Robins's Votes for Women!, which premiered at the Court Theatre, directed by Harley Granville Barker, in April 1907, was, as Sheila Stowell has remarked, "a grab-bag of conventions recycled for feminist ends," combining a carefully choreographed crowd scene at a Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting with a number of cliched plot turns from the familiar fallen woman play. (17) The play's success can be credited with inspiring the suffrage theatre...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
