Invisible Women: Problem Drama, 1890–1920

Alick: What is charm, Maggie?

Maggie: Oh, it's—it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have. Some women, the few, have charm for all; and most have charm for one. But some have charm for none.
—J. M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows (1908)

The rhetoric of realism thematizes the theatrical relationship between the drama, its performance, and the audience. The realistic stage offers an explicitly epistemological drama, both staging new objects of knowledge to the view of its middle-class audience and inspecting the status of knowledge itself, entwined as it is with evasion, blindness, and self-deception. Yet for all their power, the drama's techniques of disclosure bear a disturbing likeness to the structure of theatrical perception in the proscenium house. Knowledge in the drama is both claimed and compromised by the means of its making, as characters insistently deploy the relations of realistic theater—privileged observers, staged objects—as an instrument of understanding and empowerment. In realistic drama, knowledge frequently takes the form of the voyeuristic recognition of subjects unacknowledged by the middle-class audience: the struggles of sexual domination, of poverty, of industrial oppression. By collapsing social, economic, and gender concerns into the dramatic problem of social mobility and visibility, the "woman with a past" presents an important instance of this trope. At the turn of the century, to bring such women into view as anything other than melodramatic villains was widely regarded as a fascinating, risky coup de théâtre . As Arthur Wing Pinero's biographer Hamilton Fyfe asked, characterizing much of the contemporary reception of The Second Mrs Tanqueray , "Why recognize the existence of women of

Paula's class at all? These subjects are not for public discussion, even by the preacher. We should be kept from all knowledge of such things" (Arthur Wing Pinero 145). To bring "women" to the stage is both a stunning and a typical event in the late Victorian period. In many respects the social stigma and attraction of a Marguerite, a Paula Tanqueray, a Mrs. Dane, or Oscar Wilde's Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs. Cheveley are identical to the allure of actresses of the time, the magnetism of Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Elizabeth Robins, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, even of Ellen Terry. Here, I want to ask how the drama of the "woman with a past" represents the rhetoric of realism, how the drama reframes the working of theatrical visibility and interpretation as the structure of social action in the larger world beyond the stage. Staging the "woman with a past" discloses the rhetorical reciprocity between theatrical production and the ordering of society characteristic of the first generation of modern British and American stage realism.

To establish the relationship between class power and theatrical visibility in this drama, I would like first to set the "woman with a past" in the wider context of two plays by John Galsworthy, The Silver Box (1906) and The Skin Game (1920). The Silver Box is often taken as an example of Edwardian social realism, the representation of social ills for the edification and entertainment of the theater-going public. The play opens with Jones, an unemployed groom, being invited into the home of Jack Barthwick, wastrel son of a Liberal M.P. In a moment of drunken exuberance, Jack reveals that the reticule he carries has been lifted from his companion for the evening, a woman of questionable reputation; Jones takes this revelation as his cue to lift a silver cigarette case. When the box is missed, Mrs. Jones—the Barthwicks' char—is automatically suspected. The police raid her flat; she protests her innocence, and is restrained. Jones then confesses his guilt, and when the policeman does not believe him, Jones assaults him. After a struggle, Jones is subdued and taken into custody. The final movement of the play concerns Jones's trial and the Barthwicks' efforts to avoid publicity (because Jones assaulted the policeman, the charges cannot be dropped). In the end, Jones is sentenced to hard labor, and Mrs. Jones is acquitted but left unemployed, without references, adrift.

Galsworthy's immediate concern is evident: to expose the hypocrisy of Barthwick's "equal justice." Like his contemporaries, Gals-

worthy masks his designs in the guise of impersonality, setting "before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted , by the dramatist's outlook" (Inn 190). As a detective drama, The Silver Box assigns a prominent role to the transformation of information into knowledge, particularly knowledge of the lower classes, who are treated as a kind of public spectacle. In the second act of the play, for example, after Jones has been arrested, Mrs. Barthwick discusses the servant troubles of a neighbor, whose "girl used to have her young man to see her." Such a girl must be dismissed from service, as an example to others. What rankles Mrs. Barthwick, though, is not really the sexual impropriety but what the situation implies, that the serving girl is able to maintain a wholly private sphere of life:

Servants have too much license. They hang together so terribly you never can tell what they're really thinking; it's as if they were all in a conspiracy to keep you in the dark. Even with Marlow [the trusted family butler], you feel that he never lets you know what's really in his mind. I hate that secretiveness; it destroys all confidence. . . . It goes all through the lower classes. You can not tell when they are speaking the truth.
(18)

The play works to expose both the Jones and the Barthwick families to our view, but the formal symmetry that relates the moral structure of family life to financial security works to expose a deeply asymmetrical access to privacy and the power it represents. The audience's power is—as Stanislavski recognized—always coercive; privacy in the realistic drama and theater is the sign and the means of privilege. In The Silver Box , it is the power to exercise this privilege to stage the lower classes, to force them to dramatize themselves and their native vices, that conveys the Barthwicks' social prestige. Summoning Mrs. Jones to explain the missing box, for instance, the Barthwicks subject her to a relentless interrogation and extract an apparently shocking confession: that she was pregnant with their first child before she and Jones were married. Of course, the words themselves can't be spoken in the polite confines of the Edwardian drawing-room stage:

BARTHWICK: You mean he—ahem—

MRS. JONES: Yes, sir; and of course after he lost his place he married me.

MRS. BARTHWICK: You actually mean to say you—you were—

BARTHWICK: My dear—

MRS. BARTHWICK: (Indignantly ) How disgraceful!
(12)

Although Mrs. Barthwick speaks as a conventionally respectable matron, she is in the position to produce the secret information that it is otherwise impolite for her to recognize. Her respectability is based on the proprieties that "protect" her from such acknowledgment, the recognition of women whose sexuality is more openly symptomatic of their oppression. The proprieties that keep such issues unspoken operate at the convenience of the privileged: Mrs. Jones has no alternative but to reply, to expose her past to the view of her betters, onstage and off.

As a figure for the audience of realism, Mrs. Barthwick epitomizes the relationship between visibility, privacy, and class that runs throughout the play and that is finally brought into focus by Jones's climactic trial. While the Barthwicks stage Jones, they are able to control their own entrance onto the public stage, summoning the invisible pressures of "society" to justify their behavior. The Joneses, as the play surely shows, are more completely in that society's control. Despite his "great sympathy with the poor," Barthwick is easily persuaded that his failure to prosecute is "simply not fair to other people. It's putting property at the mercy of anyone who likes to take it," and that the courts take the problem "out of our hands" (24). Barthwick's sentimental liberalism is dramatized as a form of hypocrisy, a refusal to acknowledge that his social responsibilities are enabled by his extraordinary access to the machinery of social representation, a gesture that is literalized in the play's final action:

MRS. JONES: (Turning to him with a humble gesture ) Oh! Sir!—

BARTHWICK hesitates, then yielding to his nerves, he makes a shamefaced gesture of refusal, and hurries out of Court. MRS. JONES stands looking after him.
(32)

Retreating shamefaced from the court, Barthwick leaves Mrs. Jones alone, her unfortunate past, and her unfortunate present, now common property.^[11]

[11] On class in Galsworthy's drama, see Scrimgeour; for a description of the play's attention to verisimilitude in performance, see Kennedy 54–56.

The Silver Box is typical of the social analysis characteristic of the realistic theater, the theater's tendency at once to stage the social other while protecting the audience from the consequences of such contact, much as Mrs. Barthwick averted her eyes when "one of those unemployed came up and spoke to me" (18). The play's vision of social order is signaled by the power that an unseen, unpublicized, socially privileged audience has to control its own presentation, and to enforce the representation of others. In its depiction of privacy as power, The Silver Box exposes the detachment of realistic drama—"the selfless character which soaks it with inevitability," that so attracted Galsworthy—as an instance of the wider social economy surrounding and defining theatrical representation (Inn 192).

Sitting in the dark, beyond the dramatic action, the audience exerts an obscure pressure on the realistic stage's claim to objectivity. In The Silver Box , a woman's "past" provides an instance of the unspeakable, and so provides an occasion for the Barthwicks to dramatize their own status by making her speak. Regarding the "woman with a past" solely as a figure for Victorian-Edwardian sexual anxiety markedly oversimplifies her subversive and overdetermined position in the structure of social precedence, an instability not assignable simply to the issues of sexual freedom and the "double standard." Galsworthy's late play The Skin Game (1920) is particularly suggestive of this figure's general implication in the class dynamics of performance, not least because it at first seems unconcerned with the "woman question." The play dramatizes the social disintegration of an English country village. The Hillcrists, an established landed family, have been forced to sell some property to the Hornblowers, industrialists "representative of the newly rich, pushfully aggressive, brutally energetic manufacturing class," in the words of an early critic. From the outset, the play establishes an unstable and ironic relationship between the two families, for "caste feeling finds its antagonist not in morality but in vulgarity" (Coats 139). As a gentleman—"a man who keeps his form and doesn't let life scupper him out of his standards" (352)—Hillcrist sells property to Hornblower with the understanding that his tenants will remain undisturbed, an understanding that Hornblower violates in order to put the property to more productive use: digging claypits and building a pottery. The predictable conflict between the gracious gentry

and the rapacious manufacturer then develops a fascinating twist. Although Hornblower may be crude and grudging at times, his works will "supply thousands of people" (356), and the play exposes the Hillcrists' treatment of him as unmannerly, dishonest, and dishonorable. When Hillcrist complains that Hornblower's works would spoil the views from his home, hornblower is justly amazed: "How the man talks! Why! Ye'd think he owned the sky, because his fathers built him a house with a pretty view, where he's nothing to do but live. It's sheer want of something to do that gives ye your fine sentiments, Hillcrist" (357). Hillcrist's spectatorial distance from the community—he could relocate the dispossessed tenants to his own property, after all—enables him to conceive his social responsibility in moral generalities, as empathy rather than as action. As Hornblower points out, "You county folk are fair awful hypocrites. Ye talk about good form and all that sort o' thing. It's just the comfortable doctrine of the man in the saddle; sentimental varnish" (358).

Galsworthy gives the play its decisive turn, however, at the close of act 1, when the "past" of Hornblower's daughter-in-law Chloe suddenly intrudes and provides the organizing focus for the play. Chloe bears the actress-like marks of illicit entry into respectable society—"Lots of women powder and touch up their lips nowadays," Hillcrist's daughter Jill says of her (361)—and raises Hornblower's suspicions when she joins with Mrs. Hillcrist to bring about a compromise between the two families; he reminds them that "ladies should keep to their own business" (370). In fact, though, Mrs. Hillcrist is keeping to her business, the ordering of gender in the closed society of the provincial town. Chloe, it emerges, has been a "highly recommended" figure in London life. As Mrs. Hillcrist describes her, blackmailing Hornblower, "When cases are arranged, Mr. Hornblower, the man who is to be divorced often visits an hotel with a strange woman. I am extremely sorry to say that your daughter-in-law, before her marriage, was in the habit of being employed as such a woman" (379–80). Chloe's "past" completely alters the battle for status and power between the two families. Although Hillcrist recoils at first from the blackmail, the claims of property eventually overcome his "standards." Hornblower, once energetically scornful of landed propriety, is finally crushed by it. He sells the Hillcrists back their property at a ruinous loss, but the

secret gets out nonetheless. His family's reputation in the village is ruined, his son's marriage is destroyed, and when Chloe throws herself into the gravel pit his grandchild is miscarried.

The "woman with a past" clarifies the social relations informing the open struggle for property: the sweet science of social manners is in fact a bare-knuckle brawl, a skin game of class power. The prizes are material, but the fight is waged in the ideological register of reputation, privilege, and honor, the register that assigns a stigmatizing priority to Chloe's illicit past. As in The Silver Box , "knowledge" has ruined Hornblower and his family, but in The Skin Game , that illicit past also reveals what might be called the natural history of class conflict and implicitly relates it to the structure of realistic theatricality. Early in the play, Hornblower recalls Shaw's Andrew Undershaft, boasting that although he has "no ancestors" and "no past," his industry will assure him the "future" (356). The fact that Hornblower's family and future can be ruined by the Hillcrists' manipulative code of "honour," implies that the "comfortable doctrine of the man in the saddle" not only pervades this society but orders the function of its history as well. The play opposes men and women, new and old, future and past, bourgeois and aristocrat, industry and agriculture. By giving Chloe's past the power to destroy Hornblower as neither his rapaciousness nor his vulgarity could, the Hillcrists (and Galsworthy) insert Hornblower into a history that subjects him to the proprieties of the landed classes.

Describing the realistic playwright's relation to the world he dramatizes, Galsworthy suggests that the "dramatist's license, in fact, ends with his design."

In conception alone he is free. He may take what character or group of characters he chooses, see them with what eyes, knit them with what idea, within the limits of his temperament; but once taken, seen, and knitted, he is bound to treat them like a gentleman, with the tenderest consideration of their mainsprings.
(Inn 196)

Although The Skin Game works to expose the hypocrisy of the Hillcrists' gentility, Galsworthy tends to "treat them like a gentleman," to realize their code of empowerment in the play's framing structure of visibility. The play forces the Hillcrists to betray their own aristocratic ideals, but they nonetheless do finally succeed in contaminating and destroying the Hornblowers. As a representa-

tion of the operation of knowledge in class and social relations, the "woman with a past" locates the power of the voyeur, the spectator's power to subject or destroy the other by making it a figure on the public stage.

To be offstage in this drama is hardly to be powerless: the ability to stage others while remaining private and unseen becomes both a sign and an instrument of privilege. In this sense, realistic drama thematizes the relations of visibility governing its theater as the social environment of the world it shows on the stage. The drama, the theater, and their society naturalize the working of realistic vision as a feature of the environment, as constitutive of reality itself. Galsworthy's plays refract theatrical representation as a feature of social class; Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray draws our attention more directly to how the means of the realistic stage—acting, imitation—define the representation of gender both in the theater and in society at large. The play is a celebrated example of the genre. Aubrey Tanqueray, a widower, marries Paula Jarman, a well-known companion to the gentlemen of the social elite. When his daughter Ellean decides to return home from the convent where she was raised, a competition for Aubrey's attentions arises between Ellean and her stepmother. Fortunately, Ellean takes a European tour with a respectable neighbor, leaving Aubrey and Paula to sort out their new relationship. But Ellean returns with a suitor, who turns out to be one of Paula's former lovers: Paula, recognizing that there is no place for her in this society, commits suicide. In the view shared by Bernard Shaw and Martin Meisel, the play both piques and placates its audience by providing for the final denunciation and execution of Paula under the guise of an avowed desire for "tolerance." More recently, Austin E. Quigley has argued that Cayley Drummle's observation of the action—he calls himself "a spectator in life; nothing more than a man at a play, in fact . . . an old-fashioned playgoer" (Tanqueray 87)—masks his pivotal role as "the agent of condemnation," whose "sentimentality and forgiveness" (responses analogous to those the play invites from its audience) "perpetuate rather than revise the very standards to which Paula's youthful behaviour might pose a challenge" (Quigley 85).^[12] The figure of the spectator

[12] Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties 1: 45–46; and Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater 141–59. Quigley argues that the audience whoseviews are represented by Drummle "is thus challenged and undercut by the action of a play that undermines the very perspective the audience is encouraged to adopt. . . . The play lacks, as the well-made play must, a convincing advocate of alternative values; but the action of the play itself becomes an advocate of alternative values, an action that outruns, and demonstrates the limitations of, the benevolent perspective of its raisonneur " (89). This salutary effort to theorize the play's theatrical operation is, in this detail, perhaps at odds with Pinero's conception of Drummle. Writing to George Alexander in April 1893, Pinero expressed doubts about the casting of the part: "Read over the first act and note how bright and chirpy Drummle ought to be. In a very serious play a ray of brightness is invaluable" (Pinero, Collected Letters 143).

works to confirm the complicity of "tolerance" in the dramatic necessity of Paula's suicide.

Paula's visibility to spectators like Drummle and the larger audience of which he is a part is not merely the sign of a sexual double standard, in that Paula and her kind play a significant role in the reproduction of the social order itself. Even at the outset, Paula clearly has a kind of currency among the male characters in the play, all of whom know her and may know her intimately; she is particularly close to Drummle, who serves as her confidant. To say that the way of the world—the "name we give our little parish of St James's" (86)—works through the occlusion of this woman is only half the story, for tolerance provides a screen for Paula's commodification, valuation, and exchange. Initially, the play poses Paula as unique in her ability to elide the boundary between St. James's and her own marginal status, momentarily obscured by her cultivated performance. Unlike crass Mabel Hervey—herself recently married into the aristocracy—Paula easily enters the gestural realm of Aubrey's class. The play works to establish, despite obvious differences in manner and character, the similarity between Paula and Mabel, and to urge that Paula too is "a lady who would have been, perhaps had been, described in the reports of the Police or the Divorce Court as an actress. . . . Her affections, emotions, impulses, her very existence—a burlesque!" (80–81). Mabel's evident vulgarity seems to confirm Drummle's portrait, but his remarks are equally applicable to Paula, for the language of the theater trails her throughout the play as well. The brilliance with which Paula enacts the manners and customs of the St. James's parish renders her

much more problematic to the society of the play and to the patrons of the St. James's Theatre where the play was first performed. Arriving late and alone at Aubrey's rooms, for instance, Paula dreams about her married future:

It was perfect. I saw you at the end of a very long table, opposite me, and we exchanged sly glances now and again over the flowers. We were host and hostess, Aubrey, and had been married about five years. . . . And on each side of us was the nicest set imaginable—you know, dearest, the sort of men and women that can't be imitated.
(89)

Ready to penetrate Aubrey's society through imitation, Paula nevertheless hopes that the traces of her origins will be erased by her performance: "I seemed to know by the look on their faces that none of our guests had ever heard anything—anything—anything peculiar about the fascinating hostess." It is, of course, precisely her ability to "imitate" this class that makes her valuable, even attractive, and at the same time vulnerable to devaluation, "anybody's, in less gentle society I should say everybody's, property," as Drummle blithely remarks of Mabel (80). For "imitation" debases the currency of social status, and finally marks Paula's illegitimacy.

Drummle's reference to Mabel Hervey as an "actress" is a common euphemism, but nonetheless points to the kinship between Paula and the stage. Both the public display required by their profession and the wider, nondomestic sphere of their experience tended to class actresses among public "women" rather than domestic "ladies." Tracy C. Davis argues that the routine violation of "conventions of dress, make-up, gesture, and association that distinguished 'respectable women' from the demi-monde" tended to associate actresses with prostitutes in the public imagination, and were often conventionalized in Victorian pornography (314).^[13] Paula's valuation is that of the realistic theater, which regards the world that can be staged as degraded. Paula shares her public

[13] Shaw recognized that the actress's professional development required "a latitude in her social relations which, though perfectly consistent with a much higher degree of self-respect than is at all common among ordinary respectable ladies, involves a good deal of knowledge which is forbidden to 'pure' women," and he characteristically urged the actress to be proud that she "is essentially a work-woman and not a lady" (Our Theatres 3:277).

status with "women" of all kinds—street prostitutes, actresses, even suffrage speakers—a kinship that exiles her from the inimitable world of much of the St. James's Theatre audience. As Wilde's Lord Goring (An Ideal Husband , St. James's Theatre, 1895) remarks of a similar woman, "Well, she wore far too much rouge last night, and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman" (423).

Once married, in fact, Paula's enactment of the snooty conventions of respectability works to mark her difference from those she copies, rather than her similarity to them. In a key scene, when Aubrey's old friend Mrs. Cortelyon presents herself apologetically to Paula for an introduction, it is Paula's masterful performance of injured respectability that betrays her, signifying her inadmissibility into the inner circle.

PAULA: Why, because it is two months since we came to Highercoombe, and I don't remember your having called.

MRS CORTELYON: Your memory is now terribly accurate. No, I've not been away from home, and it is to explain my neglect that I am here, rather unceremoniously, this morning.

PAULA: Oh, to explain—quite so. (with mock solicitude ) Ah, you've been very ill; I ought to have seen that before.

MRS CORTELYON: Ill!

PAULA: You look dreadfully pulled down. We poor women show illness so plainly in our faces don't we?
(100–101)

This powerful scene conveys Paula's anger, her desperation to forge a respectable home life, and her fear that she is being undermined by Mrs. Cortelyon, who offers to escort Ellean on the European tour. And yet the effect of the scene is to stress Paula's misplaying of the proprieties of respectability. Playing the role of "Mrs. Tanqueray," Paula's performance can only be an imitation, dramatizing the "termagant aspect of poor Paula at the expense of her more sympathetic, her equally natural and genuine, qualities," as Pinero wrote to Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Collected Letters 147). Even Pinero finds Paula's performative aspect vulgar; it is hardly surprising that Clement Scott saw Pinero's "natural and genuine" heroine as "a woman so vulgar, so shrewish, so unlovable, so destitute of

taste that she sets the sensitive teeth on edge. . . . She is simply vulgar and ill-bred" (qtd. in Booth 2: 338–39).

Such performances dramatize the function of "imitation" in this society. Regenia Gagnier has argued that Wilde's drama tends to present this society as "a society of spectacle only," in which the pervasiveness of imitation signals the deeply fetishized nature of upper-bourgeois social enactment (113). The Second Mrs Tanqueray , on the other hand, treats acting in a more limited way, not as a generalized social behavior, but as a practice, a profession, required of an oppressed female class for the entertainment and stimulation of male patrons. The play treats Paula as a better class of prostitute than Mabel Hervey, but when Paula uses acting to pursue her own ends rather than to make her a partner fit for public display, she is classed among the vulgar interlopers, as a version of Mabel rather than as the seductive "Mrs. Jarman." Entering this society as an actress enters the stage, Paula can only perform as an ephemeral player:

Oh, I know I'm "going off". I hate paint and dye and those messes, but, by and by, I shall drift the way of the others; I shan't be able to help myself. And then, some day—perhaps very suddenly, under a queer, fantastic light at night or in the glare of the morning—that horrid, irresistible truth that physical repulsion forces on men and women will come to you, and you'll sicken at me. . . . You'll see me then, at last, with other people's eyes; you'll see me just as your daughter does now, as all wholesome folks see women like me. And I shall have no weapon to fight with—not one serviceable little bit of prettiness left me to defend myself with!
(129)

To Pinero's audience, this speech seemed representative "not of Paula's case alone, but of every case like hers, and in a modified degree its truth comes home to all who wantonly break the laws which the experience of the world has made for men and women." Indeed, we may be too cavalier in believing that Paula's suicide provided a comforting denouement for a hypocritical Victorian public. Hamilton Fyfe, for one, thought that suicide "ought only to be permitted in fiction to characters which we may justly regard as heroic. It ought not to be allowed to dignify weak characters which have no heroic elements about them. It is in no sense an expiation; it is merely a way of escape, and a way which very few of the Paulas . . . take, however much they may talk about it" (Arthur Wing Pinero 144, 147). Seen "with other people's eyes," Paula's

performance is devalued as mere "acting." The privileged audience reserves full humanity only for itself.

In his day, "Pinero's power, Pinero's insight into human nature," were widely recognized; like many of his contemporaries, J. T. Grein praised Pinero's women as "amazingly womanly. It is not I who say that, but I have it from women who have studied Pinero's work as closely as any critic."^[14] Yet Shaw argued that there is "no cheaper subject for the character draughtsman than the ill-tempered sensual woman seen from the point of view of the conventional man," the point of view inscribed in the social perspective of realistic objectivity (Our Theatres 1: 45). Shaw rightly suggests that Pinero's conventional morality duplicates the rhetoric of realistic theater, the ideological "point of view" engrained in the social and theatrical apparatus that represents Paula Tanqueray. To become visible through "imitation," as both Paula and the actress do, is at once to become an eroticized "public" woman, a token of masculine desire easily replaced by another of her kind. The Cayley Drummles remain invisible in this economy, just offstage in the audience of old-fashioned playgoers: as the incest motif implies, Paula is redundant, expendable to the inimitable society she enters. Lecturing at Harvard in 1886, the American playwright Bronson Howard outlined the conditions of dramatic survival for characters like Paula: "In England and America, the death of a pure woman on the stage is not 'satisfactory,' except when the play rises to the dignity of tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is not pure, as in the case of 'Frou-Frou,' is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason that it is inevitable. . . . and so an audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman" (27–28). In the theater, the audience both produces Paula and executes her, reproducing its role in the commerce of sexuality in society at large. In this sense, the "intellectual virility" that Archer demanded from the new English drama is, in 1893, already thoroughly present in the structure of realistic representation (1893 144). As the staging of Paula Tanqueray shows, the woman mentioned only impolitely in the drawing room serves as erotic currency onstage and off, dramatizing the implication of realistic vi-

[14] Grein, Dramatic Criticism 1900–1991 279; Grein, Dramatic Criticism 267.

sion in the structures of power, distinction, and "virility" that maintain this theater and this society.

Shaw was convinced that "fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing" (Preface 185). Nonetheless, Shaw's intention to rectify the conventional sentimentality of The Second Mrs Tanqueray in his play Mrs Warren's Profession (written 1893–94) is to some extent undone by his own invocation of the rhetoric of realism, the strategies at hand for "exhibiting" woman on the stage. Shaw's ironic play takes the attitudes sustaining Pinero's dramaturgy as its subject, staging "Mrs. Jarman's Profession" as an emblem of capitalist exploitation and using Vivie Warren's romantic disillusionment to suggest the possibility of social change. Since all "progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions," it is not surprising that Shaw confronts the ideological structure of Pinero's drama. Insofar as progress is "executed by supplanting existing institutions," though, we may ask whether Shaw's retelling of the romance of the "fallen woman" as a parable of capitalism succeeds in supplanting the institutions that represent and objectify "realistic" society in the theater (Preface 194).

As in Pinero and Galsworthy, staging the unspeakable woman provides Shaw with his chief means of criticizing the forms and currents of social power. And, once again, while the knowledge of such women is the prerogative of the wealthy and proper, disacknowledging them is the most common way of exercising that power. The necessity to claim understanding and to disavow knowledge of Mrs. Warren's profession can be keenly felt in the play's critical reception. Although J. T. Grein thought that "most of the women, and a good many of the men [in the audience of the 1902 Stage Society production] . . . did not at first know, and finally merely guessed, what was the woman's trade," the play's moral stance (it may "in some awaken a curiosity which had better been left in slumber") and the model of maturity it offered were deeply troubling. Grein criticized both the play's propriety for the stage—"there was a majority of women to listen to that which

could only be understood by a minority of men"—and Shaw's violation of the dramatic conventions that should provide an interpretive guide for the audience. Shaw, that is, confuses the genre's moral structure and directly challenges it paradigmatic characters, "a mother really utterly degraded, but here and there whitewashed with sentimental effusions, and a daughter so un-English in her knowledge of the world, so cold of heart, and 'beyond human power' in reasoning that we end by hating both." Casting "a cold-blooded, almost sexless daughter as the sympathetic element," Shaw transforms the sentimental rite of passage central to this drama into an intellectual experience. The characterization of Vivie seems to violate the proprieties of social inclusion that assimilate young women into adult society: "By all means let us initiate our daughters before they cross the threshold of womanhood into the duties and functions of life which are vital in matrimony and maternity. But there is a boundary line, and its transgression means peril—the peril of destroying ideals" (1900–1901 293–96).

Shaw, of course, found a gentlemanly code of oppression in such "ideals," arguing that "Mrs Warren's Profession is a play for women; that it was written for women; that it has been performed and produced mainly through the determination of women that it should be performed and produced" (Preface 200). As a realistic staging of "woman," however, Shaw's play remains to a large extent complicit in strategies of realistic visibility and the society it constitutes. For Shaw replaces Cayley Drummle's eroticized "property" with a similarly idealized "woman," or, more accurately, a man in woman's costume. Shaw's play so fully subordinates the gender economy of prostitution to the parable of capital that its ability to examine gender as a commodity on the social market is forestalled. The histrionic sign of the new woman's freedom in the play seems to be her ability to act like a man—smoke a cigar, have a firm handshake, and so on. "I am a man's creation as you see": Vivie's characterization might be said to anticipate the playing of Caryl Churchill's Betty in Cloud Nine (1979), in which the male actor's portrayal of a woman effectively erases the feminine from the categories of patriarchal reality.^[15] By providing his heroine

[15] As Catherine Wiley points out, Vivie's "superiority lies not in her repudiation of the false and debilitating femininity other women sufferunder, but in her belief that she is no different than a man"; as a result, she is "thus as devoid of identity as her mother, Paula Tanqueray, and Mrs. Dane, since she looks like a woman yet is not one; and Shaw's answer to the woman question is unveiled as no answer at all" (121). Gail Finney makes a similar comment of Shaw's Candida , remarking that for Shaw "androgyny is an ideal, but for all his attempts to present men and women as equal and alike, as in Candida , he succeeds only in perpetuating sexual stereotypes that underline the differences between the sexes" (226).

with a veneer of "masculine" behavior, and by characterizing her romantic attachment to Frank as childish, Shaw effectively removes Vivie from the political continuum represented by Mrs. Warren and so refuses to examine how the ordering of gender and the commodification of sexuality inform the economic order that the play subjects to open attack. In this sense, Shaw both criticizes Vivie's isolation—she knows "nothing but mathematics" at the play's outset, and is "absorbed in its figures " at the close (217, 287)—and depends on it to preserve the asymmetry between illegitimacy and respectability, between illicit knowledge and the power demonstrated by its denial. As he would do later in Man and Superman (1905), Shaw assigns an environmental cause to sexual practice, and so removes the construction of gender and sexuality from the dialectical process of his drama. If the economy creates only Mrs. Warren's profession, it remains possible to bracket her activity off from the practice of respectable femininity, a discrimination between "real" and "ideal" social institutions that the play generally takes as illusory. Maintaining an isolating barrier between Vivie's intellectualized energy and the sexuality she shares with Mrs. Warren, Shaw duplicates the divisions between pure and impure women that sustain the theater of Pinero.

"Woman's great art is to lie low, and let the imagination of the male endow her with depths" (Shaw, Our Theatres 1: 202). The rhetoric of realism finds it difficult to treat the "woman question" because its strategies of staging woman are themselves representative of the social machinery the plays attempt to criticize. To transform the politics of this theater, Elizabeth Robins's Votes for Women! (1907) attempts to open its rhetoric to question. This transformation is a difficult one, as Robins suggests in a collection of essays on the suffrage movement. "Let us remember it was only

yesterday that women in any number began to write for the public prints":

But in taking up the pen, what did this new recruit conceive to be her task? To proclaim her own or other women's actual thoughts and feelings? Far from it. Her task, as she naturally and even inevitably conceived it, was to imitate as nearly as possible the method, but above all the point of view, of man.

She wrote her stories as she fashioned her gowns and formed her manners, and for the same reasons; in literature following meekly in the steps of the forgotten Master, the first tribal story-teller, inventor of that chimera, "the man's woman."
(Way Stations 5)

It is a mark of Robins's intimacy with the conventions of the "new drama" that Votes for Women! does, in fact, "imitate as nearly as possible the method" of problem dramaturgy, as its contemporaries recognized: the play's heroine is "a new figure in the long procession of 'women with a past.'"^[16] In the play, a young orphan, Jean Dunbarton, is to be married to a charismatic Conservative member of Parliament, Geoffrey Stonor, who claims to be sympathetic to the suffrage cause. In the opening scene, however, she meets Vida Levering, a vivacious and inspiring social activist in the mold of Christabel Pankhurst. Moreover, she learns from a respectable older woman the secret of Vida's past—sometime earlier, pregnant and deserted, Vida had an abortion. Act 2 takes place at a suffrage rally, where it becomes apparent to Jean that Stonor was the man involved. In the final act, Vida negotiates a deal with Stonor: Vida will convince Jean that she has surrendered her claims to Stonor, so that Jean will marry him, and Stonor will sign an agreement to support women's suffrage in Parliament.

Votes for Women! skilfully and pointedly develops the standard gambits of problem drama, particularly the illicit erotic past of the heroine. Like Paula Tanqueray, Vida continually demonstrates a fluency in the social manners definitive of good breeding, as well as a penchant for violating those properties. Unlike Paula, how-

[16] Qtd. in Marcus 315. Marcus's chapter on Votes for Women! provides an extensive documentation of Robins's involvement in, and sponsorship of, the suffrage movement. Robins used the profits from Votes for Women! to buy a farm in Sussex, which she used to shelter suffragettes both before and after their prison sentences, and to house women in medical school; see also Peters 309.

ever, Vida Levering is interested not in penetrating society, to attain the status of the "inimitable" upper classes, but in reorganizing the social and political order that defines the place of women. Politics is notoriously difficult to stage in realistic theater, which tends to identify political subject matter with tendentiousness of purpose, with "thesis drama." Sexual politics can be spoken about only indirectly, as when someone alludes to Vida's secret "past" as an excuse for her poor standing in society. To mention abortion onstage would have been to bait the censor and lose, much as Shaw had done merely in referring to Mrs. Warren's "profession." Yet as Robins and others recognized, abortion provided a powerful device for politicizing women's social subjection in dramatic terms, and for epitomizing the ideological coercion that keeps the oppressed silent and their suffering unspoken. The unspeakable operation transforms a man's "indiscretion" into a woman's criminal misconduct, presenting her concealment now in terms not of the euphemistic manners of polite society but of the explicit code of the law. In Votes for Women! the woman's past is not at issue; it is the man's crime, and its hold on his future, that spurs the drama.^[17]

While Paula's past destroys her future, Vida's past authorizes and validates her political activity. Reversing the paradigm of her friend Henry James's The Bostonians , in which the child suffrageorator Verena Tarrant is moved by otherworldly inspiration, Robins locates Vida's developing mastery of platform oratory in the au-

[17] In Harley Granville Barker's Waste (1907) abortion also comes to haunt a man poised at the brink of political success. Barker avoided the word "abortion" but could not escape the censorship; Waste was given two private performances in 1907 but not produced publicly until 1936. Robins had better luck with the censor, even though she coyly used the word in another context, and left it to the audience to get the point: "He called them [people without a political stance] 'wretches who never lived,' Dante did, because they'd never felt the pangs of partizanship. And so they wander homeless on the skirts of limbo among the abortions and off-scourings of Creation" (60). On Waste and the ensuing censorship controversy, see Kennedy 85–98, and Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind 222. On staging Votes , see Kennedy 57–61. Thomas Postlewait notes the romantic attraction between Archer and Robins, and suggests that a variety of circumstances—their delay in producing Ibsen's Little Eyolf onstage, Robins's seclusion, inaccuracies in later memoirs—may point to the possibility that Robins was pregnant and gave birth to a child in 1895 (118–19).

thoritative testament of her own experience. In Votes for Women! , women's suffrage is a principal topic of discussion among the characters, and it is not surprising that women who "want to act independently of men" leave themselves open to vicious reclassification by those men: they are seen as "unsexed creatures" (47). Typically, though, the unsexing that transforms ladies into women seems to put them directly in the center of the erotic marketplace. Votes for Women! and The Silver Box shared the London stage for three weeks in the spring of 1907, and they share similar attitudes toward publicity, gender, and class. The woman of the street is always public property, for sale, and "ladies" who enter the public sphere are seen as risking their sanctioned feminine privacy. As an actress known for her pioneering work in bringing Ibsen's plays to the English stage, Robins's professional life was daily concerned with the fierce test of publicity, which directly pointed up her status both as woman and as commodity. In Ancilla's Share , Robins remarks that a "double cause is at the roots of man's long disrespect for the actress—the professional ground, which she shared with the actor, and the ground she occupied alone. . . . To say 'a public man' is to convey the idea of one arrived at eminence, usually at office; at honours, if not honour. To say 'a public woman' is, or was recently, to say a woman of the streets" (76). In Votes for Women! Vida retains the marks of the actress, transformed into a sign of power, part of her ability to define herself before the masculine social spectator. An agitator for improved shelters for indigent women, Vida occasionally disguises herself as a working woman, much as Robins would later disguise herself in the uniform of the Salvation Army to conduct research among the poor for novels and political tracts (Marcus 338). This "acting" becomes the instrument of her social awareness, an activity that reveals the working of gender oppression lurking within the institutions of society.

In her novel The Convert , an adaptation of Votes , Robins elaborates Vida's response to taking the public stage:

Vida glanced at the men. Their eyes were certainly fixed on the two ladies in a curious, direct fashion, not exactly impudent, but still in a way no policeman had ever looked at either of them before. A coolly watchful, slightly contemptuous stare, interrupted by one man turning to say something to the other, at which both grinned. Vida was conscious of wishing that she had come in her usual clothes—above

all, that Janet had not raked out that "jumble sale" object she had perched on her head.
(74)

The realistic theater literalizes the thematics of visibility informing social relations at large. Vida discovers in Votes that far from being a sign of "unsexed" status, a woman's independence seems to register her availability, and vulnerability: "I put on an old gown and a tawdry hat. . . . You'll never know how many things are hidden from a woman in good clothes. The bold, free look of a man at a woman he believes to be destitute—you must feel that look on you before you can understand—a good half of history" (50). To become a "woman" in this society is necessarily to risk the protection, enslaving though it is, of class, position, and sanctioned femininity. For a lady to step into the part of woman is, for women of Vida's class at least, to step from the auditorium onto the stage, and so to step into the perspective from which "realism" becomes visibly the encoding of masculine power, as many suffragettes in the period discovered.

"For a man to lay down laws as to what is and is not 'womanly' and 'seemly,' appears to me, theoretically, a piece of impertinent Helmerism," William Archer remarked of A Doll's House; yet the rhetoric of realism enacts just such a patriarchal law (1894 69).^[18] Robins uses Vida's performance to reveal the strategies that subject women both psychologically and politically. And although the play generally duplicates the action of the problem play, it contains one remarkable departure, the central rally scene in Trafalgar Square, where Vida addresses the audience onstage and in the auditorium, a scene particularly noted by its contemporaries for its lifelike quality. Archer recalled it as one of "the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage. . . . Throughout a whole act it held us spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its existence." Predictably, though, Archer finds the scene's didactic quality intrusive: "It was only within a few minutes of the end,

[18] Max Beerbohm is, perhaps, most revealing here, for in reducing the play's use of well-made conventions to a "syllogism"—" 'I was seduced. I had not the vote. Therefore all women ought to have the vote'"—he at once exposes Robins's reliance on the well-made convention and dismisses her attempt to validate feminine experience as justification for political action (463); see also MacCarthy 34–35.

when the story was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished, and the interest with it" (Play-Making 20). In a drama demonstrating the need of women to discover the disabling gaze of the absent masculine spectator, the central scene—and the most directly political one—interrupts the invisible barrier between stage and auditorium and elaborates a continuity between the drama, its performance, and the spectator's observation. Vida's performance transforms the audience's silent, concealed observation into a kind of gest , an ostensibly "private" act now realized in terms of its public consequences. For Vida not only takes the stage, she stages her audience as well, dramatizing the politics encoded in the realistic theater's claim to a neutral, objective mimesis. Speaking to the audience, Vida dramatizes the relationship that the theater conceals, the role of the private masculine spectator in producing the angry, resistant public woman.

Robins's strategy here points up the necessity for a critical realism to dramatize the implication of the spectator in the subjection of the figures of the stage. Much recent work theorizing the representation of women onstage has argued that the theater, like film, like reading, works as ideology by positioning its spectator, by addressing and so constituting its audience. Catherine Belsey's remarks on realistic texts might be applied to realistic performance as well, for the realistic theater similarly represents "a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action" onstage, and offers "the reader [spectator], as the position from which the text [spectacle] is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding" (51–52). To adapt Belsey's phrasing, however, invites us to consider the different means available to texts and to performances for positioning and articulating these subjects, and also to ask how reading provides an inadequate model for describing the spectator's subjection to ideology in the theater. A provocative opportunity is provided by Susan Glaspell's now-classic short story A Jury of Her Peers and its original stage version, Trifles (1916). Both the story and the play concern a similar sequence of events: a county attorney, Sheriff Peters and his wife, and a neighboring couple, Lewis and Martha Hale, are called to an abandoned Nebraska farmhouse to investigate the strangulation of John Wright. While the three men search the house, Mrs. Peters

and Mrs. Hale are confined to the kitchen, where they discover and conceal the clues that would explain the crime and condemn Wright's wife, Minnie, as a murderer. As the two women reconstruct the narrative of Minnie's life, they are continually drawn to the significant "little things" of Minnie's kitchen world, rather than to the "evidence" sought by the men, evidence which leaves the woman's story untold: the state of the kitchen, a sudden imprecision in Minnie's quilting, her patched and worn clothing (25). As Annette Kolodny suggests, Glaspell presents a reading of "woman" as a text invisible to the men (who judge Minnie, and repeatedly evaluate and qualify Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters), who finally fail to interpret either the scene, the crime, or "the women's imaginative universe, that universe within which their acts are signs" (58).

Both Jury and Trifles reverse the "woman with a past" paradigm, for Minnie's criminality arises not through her contact with public life but through her subjection to an oppressive—normal—domesticity. The signal narrative strategy of Jury requires the reader to criticize the relationship between gender and interpretive authority, for the narrative exposes the operation of patriarchal ideology both in the story and in the reader's interpretive activity as well. From the outset, Jury identifies the narrative point of view with that of Mrs. Hale, and even her husband's recounting of his discovery of the crime is placed within her narrative voice: "Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would make it harder for Minnie Foster" (8). To readers, Mrs. Hale's voice colors the typically realistic interdependence of environment, character, event, and narrative reconstruction, most explicitly when the objects in the kitchen are presented for our inspection:

Everyone in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale's mind that this chair didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung gone; the chair sagged to one side.
(10–11)

In Jury , objects emerge as evidence only within codes of narration already inscribed as feminine, as illegitimate or trivial alongside the

masculine strategies of detection practiced by the authorities. This pattern is enforced as Mrs. Hale interprets the environment through reference to her own trifling experiences; looking at Minnie's flour, "She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home—half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster?" (19). To read the short story, then, we must abandon these interpretive prejudices and learn to read within Mrs. Hale's perspective. Jury requires the reconstruction of the "immasculated" reader (male or female) within the female narrative voice.^[19] To read Minnie, and so to read the narrative of A Jury of Her Peers , is to engage reading as a political activity, one in which intelligibility and interpretation are shown to arise from the constructions of gendered behavior. Only women can read with women's eyes, but Jury positions its readers to recognize and record their anger by being schooled in the act of resistant reading.

Staging such a narrative obviously entails a critical refiguring of this process, the replacement of the narrative voice by the mise-enscène, and of the reader by the spectator. Although Glaspell copied much of the short story's dialogue from the earlier Trifles , the interpretive and political activities required of the spectator are markedly different from those required of the story's reader. While the narrative voice of the story simultaneously constructs and interprets the material world, the theater presents only the stark "loaded locale" of the stage room, the realistic box where "everything is in view, lying in wait" (States 68).

The kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of John Wright, a gloomy kitchen, plainly left without having been put in order—unwashed pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the bread-box, a dish-towel on the table—other signs of incompleted work.
(5)

In Jury , the objects are made to signify through Mrs. Hale's reading of them. She identifies with Minnie—and reveals Minnie to the reader—by reading the "text" of her kitchen. Not to read with Mrs. Hale is to retain a spectatorial distance and condescension identi-

[19] As Patrocinio P. Schweickart suggests, invoking Judith Fetterley's sense that cultural forms "immasculate" the subject, a feminist model of reading might imply a strategy of "connection" rather than mastery, a relationship between reader and narrative voice arguably structured in the reading of Glaspell's story (41, 52–53). On reading Jury , see Fetterley.

fied with the men in the story: a "kind of sneaking " attitude, "locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her" (Jury 23). In the theater, though, the objects of the stage room are shorn of this narrative voice, the voice that requires the audience's assent and that shapes its reformation as readers. In Trifles , Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters come to the same conclusions they reach in Jury and deceive the authorities in the same way. Yet while in reading the story our insertion within a woman's resistant perspective is critical to an informed reading of events, in the realistic theater our relationship with Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters can only be an accessory one: however much we pretend to see through their eyes, we really see only with our own.

It might be argued, of course, that as spectators we are free to adopt the point of view of the characters onstage, and Trifles certainly urges the audience to believe that the women are correct in their reading of events. At the same time, though, the play consistently presents the "freedom" and "objectivity" of a spectator's observation as false, irresponsible, and uninformed, not really empowered to resolve the "truth" that realistic dramaturgy promises and withholds. In both story and play, the role of spectator is a damning one: Mrs. Hale convicts herself for her years of detached observation, for the assumption of a spectatorial distance that has allowed Minnie's suffering to go unseen. Jury requires our transformation as readers and leads us to "see" Minnie by rejecting the unseeing "spectating" performed by the men. Trifles , while inviting a sympathetic evaluation of Minnie Wright, stages the narrative within a framework that exposes but maintains the subject/object, male/female dichotomies that the story brilliantly elides in the process of reading. The figuration of reading as a gendered activity in Jury works through our identification with Mrs. Hale's perspective, a kind of reading that is explicitly interested, biased, engaged. Readers of Jury , men and women, cross the boundary into a feminist reading practice. The audience of Trifles can observe this activity and sympathize with it, but only from a distance, the explicitly "masculine" distance with which the realistic theater insistently "others" its objects. Jury and Trifles expose the spectator, revealing his objectivity as a gendered means of social control, and as a form of blindness as well. The politics of Jury asks us to forsake the blindness of the spectator by teaching us to engage in a political

practice of reading. Trifles also invites us to forsake this blindness, but it has yet to imagine an alternative to the dichotomies of realistic theatricality, a new way of seeing.

Read in contrast to Jury, Trifles forces us to recognize the constraints imposed on the realistic spectator's freedom of interpretation, the extent to which it is precisely the freedom not to see. Trifles also suggests the difficulty of exposing the politics of realistic theatricality, and of engaging in a social critique with a theatrical apparatus so fully implicated in the production of social reality itself. Despite a powerful and distinguished tradition extending from Gerhart Hauptmann and Zola to Sarah Daniels, David Storey, Edgar White, August Wilson, and others, realistic methods have a compromised implication in the social ills they often appear to criticize. In the end, the thematics of observation provide an important figure for the realistic theater's inability to transcend its own conditions of representation, its reliance on a species of "objectivity" that mystifies the audience it would—and often does, indirectly—subject to inquiry.