English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 (2013) - Media Matters in J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose

Details

• article: Media Matters in J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose
• author(s): Christopher Wixson
• journal: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 (2013)
• issue: volume 56, issue 2, pages 205-230
• journal ISSN: 0013-8339
• publisher: ELT Press
• keywords: "The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock" - by Donald Spoto, Aesthetics, Alfred Hitchcock, Criticism and interpretation, Donald Spoto, Dramatists, Fay Compton, Gainsborough Pictures, Ghosts, J.M. Barrie, MacGuffin, Mary Rose, Mothers and sons, New York City, New York, Noel Coward, Portrayals, Slavoj Žižek, Theater, Theater criticism, Veterans, W. Somerset Maugham

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Links

• Google Scholar
• muse.jhu.edu

Abstract

Written between Aug 1919 and Apr 1920, J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose depicts the supernatural abduction of a young mother. Mystified by the play, critics during the period found it hard to interpret the writer's last great success in the theater. While his extensive descriptive additions to the printed text help illuminate Barrie's aesthetic intentions, at the same time they create a practical problem for the performers and designers to realize, to translate and to achieve the playwright's intended effect on the audience. Maintaining that its vexed reception is the inescapable result of Barrie's stage experiment in negative capability, Wixson investigates the play's nexus of various aesthetic and technological media to argue that, beyond simply a critique of the limits of theatrical realism, it models a more ambitious dramaturgy that both expands the audience's perceptual opportunities and complicates their process of intuiting definitive meaning.