Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners (review)

Susan Carlson. Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, Studies in Modem Literature No. 48, 1985. 153 pp. $37.95. The chief grace of Susan Carlson's book is the history and generic description she offers of the comedy of manners from 1660 to the present. She proposes to define that genre in "my own definition of the term and the tradition because I believe I can offer a model by which we can study the syntheses, texture, and milieu of the comedy of manners as they have rarely been studied before." Though this claim to uniqueness is not borne out, the book is potentiaUy useful to readers who might suppose the comedy of manners to be a charming relic only, and who wiU be led by Carlson's knowledgeable study and command of the scholarship to appreciate the depth of the genre. "Manners are not merely the surface social interaction we see and hear" but "a meeting place where society and individual contend for power" (6). She pursues important and possibly surprising links to the problem plays, which tend to be the main interest of later drama. In fact, Carlson arouses one's imagination—she seems on the verge of, and capable of, an analysis of the "transmogrification of the comedy of manners" in the work of contemporary playwrights such as Harold Pinter and even Sam Shepard. Unhappily, Carlson's other two purposes in the book are far less well achieved. One of them is to demonstrate that women in the comedies are central and that they "have found [that] the use of manners as a system of surface and depths is their key to gaining a power the double standard seems to deny them" (22-23). AU she reaUy demonstrates, however, is the truth of Norman HoUand's contention that women characters in these comedies are "rather more successful at these social games than men," and what they gain is more like an impermanent equaUty than anything one might caU power or social change arising from manners that are respectable for their connection to morals. The grace referred to in the title, when it is personified (e.g., in Boucicault's London Assurance), is seen to "question the system, invites us to also, and then decides it is worth the compromise" (25). Ultimately, somewhat contradictorily, Carlson agrees with a series of feminist critics that "Comedy, far from liberating women, pre-empts their hopes of lasting power," remaining merely a tribute to their "special social prowess." It becomes hard to know whether the author is simply describing the early plays or expressing her own opinion when she finally defines grace as "the fine art of living a stylized life," including what another critic calls a "graceful and natural acceptance" achieved in a mannerly compromise that is fuU of games, masks, and manipulation. Where exactly does Carlson stand when she quotes Frederick Crews calling these games a "tragedy of manners"? The third purpose of the book—to imbed the plays of Henry James, at once tightly and loosely, into the comedy of manners tradition—is the least successful operation of the book. The discussion of James comes on abruptly, occupying only about a third of the book. This of course renders the title very misleading and the book disunified, possibly the result also of constructing an awkward whole out of a doctoral dissertation to which are attached some independently prepared and published essays. Volume 8 150 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 There can be tittle doubt that James was simply wrong at one point to say (in a letter quoted by Carlson) that in the drama he had found "my real form, which I am capable of carrying far, and for which the pale little art of fiction, as I have practiced it, has been, for me, but a limited and restricted substitute." Yet Carlson proposes to move James's plays to center front in the comedy of manners tradition rather than to adopt Leon Edel's belief that the plays are mainly useful for the adumbration of the superiority of James's fiction, where of course the...