Abstract
“A Woman’s Play: Elizabeth Robins and the Suffragettes,” examines Elizabeth Robins’s suffrage play Votes for Women! (1907), in which the idea of marriage is de-centered and subordinated to broader questions regarding women’s role in society. Robins, like Wilde, depicts a fallen woman attempting to repair her life. Rather than seeking rehabilitation in a wealthy marriage, however, she rejects her former lover’s proposal and demands instead that he make amends by supporting the suffrage cause. A veteran actor and producer of Ibsen’s plays, Robins viewed her play as an extension of Ibsen’s exploration of women’s experience. Where Ibsen had merely exposed marriage’s failure to offer wives a constructive outlet for their energies and imaginations, Robins presented political activism as the needed outlet and an alternative to marriage.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the glowing tone of Robins’s published writings about Wilde, Kerry Powell has argued, based on Robins’s diaries, letters, and unpublished writings, that the early mentor-pupil relationship between Wilde and Robins would later become more complicated, with Robins increasingly taking an admonitory role in urging Wilde to use his influence and literary skills to support “the Theatre of the Future” (Women and Victorian Theatre, 149).
- 2.
For details on the translation, copyright, and persons involved, see Joanne E. Gates, “Elizabeth Robins and the 1891 Production of Hedda Gabler,” Modern Drama 28, no. 4 (1985): 611–19.
- 3.
The baby’s physical deformities are not described in detail in the play, but in Ameen’s original story, he is born with no legs and only one arm.
- 4.
This resemblance to Hardy’s novel led several critics to suspect him of being the play’s anonymous author. Hardy, for his part, was evidently concerned that he might be accused of plagiarizing the baptism scene from Ameen’s Befriad, for he took considerable pains to demonstrate that the resemblance was accidental: Befriad had been published in Ur Dagens Kronika, a Swedish magazine, in January 1891, five months before the baptism episode of Tess appeared in The Fortnightly Review, but, Hardy explained, he had submitted this section of his novel to Tillotson and Sons in September 1889, though he had subsequently withdrawn it (Thomas Hardy, “Letter to the Westminster Gazette,” 55).
- 5.
Bell had previously authored several less controversial plays which had been published or produced under her name, in two of which (A Joint Household and Karin) Robins had performed.
- 6.
Kingston , though she eventually became an active supporter of the suffrage campaign, appears to have been hesitant to produce a play with so controversial a topic so early in her managerial career (John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 147).
- 7.
Winkiel primarily refers to The Convert , Robins’s novel adaptation of Votes for Women !, but much of her analysis could be usefully applied to the play as well.
- 8.
In earlier drafts of the play, the character is called “Beatrice.” The change to “Jean” underscores her identification with Joan of Arc, to whom she is compared late in the play, but may also serve to associate her with Robins’s earlier controversial protagonist in Alan’s Wife.
- 9.
Angela John, Sheila Stowell, and Maroula Joannou have all suggested possible real-life counterparts for the speakers: the working woman has been identified with Mrs. Baldock (John 145) and Hannah Mitchell (Stowell 28), Pilcher with Labour MP Keir Hardie (Joannou 191), and Ernestine with Christabel Pankhurst (Stowell 29) and Teresa Billington-Greig (John 145).
- 10.
Bernard F. Dukore notes that Shaw began to experiment with writing “interruption” dialogue for his crowd scene around this same time, notably for Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s 1906 New York production of Caesar and Cleopatra (“Bernard Shaw: The Director as Dramatist,” 136–67).
- 11.
Jan McDonald points out that Granville-Barker, throughout his term of management at the Court Theatre, was a committed opponent of the star system (The “New Drama” 1900–1914, 17–18).
- 12.
Shaw’s verdict on Mrs. Ebbsmith’s revealing evening gown, by contrast, was “a horrifying confection apparently made of Japanese bronze wall-paper,” “appallingly ugly,” and “cut rather lower in the pectoral region than I expected” (TN1, 64).
- 13.
Joannou also points out that 1906, the year in which Robins wrote Votes for Women , was also the year of Ibsen’s death, and suggests that his death might have “concentrated the thoughts of Ibsenites on the cultural significance of his legacy to the stage” (“Hilda, Harnessed to a Purpose,” 188).
- 14.
“Princess Bariatinsky” was the pseudonym of actress Lydia Yavorskaia, who had starred in a Russian language production of Hedda Gabler at His Majesty’s Theatre in July 1909.
- 15.
Marcus suggests that female marriages may have served as models for reformers who sought to shape more flexible and egalitarian heterosexual marriage laws.
- 16.
Shaw , in turn, more than once alluded to the suffrage activists a decade later in his preface to Saint Joan.
- 17.
Robins , in early drafts of Votes for Women , invoked this analogy by naming her central character “Christian Levering,” though, as Angela John explains, she eventually changed the name to “Vida” in response to Mrs. Pankhurst’s concerns that the character’s sexually transgressive backstory might reflect scandal on her daughter Christabel (Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 145).
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Christian, M. (2020). A Woman’s Play: Elizabeth Robins and Suffrage Drama. In: Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40639-4_7
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