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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
Clyde Fitch was the most famous playwright of the early twentieth century, but today no one studies him. The disconnect between his fame in his lifetime and his obscurity after death points to a major historiographical problem, a problem that began in Fitch's own day. Fitch's numerous contemporary critics, many of whom were early proponents of theatrical realism, criticized his plays as effeminate, bound by the narrow conventions of the legitimate theater that relied on women as its predominant patrons. By contrast, realism, as the critics under-stood it, was masculine, bringing the gritty reality of what contemporary commentators regarded as the real world to the stage. Criticizing Fitch's feminine dramatic sensibilities became a way of prodding him toward a strained realism in his own plays. Fitch's story illustrates the close connection of realism to the gendered hierarchy that became an unconscious element in the determination of literary value. In dismissing Fitch as worthy of scholarly attention, current theatrical historians have followed Fitch's contemporary critics. Even as they have eviscerated the gendered standards of the early twentieth century, present-day scholars have retained the critical judgments and the generic categories that the gendered standards produced.
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46 William Dean Howells to Fitch, Jan. 26, 1904, in ibid., 258 (both quotations, italics original).
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