Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Harold Clurman

Critical Essay by Harold Clurman

Were I to recite in full detail all the elements which compose the play White Marriage I would still not convey its extraordinary quality….

It is at once satire, fantasy, poem….

What is pictured is bourgeois society (with peasantlike underpinnings), especially in regard to sexual relationships. The young are kept uninformed of such matters; most of the married women have been subjected to unions with men who treat them as properties. The men chase their female servants—cooks, maids and other such—like brutes. They reduce these women to wildfowl and they display little warmth to or understanding of their daughters. Thus, on the one hand we observe the silly decorum of pseudo-cultivated society (piano playing, amateur theatricals, poetry recitals); on the other, the manners and morals of the barnyard.

One might suppose, then, that all this would be transformed into a sort of women's lib parable, an earnestly fanciful denunciation of...
(read more)