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Gender and Theatrical Realism: The Problem of Clyde Fitch1
By David Sehat, Georgia State University
Clyde Fitch was the most famous playwright of the early twentieth century, but today no one studies him. The disconnect between his fame in his lifetime and his obscurity after death points to a major historiographical problem, a problem that began in Fitch's own day. Fitch's numerous contemporary critics, many of whom were early proponents of theatrical realism, criticized his plays as effeminate, bound by the narrow conventions of the legitimate theater that relied on women as its predominant patrons. By contrast, realism, as the critics understood it, was masculine, bringing the gritty reality of what contemporary commentators regarded as the real world to the stage. Criticizing Fitch's feminine dramatic sensibilities became a way of prodding him toward a strained realism in his own plays. Fitch's story illustrates the close connection of realism to the gendered hierarchy that became an unconscious element in the determination of literary value. In dismissing Fitch as worthy of scholarly attention, current theatrical historians have followed Fitch's contemporary critics. Even as they have eviscerated the gendered standards of the early twentieth century, present-day scholars have retained the critical judgments and the generic categories that the gendered standards produced.
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The name Clyde Fitch means little to most American cultural historians, but at the time of his death in 1909, Fitch was the most prominent playwright in the United States. From the late 1890s, his output and popular acclaim were unmatched. In his short dramatic career—he died at the age of forty-four—Fitch authored thirty-three original plays and twenty-three adaptations, including the stage adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. The 1900–01 season saw the production of ten of Fitch's plays, with four opening nearly simultaneously on Broadway.2 From 1900 onward, his commercial dominance was so great that many critics regarded Fitch, in the words of New York Times drama critic Edward A. Dithmar, as the "foremost American dramatist" and looked to him to produce what they considered a distinctly American dramatic masterpiece. By the time of his death, as one of his contemporaries put it, "Fitch was the American dramatist with a voice of the greatest carrying power."3 |
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