Nora Helmer, the young wife in Henrik Ibsenâs Dollâs House , prides herself on her ability to charm her husband by âdressing up and acting,â taking up the roles of Italian tarantella dancer, moonlit elf, and the incompetent child that Torvald supposes to be her real identity (DH, 21). At the end of the play, the disillusioned Nora sums up her married life: âI lived by performing tricks for youâŠ. That has been our marriage, Torvaldâ (DH, 114â115).
The metatheatrical outlook in A Dollâs House âNora as actress, marriage as playâevidently made an impression on Bernard Shaw. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, two years after the playâs first professional London production, he repeatedly underscored Ibsenâs stage metaphors, describing the Helmersâ supposedly idyllic marriage as a theatrical performance, two actors âplaying at ideal husband and father, wife and motherâ (QI, 152). More than twenty years later, in his 1913 edition of the essay, Shaw took Noraâs theatrical marriage, and her ultimate repudiation of it, as the foundational challenge both to traditional marriage and to traditional theater:
Shaw the young Fabian had hailed the play as a debunking of âthe sweet home, the womanly woman, the happy family life of the idealistâs dreamâ (QI, 151). Now, Shaw the veteran theater critic and dramatic innovator saw Ibsen as a master innovator who had offered to late-Victorian society not only a bold new anti-idealist philosophy but a new dramatic technique by which to expound it. The Helmersâ theatrical marriage was the tool for presenting both.Up to a certain point in the last act, A Dollâs House is a play that might be turned into a very ordinary French drama by the excision of a few lines, and the substitution of a sentimental happy ending for the famous last sceneâŠ. But at just that point in the last act, the heroine very unexpectedlyâŠstops her emotional acting and says: âWe must sit down and discuss all this that has been happening between us.â And it was by this new technical featureâŠthat A Dollâs House conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art. (QI, 212â213)
The equation between marriage and theater that Shaw pointed out in A Dollâs House was not unique to Ibsen and Shaw, though The Quintessence offers perhaps the most pithy and memorable setting forth of this idea. The vision of theater as marriage, marriage as theater, was one that, with numerous variations, became a recurring motif in the ânew school of dramatic artâ which Ibsen, by Shawâs account, had founded. Several prominent and influential English dramatists writing in the years following Ibsenâs London debut (not all of them admirers of Ibsen or of Shaw) created plays that, like A Dollâs House , depicted their protagonistsâ marriages in ways that emphasized the elements of scripting, staging, performance, and spectatorship within these relationships. In this book, I examine the use of the theatrical marriage idea in works by Ibsen, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robinsâdramatists identified by themselves or their observers, though not always undisputedly, as leaders in Britainâs New Drama movement.
Marriage in the Old Drama
The topics of marriage, love, gender, and sex were not, of course, anything new in Late-Victorian London theatersâthese had been staple subjects in many of the best-known works throughout the century. Romantic cup-and-saucer comedies such as Tom Robertsonâs Ours (1866) and School (1869) centered on the romances of young couples, culminating in their marriages. Fallen-woman dramas such as English translations of the younger Dumasâs La Dame Aux CamĂ©lias (1852) and the many adaptations of Ellen Woodâs sensational novel East Lynne (1861) centered on women who, through transgression, lost their marriages (past, present, or future), and whose consumptive and broken-hearted deaths offered a tragic and inevitable close. Domestic comedies such as Tom Taylorâs Still Waters Run Deep (1855) and Victims (1857) featured married couples in conflict, generally through the wifeâs social ambitions or extramarital flirtations, but ambitions and flirtations were quickly nipped in the bud, and wayward wives returned to the straight and narrow by the end of the third act. Cross-class alliances in Dion Boucicaultâs Colleen Bawn (1860) and Robertsonâs Caste (1867) were complicated by disapproving relatives and apparent deaths, but love and humble virtue triumphed in the end, and the supposedly dead spouses were startlingly resurrected.
These plays, popular in their own time and some of them still frequently revived in the closing years of the century, presented a strongly traditional vision of marriage. A wedding or a marital reconciliation or reunion represented a happy ending. To be excluded from the possibility of marriage, whether by transgression, death, or other circumstances, was tragic. If separations occurred, they generally resulted from external circumstances, such as accidents, parental interference, or military conflicts. Where real marital strife occurred, it could be easily explained as the sin or caprice of one spouse (most often the wife), as in East Lynne or Still Waters, and was readily resolved by death or reconciliation in the end. All the possibilities of married life, good and bad, were made to fit the rising and falling action of the well-made play.
These uncomplicated, idealized marriages dominated the British stage during the years when John Stuart Mill and Frances Power Cobbe were writing scathing exposures of domestic violence, womenâs economic dependence and political disempowerment, and the other aspects of marriageâs dark side. During these same years, the Matrimonial Causes Act, the Married Womenâs Property Act, the Custody of Infants Act, and the debates surrounding them were making marked alterations in the theories defining marriage and in the practical realities of thousands of couplesâ lives. The Contagious Diseases Act and the outraged demands for its repeal furnished an official and very concrete image of the sexual double standard, and Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Anthony Trollope were presenting readers with fictional bad marriages in all their excruciating nuance. In progressive theatrical circles, simplistic dramatic treatments of marriage and romance became a recognizable shorthand for the artistic and intellectual staleness and irrelevance of the mainstream theater. A. B. Walkley asked, âAre our playwrights addressing themselves to it [love] with sincerity, with veracity, with real insight? Or are they just âmuddling throughâ with it, repeating familiar commonplaces about it, not troubling to see the thing as it really is?â (Pastiche and Prejudice, 160). He ended his essay regretfully with the latter verdict. Shaw, in an 1895 review, lamented: â[W]ho on earth will ever know what Miss [Ellen] Terry can do if we are never to see her except in plays that date, in feeling if not in actual composition, from the dark ages before the Married Womenâs Property Act?â (TN1, 145).
Several factors help to explain this ideological time lag between the theater and the currents of British politics and literature on marriage as well as other issues. For much of the past century, theater had been considered more a popular amusement than an intellectual exchange or an art form. Dramatists generally wrote to the demands of actor-managers who controlled theatrical business. With slender compensation and no reliable international copyright laws in place, many found it easier and more lucrative to adapt French works by Scribe, Sardou, and Dumas fils than to attempt more original work. With playgoers, managers, and the censor to please, writers had little incentive to take risks or depart from established conventions, either in dramatic technique or in subject matter. The few mid-Victorian dramatists who successfully attempted innovation, the even fewer whose plays are known and even occasionally revived today, are those who, like Boucicault, had sufficient financial backing to become actor-managers themselves or, like Robertson and Gilbert, had the good fortune to meet with managers who treated them as collaborators, allowing them to direct their own plays and share in the profits.
Not until nearly the last decade of the century was there a concerted effort among dramatists, such as Shaw, Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Oscar Wilde, along with critics such as William Archer, A. B. Walkley, and J. T. Grein, and actors such as Elizabeth Robins, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Janet Achurch, and Charles Charrington, to raise the intellectual and artistic quality of theatrical entertainment, alter the economic conditions that had slowed theatrical innovation in the past, and gain recognition for dramatic composition as serious and original literature. The New Drama movement, as this campaign came to be called, took the form of relentless negotiations with theatrical managers for fair royalties and authorial control over the staging and acting of plays. Participants wrote petitions and essays to rally support for improved copyright laws and the abolition of theatrical censorship. They advocated for a government-subsidized national theater as an alternative to the profit-driven organization of mainstream commercial theaters. They wrote, produced, and published plays (this last previously a rare practice) to attract and intelligently engage their audiences. The authors of New Drama aimed, as Shaw wrote in the preface to Mrs. Warrenâs Profession , to âfight the theatreâŠwith playsâ (BH1, 236).
The introduction of Ibsenâs plays in London, though not the first manifestation of this movement, was an important catalyst, drawing admiration or disgust from playgoers, critics, and dramatists. Much of the discussion on A Dollâs House and on subsequent plays such as Ghosts and Hedda Gabler focused on Ibsenâs treatment of marriage, his challenge to the traditional theaterâs idealization of domesticity and romantic love. The debate gathered momentum from a recent controversy in the press. Mona Caird, in 1888, had published an essay in the Westminster Review declaring that âthe present form of marriageâŠis a vexatious failureâ and proposing that âThe ideal marriageâŠshould be freeââthat is, more egalitarian, easier to dissolve, and tailored to the individual requirements of the couple, like other civil contracts (âMarriage,â 197). Cairdâs essay, in the weeks that followed, provoked some thousands of letters to the Daily Telegraph, fiercely arguing the question: âIs Marriage a Failure?â1 Though A Dollâs House had been written nearly a decade earlier, the timing of its 1889 London production made it seem a part of the ongoing marriage debate. Shaw rei...