Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

The eugenic program of directing human evolution upward through manipulation of breeding needs to be seen in relation to wider debates that were developing about all aspects of human reproduction, particularly the struggle for women to gain greater control over their reproductive capacities. “Of all woman’s rights,” declared an unnamed author writing in Review of Reviews in 1904, “surely the first and most obvious is the right to say how many times she shall be subjected to the glorious but perilous ordeal of childbirth.”¹ This view was expressed repeatedly on the stage, for example by Eugene Brieux in his play Maternity (1904), in which a woman goes on trial for having an abortion after her drunken husband has raped her. The play boldly advocates that women not have too many children, as repeated childbearing is cruel to the woman, selfish on the part of the husband, and economically infeasible for any but the wealthy. The archbishop of Canterbury advised the Lord Chamberlain in 1918 that this was not a lesson the English needed to hear in a time of war, and the play was refused a license. As Sos Eltis notes, “Theatre was thus positioned as a valuable tool in deploying women’s bodies in the greater interests of the state.”²

It is fair to say that sex and reproduction are two areas of human life that have always dominated the theatre. We have seen how Henrik Ibsen brought female sexuality center stage: the extreme sexual passion of Beata in Rosmersholm (in the draft to the play Rosmer alludes to his dead wife’s “unfortunate frenzies of passion, which she expected me to return. Oh, how they terrified me!”)3 and of Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf, the sexually predatory Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder, and the destructiveness that results from the attempts to suppress them. Hedda Gabler celebrates reproduction of a different kind: women’s creativity through writing rather than through producing children. For Bernard Shaw, sex and birth clearly belong to a more primitive state that humans at the pinnacle of his progressive evolutionary vision have long surpassed. Both playwrights saw theatre as the natural mode to explore these ideas, defying the obstacles of censorship, critical hostility, audience antipathy, and box office failure. And both register a great shift in cultural attitudes and practices regarding human sexuality, largely prompted by developments in evolutionary theory. Perhaps the most striking change in this regard was the view of the “fallen woman,” a mainstay of Victorian theatre. The “woman with a past” remained a theatrical favorite, but “active female sexual desire” became most visible in the new realist drama, “not located simply as sin and temptation, but as an essential human impulse.”⁴

One thing that is noticeably absent from the stage is childbirth itself—like breast-feeding a taboo subject for theatrical representation. There is simply no contemporary theatrical equivalent to Mina Loy’s graphic poem “Parturition” (1914), although Eugene O’Neill’s First Man (written 1921; published and produced 1922) does mark the event of childbirth taking place off stage by the screams of the mother dying in labor. Yet how accurate is the assumption that society was not ready to see childbirth enacted on stage? In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, at least in middle- and upper-class families, husbands tended to be present during childbirth.5 There was a much higher probability of a woman’s death in childbirth than we have now, so that the husband truly might not see his wife again; childbirth might be their last moments together. Also, births overwhelmingly took place at home; when in the 1930s it became fashionable to hospitalize women in labor, the attendance of husbands at births dropped.⁶ In fact, the uniquely female physiological experiences of menstruation, childbirth, breast-feeding, and menopause rarely figure directly on stage even to this day.⁷ Sex as a field of scientific study, of course, was already well established by the turn of the twentieth century, through Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others—and many of these were active in theatrical networks. Some sexologists were already gesturing toward what Alfred Kinsey would later articulate so clearly: “not that nature sanctions any given sexual or social practice, but that it sanctions all practices equally.”⁸

Plays increasingly suggest that although she might be destined for motherhood by virtue of her sex, a woman did not have to be married to fulfill that natural role. In St. John Hankin’s Last of the De Mullins, the rebellious Janet, a single unmarried mother, tells her dutiful sister Hester (the name evoking her Puritanism): “In your heart you envy me my baby, and you know it.” She describes the biological clock ticking: “In a few years you will be too old to have children. . . . Your best years are slipping by and you are growing faded and cross and peevish. . . . You will be an old woman before your time unless you marry and have children.”⁹ Hankin seems to be voicing an old-fashioned sentiment here about women’s fulfillment through their children. But Janet qualifies this: “To do as I did [have sex, have a baby, yet remain single] needs pluck and brains—and five hundred pounds. Everything most women haven’t got, poor things. So they must marry or remain childless.”¹⁰ Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes likewise features a woman “falling” by going off to have sex with a man she is attracted to momentarily but not enough to marry. “Love you?” Fanny in Hindle Wakes says to Alan, who cannot believe she is rejecting him. “Good heavens, of course not! Why on earth should I love you? You were just someone to have a bit of fun with. You were an amusement—a lark.”¹¹ Houghton and Hankin confront head on the limited choices for women in terms of sex, marriage, and reproduction, separating motherhood from marriage, and they join a host of other theatrical explorations of such issues during this period.

Hankin’s feminism sounds convincing, like Shaw’s, when he rails against the slavery of marriage for women, but ultimately, he still sees a woman’s fulfillment in motherhood, though not, notably, in wifehood. The Last of the De Mullins has been called “excessively derivative” of Shaw and Brieux.12 And, for all the radicalism of Janet’s actions, her situation is shown as an exception to the general rule, and her choice not available to most women. Until conditions for women change, the only options for most of them who lack the courage, intelligence, and money (and Janet has had to earn this by herself, through trade—itself a scandalous step for a woman of her social class) is to start a family.

As both a playwright and an actress, Elizabeth Robins constantly questioned this familiar family-centered scenario for women, trying to do something radically new on stage in terms of the treatment of the female body and women’s issues and openly grappling with biological determinism. She worked within a context of increasing fetishization of the actress that spills over into a wide range of cultural domains, from women’s magazines to erotica.¹³ Tracy C. Davis notes the link between theatre and pornography: “The inclusion of actresses and incidents within and around theatres in so much pornography throughout the Victorian period demonstrates the theatre’s enduring erotic fascination.”¹⁴ How do these limiting views of the female body on stage align with Jane Goodall’s claim that theatre played a key role in liberating women from biological essentialism through the increasingly radical performance of the female body? A key to this question lies in the interest of many playwrights in the role of sexual selection in human evolution.

Sexual selection is innately theatrical; it involves “flaunting, display, theatre, extravagance, scents and song.”15 In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin observed that in nature the female of most species selects the mate, favoring males of the greatest beauty and prowess, whereas humans have perverted this pattern so that “money buys beautiful women, and men also seek out women who are rich, and therefore probably favour the outcome of low-fertility families where all the wealth is concentrated in one girl.”¹⁶ Alfred Russel Wallace argued for a radical reorientation of the social norms by which men select women, treading a fine line between the hard eugenics of Francis Galton and Hiram M. Stanley and the “pure sensualism” of Grant Allen.¹⁷ Wallace envisions a time when

powerful selective agency would rest with the female sex. The idle and the selfish would be almost universally rejected. The diseased or the weak in intellect would also usually remain unmarried; while those who exhibited any tendency to insanity or to hereditary disease, or who possessed any congenital deformity, would in hardly any case find partners. Thus, when we have solved the lesser problem of a rational social organization adapted to secure the equal well-being of all, then we may safely leave the far greater and deeper problem of the improvement of the race to the cultivated minds and pure instincts of the Women of the Future.¹⁸

Why was this idea so threatening? Following it to its logical conclusion, it might ultimately imply “the intellectual superiority of women.”¹⁹ Even until fairly recently, the “astonishingly brilliant” idea that human sexual selection was female driven and that women thus held the key to evolution was still finding resistance.²⁰ The debates are still ongoing regarding the relationship of feminism to sexual selection, with Fiona Erskine on the one hand asserting that “sexual selection is intrinsically anti-feminist” and on the other hand Elizabeth Grosz arguing for its inherent feminism.²¹ And with regard to the equally contested area of sociobiology, many of the plays of this period seem decades ahead of the findings of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and others confirming that the animal kingdom is full of females with sexual appetites that have nothing to do with reproduction. The larger context for their engagements with reproductive issues is what Charles Webster calls the dialectic between the biological and social sciences, “indicating the transference of ideas about human society to the animal order, and then their return to provide a biological rationale for behavior within the human family.”²²

Dorothy Brandon’s Wild Heather (1917) not only suggests some of the ideas of evolution, such as sexual selection, heredity, and adaptation, but also integrates them into the fabric of the drama, even though the word evolution is used only at the end of the play, when a well-bred young woman scandalizes her family by showing her passion for her virile lower-class lover. But her father, a professor, is not so sure John is “beneath” his daughter: “It seems to me—in evolution—the young man’s a little further from the animals and a little nearer to the gods than most.” Heather rapturously calls her father a “darling,” and her mother says, “Oh James what does evolution matter?” Heather and John hug and “kiss hungrily and openly” in front of everyone—and, far from discreetly leaving them alone, the professor “turns on the electric lamp to see them better.” They face the “staring semicircle of astonished and protesting faces,” and as Heather says “I can’t help it!” the curtain descends on a happy ending that is clearly showing the power, and perhaps necessity, of sexual selection to transcend social boundaries.23

What is striking here is not so much the use of the word evolution—though that is, as we have seen, relatively rare in dramatic dialogue—but the fact that Heather is irresistibly attracted to the manly man, a theme that pervades theatrical treatments of evolution as evidenced by Robert Buchanan’s Charlatan (1894), discussed in chapter 1, and Robins and Florence Bell’s Alan’s Wife, in which Jean has rejected a weedy vicar in favor of a virile and masterful mill worker. Shaw’s Misalliance, by contrast, is much preoccupied with what makes a good male partner, and manliness ranks well below brains; Hypatia dismisses Jerry as “a splendid animal” but a “fool,” whereas Bentley may be “a little squit of a thing,” but his brains make him “the best of the bunch.”²⁴ This would be a banal enough judgment if it were not tied so cleverly to a complex and radical discussion of the evolutionary motifs of sexual selection, breeding, and instinct.

As these plays indicate, not only are women on stage becoming choosier in selecting their mates, but also the masculine spectrum—just like the feminine one—has clearly expanded, with two increasingly separate and polar extremes: at one end the “primitive” and “red-blooded” savage, who may not be intelligent but has the brawn to “hold” the female, and at the other end the brainy but effete modern male.

An interesting backdrop to this spectrum is the growing field of ethology. The Descent of Man catalogues dozens of instances of insects, birds, and other animals having developed the organ necessary to hold, grasp, or secure the female during the sexual act.25 The book also enumerates exceptions to the assumed norm of the passive female being wooed by the aggressive male. How does this relate to the conventional notion of Victorian women as ignorant of and uninterested in sex, of passively having to “suffer and be still”?²⁶ Theatrical explorations of human sexuality and reproduction map directly onto the changing discourse on evolution.

The potential of the theatre to explore and change people’s minds about women’s issues was certainly recognized at the time. The birth control campaigner Marie Stopes wrote in 1927 that she put her ideas about sex, contraception, and human reproduction into plays because “the clash between real womanhood & conventional manhood seems to me the most dramatic thing in the world this century.”²⁷ Not only the innate drama of such a clash but also the live, public nature of theatre seemed ideal conditions for a campaigner like Stopes or Robins seeking rapid change. This was recognized by the anarchist, feminist, birth control campaigner Emma Goldman in a lecture titled The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (published 1914). The Edwardian feminist theatre critic Marjorie Strachey argued that modern drama was, for women, a “magnificent and untouched field” as it held enormous potential to represent women at this transitional point in their history—but only if women changed the subject matter of plays. Rather than the old-fashioned, “tedious” theme of love, playwrights should focus on themes such as work (“hundreds of the professions occupied by women”) and “women’s friendships with women.”²⁸

One might assume that the suffragettes would heed this call most of all. Suffragette playwright Cicely Hamilton agitated for contraception and abortion rights for women, “the right of men and women (but especially of women) to save themselves suffering, to spare themselves poverty, by limiting the number of their children.”²⁹ But Hamilton was an exception, as suffrage workers tended to distance themselves from contentious reproductive questions to keep the focus on winning the vote, rather than alienate potential allies in this fight.³⁰ Little connection exists between the suffrage cause and the staging of controversial reproductive issues. In fact, many of the strongest advocates for reproductive rights and for greater frankness about such issues had the least success when they tried to enlist the theatre to their cause—either the Lord Chamberlain or the box office simply could not stand it.

Stopes’s “banned” play Vectia is an example of this. The author of such popular works as Married Love (a pioneering sex manual) and Radiant Motherhood, Stopes wrote Vectia to show the devastating consequences of women’s sexual ignorance.31 Vectia does not understand why after three years of marriage she and her husband have no children; she seems ignorant about how babies are made. William, her husband, is impotent, and it is suggested that he “self-abused” too much as an adolescent and has therefore perverted himself. So naïve is Vectia that she does not realize how odd it is that she and her husband do not have sexual intercourse. The play’s central (and controversial) scene has the shy Vectia getting belated sex education through her faithful friend and confidant Heron, a lawyer who senses her dreadful situation. In order to find out whether Vectia’s marriage has actually been consummated, he asks her to draw diagrams since she is far too embarrassed to explain verbally. They sit back to back and silently pass the drawings back and forth along with Heron’s written questions. As Vectia slowly reads them, “a rather startled and puzzled look comes into her face as though ideas quite novel to her were throwing light on a difficult subject.”³² Vectia, Heron, and the audience all discover simultaneously that Vectia is still a virgin. This was an attempt to get past the censor by avoiding any actual dialogic references to sex.³³ Shaw uses a similar device in Back to Methuselah, part 1, when the Serpent whispers to Eve the secret of reproduction and she reacts with visible disgust; the audience is likewise “tempted” to imagine what naughty things are being said. It was a way of staging the unstageable by implication and suggestion. In addition to this device of nonverbally explaining conception, Stopes uses a particular metatheatrical trick (employed by Shaw in The Doctor’s Dilemma) of incorporating references to herself in a scene in which William denounces Stopes’s books. It is a strange moment for the audience, when real life intrudes onto a staged representation of it.

Although on the surface it is just the story of a decent girl wanting to have a baby by her husband, the plot turns on his sexual impotence and, less explicitly, his possible homosexuality. The play ends with a dramatic moment of sexual selection: Vectia realizes that Heron loves her as she wants to be loved, but that William needs her emotionally as a kind of nurse for his soul. “You two,” she says to them, “the weak and the maimed and the strong and the joyous. Which of you needs me most?” Her choice is heavily framed by biological purpose. “Isn’t it my duty to stay if he’s so much in need of me?” she asks Heron. “Your duty is to life and the fullness of life,” Heron proclaims.34 She chooses him, leaving William alone on the stage with a revolver that he uses to bash all her sculptures as the curtain descends and, we infer, eventually to commit suicide. The Darwinian message is clear in her rejection of the feeble, aberrant, and sexually spent William in favor of the healthy Heron, just as Shaw’s Candida (the Life Force) chooses the virulent Morell over the effete and decadent poet.

Vectia (under the title of her popular book Married Love) was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain along with Stopes’s play about birth control, Our Ostriches, in October 1923. It was refused a license and thus became “one of the few plays banned by the Lord Chamberlain in the 1920s” when so many other bans were finally lifted (such as those on Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Harley Granville-Barker’s Waste).³⁵ The play was never granted a license and has never been performed.

Plays like this reflect a tendency to attack marriage as an outdated institution that has little relevance to humans’ biological and emotional needs, especially in light of the idea that once viable offspring have been produced, the father might not be needed. H. M. Harwood’s Supplanters seems to suggest that the single and celibate lifestyle is the preferable one, echoing the vehement attack on the institution of marriage in Shaw’s Man and Superman. Jack objects to the idea that he is merely a tool in evolution. “I wanted to be your lover,” he tells his wife Margaret, “you made me only the father of your children.”³⁷ This echoes the conclusion of A Doll’s House but completely inverts it: Nora’s reason for leaving her children was that Torvald had made her “only” the mother of his children, fulfilling a natural function dictated to her by society more than by nature, and never gaining broader experience as a woman. She argues that she cannot be a good mother to them until she has educated herself. In Harwood’s play, parenthood is also sidelined but for a different reasons; he shows the problem of the male being sidelined by the woman’s all-consuming attention to her children primarily from the male perspective. It is instructive to contrast this with Shaw’s ability to adopt the female perspective on this issue in Getting Married (1908), when Lesbia declares: “If I am to be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife at the same time.”³⁸ Both Shaw and Harwood take it for granted that these two roles are incompatible. Jack says he’ll grant her a divorce but refuses to return to her in “the soul-destroying capacity of father of a family.”³⁹ The play ends with Jack coming back after both husband and wife have made adjustments: he has discovered that he is actually fonder of the children than he thought, while she has learned that she has to care about him as well as them. Compromise is shown to be key, but this invariably involves greater female sacrifice. The play includes two trenchant remarks on a woman’s lot: “Life isn’t very fair to women” and “a woman can’t be everything.”⁴⁰

Critical responses to The Supplanters were mixed. The Saturday Review dwelt on the husband’s inordinate sex drive: the problem is that husband and wife have “a serious difference of opinion as to how much love goes to the square meal of an ordinarily healthy man.” He should simply face the fact that “from his wife’s point of view as the mother of a family he was considerably oversexed—that he must grin and bear it like a man, finding compensation in the responsibilities of a father,” instead of “irrelevantly cursing the interloping babies.” But the reviewer felt that the play was too much a “farrago of derivations” of Oscar Wilde, Hankin, and John Galsworthy.41 The Academy, however, praised the play as “a serious sociological matter written with admirable lightness and cleverness.”⁴² It also noted the subplot, a “clever picture of the young girl of our day [Isobel] who does not mind facing the facts of life and telling us so in fresh and racy phrases.” While the main plot of The Supplanters is busy questioning the roles of mother and father, wife and husband, the subplot between Margaret’s sister Isobel and her suitor is questioning the relevance of marriage itself; Isobel scandalizes her parents by indicating that she just wants to live with him, not get married, and that she already knows about sex.⁴³

Marriage was remarkably stable despite the many attacks on it that were launched throughout the first few decades of the twentieth century.⁴⁴ What really changed was attitudes to sexual behavior before and outside marriage, with a pronounced shift between 1904 and the period 1924 to 1934.⁴⁵ Certainly, World War I helped to spur this change, as women entered into jobs normally reserved for men, gained greater social and economic freedom, and began to challenge the taboos around sex outside marriage. Alongside this change, not only in people’s sexual behavior but also in general attitudes to sex, came the concomitant “perception of sexuality as a crucial element in the nature of the individual.”⁴⁶

That marriage might no longer be a necessary, let alone natural and fitting, way to contain sexuality and reproduction was already being suggested by analogies drawn from the animal kingdom. In The Descent of Man, Darwin notes in passing that there is some tension around the meaning of the term marriage, that some observers have been too harsh and restrictive in their definition of it: “I use the term in the same sense as when naturalists speak of animals as monogamous, meaning thereby that the male is accepted by or chooses a single female, and lives with her either during the breeding-season or for the whole year, keeping possession of her by the law of might. . . . This kind of marriage is all that concerns us here, as it suffices for the work of sexual selection.” He addresses the issue of “communal marriage” but then says that “the subject is too large and complex for even an abstract to be here given, and I will confine myself to a few remarks.”47 Readers of Origin would have recognized this as a deft Darwinian evasion, as when he writes vaguely in that book that on the subject of human origins and evolution, “light will be shed” in the future. As far as sexual selection is concerned, writes Darwin in Descent, “all that is required is that choice should be exerted before the parents unite, and it signifies little whether the unions last for life or only for a season.”⁴⁸ He is talking about human relationships here, not just animals. This is a startling and bold suggestion: marriage can be dispensed with, and it is just one of a number of possible mating configurations ranging from monogamy to polygamy to rampant promiscuousness.

The Victorian conception of marriage as an institution of high social, cultural, and religious relevance and a deliberate and rational set of rules thus gives way to a Darwinian sense of the inherent randomness of marriage as a construct and the vast gap between theory and practice in terms of the actual workings of marriage as an institution. This in turn would threaten its survival—if the beast does not adapt, it will not thrive. So marriage is no longer an inflexible, rigid institution but an organic being that is subject to the same laws of nature as every other living thing. There is a concomitant shift in perceptions of children’s roles, not only within marriage but also within human evolution more generally. It is not surprising to find plays like Elizabeth Baker’s Chains depicting bitterness at marriage as inhibiting rather than satisfying because pregnancy acts like a chain on the male or the young mother in Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son complaining that the “struggle for life” is all there is once the couple has children. Harwood takes this hint much further in his depiction of children as interlopers in marriage, undermining the foundations of family life by usurping the male’s status.

There are strong links here with Elizabeth Robins, who thought deeply about this question of how far children are central to a woman’s identity. The Silver Lotus (1895–1896) is an unpublished play about the devastation caused by the tragic death of children. The play deserves publication, scholarly recognition, and analysis, particularly in light of the extraordinary scholarly interest already shown in Robins’s other theatrical writing, such as Alan’s Wife (1893) and Votes for Women! (1907). In The Silver Lotus, Eleanor’s three children have died two years ago, and she is wracked with guilt, because despite her husband’s advice, she took the children on vacation to an area that had reported cases of diphtheria: “First the baby, then the two girls; all within a week.”55 She has taken to alcohol to numb her pain, and the play treats female alcoholism “with sophistication and complexity.”⁵⁶ At the center of the play, then, is a mother deprived of her calling, which at first seems to suggest that it is of the East Lynne variety (endorsing motherhood as woman’s true calling). But the play turns out to be about much more than that.

Abetting Eleanor in her alcoholism is her devoted but strange servant Dwyer, who helps her obtain the key to the liquor cabinet, which Eleanor’s husband, Gervais, has had locked. Eleanor says that Dwyer is “victim to the most incurable of female diseases”;⁵⁷ while all that is meant is jealousy, this is a brilliant stroke in establishing this idea of “female disease” so early in the play, before we know what is wrong with Eleanor. The first scene also raises the “Woman Question,” referred to by Eleanor with a harsh laugh and the comment that “we are an obscure sect—we women.”⁵⁸ Sexual difference is rendered as irreconcilable apartness. In act 2, Eleanor’s friend Camilla—who is secretly in love with Eleanor’s husband—sarcastically rebuffs the advances of Grantham, a friend of the family, in terms that make fun of male sexual selection as passé: “Really, men are incredible. Your views about women came over with the Conqueror. If my affections were not already engaged I couldn’t resist any man who was willing to rescue me from spinsterhood. That’s the line of argument.”⁵⁹

Eleanor becomes hysterical when her mother-in-law, the sympathetic, clear-eyed Mrs. Onslow, soothingly suggests that everything will be fine once she has another child, once Eleanor’s “arms are [no] longer empty.” Eleanor reacts wildly to this suggestion that all will be well once “we’ll begin to forget our dead.”⁶⁰ Mrs. Onslow thinks that both Eleanor and Gervais are suffering from depression due to the children’s deaths.⁶¹ The pathological landscape of the play thus keeps expanding, and the audience does not even know yet about the alcoholism, which is dramatically revealed in silent tableau: Mrs. Onslow and Gervais watch as Eleanor, thinking she is unseen, sneaks toward the liquor cabinet, unlocks it with a key they thought they had confiscated, and takes a decanter, which she presses to her bosom as she leaves the room. Mrs. Onslow and the audience thus discover the alcoholism at the same time.

We learn the seriousness of the addiction when the doctor tells Gervais baldly: “This is not the case of a strong woman gradually drinking herself to death (a sharp contraction of the muscles of Gervais’s face) but of a delicate woman whose constitution is undermined, shattered—.”62 Gervais bursts out “passionately”: “If it were a mere physical disease! If it weren’t bound up with questions of will, of liberty, of personal dignity! God! if it weren’t so hard to talk about, it wouldn’t be so hard to face.”⁶³ We never see Eleanor really inebriated, but we hear about one awful episode when she got completely drunk and was discovered by Camilla, whom we now realize is her bitter rival for Gervais’s love: Gervais tells how he found Camilla “standing horror-struck by the bed. Eleanor flung across it unconscious, but talking—talking in that horrible incoherent way. (he shudders) A glass half full of raw brandy on the small table—the room reeking.”⁶⁴

Gervais’s sensible and compassionate mother asks a perfectly logical question of her son: “I can’t help wondering why under the circumstances, you have wine on your table here.”⁶⁵ The extent of the husband’s masochism is gradually revealed through such touches: wine at the dinner table of an alcoholic wife; cold, stern, and unaffectionate in the face of her debilitating grief and depression; and—most devastating all for Eleanor—totally unresponsive to her sexual needs.

The true revelation of the play is its suggestion that Eleanor’s tragedy is not only the loss of the children (that has already occurred before the curtain rises) but also the loss of her sexual life. The Silver Lotus is unflinching in its depiction of a woman’s desperation when her natural sexual desire is thwarted. In a powerful scene of reconciliation, something of the urgency of Robins’s intimate thoughts in her diaries and letters comes through when she has Eleanor plead with Gervais not to deny her physical love: “We’ve lived in hope long enough. I’ve starved on it. Let us have certainty now. (she clings to him passionately). . . . Love me—love me.” He says, “I do—you know I do,” and her response is: “But as you used I mean.” She wants him to have sex with her, but disengaging himself, he gently says that “things can’t be as—as they were till we are sure.” He says they need to be sure “that you are able to bear the responsibility that might come to you.”⁶⁶ If she were to get pregnant, she would endanger both her life and the baby’s unless cured of her addiction. This is similar to Val and Ethan’s precaution in Robins’s novel The Open Question (1898): a eugenic concern for subsequent generations must be the overriding principle in any sexual relationship. The consumptive Val in that tragic novel is also sexually passionate and another instance of Robins explicitly representing female sexual selection.

The Silver Lotus thus reveals layers of complex emotions and motives that show a deep awareness of the way a piece of theatrical storytelling works on an audience. We are pulled further and further into Eleanor’s tragedy and keep having to revise our understanding of its causes as new bits of information are gradually revealed; it is almost a textbook emulation of Ibsen’s technique of retrospective arrangement. The audience begins by thinking the children’s deaths have caused Eleanor’s retreat into lotus blossom-like alcoholism; then, we find out it is that loss combined with her husband’s refusal to have sex with her and thus offer any physical and emotional comfort to her; and finally, we realize that the presence of a beautiful female rival masquerading as a friend is sending Eleanor over the edge. The only source of comfort to Eleanor is her faithful servant, yet even she turns out to be more of an agent of death than a savior—a self-appointed mercy killer. In a strange parallel with Robins’s treatment of euthanasia in The Mirkwater, Dwyer—the (possibly Aboriginal, the text suggests) nurse Eleanor brought with her from Australia, who was Eleanor’s nurse as a child (a direct parallel with Nora Helmer’s situation)—aids in Eleanor’s addiction and eventual death by regularly supplying her with small amounts of alcohol, which she argues is healthier than Eleanor getting at the liquor herself. She thinks she is managing Eleanor’s addiction, but she is really just helping her die slowly. “I wouldn’t have dared to go and leave her without anything [to drink]. She wouldn’t have slept. The nights were awful. I couldn’t let her suffer like you did,” Dwyer stoutly tells Gervais, who of course does not know of her suffering nights as they sleep apart.67

Joanne E. Gates comments that the play effectively probes “the pain in a relationship in which the central memory is the death of children,” but it goes much further than that.⁶⁸ This is the situation of Little Eyolf, which Robins was most likely reading hot off the press while composing The Silver Lotus and was deeply involved with as an actress, playing the role of the sexually voracious Rita Allmers in the 1896 London premiere. On the surface, these two works seem to handle the representation of women’s grief at the loss of children quite differently. Where Ibsen shockingly and unflinchingly gives us a woman whose focus on her sexual relationship with her husband virtually wipes out her maternal grief, Robins gives us a woman slowly dying from that grief. But, as the play progresses, shades of Rita Allmers encroach, as we see Eleanor’s mourning bound up in the loss of her physical relationship with her husband as well. Ibsen’s The Master Builder may also have been an influence, in the tragic figure of Mrs. Solness, whose children have died; Robins played the interloping Hilde Wangel to great acclaim in the London premiere in 1893. There is also a strong echo of the Rat Wife in the strange death figure of Dwyer.

But The Silver Lotus is not merely derivative. The play shows that Robins had an “ear for crisp dialogue” and a “command of dramatic form,” as Gates puts it.69 Its symbolism echoes Ibsen’s and Anton Chekhov’s, from the title to the way it informs and deepens the play’s themes, but it is given a specifically female slant. The silver lotus of the title is a necklace that Gervais gave his wife in happier times and that she cherishes. The lotus is of course also a symbol of the sleep of forgetting that Eleanor finds through alcohol. Eleanor is one of Robins’s few female victims; in general, Robins’s stage women are adaptive and are more like Shaw’s than Brieux’s victims of circumstance. But Robins shows us a woman at a biological dead end: she has already spent her “life force” and is barred from sex for fear of spreading her “disease” to the next generation. Even while Robins paints this portrait with great empathy, it is chillingly clear that Eleanor must be sacrificed to the greater good of the species.

One can speculate on possible inspirations for this play about female addiction. There is the life of one of Robins’s colleagues, the actress Janet Achurch, who had a stillborn child while in Cairo as part of an extensive tour of A Doll’s House (1889–1891), continuing to perform only by taking morphia, on top of already having a tendency to drink too much. Sharing the same social sphere, profession, and devotion to Ibsen, Robins would most likely have known about Achurch’s problems and addiction. They worked closely together, starring in the London premiere of Little Eyolf. Her memoirs recall the momentous occasion of seeing Achurch as Nora in the 1889 premiere of A Doll’s House at the Novelty Theatre, London—another possible theatrical precedent (a mother who “loses” her three children). Robins might also have drawn on the tradition of the temperance play, a nineteenth-century theatrical staple typified by James A. Herne’s Drifting Apart (1888).⁷⁰ Robins’s innovation is to depict the alcoholic as female and to suggest unflinchingly the sexual and reproductive issues relating to her tragic condition.

Ibsen had already opened up the stage to the extreme end of the maternal spectrum in the climactic endings to plays like A Doll’s House (Nora leaves her three children to find herself), Ghosts (Mrs. Alving will surely kill Oswald—the euthanasia Robins and Bell suggest Jean commits in Alan’s Wife), and Hedda Gabler. Before she shoots herself and her unborn child, Hedda “kills” the “baby” engendered by Thea and Løvborg when she throws their book manuscript into the fire, whispering to herself, “Now I am burning your baby, Thea. . . . Yours and Ejlert Løvborg’s baby. Now I’m burning—now I’m burning the baby.”⁷³ In the draft to Hedda Gabler, reference is specifically made to infanticide. When she learns (falsely) that Løvborg has destroyed his own work, Thea tells him that she will always think of his deed “as though you had killed a little child.” He says she is right: “It is a sort of child-murder.”⁷⁴ The list of killed-off children in Ibsen goes on. Hedwig in The Wild Duck shoots herself, Eyolf drowns, and Irene in the draft to When We Dead Awaken says she has had “many children” but “I killed them. . . . Killed them [murdered them pitilessly] as soon as they came into the world. [Long, long before.] One after the other.”⁷⁵ She is bitter at having been the unacknowledged medium for Rubek’s success as an artist—the model he sculpted so successfully, yet in the process erasing the person. What made the baby killing of Alan’s Wife much more outrageous than all these child deaths put together was its directness (the audience witnesses it), the lack of an understandable motive or justification for it, and the fact that an English mother does it to her own baby. Performing child murder on the English hearth, so to speak, was a step too far.

Josephine McDonagh and others have shown that infanticide permeated the public imagination in the nineteenth century. Novels like Sir Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and sensational reports in the periodical press fueled this interest; the stage also was an important medium. William T. Moncrieff’s Cataract of the Ganges (1823), a popular equestrian melodrama that was revived in the 1850s (in both Great Britain and the United States) and as late as 1873 (Drury Lane),76 protested the practice of female infanticide in parts of India. As with Darwin and other natural scientists’ discourse on the subject, stress was laid on “the systematic (and thus foreign) nature of the practice.”⁷⁷ Infanticide as linked to both savagery and orientalism forms the major theme of Cataract. McDonagh points out that knowledge of this practice had been “gradually trickling into Britain since its first documentation in 1789,” and in 1823—the same year as Moncrieff’s play—Parliament “ordered a compilation of correspondence regarding ‘Hindoo Infanticide,’” leading to the publication in 1824 of a detailed record of “official reports, surveys, and communications between administrators and local élites.”⁷⁸ This in turn generated an outpouring of essays, stories, anecdotes, and articles shot through with “rumour and hearsay” attesting to the ongoing practice of female infanticide in India and blurring regional and spiritual distinctions so that, in the end, “all seem to merge into one under a hazy cloud of exotic names, as infanticide comes to operate as a generalised sign of Indian degeneracy.”⁷⁹ This discourse emerged strongly in the 1850s, the period of frequent revivals of Moncrieff’s play.

How was this “Hindoo” female infanticide usually carried out? The deed was done by applying opium to the nipple so that the breast-feeding baby “‘drank in death with its mother’s milk,’” as explained one account in 1856 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.80 This paradox of the life-giving act of nursing causing death brings a new and threatening meaning to breast-feeding and contrasts with images of violent means of death (burial alive, suffocation, strangulation). Above all, the discourse around female infanticide in India drew uncomfortable connections with homegrown baby killing, specifically at this time the child murder epidemic of the 1850s and 1860s in Britain, from which “women workers emerged . . . in a particularly sinister light, as mid-century incarnations of Malthus’s prototypical professional woman, Dame Nature: wet-nurses, baby farmers, and even the careless lower-class women who abandoned their own children to their care, all became killers in a massacre of the innocents that endangered the very basis of civilised society.”⁸¹ So, for all the exotic setting and costumes of Moncrieff’s play, the problem of infanticide was uncomfortably close to home. Only a month prior to the opening of Cataract of the Ganges, a melodrama called Infanticide; or, the Bohemian Mother had also called attention to this issue, though on a domestic level.⁸²

Thus, between Cataract of the Ganges and Alan’s Wife, there were numerous plays on both British and American stages dealing with infanticide, though none sparked the controversy of Alan’s Wife. In Alexandra (1893), translated from the German of Richard Voss and staged by the Charringtons at the Royalty,⁸³ a mother has intentionally killed her baby, but not in full view of the audience. Nowadays, “the crime of infanticide . . . has become a minor offence,” writes the critic of the infanticide-themed play Jeanie Deans, a stage adaptation of Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian (1818).⁸⁴ Most infanticide dramas revolved around a climactic courtroom scene. In Jeanie Deans, audience sympathy is directed toward the woman accused and convicted of infanticide because the audience knows (while she does not) that the child is alive and well. This is exactly the same pattern as Frank Harvey’s Mother: the audience knows that the mother is wrongly accused of infanticide, having seen the villain do the deed himself; then, it receives a wonderful surprise when it is revealed that the child is alive and thriving. Finally, in the sentimental melodrama The Scarlet Dye (1887) by Julia M. Masters, a woman is falsely accused of infanticide but somehow manages to lose her child, which only seems to corroborate the tale. She is arrested for murder even though the child is in the safekeeping of a gypsy, who falsely testifies that he “saw the deed committed and the body burnt.” But all turns out well: mother and child are reunited and justice is served, and the affecting songs are encored for the enthusiastic audience.⁸⁵

Despite the long history of infanticide dramas, the influential critic A. B. Walkley criticized Alan’s Wife for treating an act that was “outside the region of art.”⁸⁶ But these theatrical precedents suggest that it was not the fact that infanticide is staged in Alan’s Wife that was controversial; rather, it was the displacement of its context and the thwarting of audience expectations of a pattern that sees the woman falsely accused and then exculpated and finally a happy reunion with the child everyone thought was dead. Alan’s Wife denies all of this: mother definitely kills child, hence no chance of the kind of turnaround audiences would be used to with the last-minute reprieve of the mother and the baby miraculously produced.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin cites many instances of the “fearfully common practice of infanticide,” well established as one of the main “checks” on population.87 Again and again, he uses the word prevail with regard to this practice. “Infanticide, especially of female infants, and the habit of procuring abortion are practices that . . . now prevail in many quarters of the world,” with infanticide formerly having prevailed “on a still more extensive scale.”⁸⁸ In a subsequent chapter, he writes that “the murder of infants has prevailed on the largest scale throughout the world, and has met with no reproach; but infanticide, especially of females, has been thought to be good for the tribe, or at least not injurious.”⁸⁹ Until now, he has not yet indicated who kills the infants. Only toward the end of the book does Darwin suddenly and repeatedly identify the child killers as women. Among the New Zealand Maoris are “women who have destroyed four, six, and even seven children, mostly females, though this practise seems to be disappearing.”⁹⁰ Again: “In the Polynesian Islands women have been known to kill from four or five, to even ten of their children; and we could not find a single woman who had not killed at least one.” The beneficial implications are clear: “Wherever infanticide prevails the struggle for existence will be in so far less severe, and all the members of the tribe will have an almost equally good chance of rearing their few surviving children.”⁹¹ One way of seeing this high rate of infanticide, then, is in the Malthusian light of the greater good of the tribe.

Modern scientific studies have confirmed what Darwin wrote. Far from being an “abnormal and maladaptive behavior,” infanticide is “a normal and individually adaptive activity” encompassing “an ever expanding list of behaviors” that are “not necessarily pathological.”92 Not surprisingly, few critics of Alan’s Wife adopted this view, though some did attempt to understand Jean’s character and motives. The critical response to the play was characterized by Jacob T. Grein as a raging “war.”⁹³ William Archer (close friend, adviser, and probably lover of Robins) in his forty-three-page introduction to the play maintained that Jean Creyke is not insane but is simply “a terribly afflicted woman . . . who acts as, somewhere or other in the world, some similarly tortured creature is doubtless acting at the very moment I write these words.”⁹⁴ Yet Archer, even while ostensibly supporting the play, publicly made it known that had it been his work, he would have treated the subject matter differently, for example “developing dialogue around the ethical issue rather than presenting emotional drama.”⁹⁵ He thus undermined the play even as he introduced it, by suggesting that it becomes bogged down in emotion rather than appealing to the audience’s intellect as a piece of polemical drama arguing for a specific cause, in this case euthanasia. Archer also states in his introduction that his adaptation would have staged the infanticide more obliquely: after a brief and “incoherent” soliloquy, “in an inner room, seen but vaguely by the audience, she was to have done the deed.”⁹⁶ Robins and Bell were much bolder, bringing the curtain down just as the mother smothers the baby in full view of the audience. Though they needed his influence, they were wary of Archer’s tendency “to suppress their creative efforts”; they kept the ending of Alan’s Wife a secret from him until well into the writing of it, aware that he might “quash it” (Bell’s words), and they found his lengthy introduction “overwhelming.”⁹⁷

At least one critic did note the play’s importance in raising awareness of euthanasia and showing the need for a new critical vocabulary to address such issues; as McDonagh observes, this new kind of tragedy is “a drama of impossible choice” that thus “offers a heroic role for the woman, implicitly turning Medea into Agamemnon. . . . The play presents the [baby] killing as an act of bravery in the context of tragedy.”⁹⁸ Such an act is briefly discussed in Sudermann’s Magda (one of Duse’s greatest acting successes) when Magda, who has had an illegitimate baby, confesses that she was once so depressed and desperate about her situation that she considered killing both herself and the child. For her also it would have been an act of bravery within a tragic context. But, where Magda becomes almost too verbose and expressive, Jean lapses into muteness: throughout the entire final scene, until the very last seconds of the play, she is silent, even though she knows that not attempting to defend herself and explain her actions will result in the death penalty.

From the early 1890s onward, Robins had been an outspoken critic of marriage and motherhood.99 Through the device of Jean’s silence, the play registers “the impossibility of modern motherhood,” according to Katherine E. Kelly, which requires on the one hand a liberated, fully developed female consciousness and on the other an assumption of the role of fully invested, full-time carer.¹⁰⁰ Although Robins and Bell are hardly advocating infanticide as a way out of the predicament for modern women (any more than Ibsen is advocating that all women follow Nora Helmer and desert their families), McDonagh notes that feminist writers often used the “motif of infanticide as a means of female emancipation,” and that the motif is “at its most raw in Alan’s Wife.”¹⁰¹ Robins’s unpublished letters show a woman often agonizing and tormented about her choice to resist what she deemed the “natural” female behavior of motherhood. Significantly, she does not deem her choices to be natural. Robins and Bell suggest that maternal behavior covers a broad spectrum—one that can encompass infanticide as well as its extreme opposite, the life-giving nurture depicted by Herne.

The picture that emerges from Robins’s unpublished plays and correspondence in relation to her published work is of a woman writer and actress whose position on feminism is far more complicated and nuanced than the label New Woman suggests. Sheila Stowell has stated that Robins was a gender essentialist; she did not “‘seek to dissolve gender distinction’ altogether, but, rather, ‘to intrude [her] own version of “womanliness” into a male-dominated social and political system.’”102 Robins’s feminism, her championing of Ibsen’s plays, and especially her own dramas with their resistance to accepted moral and biological roles for women all connect her to a newly opened discourse on the female body that stemmed directly from late-nineteenth-century biology. Yet this new theatrical emphasis on women’s experience and relationships was by no means the sole interest for Robins. One of her unfinished plays, probably written in 1911/1912, called Discretion, contains a character named Eve who refers to “larks and squirrels”—Helmer’s pet names for Nora in A Doll’s House (echoed by John Osborne in Look Back in Anger, a play that puts women firmly back into a narrow domestic sphere). On one page, Robins appears to criticize her play as she notes in the margins, “Error / You make character and exigency / all circle about women / Consider the man’s need, and exigency.” She goes on to say: “3rd scene: let man dominate.”¹⁰³ This is interesting in light of Robins’s relationship with male writers like Henry James and Shaw, whose advice she frequently sought and usually followed. Theatre and Friendship shows how James advised Robins to let the male dominate in her work; Shaw admired Votes for Women! and encouraged her writing of it, helping to get it produced at the Court; yet his nickname for it was “the Stonor play,” which turns the focus of the play to the male character, Geoffrey Stonor, when in fact it is Vida Levering and her protégée Jean. Are the notes in Discretion about emphasizing “the man’s need” and letting “man dominate” simply Robins’s capitulation to the likes of James and Shaw and to audience expectations? Or is she less committed than we thought to feminist concerns?

In her biography of Robins, Angela V. John emphasizes the constant reinvention of the self: Robins cannot be “pigeonholed” and her “love of experimentation and wide-ranging life-style preclude narrow compartmentalization.”¹⁰⁴ She resists straightforward taxonomy. Even her friendship with Bell renders her a more complex figure in terms of her feminism, for Bell in 1890 had written a play called A Woman of Culture, still unproduced, that “contains one of the most notable portraits of the decade’s New Woman” in the character of Diana Chester yet comes down in favor of the male protagonist’s insistence on raising Evelyn, for whom they are joint guardians, to pursue the traditional route for women (marriage) rather than political activism.¹⁰⁵ In fact, Chester is shown to be deficient in femininity because she is politically active.

Grein called Jean “a fanatic who dies for her cause.”¹⁰⁶ But what is her cause? Jean’s refusal to supply explanations for her act left it wide open—as it still is—for interpretation.¹⁰⁷ Both McDonagh and Julie Holledge see the motive for Jean’s infanticide as eugenic: Jean’s killing of the baby not only is her rejection of the role of mother, but also is “intricately connected with her decision to marry Alan, whom she describes as if he were a member of a master race.”¹⁰⁸ If that superior being cannot live, then his inferior child should not either. Further evidence of their eugenic purposes can be seen in the contrivance of two models of maleness that the play holds up to audience scrutiny: the robust manual laborer Alan versus the delicate intellectual James Warren, Jean’s childhood playmate, now the local vicar, and a complete invention of Robins and Bell.¹⁰⁹ Jean’s mother wishes her daughter had married James, an idea of “marital selection on the grounds of improving class and species health” that had been around long before Darwin and the rise of eugenic interpreters of his work.¹¹⁰ Archer uses Darwinian terms to describe Jean and Alan: “She selects as her mate the handsomest, most capable man of her class that comes in her way.”¹¹¹

The question of how far Robins and Bell go in this eugenic direction is still unresolved. The baby’s disability is never made clear, so we do not know if it could ever mature and reproduce; presumably, it is so maimed that its mother feels compelled to put it out of its misery, rendering the act one of euthanasia but with no eugenic motive. Kelly maintains that Robins took a dim view of eugenics, but her evidence is based on a statement Robins made much later in life (1926) dismissing eugenics as “childish.” Given that Robins and Archer shared a deep intellectual interest in the ethics of euthanasia and suicide, and that she treated these issues in The Mirkwater, an unpublished play written in the mid-1890s, and her novel The Open Question (1898), which argues that suicide is ethically defensible to prevent the spread of hereditary disease, there is a strong case for seeing Robins at this stage of her life favoring eugenics, at least on this individual, case-by-case level.

In the published text of Alan’s Wife, Jean baptizes the child before killing it and in the moment of suffocation expresses anguish, showing that it is not done in cold blood—a crucial distinction from Darwin’s dispassionate reports of women killing their babies. Yet this scene was not shown on stage, only put in the published text, so audiences would not have seen Jean’s emotional torment. Also, Jean’s child is a boy, and as Darwin points out, infanticide is usually practiced on girls, with an implicit sense of identification between mother and daughter if the mother is committing a mercy killing (saving her daughter from a life of poverty and prostitution or slavery, for example). While Jean kills her baby to end his suffering, “theirs is not a shared affliction. Moreover, the act becomes associated specifically with her emancipation, rather than his: it is her ‘one act of courage’ through which she reaches a state of transcendence, even a kind of self-fulfilment.”112 In short, Robins and Bell remove any ameliorating factors so that it is impossible to excuse Jean’s act—the audience must come to terms with her justification for it, not apply any existing legal, moral, or cultural paradigm.¹¹³

Alan’s Wife does not call for actual, or at least highly realistic, infants to be used on stage. It is entirely possible simply to have a baby crib on stage and leave the rest to the audience’s imagination. But the moment when Jean does the deed, reaching into the crib with the pillow and suffocating the baby, is surely no less powerful for being left to the spectator’s own mental staging, just as Edward Bond’s Saved (1968) does not require us to see the baby in the pram as it is being stoned to death (or to see the baby, who is crying inconsolably throughout an entire previous scene in which all the adults in the room, including its mother, ignore it, an excruciating experience for the audience). In both cases, the distress is acute, and a prosthetic baby would only diminish this effect since its artificiality would be obvious. The reliance on each member of the audience to imagine the baby simultaneously assumes and questions a collective picture of infanthood already being undermined by the emergence of “baby science” and the anthropological findings on the universality of infanticide.

Alan’s Wife has often been seen as a New Woman play, which is odd given that it shows a woman so dependent on her husband that she cannot live without him—a female character so defined by her role as wife that motherhood cannot enter into it. Her mother complains, “Yes, it’s always Alan’s dinner, or Alan’s tea, or Alan’s supper, or Alan’s pipe. There isn’t another man in the North gets waited on as he does.” Jean merrily replies, “Is anything too good for him? Is anything good enough?” She revels in having “a husband who is brave and strong, a man who is my master as well as other folks’.” She delights in keeping her little cottage “bright and shining” and in getting her husband’s dinner ready: “Isn’t he the best husband a girl ever had? And the handsomest, and the strongest?” Most of Jean’s statements early in this scene—forming our first impression of her—are phrased as questions, giving her a tentative quality hardly in keeping with the assertive aggressiveness of the stereotypical New Woman.114 The portrayal of infanticide has completely overshadowed this tentative quality and the other aspects of the play that undermine her as a New Woman.

Although vastly different in ideological orientation, the plays discussed in this chapter foreground what Angelique Richardson identifies as the “increasingly biologized” maternal aspect of femininity.¹¹⁵ Quite apart from the fascinating intersections with scientific discourse, these plays are also worth looking at for how they problematize the New Woman label, whose critical currency is in danger of being eroded by becoming too broad and indiscriminate, automatically applied now to any female character in post-1890 drama that does anything even faintly rebellious, thus absorbing practically any play of this period that deals with issues of gender, motherhood, and marriage.¹¹⁶ These works provide compelling examples of plays grappling with these ideas that don’t fit easily into the New Woman–play paradigm.

The critical literature on Robins and the image that she self-consciously cultivated and projected have helped to build a picture of a woman dedicated unquestioningly and exclusively to her many careers (actor, playwright, novelist, journalist, suffrage campaigner), who after her husband’s suicide started a whole new life and never looked again toward marriage or children. Yet in one of her letters to Bell, written in 1892 and sounding a lot like the character of Hedda whom Robins had just so successfully played, Robins seems deeply conflicted about motherhood and what is natural for a woman. She calls herself a “coward, a slave to convention,” who hates being “loved” yet sometimes yearns desperately for it; she says, “Why am I so afraid to be natural? . . . In my heart of hearts I don’t think those women stronger better nobler who resist successfully as I the Mighty Mother’s Call, than those who have the courage to obey her.—Ah it’s probably a mistake this bondage women are born under and grow so accustomed to they refuse freedom as I do.” This long and anguished letter probes this question—so forcefully addressed by Mona Caird and others at the time—of what is natural, what it means to be a “hot-blooded woman” whose bed is a “furnace” as she is tortured by her resistance to love, sex, and motherhood.117

Situating these plays within the cultural discourses on evolutionary theory that they both reflect and challenge complicates a progressivist narrative of women and theatre and allows a new perspective on the female body in performance in this period. Women taking control of their own bodies through contraception was a key issue in debates about reproduction throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and the stage becomes a prominent site of such debates, in an astonishingly wide range of theatrical modes. Evolution relies on unions that result in viable offspring, but humans have evolved ways of manipulating this reproductive function, and despite the challenges of handling such subject matter on stage, playwrights have taken an avid interest in depicting contraception and abortion, even in the face of censorship laws or box office pressures.

Guillaume Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias, begun in 1903 and completed in 1917) satirically reflects the prominent place that reproductive issues were taking in the discourse on the declining birth rate that was affecting not only France but also many other European countries around the turn of the century. The play also forms an important precedent for Beckett’s first play, Eleuthéria, as discussed in chapter 8. Apollinaire wrote it partly as a protest against realism, yet he chose as his theme a real social problem: “female emancipation, and its relation (which seems to have wholly charmed Apollinaire) to population decline.”¹¹⁸

There are three striking things about the play’s treatment of reproduction. First, he leaves the sexual act out of it, so that it is about “a man who makes children”; the emphasis is on manufacture, as if children are simply commodities. Second, there is a blurring of gender lines, a questioning of gender essentialism; Thérèse grows a beard and her breasts fly off her body (staged using balloons), and she refers to her husband as “less virile” than she is.¹¹⁹ Third, despite the presence of exaggerated, grotesque breasts, they do not seem linked to anything either sexual or nurturing. In fact, it is the opposite: Apollinaire rather sneeringly notes in his preface that one critic “finds a ridiculous connection” between the rubber of the fake breasts and “certain articles recommended by neo-Malthusianism,” and even provides a footnote to this comment on condoms “to clear myself of any reproach concerning the use of rubber breasts.”¹²⁰

Thérèse sings “let us get rid of our breasts,” setting them on fire so that they explode, and her gender inversion becomes more pronounced as the play progresses (her husband does without testicles, she does without breasts; she trades clothes with him, puts on a mustache, and so on). In addition to destabilizing heterosexual norms and breaking down essentialist gender categories, the play satirizes feminism as incompatible with child rearing. Since the women of Zanzibar will not have children because they “want political rights,” it is up to the men. As in Allan Neave’s Woman and Superwoman, the play depicts women’s desire for political rights as supplanting their natural reproductive role, rather than compatible with it.

Act 2 opens with the revelation that the Husband has just made 40,049 children in a single day, evidently by parthenogenesis. Along with lots of cradles, there is the continuous crying of babies on stage, in the wings, and in the auditorium throughout the scene. The stage directions indicate when and where the crying increases, not how this could possibly be staged. The Husband proclaims he has found “Domestic happiness / No woman on my hands” as “He lets the children fall.”121 He tells a reporter (who is only a mouth, providing a notable link to Beckett’s Not I, which similarly deals with reproductive issues) that he will bottle-feed the babies, something made possible and popular by the rapid advances in pediatrics and infant feeding at the time (pioneered in France). The incentive is wealth: the Husband says that having all these children will secure him immense riches. This is to counteract the pervasive fear that having children will make you poor.

Apollinaire belongs to the Continental avant-garde rather than the “new drama” that characterizes so many of the Anglophone plays under discussion here. This means that the play’s modernist aesthetic draws more attention than the subject matter: his treatment of reproductive issues. By contrast, the American playwright Susan Glaspell has only recently begun to gain critical attention for the aesthetic innovation as well as the content of her plays. Like her compatriot Robins, Glaspell gives prominent place to vexed or failed parent–child relationships, especially to childlessness, and likewise has a more complex orientation toward feminism than has previously been recognized, now firmly endorsing female emancipation and free thinking about marriage, now retreating into reactionary anxiety about her childlessness and her need for conventional relationships. Glaspell, whose plays are deeply influenced by Ernst Haeckel, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Herbert Spencer, shone a fierce light on parent–child relationships in the context of her broader evolutionary vision as exemplified by Inheritors and The Verge, which are explored in the following chapter. Here, it is Chains of Dew that has direct relevance, although already in Bernice, her breakthrough play, childlessness (and a possible miscarriage) defines the main character: “She would have made a wonderful mother, wouldn’t she?”¹²² There is also an implicit link between female activism and childlessness, just as in the Apollinaire and Neave plays.

Chains of Dew (1922) deals to some extent with the issue of birth control.123 Though brisk and lighthearted in tone, it is a topical drama that reflects a contentious issue of the day: the campaign to legalize contraceptives and the dissemination of information about them, pioneered by Emma Goldman, Mary Ware Dennett, and Margaret Sanger.¹²⁴ This topic was not so unusual for a play; as we have seen with Brieux’s and Apollinaire’s plays, concerns over reproductive issues like these were common theatrical material, linked to and reflecting wider eugenic anxieties. What is different is Glaspell’s attempt to strike a new tone, somewhere between the grave seriousness of Brieux and the surrealism of Apollinaire.

Chains of Dew opens in the New York city offices of an attractive birth control campaigner, Nora, who is having an affair with married poet Seymore Standish. There is little discussion of birth control itself, however; the play moves rapidly to the Midwest home of Seymore, where Nora suddenly arrives with a view to bringing her campaign to the wider population. The focus of the play shifts from Nora to Seymore’s dutiful wife, Dotty, a self-effacing housewife reminiscent of both Vectia and Nora Helmer, who goes through a similarly life-changing awakening when Nora persuades her to campaign for birth control. Dotty pours her energies into this new cause. Her position is analogous to Vida’s as a childless woman who devotes herself to women’s emancipation.¹²⁵ Thus, Chains of Dew is part of a growing interest among playwrights in staging the tension between women’s work and their reproductive lives—a new theatrical frontier, and an idea with controversial implications for human evolution if, as some feared, work supplanted childbearing.

Chains of Dew has a disappointingly nonfeminist ending, putting the doll back in the doll’s house as Dotty sacrifices herself to what she perceives are her husband’s greater needs. She returns to her normal life, with the one concession that Seymore promises to take her with him to New York occasionally; apart from this, the status quo is completely restored. It thus disappoints those expecting more of the radical feminist Glaspell of Trifles or The Verge. The play was a disaster on its premiere due to poor production values, poor acting, and bad timing, in that Glaspell and Cook were living in Greece and not able to exert any influence on the production in New York. Critics thought the characters were caricatures more than fleshed-out people and were disappointed in what seemed a thin and underwritten play after the powerful drama of The Verge. But, one critic, Maida Castellun, admired Glaspell’s “ironic treatment of the theme and, especially, her extremely subtle satirical expose of the essentially conservative nature of men.”¹²⁶

One character critics particularly noted was Dotty’s mother-in-law, who is central to the play both as its voice of reason and in symbolic ways through constant references to her avocation of doll making. The Seymore house is filled with her dolls, which pointedly look much more like people than playthings, and she constantly utters the pearls of wisdom expected of a wise older woman. Glaspell thus literalizes what was only a metaphor in Ibsen’s A Doll House. There is a further parallel between this doll-making mother-in-law in Chains of Dew, whose dolls are obviously sublimations of her own repressed feelings (like the lame Jenny Wren in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend) and Mrs. Solness’s “nine lovely dolls” in Ibsen’s Master Builder. What in Ibsen’s play serves as a metaphor for Mrs. Solness’s dead babies (and a constant reminder to Solness of his guilt for bringing this tragedy about) becomes in Glaspell’s hands a powerful signifier of women’s need to widen their sphere beyond motherhood. This connects with The Motherly One in Glaspell’s short proto-Absurdist play Woman’s Honor: “The prototype of the calm, wise, older woman who appears in many of Glaspell’s later works and who is most aware of the workings of society; she voices Glaspell’s contradictory feelings about individuality and evolution in traditional society.”127

Glaspell’s conclusions are as troubling and ambivalent as Robins’s, with the birth control campaigner remaining single and childless while the mother who has taken up that cause with such zeal ends up abandoning it to preserve her marriage and family life. As with Robins, Glaspell’s theatrical spectrum is vast and her political identity in constant renegotiation. This makes these writers harder to place than their male counterparts. Yet far from becoming dated, the play seems to work well in modern revival; the issues it addresses have by no means been resolved.¹²⁸

Another intervention in natural reproductive processes that gripped playwrights’ imaginations in relation to evolutionary theory was abortion.129 A surprising number of plays deal with this issue in these early years of the twentieth century, and they did not have an easy path to theatrical production, especially in England under the ongoing theatrical censorship. Granville-Barker’s play Waste deals with a politician, Henry Trebell, whose lover, the married woman Mrs. O’Connell, has an illegal abortion and dies. The play was refused a license in 1907, the same year that Edward Garnett’s The Breaking Point, a plea for more relaxed abortion laws, was banned. As a response to the decision on Waste, seventy-one playwrights sent a petition to the editor of the Times detailing why they objected to stage censorship: it was arbitrary, it undermined art and the craft of theatre, and it did not allow for any legal appeal process.¹³⁰

But, for all its notoriety as an abortion play, Waste’s main interest is in female sexual selection. The opening stage directions describe Mrs. O’Connell as “a charming woman, if by charming you understand a woman who converts every quality she possesses into a means of attraction, and has no use for any others.” Amy O’Connell is driven by her life force (she is ovulating) to have sex with Trebell, who is helpless in its grip. There is a strong link here to Ann Whitefield, similarly portrayed as the predatory female turning all her charms on Tanner. The influence of Shaw’s evolutionary theory (and perhaps also Henri Bergson’s) on Barker was profound. The two men worked closely together on the groundbreaking 1904 to 1907 seasons at the Court Theatre (a partnership sartorially signaled in the tongue-in-cheek costuming of Barker to resemble Shaw when he played Tanner in Man and Superman, which he also directed, as shown in figure 1, chapter 5). The first version of Waste actually contains the term life force, and there are numerous other echoes of Man and Superman, though of a more somber nature, as Waste ends in suicide rather than the “bounding high spirits” of Shaw’s play:¹³¹ “In Barker’s play the dominant image is that of barrenness (the word ‘barren’ itself occurs several times at crucial moments) and sexual barrenness and the wilful refusal of life is overtly and explicitly equated with spiritual barrenness.”¹³² I would argue that the word Waste recognizes not only the tragic waste of human lives (Amy’s and the unborn baby’s as well as Trebell’s) but also the Malthusian excess of life that is required to ensure the continuation of the species—the downside being that some must “go to the wall” in the struggle for existence. The version in 1927 of the final speech by Trebell refers to nature as “spendthrift,” then says: “Yet the God to whose creating we travail may be infinitely economical and waste, perhaps, less of the wealth of us when we’re dead than we waste in the faithlessness and slavery of our lives.”¹³³

By contrast, Robins turns abortion-induced waste and barrenness to political efficacy. Her play Votes for Women! is in its treatment of abortion from the female perspective an exact inversion of Waste, though written in the same year and performed in the same context (the Court Theatre); indeed, the play was one of Barker’s and the Court’s greatest successes. In this play, Vida refers only obliquely to her abortion: “It was my helplessness turned the best thing life can bring into a curse for both of us [Vida and Geoffrey Stonor, her lover].”134 As Eltis points out, this line comes after an exchange in which Vida has made it clear that her pregnancy came about through her own sexual desire and her recognition of a physical need as much as through her lover’s advances; she was not just helplessly “succumbing to love,” not taken advantage of as a stereotypically passive fallen woman. In this scene, “the tangential nature of the dialogue—necessitated by the constraints of theatrical censorship, if not by Robins’s own artistic preferences—leaves it uncertain whether Vida’s ‘curse’ refers to the aborting of the child or the reduction of her relationship with Stonor to a form of prostitution, or, perhaps, both.”¹³⁵ This relates to evolution in the sense of directing it, being selective, making reproductive choices rather than letting nature take its course, as Tares put it. It also has to do with the impact on other lives, particularly the woman’s, and the effect that in turn has on her life choices and her relationships.

By contrast, Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play simply and shockingly entitled Abortion (1914) seems at first wholly uninterested in seeing the issue from the female perspective; the young girl who has had an abortion never appears, as she is already dead. Set on an unnamed university campus (probably Princeton), the play shows basketball star Jack Townsend being cheered by a crowd of classmates, his family, and his girlfriend. Moments later, he is visited by a scowling local youth suffering from tuberculosis who turns out to be the brother of a girl Jack got pregnant. He tells Jack that the girl has died as a result of a botched abortion that Jack and his father had financed. Jack must face the consequences of his affair with a girl from the other side of town, of a lower class. He realizes that not even money can clear his name, so he shoots himself, just as Trebell does in Waste.¹³⁶

As with Waste, the sensational topic of abortion can too easily overshadow the real interest of the drama: its anatomizing of the sex instinct not only in terms of individual character but also in the broader context of evolution. Abortion likens the sexual urge to the vestiges of primeval mud on civilized man. When we give way to our sex drive, we act like savages. “We’ve retained a large portion of the original mud in our make-up,” says Jack’s father to him, “that’s the only answer I can think of.” Jack picks up on this in the next line, saying that he was not really himself when he slept with “this girl”; he was some form of early man, “the male beast who ran gibbering through the forest after its female thousands of years ago.”137 Jack’s father calls this “pure evasion” and says we are responsible for both the Jekyll and the Hyde side of ourselves. Jack argues that in fact the sexual impulse he gave in to is more natural than “our ideals of conduct, of Right and Wrong, our ethics, which are unnatural and monstrously distorted.”¹³⁸ This is the crux of the matter in evolutionary terms, raising again the issue of what is “natural” but framing it in a moral context (as J. M. Barrie does in The Admirable Crichton with a much lighter touch and within the context of the rigid British class system). O’Neill treats Jack sympathetically, as “a victim of both humans’ natural, biological sex drive and the unnatural social result of puritanical morality.”¹³⁹

This chapter has shown three main things. One is that theatre’s engagement with reproductive issues was deep, varied, and complex, and was often linked with deeply controversial areas such as eugenics and sexual selection. Two is the frequency with which the system of censorship and the need to please audiences prevented such plays being performed. Three is that the crux of the matter was, in many ways, the notion of what was “natural”—and this itself was a term of shifting semantic value at this time.

So far, much of the discussion in this book has centered on drama emanating from Britain, the home of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, William Bateson, and so many other seminal evolutionists. We have seen some important early theatrical engagements with evolution by Americans Herne and Robins, but Herne is something of an isolated case, and some of Robins’s work remains unpublished and unperformed, a treasure trove waiting to be fully mined. It is in plays by their successors Glaspell and Thornton Wilder that American drama fully confronts evolution in a distinctive style in the middle of the twentieth century.