Читать книгу Social Minds in Drama - Golnaz Shams - Страница 16

In this book, I am concentrating on late-Victorian plays. This does not mean that the model I am suggesting will not work for drama of other literary eras. The scope of this study, however, forces me to limit myself to a fraction of the possible pool of material and for that, I decided to use the very specific social realist plays of the late-Victorian period. The first and very obvious reason for my decision is that since I am framing my methodology within Palmer’s theoretical premise, this social realist corpus will also keep me within the same framework. The second and more elaborate reason is that this type of drama proves to provide the perfect ground for an outlook that is set to deal with intramental as well as intermental aspects of characters in drama.

Victorian drama, in general, is one of the most rewarding areas of research today. The popularity of drama increased especially in the late Victorian period, leading to an improvement in its production quantity and quality wise. Before, the theatre was “wrongly, dismissed as sub-canonical, at least until the 1890s, when the self-conscious literacy of Wilde and Shaw elevated it to [a]; verbal sophistication” (Auerbach 2004: 3). This sophistication can also be traced in the complexity of the construction of characters and their relationships in the plays, which is important to my approach, since I want to analyse the construction of characters and further focus on their interrelationship.

The fact that all the social realist plays examine socio-political issues makes them interesting for this study too. On the one hand, it makes it possible for me to trace the individual characters within a highly social context and thus to employ the externalist approach towards characterisation. On the other hand, it is precisely due to the socio-political nature of the context that these individual characters often operate in groups and provide ample ground to study the intermentality between them.¹¹

Furthermore, late-Victorian plays are well-suited to a study that analyses playscripts since they were written not only with the purpose to be performed ←29 | 30→and staged but also to be published. Up until 1891 very few playwrights published their plays:

… one of the results of the Anglo-American Copyright Law of 1891 was the publication of reading editions of plays, shorn of the detailed stage directions that disfigure acting editions for the layman, and sometimes with the addition of prefaces. It was only natural that the playwright, once he was able to address a reading public as well as a theatre-audience, should be at pains to add a literary quality to his work. (Hudson 1951: 98)

This emphasises the importance of the playscript and ties in with the discussion and discriminations, which I have mentioned before, between the diegetic and mimetic nature of drama, and it poses an alternative corpus to that of the scholars who engage in performance studies.

The playwrights I am discussing in this book are Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They all have been regarded as the proponents of (social) realist plays. I have chosen four playscripts by each of these playwrights, the limitations of this project would not allow me to deal with more primary material. Thus I concentrated on the plays most commonly regarded and labelled as realist and socialist. From Ibsen, I will be discussing: A Doll House (1879),¹² The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892). Wilde’s plays will be: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (performed 1895, published 1898) and The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895, published 1898). In Shaw’s case, I will be concentrating on his Plays Pleasant collection: Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894), A Man of Destiny (1895) and You Never Can Tell (1896).

As mentioned before, in the mid-nineteenth century, the standing of theatre was not high in Britain (nor was it on the Continent or the United States). It is often said that the arrival of A Doll House in London breathed new life into the whole body of drama and inspired a new generation of playwrights. This might be the reason why according to William Archer “Ibsen became the most famous man in the English literary world.”¹³ In the four plays I have chosen from Ibsen’s Realist Cycle, he sets the tone for many a playwright, and especially for Wilde and Shaw. What is particularly relevant to my work is how Ibsen has been able to “embody contemporary social problems through the medium of an individual’s destiny” (Hemmer 1994: 71). It is this presence of the individual ←30 | 31→and also society that make Ibsen’s plays well suited to my model of Palmerian character construction and intermentality, such as the fact that Nora is treated as a generic family member, but simultaneously her individual fate seals the fate of that family. These types of plays recur again in Wilde and Shaw. In Wilde, we have an abundance of the clash between characters and their identity. The concept of identity according to the individual and according to society is always at the heart of those plays (see Knox 2008). And Shaw has inherited characteristics from both Ibsen and Wilde. The variety of characters in Shaw is impressive and the way he constructs their individual and social consciousness reinforce my claims in this study. In the case of Shaw, his lengthy, novel-like introductions also provide ample ground for discussion about the narrative nature of the playscripts.