Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Women's Drama before 1945

Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Women's Drama before 1945 REBECCA S. CAMERON Modern British drama, influenced by Ibsen and the feminist movement, is replete with criticisms of the institution of marriage - fe-evaluations of traditional gender roles, condemnations of the sexual double standard, and critiques of the various social, economic, and psychological inequalities arising from the marriage contract. British dramatists nevertheless resisted ending their plays with the parting of husband and wife, despite the impact of Ibsen 's A Doll House through the first half of the twentieth century. Divorce seldom received serious treatment on stage, although the issue attracted lively sociopolitical debate during this period. After World War I, mainstream theatre and film began to exploit the comic potential of the subject, but few dramatists ventured to represent divorce as a serious alternative to reconciliation. Two little-known plays, however, both written by women and produced in London between the wars, take up the issue in all its complexity: Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement (1921) and Elizabeth Baker's Penelope Forgives (1930). These bold and provocative treatments of divorce remain quite distinct from those of more prominent male dramatists of the period, such as Shaw and Coward, as well as from mainstream farce and film. Like many women playwrights of the period, Dane and Baker engage directly with political and intellectual debates of their day, and they are best understood within that context. Both write from feminist perspectives, but they take different approaches to the divorce question as it was conceived in their time, Dane emphasizing eugenics, and Baker, class and economics. However, their plays are of interest not on)y for their response to the immediate political situation but also for their departure from the conventional comic- romantic structure shaping so many representations of marriage and even divorce in British drama before World War II. Immediately following the Great War, the divorce rate in Britain increased dramatically. The press seized on the issue, and the resulting controversy led to Modem Drama, 44:4 (2001) 476 Divorce and Women's Drama 477 the production of several books and pamphlets on marriage and divorce through the 1920Sand early 1930S by organizations ranging from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to the Divorce Law Reform Union. Though divorce rates had risen steadily before the war, these post-war figures were unprecedented, and, to many, cause for alarm. In England, the annual number of divorces almost quadrupled.' Roderick Phillips's history of divorce suggests several possible causes for the deterioration of marital relations during wartime: hurried courtships, enforced separations, women's increased independence (including wartime employment), and wartime adultery at home and abroad. World War I, however, merely accentuated a trend that had begun much earlier. For several decades, feminists, socialists, eugenicists. and others had lobbied for marriage law reforms that slowly began to materialize. In 1912, a Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes - despite being composed , according to Rebecca West, "mainly of people impervious to ideas" (Marcus 124) - recommended wide-ranging reforms to the divorce laws, including increased access for the working classes, equal grounds for women, and the admission of grounds other than adultery, namely cruelty, desertion for more than three years. incurable insanity, and incurable drunkenness. The campaign for more liberal divorce laws remained strong throughout the inter-war period, its advocates including prominent intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and Rebecca West. The proposed reforms, however, took years to become law: the Poor Persons' Procedure was introduced in 1914. but the double standard for men and women was not redressed until 1923, and grounds apart from adultery were not recognized until t937, thirty years after the commission was formed. However slow their implementation in law, these contemporary sociopolitical debates over divorce legislation allowed dmmalists such as Dane and Baker to imagine more concretely situations that hitherto had been mostly speculative; as the reforms became tangible reality, these women began to envision their consequences. The liberalization of divorce legislation in Britain met with considerable resistance. Some of the strongest opposition, not surprisingly, came from the Church, as well as from socially conservative thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton and Warwick Deeping, who argued that...