Abstract: Reviewed by: Women, Performance, and Modernism Lynn R. Wilkinson (bio) Farfan, Penny. Women, Performance, and Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2004. xi + 173 pp. $80. Until recently the work of women playwrights has been all but invisible in histories of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American literature and theatre, which portray Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Bernard Shaw as founding fathers of a tradition called "modern drama" and emphasize the depiction of male angst in their works and those of their followers. Although scholars working in German, French, Russian, and Italian studies have been eager to point out the importance of other tendencies in the theatre of the time—such as expressionism or symbolism—only recently has the master narrative of modern drama itself come under fire. Studies such as Toril Moi's Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2006) or Frederick Marker and Lise-Lone Marker's Strindberg and Modernist Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2002) have argued for a broader consideration of Ibsen, Strindberg, and other playwrights in the context of European modernism. Feminist scholars have brought to light the work of women playwrights of the time such as Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952) in England, or Rachilde (Marguerite Emery, 1860–1953) in France. Katherine E. Kelly's anthology Modern Drama by Women, 1880s–1930s: An International Anthology (Routledge, 1996) introduces the work of twelve of them. In Scandinavia, Margareta Wirmark has surveyed the field in a study entitled Noras systrar: Nordisk dramatik och teater 1879–1899 (Nora's Sisters: Nordic Drama and Theatre 1879–1899 [Carlsson, 2000]) and an ongoing research project in Sweden has brought to light the work of some sixty Swedish women playwrights active in the decades surrounding 1900. In spring 2007, some of the actors at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden organized a series of readings of plays by women that had been performed at that theatre in the last decades of the nineteenth century, beginning with Anne Charlotte Leffler's groundbreaking The Actress, which premiered there in 1873. Penny Farfan's Women, Modernism, and Performance consists of six suggestive essays on topics that range from Elizabeth Robins's "feminist critique of Ibsen" to the dancing of Isadora Duncan to Virginia Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts, which has at its core the performance of a play by a lesbian playwright. Like Toril Moi and the Markers, Farfan also emphasizes the modernist aspects of western theatre since Ibsen, but argues as well that Ibsen prompted some women writers and artists to reflect on the role of performance both onstage and in everyday life. As Gay Gibson Cima has also indicated elsewhere, Elizabeth Robins's Ibsen and the Actress (Hogarth Press, 1928) points to Ibsen's role as the founder of a new tradition of performance for women, both onstage and off, for it argues that Ibsen's plays demanded that actors participate in the creation of the roles. The first chapter in Women, Modernism, and Performance focuses on Elizabeth Robins, too, and acknowledges her importance as a playwright and actress, but criticizes her most famous play, Votes for Women! (1907), for its reproduction of conventional gender roles. The second chapter, "Feminist [End Page 174] Shakespeare: Ellen Terry's Comic Ideal," considers the work of one of Elizabeth Robins's contemporaries, the actress Ellen Terry (1847–1928), arguing that her work represents a utopian alternative to realistic performances of Ibsen's plays. Farfan then turns to Virginia Woolf's portrayal of Ellen Terry in her play Freshwater (1923 and 1935), in which the actress embodies "the restrictions that conventional gender roles impose on human creativity," at the same time that her character is able to "conceptualize the potential of her own [Woolf's] writing to articulate alternative and more emancipatory modes of subjectivity" (50). Chapter 4 considers Djuna Barnes's play The Dove in relation to ongoing debates about obscenity. The play stages the possibility of lesbian sexuality indirectly, above all in its quotation of Vittorio Carpaccio's painting Two Venetian Courtesans. Chapter 5 returns to Virginia Woolf and her last novel Between the Acts, which she worked on while also writing essays on Ellen Terry and other...
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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