Alice Gerstenberg's <i>Overtones: </i>The Demon in the Doll

Abstract

Alice Gerstenberg's experimental one-act drama, Overtones (1915), is a good example of a play that portrays women in conventional roles at the same time as it implicitly reveals the destructive limitations of such roles. As such, it is like other women's dramas of the early decades of the twentieth century that accurately depict typical dilemmas facing women characters in traditional society (e.g., lack of autonomy, sex discrimination, and infantilization), but that stop short of proposing solutions. Like other women's plays of the first half of the twentieth century — for example, Zoe Akins's Declassee (1919), Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), and Clare Boothe's The Women (1936) — Overtones is an easy play to misread. Consequently, some of Gerstenberg's contemporaries saw the play as a realistic portrayal of women's "natural" cattiness toward each other, while later critics, taking the play out of the context of its time, have mistaken Gerstenberg's depiction of the status quo for her sanction of it, resulting in the wrongful devaluation of her drama. Overtones may show women acting in predictable patriarchal stereotypes, but because it exposes the roots of such behaviour in women's inferior social status and in their distance from centers of power, it serves as an important indictment of society.