This need of motivation may be fundamental, that is, the characters may seem to an audience unconvincing from the start; or may be evident in some insufficiently explained change, transition in character; or may appear only in the last scene of the play, where characters hitherto consistent are made to act in a way which seems to the audience improbable. When Nathaniel Rowe produced his Ambitious Stepmother in 1700, Charles Gildon bitterly attacked it as unconvincing in its very fundamentals.
Mirza is indeed a Person of a peculiar Taste; for a Cunning Man to own himself a Rogue to the Man he shou’d keep in ignorance, and whom he was to work to his ends, argues little pretence to that Name; but he laughs at Honesty, and professes himself a Knave to one he wou’d have honest to him....
In the second Act, he talks of Memnon’s having recourse to Arms, of which Power we have not the least Word in the first: All that we know is, that he returns from Banishment on a day of Jubilee, when all was Safe and Free....[18]
For similar reasons, Mr. Eaton criticises unfavorably The Fighting Hope:
One of the best (or the worst) examples of false ethics in such a play is furnished by The Fighting Hope, produced by Mr. Belasco in the Autumn of 1908, and acted by Miss Blanche Bates. In this play a man, Granger, has been jailed, his wife and the world believe for another man’s crime. The other man, Burton Temple, is president of the bank Granger has been convicted of robbing. A district attorney, hot after men higher up, is about to reopen the case. It begins to look bad for Temple. Mrs. Granger, disguised as a stenographer, goes to his house to secure evidence against him. What she secures is a letter proving that not he, but her husband, was after all the criminal.
Of course this letter is a knockout blow for her. She realizes that the “father of her boys” is a thief, that the man she would send to jail (and with whom you know the dramatist is going to make her finally fall in love) is innocent. Still, in her first shock, her instinct to protect the “father of her boys” persists, and she burns the letter.
So far, so good, but Mrs. Granger is represented as a woman of fine instincts and character. That she should persist in cooler blood in her false and immoral supposition that her boys’ name will be protected or their happiness preserved—to say nothing of her own—by the guilt of two parents instead of one, is hard to believe. Yet that is exactly what the play asks you to believe, and it asks you to assume that here is a true dilemma. A babbling old housekeeper, whose chief use in the house seems to be to help the plot along, after the manner of stage servants, tells Mrs. Granger that she must not atone for her act by giving honest testimony in court, that of course she must let an innocent man go to jail, to “save her boys’ name.”
It would be much more sensible should Mrs. Granger here strike the immoral old lady, instead of saving her blows for her cur of a husband, in the last act, who, after all, was the “father of her boys.” But she listens to her. She appears actually in doubt not only as to which course she will pursue, but which she should pursue. She is intended by the dramatist as a pitiable object because on the one hand she feels it right to save an innocent man (whom she has begun to love), and on the other feels it her duty to save her sons’ happiness by building their future on a structure of lies and deceit. And she reaches a solution, not by reasoning the tangle out, not by any real thought for her boys, their general moral welfare, not by any attention to principles, but simply by discovering that her husband has been sexually unfaithful to her. Further, he becomes a cad and charges her with infidelity. Then she springs upon him and beats him with her fists, which is not the most effective way of convincing an audience that she was a woman capable of being torn by moral problems.
Of course as the play is written, there is no moral problem. The morality is all of the theatre. It belongs to that strange world behind the proscenium, wherein we gaze, and gazing sometimes utter chatter about “strong situations,” “stirring climaxes,” and the like, as people hypnotized. There might have been a moral problem if Mrs. Granger, before she discovered her husband’s guilt, had been forced to fight a rising tide of passion for Temple in her own heart. There might have been a moral problem after the discovery and her first hasty, but natural, destruction of the letter, if she had felt that her desire to save Temple was prompted by a passion still illicit, rather than by justice. But no such real problems were presented. The lady babbles eternally of “saving her boys’ good name,” while you are supposed to weep for her plight. Unless you have checked your sense of reality in the cloak room, you scorn her perceptions and despise her standards. How much finer had she continued to love her husband! But he, after all, was only the “father of her boys.”[19]
It is insufficiently motivated characterization which Mr. Eaton censures in The Nigger: