This book focuses on the re-evaluation of four Maxwell Anderson plays within the context of the emergence of the New Woman and the perception of a marriage crisis in the United States during the 1920s. The four plays under consideration are White Desert (1923), Sea-Wife (1924), Saturday’s Children (1927), and Gypsy (1929). These plays are largely forgotten and, even when the titles appear in Anderson scholarship, coverage has tended to be cursory and dismissive. This work represents a fresh approach and re-assessment of an American playwright who bore a significant impact on the drama of his time, serving not only to place Anderson’s work more effectively within the context of American theatre during the 1920s, but also to bridge the gap between his work and the marriage-related plays of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Author(s): Fonzie D. Geary II
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 191
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Jazz Age Theatre and the “Marriage Crisis”
Case Study #1
Case Study #2
The Crisis Defined
The Marriage Institution & Protestant Victorianism
Progressive Era Challenges to the Protestant Victorian Ethos
The Crisis Addressed
Setting the Stage: Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry?
Marriage Plays of the 1920s
The Emergence of Maxwell Anderson
The Plays
Anderson’s Limitations
Rationale
Notes
2 White Desert: Marriage as Manifest Destiny
Rationale
Prologue: Are You Sure This Is Still the Earth?
Act I: A Marriage, Not a Purchase
Act II: Beware of Me
Act III: An Old Law of Sex
Act IV, Scene 1: Guilty or Innocent, It’s All the Same
Act IV, Scene 2: Something Wrong from the Beginning
Conclusion
Notes
3 Sea-Wife: Marriage and Superstition
Rationale
Act I, Scene 1: Damn the Women! They Drive You Mad!
Act I, Scene 2: It’s so Bitter a World
Act II: They’ve Gone Forever!
Act III: Yes—One Can Believe in Death
Conclusion: Of Strange and Peculiar Beauty
Notes
4 Saturday’s Children: Love Before Marriage
Rationale
Act I: I Wouldn’t Marry Anybody
Act II: You Can Wash Your Own Dishes!
Act III: What We Wanted Was a Love Affair, Wasn’t It?
Conclusion
Notes
5 Gypsy: Love After Marriage
Rationale
Act I: I’m Willing to Be Faithful, But I Haven’t Really Any Instinct About It
Act II: And that Was Why I Couldn’t Take the Money
Act III: I Knew He Was Going to Kiss Me
Conclusion
Notes
6 Maxwell Anderson Reassessed
The Play Would Gain Greatly by Judicious Cutting: Why Marry? Revisited
Simple, Human and Joyous: Frank Craven’s The First Year
A Monstrosity Plucked from Garbage Can to Sewer: Mae West’s Sex
Marriage and Maxwell Anderson
Summation
Notes
Index
