Drama and the Rhythm of Work in the 1920s

The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives.

--Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character¹

Representations of work in the drama of the 1920s often depicted it as either destructive to the individual or, to the extent that characters were well adjusted to their work environment, as a refuge for the shallow and unimaginative. Such dramatic representations of work and workers convey a horror of mechanization. In them machine processes consistently pervert the individual, in part by undermining the possibility of worker self-determination. But work also becomes a source of social distinction and self-creation, exacerbating the tension between the increased standardization of work and the desire to see work as an expression of identity. On one level, work simply recapitulates the difficulties an ideology of individualism necessarily faces when confronted with the fact of society. In addition, however, the attention plays such as Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's Beggar on Horseback, and Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and The Great God Brown pay to work as a sign of an individual character's essential capacities and attributes reflects a developing cultural focus on the adjustment and contentment of the individual worker. The 1920s had seen the birth of industrial psychology as a discipline and accepted function within the firm, a development that coincided both with research suggesting the importance of worker morale to productivity and with the decline in the power of organized labor.

What these plays assume to be important or interesting about the working men and women they portray has less to do with the social and material relationships in which their work places them than with the ways in which the work they do embodies or expresses them as individuals. As Henri Lefebvre observed, it was not until the bourgeois era that work and the development of individuality could be seen as anything but mutually contradictory endeavors. The cultivation of the self was the privilege of the leisured class until, with the advent of the bourgeois work ethic, work itself began to be seen as an appropriate realm for the expression of the self. ² For Lefevbre this development coincided with the increased fragmentation of work in the industrial age, and thus with an eventual shift in the locus of self-expression from work to the space of leisure. In apparent support of Lefevbre's thesis, the realm of leisure burgeoned in 1920s, and some have argued that leisure activities provided a safe place for the exploration of the inner self, a place minimally disruptive to the discipline and order required by work. ³ More recently, however, this view has been challenged by Thomas Lutz, who recognizes the crucial role played by work in the identities of the professional/managerial class. Lutz argues that for this class, work became a positive force, leading to a hedonic work ethic that located in work "a source of energy, fulfillment and pleasure." ⁴

The argument that follows supports Lutz's thesis, but in the service of a different question. Its focus is less on the relation between work and leisure than on the anxiety provoked by attempts to reconcile two conflicting versions of the relationship between the self and work. On the one hand, many of the plays under discussion assume a static, essentialized version of the self--that is, a self whose most authentic and (therefore implicitly) unchanging attributes must find their proper and appropriate expression in an individual's life work. On the other hand, as opposed to the fragmented and repetitive nature of industrial work, self-fulfilling work is supposed to embody both narrative continuity and organic development. As in Richard Sennett's observation on the conflict between present-day work patterns and the development of...