| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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workings of human beings, and to read their buried secrets. This sense that Europeans, and later Americans, could read others with superior ability fit the ideology of imperialism of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For Americans, that view became intensely problematic during the Vietnam War as understandings were divided, arguing whether the Vietnamese were Communist puppets, or whether the war was their own revolution to be free from outside interference. As a result, the country confronted multiple interpretations of reality, each valid depending on one’s starting assumptions.
Reflecting this duality, postmodern realists appropriate the trappings of realism, fragment them, and use them in staging in order to invoke the privileged position of realistic objectivity; then they leave gaps so that the objective standpoint is undercut. In this way they use realism to give the audience the reassurance of old-style objectivity, but then increasingly problematize such assumptions.
Struggles to Define Realism and Althusser’s Ideology
Brenda Murphy’s definitive work, American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (1987), clearly presents the problem with the modernist approach to realism. Written before Althusser’s work on ideology became widespread, she begins with her own justifiable critique of American drama scholars who start their conceptions of realism with European theories, rather than with theories of realism by American writers, and so do not recognize the native roots of the realistic tradition (mainly in Henry James and William Dean Howells). Her book rightly seeks to rectify that error. But as she begins to grapple with these early theories of realism, she gets bogged down in ideology, using the language of mimesis as she deals with stereotypes and local color: