Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists

Overview

James Huneker surveys the major 19th-century dramatists who shattered theatrical conventions and reshaped modern drama. His essays move briskly from Ibsen's moral realism through Strindberg's savage experiments to Hauptmann's poetic naturalism, offering close readings of pivotal plays while arguing that these writers deserve recognition for their psychological insight and dramatic courage. The tone is ardent and conversational, mixing admiration with sharp, sometimes acerbic, critical judgment.

Major Subjects

Huneker treats Henrik Ibsen as the decisive modern dramatist whose plays exposed bourgeois hypocrisy and mapped inner moral conflict with unprecedented clarity. August Strindberg appears as the volatile iconoclast who attacked social illusions and probed pathological passions, often at the cost of personal rancor and theatrical excess. Gerhart Hauptmann is praised for rendering social environments and working-class experience with dignity and lyric detail. Alongside these central figures he gestures to other Continental innovators who together mark the transition from melodrama and romantic escapism to serious, socially engaged theater.

Themes and Argument

The core claim is that modern drama must break idols and face uncomfortable truths about character, society, and fate. Huneker insists that these dramatists are united less by a shared technique than by a shared refusal to flatter conventional morality. He emphasizes realism and psychological depth, arguing that drama should depict the clash between individual temperament and social forces, often without tidy moral resolutions. This insistence on complexity, ambiguity, and moral frankness is presented as both the modern theater's strength and the source of its scandalous reputation.

Close Readings and Exemplars

Short, vivid analyses concentrate on emblematic plays. Ibsen's "A Doll's House" is read as a devastating examination of marital illusion and selfhood, while "Ghosts" and "Hedda Gabler" receive attention for their moral complications and tragic irony. Strindberg's "Miss Julie" and "The Father" exemplify the author's fascination with dominance, heredity, and sexual warfare, with Huneker noting Strindberg's tendency to fuse personal obsession with dramatic invention. Hauptmann's "The Weavers" serves as a model of socially conscious drama that nevertheless preserves a lyrical sensibility and human sympathy.

Style and Critical Voice

Huneker's prose is muscular, witty, and often impatient with affectation. He writes as a passionate advocate rather than a dispassionate scholar, deploying epigram and anecdote to enliven argument. His judgments can be vehement: he celebrates daring and originality, scorns sentimentality and affectation, and admires plays that strike the reader as vital and truthful. This temperament makes the essays lively and persuasive but also occasionally uneven in rigor and balance.

Significance and Reception

By championing European dramatists for American readers, Huneker helped popularize modern theater and shaped early 20th-century taste. His essays offered an energetic bridge between continental innovations and Anglo-American audiences hungry for new dramatic models. While later criticism would refine and revise some of his claims, the book remains a spirited testament to a pivotal moment when drama turned inward, social, and dramatically unforgiving, and when critics like Huneker celebrated that revolution with relish and impatience.