The Mirror of Nature (The Alexander Lectures, 1982)

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Summary: Psychology revealed in melodrama
Review: This book comprises the three Alexander lectures that Robertson Davies gave at the University of Toronto in 1982. He explores the evolution of nineteenth-century English-speaking society's view of itself, as reflected in the popular theatre of the time. While these lectures are not a scholarly history of melodrama, synopses and descriptions of some of the most popular nineteenth-century plays in English provide much of his material. So if your literature and theatre courses were like the ones I took, where English drama disappeared between the Restoration comedies and George Bernard Shaw, this book will begin to fill in the blank.

Davies is the first to admit that these plays are not great literature. He draws upon his practical experience in the theatre, his sense of the Romantic movement, and his appreciation for the psychological insights of Freud and Jung, to show how these plays gave nineteenth-century audiences a mirror that was "true to life as they [knew] it". The first lecture gives a general overview of melodrama as "oblivion's balm". In the second lecture, Davies uses archetypal concepts to interpret the limitations imposed upon female characters in melodrama. The final lecture deals with characters who have guilty secrets, a characteristic that Davies believes many of the audience members must have shared. Since part of Davies' theme is the evolution of the Nature that the theatre was reflecting, the close of this lecture discusses the genius of Ibsen in dealing with characters' secrets in a much more complex and illuminating way than in the melodrama that preceded it.

I found the book quite interesting, because I admire Davies' ability to draw upon eclectic sources to illuminate human Nature, both in his novels and in his nonfiction. While I do not expect to energetically pursue the study of Victorian melodrama after this, I now have a much greater sense of why it mattered. For those readers who would like to learn more about the subject, the book includes some illustrations and a bibliographical note pointing to scholarship on the nineteenth-century theatre, as well as some collections of memoirs and anecdotes "of varying dependability."