| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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What is confused is “recognizable types” with realism. The same idea clearly underlies stereotyping. What is the difference? Murphy’s approach jumps back and forth between stereotype as realism, and conventionality as artificial. There is no sense that Harrigan’s “types” of the stage—Irishman, African, and German, his specialties of “local color”—might be seen as racist and stereotyping, rather than artful reflecting “everyday life in action.” What the audience would see, through the lens of shared ideology, is “real life.” But that is a fiction based on a common outlook, not a depiction modeled on some ultimate real, as Althusser makes clear.
When she attempts to define realism through Howells, her definition is as a consequence very traditional:
This is a perceptive and succinct appraisal of the realist’s dual strategies. There is both an outer set of causes and an inner one. The realist’s dilemma, in a sense, is quickly discovered to be that mere local color, reproduction of the outside surface of characters and their environment, never quite provided access to the inner “individual.” Thus an elaborate psychological apparatus was necessary to probe the inner life through examining semiotic signs in the outer. The whole construct is based on the dualism of Descartes with an inner and an outer person.
One contradiction in this theory of realism is that the external does not necessarily reveal inner thoughts or feelings. An elaborate set of correspondences and an enormous hermeneutic for dealing with “appearance and reality” are always entailed. By dispensing with this dualism, postmodern theories escape the inner/outer endless complexities. Instead,