Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism (review)

In a 1987 special issue of The Southern Quarterly guest editor Milly Barranger initiated a discussion of and called for more critical engagement with the literary and theatrical heritage of southern women playwrights. This collection of essays responds to that appeal, addresses the neglected state of scholarship on southern women dramatists, and suggests opportunities for further inquiry in literary, theatrical, and Southern studies. Instead of establishing a "canon-making anatomy of the Southern Woman Playwright," editors Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige set out to highlight the "distinctive voices, features and themes in drama by Southern women," to reflect upon the active construction of "The South" and "Southernness" as a process of telling and enactment in the works of these playwrights, and to reveal how conscious or unconscious regional affiliations inform their aesthetic and thematic choices (x).

McDonald's essay "The Current State of Scholarship on Southern Women Playwrights" opens the volume and argues that women playwrights who write out of their experience of being born in or residing in the American South face academic attitudes that devalue drama among the other genres of American literature in both literary studies and Southern literary studies, as well as "the region's peculiar problematizing of its women and their art" (5). This critical shortsightedness accounts, in McDonald's view, for the dearth of scholarly inquiry about these dramatists. While he allows that substantive research has been conducted on the work of Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Lillian Hellman, he criticizes the lack of scholarly analysis of work by emerging playwrights and calls for the study of plays by writers known primarily as novelists, such as Carson McCullers and Zora Neale Hurston.

In its attempt to begin this critical conversation, the collection includes three essays devoted to reclaiming both McCullers and Hurston as playwrights. John Lowe's "Let The People Sing!: Zora Neale Hurston and the Dream of a Negro Theatre" considers Hurston's ambitions as a folk dramatist, detailing her oeuvre of both published and unpublished plays. Judith Giblin James's "Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, and the Politics of Broadway" is a comparative study of the efforts of both women to stage their plays. Arguing that McCullers and Smith shared affinities through the challenges of producing The Member of the Wedding and Strange Fruit for the stage, Giblin asserts that representations of racial segregation and Broadway's political navigations were closely linked to the commercial success and failure of these plays. Broadway insiders anticipated that Smith's treatment of racism and miscegenation would insure the play's success, while McCullers' story of female adolescence was not expected to draw audiences. However, Strange Fruit failed and The Member of the Wedding was a commercial success and Giblin attributes this to McCullers' willingness to openly critique and abandon those who threatened her artistic vision. Turning to the intersection of sexual and regional identity, Betty E. McKinnie and Carlos L. Dews's "The Delayed Entrance of Lily Mae Jenkins: Queer Identity, Gender Ambiguity and Southern Ambivalence in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding" examines McCullers's "response to the South's homophobia and its strict demands of gendered behavior" (61) by tracing her development and consequent abandonment of the cross-dressing Lily Mae Jenkins from an early manuscript of The Heart Is ALonely Hunter to her stage adaptation of Member in which the character reappears not on stage but only in dialogue (61). Through Lily Mae Jenkins, McKinnie and Dews contend, McCullers reflects on her own adolescent struggles with gender and sexuality and with Southern queer identity and its ambivalences while advancing a critique of the South's insistence on fixed gender roles.

While these are important interventions, the volume nonetheless devotes most of its essays to established playwrights despite the interests stated in the introduction in drawing more attention...