Dis/Contented Citizens

Abstract

To this point, I have been considering how the playwrights employed various strategies to engage with problematic issues, including: the production of a “fictive ethnicity” of Anglo-Saxon purity in a racially divided nation; the construction of the reader-consumer; the consolidation of a “superior” middle class; the erection of barriers predicated on necessary distance and difference; the insistence that women were happier wedded than enfranchised; the cultural displacement of suicide and sex; and the appropriation and transformation of the Other. Though the periodicals worked hard to naturalize these fictions and to produce an image of contentment with the status quo, there were four issues that were too fraught and threatening to paint over with illusions or deflect with strategic artifices: the social evils of industrial slavery, the rise of immigration, the “social evil” of prostitution, and, above all, the war in Europe. With these problems, citizens were openly discontented. Given the generally circulating assumption of ideological hegemony within middle-class culture, which has been current in the histories until quite recently, and though the most direct, reformist opinions were usually expressed in the two progressive periodicals, Arena and Forum, it is important to stress the open expression of discontented criticism that circulated in the periodicals.