• Canada
• Research dataclose
• Research softwareclose
• Other research productsclose
• Scholarship@Western close

You can’t get much more middle class than Sara Jeanette Duncan’s turn-of-the-century novel The Imperialist. Its middle-classness calls out from virtually every page and through almost every narrative technique the novelist employs from her choice of theme—the debate over imperial federation, conducted some hundred years ago primarily in elite political circles—to her setting—the social world of the commercial classes who live in a prosperous southern Ontario town (which she names Elgin but which most critics suspect is Duncans own hometown of Brantford in very thin disguise)—and finally to her protagonists, the Murchisons, whose middle-class values are proudly paraded at every opportunity and who are ultimately enshrined as a superior people, "too good for their environment" (34). Although The /mperialist criticizes certain kinds of middle-class behaviour, the Milbum variety, for example, it cautiously but warmly commemorates ano ther. Even Duncan's penetrating and clever irony does not Sat in the way of her fondness, or ours, for the Murchison family and their fundamentally intelligent, honourable ways.

The October 2008 issue of Theatre Journal was bookended by articles from Jill Dolan and Dorothy Chansky that separately reevaluated two stalwarts of the second-wave feminist movement: Wendy Wasserstein (Dolan) and Betty Friedan (Chansky). Together, they marked one unofficial beginning of what has since become a vibrant contemporary movement (including my work with Roberta Barker in Canada, as well as work by Elaine Aston in the United Kingdom, and Varun Begley and Cary Mazer in the United States) to rethink, reframe, and reclaim stage realism in all of its fraught complexity. While it is impossible to recuperate stage realism naively, thanks to the robust critique leveled against it by feminist and critical race scholars over the past four decades, it is—as the above writers contend—nevertheless necessary to parse that critique with care, to distinguish among the multiple practices and strategies (dramaturgical, technical, and performative) that constitute the thing(s) we mean when we talk about “realism,” and to take the measure of the different kinds of cultural work that multiple “realisms” can do—sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem, and sometimes at tantalizing cross-purposes with one another.