In the late Victorian period, when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best.

The work of Arthur Wing Pinero helps us to understand why these dramas portrayed such limited horizons for themselves and their female protagonists. Existing scholarship on Pinero attests to the fact that he was a popular and prolific dramatist, having a hand in over fifty dramas (many of which ran over a hundred performances), and responsible for the “high point of the well-made play's career in Britain” (Taylor 52). Several studies have sought to recuperate his reputation, but on the whole he remains underappreciated.Footnote ¹ In Mrs. Tanqueray and Mrs. Ebbsmith, Pinero uses the trope of the fallen woman or “woman with a past” to express his frustration with the playwright's lack of authority in the late Victorian period. Moreover, he demonstrates that the late Victorian theatrical climate actually thwarted the development of the New Drama it so anxiously demanded, just as characters and society conspire to prevent his female protagonists' developing from fallen women into New Women. As Amanda Anderson has shown for the 1840s through the 1860s, the rhetoric of fallenness served as a way for Victorian culture to articulate anxieties about agency and selfhood. Although the term “fallen woman” is “a wide umbrella term” that “cuts across class lines and signifies a complex of tabooed behaviors and degraded conditions,” for Anderson the fallen figures can always be associated with “attenuated autonomy and fractured identity” (2). My readings of Pinero's plays suggest that this rhetoric of fallenness persisted into the 1890s, when he exploited it to express anxieties about self-determination for playwrights. The woman with a past provides a displaced representation of the dramatist struggling to produce a New Drama.

Enhancing this metadramatic function, the woman with a past also straddles a historical shift in what it means to be “modern.” The very things that make her unmodern in late nineteenth-century terms make her modern in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the earlier scheme, to be modern means to break from the past and from the dominating aesthetics of idealism that Toril Moi has recently recalled to our attention.Footnote ² This aesthetic, which was the standard for judging art and literature in most of nineteenth-century Europe, equated beauty with truth and goodness and implied that art should reflect morality and serve a higher social purpose. As Jerome Buckley has shown, the Victorian moral aesthetic was at its height in England in the 1850s, before the aesthetes began to divorce art from its communal and public functions.Footnote ³ The cultural fascination with ethics spawned sentimentalized portraits of goodness as well as tales of criminality and transgression.Footnote ⁴ Starting in the 1870s, Moi contends that “modernism [was] built on the negation of idealism” and could be associated with freedom, amorality, and independence (67). The Pre-Raphaelites, anti-rationalists, and aesthetes practice versions of this individuation in the 1870s and 1880s, but not all repudiated art's moral function.Footnote ⁵ Pinero and his female protagonists strive to break with idealism and achieve freedom, amorality, and independence, but ultimately they too return to the world of traditional morality because they cannot escape its judgments.

The later understanding of modernity that develops after World War I places circumscription, not freedom, at the center of human identity. Silently accepting this notion, Anderson highlights the “attenuated autonomy” and “fractured identity” of fallen women as making them particularly modern. She argues that the fallen woman of mid-Victorian culture “is racked not so much with guilt as with the anguished knowledge of her unavoidable fate. In this sense, the fallen woman comes to carry the burden of a peculiarly modern form of self-consciousness” (57). For Anderson, a lack of agency – or perceived lack of agency – is one of the defining characteristics of modernity. The distinctly unmodern woman with a past looks very modern indeed when identity is marked by a decisive lack of agency, by the feeling that humans are subject to discursive and cultural forces beyond their control. By failing to escape idealism and become modern in nineteenth-century terms – that is, free and amoral – Pinero's protagonists become modern subjects in the twentieth-century sense – limited and tied to existing discourse. Plays about the woman with a past remain on the critical radar since they fit neatly into the paradigm of modernity which predominates now and sees subjects as bound and fragmented by competing social expectations and discourses.

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray opened at the St. James Theatre, 27 May 1893, and a few years later The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith appeared at the Garrick Theatre, 13 March 1895. As both these titles suggest, the plays focus on women whose social and sexual identities challenge acceptable norms. Mrs. Tanqueray focuses upon the new but ill-fated marriage of Aubrey and Paula Tanqueray. As a woman with a “past” – a series of relationships not legally or socially legitimized by marriage – Paula cannot reenter respectable society. When her past returns in the figure of a former lover who surprisingly turns up as her stepdaughter's fiancé, Paula commits suicide. Mrs. Ebbsmith dramatizes a similarly hopeless chain of events. The young widow Agnes Ebbsmith has taken up residence with Lucas Cleeve, a young, respectable Englishman whom she met while nursing invalids in Italy. Slowly realizing his attraction to her is sensual rather than intellectual, Agnes succumbs to playing the role of kept mistress and eventually breaks off with Lucus altogether so that he can reunite with his wife. The play ends with her mutely raising her bandaged hand, burnt by retrieving a Bible from the fire, in full recognition of her role as fallen and broken woman supported by the generosity of friends. It is a quintessential example of that plot which theatre critic William Archer described as “as old as human nature.”Footnote ⁶

Both plays end with the woman's acknowledging her identity as fallen woman, accepting the conventional system of morality, and displaying her utter deauthorization – one dead, the other maimed. While Paula is a proto-New Woman (appearing in 1893 before the label fully crystallized), a letter-writer and loose-talker, Agnes is a full-fledged New Woman, a public speaker, writer, and activist. In both dramas female identity directly correlates to metaphors of textuality and self-expression. Judith L. Fisher recognizes that the conflict in these plays turns upon language, but she finds that “individuality – not sexuality – is at issue” (203). I argue that it is the individuality of the playwright, not the women, that is ultimately at stake. By staging these women's struggles to escape their history and assert their voice, Pinero stages the feminized position of the dramatist who experiences deauthorization due to forces beyond his control: oppressive social mores enforced by market forces and censorship. He can only produce a dead and maimed drama within the confines of the current moral and political system.

In this essay I read Pinero's plays alongside the criticism and reviews of William Archer, a leading theatre critic of the 1890s, to illustrate the interrelated struggles of the New Woman and the New Drama. Before reviewing Archer's theories and examining Mrs. Tanqueray and Mrs. Ebbsmith in more detail, we need to establish the parallel origins of the “New Woman” and the “New Drama.” It comes as no surprise that the terms have similar genealogies. Sally Ledger's telling statement, “It would be an exaggeration – but only a small one – to claim that Ibsen invented the ‘New Woman’ in England,” points to the fact that innovations in stage and gender mutually influenced one another.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, it does seem the case that the first performance of Ibsen in England, an 1889 private production of A Doll's House, inflamed existing debates about women and theatre, making it possible for both New Woman and New Drama to enter the English vocabulary within a few years. Scholars have tracked the origins of “New Woman” quite precisely to an exchange of articles between novelists Sarah Grand and Ouida in the North American Review of 1894.Footnote ⁸ But as Ellen Jordan notes, “the birth of the New Woman pre-dated her christening by a good many years”; that is, the concept circulated widely before it acquired a name (19). Michelle Tusan has provided an essential supplement to our usual account of the label's birth, for she has shown that feminist presses actually coined the term “New Woman” in August 1893 and were promoting her as “a symbol of a new female political identity that promised to improve and reform English society” long before the mainstream press parodied her as a “dystopic vision” (169).

The New Woman, a diverse category of emancipated femininity, would seem to be the opposite of the fallen woman marked by “attenuated autonomy” and a “fractured identity” (Anderson 2). As scholars have shown, the New Woman's manifestations were many and varied; she was often an intellectual, a feminist and political activist, a working professional, and a sexually liberated being (meaning that she could bestow or withhold her sexuality – she now had the right to choose). The popular press often caricatured her threatening “mannishness” through cartoons of bicycle-riding, cigar-smoking, and book-toting women, but that particular “media construct” represents only one form of New Womanhood.Footnote ⁹ Unfortunately, a New Woman could easily slip into the role of fallen woman, depending upon social perception. The line between a modern woman embracing and controlling her sexuality and a fallen woman engaging in illicit affairs could be very fine indeed, and Paula Tanqueray and Agnes Ebbsmith vacillate on both sides of that line. In addition to their liberated sexualities, Pinero aligns these women with the New Woman through their relationships to words, work, and masculinity. Pinero was not the only dramatist to capitalize on the New Woman craze. Sidney Grundy's The New Woman (1894) is a notable comedy that viciously parodies the type. The plays mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay explore questions of femininity and the New Woman identity, as do the works Jan McDonald analyzes in “New Women in the New Drama” (she examines a later phase in the development of New Drama).Footnote ¹⁰

Recalling that late nineteenth-century thinking associated the modern with freedom and amorality while expecting women to form the moral backbone of society and depend on their husbands and families for self-definition, we can see that the term “modern woman” and its near relation “New Woman” were oxymorons. The connotations and ethical values of the latter half (woman) directly contradict those of the former (modern or new). But this contradiction does not remain stable: the turn from idealist aesthetics to formalism, the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism, and the disillusionment due to war and economic depression alter Western culture's perception of the modern. When “modern” comes to signify lack of agency and fragmentation, as it does by the mid-twentieth century, it becomes compatible with hegemonic concepts of femininity. “Modern women” appear in discourse today because the tension between the terms has dissipated, but since the valance of “new” does not change, the New Woman does not have the same viability. She remains an impossible construct that fascinated the era of her invention.

The term “New Drama” follows a course parallel to “New Woman” during the same time period. Just as small feminist presses introduced the utopian New Woman, avant-garde theatre critics created the New Drama. Henry Arthur Jones's The Renascence of the English Drama (1895), a collection of lectures and essays written from 1884 to 1894, significantly contributed to the concept, but he eschewed the word “new” in favor of “modern drama,” “modern English drama,” and “literary drama.” William Archer does not apply the term in his earliest essays theorizing drama, but in 1891 he wrote “The Free Stage and the New Drama” for The Fortnightly Review. Within the body of the essay he uses “new drama” (lowercase letters), and the title establishes “New Drama” as an emergent genre. The term seems to owe its entry into common parlance to an article on “The New Drama” in the Quarterly Review of October 1895. The author, Walter Sichel, follows on the heels of the New Woman vogue and proposes an exploration of the so-called “New Drama.” He roots his discussion in extensive analyses of Jones's and Pinero's work, showing that in 1895 these two men were firmly seen as leading practitioners of the New Drama. Twentieth-century critics have had a tendency to relocate the New Drama movement to the early 1900s and to obscure the significance of writers like Jones and Pinero.Footnote ¹¹ This is a rhetorical move that denies the lasting achievements of the 1890s dramatists. In 1895 Sichel, speaking for a prominent journal, viewed Pinero as “the greatest contemporary master of dramatic moments . . . . he has invented a new form of drama” (416). In 1902 Hamilton Fyfe called Pinero “the leading dramatist of to-day” (10). Archer likewise expressed much admiration for Pinero's work, calling his plays “modern and masterly,” but he resisted acknowledging them wholeheartedly as the arrival of the New Drama.Footnote ¹²

The writings of William Archer, a friend of Pinero and according to at least one historian “the most influential drama critic of the New Drama movement” (Dietrich 2), provide an essential context for interpreting Pinero's work. Archer was a prolific writer with a substantial influence over the theatre world, earning the title of “prophet” in the eyes of some scholars.Footnote ¹³ Not only a critic, he translated Ibsen for English audiences, led the campaign for a national theatre, and even composed a few plays himself.Footnote ¹⁴ His aesthetic expectations exemplify the rhetorical and cultural constraints with which Pinero and other late Victorian playwrights struggled. They reflect the lingering idealism that devalued art which fails to “uplift or improve us” or “change society through its relentless uncovering of truth” (Moi 102).

In numerous essays and reviews, Archer envisions the New Drama as a virile, intellectual departure from the existing theatre of vulgar entertainment. In his plays, Pinero insists on drama's femininity and inescapable connection to the past. By infusing his protagonists Paula Tanqueray and Agnes Ebbsmith with New Woman attributes, Pinero brought a certain degree of masculinity into his plays. Yet this brand of virility was not the kind that Archer desired in his New Drama, and his reviews of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith register his discomfort and dissatisfaction with Pinero's attempts to reformulate femininity. Hans Schmid's claim that “Pinero wrote the plays which Archer dreamed of writing” overlooks the fundamental incompatibility between these two writers' conceptions of the theatre and its possibilities (105).

Characterization, intellectualism, and a mimetic observation of life become the hallmarks of the new theatre for Archer. In an early and important essay on this topic, “Are We Advancing?” (1886), Archer sets forth his ideals and assesses the “progress” made toward them on the English stage from 1882 to 1886. He opens with a favorite extended metaphor, likening the drama to a “ship” whose “destination” must be ascertained in order to determine progress:

This vision of the drama is filled with allusions to decidedly masculine activities. Sailing is, of course, an ancient profession where men work and share experiences in an isolated community that eschews women. In the contemporary context of mercantilism and imperialism, sea-travel continued to represent a largely masculine endeavor to profit by appropriating goods and land. The vessel, the drama, may be female, but the commanding crew and the act of the journey are not. Here the drama is a careening vehicle run by too many captains who bicker for control, allowing little space for feminine influence. In the segment replaced by ellipses above, Archer lists a series of playwrights, all male, who have directed the ship in the past. The gloss in the margins, “Many men, many minds,” emphasizes the point (2). Even the suggestion that they steer toward Queen Elizabeth proves an empty gesture toward femininity, for the real target Archer alludes to is Shakespeare.

The language of manliness, vigor, and intellectualism as theatrical ideals permeates all of Archer's criticism. In the aforementioned “The Free Stage and the New Drama” (1891), he retains the perception that the serious New Drama has failed to materialize and reinscribes the theatre's masculinity. Archer declares, “if the new English drama – the vigorous, accomplished, virile stage-literature of the future – does not make haste to ‘precipitate’ itself, my faith will certainly begin to waver” (664). This construction implicitly feminizes English drama currently in production (as not vigorous, not virile) and clashes with the female-centered drama that eventually does rise to assume the place of the New Drama (from Jones, Pinero, Shaw, and others). It associates virility with the future and leaves femininity rooted in the past, a truism that Pinero's dramas present without fully endorsing. Archer returns to his masculine sailing metaphor in “The Drama in the Doldrums” (1892), published one year before the opening of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, to continue to lament the condition of the English stage and call for a virile drama that achieves the “possibility of a potency” suggested by Ibsen's work (150). His statements display a condescending attitude toward dramatists, a fear of emasculation, and the strong wish to ally the stage with the male rather than the female.

Many factors – mechanics of production, public taste, critical opinion, and the ever-present censorship – do indeed limit the playwright's scope and function and metaphorically strip his virility. From the establishment of the Theatrical Licensing Act in 1737 until its full repeal in 1968, new playtexts had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays before they could be performed in London (or by local magistrates in the provinces). This rule applied to “legitimate” drama – that is, plays consisting of spoken dialogue, often with aspirations to literariness, which could only be performed at theatres operating under royal patent – as well as to any scripted text, like brief scenes or song lyrics. Pieces consisting of music, dance, pantomime, and spectacle did not require such approval and were performed at numerous theatres, opera houses, and music halls. By the late Victorian period the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama had loosened: “legitimate” then referred to any serious, intellectual play, not merely a work approved for acting at a patent house. The monopoly of the patent theatres on legitimate drama had broken down.Footnote ¹⁵ But it was still the case that a drama which broached the arenas of politics, religion, and sexual freedom risked earning the censor's veto.Footnote ¹⁶ The Examiner was not just an individual enforcing his personal taste: he tended to respect cultural consensus and to act as the enforcer of “English Mothers and Anonymous Clergymen” (Elliott 8). Thus the dramatist faced a dilemma that critics like Archer often failed to acknowledge: how to write a legitimate drama of moral and intellectual complexity that would also please the censor. In the late nineteenth century, to be modern was often to be amoral, and such anti-idealist works were not welcomed on stage.

Though he expresses some sympathy for their plight, ultimately Archer refuses to grant that the playwrights are doing as much as they can under the circumstances. Instead he reminds them that “plays beget actors, not actors plays” (Doldrums 167), and repeatedly privileges elitist aesthetics and cultural judgments.Footnote ¹⁷ In “Are We Advancing?” Archer measures the theatre's progress by its ability to attract the attention of the “educated and thoughtful portion of the community” (2). Broad popular appeal or financial profits earn no credit in his view. This assessment of progress proves problematic, because in order for a drama to succeed it must meet certain requirements of the stage and public. Walter Sichel, the Quarterly Review critic, takes a more practical stance: “The playwright who defies his audience may be read, but he will not be performed” (402). As Jean Chothia reminds us, a play needs “the whole rigmarole of producers, actors, and performance spaces” before it can be “fully realized” (8). It is impossible to discount these practical factors, and Archer's attempt to do so leads him to construct an impossible dramatic ideal.

To his credit Archer does correctly anticipate the archetypal plot upon which the New Drama founds itself: the story of the fallen woman. As I have argued above, this can also be interpreted as the story of the New Woman, for by exercising her sexual freedom and defying the usual gender codes, the New Woman inevitably “falls” in respectable society. Archer admires the characterization and local flavor in Henry Arthur Jones's Saints and Sinners (1884) though “there was no novelty in the theme he chose.” He provides a revealing summary of this theme:

This summary rests on two assumptions: “we” are familiar with this story, having witnessed it over and over in voyeuristic fashion yet maintaining a distance safe enough to avoid interference; and the woman is somehow complicit in her downfall, conquered “almost” against her will, but not quite. The notion that the woman is brought back to a “better self” is wholly illusory, for in returning to her former identity she can only remain trapped in the system of double-standards that either exposed her to corruption or inspired her to revolt. Archer's summary of this plot reflects his inability to leave the past behind; in fact, he almost shows a nostalgic fondness for it.

As Archer worked to construct the New Drama, Pinero aimed to meet his demands for characterization, mimetic observation, and intellectualism by writing plays on the New Woman. Mrs. Tanqueray and Mrs. Ebbsmith explore how the individual attempts to assert autonomy and self-definition in the face of historicizing discourses, the rigidity of moral and social convention, and the devaluation of the feminine. In other words, they explore what it means to be “modern.” Paula's free sexuality and verbal looseness make her into “something resembling the New Woman” (Dietrich 45). These qualities allow her to move in and out of relationships with the opposite sex and maintain some level of economic independence outside of wedlock, a formerly male prerogative. Not all New Women were single, and not surprisingly Paula continues to exhibit characteristics of the New Woman after she marries.Footnote ¹⁸ Her husband, Aubrey, persistently tries to redefine her and prohibit her attempts to speak out the reality of her sexual identity. Though he declares that he intends to reform Paula and reclaim a space for her in respectable society, that “it's possible to rear a life of happiness, of good repute, on a – miserable foundation,” Aubrey's attitude and actions reflect the opposite motivation (155). Rather than integrate her in society, his first step is to cut off all correspondence with former friends and retreat to an isolated country house where the only person with whom Paula can interact is her frigid stepdaughter, Ellean.Footnote ¹⁹ He then tries to refashion Paula into a different woman by selectively ignoring her past.

Whenever Paula tries to assert an autonomous history, Aubrey completely silences her. On the eve of their marriage, Paula attempts to inform Aubrey of her entire history via a letter, so that he can know the full import of the partnership he is entering. The letter contains Paula-as-text, and represents an enormous sacrifice on her part, since she does “so want to be married” (159). Aubrey takes this self-verbalization and consigns it to the flames. He reprimands her gently:

This passage reveals much about male conceptualizations of femininity. Aubrey cannot bear to think about the unspeakable past. By refusing to let Paula articulate herself – through speech or writing – Aubrey believes he can reshape her into a happy, pure wife. Identity becomes a matter of “will” – of intellectual control – rather than historical physical experience, and a male intellect must perform the shaping. Archer's prophecies for the drama repeat this futile gesture of redefinition. He clamors for a theatre of intellect that erases its origins in the illegitimate theatre (pantomimes, musicals, melodramas, and farces) of the past, but of course in practice this continuity cannot be denied. Nor can the physical exigencies of stage drama be ignored.

With her tongue, that metaphoric organ of speech and sensuality, Paula treads into masculine arenas. Aubrey fears the power of her words, of the self he thought he could eradicate by burning and forgetting. Despite his noble intentions to recuperate Paula's reputation, he himself never sees her as anything more than a fallen woman who threatens to corrupt his daughter (he had married her, after all, because she has the abundant sexuality that his first wife lacked). He complains to his friend, Cayley:

Paula's verbal nature is her greatest threat. Substitute “the English drama” for Paula in the above passage and the description of the Victorian stage put forth by Archer and others emerges: she is proliferating out of control (there are certainly many popular plays) in the wrong direction (but they are not serious and respectable art). The image recalls Archer's careening ship.

Interestingly, Pinero evokes the idea of the “good woman maimed” that will become the central focus in The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. Here, Aubrey maims Paula by refusing to grant her any dignity, autonomy, or authority. In the third act, he confesses to Paula his contempt for her words: “Every belief that a young, pure-minded girl holds sacred – that you once held sacred – you now make a target for a jest, a sneer, a paltry cynicism. I tell you, you're not mistress any longer of your thoughts or your tongue. Why, how often, sitting between you and Ellean, have I seen her cheeks turn scarlet as you've rattled off some tale that belongs by right to the club or the smoking-room!” (186). Paula's tales disturbingly advance her into a masculine discursive arena. As a self-possessed New Woman, she dwells upon the sorts of vulgarities that so infuriated serious critics when the censor condoned them on the stage, or in music-halls, pantomimes, and burlesques. The qualities Paula shares with illegitimate theatre are the ones Aubrey wants her to repress to create a new self.

Pinero shows both the dangers and possibilities contained in language through his emphasis on the tongue. The image of the out-of-control tongue explains the course of Paula's entire life, both her sexual and verbal transgressions. The danger lies in her speaking about her experience, so that the plot's crisis point literally revolves around the question of tongues. When Paula discovers that Ellean's suitor is her own former lover, Hugh Ardale, she faces the dilemma of whether to tell Aubrey. Hugh simply proposes that they “hold [their] tongues” (195). Yet this holding is precisely what Paula cannot do, cannot comprehend. She confesses to Aubrey and earns Ellean's hatred. Paula's past, written upon her face, involuntarily reveals itself to Ellean, who it turns out “suspected [her] character from the beginning” (207). Aubrey makes one last attempt to deny the existence of Paula's past, proposing to convince Ellean that Paula's relationship to Ardale is a lie and to start a new life on the continent. Aubrey wistfully dreams, “We'll make our calculations solely for the future, talk about the future, think about the future” (209). Paula argues that this fantasy is impracticable: “I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate” (209). Defined only as a sexual being, as a woman with a past rather than a New Woman, Paula sees no future for herself. This exchange echoes the unspoken conversation between Archer and Pinero: the former clamors insistently for a drama of the future while the latter recognizes that a radical break with the past is impossible, in part because the proponents of the future refuse to enact the erasure of the past that they supposedly advocate.

Paula's suicide signals the collapse of the New Woman and the New Drama. Fisher suggests that we can read this ending as a kind of triumph, for “in an odd way her despairing suicide deprives the conventional world of a victory because she does not change” (212). Nina Auerbach makes a similar bid for the triumphant value of a fallen woman's death, arguing that it becomes “the only honorable symbol of her fall's transforming power” (35). But an escape into death is hardly an escape. The final image on the stage is that of a woman representative of traditional morality (Ellean) telling the audience how to read Paula's demise – as suicide – and acknowledging complicity in the death. Paula's letters, tongue, and face manage to disclose her past despite attempts to regulate their legibility. The only successful way to silence her voice is via the self-imposed censoring of death. Pinero implies that English drama likewise must turn against itself because of the pressure of the past and social expectations. Neither the New Woman nor the New Drama can thrive if the formal and informal censoring mechanisms of late Victorian culture prohibit the radical interrogation and reformulation of conventions. They will only remain oxymorons. Pinero offers his audiences a New Drama that ultimately reverts to the old, but in that startling reversion he manages to provoke an intellectual engagement with the systems that regulate gender and genre.

This intellectualism both pleases and unsettles William Archer. In his review of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Archer celebrates the play as a robust piece of masculine writing:

Mrs. Tanqueray provides evidence that Pinero is quite potent. Archer thinks Pinero would agree, “if art is not virile it is childish” (128). He goes on to explain some of his many reasons for considering Mrs. Tanqueray “an immeasurable advance” upon Pinero's previous works: the strong characterization, “the seriousness of the subject,” the witty and consistent technical construction (138). Archer evidently sees the faithful observation of modern life for which he so desperately called in “Are We Advancing?”: “There is no illogical compromise in Mrs. Tanqueray, nothing impossible, nothing flagrantly improbable . . . . the whole course of the drama is smooth, natural, life-like . . . . In brief, the play is modern and masterly” (130). Mrs. Tanqueray fits Archer's criteria of provoking thought, though its intellectualism is painful: “Frankly, it is not a play I hanker after seeing again. I want to read it, to study it . . .” (131). This sounds like a description of the much desired literary drama, but Archer remains strangely unsatisfied. In his criticism he replicates the logic that Pinero exposed as fatal to femininity and therefore to the drama: he wants to define Paula by her past and ignore the contingencies that make a happy ending impossible.

Archer finds two major faults with Mrs. Tanqueray, the same faults he later finds with Mrs. Ebbsmith. First, he wants to know more about Paula's personal history and motivations, “of her parentage, her girlhood, her education, of the instincts and influences that have made her what she is” (133). Such a wish ties Paula to her past and replicates the stagnating logic of the play where femininity cannot exist apart from its past; it does not allow her to be “new” or “modern.” This criticism reflects Archer's obsession with historicity, an obsession which manifests itself in his many essays and books that seek to locate the drama temporally in order to illustrate its progression: English Dramatists of To-day (1882), “Are We Advancing?” (1886), “The Censorship of the Stage” (1886), The Old Drama and the New (1929). Archer resembles Pinero's male leads, who think that by defining and controlling female history they can determine the course of the future. Pinero thinks this project impossible and demonstrates its futility.

Archer's second criticism of Mrs. Tanqueray reveals much more directly his misunderstanding of the English playwright's compromised position. Ironically, he mentions the censorship just before addressing the conclusion of the play, yet makes no connection between the presence of a silencing authority and the silenced woman represented on stage. He cannot see her death as a necessary protest of the playwright's limitations:

Even some modern critics puzzle over the play's resolution. Mark Sterner calls it a “gratuitous suicide” (204) while John Russell Taylor labels it “too convenient” (60). But the fallen woman's survival in a “happily ever after” marriage would pose a moral problem for late Victorian audiences, to the point that they (and the censor) would reject the work. Moreover, within the framework of the play Paula cannot survive. The forces of society, embodied in Aubrey and Hugh, conspire to silence her and define her as a purely sensual being who exists only to gratify the desires of men. They do not allow her to be modern – that is, free and self-defined. Male rhetoric about the future proves empty; she cannot evade her history, and the attempts to regulate her verbal expression destroy her. Elliott Simon usefully observes that the “indeterminate endings” of Pinero's plays are precisely what make them morally and politically effective: “It is the indeterminate ending with its ambivalent statement and ironic action, rather than a particular social issue, that presents the problem for his audience. And it is the audience's intellectual engagement in the resolution of this problem that ultimately creates the ‘high seriousness’ of the dramatic experience in his problem-plays” (“Reappraisal” 45). He argues that Paula's suicide is the necessary outcome of the struggle between free will and fate, that “her death and her tragedy are caused by the destruction of her emerging identity as the second Mrs. Tanqueray by her history as Mrs. Jarman” (54). Readers and critics who only want to see the play as a dated commentary upon Victorian marriage politics tend to find Pinero's ending dissatisfying. Like Archer, they overlook the important link between the denial of the New Woman and the suppression of the New Drama.

Pinero's next play draws a more explicit connection between the woman with a past and the author who encounters critics and audiences hostile to his goals of self-definition. If Paula Tanqueray shares the unwanted illegitimacy and lack of direction of the New Drama, Agnes Ebbsmith displays the eager proselytizing and thwarted desires of the New Dramatist. In The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, Pinero's eponymous protagonist endures a literal devoicing that haunts the audience as a sacrifice to conventional morality, here identified explicitly with Christian patriarchy through the Bible that she embraces. Though the heroine survives, seemingly offering a more hopeful ending than Mrs. Tanqueray, this survival has a very disturbing effect. Witnessing the tortured change in character is almost worse than witnessing murder. The conclusion leaves the audience wondering how the mutilated woman will endure the long life of suffering ahead of her, partially feeling she would be better off dead, and partially deriving a perverse pleasure from seeing her punished. As in the previous drama, social forces conspire to censor Agnes and redefine her relationship to her own history.

Throughout the play we learn bits and pieces about Agnes's very vocal history before she met Lucas in Italy. Her father was a revolutionary “demagogue” who lectured and wrote “upon trade and labour questions, division of wealth, and the rest of it. He believed in nothing that people who go to church are credited with believing in” (72). To escape her childhood home and the oppressive atmosphere of her parents' unhappy marriage, Agnes turned towards the church and a marriage of her own. This marriage was far from pleasant: “It lasted eight years [before he died]. For about twelve months he treated me like a woman in a harem, for the rest of the time like a beast of burden” (73). Inspired by this knowledge of marital unhappiness, and with her father's elocutionary blood in her veins, Agnes took to lecturing, “lashing abuses with [her] tongue” against the “pit” of marriage (73). In a twist of conventional morality, the danger women must avoid “falling” into is wedlock, not sexual seduction. Pinero intends Agnes to represent the New Woman who chooses free union over marriage, promotes female independence, and pursues an active political life. Her plain dress symbolizes the rejection of conventional female sexuality and social roles. In these early days, acting as “a sort of aggressive Mary Woolstonecraft [sic]”,Footnote ²⁰ Agnes has the power to challenge social norms through her unruly speech, threatening to destabilize accepted notions about femininity and sexuality with the same tongue that Paula Tanqueray loosed upon the world. But as with Paula, and with the dramas that present too great an upheaval of conventional morality, this indulgence in excessive verbal criticism results in illness and failure. Social institutions prove too strong an enemy and reduce Agnes to starvation: “I found my bones almost through my skin and my voice too weak to travel across a room” (73).Footnote ²¹ During this period of her life she earned the nickname “Mad Agnes,” signaling that her mental health as well as physical health was in jeopardy (91). These consequences await anyone who tries to challenge established codes of behavior, including the dramatist who attempts to stage a genuinely radical play.

Pinero systematically distances Agnes's relationship to words and texts until she appears entirely mute at the final lowering of the curtain. From militantly preaching her own words, she becomes a mere copyist of Lucas's manuscripts. The slightest hint at exercising her own judgment draws a cynical rebuke from Lucas. She must reproduce the male's standard text without alteration. Agnes's ideal of an intellectual companionship, where man and woman work together to effect political and social reforms, proves unrealizable. Not only does Lucas usurp the pen, he also wants to abandon their social reforms altogether. When she asks, “Do you mean that all idea of our writing together, working together, defining our position, and the positions of such as ourselves, before the world, is to be abandoned?” (104), he responds:

Even her agency as copyist is eradicated. Like Aubrey, Lucas wants to annihilate the past and form a future based upon his desires and ideals. But Agnes cannot divorce her past self so easily. Having lived as a New Woman, she finds the return to conventional femininity undesirable and impossible – she is now a fallen woman, not a respectable wife or widow.

Agnes's perception of womanhood's relation to time resembles Paula's: the former self never disappears, the past and the future become one. Pinero makes this construction apparent by giving Agnes lines such as “My marriage – the early days of my marriage – all over again!” or “My old life – my old life coming all over again!” (105, 106). The atmosphere is one of frightening stagnation and uncanny repetitions. Pinero raises the question of whether a return to the past is inherent in femininity, or the operation of larger cultural structures produces that effect. In both Paula's and Agnes's cases, it seems to be the men in their lives who constrain their roles. The representative of mainstream society, Lucas, defines Agnes as a sexual creature, a “woman,” and wants to limit her autonomy. The famous dress scene in Act 2 evinces his need to adorn her in finery and sexualize her, instead of allowing her the plain dress and companionship that she seeks. His attitude mirrors the demands of the theatre going public, who enjoyed flashy spectacle and tawdry humor more than the stark observation of life or intellectual theatre advocated by Archer and others. Yet his attitude also replicates the rhetoric of the theatre critics, who consign drama to illegitimacy by their complaints and unwillingness to perceive it as New Drama. In the same way, Aubrey resigns Paula to the identity of whorish woman by refusing to see her as a respectable lady, by silencing her voice instead of reincorporating her into society and granting her a new form of femininity. His vision of the future, while ignoring Paula's past, does not construct her an alternative identity besides his wife and sexual partner.

In the movement away from her vocal self-definition, Agnes becomes associated with the Bible. Some viewers (including Archer, as we shall see below) considered this the most distasteful element of the plot, because they accepted it at face value instead of considering that Pinero did not endorse his heroine's return to patriarchal normalcy. Rather, he shows that return as the only possible outcome under the given circumstances. At first Agnes rejects the book given to her by Reverend Amos. Written by patriarchal others, the Bible causes her wickedness and suffering. She tells Gertrude and Amos that the book once “drove [her] distracted” when it failed to solace the curses and beatings endured at the hands of father and husband (121). Moments later, she throws the Bible into the fire. Pinero was certainly pushing his bounds in this controversial scene. One way he redeems it from potential offense is not to indicate clearly what the “small leather-bound book” is. The other tactic is, of course, to have Agnes retrieve the book from the flames and therefore reinscribe its authority. The destruction of the Bible might have been a moment of glory in which Agnes destroys the text imposed upon her in favor of her own ardent articulations. But she cannot break free from its influence, and the following act finds her reading the Bible calmly after leaving Lucas. Mrs. Sybil Cleeve, Lucas's estranged wife, comes to persuade Agnes to return to England with Lucas as a kept mistress, as these are the only conditions under which he will reconcile peaceably with her. Agnes first agrees, for Sybil's sake, but suddenly Sybil retracts her request in order to spare Agnes from further infamy. She does not want Agnes willingly to engage in such a relationship, where she would not only be a fallen woman, but a sinner fully conscious of her transgression.

Here Lucas rushes in upon the scene, and Agnes makes one last vehement speech berating him and seemingly attacking the concept of the New Woman:

In this declaration Agnes disowns all her New Woman attributes: her status as a leader, worker, and activist, as an autonomous thinking and sexual subject. Once she accepts the laws and sacraments, she subscribes to the old ideals that she sought to challenge in her days as “Mad Agnes.” The conventional moral system fully contains her, and she ceases to be modern. But this does not mean that Pinero endorses this system or its assault on New Womanhood. What if the figure were not “made of wax,” but of something sturdier? A woman who could resist the power of men, the Bible, and laws? Unfortunately, Agnes does not have that ability to reject patriarchal definitions of her femininity. In her last words she promises to pray for Lucas, who incredulously stares at her, invoking a sense of how radical a change has come about and of how contradictory it is that this whorish woman intends to embrace established religion. As Lucas's uncle, the Duke of St. Olpherts, seeks to depart, he shakes hands with everyone, but Agnes is of course incapable of shaking. The stage directions require her to “lift her maimed hand” and “nod wearily” (134). Not only can she not shake hands, she cannot speak to explain why. The path of Agnes's deauthorization – from public speaker and writer, via copyist and reader, to mute – parallels her path of feminine disempowerment: from New Woman to fallen woman, from political activist and partner in free union, to kept mistress, then penitent whore, “brought back by love and forgiveness to her better self,” as Archer says.

If we take the position of the woman in Mrs. Tanqueray and Mrs. Ebbsmith to be reflective of the feminized and censored position of the dramatist in Victorian England, Agnes's supplicating gesture, raising the bandaged hand as if to beg God for help, becomes Pinero's cry as well. The dramas depict a hopeless position for the author – who can write when the hand that holds the pen is injured? – and for the woman who seeks to fashion an intellectual and political identity outside the sexualized realm of wedlock. The social climate and prevailing mores in late-Victorian England produce these inevitable consequences: the transgressive woman must be killed or maimed, just as the fledgling New Drama finds itself dead and restricted. Archer, who supposedly has his finger on the literary-theatrical pulse of the day, misses precisely this point. Though he praised these two dramas on the whole as the best works to appear on the English stage in many years, his criticisms reveal that the moral import troubled him and the connections drawn between authorship, gender, and social censorship eluded him, or else he ignored them out of extreme reluctance to categorize the drama as feminine.

Archer reacts to The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith similarly as he reacted to Mrs. Tanqueray, finding it an improvement upon Mrs. Tanqueray but worrying again over the cohesiveness of the heroine's history and the concluding chain of events. Acknowledging that the play must have barely eluded the censor's veto, Archer writes in his review: “The time is pretty nearly ripe for the revolt that must come sooner or later – the storming of the secret, silent Bastille” of the censorship.Footnote ²² Archer still places this event off in the future and fails to recognize the way in which the drama at hand foregrounds the feminized position of a deauthorized, detextualized subject. Archer calls Lucas “admirable” (one can only hope in reference to the drawing of his character, not the man himself), while “Agnes Ebbsmith, however vividly and ably projected, can scarcely pass muster as a well-observed type” (78–79). Though Agnes is in many ways a more believable character than the frivolous and tantrum-prone Paula, Archer finds her form of femininity much less palatable. Her enigmatic history troubles him, for it “does not hang together” in a satisfying whole the way a woman's history should (81). And her request for a sexless partnership with Lucas is wholly dismissed as “a merely intellectual vagary” (84). Archer assumes the authority to speak on the subject of female sexuality:

This remark reveals Archer's own reluctance to recognize any sort of femininity that does not embrace sexual reproduction as an integral part of its identity. Reflecting the widespread “panic provoked by the New Woman” observed by Sally Ledger, Archer betrays that he shares in the “very real fear that she may not be at all interested in men, and could manage quite well without them.”Footnote ²³ Though for many women the New Woman was not incompatible with the identities of wife and mother, for others she promised an escape from lives of involuntary intercourse and childbearing, from being defined solely in terms of one's sexual function.Footnote ²⁴ The New Woman wanted to redefine the “destiny of her sex” to make room for education, professional labor, political advocacy, and possibly even same-sex love. This figure was under constant debate and revision during this decade, so Archer's resolute observation of its fixity is an illusion.

Archer finds the most fault with “the Bible incident and the piestic end” (85), or with what Taylor refers to as one of Pinero's “last-act aberrations” (77). As with Mrs. Tanqueray, Archer wants to keep Mrs. Ebbsmith intact and alter the final moments: “It should be quite possible to tell Agnes's story, up to the moment when she thrusts her hand into the fire, without altering a single incident or emotion, yet in such a way as to obviate all the above objections, which are founded upon phrases rather than facts” (85). This is remarkably wishful thinking on Archer's part, for Pinero does write the Bible incident, and an entire following act. These events must be integrated into any reading of the play that authentically aims to comprehend the playwright's thematic and moral intentions. As shown above, these elements that Archer dismisses figure prominently in the staging of Agnes as deauthorized subject. Perhaps Archer wants to read the drama as an outright flouting of conventional morality: let Agnes burn the Bible and not retrieve it. But this type of flouting is not Pinero's interest. Instead, he wants to show the subtle and debilitating effects of that morality – a more powerful incentive to rethink social mores than a simplistic rejection of them would inspire.

Ibsen provides an interesting counterpoint to Pinero, for his work has been received as more fully modern. His plays appear on syllabi for modern drama courses (even if they are treated as “hurdles to be got over” before the interesting stuff),Footnote ²⁵ are frequently performed, and attract the attention of scholars more often than many other playwrights from his era. A Doll's House (1879) arguably presents a more forward-looking analysis of society, since Nora follows an opposite trajectory from Pinero's women. She begins by upholding the ideals of marriage and femininity and later breaks out of her confined and dependent subject position. Unlike Paula or Agnes, she succeeds in redefining herself and gaining freedom: at the end of the play she is able to shut the door and not look back. Nora stands as an anomaly in Ibsen's career, for his other female characters do not embody such self-assurance. In Ghosts (1882) and Hedda Gabler (1890), his female protagonists do not escape the immense pressures limiting their authority. Mrs. Alving is last seen in speechless horror after finding that all her endeavors to protect her son have been in vain, while Hedda commits suicide rather than face a lifetime of motherhood and marriage. Although Ibsen does not engage directly with the New Woman or fallen woman, his vision of female identity, except for Nora, strongly resembles that presented in Mrs. Tanqueray and Mrs. Ebbsmith.

We can see a parallel between Ibsen as a dramatist and his women as subjects, just as we do between Pinero and his heroines. Two factors enabled Ibsen to assert autonomy for himself as a playwright and for Nora as a modern women. First, as a Norwegian, Ibsen was already outside English literary and social conventions, writing for a smaller audience and able to exercise more artistic flexibility. He was not tied to the censorship and practical considerations of the London theatre, but to the less commercialized theatres of Norway and Denmark. Second, as Toril Moi has recently argued, he was aware of idealist aesthetics, had written a perfectly idealist work in Terje Vigen (1862), and was self-consciously prepared to break from that tradition: “The experience of finally mastering the dominant aesthetic form appears to have been liberating to Ibsen. Above all, it appears to have given him the self-confidence he needed to find his own, original voice as a writer” (149). Instead of writing a play confirming traditional morality, he could challenge accepted notions of right and wrong and present other possible social arrangements. A Doll's House may reflect a fleeting moment where Ibsen did indeed feel free to write what he pleased, but the later plays reflect his growing awareness of the need to respect literary traditions (as he achieved recognition from all of Europe) and the developing cultural emphasis on constrained and fractured identity. Nora is the only woman in all these plays who succeeds in being modern according to late nineteenth-century standards, and A Doll's House may initially have earned Ibsen his reputation as a modern dramatist; the other plays are what sustain that reputation and modernize him to later readerships and audiences.

Through their dramatic investigations of femininity, writers like Pinero and Ibsen are able to explore their own position as authors circumscribed by discourses of criticism, censorship, and morality. Both the New Drama and the New Woman define themselves through and against the figure of the fallen woman, whom dramatists continue to revisit in the next few decades.Footnote ²⁶ The woman with a past becomes central to formulations of modernity because she bridges the divide between two forms of modernism and two understandings of human identity. Fueled by structuralism and postwar pessimism, the shift in what it means to be modern – from free to circumscribed, from whole to fractured – occurs just at the historical moment when women increasingly claim agency and selfhood in social and political life.