Changing the subject: encountering objects and objectness in modernist plays, 1890s–1950s

This thesis engages in a study of objects in western modernist drama from 1890s to 1950s, looking at their different modes of representation and encounter in text and theatre. I suggest that the relatively understudied field of objects offers a heretofore overlooked lens and subject for theatre, literary, and modernist studies wherein objects become active interpreters offering alternative perspectives that complicate or contradict established readings of early to mid-twentieth century plays. A study of dramatic objects poses a challenge to the largely anthropocentric readings that privilege exclusionary definitions of a subject at the cost of the material vocabulary of a play and its role in meaning-making across text, staging, and reception. Overlooked as invisible backdrops, inert symbols, or arbitrary props, objects offer uncharted modes of reading and attention that are erased within subject-centric approaches to theatre analyses. Exploring both objects and objectness, I attempt to bridge the gap between modernist attentiveness to and critical disregard of theatrical object-encounters.

The thesis reveals both the critical and methodological fertility of objects to contradict established readings and approaches to specific plays and to invite interventions from different fields, synthesising object and nonhuman studies with identity and cultural theories. Each chapter develops three critical frameworks by identifying prominent material presences and orientations in modernist theatre: misbehaving objects, fidgeting with objects, and revolting objects. I use these to analyse works of both canonical and understudied modernist playwrights — Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and Boris Vian — uncovering overlooked subtexts, approaches, and layers left unaddressed by established criticism and commentaries on a play. Finally, the thesis establishes the critical and theoretical potential of objects as both subjects and lenses of analysis, redressing the anthropocentricism entrenched in theatre, literary, and modernist studies, and pointing to the wider applicability of such redressals in adjacent fields and contexts.