A NEW EXAMINATION of MILLAY's DRAMATIC WORKS by KATHRYN
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“THESE WERE THE THINGS THAT BOUNDED ME”: A NEW EXAMINATION OF MILLAY’S DRAMATIC WORKS by KATHRYN ELIZABETH ANDERSON Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2008 1 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of ___________Kathryn Elizabeth Anderson_____________ candidate for the ___Master of Arts_____________ degree *. (signed) ___John Orlock_____________________________ (chair of the committee) ___Megan Swihart Jewell__________________________ ___Judith Oster________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) ___March 18, 2008____________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 2 I extend my gratitude to the people and places who supported me in the completion of this project: * * * John Orlock, Case Western Reserve University Megan Swihart Jewell, Case Western Reserve University Judith Oster, Case Western Reserve University Peter Bergman, The Millay Society Dean Rogers, Vassar College Special Collections David and Elizabeth Anderson Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University The Newberry Library, Chicago Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois Bookman’s Alley, Evanston, Illinois The Armadillo’s Pillow, Chicago 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 4 Millay Timeline 5 Part I: The Hidden Canon 6 Part II: Ostentatious and Pedantic Drivel 20 Part III: From Persiflage to Purpose 56 Part IV: Toward a New Comprehension 81 Works Cited 98 4 “These Were the Things That Bounded Me”: A New Examination of Millay’s Dramatic Works Abstract By KATHRYN ELIZABETH ANDERSON The distaste of their author and her little-known career as a playwright has inspired minimal scholarship and virtually no production of Edna St. Vincent Millay's dramatic works. Millay's dramas generally failed to extend beyond first printing, and their author is almost never listed among the names of American dramatists. This thesis examines the scholarly and public obscurity of Millay's playwriting career and explains the textual obstacles that condemned Millay to inferiority as a dramatist—namely language, form, and agenda. In her dramas, the intensity and economy of Millay's celebrated poetry gave way to irregular expansion and formal uncertainty; however, Millay's poems and plays are built of many of the same materials and, when successful, exhibit some of the same virtues. Millay's poems have inspired a legacy of scholarship and celebration—what might her dramas, as relative "failures," contribute to Millay studies and to American theatre history? 5 Life Poetry Drama Meanwhile… Whitman dies; Archibald Born (February 22) in MacLeish and Arthur Miller 1892 Rockland, Maine also born 1900 Parents divorce Graduates from high 1909 school Stein’s Three Lives “Renascence” appears in 1912 The Lyric Year Poetry Magazine founded 1913 Enters Vassar Graduates from Vassar, moves to Greenwich Renascence and Other Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. 1917 Village Poems Alfred Prufrock” 1919 Aria da Capo premieres Two Slatterns and a O’Neill wins Pulitzer for 1920 A Few Figs From Thistles King Beyond the Horizon 1921 Leaves for Europe Second April The Lamp and the Bell Joyce’s Ulysses In Paris writing for Vanity Fair, chronic 1922 illness begins Aria da Capo Brecht’s Drums in the Night Returns from Europe, The Harp-Weaver and William Carlos Williams’ 1923 receives Pulitzer, marries Other Poems Spring and All 1924 Distressing Dialogues Forster’s A Passage to India Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 Moves to Steepletop Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Protests Sacco-Vanzetti 1927 trial The King's Henchman Kern’s Show Boat 1928 The Buck in the Snow Brecht’s Threepenny Opera 1931 Mother, Cora, dies Fatal Interview Begins regular radio broadcasts reading her The Princess Marries 1932 poetry the Page Huxley’s Brave New World Hitler becomes Fuhrer, 1934 Wine From These Grapes Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess Estranged father, Henry, Eliot’s Murder in the 1935 dies Cathedral Permanently weakened by car accident; Manuscript of morphine addiction Conversation at 1936 begins Flowers of Evil Midnight destroyed Gone With the Wind and The Conversation at Wizard of Oz on film, 1937 Midnight Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men 1939 Huntsman, What Quarry? Second World War begins Make Bright the Arrows, “There Are No Islands 1940 Any More” 1941 Collected Sonnets Citizen Kane 1942 Murder of Lidice Camus’ The Stranger 1943 Collected Lyrics Physical and mental “Poem and Prayer for an 1944 health in decline Invading Army” 1949 Eugen dies Miller’s Death of a Salesman 1950 Dies (October 19) 1954 Mine the Harvest 6 Part I. The Hidden Canon “Nobody in the world but Edna Millay could have written these words of early love which burns with so clear a flame and yet is puzzled and appalled by its own brightness...” —Elinor Wylie reviewing The King’s Henchman “I understand that this play is a great success on the stage, but I find that hard to believe. If I were a producer, I wouldn’t touch it…” —Eugen Boissevain, Millay’s husband, on Aria da Capo “She has written more uneven books, but, in all the fourteen volumes, she has never been so insistently discursive and so consistently dull...” —Louis Untermeyer on Conversation at Midnight “I don’t know. It is not really a play…” —Edna St. Vincent Millay on Conversation at Midnight What I initially assumed to be a careless shelving mistake was the impetus of this study. Three years ago, in the drama section of a bookstore in Chicago, I ran across the name “Millay” on the spine of one of the books—The Lamp and the Bell. While I was familiar with all of Millay’s volumes of poetry, this edition was foreign to me. Upon inspection, I realized that there was no shelving mistake and I was indeed holding a play. Never had I heard of Millay as anything other than a poet, and I immediately set about collecting information about her from a different perspective. My home library offered no clues about Millay’s second career; none of the prefatory material in any of my poetry books even mentioned Millay as a playwright. After a slow beginning, I successfully amassed a collection of Millay’s plays only by visiting rare bookstores and hunting for them across the internet. As each of them arrived in the mail, I observed a trend: they all appeared more or less to be verse plays. I was confused by the style and language of the plays because I understood Millay to have been a vanguard of modernity—one of the bohemian, sharp-witted voices of female poetry in a group of forward-looking writers in the 1920s and 1930s; yet here she had written verse plays set in the Renaissance. Not 7 knowing how to rationalize this apparent stylistic departure, I hoped to corroborate my own observations with critical responses to the works, yet they were as difficult to locate as the works themselves. Since that time, I have gathered a comprehensive collection of the extant scholarly research about the plays, positive and negative critical responses contemporaneous with their creation, and first editions of each of the plays. The discovery of a second Millay canon has perpetually intrigued me; moreover, it has revolutionized my impression and understanding of the author. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892—1950) is consistently championed as a major American poet. In her life, she published twenty-two books including her widely respected volumes of poetry, a translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, collected prose works, five verse plays (we will get to the difficulty in classifying them as such), and a poem-play for radio. Millay was famously promiscuous, yet despite her bisexuality and open marriage, her acclaimed poetic work remained the foundation of her celebrity. Living during a tumultuous period of American history, Millay’s voice was the vehicle for politically and philosophically serious matter; however, her most memorable poems communicate the rapturous emotions of love, catastrophe, and the glory of the world. In 1923, Millay was the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and, in 1943, the second woman to win the Frost medal.1 Naturally, her less adroit works have fallen to the wayside in respect to criticism and reader accessibility— and, along with some less successful later war poems, her obsolete dramatic works comprise the bulk of these. Her series of dramatic works follows a path from the very light to the very grave, marking a steady change in theme. Her earliest dramatic works, Two Slatterns and a King and The 1 The Frost Medal celebrated her lifetime contributions to poetry, putting her in the company of fellow winners Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters, and later Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, and Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Ginsberg. 8 Princess Marries the Page, both written at Vassar in the 1910’s, depict lighthearted subjects falling in and out of love. The trajectory ends with her dramatic work Conversation at Midnight (1937). As we will see, that work is the absolute opposite of her first two attempts at drama. Not only had Millay matured by that time, but the world at large had entered into circumstances begging the artistic voice for more sincere expression. No longer staged in castle towers, Millay’s serious works Aria da Capo (1922) and Conversation at Midnight place their characters, respectively, in a metatheatrical dimension of greed and ignorance and a liquor-filled parlor where politicized voices strain to be heard. Thus, both in her poetic career and in drama, Millay gradually assumed a more globally-relevant, less personally romantic voice. After battling with these obscure texts and the equally obscure secondary materials regarding them, I am convinced that Millay scholarship is not sufficiently represented by poetic analysis alone.