Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Andrade, Brandi Hoffman

Titel

Hedda and her sisters: Realism, feminism, and social reform on the American stage

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2004

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation, as its title suggests, examines the relationship among realism, feminism, and social reform at the period of aesthetic and literary realism's ascendancy in American cultural life: the dawn of the twentieth century. With a focus on the stage, a number of significant works of realism are examined, including Henrik Ibsen's most notorious plays, Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, and Ghosts, as well as George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, Rachel Crothers' A Man's World, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. The authors' comments on their works are noted, but the emphasis is on the American response to them as found in printed commentary and reviews. Also examined are the works and ideas of several who were interested in realism as it related to women's rights, like famed actress and suffragist Mary Shaw. Additionally, the writings of two noted social reformers—Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams—are examined in the light of realist principles. The study of this collection of characters (which at first glance might seem a bit arbitrary) reveals uncanny parallels—and often explicit references to one another—that position aesthetic realism as a radical cultural enterprise rooted in experience and aimed at reforming the world. Making explicit connections between depiction and oppression, and between personal and social (or political), I argue (in contrast to the received views of realism, feminism, and even American women's history) that aesthetic realism was the consciousness-raising tool of American feminism's first wave.