A Book About the Theater

by Brander Matthews

But to grant equality of opportunity is not to confer equality of ability, and when we call the roll of the dramatists who have given luster to French literature and to English, we discover that this list is not enriched by the name of any woman. The fame of George Sand is not derived from her contributions to dramatic literature, and the contributions of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, and Mrs. Inchbald, of Mrs. Bateman and Mrs. Mowatt, entitle them to take rank only among the minor playwrights of their own generations; and to say this is to say that their plays are now familiar only to devoted specialists in the annals of the stage, and that the general reader could not give the name of a single piece from the pen of any one of these enterprising ladies. In other words, the female playwrights are so few and so unimportant that a conscientious historian of either French or English dramatic literature might almost neglect them altogether without seriously invalidating his survey. Perhaps the only English titles that are more than mere items in a barren catalog are Mrs. Centlivre's 'Wonder' and Mrs. Cowley's 'Belle's Stratagem'; and the French pieces of female authorship which might protest against exclusion are almost as few—Mme. de Girardin's 'La Joie fait Peur,' and George Sand's 'Marquis de Villemer' and 'Mariage de Victorine.'

Indeed, the women playwrights of the past and of the present might be two or three times more numerous than they are, and two or three times more important without even treading upon the heels of the male play-makers. This is an incontrovertible fact; yet it is equally indisputable that as performers in the theater women are competitors whom men respect and with whom they have to reckon, and that as story-tellers women are as popular and as prolific as men. And here we are brought back again to the question with which this inquiry began: Why is it then that women have not been as popular and as prolific in telling stories on the stage? Why cannot they write a play as well as they can act in it?

One answer to this question has been volunteered by a woman who succeeded as an actress, and who did not altogether fail as a dramatic poetess, altho she came in later life to have little esteem for her earlier attempts at play-writing. It is in her 'Records of a Girlhood' that Fanny Kemble expressed the conviction that it was absolutely impossible for a woman ever to be a great dramatist, because "her physical organization" was against it. "After all, it is great nonsense saying that intellect is of no sex. The brain is, of course, of the same sex as the rest of the creature; beside the original female nature, the whole of our training and education, our inevitable ignorance of common life and general human nature, and the various experiences of existence from which we are debarred with the most sedulous care, is insuperably against it"—that is, against the possibility of a really searching tragedy, or of a really liberal comedy ever being composed by a woman. To this rather sweeping denial of the dramaturgic gift to women Fanny Kemble added an apt suggestion, that "perhaps some of the manly, wicked queens, Semiramis, Cleopatra, could have written plays—but they lived their tragedies instead of writing of them."

II

At first sight it may seem as if one of Fanny Kemble's assertions—that no woman can be a dramatist because of her inevitable ignorance of life and of the experiences of existence from which she is debarred—is disproved by the undeniable triumphs of women in acting, and by the indisputable victories won by women in the field of prose fiction, achieved in spite of these admitted limitations. But on a more careful consideration it will appear that as an actress woman is called upon only to embody and to interpret characters conceived by man with the aid of his wider and deeper knowledge of life. And when we analyze the most renowned of the novels by which women have attained fame, we discover that the best of these deal exclusively with the narrower regions of conduct, and with the more restricted areas of life with which she is most familiar as a woman, and that when she seeks to go outside her incomplete experience of existence she soon makes us aware of the gaps in her equipment.

One of the strongest stories ever written by a woman is the 'Jane Eyre' of Charlotte Brontë; and the inexperience of the forlorn and lonely spinster is almost ludicrously made manifest in her portrayal of Rochester, a superbly projected figure, not sustained by intimate knowledge of the type to which he belongs. Charlotte Brontë knew Jane Eyre inside and out; but she did not know even the outside of Rochester. Because women are debarred with the most sedulous care from various experiences of existence they can never know men as men can know women. This is the basis for the shrewd remark that in dealing with affairs of the heart men novelists rarely tell all they know, whereas women novelists are often tempted to tell more than they know. Even women like George Eliot and George Sand, who have more or less broken out of bounds, are still more or less confined to their individual associations with the other sex; and they lack the inexhaustible fund of information about life which is the common property of men.

Women have most satisfactorily displayed their special endowment for fiction not in what must be called the dramatic novel, not in soul-searching studies like the 'Scarlet Letter' and 'Anna Karénine,' but rather in less solidly supported inquiries into the interrelation of character and social convention, as in 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Castle Rackrent.' It would be unfair to assert that Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen are superficial; yet it is not unfair to say that they do not explore deeply, and that they do not deal with what Stevenson called the great passionate crises of existence, "when duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." This is the essential struggle of the drama; and the authoress of 'Jane Eyre' sought to present it boldly, even if she was handicapped by insufficient information; and this essential struggle was what Charlotte Brontë herself missed in Jane Austen: "The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, tho hidden, what the blood rushes thru, what is the unseen seat of life, and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores."

Jane Austen spent her great gift on the carving of cherry-stones, laboring with exquisite art to lift into temporary importance the eternally unimportant; and Charlotte Brontë, in her ampler endeavor, was ever hampered by inadequacy of knowledge. George Eliot, with wider opportunity than either of these predecessors, profited by both of them and borrowed their processes in turn; she was broader than they were, and bolder in her attack on life; her effort is more strenuously intellectual than theirs, and therefore a little fatiguing, and this is perhaps why her vogue seems now to be evaporating slowly. And when all is said, no one of these clever story-tellers really attains to an altitude of accomplishment where she can fairly be considered as a competitor of the mighty masters of prose fiction. No woman novelist is to be ranked among the supreme leaders, worthy to stand by the side of Cervantes and Fielding, Balzac and Tolstoi. The merits of the women novelists are many and they are beyond cavil; but no one of them has yet been able to handle a large theme powerfully and to interpret life with the unhasting and unresting strength which is the distinguishing mark of the mightier masters of fiction.

III

Furthermore, we find in the works of female storytellers not only a lack of largeness in topic, but also a lack of strictness in treatment. Their stories, even when they charm us with apt portraiture and with adroit situation, are likely to lack solidity of structure. 'Castle Rackrent,' an illuminating picture of human nature in a special environment, is a straggling sequence of episodes; 'Pride and Prejudice' is almost plotless, when considered as a whole; and 'Romola' is ill-proportioned and misshapen. No woman has ever achieved the elaborate solidity of 'Tom Jones,' the superb structure of the 'Scarlet Letter,' or the simple unity of 'Smoke.' And here we come close to the most obvious explanation of the dearth of female dramatists—in the relative incapacity of women to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose.