NAVSA 2015 Annual Conference – Victorians and the World

Surreal Foliage: Banang Trees

I have just come back from an extremely informative and rewarding conference at this year's NAVSA annual conference, Victorians and the World, held in Honolulu, Hawaii. I delivered a paper inspired by certain aspects that have popped up whilst I've been conducting the research for my thesis. Over the course of my study, I have noticed that as the century approached it's close, the style of the plays became progressively more realistic. However, in my paper I attribute this solely to the work of Henrik Ibsen. However, it is possible to identify elements of realism which predate Ibsen’s popular years by twenty or even thirty years in some of the plays. As such, whilst my paper for NAVSA posed that it was Ibsen’s influence that was changing the style of the plays so dramatically from one another (and the original sources), I now seek to identify the pre-Ibsen stage adaptations, which are ‘realistic’.

At the conference, a recently finished PhD student from the University of South Florida, Dan Brown, delivered a paper, which was appropriately (and somewhat embarrassingly) right before mine. In it, he refuted Ibsen's title as the father of the realism and rightly so. I then had to awkwardly stand up and follow Dan’s paper, which had thoroughly denied Ibsen his commonly accepted title, and lay the full stylistic changes I had recognised in my studies at Ibsen’s feet along, as such before I started speaking I had to nod to the fact that in that paper I was accepting Ibsen as the sole father of realism, but that there is plenty of evidence to show that he is not. I added that, what's more his crown needs to be re-evaluated in the light of new evidence. 

Certainly as the century reaches the fin-de-siècle, elements of realism became more frequent and more noticeable in the adaptations. In James Willings’ (1879) and Wills’ (1882) productions of Jane Eyre. They both focus on character development and show Jane struggling with her inner desire to be with Rochester despite his existing marriage. A vital element of the theatrical style of realism is the presentation of controversial issues. Both Wills and Willings present a discussion of delicate social issues. Willings’ goes so far as to present the burgeoning women’s movement with the ‘female sisterhood’ frequently invoked (Stoneman 2007: 330-331 and 336). Pre-dating both Wills and Willings, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer's adaptation of Jane Eyre from 1870 contains many elements that are recognisable as realism. Her production, and she herself, was German. This is particularly revealing regarding the state of European literature and Art in the nineteenth-century, as Ibsen himself was from Norway of course. On a separate note, it would be very interesting to chart specific plays in date order on a map to see whether the theatrical style of realism did originate in Northern and Central Europe before reaching Britain.

Birch Pfeiffer’s ‘realistic’ German adaptation is marked by the fact that it was the first one to entirely cut the novel’s telepathy scene between Jane and Rochester. The only British adaptation to do so was Willing’s in 1879. The omission of this scene in both plays indicates a definite move away from not only the sensationalism and Gothic aspects of the original source, but also a move away from the theatrical style employed by the earlier adaptations. The scene does re-appear in Wills’ production in 1882, however it is not shown directly on the stage and is only referred to by Jane on her arrival at Ferndean as a ‘vision’ to explain her return to Rochester. Evidently by 1870 the sensation of this scene had lost its charm for the Victorian audiences.

Examples of pre-Ibsen realism also extend to the stage adaptations of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. In John Brougham’s adaptation of Lady Audley’s Secret (1866) the focus of the play is on social responsibility. A key aspect of realism is the presentation of taboo subjects and Lady Audley is shown being pushed to the edge by a restrictive patriarchal society as she is not given the much needed support she requires as an abandoned wife with a child to feed. This is the message that Brougham ultimately presents. He also indicates that Lady Audley may well have committed bad acts, but that ultimately she was not a bad woman. He lays the blame of Lady Audley’s ‘madness’ firmly at the audience’s feet by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her in the play’s climax for goading her to ‘madness’. You can easily see her stood on the stage in this scene, not just pointing at the characters gathered around her but at the audience too. For Brougham, crucially it was that Lady Audley tried to escape the restrictions imposed on her by a cruel, patriarchal society that made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of society. Or more succinctly, she was mad because she refused to conform. 

The stage adaptations of Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1863) also presents evidence of the move towards more realistic theatre. Hamilton Hume’s adaptation from 1863 is the most sensational as a result of its use of dramatic, emotive language, asides and soliloquies and tableaux; key elements of the style. However as the nineteenth-century progressed the use of these dramatic devices declines as the chart below shows.

Number of Tableaux/Pictures

Author	No. of Tableaux / Pictures
Hamilton Hume 1863	7
Spencer 1865	2
Palmer 1874	1 1
Dick 1879	0

Whilst Dick’s production takes place on the edge of Ibsen’s most popular period starting, what this chart shows is that the style of the works performed in, what are dismissively called, minor theatres was changing before Ibsen became really successful.

As a final note, the most significant thing I took away from this year’s NAVSA conference was not an organised event or a planned meeting, it was something completely organic deriving from the pooling of all of our areas of research and the resulting discussions. Every year people will leave NAVSA with a completely new thought that will lead them on to a new path of enquiry or make them completely re-evaluate their whole research. This will largely be for the better, as was my personal experience. NAVSA has enriched my already significant research to date, not just by informing me of new authors or events, but by just encouraging deeper thought and greater probing.