American Drama Realism

The History, Geography, and Heterogeneity of American Dramatic Realism
Author(s): David Graver

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 710-720
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490276
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The History, Geography, and
Heterogeneity of American
Dramatic Realism
David Graver
American Drama. The American dramatic realism has always presented a para-
Bastard Art dox: while it dominates theatrical and dramatic institutions, ma-
By Susan Harris Smith jor theatrical practitioners and academics denigrate its mimetic
Cambridge University
conventions and ideological import. Although playwrights such
Press, 1997
as David Mamet, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Wil-
Realism and the liams, and Eugene O'Neill command the stage, dramatic anthol-
American Dramatic ogies, and journalistic attention, scholars and artists attack dra-
Tradition matic realism from a broad range of academic and aesthetic
Edited by William W
perspectives. Deconstructionists castigate realism's reverence for
Demastes
University of Alabama
referentiality, order, and closure and deride its reliance on consis-
Press, 1996 tent subjects as an origin of meaning (Barlow 162-66; Belsey).
Feminists have suggested that portraying existing social condi-
Staging Place: The tions and behavior automatically surrenders to ideological preju-
Geography of Modern
dices implicated in the oppression of women (Case; Diamond).
Drama
Politically progressive playwrights and critics drawing from
By Una Chauduri
either the Workers' Theatre Movement or Brechtian traditions
University of Michigan
Press, 1995 also mistrust the ideological presuppositions of realist drama.
They reject the obfuscation of social relationships and systems of
Staging Depth: Eugene exploitation resulting from the typically domestic focus of realist
O'Neill and the Politics
plays, and they censure the passive, self-indulgent attitude en-
of Psychological
Discourse couraged in the audiences of such plays (Boal; McGrath). Ad-
By Joel Pfister
herents to Antonin Artaud's theatrical ideals dismiss realism as
University of North a collection of passionless, worn-out conventions that cannot
Carolina Press, 1995 produce the ecstatic energies possible on the stage (Brook; Gro-
towski). A broad array of theatrical and performance innovators
connected to neither Brecht nor Artaud also turn away from re-
alism because of its rigid conventions, which favor the demands
of mimetic representation over the wider possibilities of theatri-
cal expression (Foreman).
Invoking dramatic realism as a unified style pervasive and
obvious in its features, such approaches fail to explain its appeal
in the theater and universities of the US. Fortunately, a few re-
American Literary History 711
cent books and essays offer new evaluations of the place and
efficacy of dramatic realism in US culture. These studies not only
reveal the complex ideological functions that dramatic realism
has served but also offer nuanced definitions of the form. Such
studies explain the appeal of dramatic realism while pointing to
important aspects of theater and culture masked by the domi-
nance of that appeal. Rather than uncritically accept or reject
dramatic realism, they integrate it into broader commentaries on
US theater and culture.
In American Drama: The Bastard Art (1997) Susan Harris
Smith highlights the complexity of dramatic realism by charting
the changing labels, apologia, and critiques of drama and theater
among American intellectuals. She notes that the first wave of
dramatic realism in the US, championed and exemplified by Wil-
liam Dean Howells, was termed "evolutionary realism" because
its proponents saw it as an aesthetic advance on the crude theat-
ricality of melodrama. Rather than representing the world as it
is, it aimed to establish principles of behavior and judgment that
would give reality an ideological consistency. As Arthur Hobson
Quinn notes, Howells's plays "taught manners and social values
to thousands who played in them or saw them on the amateur
stage" (qtd. in Smith 173). Yet Howells's dramatic realism, which
embraced both farce and pedagogy, was far from the meticu-
lously illusionistic vignettes developed in the 1920s and 1930s.1
As Amy Kaplan observes, realism of the 1880s and 1890s "is not
a seamless package of a triumphant bourgeois mythology but
an anxious and contradictory mode which both articulates and
combats the growing sense of unreality at the heart of middle-
class life" (9). The anxiety of realism in general is reflected in
the didactic impetus of dramatic realism. In turning away from
melodrama dramatic realism's first impulse was not to represent
reality but to construct a reality worthy of representation. The
truth it sought to portray did not concern facts in the world so
much as fragile ideals harbored in the hearts of a middle class
uncertain of its place in the world.
From 1905 to 1917 "muckraking realism" dominated
American theater, taking the pedagogical concerns of "evolu-
tionary realism" and shifting to an interest in broader social is-
sues with plots that hinged on partisan politics. Charles Klein's
The Lion and the Mouse (1905), a stage adaptation of Ida Tar-
bell's History of the Standard Oil Company (1902-04), was the
first play of this type and "had the longest continuous run of any
American play to that time" (Smith 176). Yet despite its impor-
tance and popularity muckraking realism was ignored by critics
712 American Dramatic Realism
(Smith 177) and forgotten by scholars, who have focused instead

on psychological realism, which began in art theaters and little
theaters after 1917.
Although many academics credit (or blame) psychological
realism with dominance over the twentieth-century American
stage, the forms of this century's dramatic realism exhibit a com-
plex variety and serve many ideological and aesthetic ends. Ten-
nessee Williams's realism has been dubbed "lyrical," "symbolic,"
even "expressionist" and "surrealist" because of the ways he
weaves psychological verisimilitude into a setting rife with ab-
stract symbols and improbable imagistic resonances (Demastes,
Realism 172-75). Brenda Murphy has labeled Arthur Miller's
plays "subjective realism, a form of drama that juxtaposed the
protagonist's purely subjective experience with the objective, so-
cial reality that is the experiential field of representational real-
ism" (Demastes, Realism 190). Thus even among the playwrights
central to the canon of dramatic realism, sharp distinctions cut
holes in the notion of a unified mimetic strategy.
More recent playwrights make even more pointed depar-
tures from a supposedly common form. Sam Shepard's plays ex-
hibit what Una Chauduri calls "ironic realism": "The stable cor-
relations of the theatrology of classical realism-correlations
between person and role, stage space and fictional space, speech
and subjectivity, utterance and meaning-are gently prized
apart" (179). In ironic realism issues such as psychological moti-
vation, so vital to the conventional notion of realism, may be
raised and pursued through a number of surprising turns of plot
only to be suddenly dropped as if of negligible value or interest.
The characters' behavior and their milieu become tinged with
allegorical or even vaguely mythic values that are played with but
never decisively embraced. In Shepard's work realism loses its
status as an all-embracing representational convention and be-
comes an unessential trope at play within a field of varied mi-
metic and theatrical gestures.
In the work of David Mamet, whose plays have been called
"jeremiadic realism," the denunciation of a supposedly decadent
element of reality counts for more than the accuracy with which
that reality is described. As Michael Quinn puts it: "Realism is
not in this case representational but expressive, focusing on per-
formed actions rather than mimesis, and making judgments of
truth a matter of active construction rather than of comparison
with an a priori reality" (Demastes, Realism 235). Replacing the
attractions of psychological depths with those of soapbox or pul-
pit oratory, even when the setting remains domestic, Mamet's
drama hearkens back to the denunciatory rhetoric of muckrak-
ing realism, but without its interest in evidence and documenta-

tion. While most critics are seduced into seeing Mamet's work as
"bold, hardheaded, and realistic," Quinn argues that it springs
primarily from "a standard romantic ritual of American intellec-
tual culture" in which "membership in the national tradition de-
pends upon a declared rejection of the current state of cultural
affairs" (236). Thus what critics unthinkingly label a form of psy-
chological realism turns out to arise from much older American
traditions of theatricality and cultural legitimacy.
To accommodate the broad range of forms realism has
taken, some scholars have proposed more general definitions.
William Demastes and Brian Richardson (in Demastes's collec-
tion, Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition [1996]) argue
that realism is driven by an epistemological imperative more than
a formal or thematic one (Demastes, Beyond Naturalism 4; Real-
ism 2-3). Thus changes in the style and subject matter of dra-
matic realism can be seen as efforts to represent more accurately
the reality of lived experience. This definition distinguishes dra-
matic realism from other forms of drama by the truth claims it
attributes to mimesis. Where expressionism or theater of the ab-
surd arguably aims at strong theatrical effects, realism strives for
accurate representation even when the forms used by these
schools are rather similar. If realism is an epistemological claim,
the possibilities for its form become much more diverse.
Critics of dramatic realism object that epistemological
claims are not so much a part of the definition of realism as a
part of its ideological pretensions (Smith 185-87; Demastes, Re-
alism 158-63). But even if epistemological claims are a necessary
element of dramatic realism, they do not sufficiently define it.
The epistemological weight of verisimilitude is certainly an im-
portant element of dramatic realism, but it can only rather awk-
wardly be accommodated on the stage. In fact, many elements
of reality must be ignored to see the realism of any given play.
To judge the naturalness of a stage presentation, one must over-
look all the elaborate artificialities of theater-the actors' techni-
cal training, the proscenium arch, the audience sitting quietly in
the dark. Moreover, the obstacles to verisimilitude that the stage
presents have an appeal of their own, and many forms of dra-
matic realism exploit the tensions between performance and rep-
resentation, theatricality and mimesis, rather than minimize
them. Even the most naive and conventional theatergoers are of-
ten attracted to a theatrical production to watch a celebrity per-
form rather than to see reality portrayed.2 When representation
is the dominant issue, truth still often is not. Joel Pfister points
out that realism privileges a particular image of selfhood cher-
ished by a particular segment of the theatergoing audience be-

cause it lends a theatrical flair to their concepts of themselves
(53-104).
Dramatic realism's efforts at verisimilitude are further com-
plicated by its attempts to teach its audience something about
the world. As Judith Barlow points out, realism, far from being
an exclusively culinary, conservative theater, often serves didactic
purposes close to agit-prop or Brecht's dramaturgy (Demastes,
Realism 162). This combination of pedagogy and mimesis creates
another central paradox of the genre: while mimesis demands
that the audience be ignored, pedagogy requires playing to and
for the audience.
This heterogeneity within the concept of dramatic realism
becomes even more complex in some of the hybrid forms dra-
matic realism takes on the stage. Rather than exercising a mono-
lithic dominance of American theater, dramatic realism mixes
with other ideological and performative interests. As Robert F.
Gross points out in "Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Ideal-
ism, and 'Hokum' in American High Comedy," the high come-
dies of Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, and Robert Sherwood "are
shaped by three differing, and sometimes contradictory, forces:
(1) the impetus toward realism in all forms of legitimate theater;
(2) the tendency toward idealism in the form of intellectual ab-
straction, which had come to define high comedy; and (3) the
demands of the Broadway system, which viewed plays as vehicles
for stars" (Demastes, Realism 73-74). Gross lays particular stress
on the importance of Broadway theatricality, what he calls "ho-
kum," because while it dominates the theatrical world, most the-
oretical treatments of theater neglect it. He finds these three high
comedy playwrights particularly important for his discussion
because "Barry's In a Garden (1925), Behrman's Brief Mo-
ment (1931), and Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna (1931) not only
are constructed from the interplay of realism, idealism, and
hokum-they thematize it through characters that represent the
different values of dramatists and actors" (81). Thus even in a
period identified predominantly with dramatic realism, the genre
must be understood in relation to the institution of theater and
broader social configurations.
The work of Gross and others suggests that to understand
dramatic realism's interactions with other modes of representa-
tion and performance restores its dynamic theatricality and com-
plex social functions. Little is to be gained by pitting dramatic
realism against all other forms of theater, as its partisans and
critics tend to do. Instead, as Smith and Chauduri suggest, it
is more useful to pay careful attention to the hybrid forms and
competing traditions and functions that make up American

drama. Recent feminist rejections of realism, for example, fail to
consider the usefulness of the form to early feminists from
Angelina Grimke to Lillian Hellman. While the realistic mode of
representation presents pitfalls for those committed to criticizing
the current social order, Barlow notes that "to dismiss utterly
the usefulness of realism to women as an instrument of social
commentary and change is to erase a large part of our theatrical
heritage and to deny future women playwrights still one more
valuable weapon in their dramatic arsenal" (Demastes, Realism
168). Instead of rejecting dramatic realism altogether, critics Instead of rejecting
might more reasonably take exception to ossified, reductive dramatic realism
altogether, critics might
definitions of realism or the restrictive, oppressive forms of real-
more reasonably take
ism that dominate theatrical institutions.
exception to ossified,
But there are dangers even in such refined forms of rejec-reductive definitions of
tion. To reject a dominant definition or form of dramatic realism realism or the restrictive,
without coming to terms with the historical and institutional rea- oppressive forms of
realism that dominate
sons for that dominance, far from disrupting or even throwing
theatrical institutions.
light on configurations of domination, offers little more than an
ineffectual gesture of dissent or refined aesthetic standards per-
fectly compatible with the very institutional configurations that
produce the domination of repressive forms of dramatic realism.
Una Chauduri's Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama
(1995) moves beyond such oversimplified analyses by offering a
new history of dramatic realism free of the evolutionary, repre-
sentational defense of the form common among its earlier sup-
porters. Chauduri provides a larger theoretical and thematic con-
text for the historical development of dramatic realism so that it
is not seen as a singular, fully formed genre that displaces the
earlier, more primitive melodrama. For Chauduri dramatic real-
ism is marked primarily by its treatment of the environment of
the dramatic action. In the more stage-oriented melodrama the
characters drive forward the action, but in realism, with its orien-
tation toward the represented scene, the place of the action exerts
strong forces on the course of the action. Chauduri calls this
important element of dramatic realism "geopathology" because
the environment, particularly the bourgeois obsession with the
home, inevitably has a debilitating effect on the characters.3 The
dramas of the later half of the twentieth century continue this
concern with geopathology as they question its roots, manipulat-
ing themes prompted by immigration and the feelings of home-
lessness or displacement that they entail.
Chauduri's emphasis on the treatment of place allows her
to juxtapose realistic and nonrealistic plays in ways not possible
when verisimilitude is seen as the main project of drama. For
example, O'Neill's concern with the characters' desire for a home

(Kaplan 12) in Long Day's Journey into Night (1941) creates a
vivid tension between theatrical visibility and a mournful invisi-
bility that hinges on the characters' feelings toward the place they
inhabit (56-60). Their transient habitation of rented domiciles
prevents them from grounding their identity in a home. Instead,
they either construct identities from gestures, attitudes, and nar-
ratives made dubious by their theatrical artifice or sink into the
self-effacing oblivion of drug addiction or, allegorically, the blan-
keting fog. By analyzing dramatic realism in terms of tropes of
theatrical visibility and psychologically disintegrating invisibility
within a particular place, Chauduri connects realism with other
forms of stage performance.
Chauduri argues that the principle force of American dra-
matic realism springs less from an evolution of Howells's peda-
gogical realism of manners than from the notion of geopathol-
ogy honed in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and
August Strindberg, adjusted for the sense of a rootless space that
the American scene suggests. As the sense of a stable "American"
identity has been challenged throughout the twentieth century,
and as US culture has become less rooted in a sense of "home,"
dramatic realism has increasingly resorted to masks and perso-
nas, which reflect the gap between an interior self and its cultural
representations. The new multicultural plays of the late twentieth
century display this new acknowledgment of the necessity of the-
atricality in a rich array of inventive ways, which often use verisi-
militude without subjugating all aspects of the play to it.
Despite the subtitle, Chauduri's book is more a history than
a geography. She has little to say about where drama takes place,
either literally (on what stages) or metaphorically (in what insti-
tutional milieus). She is interested in how broad historical trends
in society as a whole make an impact on specific developments in
dramatic form, but her attention is directed primarily to certain
threads of development in dramatic form over a period of 100
years.
In contrast, Joel Pfister's Staging Depth. Eugene O'Neill and
the Politics of Psychological Discourse (1995) offers a broader
treatment of the cultural milieu in which dramatic realism rose to
prominence and intertwines institutional and formal questions.
Pfister provides a history of O'Neill's development and a geogra-
phy of the cultural scene within which his works found a stage,
audience, and critical acclaim. He reads O'Neill's plays with a
historiographically inflected attention to gender, race, and class,
but he also examines the ideological presuppositions of past
O'Neill scholarship, the functions O'Neill's plays served for the

growing professional-class theatergoers, and the creative con-
cerns that drew O'Neill to many aspects of realism but also drove
him to other modes of representation to escape realism's con-
straints.
Whereas past studies of O'Neill tend to praise the psycho-
logical depth of the characters, Pfister sees "psychological depth"
less as an advance in realistic drama's representational powers
than as an ideological construct flattering to the urban profes-
sionals who patronized the theater and useful to O'Neill in be-
coming a successful playwright. As Freud's psychoanalysis was
promoted in popular magazines, this class looked to the conven-
tions of psychological depth for a representation of their highly
educated, alienated self-awareness. Social pressures also led to
changes in the representation of race, class, personality, and fam-
ily relationships on the stage.
For Pfister, then, realism is not a rigid set of conventions but
a broad network of historically evolving expectations. O'Neill is
important for understanding realism not because he mastered
its requirements more expertly than any other playwright, but
because the kinds of plays he wrote were useful to powerful
emerging groups. O'Neill's focus on psychology played to the
professional class's interest in the subject, to scholars' and critics'
enthusiasm for complexly suffering individuals, and to the devel-
oping discipline of Method acting.4 Pfister's detailed analysis of
social institutions and hegemonic ideological values makes clear
how O'Neill was more useful to dominant cultural forces than
were dramatists such as Susan Glaspell, who eschewed psycho-
logical depth to draw attention to gender and power relations
among the characters, and Living Newspaper activist-theater
creations such as One Third of a Nation (1938). Yet Pfister also
notes that O'Neill was uneasy with a position at the center of
ideological expectations and looked to other areas of cultural
production (anarchist politics, the women's rights movement,
African-American culture) for inspiration. Pfister also finds
much to admire in O'Neill's grasp of the changing nature of fam-
ily life over 100 years of US history and his ambitious attempts
to break with many of the conventional suppositions of the the-
ater of his day. Pfister thus reveals how historical trends in aes-
thetic expression intertwine with the cultural institutions of a
particular moment in fostering particular forms of dramatic real-
ism. Studies such as his show that realism itself is a shifting con-
cept dependent on the cultural moment in which it is actualized.
For Smith, dramatic realism is not so much an evolving the-
atrical form (as it is in Chauduri's study and most earlier treat-

ments) as a favored topic of discussion in powerful institutions
of culture that have little interest in an objective evaluation of
either the wide potentials or specific practices of American the-
ater. Smith provides what might be called an extended historical
geography of American drama, less concerned with the structure
and content of drama than with its purposes and reception. In
analyzing the three constituent components of "American" "dra-
matic" "realism," Smith is skeptical of what academics and intel-
lectuals have had to say about each's value and significance: "The
notion of a purely 'American' literature was based on an ideal-
ized cultural nationalism that was appropriated by the bur-
geoning academy and refined by a proliferating, self-justifying
professoriate intent on professionalizing themselves as the pro-
ponents of an elite culture" (200). While "American literature"
has proven useful to academics, "American drama" has not: "In
the hierarchized categories of genre, drama, too closely aligned
with entertainment and with emotion, has been affixed in the
cement shoes of high critical disdain and sunk to the murky bot-
tom of academe" (197). Smith's observations suggest that the
paradox of drama hinges on the extent to which the stage can be
recuperated by the literary concepts of the academy. In Smith's
account, then, realism is not so much a mark of the play's grasp
of the world as its openness to easily thematized readings, specu-
lative psychologizing about characters, and facile sociological
generalizations about how the play reflects society (201). In the
realm of theater, "realism" is a powerful concept because it
seems to legitimate the stage with the aesthetic values of elite
culture; within elite culture, however, the stage remains suspect
either because of its links to mass entertainment or (more re-
cently) because "realism" has fallen out of academic fashion.
Smith's book counters the self-importance of dramatic real-
ism within theater studies by showing the slight, generally derog-
atory treatment it receives within broader intellectual institu-
tions. At the same time, she defends the value of theater (beyond
the confines of realism) against the prejudices of the academy.
Smith's point of view opens the question of how much recent
criticism of dramatic realism within theater studies represents a
greater sensitivity to ideological prejudices and the nonmimetic
powers of theatrical performance and how much it represents a
benighted antitheatrical prejudice creeping into the discipline
from more culturally prestigious branches of intellectual en-
deavor.
Offering three distinct approaches to the subject, acute con-

temporary critics demonstrate that dramatic realism must be un-
derstood within the context of broader cultural and historical
phenomena. First, as Chauduri points out, American dramatic
realism was and is part of a larger European tradition in which
America is not just a place where formal developments took a
particular turn but a motif of placelessness within drama that
helped shape the move from geopathology to multiculturalism.
Second, it is crucial to pay attention to what Raymond Williams
has called the "conventions and institutions which, properly ex-
amined, are the really active society" (189) in which the notion
of "American dramatic realism" finds circulation (Smith 201).
Such a broader perspective, Smith maintains, could lead to a
broader understanding of American drama: "Might we not think
of American drama as being interactive, as calling for participa-
tion, as celebrating its irreducible social engagement, as being
multicultural?" (206). Finally, as Pfister, Gross, Quinn, and Bar-
low all suggest, the divergent aspects of theatricality and Ameri-
can culture resonate within individual plays and the oeuvres of
particular playwrights.
In all three approaches, dramatic realism is no longer treated
as the standard of good theater but as one trope available for use
within the broader cultural institutions that produce and evalu-
ate theater. By recognizing these forces, which contribute to the
paradoxical idealization and denigration of American dramatic
realism, we can begin to appreciate the critical role it plays within
the multiple currents of US culture.
Notes
1. For a discussion of what is considered by many scholars the high period of

dramatic realism on the American stage in the 1920s and 1930s, see Murphy
147-49 and Worthen 73-80.
2. See Carlson; Graver; Demastes, Realism 71-90; and Quinn.
3. Georg Lukacs and Arnold Hauser have previously noted the strong influ-
ence of environmental factors on the course of dramatic action in realistic
plays, but where they stress the importance of objects and social milieu, Chaud-
uri argues for the importance of "place"-the architectural and ideological lay-
out of living conditions.
4. A more developed discussion of O'Neill and the Method can be found in

Worthen 54-70.
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The History, Geography, and Heterogeneity of American Dramatic Realism

Author(s): David Graver

(Smith 177) and forgotten by scholars, who have focused instead

ing realism, but without its interest in evidence and documenta-

ished by a particular segment of the theatergoing audience be-

competing traditions and functions that make up American

example, O'Neill's concern with the characters' desire for a home

O'Neill scholarship, the functions O'Neill's plays served for the

atrical form (as it is in Chauduri's study and most earlier treat-

Offering three distinct approaches to the subject, acute con-

1. For a discussion of what is considered by many scholars the high period of

2. See Carlson; Graver; Demastes, Realism 71-90; and Quinn.

4. A more developed discussion of O'Neill and the Method can be found in

Belsey, Catherine. "Constructing the Graver, David. "The Actor's Bodies."

Diamond, Elin. "Mimesis, Mimicry,

Foreman, Richard. Unbalancing Acts.

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