Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama

Acts of Seeing

Amy Holzapfel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136768439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the crux of the encounter between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of "acts of seeing" on the realist stage, Holzapfel demonstrates how theatre participated in modernity's aggressive interrogation of vision's residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers—such as Diderot, Goethe, Müller, Helmholtz, and Galton—exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. Realist artists across media paradoxically embraced this paradigm shift by focusing on the embodied observer. Drawing from extensive archival research, Holzapfel conducts close readings of iconic dramas and their productions—including Scribe's The Glass of Water, Zola's Thérèse Raquin, Ibsen's A Doll House, Strindberg's The Father, and Hauptmann's Before Sunrise —alongside analyses of artwork by major painters and photographers—such as Chardin, Nadar, Millais, Rejlander, and Liebermann. In a radical challenge to existing criticism, Holzapfel argues that realism in theatre was never the attempt to reproduce an exact copy of the seen world but rather the struggle to make visible the act of seeing.

1 Scribe's Actions of Seeing

The eye must be taught to look at nature.

—Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin¹

Little things … are responsible for great effects.

—Eugène Scribe, The Glass of Water²

This chapter begins with a return to an iconic example of eighteenth-century French painting: Chardin's Blowing Soap Bubbles (1733–34; Figure 1.1). The portrait shows an adolescent boy in the act of blowing a soap bubble. The youth is neither a child, as the presence of a younger boy on the right side of the image makes clear, nor an adult. The ancient Greeks would have called him an ephebe, with the flushed rosiness of his cheeks and lips suggesting an adult self on the cusp of emergence. The youth's right hand rests on a window ledge with his left gracefully propped upon it as he blows his breath into a thin pipe held between his thumb and index finger. The background of the portrait is dark, making its young subject stand out in relief. The internal framing device of the window and ledge gestures toward the proscenium-bound stage of early eighteenth-century French playhouses. Chardin's use of light is suggestively theatrical, too, shining up from beneath the youth as if from footlights to produce a shadow of the bubble on his face. Like the bubble, which is both full and empty, the youth exists in an absolute present that makes no concessions to its past or future. His optical focus is directed entirely toward the translucent, transitory object as it comes delicately into being.

A little over a century later, Eugène Scribe, who invented the pièce bien faite, or well-made play, took a similar approach in French popular theatre. As the title of his comedy The Glass of Water (Le Verre d'eau, 1840) suggests, many of Scribe's well-made dramas displayed a penchant for everyday objects and materials.³ Like Voltaire, Scribe subscribed to the notion that the most trivial thing can unleash the greatest force of violence and destruction. Set in England during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), The Glass of Water is a nostalgic drama, revolving around the trials and schemes that result from a chaotic merging of two worlds: royal and bourgeois. On its surface, the play plants the seeds of democratic revolution by suggesting that the Queen's haphazard encounters with a common shopworker, Abigail, and a glass of water will either incite a war or lay the groundwork for international peace. The power of the common object—whether living (Abigail) or lifeless (the glass)—must have been a tantalizing notion to middle-class theatre audiences in the early 1840s, the years leading up to the failed revolutions of 1848. Yet any potential for radical political agency is stifled by the script's overall tidiness of form. In the play's final lines, Europe remains at peace because royalty has been restored “thanks to a glass of water” (103).

Figure 1.1 Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Blowing Soap Bubbles, 1734. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Photo by Erich Lessing

What do Chardin's soap bubbles have to do with Scribe's water glass? Both the painting and the drama depict domestic worlds governed by things, which, as Robin Bernstein might describe it, “script” specific bodily and gestural behaviors.⁴ Chardin preferred to paint still objects rather than live subjects, and many of his works self-consciously echo seventeenth-century Dutch painting's virtuosic representations of kitchen-sink realities preoccupied with a shared vocabulary of symbolic objects—such as cheeses, vases, pitchers, heads of game, knives, and dead birds. One rumor recounts how Chardin had to be ridiculed into painting a human figure by his friend Jacques Aved.⁵ An early attempt at doing just that, Blowing Soap Bubbles merges Chardin's devotion to representing everyday objects with the challenge of portraying a living human body on the canvas. Scribe also may have been better acquainted with material possessions than human beings, a problem considering his chosen medium. Many of his dramas could not be staged in the absence of a specific handheld property—particularly a letter. Both Chardin and Scribe place objects center stage, but more importantly, they spotlight the gesture of looking at an object. The action of spectatorship becomes a principal subject of both Chardin's canvases and Scribe's dramas, drawing our focus to the ways we navigate the world through our sense of vision.

Scribe's plays, like Chardin's paintings, stage the action of seeing as a function of the sensual body. In this regard, Scribe's realism is indebted to one of Chardin's greatest admirers: the philosopher Denis Diderot. With their adherence to Diderot's theories of illusionism in the arts, the well-made dramas of Scribe, and those of his disciples Victorien Sardou and Alexandre Dumas fils, are staged genre paintings. Plays by these authors generally uphold a scenic conventionalism that denies the embodied presence of their audiences. Yet the plays of these “direct sons of Diderot,” as Zola called them, are built on the gestural actions of an observer as he or she encounters, through the body's senses, a world inundated by not only visual but also tactile, material objects.⁶ Though their corporeal presences were strategically ignored, audiences of mid-nineteenth-century French theatre were exposed to a realist aesthetic vernacular rooted in a new understanding of vision, one that linked the body's experience of sight to that of touch. What's more, the theatre, as a three-dimensional medium, illustrated the link between the senses of vision and touch in ways that painting, as a two-dimensional form, simply could not. In the drama of Scribe, Sardou, and Dumas, realism emerges not only through the privileging of visual over literary discourse but also through the fluid integration of two senses: vision and touch.⁷

DIDEROT'S THREAD

In his 1880 essay “Naturalism and the Stage,” Zola characterizes Scribe as a dramatist whose work exemplifies a “theatre of action.”⁸ Zola goes to great lengths to label Scribe's model of the well-made play a failure of naturalism, due to its exaggeration of “this new principle of action, making it the principal thing … at the expense of the delineation of character and the analysis of emotion.”⁹ Lambasting Scribe's reliance on “imagination” as another egregious tendency, Zola argues that Scribe's overemphasis on action creates a dramatic world inhabited by “marionettes, led by a thread.”¹⁰ While his discussion focuses on Scribe's dramatic structure, Zola may also have been presenting a subtle critique of Diderot's dramatic theory. To understand Scribe's dramaturgical machines, Zola knew, one was forced to confront the naturalist prescriptions of the eighteenth century.

Almost all of Diderot's arguments lead back to a single basic idea: actions undertaken by the sensory body. A decade before he advanced a study of the methods used by painters, dramatists, and eventually actors to achieve a greater illusion of truth in art, Diderot investigated the nature of the human body and its epistemological function. Chardin's emphasis on the youthful body of his bubble blower may have proven an early inspiration for Diderot in this regard. The innocent, youthful gesture depicted on Chardin's canvas evokes the process of an embodied observer mediating the world through both his eyes and hands. The way Chardin's boy gazes at the sphere of the bubble offers its own theory of the senses, one in which how we see is predicated on how we touch. As Jonathan Crary writes of Chardin's Blowing Soap Bubbles: “The flickering heaviness of the atmosphere in Chardin's mature work is a medium in which vision performs like the sense of touch, passing through a space of which no fraction is empty.”¹¹ Crary views Chardin's style as moving away from the disembodied perspectivalism of Newton to a “Cartesian science of a corpuscular, matter-filled reality, in which there is no void, no action at a distance.”¹² Chardin's up-close perspective emphasizes the corporeality and attendant sensory perception, or, as the French would call it, the sensibilité, of its subject's very matter.¹³

Diderot subscribed to many of Descartes's theories. He was particularly sympathetic to Descartes's focus on the body as a living storage container for knowledge, which the earlier philosopher viewed as imprinted innately upon the mind's eye. In response to Descartes's famous use of the camera obscura as an analogy for the eye, Diderot, in his essay Letter on the Blind (1749), proposed a similar metaphor:

The miniatures painted on the retina are so beautiful and exact that no painter, however skillful, could hope to reproduce them. There is nothing more precise than the resemblance between this representation and the object represented, and the size of the canvas on which they are painted is after all not so small as to cause confusion between the shapes on it, being a full half-inch square.¹⁴

Diderot shared Descartes's concern about the size of representations. He, like Chardin, understood vision as implicitly linked to touch—that is, to truly see something one had to be able to reach out and touch it.¹⁵ In this regard, Diderot was highly influenced by Locke's interpretation of the senses and human perception. According to Locke, all bodily sensations lead to impressions in the mind, where they become Ideas. Locke's theory of epistemology diverges from the Cartesian view because he stressed the non-innate and experientially derived (rather than divinely established) qualities of Ideas. From Locke's perspective, the senses perform a central role in the formation of identity and knowledge.¹⁶ In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke raised what became known as Molyneux's Question: could a blind man who can easily discern the difference between a cube and sphere by touch, upon suddenly gaining his sight, tell them apart by vision alone? Locke argued the man could not, implying that the interrelation among senses largely determines meaning, but his assumption was based solely on theoretical conjecture. In 1728, almost forty years after Locke published his answer to Molyneux's Question, the philosopher and anatomist William Cheselden performed surgery on a young subject to determine whether the senses could be discriminated. As Nicholas Wade summarizes: “[Cheselden] found that distances, sizes, and shapes of objects could not be differentiated.”¹⁷

Around a decade later, in the late 1730s, Voltaire took the matter under consideration, reintroducing Molyneux's Question to eighteenth-century philosophers, including Diderot. Confronting the issue directly in the Letter on the Blind (1749), Diderot suggested a slight modification to the experiment: replacement of the sphere and cube with a circle and square, so as to remove the factor of depth. Defending his choice of two-dimensional objects, Diderot wrote: “It is only by experiment that we come to judge of distances, and, of course, he who uses his eyes for the first time sees only surfaces, without knowledge of any thing or projecture; the projecture of a body to the sight, consisting in some of its points, appearing to us more than the other.”¹⁸ For Diderot, an understanding of depth is achieved only through actions performed by a perceiving body in space and time. Diderot states in his Letter that we “owe the notion of permanent objects”¹⁹ to repetitive bodily encounters in the same way a child comes to understand the permanence of his mother through repetition of the game of hide-and-seek. He emphasizes this point by considering what a straight line means to a man who has been born congenitally blind, concluding: “For a blind man, a straight line is nothing but the memory of a succession of sensations encountered along a taut string.”²⁰ In other words, the geometry of a line stems from the body's sensual perception of the string through the action of touch, not from a divinely ordained, innate conception of its linearity. Diderot's metaphor for the “taut string” may have found an echo a century later in Zola's description of Scribe's well-made theatre as a dramatic art form populated by “marionettes, led by a thread.”

In The Interpretation of Nature (1751), Diderot summarizes his earlier findings by claiming that all knowledge is formed on the basis of a repeated prodigal pattern of experiential inquiry conducted by the body, in sync with the mind: “Everything is reduced to a return from the senses to reflection, and from reflection to the senses: to turn into oneself and to turn outwards once again, ceaselessly.”²¹ Diderot compares human beings to bees, who only make meaning out of their journeys into the world by returning to the hive and turning the pollen they've gathered into honey. While he w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Acts of Seeing
• 1 Scribe’s Actions of Seeing
• 2 Zola’s Tunnel Vision
• 3 Ibsen’s Ocular Realism
• 4 Strindberg’s Composites
• 5 Hauptmann’s Lived Perspective
• Conclusion: Seeing Realism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index