Maxwell Anderson and the Marriage Crisis: Challenging Tradition in the Jazz Age

Description

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. 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