At a first reading, James A. Herne’s once exceedingly controversial play, Margaret Fleming (1890), comes across as a skillfully crafted exercise in 19th century dramatic conventions and artifices. For example, the play unfolds a melodramatic story of a wronged young waif (Lena Schmidt) who must bear her illegitimate child in shame. Her robust older sister (Maria Bindley), conveniently situated in the home of her younger sister’s seducer (Philip Fleming), plays the role of his wife’s maid, and at one point in the play she threatens to avenge her sister’s dire circumstance aiming at Mrs. Fleming with a pointed gun. On top of everything, the angelic wife (the titular Margaret Fleming) is struck blind as she learns of her husband’s infidelity. However, these apparent surface clichés are put to a new use. A more careful reading of this social drama enacted in a closely knit family environment attests to a conscious choice on the part of the playwright to render a carefully planned study of American domestic life at the turn of the last century.
In her critical study of Herne’s overall playwriting choices, Patricia D. Denison closely examines the author’s ‘game plan’ for/in Margaret Fleming. (Denison, Patricia D., “The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms”, found in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William Demastes, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996, pp.18-36)
Ms. Denison remarks that both Herne and his contemporary, the Norwegian playwright Ibsen, grew out of the theatrical tradition of the second half of the 19th century which, in turn, demanded the production of melodramas and well-made plays. At the same time, Ms. Denison is quick to point out that it was precisely this early theatrical experience which strengthened the two playwrights’ determination to pursue innovation in then contemporary theatrical practice. That is to say, “for both playwrights, subsequent innovation became less a matter of repudiating the old than reconfiguring it in order to create anew.” The new in Margaret Fleming is Herne’s attempt to build a storyline around social constructs, such as class and gender, refiguring their place and their mutual relationship as found in an American patriarchal hegemony.
By having the action of his controversial social drama set in a small New England town, Herne draws our attention as critical readers to his method, or better, his conscious choice for the selection and application of ‘representative truths’. Ms. Denison, in her essay on Herne’s work as a fledgling realist on the American stage, poignantly questions the author’s principle of selection. She refuses to take the ‘representative’ in Margaret Fleming as a “truth” set in stone; quite the contrary, for Ms. Denison “the representative [in the play] can prove to be not so much a descriptive inevitability as a prescriptive necessity for those seeking to shape a society in flux.” This way, the author has made enough provisions for the audience’s contestation of socially rigid barriers of class, gender, even to an extent race, in a particular historical time and place.
Contemporary readers may disagree with Ms. Denison’s appraisal of Herne’s work as a innovative dramatist; some may find the play’s final chapter, the closing of Act IV, with Margaret’s ‘blind forgiveness’ and Philip’s seeming honesty and mended ways, to be too acquiescent of the same social values and relationships the play set out to challenge in the first place. A present-day reader may not welcome the didacticism behind Dr. Larkin’s speeches, nor for that matter the overwhelming presence of Margaret’s reborn self in the final scene. In all likelihood, they might find it a tad too soap-operish for their taste. On the other hand, such readings of the play, to the contemporary minds’ abjection, are too universally representational in the contemporary mind’s abjection of a historically different social reality. Ms. Denison’s critical study offers us, weary and almost too cynical readers, a way of acknowledging, if not fully accepting, Margaret’s character for what she truly is. According to Ms. Denison, “what Margaret finally offers Philip, and the audience, is not a large, simplifying and summarizing image of the “true” wife and mother to cover all cases for all times, but a local, historically situated, complicated instance of one person’s adjustment to changing social circumstances.” In this respect, James A. Herne has left behind him an imprint of a new American drama, one which may be roughly modeled upon the conventions of the European drama at the time, and yet at the same time, unquestioningly American in its portrayal of a distinctive social, cultural and economic milieu.
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