Name: Evita

NIM: 183211034
Class: 5F Literature

Reaction Paper Expressionism

Expressionism is an artistic style in which artists attempt to describe subjective emotions and
responses that arise from objects and events in a person. The artist achieves this goal through
distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the application of formal elements
that are clear, jarring, crude, or dynamic. In a broader sense, Expressionism was one of the main
currents of art in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and a highly subjective, personal, and
spontaneous quality of self-expression is a hallmark of many modern artists and art movements.
Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent trend in Germanic and Nordic art from at least
the European Middle Ages, especially during times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this
sense it forms the opposite of Italian and later classical and rationalist tendencies. from France. in
particular, this expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a number of German
artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian artists, who became active in the years before
World War I and remained so throughout the interwar period.
Expressionism in literature emerged as a reaction to materialism, complacent bourgeois
prosperity, rapid mechanization and urbanization, and the domination of the family in European
society before World War I. It was the dominant literary movement in Germany during and
immediately after World War I.
In forging the drama of social protest, the Expressionist writer aims to convey his ideas through a
new style. Their attention is more to general truths than to specific situations; hence, they explore
in their plays the difficulty of representative symbolic types rather than fully developed
individual characters. Emphasis is placed not on the external world, which is depicted only
within and is hardly determined in place or time, but on the internal, on the mental state of the
individual; hence, the imitation of life is replaced in the Expressionist drama by the awakening of
a joyful state of mind. The main characters in Expressionist plays often pour out their woes in
long monologues written in concentrated, elliptical, almost telegramatic language that explore
the spiritual malaise of youth, its rebellion against older generations, and the various political or
revolutionary solutions that emerge. The main character's inner development is explored through
a series of loosely related taboos, or "stations," in which he rebels against traditional values and
seeks a higher vision of spiritual life.
 Treadwell’s Machinal
Sophie Treadwell was born in 1885, she grew up as an only child in Stockton, California. When
he was very young, his father left his family and moved to San Francisco, where a future
playwright visited him during the summer, an experience that first exposed him to theater. When
he attended the University of California at Berkley in 1902, he began writing and acting in plays
while also serving as a college correspondent for The San Francisco Examiner. This position is
just one of several jobs he held to support himself while in school. During this busy time
Treadwell was also dealing with mental illness - a battle against anxiety that would follow him
throughout his life, sometimes resulting in lengthy hospital stays. After graduating from college
in 1906 and marrying a sports writer who worked for the San Francisco Newsletter, Treadwell
and her new husband moved to New York, where the young writer became involved in the
struggle for women's suffrage. Because of her firm belief in women's freedom and freedom, she
and her husband lived separately in the city as she quickly formed relationships with important
modernist artists. This period featured some of his most important theatrical reporting and
writing, and Treadwell rose to prominence not only for his impressive undercover and immersive
journalism, but also for his defense of author's rights. By the time he died in 1970, he had written
four novels and nearly 40 plays, some of which he produced and directed himself and which
appeared on Broadway.
The plot of Machinal draws inspiration from the infamous 1925 case of Ruth Snyder, who killed
her husband after starting an affair with another man. Unlike Helen and Mr. Roe, who don’t
work together to kill George, Snyder and her lover, Henry Judd Gray, collaborated in their plans
to kill Albert Snyder. After persuading Albert to buy life insurance, Ruth and Henry strangled
him and tried to make his death look like it was the result of a botched break-in. Like Helen,
Ruth’s story in court didn’t hold up under intense scrutiny, and she finally broke when the
prosecutors produced a piece of paper they found in the Snyder home. This paper bore the
initials of Mr. Snyder’s former wife, Jessie Guishard. In a state of panic, Ruth thought these were
Henry’s initials, an association that made her prosecutors suspicious, since Henry’s name hadn’t
yet come up in the trial. Both lovers were eventually found guilty, and they tried to put the blame
on one another. In 1928—the year Machinal was produced—Ruth went to the electric chair. The
entire ordeal was sensationalized throughout the media; a reporter even snuck a camera into the
execution room, and the following day the New York Daily News ran a picture of Ruth in the
electric chair.