Critical Concepts

Dramatic Situation | Conflict

Examples:

Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles opens with 5 people entering the kitchen of an Iowa farmhouse on a winter morning.  Three are men:  the county prosecutor, the county sheriff, and the owner of a neighboring farm who the day before happened to visit the house and discovered his neighbor, John Wright, strangled in bed, and Wright’s wife Minnie in a strange mind-wandering condition, barely able to attend to his questions, and with no apparent idea of what has happened. The other two are women:  the wife of the sheriff and the wife of the neighbor. They have come along to gather some clothes for Minnie Wright, who is now in custody in the county jail on suspicion of murder.  The two lawmen have come to try to discover what might have been a motive for Mrs. Wright to have killed her husband.  Without a convincing motive, the prosecutor will be unable to prove an essential statutory element of the crime of murder (in either the first or second degree).  These facts — which the playwright brings out by having the prosecutor ask the neighbor to review the events of the day before — are thus main elements of exposition in the overall plot of the piece:  they constitute the initial situation from which the drama to come unfolds.  As such, they establish the initial dramatic question which directs the audience’s attention to the events that immediately follow:  will such a motive be found?  

They do not, however, constitute what in general usage is termed the dramatic situation of the play.  This doesn't become clear to us, in this particular piece, until somewhat later on.  In fact, one function of the dramatic question -- which has to get laid on the table almost immediately -- is to hold our attention until we can get oriented with the deeper concerns of the piece, among which can be the thematic issues at stake in the various conflicts the piece is designed to involve us in.  (For more on the distinction between dramatic question and dramatic question, see here.)  Some stories plunge us directly into the initial dramatic situation  itself.  But others, like this play, introduce us to the dramatic situation (or, if we prefer, to a set of interrelated dramatic situations)  only after some further events have transpired.

This means we want to keep distinct in our mind the concepts of dramatic situation and exposition.  The situation presented in the exposition may or may not corresponded to what we are here calling a dramatic situation -- or even to the particular dramatic situation with which we are first made familiar.  And exposition (as the term is used in discussion of works of literature) is not synonymous with dramatic question

Check the other article

Still less is it equivalent in meaning to the phrase "situation in a drama," and this for two reasons.  For one thing 

XXX

Note that in this play there are several conflicts of will (and/or will and impulse, will and institution) that are important in the larger situation the play brings to our attention.  

1. There is the general conflict we come to know about between Minnie and John (his suppression of her need for companionship, through his own incommunicability, his frustration of any impulse on her part to visit the neighbors or even to participate in church affairs, his refusal to bring a telephone into the house), culminating in the specific conflict on the crucial evening:  the husband's flying into a rage at the singing of the canary that has always irritated him, his wringing its neck in front of his wife, her struggle (ultimately unsuccessful)  to get control of her feelings (by turning to her sewing), and finally her somnambulistic strangling of her husband asleep in is bed.
2. There is the conflict that develops in the course of the play itself (i.e., presented before our eyes, in the present) between the two wives on the one hand and the men folk on the other.  The men repeatedly behave towards the women in a condescending way, belittling their concerns -- and women's work in general -- as "trifles" (in comparison with the important things of life, with which it is the business of men to be concerned).  The women register this attitude from the outset, and increasingly show signs of their resentment of it.  (Their resentment is of course one of the chief factors in motivating their decision, in the play's climax, to keep what they have learned from the men, not only to protect Minnie from what they consider a distorted system of justice but as a revenge against a general male address towards females to which they themselves, along with Minnie, have been subjected).
3. There is the conflict that emerges from time to time between the two women themselves before they come to their tacit agreement to withhold knowledge of what they have found from the men.
4. There is the conflict within each of the women, and particularly within Mrs. Peters, who is "married to the law" (the county sheriff), as to whether she will conspire with the other to "obstruct justice" (a felony in its own right) in order to prevent a grave injustice as she privately sees it.  We can think of such a conflict as a conflict of wills within the protagonist(s):  the will to do the right thing as one has been taught, and the will to do the right thing as one has come to see it.

Not all of the conflicts we have summarized above constitute the play's dramatic situation, as that term is used in precise parlance.

The term dramatic situation  is not generally used to refer to just any situation characterized  by conflict that a narrative or dramatic work seeks to interest us in.  It is employed rather to point some conflict that the action of the play or story seeks to engage us in the presentation of.  A dramatic situation (in this special technical sense of the term) will be part of the action that the story or play foregrounds as "present."  In Trifles, the conflict between Minnie and John Wright is over and done with before the play even begins, and whose history is uncovered in the course of the unfolding action that the play does present for our immediate inspection.

The question arises:  does the dramatic situation have to be disclosed at the outset of the story or play?  Is a dramatic situation (as the term is in fact used) the situation of conflict with which a story or play begins?  One might have elected to use the term this way.  If we were to do so, however, the phrases "initial dramatic situation" and "opening dramatic situation" would contain a redundancy, and to speak of "the dramatic situation after such-and-such turn of events in the story" would be to utter a contradiction.  But imposing these restrictions on ourselves would serve no useful purpose.  On the contrary,  we would like to be able to distinguish between situations of conflict earlier in some continuous history (factual or fictional) and situations of conflict into which they later evolve. If we restrict ourselves from using the term dramatic situation to refer to these, we would have to invent some other term for doing this (and then have to put up with the fact that, by itself, the phrase "dramatic situation" would misleadingly appear to be doing just that!)   Since the term "dramatic situation" offers itself to this purpose quite conveniently, the criterion of being disclosed at the outset has not ended up as internal to the concept it has come to denote.

Having noted all this, we would want to stress that a practiced reader will be alert from the outset to any clues that might help clarify what counts as a situation the story or play is presenting for our engagement in.  That reader will also be interested in any situations of conflict prior to the primary action to which the story directs our attention in the course of developing whatever dramatic situations it presents.  The fact that we have no special term for referring to these does not mean they aren't worth actively taking into account!

Similarly, before closing the subject, it is worth reminding ourselves that a conflict doesn't have to be resolved for the state of affairs  it defines to count as an instance of dramatic situation.  In Trifles, the conflict between the women and the men is not disqualified from being spoken of as one of the play's dramatic situations just because it is not resolved at the end of the play.  The questions to ask when we tune into a dramatic situation is rather: 

1. Is it resolved, and if so, exactly how?
2. What possible thematic purposes might be served by presenting for our inspection a dramatic situation that changes, or doesn't change, in precisely this way?

     Return to List of Key Critical Concepts.

     Return to home page for:  English 251 / English 233 / English 320.

  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2000 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

      This page last updated 29 August 2000 .