Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (review)

The title of Tamsen Wolff's book comes from a mechanical display model called "Mendel's Theatre" that was used by the eugenic movement to teach theories of genetic inheritance to early-twentieth-century Americans. This performance was played to those who were to become the chief actors and directors in an offstage drama: potential field-workers who would go into communities to help direct future progress towards human betterment. As this audience was mostly female, eugenicists attempted to convey scientific concepts clearly; in order to make visible what was invisible, they relied heavily on performance and theatricality. "Mendel's Theatre" was shaped like a proscenium stage embedded with a rolling scroll on which three acts "detail[ed] with pictures and dolls the inexorable drama of the Mendelian inheritance of human hair and skin color" (61). The analogy between the eugenicist dramatization of the theories of inheritance and modern dramaturgy continues throughout Wolff's well-researched, fascinating, and extremely convincing book, which argues that the eugenic movement was inherently theatrical and that modern drama engaged with (and was enlivened by) both the ideas and the theatricality of that movement.

The book is an original and compelling dramatization in both theme and style: tracing the origins of dramatic fascination with the theme of heredity, Wolff builds her own ancestral tree, beginning with a chapter on the "Predecessors" of American eugenic drama–Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw–and ending with a chapter titled "A Genealogy of American Theatre." Paying clear attention to the ambiguities, ambivalences, and downright contradictions of eugenic thought in the early twentieth century, Wolff shows how dramatists adapted and adjusted their stagecraft to present prevailing hereditarian ideas. For Ibsen and Strindberg (whose pre-Mendelian era plays connected them to a more confused or complex neo-Darwinism, such as environmental or Lamarckian eugenics), this was more a thematic concern to make visible in the present the impact of an unseen past. Subsequently a major goal of modern drama, revealing the hidden (or recessive traits and genes) was a similar concern for eugenic pedagogy, as shown in Mendel's Theatre. Once Mendelian genetic theory was rediscovered in 1900, the shift in eugenic thought also emerged in a dramaturgical shift, most clearly in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Developing his own theory of "Creative Evolution" (37), Shaw built on Ibsen and Strindberg to stage explicit dramas of eugenic idealism (however confused it may have been at the time), and those dramas subsequently influenced the American dramatists Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, whose works and engagement with eugenics are the central focus of the book.

The reception and production of hereditarian theatre in America was particularly strong, Wolff argues, because eugenic thought was widely accepted, along with progressive discourses about the future of the American population. In many ways, she correctly points out, America was the stage on which the eugenic drama would unfold. Wolff provides a useful outline of the development of the eugenic movement in America, and, while much of this development has been detailed before, she stays focused on its central relationship to dramatic developments. Chapters on Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and O'Neill's Strange Interlude provide close readings of both the themes and stage-craft associated with prevailing eugenic ideas and ideologies, showing that the very contradictions in such thought operated to make complex and ambiguous stage dramas. While inflected by eugenic thought, The Verge also dramatized and undercut a rhetoric that would deny women agency and put unsustainable faith in the evidence of the unseen and unknowable. Similarly, Strange Interlude–called by one contemporary critic the "Eugenic O'Neill Baby" (qtd. in Wolff 142)–enacted the production of a eugenic child and its consequences in a nine-act drama that was incredibly popular at the time (though never since). As in Ibsen and Strindberg, the problem of free will created a dramatic tension with the eugenic message of unseen forces directing human behaviour...