Writing from the interior: Early twentieth-century one-act plays of domestic realism by American women.
Item
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Title
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Writing from the interior: Early twentieth-century one-act plays of domestic realism by American women.
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Identifier
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AAI9917627
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identifier
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9917627
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Creator
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Beck, Anne Elizabeth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Judith Milhous
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Date
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1999
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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 | Women's Studies | Literature, American
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Abstract
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This study examines twenty-six one-act plays by women published between 1915 and 1938, most of which were written for production in amateur venues---such as university and little theatres and farm clubs---where women dominated as both participants and audience members. The plays I discuss are now out of print and most of the playwrights unknown, but at the time they wrote, the women had modest success. The dissertation focuses on how the writers used plays set in the home to comment on issues concerning them and their audiences.;The plays divide between those about women of the lower-class, written to remind audiences about their responsibilities to others, and those about middle-class women with whom the audience could identify and often commiserate. The plays evidence the writers' concerns about families living in poverty, a housewife's isolation, the nature of marriage, and the result of women's economic dependence. Despite the legal advances for women made possible by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the plays document how much still needed to be accomplished. The intense struggle between a woman's traditional role as conservator of home values and the desire to flee the home recurs throughout this period. Unable to dramatize change, the one-act form fit the thematic focus of home-bound stasis, framing as it did the circumstances that defined the lives of many women.;Chapter One treats the influence that Progressive Era reform had on amateur writers, whose realistic social dramas fit with the democratic principles espoused by many artists active in the early years of the Little Theatre movement. Chapter Two contrasts the characterization of middle-class women as invidious parasites as depicted in a few plays by men with those by women, which show housewives entrapped by domesticity. Chapter Three discusses folk plays dramatizing the plight of farm women that correlated to conditions that concerned rural reformers in the Country Life Movement. Chapter Four considers the growth of community theatre in the 30s and the opportunity it afforded amateur writers.
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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.
