Aesthetic Prejudice in Modern Drama

Abstract

The aesthetic prejudice chiefly in question is that subordination or suppression of the performing subject that is particularly associated with realism in modern drama. It stands revealed as such not only in the staging but also in the performative elements of the verbal texts in which dramatic realism, rather paradoxically, defined itself. The incommensurability of an act of representation and a corresponding embodiment of a performing subject is often made quite obvious in the juxtaposition of modern dramas and their operatic versions, and it is a given in the aesthetics of physical theatre. In the earlier twentieth century, such aesthetic issues were so embroiled in fateful political struggles as to induce such crises of representation as those instanced here: the transmutation, in Walter Benjamin's theory, that brought with it an acceptance of didactic performance; the severe problems encountered in Marc Blitzstein's operatic and remedial transformation of Lillian Hellman's flawed aesthetic in The Little Foxes and its associated moral blindness; and the divergent theatre practices of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot with respect to speech, music, and dance. In these instances, performativity versus discourse is a critical issue, and it remains so in contemporary practice, though hardly the dangerous one that it has been in the past.