Although a number of women who wrote for the American stage before Lillian Hellman, including Susan Glaspell, Rachel Crothers, and Sophie Treadwell, have recently been receiving serious attention from theatre scholars and historians, Hellman was the first woman playwright to be admitted to the previously all-male space of the canon of American dramatic literature - and that on the basis of two major successes from the 1930s which remain to this day the best known of her eight original plays: The Children’s Hour (1934), which introduced Hellman to theatre audiences and provided the longest run (691 performances) of her thirty-year playwriting career; and The Little Foxes (1939), a perennial favorite with actresses that continues to be given star-studded Broadway revivals. While it may not seem particularly surprising that these same two works, sixty years or more after their New York premieres, continue to be the focus of critical commentary on Hellman, what is somewhat ironic, though perhaps not unexpected, is that they have become the center of contention among feminist scholars, for whom their canonized position is seen as deeply problematic.

The Children’s Hour concerns accusations of lesbianism involving two teachers at a girls’ boarding school; though the rumors are founded on the lies of a vicious child, without evidentiary proof, they fuel a campaign of vilification and hatred, leading ultimately to the broken engagement of one woman and the suicide of the other. Because the lesbian experience is described as socially disruptive, named by the community as “unnatural”- the designation most frequently appearing in the dialogue Hellman writes for her characters - and eventuates in the death of the abject sexual Other, recent criticism tends to regard the play as a “profoundly conservative text”whose adherence to realism’s codes inscribes lesbianism as an “enigma”that must be “purged,”and thus a play whose very canonization valorizes heterosexism and homophobia.

OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA (1935-I974)

Oscar Zeta Acosta was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1935 but moved with his family to Riverbank (now part of Modesto), California, at the age of five. After attending Oakdale Joint Union High School, Acosta turned down a music scholarship to the University of Southern California, instead enlisting in the United States Air Force (as a member of the Air Force Band), primarily so that he could continue to be involved with an Anglo woman whose parents disapproved of him. After their relationship ended a year later, Acosta sought solace in religion, converting from Catholicism to the Baptist faith and becoming a preacher. Shipped to Panama in part because of his overzealous attempts to convert other Catholic soldiers, Acosta became a minister at a leper colony and was honorably discharged from the air force in 1956. After a suicide attempt prompted by his loss of faith, Acosta met Betty Daves in a Modesto hospital and married her shortly thereafter. In 1965, the then-divorced Acosta began studying law at night at San Francisco Law School and became an attorney for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society. Two years later, he quit his law practice to wander around the Southwest in search of a vision; after being briefly jailed in Mexico, Acosta assumed a new identity — Buffalo Z. Brown — and became a political activist in Los Angeles and a leader of the Chicano Movement. In 1969, he met his second wife, Socorro Anguiniga. After unsuccessfully running for Los Angeles County sheriff (as an independent, on an anarchist platform) in 1970, Acosta befriended Hunter S. Thompson and accompanied him on the trip that would be preserved for posterity in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In June 1974, he disappeared in Mazatlan, Mexico and was never seen again.

Few scholars of American drama would deny the importance of Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, or Susan Glaspell, playwrights active in the early decades of this century. Materials on these playwrights and their work for the stage are readily accessible through preserved notes, letters, reviews, photographs, and production records. Indeed, if one were to leaf through bibliographies of American plays and playwrights prior to 1930, it would seem that only white Americans were writing for the stage and thereby grinding the lens through which American life and culture could be viewed. By relying only on the reflection of American life and culture presented by white playwrights, however, one would have a warped picture, one that presented a monocular view of the United States and its drama of the early twentieth century. In 1987, Richard Bernstein, theatre columnist for the New York Times, wrote, “The tradition of a Black American Theatre is not a long one, going back only a generation or so to the work of such playwrights as Amiri Baraka [in 1970]”(“August Wilson’s Voices,” 34). Little realized by Bernstein, theatre students, and scholars of American drama is that 100 African American playwrights, thus far identified, wrote 350 plays before 1930. Of these playwrights 47 were women. Yet how many scholars of American drama can name more than a few, if any?

By all objective standards, Rachel Crothers is the most significant woman playwright the United States produced in the early twentieth century, and one of the four or five major American playwrights who did their best work before World War II. An actress, director, and the author of more than thirty plays, most of which were commercially successful, Crothers was a consistent and acknowledged presence in the American theatre between 1906, when her first hit appeared, and 1937, when her last play achieved a run of 288 performances and won the Theatre Club’s award for the outstanding play of the 1937-38 season. Crothers has consistently been undervalued by drama historians and literary critics, however. Like that of most women writers in the early twentieth century who wrote about the relations between the sexes, the institutions of marriage and the family, and the struggle of women to define their values in the face of the conflicting demands of nurturing a family and pursuing a career, Crothers’ work was marginalized by her contemporary critics and reviewers. The influential academic critics of American drama continued this marginalization during the thirties by setting Crothers’ work outside the “mainstream” of male playwrights and dismissing it as a “feminine” footnote. Arthur Hobson Quinn’s chapter, “Rachel Crothers and the Feminine Criticism of Life,” in the standard prewar history of American drama, is typical of this treatment.

American women have been writing plays for at least 150 years, and, if we are willing to look innocently (because he is not a woman) at early American drama, an argument could be made that Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) is the first feminist American play. More commonly, it is Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion, written and performed in 1845, that has been considered to be the first popular play written by an American woman (but Fashion is not a feminist play). At least three other scripts compete for the position as “first feminist play ”: Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Megan Terry’s Calm Down Mother (1965). There are various angles from which one can contest these selections. Plays written by American women were performed in the nineteenth century; some remain available in collections and paperback printings. They occasioned much delight among their audiences, according to letters and news reports of their time, but hardly lasted beyond the moment or beyond a single tour of American cities. That, of course, is typical of Western drama (indeed, of most drama - not just American drama - or drama written by women). Leading the early one-act plays in the United States were the plays written by women: they authored “little” plays (usually one-acts) performed in towns, villages, and cities in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Robert Penn Warren’s literary career began before the publication of The Waste Land and ended after Robert Lowell and many poets of the generation following had died. Like Thomas Hardy, Warren has a distinguished reputation both as a poet and as a novelist, winning the Pulitzer prize in both genres (and twice in poetry). As with Hardy, his poetry, for which he was appointed the first poet laureate of the United States, is his principal claim to fame for those who know him best, but his fiction is better known to readers at large. He distinguished himself as well as a critic and as a teacher, coauthoring with Cleanth Brooks Understanding Poetry (1938), the textbook that taught two generations of college students how to read poetry and that symbolizes for the literary criticism of the present day that figment of the retrospective imagination now called New Criticism. Warren also was a considerable essayist on politics and history, and he made a mark as a biographer and as a dramatist as well. Few white Southerners of his generation thought as seriously or in as sustained a way as Warren did about the problems of racism during the last years of legal segregation of the races in the South and the first years of legal integration.

Growing up in Guthrie, Kentucky, a railroad junction on the Tennessee border where he was born in 1905, Warren was a precocious student (he skipped two grades in school) and was subjected to considerable hazing, including one incident, discovered by a recent biographer, in which local toughs actually hanged him. At the age of 15, after graduating from high school and studying an additional year in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, Warren received an appointment to the United States Naval Acadamy in Annapolis, but an accident cost him the use of one eye and forced his parents to send him to Vanderbilt University instead.

Tennessee Williams felt himself to be an outsider. His particular sexuality was expressly forbidden by law; his avocation as a writer seemed to put him at odds with a society that plotted its priorities along different axial lines. He came from a part of the country that seemed to have been abandoned by a nation whose model of the twentieth century had little use for those whose eyes were fixed not only on the past but on a fantasy reworked as myth. Even in the South, however, he felt out of place, aware, as he was, of its prejudices and of the violence that existed just below the veneer of civility. It is perhaps hardly surprising, therefore, that he wrote a series of plays that focused on the plight of those left behind by the bright lights and noise of the Twentieth Century, that symbol of modernity, the cross-country train that used to roll across America and that Hart Crane turned into a powerful metaphor in a poem, part of which Williams was to use as an epigraph to A Streetcar Named Desire.

His first public success, The Glass Menagerie, drew deeply on his own family situation. Indeed, he himself appears as Tom (his own name was Thomas), a young man torn between responsibility for his crippled sister (Williams’s own sister, Rose, was mentally damaged) and a free life as a writer responsible to no one but himself and to nothing but his craft. It was a play of considerable honesty and great subtlety.

It has become a commonplace in recent feminist theory to dismiss stage realism as fundamentally incompatible with feminist interests. The reasons for this dismissal have changed through time. In the 1970s some feminists rejected realism simply because they saw its linear form as designed to reflect male experience exclusively. More recently, others have denounced realism because it apparently normalizes the traditionally unequal power relations between genders and classes. Still others have charged that realism reinscribes this inequality in a particularly dangerous way by pretending to be an objective recording of the world while representing woman as sexual “Other” and excluding female subjectivity.

While it is certainly true that stage realism has often been guilty of these offenses, I fear that the dismissal of realism by feminists might have several undesirable effects. First, abandoning stage realism means abandoning much important theatre history, especially in America, and especially the works of early twentieth-century feminist playwrights who used realism to illustrate the entrapment of women characters in traditional roles. Second, the outright rejection of realism ignores the built-in subversive possibilities of this endlessly adaptable form. Finally, since realism is still the most prominent mainstream dramatic form in American theatre, rejecting it as a vehicle for feminist issues would deprive feminist playwrights of a widespread audience.

American women realists of one period did, in fact, employ realism as a means to express feminist views. This chapter focuses on three playwrights of the Progressive Era - the first few decades of the twentieth century - because it was a time of widespread changes in the position of women as they fought for the rights to vote, to become educated, to support themselves, and to live independent lives. The plays of Zona Gale, Rachel Crothers, and Marion Craig Wentworth will demonstrate how realism could once - and possibly still can - be used to promote positive social change for women.

Atomism was the creation of two thinkers of the fifth century B.C., Leucippus and Democritus. The former, attested by Aristotle, our primary source, as the founder of the theory, was a shadowy figure even in antiquity, being eclipsed by his more celebrated successor Democritus to such an extent that the theory came to be generally regarded as the work of the latter. Epicurus, who developed and popularised atomism in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C. (following in the tradition of various figures such as Nausiphanes and Anaxarchus, now little more than names), went so far as to deny that Leucippus ever existed. Only a little more is known about Democritus (see p. xix). The precise relation between Leucippus and Democritus is unclear. Plato never mentions either by name. Aristotle and his followers treat Leucippus as the founder of the theory, but also assign its basic principles to both Leucippus and Democritus; later sources tend to treat the theory as the work of Democritus alone. While it is clear that the theory originated with Leucippus, it is possible that the two collaborated to some extent and almost certain that Democritus developed the theory in a number of areas, for example, extending it to include a materialistic psychology, a sophisticated epistemology, and an account of the development of human society that laid particular stress on the human capacity to learn from chance experience.

c. 1900–c. 1940

At the turn of the twentieth century the cello was usually considered a man's instrument, due largely to Victorian ideas of female decorum. General standards of playing were not particularly high – in 1890, Bernard Shaw had likened the sound of the cello to a ‘bumble-bee buzzing inside a stone jar’! Much of the literature which was to provide the basis of cello instruction for the next hundred years either already existed or would appear within fifteen years. This literature was intended for the mature player, since young child beginners were rare. However, the availability of small cellos was increasing in the wake of the developing production of small violins, and the metal, retractable cello spike, though not in general use, was gradually gaining acceptance. Pablo Casals and Emanuel Feuermann helped to transform cello performance into an art of the highest order during the first half of the century, their playing incorporating a new ease and fluidity of physical movement as the basis of their technical command.

Early twentieth-century pedagogical material was logically presented, starting in the lower positions and working towards the higher ones, but often failed to take into account what was physically most appropriate for the player. It comprised systematic tutors, studies which focused on specific technical aspects, and short exercises for daily practice. Apart from Carl Fuchs' Violoncello Method (3 vols., London, 1906), this material was neither musically rewarding nor suitable for the young beginner, most tutors being written by famous players who omitted to explain fully the reasons for their recommendations.