Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition ed. by William W. Demastes (review)

Book Reviews WILLIAM W. DEMASTES. ed. Realism alld the American Dramatic Tradition. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press 1996. Pp. 290. $29.95 This collection of sixteen critical essays is not just an analysis of literary realism as practiced by twentieth-century American dramatists but a defense of it. Modest, innocent little realism has come under some critical attack in recent years and, implicitly or explicitly, each of the essayists here represented attempts to defend either the playwright at hand or the mode in general. Their varying degrees of success are a measure of how powerfully realism's critics have set the terms of the debate. The charges against realism fall into two groups, the aesthetic and the political. On the one hand the genre is accused of fraud, in that it does not really depict external reality as it supposedly claims. The political charge is that, since realism does depict external reality (anybody notice a contradiction here?), it implicitly validates the status quo; in particular, since most American dramatic realism is also domestic, it affmns patriarchal gender roles and definitions. Generally speaking, the first charge is the easiest for the essayists to refute, the proper answer to the accusation that realism isn't realistic being "of course not." Nobody seriously claims that realism is the photo- and phonographic reproduction of the external world; it is a set of artifices conventionally accepted as representing reality . (As my freshmen enjoy having pointed out to them, in realistic plays characters speak one at a time, and in grammatical sentences.) Thus Brian Richardson, in his Introduction; Thomas P. Adler, on Tennessee Williams ; and Brenda Murphy, on Arthur Miller, all happily acknowledge the artifice used by realistic writers without conceding that it in any way invalidates the mode. On the other hand, those who try the "They are, too, realistic" approach are generally less successful ; Patricia D, Denison's defense of James A. Heme too obviously ignores his melodramatic side, and surely Frank R. Cunningham is the first critic ever to use the phrase "adroit handling of dialect" ( I 15) in an essay on Eugene O'Neill. Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 295 Book Reviews The new-historicist political-correctness criticisms prove more thorny, as essayists fmd themselves accepting the premises of the criticism while defending against it. The thrust of J. Ellen Gainor's analysis of the Provincetown Players' repertory and of Judith E. Barlow's study of Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes is essentially that these are exceptions to the rule of domestic realism's anti-feminism. And by arguing that Beth Henley's women achieve, and Wendy Wasserstein's women search for resolution within the accepted social framework instead of demanding a transformation of society , Janet V. Haedicke concedes the issue. Her essay, and parts of some others, read like the Communist Party literary criticism of the 19305, attacking writers for not hewing to the party line; the possibility that Wasserstcin, for example, is criticizing the status quo by dramatizing the frustrations of women trying to find fulfillment within it, isn't considered. Inevitably a thematic collection such as this has its share of entries whose connection to the central subject is tenuous, and a couple that seem to have just tacked new introductions and conclusions' onto essentially unrelated analyses. The essays by YVOIUle Shafer (on Rachel Crothers, and really about the male establishment's failure to appreciate her), Robert F. Gross (on artifice in three social comedies), John W. Frick (with the big news that Odets used individual families to represent the experience of a class), Eric Bergesen and William W. Demastes (on the different social agendas of Amm Baraka and August Wilson), and Michael L. Quinn (on rOle-playing in Marnet) each offer insights into their subjects, but have little to say about realism. And that is perhaps a good summary comment on the book as a whole. Anyone of the essays could be fruitfully read by an undergraduate looking for help in understanding the individual playwright. But the collection as a whole offers less clarification of the general subject of realism than evidence of how such a simple concept has become such a Critically confusing one. GERALD M...