(Re)Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama

L. Bailey McDaniel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137299567
• eBook ISBN: 9781137299574
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Looking at a century of American theatre, McDaniel investigates how race-based notions of maternal performance become sites of resistance to cultural and political hierarchies. This book considers how the construction of mothering as universally women's work obscures additional, equally constructed subdivisions based in race and class.

C H A P T E R 1

NEW WOMAN (RE)PRODUCTION IN RACHEL CROTHERS’ ALTERNATIVE MATERNITIES

It seems to have been reserved for this generation to work out new standards of social justice and develop a new basis for our industrial civilization. Freedom, maternity, education and morality—all the blessed and abiding interests of . . . home are at issue in this supreme struggle.

—Margaret Dreier Robins, 1911

IN 1911, THE YEAR THAT SOCIAL REFORMER AND WOMEN’S TRADE UNION League President Margaret Dreier Robins made the above statement, Rachel Crothers was in the most overtly political stage of her multidecade career. Both within and outside the American theatre, the opportunities available to women (and attitudes toward gender reform) during the decades of and preceding Crothers’ prodigious work reveal a great deal about her professional accomplishments. As described in my Introduction, I contend that a contextualized, materialist consideration of a play text and its reception is requisite to any analysis of what Ric Knowles describes as the “cultural work” a performance accomplishes. In other words, this chapter interrogates the maternal construct as it is performed, in every sense, on the early twentieth-century American stage, but fundamental to that study is an investigation of the play text alongside a more “politicized analysis of the ways in which specific aspects of theatrical production, and specific contexts of reception, shape the audience’s understanding of what they experience in the theatre.” ¹

As Sharon Friedman points out, prior to the twentieth century, “Unless a woman had friends or family in the theatre, or connections to secure financial backing, she had little hope of having her play produced.”² That Rachel Crothers had none of these and still achieved a nearly four-decade run of success, mostly with herself at the creative helm, is a substantial feat. Arguably, Crothers’ regular commercial success in the first three decades of the twentieth century and her insistence on creative control throughout would be enough to place her in broader categories of feminist theatre. As a practitioner who placed gender hierarchies as a central issue to be explored in performance, it would also be fair to assess her work as politically progressive. Situating Crothers in a feminist canon is a task not free of complications, however. At the textual level, an ambivalence toward feminism found in most of her plays; her frequent commercial success, occurring even less “radically” on mainstream Broadway stages; and several of her own public comments often seem to dilute the political potency of her oeuvre.

Many of Crothers’ more provocative texts, especially those produced early in her career, engage varying incarnations of the New Woman construct. With roots dating back to post-Victorian responses to the restrictive domesticity of the “Angel in the House” and the equally reductive alternative, the Whore and “Fallen Woman,” the New Woman figure surfaced in England and later in the United States bent on securing increased personal freedoms.³ Included in these freedoms were smoking, drinking, and working outside the home—often motivated by personal fulfillment—and enjoying sex in a dangerously masculine way. While conservative voices at the end of the nineteenth century were still trying to counsel against the fundamental evils linked to higher numbers of women seeking professional lives or worse, rejecting their so-called intrinsic maternal-domestic identities, scores of women attempted to place themselves within new social and economic conditions that promised to be a proactive response to previous exclusions. The varying success these women enjoyed, many of them artists and writers, can be seen in the work and lives of Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Ellens Watkins Harper, Susan Glaspell, and Angelina Weld Grimké. With so many real-life New Women surfacing in the roles of writer and artist, it’s not coincidental that Crothers, herself a writer, offers up two feminist protagonists in A Man’s World (1915) and He and She (1920), New Women who earn their respective incomes as a writer and a sculptor. New Women writers and their treatises (sometimes fictional or dramatic, sometimes not) provide an especially revealing testing ground for an analysis of cultural shifts taking place at and around the turn of the century. As Lois Rudnick writes, “American women’s literary production and their impact on public policy were arguably greater during the Progressive Era than at any other time in U.S. history until recent times.”⁴

The pattern of divergent voices trying to be heard in what was not one congruous sociopolitical movement is particularly significant when we examine Rachel Crothers, a playwright, actor, director, producer, activist, and “New Woman” who has received and still receives only mixed reviews for her achievements as a feminist. As is typical within many New Woman texts, Crothers’ earlier and more political plays focus on issues of motherhood. Along with an exploration of the shifting gender politics that characterized the new century’s first three decades, Crothers work frequently digs into the sediment of public/private binaries—the problematic either/or social paradigms still attempting to assign women any “professional status” invested exclusively in domesticity and motherhood. That Crothers’ complication of this gender binary often goes so far as to articulate a feminist subjectivity that explicitly touts (as positive) public/professional employment is noteworthy, to be sure. But a less-obvious and worthwhile exploration of maternity itself also functions productively, particularly when these texts and their histories are read against expectations.

Although Crothers often leaves essentialized notions of gender unquestioned, this pattern is not uncommon during the period or even within, specifically, feminist discourse of the period; indeed, the latter often relied on “women’s moral superiority” as evidence for more deserved freedoms.⁵ Theatre and gender scholars alike have explored the catch-22 dilemma that exists from gained social freedoms for women emerging out of an essentialist rhetoric of moral superiority. In her analysis of Progressive Era dramas, Judith L. Stephens explains that these plays regularly interrogated “issues that grew out of contemporary social movements dedicated to changing women’s position in society”; but as “a site of struggle over the meaning of gender” they also “characteristically adhered to the conventional belief in the moral superiority of females while simultaneously addressing issues arising from women’s changing position in society.” Stephens continues: “The feminist tradition inherited by leaders of the Progressive era was a tradition marked by ties to religion, family, and a sense of moral duty,” and it made strategic sense that “female reformers of the Progressive Era openly embraced the moral hegemony nineteenth-century ideology bestowed on middle-class women.”⁶

Essentialist-based discourses of this time also used and then productively extended public/private binaries. Although essentializing, rhetoric supporting much of the Progressive Era’s feminist accomplishments promised a reorganization of the gender-based restrictions regulating work and family life. As a response to the inflexible Victorian public/private binary that placed women literally inside, within her domestic role (and men outside, free to inhabit a professional, public, but often morally suspect subjectivity), the New Woman’s insistence on and celebration of a professional identity outside the home usefully addresses (1) increased professional freedoms, but also (2) complicates pre-existing public/private binaries of domesticity. Stephens makes this association clear:

Nineteenth-century middle-class ideology constructed an image of Woman as a morally superior being especially suited for protecting her (female) domestic sphere from the corruption of society or the (male) work place. Accepting this conventional belief which, on the one hand, relegated women and men to separate spheres but, on the other, gave females special sanctifying powers, women reformers of the Progressive era successfully argued for a logical extension of those powers from the private sphere of the home into the wider public sphere of society.⁷

In other words, Crothers’ varying participation in a rhetoric of gender and moral subjectivity that places women’s “nature” as essential/inevitable if also superior does not deviate dramatically from the offstage work of active, often influential reformers. Because these very conflations typically orbit (and occasionally deconstruct) performances of maternity, Crothers’ work provides an especially rich body of material for the work of this book.⁸

In addition to the admittedly less potent, occasionally essentializing lexicon in which Crothers’ plays might participate, however, a paradigm of nonbiological maternity surfaces in her work that creates radical alternatives to existing models of motherhood (models that rely on essentialized, biological paradigms of gender and maternity). In their interrogation of the New Woman identity and that identity’s complicated relationship with the role of the mother, two of Crothers’ earlier and most explicitly feminist plays, He and She and A Man’s World, suggest a maternal labor that is neither figuratively nor literally gynocentric and freed from typical conflations of biology and the female body. This chapter, however, does not attempt to provide a conclusive response regarding Crothers’ work or its ultimate value to feminism. Rather, in looking closely at Crothers’ professional life and the commentary it provides to an investigation into what Elaine Showalter describes as “the ways in which the self-awareness of the woman writer has translated itself into a literary form in a specific place and time span,”⁹ this chapter examines how that “awareness” (within the plays themselves, and the discourse surrounding them) has developed and where it might lead in our understanding of gender, performance, and maternal constructs on and off the American stage.

Here I argue that in her exploration of the turn-of-the-century New Woman, two of Crothers’ most “political” plays invoke that identity in ways that productively reimagine the paradigms of motherhood. Because this redefinition at times bypasses gynocentric-biological understandings of maternity, the spectator/reader is offered a rubric of gender and reproduction whereby “feminism” and “motherhood” are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts. Although this reimagining offers positive alternatives vis-à-vis the nonbiological framework in which the mother role is placed (endowing maternal status/representing the performance of motherhood to subjects not responsible for the biological reproduction of their dependents), Crothers occasionally relies on essentialized gender constructs in the process. In keeping with the materialist semiotics of performance outlined earlier, I further suggest that any final analysis is incomplete without also considering the contextual realities of the playwright, the productions, and the sociopolitical moment from which they emerged. In addition to a brief outline of the American New Woman identity and my analysis of the playtexts themselves, I explore the historical context of both American feminism and American theatre from which Rachel Crothers emerged.

With regard to A Man’s World, I also investigate what if any relationship transpires between what Jill Bergman posits as the strategic use of “the discourse of evolution and progress” and the New Woman activists who invoked (if not relied) such rhetoric.¹⁰ As critics and historians such as Bergman, Angelique Richardson, Martha Patterson, and Anna Stubblefield point out, within the politically active culture of women’s clubs and activists that defines the New Woman, there also exists a eugenics-inspired directive that disputes the value of desegregation and undeniably “participat[es] in a widespread national discourse that linked American progress and white supremacy.”¹¹ If, as Stubblefield writes, “the eugenics movement thrived in the United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century,”¹² and (as biologist Charles Davenport reported in 1904), many American scientists “now recognize[d] that characters are inherited as units,”¹³ how did the race- and class-based rhetoric of essentialized identity and evolution coexist with a political agendas bent on endowing women with more reproductive agency? I explore how A Man’s World and New Woman texts like it disclose sites of maternal agency as they negotiate the radical social changes occurring at the turn of the century; I pay particular attention to how these negotiations function in collusion with what Bergman terms an “American dominance and imperialism on a world stage.”¹⁴ How, in other words, does this rhetorical positioning take place “against the broader national context [arguing] implicitly [for] the classifications of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ in order to define a specifically white identity for the New Woman”?¹⁵ As an icon of progress and feminism, what relationship does the New Woman—and her drama—maintain with essentializing narratives of identity that are based explicitly in class and race?¹⁶

NEW FEMINISMS, NEW WOMEN

First emerging in the United States in 1894 when it appeared in a published debate on the pages of the North American Review, the term “New Woman” connoted everything from vulgar and physically unappealing challengers to traditional gender roles and family sanctity to more positive images of independent, educated devotees of progressive social reforms such as sexual freedom and suffrage.¹⁷ In the United States, the broader historical context for the New Woman is most closely associated with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother? Race, Sex, Class, and Essential Maternity
• 1. New Woman (Re)Production in Rachel Crothers’ Alternative Maternities
• 2. Ethnic Anxieties, Postwar Angst, and Maternal Bodies in Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Wash
• 3. Race and the Domestic Threat: Sexing the Mammy in Tony Kushner, Alfred Uhry, and Cheryl West
• 4. Queering the Domestic Diaspora, Enduring Borderlands: Cherríe Moraga’s Familia de la Frontera
• Conclusion Nurturing Performance, Raising Questions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index