Women's Justice: Alan's Wife and the Defense of Silence

Abstract

Abstract: Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell's Alan's Wife (1893) shocked its first audiences with the brutality of the piece, but the play holds greater historical interest for its fusion of nineteenth-century theatrical approaches. The Naturalism associated with the independent theater movement is apparent in the debates about eugenics, capital punishment, and women's roles embedded in the piece, but Robins and Bell also borrow from commercial melodrama the device of the silent heroic character. In the final scene, Jean Creyke does not speak until her closing monologue, responding instead solely through eloquent gesture. The choice of gestural rather than spoken language draws on the moral certainty of melodrama to impart a political argument, anticipating the performance-based methods of the campaign for women's suffrage.