The Death of Character: Perspective on Theater after Modernism by Elinor Fuchs (review)

166 Book Reviews and Cleopatra, with Melbourne, Prince Albert, and Disraeli as partial Caesarprototypes and Baroness Lehzen as an original for Ftatateeta. And he presents evidence to make one think about both Broadbent in John Bull's Other (sland and Balbus in The Apple Cart as deriving in certain ways from Churchill. The four essays that reveal Professor Weintraub at his best, it seems to me, are' the ones devoted to Shaw's fellow Irish writers: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and O'Casey. In each of these pieces - and particularly in the one on Yeats, which is the most substantial piece of scholarship in the volume - Weintraub has gathered together materials from a great variety of sources, and has arranged them in a way that clearly tells the story of the relationship between Shaw and the other writer. (I also very much enjoyed reading the Trebitsch piece, but here I must declare an interest in that portions of it seem unaccountably to have migrated from my own review of Bernard Shaw's Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch.) Another virtue of Shaw's People is the inclusion of some fine quotations that Weintraub's research has brought to OUT attention. There is a wonderful passage, for example, in which Shaw ridicules statues of Queen Victoria (27), and a nice line from Yeats, written at the time of Back to Methuselah 's publication: Shaw, he told George Russell (AE), "is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor" (110- and see AE's reply, Ill). Fifteen years ago Stanley Weintraub gave us another collection of his essays under the title The Unexpected Shaw. Now he enables us to look further at the unexpected Shaw - at the diversity of his interests, and at the attentiveness (and retentiveness) of his mind. Shaw's People ought to enhance Shaw's reputation as a figure and to extend interest in his plays. J.L. WISENTHAL, TIlE UNIVERSITY OF BRmSH COLUMBIA ELINOR FUCHS. The Death o/Character: Perspective on Theater after Modernism . Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Pp. 224. $39.95; $17.95 (PB). Elinor Fuchs deserves to be acknowledged as a pioneer in the application of contemporary theoretical perspectives to the theatre. In the early 1980s, she was one of a very few scholars actively engaged in exploring what poststructuralism and cultural theory - especially deconstruction and postmodernismmight mean for theatre practice and criticism. That she leads, then and now, a double life as a journalistic critic and a scholar means that she has long been in the perfect position to examine new perfonnance in relation to new theory. Fuchs's eagerly awaited book, The Death o/Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism, is the fruit of this ongoing, dual commitment to the worlds of practical criticism and scholarship and is a thoughtful, highly read- Book Reviews able contribution to the evolving literature on theatre and postmodernism. The book's organization reflects the double nature of Fuch's engagement with theatre : two sections of academic writings are followed by a selection of reviews and essays written for non-scholarly publications. Fuchs's writings show that the membrane separating her two identities has proven valuably permeable: her academic writing is infused with the pragmatism of the journalist, while her reviews reflect the theoretical sophistication of the scholar. Given Fuchs's stature as a reviewer of the latest in theatre and performance, and the title of her book, it comes as a welcome surprise that the first section is devoted to essays on modem drama. Rather than presenting a theory of postmodernism or postmodern culture then applying it to theatrical examples - the established pattern for work of this sort - Fuchs charts the appearance of postmodernism on the map of the history of dramatic literature. Taking as her starting point the Aristotelian concept of character, she traces the evolution of modem character out of Romanticism, observing that "at the entrance to theatrical modernism, there are clear signs that character is in retreat from its Hegelian apogee" (3I). Fuchs goes on to identify three trends in modem drama, each of which tends to undermine the autonomy of character: the allegorical, the critical, and...