| This project examines representations of marriage in the theater of the 1890s and the ways in which plays during this period responded to changing laws and popular perceptions governing the marriage institution in late-Victorian England. During the second half of the nineteenth century, changes in divorce and women's property laws had altered the official parameters of marriage, and these legal changes and the debates surrounding them had questioned prevalent romanticized ideals of domesticity and companionate marriage. This change disrupted the genre conventions that had dominated English drama for much of the nineteenth century, in particular those of melodrama and domestic comedy. These conventions equated marriage with happy ending and seduction or adultery with tragedy; thus, to question the credibility of marriage was to challenge playwriting itself as it had previously been practiced.;Focusing on plays by Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Elizabeth Robins, I argue that these dramatists responded to the double challenge to marriage and to theater by depicting their protagonists' troubled marriages metatheatrically; that is, the marital relationships are themselves theatrical performances presented by the married protagonists to an audience of fellow characters. This multilayered dramatization allowed theater to become a prominent forum for debating marriage and gender roles, pointing out the problems of traditional marriage, and envisioning alternative forms of partnership between the sexes. At the same time, these plays debated the conventions of theater itself, adapting and rewriting familiar theatrical genres and developing the new genres, in particular the Society drama and the problem play. In presenting marriage as a real-life performance, these plays questioned the function of theater itself and its relationship to the world outside the playhouse. |
