Feminism, Theatre Criticism, and the Modern Drama

Abstract

"Feminism, Theatre Criticism, and the Modern Drama": The paper examines theatre criticism in the Edwardian feminist press to reveal the connections feminist reviewers were making between the plays of the period and the wider social and political reforms they were campaigning for. Examples are drawn from suffrage newspapers and feminist reviews and include commentaries on leading modern male dramatists such as Ibsen and Shaw, coverage of lesser-known women playwrights, as well as reflections on general issues related to dramatic literature and theatrical production in the period. As contributors to feminist periodicals, journalists, writers/playwrights, actresses, and activists were conscious of themselves as "modern" and "advanced" women implicated in and benefiting from the changes taking place in all spheres of life. Their concerns, in relation to the arts, were more often with innovation at the level of ideas and attitudes, rather than with formal experiments. As part of a larger exploration of the issues related to staging modernism, this paper calls into question the relevance of modernism as a critical paradigm in relation to both feminism and theatre/drama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By elaborating the problems with what Rita Felski terms the "symptomatic confusion of a historical period (modernity) with an artistic movement (modernism)" the paper argues that these attempts to mediate culture from a feminist perspective are better understood in the context of the relationship between feminism and modernity (women's experience of the social and political changes associated with the early twentieth century) than in the context of high modernism as an avant-garde aesthetic movement. In the process, the paper outlines the limits of modernist studies as a field of enquiry and of modernist definitions of what was considered new, innovative, and relevant at the time.