Rooms in Dramatic Realism

Fred Miller Robinson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138953635
• eBook ISBN: 9781317357490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Dramatic Realism, since its birth in the hectic late years of the nineteenth century, gave theatrical and thematic energy to the interaction between a play's text and the way that it looked on the stage. Characters began to find themselves in rooms and settings that played an active and changing role in the drama, and their dialogue and reactions evolved in time with these changes. As life itself became more elaborate during the 20th Century, so these rooms were invaded and then defined by the outside world.

Fred Miller Robinson's enjoyable and stimulating essays on this enduring genre tackle the dreams and anxieties of the middles classes of the Industrial Revolution – dreams of domestic comfort and refuge, and anxieties about how entrapping that comfort could be.

Moving from Ibsen to Chekhov and onwards into later plays in which the reality of 'Realism' comes under scrutiny, this is a book to dip into before a performance or to study during a class.

Chapter 1

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Rooms: An Introduction

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Box Sets

Dramatic realism began with rooms, not just interior stage spaces but rooms that were spaces of interiority itself.

How did this happen? Imagine a time-lapse photography of the ancient Greek skene. There it is, a plain one-story wooden structure for storage or costume changes behind the performance space. Gradually it sprouts wings (paraskenia) with porticoes and columns, and is built with stone. When Aeschylus’ Oresteia is staged, an interior room in the skene displays Agamemnon’s and Cassandra’s corpses, but is not used for acting. In Hellenistic and Roman times, the skene grows to two or three stories high and moves forward toward the performance space, transforming the theatre from a theatron (a place to see) to an auditorium (a place to hear), with better acoustics. Gradually and within this three-walled enclosure, an elaborately architectural front stage evolves. The Elizabethan theatre adds open archways to a second performance space for small scenes, and spectator galleries to the wings. Second-story rooms appear. A proscenium begins with valences placed across the wings, cutting off an overhead view as the elaboration of the skene closes off any view beyond.

As the theatre contracts itself into a shelter, the gods disappear from it. In the seventeenth century it moves indoors, the development of it as an auditorium triumphant. The raised stage is now behind the proscenium (usually an arch, though likely to be closed off by painted backcloths for, say, boulevard scenes on the stage lip). But mostly, a room or rooms take center stage. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a box set appears: in stage terms, three lashed flats into which we peer, as through a removed fourth wall. The stage structure for dramatic realism is in place when, also in the nineteenth century, architectural doors replace the spaces between wings through which the actors enter and exit. The skene has evolved into scenery, theatre at once having expanded and elaborated its architecture and contracted its focus, often to a single room. In the first half of the nineteenth century that room would be, for the most part, a setting for melodramas and farces. It would take a while for it to become more than scenery.

Caste and Caste (1867)

The English playwright T. W. Robertson’s Caste, which was staged twelve years before Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, can stand in here for Victorian drama. It had a box set of realistically appointed rooms, remembered fondly by George Bernard Shaw in 1897:

In the windows, in the doors, in the walls, in the carpet, in the ceiling, in the kettle, in the fireplace, in the ham, in the tea, in the bread and butter, in the hats and sticks and clothes, in the familiar phrases, the quiet, unpumped, everyday utterance: in short, the commonplaces that are now spurned because they are commonplaces, and were then inexpressibly welcome because they were the most unexpected of novelties.

Shaw wrote this as a testament to the use of the box set to bring audiences into the lives of people that had not been evoked onstage before – in particular, the lower-middle-class characters in their “plain set chamber” in Acts One and Three (Act Two is set in an aristocratic room).

Robertson’s rooms are as carefully detailed as Shaw’s (Shaw of course knew this, was paying a brief homage to the rooms on which Ibsen and he had drawn), yet they serve no dramatic function beyond indicating caste: the Eccles family works hard to get by, and their room is “practicable”; George D’Alroy’s aristocratic lodging has muslin curtains, easy chairs, flowers and wineglasses and an oil painting of George in “full Dragoon regimentals.” It’s a room Shaw only needed to recall in its detail because it had already been an onstage room since the seventeenth century. Caste doubtless had a box set, the difference in rooms made with portable props. The castes in question are, of course, expressed in these rooms: the social system is literally set. George will court and marry and have a child by Esther Eccles, and there will be much ado about whether or not this will work. It does work, largely because Esther doesn’t act or seem like someone of a lower caste, as the rest of her family does. George’s Marquise mother is a forebear of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, and so tensions arise in the last act, especially in the absence of George, who has been sent off to a war in India, reported missing in action, and presumed dead. But he suddenly arrives, as if miraculously, to resolve the play, saying, “Oh, Caste’s all right. Caste is a good thing if it’s not carried too far. It shuts the door on the pretentious and vulgar: but it should open the door very wide for exceptional merit.” Exceptional Esther, then, is allowed into the exceptional aristocracy, caste presumably being meritocratic. The word “caste,” borrowed from the very India to which George is deployed, was probably both provoking for an English audience, as if to shed a harsh light on the English class system, and comforting, as though India had colonized England in some way, and that was the problem. Robertson’s reliance on the structure of melodrama (rescue and resolution) and comedy-of-manners dialogue – the former making the latter seem “real,” the latter making the former seem light – keeps the play decorous. We can file Caste as a “well-made” play in the manner of popular French dramas of the time. It allowed its audience, which then were of mixed caste themselves, to take comfort in a social system that is at once more flexible and settled than they thought it might be.

In Act One, Esther Eccles says to George, “You can see this little house is on my shoulders. Polly [her sister] only earns eighteen shillings a week, and father has been out of work a long time. I make the bread here, and it’s hard to make sometimes.” Hers is a homely and brave statement of fact, not of any dream of aspiring to raise your circumstances in an expanding class with one door stage right to success and another stage left to poverty. Esther doesn’t think of her situation as a “hardship” (as Robertson coaches in a stage direction) to be overcome but a declaration of how things are. When in Act Two she is George’s wife, in his room, she accepts that too as a simple and lucky fact, without pretense or anxiety. Caste is not really about money. A Doll’s House and almost every realist play that has succeeded it is, assuredly and obsessively, right down to Torvald’s decision in the past to quit law and enter banking (where the capital is more cleansed), and to the last payment on Willie Loman’s refrigerator – which, when paid off (memo to Linda), will change nothing.

The Addiction to Dwelling

The box set is in effect designed for well-made plays, providing the blandishments or at least the familiarity of the domestic, which will remain, solid as a caste system, after the characters have resolved their problems, or had them resolved for them. What was needed, for dramatic realism, indeed modern drama, to begin, in 1879 with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, were middle-class characters to inhabit the rooms, with their anxieties about social identity and money, about what it meant to be middle class, which then was something recent, broad and ill-defined. The very depth and flux and uncertainty of these issues helped to dissolve the structure of the well-made play.

But there are other than theatrical reasons for the development and use of stage rooms, having to do with how middle-class people historically regarded their interior spaces. What were their private and/or domestic rooms like? And why were they like that? In The Arcades Project (w. 1927-40), his unfinished magnum opus on modern, middle-class life in Paris in the nineteenth century, Walter Benjamin returns again and again to how the middle class imagined the city rooms they inhabited as refuges from the very business and industrial world that shaped their identity and behavior. In their interiors they brought together furnishings and decorative objects from “remote decades and memories of the past.” They had a propensity for oriental rugs, heavy drapery, sofas and chaises longues, along with exotic bric-a-brac, singular or collected. The rooms were spaces designed for the privacy of fantasy and dream as well as the need to remove objects from contemporary life and then possess them by encasing them:

The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his étui. Ever since the time of Louis Philippe [1830-48], the bourgeois has shown a tendency to compensate for the absence of any trace of private life in the big cities. He tries to do this within the four walls of his apartment. It is as if he had made it a point of honor not to allow the traces of his everyday objects and accessories to get lost. Indefatigably, he takes the impression of a host of objects; for his slippers and his watches, his blankets and his umbrellas, he devises coverlets and cases. He has a marked preference for velour and plush, which preserve the imprint of all contact … The traces of its inhabitant are molded into the interior.

Outside of this compensatory behavior, modernity in the form of the industrial revolution is quickly and relentlessly developing its capital exchange, its machinery, its commerce – which is to say, the expanding interests and life of the middle class itself, its ticket out of servitude or artisanal poverty. In the historically unprecedented division of office and home, the home was constructed as a den or refuge, what we would now call a comfort zone, inhabited by people whom Benjamin called “addicted to dwelling,” their residences being their drug of choice. But the private middle-class person cannot seal himself off from a world in which he goes about his business. He designs his interior because of that world, bringing it inside with him, as part of his identity as middle class. The domestic interior is an illusion that at once resists and develops this identity. As such, it is at once a room of relief and anxiety.

Charles Baudelaire, who, like Benjamin, had the contempt for the middle class that only people personally immersed in it have, evokes, in his prose poem, “The Double Room” from Paris Spleen (1869), a chamber of his imagination from the circumstances of his cramped apartment. His fantasy room, right out of Poe’s “The Philosophy of Furniture,” is a vision of languid idleness, a kind of oda, with aromatic perfumes, diaphanous muslin drapery, and furniture designed for recumbency. Here Baudelaire lies, prostrate and half-slumbering. There is a knock on the door and everyday exigencies intrude: law and work. The chamber is then seen as it presumably is, gloomy and dirty and smelling of tobacco. “Life” prods him to get up.

That the first version of the room (a timeless and opiate dream) is as banal as the second is a function of their interrelation. The mundane second vision initiates and inflects the first, and vice versa. (The fact that Baudelaire describes the dream room first indicates his investment in its seeming real.) The room can be two things, privately removed from and a part of busy Paris with its bailiffs, newspaper editors and concubines. It alternates like the fortunes of the middle class, becoming both the place you are glad to enter and bound to leave. As in a dream, it is Baudelaire himself who is the female idol on the bed in the first vision, attracting and devouring his gaze, a femme fatale promising erotic and malicious mysteries, a twin of the concubine from outside who enters as a Spectre. And it is Baudelaire himself who knocks on the door. The same anxiety suffuses both visions of the room, each one potentially devouring.

In his reading of “The Double Room,” Charles Rice, in his The Emergence of the Interior, notes that only from the beginning of the nineteenth century did the interior come to mean the inside of a building or a room, or the representation of one, as in a theatre set. Rice’s idea of the double-ness of the domestic interior emerges from the tension between the room as a space and as an image, the two at once contradictory and “interdependent.” The room is a space among other spaces in a system of habitation, something paid for by work, open to and part of the business of the world. But as an image it is suffused with an “individual subjectivity” that sets itself off from work as the opposite of work.

The interior room is not just a space for imagining but is itself imagined; Baudelaire writes that the furniture “seems to be dreaming.” The question, implied here but the very stuff of drama, is as follows: What is the dweller going to do about it?

The Lapsed and the Lost: Pillars of Society (1877)

In Ibsen’s first venture into dramatic realism – the first of his twelve “prose cycle” plays, preceding by two years his second, A Doll’s House – we have (upper)-middle-class characters front and center, and the fixed set has the double-ness of Benjamin’s interiors. Consul Bernick’s garden-room is a domestic space imagined as a haven from, when in fact it is an incubator of, “outside” social ills involving money. It has a wall and door of plate glass leading to a garden and beyond, the street of a small seaside town. The house opens itself out to this world, expressing Bernick’s wealth and command of perspective. It is made clear early on that this spacious house is to be regarded as “a good and pure home, where the family is seen in its fairest shape – where peace and amity reign”, a haven from a “fermenting” social unrest outside that is promoted by an “impatient age” – that is, modernity. What this “outside” involves is the making of capital, the achieving, at any cost, of reputations based on covering over the amassing of money with a carefully crafted moral respectability. Consul Bernick, whose house is a “little, close-drawn” circle in which no disturbing elements cast their shadows, turns out to be the embodiment of this hypocrisy. His house is actually a site of governance (in his offstage office) and surveillance (literally, of the town through his glass wall).

When, near the end, a crowd of townspeople gather outside to honor the wealth Bernick is bringing the community through the building of a railway line, an admiring friend of his says that the curtains will be drawn back for the crowd, revealing “an astonished and delighted family. A citizen’s home should be transparent to all the world.” But when Bernick realizes that his own monetary self-interest will lead to the death of his young son, he feels the very lights meant to reveal the family tableau are glaring at them, “lights in a dead room.” The audience, who knows what Bernick has done to accumulate wealth, is now offered a perspectival switch: no longer a site of surveillance (as of a demesne), the room is surveilled by us, as the mausoleum of his ambition. By the end, all the lights are out in the windows. What is outside in the modernizing world has been going on inside all along. The haven has become a trap; its languor of comfort (women sewing clothes for the Lapsed and Lost poor) gives way to the lapsed and lost men making business deals in the offstage office.

What prevents The Pillars of Society from being the example of dramatic realism that A Doll’s House would turn out to be is its melodramatic ending, similar to but more rooted in character than that of Caste. At the end, freeing himself from guilt and opening himself up to his family, Bernick realizes and confesses what he has done, a personal regeneration based on luck, the actions of others, and his being backed into a corner (if he didn’t confess, his son would die). It is as though Torvald comes to an understanding of his own weak reliance on business/social appearances and saves his marriage at the expense of his reputation. By giving himself over to the verdict of the townspeople, Bernick may lose everything if he is convicted in their minds, but that is not dramatized any more than is the sudden education of Torvald. We are left, at the end, with his reconciliation with his family, with his seeing them as more than a Tableau of Family, and in this way the ideal of the domestic is rescued and reconstituted. The resolutions deny the garden-room – and the play – of any force as an environment. It is a thematic but not a dramatic site, which puts The Pillars of Society closer to Caste than to A Doll’s House in respect to the onstage room.

Even though Ibsen’s roots are in melodrama, his dramatic realism established itself as a form of drama by resisting the tendency of melodrama to resolve issues. In realism there were social issues, the heat of which was turned up in the rising action, but because the characters were complex, three-dimensional people, the problems confronted by them made the resolutions of well-made plays irrelevant or unconvincing. Melodrama will become modern drama, and rooms will become phenomenal (see “Close Quarters: The Phenomenal Room,” p. 11) when middle-class protagonists have to suffer the nature of what is taking place around and through them without the playwright’s resolving that suffering and thereby casting any resulting drama out of the room and out of the theatre. The fixing of what has been uncovered and suffered sucks the energy out of the stage environment, which has everything to do with what has been going on. The drama has been the characters’ and ours (see “The Structure of Meaning in Dramatic Realism,” p. 24); the resolution is the playwright’s, a dispelling of the reality to which we have been exposed. Pillars of Society is about capital in the way Robertson’s play is about caste. There’s no “about” in A Doll’s House and its successors; there’s an experience.

Inside and Outside A Doll’s House (1879)

Consider Ibsen’s details for the fixed set of A Doll’s House: a comfortable, tasteful, inviting drawing room (in a literal sense, as the room people are drawn into from outside), more moderate than ostentatious, furnished more for comfort than display. It’s a room people are glad to enter from a Norwegian winter and warm themselves at the wood stove. Unlike the Eccles’s room in Caste or any room in, say, Molière’s plays, it is not only a backdrop indicating the social class of its inhabitants; rather, it expresses something about their life. We learn that Nora has been directing some of the allowance Torvald gives her for household expenditures toward amortizing the illegal debt she owes and keeps secret, and so has to decorate cleverly so that he won’t notice the savings. We also learn that the wall engravings, art objects and “richly bound leather books” express Torvald’s desire that his home be respectably beautiful, just as his wife is, his aesthetics having everything to do with his banishing from the interior all evidence of work, except what is in his hideout office and what is provided by the maid. (We may regard the leather binding of his books as their étuis [cases], which project them at once as decorative collectibles and Torvald as a reader and thinker.) In Act Three he even pauses to show Kristine, who does piecework as part of her meager living, how much more visually attractive it is (now that she is in his house) for a woman to embroider rather than to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Rooms: An Introduction
• 2. Specimens
• 3. Variations
• 4. Interventions
• Addendum
• Bibliography
• Index