If permitted to borrow from critic Eric Sundquist, realism as a genre has been especially successful at maintaining its notorious allusiveness in the eyes of the body of critics. Whether these attentive “feelers of the public’s pulse” have taken to regard realism as almost interchangeable with naturalism or verisimilitude, drawing on the precepts of nineteenth century art/literary theories, or opting for a more open (‘progressive’) interpretation by looking at realism as a critical concept that is simultaneously a site of ideological struggle between different critical positions, it seems that the genre which marked the literary and theatrical practices of the late nineteenth century is quite hard to “pin down”. However, what is useful to keep in mind when discussing the form and content of a ‘realist work of art’ is the multi-discursiveness of realism as a concept. In her essay on the creative vitality of the Provincetown Players and their employment of realism “as the mode in which to express their most critical and progressive political ideas”, the critic J. Ellen Gainor reminds us of this often dismissed, composite element of realism. (Gainor, J. Ellen, “The Provincetown Players’ Experiments with Realism”, found in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William W. Demastes, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996, p. 53.)
Straightforward and precise in her opening statement, Ms. Gainor refuses to play along the lines of certain recent feminist theatre criticism which has fashioned a rather limiting extrapolation (in reverse) of realism by identifying it “as a mode antithetical to its goals.” Instead, she is interested in an in-depth re-examination of such trends within contemporary theatrical scholarship by discussing how certain “realist” works (namely, three plays from the Provincetown Players’ repertoire, including Susan Glaspell’s anthologized work, Trifles), contest the same formalist position that tends to dismiss them at face value, based on their ‘ideologically suspect’ physical attire, i.e., form. Ms. Gainor approaches her critical reading of the Provincetown Players by focusing her attention on reassessing particular representative statements that have come out from the anti-realist camp affiliated within feminist/ Marxist/ poststructuralist/ ”Brechtian” theory, by pointing out the socio-specific and historically-pertinent circumstances which situate the body of work associated with the group, as well as their impact on the Little Theatre movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, in a unique interplay with (retrieved) Brechtian principles of realism.
Under the dutiful eye of George Cram Cook, the group’s productions of American plays by American playwrights, in small, nurturing, community-reared spaces, stand out as an important but rather forgotten (or better forsaken) part of American dramatic traditions. As Ms. Gainor notes in her article on the group’s experimentation with form and content, the context of the early decades of the twentieth century in regards to the situation on the American stage begs a reshaping of conventional (Euro-centric) understandings of the concept of realism, i.e., a “realist work of art”. Her study of three distinct works by the Players, in particular Susan Glaspell’s treasured ‘little gem of a play’, Trifles (1916), is based on such a careful re-examination; Ms. Gainor “reads” Glaspell’s work as an act of conscious subversion of the codes of realist dramaturgy, as Glaspell manages “to break down the very processes of mimesis and identification theoretically integral to the realist form” by using “these same subversions to highlight her feminist agenda.” (Gainor, p. 63)
What better (or more innovative way) to expose the problems of a patriarchal hegemony than by involving its most powerful ‘tool’, the conventional narrative strategy of a realistic representation which denotes the authenticity of ‘our world’?
Ms. Gainor traces Glaspell’s trajectory by observing some of the playwright’s techniques at achieving such an insurrection of the practices of realistic dramaturgy; for example, in Trifles, Glaspell centers the action of the play around what is hidden, hinted at, trivial to the ‘naked eye’. By removing the two principal figures of the play’s storyline (Minnie Wright and her murdered husband, John Wright) from the stage, and thus centering the play’s unfolding on the traditionally marginal characters (Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, and Mrs. Hale, the wife of a neighboring farmer) and their growing bond of identification with the absent ‘murderess’, Glaspell creates an environment, a realistic setting, which is far from monolithic. As an audience, we are challenged to follow the journey that the two women undertake, in the small, confining space of the absent woman’s kitchen, step by step, discovering the actual realism of Mrs. Wright’s grim life. This version of reality, as Ms. Gainor attests to in her article on the Provincetown Players implementation of ‘realist techniques’, is consistently contrasted to “that to which women are taught to aspire, which would, in conventional realism, reinforce ideological codes,” allowing Susan Glaspell the playwright to “expose problems of ideology and political perspective in the dominant culture.” (Gainor, pp. 64-65)
Therefore, this ‘turning of the tables’ on the analysis of realism, which is closely connected to a “theatre firmly grounded in concrete material and cultural conditions for its creation”, exposes formalist theoretical principles and their inadequacy to accurately encapsulate the aesthetic merit of plays which belong to the local historical moment surrounding the Little Theatre movement, particularly its proponents, the Provincetown Players. Perhaps Ms. Gainor’s work will be followed by other attempts, on the behalf of cultural critics and literary scholars (disregarding their geographical, social, political context), to ‘free’ realism from stagnant suppositions that preclude its elemental nature as a signifying practice akin to bourgeois representations (but with a claim on all classes!). It is the ‘how’ (and not the ‘what’) of realism which will readdress the process of canonization, which in turn, will learn to value textual artifacts on the grounds of their historically-specific universality rather than “a putative transhistorical…significance.” (Gainor, p. 67)
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