Themes, Variations and Constants

Abstract

1900 is not an important literary date. The publication in 1880 of Dostoievski’s The Brothers Karamazov was a much more important event in the early development of a specifically twentieth-century literature, as was also the first performance in 1879 of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Although no woman playwright has so far equalled the achievements of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer or Kate Millet in using the long essay to set out the case for what Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 essay called he Deuxieme Sexe (The Second Sex), Ibsen’s play is at one and the same time a forerunner of the revival of the theatre which is so marked a feature of twentieth-century literature, and the first major attempt since the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, in 411 BC, to use literature to call into question the authority of men over women. When, in 1988, Angela Holdsworth prepared a major documentary for the BBC subtitled ‘The Story of Women in the Twentieth Century’, it was a fitting tribute to Ibsen that the main title should be Out of the Doll’s House. There is, in this respect, some irony in the fact that apart from Joan Littlewood, whose 1963 musical Oh What A Lovely War! made so many of the attitudes of the English poets of the 1914–18 war popular with a wider public, no other woman has made her mark in the twentieth-century theatre as an author or a director.