Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian Eglantina Remport (bio) Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists, by Mary Christian; pp. xii + 203. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.00 paper, $74.99 ebook. Mary Christian opens Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists with a re-examination of the widely held view that, when Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House was first performed at the Novelty Theatre in London in June 1889, it presented Victorian audiences with a marriage plotline that was markedly different from those to which they had been accustomed. She argues that, by offering an ending in which the wife leaves her husband, the play challenged the traditional marriage plotline of British comedies and melodramas, and "the rising and falling action of the well-made play" that was popular at the time (3). She further remarks that, due to its thematic novelty, the play challenged contemporary British playwrights to engage newly with the traditional marriage plotline, by responding to changing social realities at the turn of the century. Christian focuses on five dramatists from the period: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, George Bernard Shaw, and Elizabeth Robins. The first strand of the argument is concerned with the ways in which these dramatists engaged with Ibsen's A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem), first performed at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 1879. Christian's analysis offers a new way of regarding marriage itself as theatrical, a play in which husband and wife each fulfill their socially constructed gender roles. Christian considers the tarantella episode in A Doll's House as the starting point of these [End Page 350] investigations, emphasizing the significance of its meta-theatricality. This argument is intriguing and is well-elaborated in the second chapter, though perhaps there could have been a more sustained engagement with this idea throughout the book as a whole, an approach that would have strengthened Christian's case for Ibsen's influence on British dramatists of the 1890s and 1900s. As it stands, the representation of marriage in the plays of the New Drama movement of the 1890s is often conflated with other issues more generally related to marriage during the period. These include Christian's discussion of a range of issues in the book: marriage legislation in Britain; contemporary divorce cases; the married lives of dramatists; actors playing marital roles; interaction between the actors playing in marriage plots and their audiences (both on-stage and off-stage); critical commentary in newspapers on the marriage plot of a given play; and the rewriting of certain marriage-themed plays as parodies. Each chapter of the book deals with a number of these issues, offering intriguing analyses of the plays of Wilde, Shaw, Pinero, Jones, and Robins. The result is a remarkably informative book on marriage and theater during the late Victorian period, but one in which the main argument—or, perhaps, arguments—is (or are) drowned in the volume of information given in each paragraph, information that is often digressive. This kind of microscopic writing has become fashionable of late, but it does leave in obscurity any overarching argument. Christian's concluding chapter on American-born British actress and playwright Robins is an effective coda to the investigations undertaken in the book as a whole. Christian shows that Robins was a suffragette who used the stage as her pulpit and made a name for herself fighting against women's marital oppression and their marginalization in British society. Analyzing Robins's work for the stage allows Christian to address more directly and persuasively her own concerns regarding the representation of women in fin-de-siècle drama, especially in works by more traditionalist male dramatists, such as Pinero and Jones. She effectively connects Robins's late Victorian Alan's Wife (1893) and late Edwardian Votes for Women! (1907) to Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), Jones's The Masqueraders (1894), and Shaw's Candida (1894), among others. She makes the point that, both on the stage and in British society, marriage was often treated as a spectacle during the late Victorian period. Marriage was to...