1—
Theater and the Scene of Vision

Chekhov's Camera:
The Rhetoric of Stage Realism

Let me recall a brief, brilliant scene from Chekhov's Three Sisters . Toward the end of the first act, the Prozorovs and their guests retire from the downstage drawing room to the partly concealed reception room upstage, to celebrate Irina's name-day. Natasha arrives, nervously checks herself in the mirror, and rushes to join the party. The forestage is empty, when two of the omnipresent junior officers suddenly appear. Taking out a camera—still a novelty at the turn of the century—they pose and silence the party, taking one photograph and then another. It is a striking moment. Taking a picture syncopates the action and highlights the stylistic transparency of Chekhov's drama. As the characters withdraw upstage, the play becomes lifelike by becoming random, oblique, untheatrical; the photograph stops the action, fixing it as an image for a second or two in the blue halo of the flash. Bernard Shaw remarked that "drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature" (Preface 197), and Chekhov's camera both asserts the verisimilitude of his drama and denaturalizes it, exposing that "reality" as a rhetorical effect of the realistic stage.^[1]

The history of stage realism is often told as a narrative of technical mastery, in which playwrights from Henrik Ibsen to David Storey find their theatrical expression through the practical innova-

[1] Hand-held Kodak cameras were, of course, available in Europe at the turn of the century, though their use in the home, and their appearance on the stage, would still have excited comment. Beaumont Newhall's description of Édouard Vuillard's use of the camera to photograph gatherings in his home is suggestive of the scene in Three Sisters . A "folding Kodak camera was a fixture in his house, and during social gatherings he liked to put it casually on a piece of furniture, point it at his guests, and ask them to hold still while he made short time exposures." See Newhall 136.

tions of great directors: André Antoine, Constantin Stanislavski, Harley Granville Barker, Elia Kazan, Lindsay Anderson, and so on. This parable presents theatrical change as an evolution in engineering, with playwrights, technicians, and directors collaborating to render the world on stage with increasing fidelity and precision. And yet, as Chekhov points out, stage verisimilitude is an effect of where we sit to receive it. The camera—something of a cliché for realism even in Chekhov's day—can only halt and distort the "life" it would reproduce. Chekhov's camera implies that the effect of the "real" arises not from mimetic fidelity but in our relation to the apparatus that discloses it. The effect of the "real" is something that we produce both before us and within ourselves, a world and an interpretation of it, a reading based, as Émile Zola—that novelist, playwright, and amateur photographer—might have put it, on a systematic "amputation of reality" (287).^[2]

I want to begin a different narrative, tracing the rhetorical continuity between the experimental era of Zola's naturalist polemics and the equally experimental work of our own realistic theater a century later. Historically, the rise of modern realism in the theater is usually traced to developments in theater technology dating from the mid-nineteenth century. This complicity between dramatic style and stage technology is informed by a sustaining ideology, what Roland Barthes calls the "ideological unity of the bourgeoisie," a unity that "gave rise to a single mode of writing" (Writing 2–3). In Writing Degree Zero Barthes traces later divisions in literary form to the breakup of this unified bourgeois consciousness, and we can certainly see a related development in drama as well: the proliferation of such apparently anti-realistic dramatic forms as expressionism, symbolism, Brechtian epic theater, poetic drama, theater of the absurd, "new realism," theater of images, and socialist drama. In the theater, the hegemony of realism is challenged not simply in terms of the style of the drama, but in the terms of stage production as well—different strategies of theatrical production challenge realism's ways of framing a picture of the world and controlling the

[2] Not surprisingly, perhaps, Zola exempts naturalism from the "amputation" characteristic of earlier modes: "Toutes les formules anciennes, la formule classique, la formule romantique, sont basées sur l'arrangement et sur l'amputation systématiques du vrai."

audience's reading of it. In this regard the theater tells a somewhat different story than Barthes does, in large part because the rhetoric of realistic production has been much more difficult to suspend, even when the drama it stages seems far from the mode of Ibsen, Chekhov, O'Neill, or Storey. Although competing modes of stage production challenge the rhetoric of realism and the audience it produces, they often bear the traces of the "realistic" designs they oppose.

Realism is notoriously elusive, difficult to locate either as a "style" or at a particular moment in history. Here, I treat realistic theater and drama as an arrangement of practices developed as part of a cultural milieu of which we are still a part. To this extent "realism" is always a shorthand for "modern realism," or for "realistic drama and theater since 1850." The date is less important than what it marks—though 1889, the year of the first unaltered production of Ibsen's A Doll's House in England, comes to mind—for it points to the joining of literature, technology, and society in a sustaining ideological project. That project is what I mean by "realism," the distinguishing marks of which lie in its character as rhetoric, its ways of using theatrical production—conventions of acting, design, direction—to naturalize a particular relationship between the dramatic fiction and the offstage world of the audience. Unlike earlier modes of theater, realism not only asserts a reality that is natural or unconstructed, it argues that such a reality can only be shown on the stage by effacing the medium—literary style, acting, mise-en-scène—that discloses it. What is most characteristic of realism, that is, is not the verisimilitude it claims as its style (as though Hedda Gabler were more lifelike than Medea or Lady Macbeth simply because she speaks prose and owns a practical stove) but the framing machinery that seems to make such lifelikeness appear. Verisimilitude, instead, arises as an effect of the audience's activity, and it is the rhetorical purpose of realistic theater to assert the perception of verisimilitude as the sign of our proper engagement with the play. The modern realistic stage is a device for claiming and legitimating a certain kind of interpretive activity; its technology and techniques work to frame our ways of reading the stage and the kind of meanings we can find there.

Realism provides a way to hold audiences, performers, and drama in a particular relationship; the stage deploys its dramatic

and theatrical style to shape certain forms of audience attention, experience, and interpretation. The formal and stylistic markers of realistic drama in this period are familiar: prosaic dialogue, bourgeois setting and subject matter (or, if the setting is drawn from another class, an implied bourgeois perspective on that class), a conflict between internal psychological motives and external economic or social pressures, a rigorously "causal" plotting, predominance of incident, and so on. These are, in a sense, the features of "realism" that the drama appropriated from the novel in the late nineteenth century, and which similarly assert the drama's unmediated transparency to the offstage reality it presents.

To produce this dramatic effect onstage requires an equally articulate theatrical rhetoric, and before turning to a reading of realistic drama we will need to elaborate this rhetoric more fully. Two points are easily anticipated: the pictorial, "photographic" objectivity claimed for the mise-en-scène, and its ability to govern a behavioristic style of acting.^[3] The third moment of this rhetoric—how this complex of dramatic, staging, and acting techniques produces a characteristic experience for its audience—is more difficult to bring into focus, because the realistic theater negates the audience's overt participation in the theater as a necessary part of its proper interpretive activity. Defining verisimilitude as a thorough identification of the drama (present) with its performance (transparent), the theater casts its audience as absent from the field of representation. Legitimate theater experience, and so a proper interpretation of the "knowledge" that realistic drama often promises, can occur only when we have been apparently exiled from the field of theater itself.

The realistic stage works to arouse a familiar modern appetite: the desire to view others as theater from a position of unstaged freedom. We might think of realistic rhetoric in the theater as the body of practices that both stimulate and satisfy this appetite for "objectivity." The desire to produce the stage as object, a photographic slice of life free from the mediation of dramatic or theatrical style, becomes visible in the first polemics calling for realistic experimentation in the 1870s and 1880s. As Zola suggests, the rhetoric of

[3] For a reading of the divergent styles of naturalism and realism in drama and in performance, see Styan vol. 1.

realism claims to duplicate the epistemology of experimental science. Naturalistic playwrights, Zola argues, should imitate "le mouvement d'enquête et d'analyse, qui est le mouvement même du dix-neuvième siècle" (283), by writing ironic, anti-romantic plays illustrating the behavior of characters as the effect of material causes, causes usually located in social pressures or "physiological" urgings. The "science" of theatrical naturalism lies less in the thematics of the drama than in the ideological neutrality it assigns to stage practice, and in the construction of the spectator as a disinterested, "objective" observer. The mise-en-scène appropriates the authority of "science" by assigning a "scientific" transparency to its own instruments, in order to ascribe a similarly scientific objectivity to its audience.

We can see that the machinery of theatrical production is assimilated to notions of scientific objectivity in a variety of ways. Much as the scientist's instruments or the photographer's camera are said to make objective observation possible, so too the technology of the theater is said to determine the "rise" of realistic drama. As Brander Matthews, the first professor of dramatic literature in the United States, found when he surveyed the history of the nineteenth-century theater in 1910, the "real responsibility" for the prosaic style of modern drama "does not lie on Ibsen's shoulders, but on Edison's,—since it was an inevitable consequence of the incandescent bulb" (A Study 64). In The Principles of Playmaking (1919) Matthews clarifies this history:

In the course of the middle half of the nineteenth century the actual stage underwent a transformation. It was so amply lighted first by gas and then by electricity, that the actor had no longer to go down to the footlights to let his changing expression be seen. The parallel wings and borders by means of which interiors had been crudely indicated were abolisht and the compact box-set enabled the stage-director to suggest more satisfactorily an actual room. The apron was cut away; and the curtain rose and fell in a picture-frame. The characters of the play were thereafter elements in a picture, which had a characteristic background, and which might be furnisht with the most realistic elaboration. The former intimacy of the actor with the spectators, due to his close proximity, disappeared speedily; and with this intimacy there disappeared also its concomitant, the soliloquy addrest by a character to the audience for the sole purpose of supplying information. The drama immediately became more picto-

rial; it could rely more certainly upon gesture; it could renounce the aid of purely rhetorical oratory; it could dispense with description; and it insisted that the performer should subdue himself to those new conditions and to be on his guard lest he should "get out of the picture."
(236–37)

Matthews echoes Zola in treating the representational practices of the realistic theater and drama as the result of evolutionary necessity. Reifying the "fourth wall," displacing the drama from the apron into the recessed box set, integrating characterization with design and costume elements, assimilating acting style to the understated manners of social behavior, and displacing the audience as participant, are all, to Matthews, dictated by the simple fact of their technological possibility. Matthews sees in this technology the origin and cause of realism, but its history is actually bound to the rise of the more spectacular modes of production that dominated other precincts of the nineteenth-century stage: cataclysmic melodrama, Irving's splendid "historical" Shakespeare, the glitter and panache of pantomime and extravaganza.^[4] Zola saw naturalism as the result of a positivist literary and social "évolution," both the expression of "l'intelligence contemporaine" and its absent cause, transcending the passing fashions of specific individuals, classes, or institutions (285). Matthews similarly finds the triumph of realism to be implicit in its theatrical environment; although stage technology might sustain a variety of dramatic species, only realism seems fit to survive.

Theatrical realism claims to stage an objective representation by integrating dramatic and performance style into the pictorial consistency of the material scene onstage. The purpose of this consistency is not, in the end, simply mimetic: the aim of realism is to produce an audience, to legitimate its private acts of interpretation as objective. How does the rhetoric of realism cast its audience, and render the audience's typical mode of attention—displaced, absent, private viewing—meaningful? The picture frame of the proscenium not only circumscribes a dramatic world, it establishes the characteristic relation between actor, role, and eavesdropping audience through which its meanings are realized.

[4] On the limits of technological determinism as a description of naturalism, see Williams, "Social environment" 208.

In Play-Making (1912), for example, William Archer describes the dramatist's craft in pictorial terms: the "stage now aims at presenting a complete picture, with the figures not 'a little out of the picture,' but completely in it" (64). Only by visualizing the stage as a pictorial environment, rather than as a stage set, can be playwright find "a safeguard against theatricality" (13). In part because the actor/character cannot emerge from the "picture," the environmental set becomes a decisive factor in the audience's interpretive activity, especially in its reading of "character." In 1911, for instance, David Belasco used the set for the opening scene of The Return of Peter Grimm to demonstrate the character's implication in a complex of social, economic, domestic, and even psychological histories:

The sun comes brightly into the room. Through the window can be seen tulip beds, other flowers, hot houses, and rows of trees. Peter Grimm's botanic gardens supply seeds, plants, shrubbery, and trees to the wholesale trade as well as retail; and the view should suggest the importance and extent of the industry which Peter has inherited and improved.
(Marker 71)

A character so fully identified with its productive environment is more completely contained within the stage. "Character" is no longer a medium of theatrical exchange between actor and audience—as it was, say, in Shakespeare's or Garrick's theater, where the making of character was more openly negotiated between actor and audience—but one object among many, part of a dramatic ecology the audience can observe but not enter. The objectivity of the pictorial stage both withdraws it from the audience's influence, and claims to render the drama "absolute," as though it were not implicated in the activities of performance and of observation that fabricate it on the stage.^[5]

[5] Peter Szondi regards the historically specific conditions of the modern theater as an index to essential or universal features of the drama; although we differ markedly on this point, his description of the relationship between drama and audience—with this qualification—is powerful. The "much-maligned 'picture-frame' stage," Szondi says,

is the only one adequate to the absoluteness of the drama and bears witness to it in each of its features. It is no more connected to the house (by steps, for example) than the Drama is connected (stepwise) to the audience. The stage becomes visible, thus exists, only at the beginning of the play—often, in fact,

The desire to produce the audience in an "objective" relation to dramatic events also requires an increasingly underplayed acting style. Much as the mise-en-scène frames a coherent picture, purged of the traces of the theater, the pictorial stage suppresses a self-evident style of acting as an object of the audience's attention. Realistic acting erases itself from view, renders the actor the vehicle of a fully coherent "character" already present in the dramatic text. The actor's performance is rendered theatrically invisible, and aesthetically palatable, through a thoroughgoing identification between the conventions of "acting" and the manifest codes of social enactment. The increasingly subtle reproduction of domestic behavior informing English acting from Squire Bancroft to Granville Barker is one instance of this development, analogous to the efforts of Antoine's Théâtre Libre, of the Provincetown Players, of the Irish realists, of the Moscow Art Theater, and later of the American Method. This attitude is evident, too, in popular responses to the theater, which often betray this deeply idealized conception of dramatic performance. When the Times critic A. B. Walkley asks "What is the very quintessence of acting but the effort to bring about the complete identity" between actor and character, he inscribes in that identity a typical hierarchy of value: "If the actor is the part, so that you fail to distinguish one from the other, then he has achieved what he set out to do and he deserves all the praise he gets" (More Prejudice 69). In part, this priority reflects the sense that actors' special personality, their public extroversion, and their professional openness to the view of others necessarily violate the essential privacy and inwardness of the self, of authentic experience. In relation to the roles they perform—where "character" is revealed through indirection, unselfconscious disclosure—actors' public self-representation seems nearly patho-

Similarly, Szondi continues to describe acting as "subservient to the absoluteness of the Drama. The actor-role relationship should not be visible. Indeed, the actor and the character should unite to create a single personage" (8–9).

logical, and so must be neutralized by a mimetic rhetoric that assigns it an instrumental transparency.^[6]

The widespread interest in puppets and marionettes at the turn of the century is also symptomatic of the uneasiness produced by the actors' dizzying self-multiplication. Gordon Craig's experiments, Meyerhold's sculptural plasticity, and Yeats's statuesque acting demonstrate the complicity between "symbolic" or "poetic" and "realistic" acting as strategies for audience implication: both claim to produce an ideal "character" by refining the actor's distracting personal charisma from our view. As Walkley suggests in proposing a marionette production of Thomas Hardy's Dynasts , puppet presentation

would clarify, simplify, attenuate the medium through which the poem reaches the audience. The poet and his public would be in close contact. It is, of course, for many minds, especially for those peculiarly susceptible to poetry, a perpetual grievance against the actors that these living, bustling, solid people get between them and the poet and substitute fact, realism, flesh-and-blood for what these minds prefer to embody only in their imagination.

By using puppets or untrained performers instead of actors, Walkley hopes to dematerialize the actor's troubling opacity, to present the drama to its public through "a 'transparent medium'" (Pastiche 174–75, 177).

Realistic theater works to "attenuate the medium" by which the drama reaches its audience as a means of attenuating the audience's complicity in the performance itself. The spectator is cast as an impartial observer, construed outside and beyond both the drama and the theatrical activities—including his or her atten-

[6] One has a sense of the threatening pathology of actors in this analogy of William Archer's: "Suppose a man imprisoned in a narrow chamber, walled, roofed, and floored with mirrors, some plane, some concave, some convex, some warped in all conceivable ways, wherein every feature of his face, every motion of his limbs should be reflected and re-reflected, until his personality in all sorts of disguises and contortions, should seem to fill all space and stretch away into infinitude. Whose sanity could stand such a strain? Who would not emerge with perceptions clouded and nerves unstrung from a course of this 'self-consciousness torture,' as it might be called?" Archer goes on to note that "it is the inevitable tendency of the actor's art to build round him such a mirror-cell" (About the Theatre 219–22). On the pathology of acting in the period, see Worthen, Idea 131–53.

dance, participation—that produce it. Staging drama that often insists on the pervasive determination of an environment metonymically reduced to the drawing-room box, realistic theater suppresses the theatrical environment as both cause and explanation of the drama's meanings or our interpretation of them. "A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation," Michel Foucault remarks of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (202). Yet if the panopticon is, like the theater, a "privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them" (204), it also points to the considerable constraint exerted on the observer, the experimenter, the spectator. Much as it does in the panopticon, the spectator's interpretive freedom in the theater emerges within the substantial control placed on his or her activity by the apparatus that makes observation possible. The warden, after all, is free to gaze on the cells of the inmates only through the window of his own cell-like enclosure. To objectify others as public, as controlled by an "environment" which operates as fate, while remaining in a privileged position of observation, beyond representation: like the thematics of realistic drama, the relations that govern the realistic audience have been so fully "detextualized," rendered as a force of nature, that they appear to be merely the condition of theater itself.^[7]

Stage technology and acting practice in the late nineteenth century enabled the realistic theater to place the audience before an integrated, freestanding tableau, "leaving the spectator free to draw his own moral from the picture" (Matthews, Study 89). The public's freedom of judgment, in the theater and elsewhere, is paradoxically framed by the constraints of the scene in which that freedom is enacted. The rhetoric of realism creates this "freedom" precisely through the denial of its own rhetoricity; this erasure is especially marked in accounts of playwriting, though we can see it in acting and directing as well. It is notable, for instance, that the antithesis to realism—"a picture of life, as it is or as it might be"—is not usually found in the expressionist, symboliste , or surreal theater, but in theater that explicitly avows its suasive purpose: political theater, known in this period in terms of its typical dramatic form, the thesis play. Thesis plays fail to produce realistic

[7] On the detextualization of the body, see Berger.

illusion by acknowledging the rhetorical character both of the drama and of the audience's response. As Archer suggests in Play-Making , thesis drama necessarily suffers "artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme—that is to say, the abstract element—over the human and concrete factors in the composition. . . . No outside force should appear to control the free rhythm of the action," or of the audience's reading of it (18–19).

Yet in Play-Making Archer has written a manual for controlling the dramatic action and its effect on the audience, and the playwriting he prescribes shapes the contours of the audience's freedom and necessity. Archer sees a symbiosis between the world offered by the playwright and the composition of the audience, implicitly acknowledging that the audience's sense of freedom is devised as an effect of the theater. The freedom of the spectator must be read against the substantial ground of necessity, his or her constraint by social opportunity, theatrical manners, and the playwright's clever manipulation of dramatic form and theatrical perspective:

Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play is bound to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene, perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the "specifically dramatic effect" to be extracted from a horse-race is found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them opulence—to the extent, perhaps, of a £5 note—and for others ruin. (238)

Archer's description precisely records the structure of visibility sustaining the production of an audience and its interpretive prerogatives. The lower classes are placed directly before, practically amidst, the spectacle. The theater replicates the spectacle of social life, casting them as an unreflective, tractable crowd, absorbed in sensational events and lacking the interest or ability to penetrate to their cause. The upper-class theater of society drama shifts attention from the race to the response of its well-bred stage audience. While the lower classes are seduced by the superficial hum of events, "society" replicates the world in its own self-absorbed and

dizzy futility. In the third example, apparently an instance of the "new drama," the stage claims for its subject the social consequences that result from horse racing. This theater provides the audience with a complex and contradictory role, one that invites both empathetic engagement and a pacifying separation, a summons to action and an actual paralysis. The audience scrutinizes the consequences of gambling and is invited to criticize the social and political organization that permits it. Yet the social process that connects the slum to the track (and, of course, the track to the banks, to real estate interests, to the audience) remains invisible, undramatized, much like the audience's invisible, voyeuristic relation to the stage. These spectators see neither the action of the race nor themselves dramatized but occupy a position of interpretation and judgment. Yet the apparent power of the audience is also neutralized, since that power cannot be put into action: neither the audience's relation to the dramatic subject nor its implication in the theatrical production can be legitimately recognized.

"With Sardou play-making is not merely as much a trade as clock-making; it is the same trade." Although the mechanics of well-made dramaturgy are often mocked, they remain essential to the ideal "impersonality of the drama" in the turn-of-the-century theater (Walkley, Playhouse 80, 14). This impersonality is claimed by the mechanical "logic" of the well-made play. The action of such plays turns relentlessly on the revelation of "facts" (secrets, confessions, coincidents, letters, and so on), information which assumes the role of fate for characters and audience alike. Well-made dramaturgy claims to preserve this "impersonality" and, consequently, the freedom of the spectator, by assigning to information itself a transcendent explanatory power. Finding the plotting of Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893; unless otherwise noted, plays are dated by first stage production) to be "clear, simple, natural," William Archer explicitly naturalizes Pinero's relentlessly coincidental plot to the process of social life: the "limitations of Mrs Tanqueray are really the limitations of the dramatic form" (see 1893 125–39). The explanatory character of this drama is partly epitomized by the functional necessity of the raisonneur , who points to a desire for interpretive closure implied in the reciprocity between well-made causality, the information it offers as explanation, and an interpretive situation outside or beyond the action itself. The familiar con-

ventions of well-made plotting constitute a self-propelled dramatic machine. The audience ratifies this dramatic closure by marshaling information into an explanation, one that accounts for and totalizes the process of the dramatic action from which it has been exiled. To Archer, and to his theater, the working of "well-made" conventions has been so fully "transformed into feeling" as to be definitive of the working of ideology more generally: "an ideology which men will not feel to be an ideology," as Georg Lukács once put it ("Sociology" 443).^[8]

Realistic production invites empathy and even understanding, but it invites us to practice that understanding only as spectators. June Howard and others have suggested that in naturalistic fiction, the role of the spectator prevents understanding and self-awareness from being translated into action, into the brute behavior so often described by the spectatorial heroes of naturalistic novels (see 106–16). Like the brilliant flash that Jacob Riis used in his pioneer photographs of New York slums, How the Other Half Lives (1890), the realistic stage tends to reveal the sordid constraints of social reality while sentimentalizing its characters to a more privileged audience. "Realistic" observation seems finally to deny the working of society at the moment that it is most profoundly active and visible. The politics of the realistic theater, like the rhetoric of realistic theatrical production, are conveyed through the concealment of a specific agency: the mystified social environment of the drama, the behavioristic transparency of acting style, the detheatricalized absence of the audience. Like the camera—its most pervasive metaphor—the realistic theater claims to offer images of an objective reality to an audience of detached observers; like photography, the realistic drama tends to imply how relations of visibility themselves encode other less apparent relations, relations of consciousness, of interpretation, of power.

The realistic stage assigns interpretive power and freedom to a class of patrons identified as absent, largely by imposing a certain

[8] It should be noted that not everyone was as easily seduced as Archer by the "well-made" structure of feeling in The Second Mrs Tanqueray . Shaw remarked that "the only necessary conditions of this situation are that the persons concerned shall be respectable enough to be shocked by it, and that the step-mother shall be an improper person. Mr Pinero has not got above this minimum" (Our Theatres 1: 46).

kind of activity on the audience as the sign of its freedom. Meanwhile, it discloses others onstage as the products of an ineffable "environment," through the medium of a mise-en-scène and a histrionic technique that conceals or denies its working, its agency in the spectacle. The rhetoric of realism appears to enable the spectators to escape their own representation as the condition of entertainment, but the "privacy" it produces for the spectators becomes, finally, both a form of privilege and a kind of prison. The rhetorical character of this privacy intrudes again and again in realistic drama, as though the drama were unable to repress its own rhetoricity. Like Three Sisters , many plays expose the rhetorical character of stage realism and so dramatize the procedures that constitute "realistic" effects and interpretation; Ibsen's The Wild Duck (1885) provides a classic example of this kind of self-reflection. The play is fully within the orbit of realism: the densely material environment both controls characterization and helps to explain the action to the audience; the characters are integrated into their object world; the play urges a thematic concern for inheritance as a figure for the persistence of the past and the confinements of social life; and the play's well-made progression provides the gradual revelation of "facts" with a markedly "explanatory" force. Yet Ibsen strategically questions the confident rhetoric of realism, most directly in the representation of what might be called "well-made" thinking, in that the most benighted, unrealistic form of plotting in the play is practiced by Gregers Werle. Ibsen shows Gregers's disinterested plan to produce a "true marriage" for the Ekdals to be a solipsistic, manipulative fantasy by emphasizing its theatrical quality, particularly when Gregers is disillusioned by the failure of his climactic scène à faire: "I was really positive that when I came through that door I'd be met by a transfigured light in both your faces. And what do I see instead but this gloomy, heavy, dismal—" (459). Much as he does when improvising multiple causes for most of the play's effects—the history of blindness in both families, for instance—Ibsen carefully subverts the certainty of "well-made" logic, emptying it of value as an "objective" means to truth or understanding.

Ibsen's most searching investigation of the rhetoric of realism, though, develops through his use of theatrical space, particularly the loft area, that stagey playground whose scattered props and

tawdry trees offset the insistent verisimilitude of the studio downstage. Something like chiaroscuro in painting, the obscure garret space—never fully seen by the audience—works to highlight the "reality" of the more visible forestage area, contributing to what Michael Fried has called in another context the "overall impression of self-sufficiency and repleteness that functions as a decisive hallmark of the 'real'" (59). Like Jean Genet's erotic theater, the garret room needs both false and authentic details to be persuasive to Ibsen's characters. To be redeemed from the realm of private fantasy, to function as a reduction of the "reality" that it replaces, displaces, and avoids, the garret needs "real" properties, real trees, a real duck. As an onstage theater, on the other hand, the garret seems to infiltrate and disrupt the realistic insistence that a complex social environment can be reduced metonymically to the stage scene through selective behavioral and material identity with the larger world it represents.^[9] What seems striking about the loft in this context is not only its fantastic intrusion into verisimilar stage space but the ways in which this theatricalized milieu is entered and interpreted by Gregers and the Ekdals. The spectators onstage are only intermittently able to agree on their reading of the garret space, to join in the single perspective that coerces the theatrical spectators to read as a single public and to view the stage as objective reality. The tragedy, or irony, of The Wild Duck is that the garret theater seems not to refer to the world but only to the characters themselves, as when Gregers is shown the wild duck and immediately allegorizes it: "I'm hoping things will go the same with me as with the wild duck."

Ibsen's point here seems twofold. As a spectator, Gregers implies that objective interpretation is impossible, that all schemes claiming objectivity will in fact conceal unacknowledged agendas. To take Gregers as a model would lead us to look for other examples in the play where observation is shown to be a form of self-deluding blindness. Relling's assertion of the "life lie," for ex-

[9] On metonymy as reduction, see Burke, Grammar 505–07. Bert O. States amplifies Burke's position with reference to the practices of realistic theater, when he remarks: "Metonymy and synecdoche, as we find them on the realistic stage, are devices for reducing states, or qualities, or attributes, or whole entities like societies, to visible things in which they somehow inhere" (65).

ample, might seem to restate Gregers's "claim of the ideal," not to counter it. Relling's ability to interpret and guide the actions of others arises from his adoption of a spectatorial attitude much like Gregers's, perhaps as a way of preserving his own self-image as realistic healer. Werle, too, stages a play—the Ekdal family itself—that is manifestly a form of self-displacement. By providing for Old Ekdal, Gina, and Hedvig, he both assuages his guilt and frees himself from implication in their plight: his power in society is largely signified in the play through his ability to cast the family as a distinct "tableau" while keeping his own relation to the Ekdals in obscurity. And of course Hjalmar Ekdal's profession itself might be taken as an index of Ibsen's skeptical regard for his own theatrical procedures, for photography in The Wild Duck is mainly an art of retouching, an art that threatens to lead, in Hedvig's case, to blindness. The Wild Duck questions the premise that we can "know" as detached, uninvolved, "experimental" observers; the play offers no position that is not compromised by its procedure for staging others to the view.^[10] To fail to attend to the ways that we make the world, to fail to recognize ourselves among the play's gallery of absent authors, is to enter into the delusions afflicting Ibsen's characters and to reproduce the circumstantial contradictions defining our role in the realistic audience.

As Amy Kaplan has remarked in her fine study of American realism, our attitudes toward the form and purposes of realism have undergone an important change since Ibsen's era, perhaps even since the heyday of Tennessee Williams; far from an "objective reflection of social life," realism has become, for us at least, "a fictional conceit, or deceit, packaging and naturalizing an official version of the ordinary" (1). To recognize the ideological work of stage realism, though, requires an inquiry into the specifically theatrical forms of this process, how the rhetoric of realism identifies the drama, its stage production, and the activities of its audience within the stabilizing attitudes of its sustaining culture. This work generally takes a double shape, which Michael Fried,

[10] Indeed, Ingmar Bergman's 1972 production of the play emphasized just this point, by locating the loft downstage: the Ekdals looked through the loft toward the audience, now placed literally in the sphere of fantasy. See Marker and Marker.

in a telling reading of Thomas Eakins's paintings, suggestively describes:

The result is a tension or competition between two fundamentally different modes of seeing—one that looks to enter the representational field and to merge its interests with those of the protagonists, inevitably losing sight of the whole in the process of doing so, and another that remains emphatically outside the representation, viewing the painting with something like detachment but also with special concern for "formal" values of a certain sort.
(77)

These "conflicting modes of seeing, one excessively intimate and the other excessively detached" (85), are akin to the modes of experience articulated by the realistic theater, which invites sympathy for its Paulas and Hedvigs, but a sympathy that is necessarily performed across a paralyzing distance, a distance that conceals the audience's actual and figural role in the production of the "problems" onstage. The relation between these two kinds of seeing provides the ideological frame of realistic interpretation. In this sense, the realistic theater of disclosure is also a theater of concealment. The question is whether the space of concealment that we inhabit will also be exposed, be shown to be complicit in the making of the world.

The clearest connection between the privilege of privacy and the consequences of public display can be made in relation to one of the most significant dramatic genres of the turn-of-the-century stage, the drama of the "fallen woman." In these plays, the drama of sexual politics depends on the rhetoric of realistic vision; the action negotiates the gendered relationship between privacy and publicity, the power of the spectator and the power of the performer, in ways that clarify the politics of visibility in the realistic theater. This may seem to be a special case, though, and so in chapter 2 I will consider a more familiar aspect of realistic drama, the thematic interplay between character and environment, as a feature of its theatrical rhetoric. To do so, however, will require us to transform the materials of the drama into the activities of theatrical production, to assess the rhetoric of dramatic "character" and "milieu" not as isolated features of dramatic texts but in relation to theatrical acting and the disposition of objects in the environment of the stage. This reading will take us not only across the ground of

American drama and performance in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, but also to the problematic agency of objects and passivity of characters in more recent drama in the realistic mode, in the plays of Pinter, Shepard, and Bond.

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.