Suffering angels: Images of children in nineteenth century drama.
Item
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Title
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Suffering angels: Images of children in nineteenth century drama.
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Identifier
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AAI9130367
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identifier
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9130367
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Creator
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Ruff, Felicia J.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Daniel Gerould
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater
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Abstract
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Children and childhood captured the imagination of nineteenth-century writers and theatre audiences. Concern for children exploded during the period, manifesting itself in legal, educational, and familial reforms and powerfully intruding into literature in poetry, fiction, and drama. In nineteenth-century European and North American society, children were placed at first in a position of neglect and enforced maturity but were ultimately exalted in literature; for even when suffering, their sensitive natures set them above the corruption of adult society. Transformed by romantic poets and writers at the turn of the eighteenth century, the child-image came to represent particular attributes, such as helplessness, innocence, and purity.;While the image of children has been carefully studied in the poetry and fiction of the century, the child-image in drama has not yet been the subject of critical analysis. This study attempts to fill that critical void and reveals that dramatists of varying periods and temperaments found this new symbolic character particularly suited to their needs. Melodramatists found the child perfectly suited to the role of victim, while other child characters were portrayed as innocent vessels capable of spiritual cleansing. In the later, more poetic works of Ibsen, Wedekind, and Maeterlinck, certain characteristics such as naive purity and helplessness are retained, yet the treatment is more oblique and, unlike melodrama, undermines traditional middle class values.;The treatment of children changed as the drama developed throughout the century. Initially, the child's sensational and pathetic qualities were exploited by melodramatists who established the basic iconographic motifs which were later transformed by thematically and structurally experimental playwrights. And yet all children throughout the century were united in their capacity for suffering and goodness. Their helplessness and innocence were the inspiration for the title of this study--suffering angels--because each of these young innocents was superior to the polluted adult society they were forced to inhabit.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
