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2014 Dora Cubed: A Multimodal Analysis of Canonical Representations of Dora Bauer from the Perspectives of Metaethics, Multiplicitous Identity, and Cubism Evangeline Ciupek
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COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE AND DANCE
DORA CUBED:
A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF
CANONICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DORA BAUER
FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF METAETHICS,
MULTIPLICITOUS IDENTITY, AND CUBISM
By
EVANGELINE CIUPEK
A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2014 Evangeline Ciupek defended this thesis on April 15, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Kris Salata Professor Directing Thesis
Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member
Dan Sack Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
Dedicated to Donald “Papa Don” Trant and Charles “Bird” Poole.
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to take the time to acknowledge certain individuals whose encouragement and support have given me strength in the process: Brady Peterson, Rachel
Yubeta, Jonathan Ciupek-Reed, Kira, Paul, Clyde, and Joy Ciupek, Charles Poole Sr.,
Aaron Thomas, Jeff Paden, Marie Patrick, and Jacky Dumas. Thanks to the cast and crew of The Dora Project for helping manifest my research on stage. And a special thanks to Kris
Salata, chair, mentor, and friend.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... viii
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Introductions: Ida, Meet Dora, Meet Dora ...... 1
Ida/Dora’s Identity Crisis ...... 2
Objectives ...... 4
A Multimodal Approach: Metaethics, Multiplicitous Identity, Cubism ...... 5
Structure of Multimodal Questions and Analysis ...... 8
1. FREUD’S DORA: THE STORY OF THREE MONTHS WITH AN HYSTERIC...... 10
Strategies ...... 10
Documentation, Treatment, and Freud’s Ethics ...... 13
Structural Ethics: Transcribing Convoluted Speech ...... 17
Freud’s Cubist Portrait of Dora ...... 19
The Interpretation of Dora’s Dreams ...... 22
Freud’s Multiplicitous Nature ...... 24
2. CIXOUS’ DORA: COSMIC FEMALE, RESISTING BODY ...... 28
Introduction ...... 28
The Ethics of Écriture Féminine ...... 31
Dora, Meet Cixous ...... 37
Dora’s Discrepancies and Multiplicities in Portrait of Dora ...... 40
Multiplicity in Dreams ...... 43
A Cubist Portrait of Dora ...... 45
Resistance and Écriture Féminine ...... 48
v 3. PHILOSOPHICAL AND PRACTICAL QUESTIONS OF THEATRICAL
REPRESENTATION, JUSTICE, DIMENSIONALITY, FEMINISM, AND
AESTHETICS ...... 50
Introduction ...... 50
Writing Dora, Writing Self: Creating History Through Speech Acts ...... 50
Ethics in the Gender Binary ...... 53
The Postmodern Kickback – A Multiplicitous, Cubist Resistance ...... 55
The Male Gaze As Culprit ...... 57
In the Pursuit of Phronesis: A Casebook on The Dora Project ...... 60
Phase One: The Impulse Read ...... 61
Phase Two: Work-shopping The Dora Project ...... 66
CONCLUSION: A MANIFESTO FOR CUBIST ETHICS AS A FORM OF
THERAPEUTIC THEATRE ...... 80
APPENDICES ...... 85
A. THE DORA PROJECT ...... 85
Cast of Characters ...... 86
Prologue ...... 87
Parodos ...... 88
First Episode ...... 89
Second Episode ...... 93
Third Episode...... 103
Fourth Episode ...... 108
Fifth Episode ...... 113
B. THE DORA PROJECT LYRIC AND CHORD SHEETS ...... 116
“That feeling you get in the fog of electroconvulsive therapy” ...... 116
vi “Charcot the Charlatan” ...... 119
“Hagiomania; or, Bellum in Sanctum Sanctorum” ...... 121
“Most Men Lead Lives” ...... 123
“I Live, Motherfucker” ...... 125
C. COPYRIGHT APPROVAL FORM ...... 128
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 129
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 133
vii ABSTRACT
Dora is a multiplicitous being who transcends time, space, and reality like a cubist painting. A pseudo-fictional, literary character based on a once living woman, Ida Bauer,
Dora is an amalgamation of Ida and of Freud, who published the sole account of Ida’s case of hysteria.
I will research the two most striking iterations of Dora Bauer –the casebook Dora:
An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and the stage play Portrait of Dora by
Hélène Cixous. My multimodal form of analysis encompasses three distinct modes. Through the first mode, metaethics, I aim to assess Freud and Cixous’ arguments and ethics of representation, not to judge, but to reveal the validity of their potential motivations when viewed through each one’s individual matrix of ethics. Through the second, Naomi
Scheman’s multiplicitous identity theory, I will investigate the signs of multiplicity in
Dora’s portrayal by both Freud and Cixous. Through the final mode of analysis, cubism as an art form in concert with Non-Euclidean geometry, I will reveal both Freud and Cixous’ fourth dimensional quality of writing and of representation.
Metaethics, multiplicitous identity, and cubism can be modes of resistance, of therapy for the theatre. In concert with this thesis, I have created a rehearsal process in which the actors and I investigated these modes within the theatre. With Dora as our subject, we have created an experimental reading of Cixous’ Portrait of Dora, and we have written and composed an original play with music The Dora Project. I will explain in the final chapter how we set about manifesting this scholarship on stage and what we encountered along the way.
viii INTRODUCTION
Because it has always already begun, representation therefore has no end. But one can conceive of the closure of that which is without end. Closure is the circular limit within which the repetition of difference infinitely repeats itself. That is to say, closure is its playing space. Jacques Derrida1
In a whole series of cases the hysterical neurosis is nothing but an extensive overaccentuation of the typical wave of repression through which the masculine type of sexuality is removed and the woman emerges. Sigmund Freud2
History is always in several places at once, There are always several histories underway; This is a high point in the history of women. Hélène Cixous3
Introductions: Ida, Meet Dora, Meet Dora
October 1900, 18-year-old Ida Bauer sits in the office of a psychoanalyst in Vienna and proceeds to share her secrets.4 She confesses to him her conflicting feelings about parents and older married friends. She carries a purse and struggles with the latch. Her throat hurts when she swallows, and she has left a suicide note on her desk where her parents can see.5 She dreams of a jewel-case and smoke, fire and forests, train stations and her father’s death. Her father’s close friend bothers her with sexual advances. Her father takes her to Dr. Sigmund Freud’s office, a place he visited years before for medical help.6
Little does she know that in a few years Freud will give her a pseudonym and reveal her
1 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (The University of Chicago, 1978), 250. 2 Sigmund Freud, “General Remarks,” in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 124. 3 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, “The Untenable,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria— Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 293. 4 Peter Gay, Freud (New York: Norton, 1988), 246. Dora visited Freud in 1898 (in connection with her father’s visits), and she began her own treatment October 1900. 5 Freud, Dora: An Analysis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 16. 6 Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 4. Herr Bauer had been suffering from venereal disease.
1 life to the world in a book that will affect both clinical psychology and women’s studies:
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.7
Dora has garnered many readers and few fans over the years and become a source of contention among scholars across disciplines. This little book carries with it controversial views on womanhood, sexual health, and the unconscious.8 Today a multitude of scholarship concerning the case exists and argues for opinions and hypotheses of Dora’s identity, desires, and fears: Was she heterosexual or homosexual? Was she psychologically deranged? Was she a feminist icon? Was she rebelling against a bad society? Did she suffer from a disease? Part of Dora’s conundrum stems from her diagnosis—hysteria, which the medical community no longer acknowledges as a disease.
Over the centuries, noted hysteria symptoms varied, as did the forms of treatment, but a cure never surfaced. Throughout the early 20th century, hysteria’s symptoms became signs for new diseases, and in 1980 the DSM III officially retired hysteria from their list of maladies.9 All that remain are the separate diseases that collectively took hysteria’s place— epilepsy, dissociative disorders, psychoses, schizophrenia, and iron deficiency anemia, to name a few.10
Ida/Dora’s Identity Crisis
Dora continues to circulate in scholarly and artistic sets, and she often becomes conflated with Ida Bauer. But this oversimplified equation cannot stand, because Ida is not
Dora. Yes, Ida was a hysteric, she did sit in Freud’s office, and she did leave three months
7 Philip Rieff, Dora: An Analysis, 1. First published in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Nuerologie. From this point, I will reference Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria as simply Dora. 8 Subsequent generations have taken this account as a representative source for Freud’s view on hysteria, yet he himself altered subsequent editions of the casebook, in which he openly disagrees with what he originally wrote. Since the casebook was the result of a specific time in Freud’s ever- shifting understanding of the psyche’s roots and effects on the body, his initial analysis of Dora should not be taken as a synecdoche of Freudian psychoanalysis. 9 Cecilia Tasca et al., “Women and Hysteria,” Clinical Practice 8 (2012), 110. 10 Mark S. Micale, “The Decline of Hysteria,” Harvard Mental Health Letter 17. 1 (July 2000), 4.
2 later. But she is not Dora. Freud defamiliarizes Dora from Ida in three ways: a pseudonym, family ties, and topography. Freud distanced Ida from Dora by changing Ida’s name to
Dora, making her family and friends pseudonyms (the “B.’s” and the “K.’s”), and altering the topography of her life, i.e., the names of cities, towns, and vacation homes. Freud gave
Ida the pseudonym Dora to protect her from undue attention, to protect the doctor/patient relationship. He protected Ida and her family from identification by excluding them from the circulation in literature.11 Her avatar, Dora, on the other hand, proliferates scholarly pages and serves as a stand-in – a signifier for Ida.
Who is Dora? She is a textual persona who contains traces of Ida within her, but Ida is always already lost within Dora. Jacques Derrida says that the referent of a text can never be caught within the text:
The unconscious text is already a weave of pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united—a textnowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction. Always already: repositories of a meaning which was never present...12
Ida Bauer becomes displaced so far beneath Dora that she disappears, and any trace of her existence is always already lost to us. The woman chronicled in Freud’s casebook fails to be synonymous with Ida. She must remain Dora, a uniquely textual character. She is the possibility of a cure. As the pseudo-fictional woman, Dora still contains traces of Ida, but the line between the real Ida and the fictional Dora remains blurred. At the same time, this blurring does not discount, as many scholarly essays will attest, the potential for truth in
Dora’s portrayal. She is a case subject who, though fictionalized, still holds an allure of veracity. This allure would result in a new version of Dora whose distance from Ida becomes immeasurable.
11 Ironically, we have now identified Ida Bauer as the historic referent for Dora, but most scholarly efforts concern Freud’s representation of Dora – as if she were interchangeable with Ida. 12 Derrida, 211. Quotes Freud from Complete Psychological Works (Hogarth, 1961).
3 One writer who took interest in Dora’s story, Hélène Cixous, made the casebook the basis for a novel, and in 1973 she published Portrait du Soleil, a fictionalized retelling of
Dora and Freud’s sessions.13 Cixous’ version of Dora enhanced Dora’s feisty, indomitable spirit, as Cixous claims: “[Dora] fascinated me, because here was an eighteen-year-old girl caught in a world where you say to yourself, she is going to break—a captive, but with such strength!”14 Cixous rewrote the story, fictionalizing it, so Dora would become the hero in the end. This novel attracted French feminist director Simone Benmussa who encouraged
Cixous to turn the novel into a play, and in 1976 the theatrical adaptation Portrait of Dora opened in Paris to rave reviews. This play also garnered a fresh wave of critique and criticism of what Cixous had done to Dora.
Objectives
Dora has become a site of multiple identities, traces of the once-living woman Ida, the pseudo-fictional woman in Freud’s casebook, and the fully fictional theatrical woman in
Cixous’ play. Dora’s identity morphs in the hands of different sources. These identity shifts tell us more about the sources describing her than they ever could about Ida. Their forms of representation offer a window to their own ethics of representation.
In this thesis I will employ “cubist ethics” – a theoretical and practical research tool of my own design – in my study of Freud’s literary and Cixous’ theatrical modes of representation, with the hope of understanding Freud and Cixous’ unique ways of engaging with Dora. I will treat Ida, the hopelessly and endlessly deferred signified subject, as a lost subject by refusing to equate her with Dora, who is pure text and concept.
Additionally, I will employ a practice-based research approach to explore the possibilities theatre offers for representations of a character with multiple potential
13 Portrait du Soleil has never been translated into English. 14 Cixous, “The Untenable,” 277.
4 identities, and how this postmodern concept actively resists the totalitarian aesthetic of the historically phallocentric, misogynistic machine of Western society.
Finally, I will offer a potential avenue for this cubist ethic onstage in a reflective case study of my own directorial endeavor: The Dora Project. Thus my project may be seen as a performance-based historiography, creative dramaturgy, and artistic research that identifies potentially multiplicitous representations of a human subject in clinical, critical, and creative discourse.
A Multimodal Approach: Metaethics, Multiplicitous Identity, Cubism
The systems of analysis I will utilize in this thesis each incorporate multiples and an egalitarian-minded approach to the multiples. Thus they all fit under the term: multimodality.15 My research method is multiplicitous, and each facet of it concerns a different approach for assessing multiples—whether they be ethical motivations, identity constructions, or artistic representations of more complex forms of dimensionality.
My approach to Dora’s identity begins with a metaethical analysis of separate theories—specifically Freud and Cixous’—concerning Dora. Philosopher Geoff Sayre-
McCord defines metaethics as “the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.”16 These presuppositions and commitments are others’ theories of Dora. Thus meta as a term situates this process within an analysis of the structuring principles guiding systems of ethics. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, ethics are simply “moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior.”17 Utilizing a
15 “Multimodal [is] characterized by several different modes of occurrence or activity; incorporating or utilizing several different methods or systems.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 16 Geoff Sayre-McCord, “Metaethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2012). 17 The OED defines morality as “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” “Morality,” Oxford English Dictionary.
5 metaethical analysis of the motivating factors behind Freud and Cixous’ writings, I aim to understand them as they are, not to impose judgment as to whether they are right or wrong. In this case, the subject for Freud was Ida (who became Dora in his casebook), and the subject for Cixous was the casebook’s Dora—reformed into a theatrical Dora.
Dora’s referent, Ida Bauer, is irretrievable, so we cannot know which version of Dora is more valid. No one Dora represents her whole self. Her semblance of wholeness derives from multiple incongruent iterations. This brings me to the second mode of analysis: the multiplicitous self, which I define in concert with feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman, who speaks of society as a domineering mechanism that forces individuals to sacrifice portions of their identities that do not meet society’s demands. In her essay “Though This
Be Method, Yet There Is Madness In It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology,” Scheman states that an individual’s identities are complex and multiplicitous. When persons appear to society to be singular, “such unity could only be bought at the price of self-betrayal.”18 In the case of Dora, the betrayal does not come from her but from her analyzers – Freud,
Cixous, and others. While they attempt to condense Dora into a whole person, they potentially dismember anything that does not fit their perception of her identity. If as scholars we allow this to happen, Scheman says we harm the person as a whole: “We will be fundamentally misrepresenting the experiences of even the most privileged among us, whose apparent unity was bought at the price of the projection onto stigmatized Others of the split-off parts of themselves that they were taught to despise.”19 Employing this multiplicitous identity theory, I will explore the incongruences of Dora’s repetitions and traces to show the seams in her fractured self.
18 Naomi Scheman, “Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology.” Mind of One’s Own, ed. Louis M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 165-66. 19 Ibid., 165-66.
6 While cubism may appear as an artistic style and not a critical methodology, as a visual model for complex theories of dimensionality, cubism offers a unique way of articulating representations. Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, in their book Inside
Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative, define cubism as an art form that aims to represent a reality that naturalistic painting cannot convey. What we perceive as real through our eyes is not reality. Thus paintings that aim at “single-point perspective” are
“illusionist.”20 Vargish and Mook state that cubism “participated in the important shift of emphasis away from subject matter (the objects painted) and toward treatment (the act of representation). Cubism valorized not the subject itself but the observation and representation of the subject. This was itself a reflexive act.”21 A cubist approach to Dora would not attempt to capture the original object, Ida, but it would treat the multiple representations and observations of others concerning Dora as different perspectives of the same subject. These different perspectives would become profiles of Dora, and all of the images seen collectively would create a collage. While this makes for a stunning visual picture of identity, it also represents a deeper reality. In The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, art historian who specializes in 20th century art history,
Linda Dalrymple Henderson states that the cubist art movement stemmed from non-
Euclidean geometry: “in which four-dimensional figures developed by analytical geometry are projected on a two-dimensional page.”22 These figures often look like diamonds. Thus, a cubist approach inspired by non-Euclidian geometry would reject the false reality of a linear perspective and instead embrace a four-dimensional image that expresses an unseen truth.
20 Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 25. 21 Ibid., 143. 22 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension (Princeton University Press, 1983), 57.
7 Like a cubist painting, an ethical analysis of the multiplicitous Dora would explore and embrace all perspectives and identities at once. Dora’s profoundly splintered identity dashes any hope of reaching the person of Ida Bauer. The textual Dora is a cubist portrait: an amalgamation of her own traces and, to a larger extent, of all the theories applied to her.
She cannot reconcile as a whole, homogenous person. Since her every facet is as hypothetical as the previous one, no one facet can be less plausible than the other, therefore all aspects of Dora deserve exploration.
Structure of Multimodal Questions and Analysis
Chapter One will examine Freud’s casebook Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria and ask: How did Freud present Dora? How did he interpret what she said? By detecting his mode of presentation and interpretation, we can discover his ethical motivation for analysis, his hypothesis of Dora’s symptoms, and his role as Dora’s psychoanalyst. Freud developed the form of the casebook to intentionally reflect the structure of his sessions with
Dora. He coupled his portrayal of Dora with a retrograde commentary in the form of footnotes and a postscript that reveal his uneasiness about his past approaches to the case.
Within the casebook, Freud exists as a multiplicitous character that transcends time; he is the analyst of 1900 sitting across from Dora, the author of 1901 who gives commentary after the fact, and the authors who revise his commentary in subsequent publications—the latest being 1933.
Chapter Two will analyze the play Portrait of Dora as Hélène Cixous’ response to
Freud’s Dora. While her play was based on Freud’s casebook, Cixous modified her portrayals of Freud and Dora so as to make Dora a symbol of female strength and resistance. Was Cixous’ manipulation of Dora’s identity an act of artistic license that used
Dora’s specific story (via Freud) to comment on a universal problem? Mindful of Cixous’ anti-patriarchal agenda (akin to the feminist movement of her day), I will investigate how
8 Cixous rewrote Dora, and how the rewrite revealed Cixous’ ethical approach to Dora’s unstable identity, desires, and interaction with Freud. I will also investigate the fluidity of
Dora’s voice in the play as a portrayal of a multiplicitous self, and I will examine Cixous’ ethical stance on Freud in both Portrait and her essay The Laugh of the Medusa.
Chapter Three will contain two separate parts that investigate the philosophical and practical applications of cubist ethics. In the first part, I demonstrate how multifaceted and center-less cubist ethics disrupts old forms of art and concepts of reality and resists the totalitarian aesthetic of phallocentric society.
The second part of Chapter Three serves as a case study of my own directorial process over the past year, investigating Dora’s many identities and finding ways of directing, acting, casting, and rehearing in line with my cubist ethics theory. In this case study, I describe the group’s process of working through explorations of theories, histories, and acting styles, and questions of representation, justice, and audience reception. As the
“practice-based research” aspect of this thesis, my cast and I devised an experimental reading of Cixous’ Portrait of Dora for the fall of 2013 and The Dora Project, a play with music, for the spring of 2014. Chapter Three concludes with a manifesto suggesting how cubist ethics can serve as a form of therapeutic theatre in the postmodern age.
This thesis also contains appendices applicable to my performance case study, including a reproduction of the script and lyric and chord sheets for The Dora Project. The appendices document some of our practical investigation and offer to the reader insights to our process of encountering cubist ethics through performance.
9 CHAPTER ONE
FREUD’S DORA: THE STORY OF THREE MONTHS WITH AN HYSTERIC
If it is true that the causes of hysterical disorders are to be found in the intimacies of the patients’ psycho-sexual life, and that hysterical symptoms are the expression of their most secret and repressed wishes, then the complete exposition of a case of hysteria is bound to involve the revelation of those intimacies and the betrayal of those secrets. Sigmund Freud23
Ida Bauer was a hysteric. Diagnosed at the age of eight, Ida spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years visiting various specialists in Vienna who subjected her to the common treatments of the time—including electroshock therapy and hydrotherapy.24 After a steady worsening of her symptoms, Ida’s parents urged her to visit a different sort of physician. At the age of eighteen, Ida began visiting analyst Sigmund Freud. They met six times a week, from early October to December 1900. In December, she told Freud she would leave his care in January – a warning he did not take seriously.25 She kept her promise, and on January 1st, 1901, she walked away from Freud’s therapy. Surprised and confused after her exit, Freud swiftly wrote down a record of their sessions and changed Ida’s name to protect her identity in the case study Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.26
Strategies
Dora has become a site of contestation over the years, spurring multiple theories, essays, and whole books from scholars, psychoanalysts, feminists, and historians. For a
23 Freud, Dora: An Analysis, 2. 24 Decker, 13. Movies (like the fictional romantic comedy Hysteria), plays (like The Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl), and books (like the historically accurate yet decidedly myopic The Technology of the Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines) poke fun at doctors’ naiveté in using sexually stimulating pelvic douches and vibrators. But electrotherapy and hydrotherapy were not always localized on the pelvis. Hydrotherapy was a harsh hosing of the body with cold water. Electrotherapy electrocuted various parts of the body – specifically intestines, brain, and throat – without the aid of anesthesia. These electrocutions often burned or split the skin and sometimes left permanent scars. Treatments for hysteria were often painful and humiliating. 25 Gay, 246, and Dekker, 177. 26 I will refer to Freud’s casebook Dora: An Analysis simply as Dora.
10 twenty-first century scholar, Freud’s brief casebook exists in the center of a root ball of references and arguments that blur the line between Freud’s actual words and theorists’ reinterpretations of him. One becomes baffled at where to begin pruning to find Freud in the mess. My own research began as an examination of the entire root ball, and I found that often the theories of others prejudged Freud as a villain, and as such they choked his statements with their own propaganda. To begin seeing Freud clearly, I had to relearn him, to detach him from the anti-Freudian scholars. I had to forget them, at least for a while, to begin seeing him and Dora. This was the beginning of my journey to metaethically understand the Freud who wrote Dora.27
In this chapter, I will explore Freud within Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria through cubist ethics, a term encompassing my multimodal approach, which includes metaethics, multiplicitous identity theory, and cubism as research tools. Instead of approaching Freud through any preconceived notion of his purpose or of the justification of his values, I will look for the places where he reveals his ethics concerning the case. Was he motivated by a matrix of ethics while treating Ida and then writing about Dora? If so, what were those ethics, and how did they inform his decisions? Did they potentially complicate his loyalties in the case? Was he loyal to anything? I will attempt to answer these questions and discuss Freud’s case to better understand the correlation between his stated ethical understanding and his behavior within the text. In order to move forward, however, I will briefly introduce my methodological tools and scope.
Metaethics – a division of philosophy – aims to discover the motivations of individuals – what makes them believe, act, and interact the way they do. Those hoping to read in these pages a definitive claim for either Freud’s goodness or badness will be sorely
27 I make this qualification because throughout Freud’s life his theories did shift and change, depending on the influence of new cases or discoveries in the field. For the scope of this paper, I will constrain myself to understanding Freud within Dora: An Analysis.
11 disappointed. I desire to present Freud’s ideas and ethical motivation (more often than not written by Freud himself) in as unbiased a way as possible. Metaethics endeavors to achieve this unbiased approach. In his presentation of Dora, Freud discloses his ethics of analysis—the guiding principles that make up his analytic belief and influence his choices as an analyst.28 His understanding of hysteria’s connection with the patient’s mind and sexuality influenced his tactics of inquiry and hypothesis.
Through metaethical examination, I have discovered Freud’s actions toward Dora to be cubist in the sense that he searches for another dimension of her in his casebook. I base my approach to cubism on Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Henderson says: “For the Cubists, then, the most general usage of ‘the fourth dimension’ was to indicate a higher reality, a transcendental truth that was to be discovered individually by each artist.”29 In the casebook, Freud holds that an element, or dimension, of Dora has been hidden, and he is determined to find it.
This element, though unseen, contains a truth about Dora. Hence, Freud’s effort to discover and articulate Dora’s hidden dimension in the text aligns with the cubists’ efforts to portray the fourth dimension in art.
Freud’s search for Dora’s hidden dimension shifts over the years of writing and re- writing Dora, making his own identity within the casebook multiply. I will utilize multiplicitous identity theory, as defined by Naomi Scheman in her essay “Though this be method, yet there be madness in it: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology.” This theory will help keep my metaethical analysis unencumbered by the fallacy that Freud never changed his mind. He did. Throughout the casebook Freud opened himself up to questioning and to the possibility of a future change in understanding. He reveals in the casebook a
28 “Ethics” was defined in the introduction as “moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior.” Oxford Dictionaries. 29 Henderson, 181.
12 multiplicitous self through his engagement with the case at varying points of his life, which correspond with a changing understanding of Dora, hysteria, and their interactions.
Documentation, Treatment, and Freud’s Ethics
Before stepping deeper into the casebook, we need to explore the traditions of documentation and treatment of hysteria, to contextualize Freud’s specific choices in Dora’s case. In Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, literature scholar
Lisa Appignanesi refers to hysteria as “the most fashionable diagnosis of the latter part of the [19th] century”30 In his book Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Georges Didi-Huberman says Jean-Martin Charcot rediscovered the disease in the 1800s: “[Charcot] distinguished it from epilepsy in particular and from all other mental disorders. In short, he isolated hysteria as a pure nosological object.”31 In the Salpêtrière, hundreds of ill women with varying forms of disease and madness were housed in close quarters and deemed by their own physicians to be “incurable.”32 Lisa Appignanesi says Charcot’s teaching hospital became one of the prime locations for the study of hysteria, and Charcot broadened his influence on medicine outside of France through the use of photography: “Through the late nineteenth century’s representational technology of photography, the Salpêtrière amassed a vast archive of the iconography of mental illness. Charcot’s hysterics, like the early silent film stars who may well have imitated their expressions, went through the dramatic paces of their condition for the camera.”33 The photographs of young and old women lying in beds, standing hypnotized by Charcot, or nakedly displaying their physical deformities became part of a popular genre of scientific casebooks written in a style similar to roman á clef – enticing page-turners with
30 Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad & Sad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 126. 31 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 19. 32 Appignanesi, 127. 33 Ibid., 129.
13 no practical strategies for future physicians.34 These sensational descriptions of hysteria disturbed Freud.
In Dora, Freud alters the way physicians record encounters with hysterics. His reasons are ethically motivated by the desire to search for a cure. He believes the path to a cure is paved with publications of carefully detailed case records. These scientific resources should aim to deal first with the most common of hysteric symptoms – mundane but rampant. Freud states at the beginning of Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria that he will consciously depart from the common style of objectifying material and abstain from making the case erotic. Not only does he choose to portray his case in a purely scientific manner, he encourages other physicians who have classically eroticized their cases in the past to change their approaches as well. His introduction becomes a call to arms for physicians to work toward a cure for hysteria:
… it becomes the physician’s duty to publish what he believes he knows of the causes and structure of hysteria, and it becomes a disgraceful piece of cowardice on his part to neglect doing so, as long as he can avoid causing direct personal injury to the single patient concerned.35
Freud decries the fact that hysteria cases have become stories of sensual mystery, fantasy, and pornography hidden beneath hardbound scientific covers. The patients in such stories have become spectacles, and the doctors who record them capitalize on the shock and spectacle to the exclusion of furthering their scientific understanding of hysteria. Freud calls this an act of “cowardice” and “neglect” on the part of the physician. “It becomes the physician’s duty,” Freud says, to aid in the search for a cure for the sick by presenting
“what [the physician] believes he knows of the causes and structure of hysteria.” This statement reveals two separate elements of his ethics of medical practice:
1. Those who practice medicine should not offer spectacle; they should offer cures.
34 Freud, Dora: An Analysis, 3. 35 Ibid., 2.
14 2. Even if the cure is not solid, there is worth in the hypothesis.
Freud places this ethical responsibility upon himself. If he publishes on hysteria, he will do so for the greater good of science. Though he knows he may not find the cause of hysteria, he has an ethical obligation to search and to present his findings – even if incomplete. In the end, his findings in Dora’s case would remain incomplete, but they would lead to great breakthroughs. One of which, though simple, would be a publication centered on the serious contemplation of the commonest cases of hysteria.
Other documentation of hysteria boasted cases of trance-like states of sexual ecstasy, displays of nudity, and astonishing symptoms like stigmata and transcendental visions. Juxtaposed with such sensational cases, Dora’s case is a clear step in a different ethical direction.36 Freud articulates this direction in his introduction to Dora:
More interesting cases of hysteria have no doubt been published, and they have very often been more carefully described …. I may venture to remark, however, that all such collections of the strange and wonderful phenomena of hysteria have but slightly advanced our knowledge of a disease which still remains as great a puzzle as ever.37
Freud could have decided to write about a more unique and exciting hysteric, but he did not believe that the study of hysteria benefits from the public spectacle surrounding it.
Searching for a cure, Freud concerned himself with a case that would represent the largest cross-section of sufferers: “What is wanted is precisely an elucidation of the commonest cases and of their most frequent and typical symptoms.”38 Freud felt an ethical duty to science to focus on Dora’s mundane case, because if he could cure her common form of hysteria,39 he could by extension offer a cure to the masses. Even though Dora left him
36 Freud remarks early on that Dora’s story “does not upon the whole seem worth recording. It is merely a case of ‘petite hystérie’ with the commonest of all somatic and mental symptoms.” Ibid., 17. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Dora’s childhood illnesses were many; by the age of eight she had been diagnosed with hysteria, and her symptoms (typical of petite hystérie) included: “dyspnea, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and
15 before he could fully establish his methods, the techniques he applied to her case could serve as a case study for the benefit of future analysts.
In Dora, Freud mentions the influences of past hypotheses on his current state of analysis, how the views he held in the past have influenced his treatment of Dora in 1900.
Also, this treatment impacts the past concepts by either supporting them or dismantling them. Influenced by his time at the Salpêtrière under Charcot’s tutelage, Freud began treating hysterics through physical means. Yet, he found the common forms of treatment offering temporary relief at best, ineffectual at worst. In the early 1890s Freud became dissatisfied with the lack of results and stopped performing electrotherapy.40 Not long afterward he also discarded hypnosis.41 Though his analytical journey began with “the symptoms, and aimed at clearing them up one after the other,” he felt compelled to change his methods because he believed that these treatments were not attending to the root cause of the disease.
Freud argues that hysteria is a form of neurosis – a disease of the mind that manifests itself in physical symptoms; in other words, hysteria is psychosomatic. While the thought of hysteria as a neurosis was not a revolutionary concept, Freud’s treatments were.
Instead of soothing the symptoms of hysteria through physical means (as did most physicians) Freud treated the hysteric’s mind. His reasoning lay in his theory of hysteria as a neurosis that manifests in the body through various physical ticks. Each of these physical symptoms is rooted in specific memories, desires, or fears in the hysteric’s psyche. If he possibly migraines, together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae” (Ibid. 17, 21). By the time Freud began treating her, she had grown out of the headaches, but many of her other symptoms were as strong as ever. Other physicians had attempted to sooth her symptoms with physical therapies “including hydrotherapy and the local application of electricity,” but they had not succeeded: “The various methods of treatment which are usual, including hydrotherapy and the local application of electricity, had produced no result” (Ibid. 15). 40 Gay, 62. 41 As Peter Gay relates: “In his gradual abandonment of hypnosis Freud was not just making a virtue out of a defect; the shift amounted, rather, to the momentous adoption of a new mode of treatment. The technique of free association was in the making.” Ibid., 71.
16 could find the psychological trigger for the hysteric’s symptom, the symptom would disappear. This search needed a more cooperative form of treatment than hypnosis.
Prior to this point, physicians controlled the process of treatment and objectified their patients. Hysterics were objects of study – subdued and controlled by their analysts.
This world of controlling doctors and passive muted patients altered in 1895 with the publication of Studies on Hysteria (1895) co-authored by Freud and Joseph Breuer.42 In
Studies on Hysteria Freud embraces the findings from Breuer’s case with the hysteric Anna
O. and appropriates Anna O.’s phrase “talking cure” as a practice for treating neuroses.
That is, he begins to see the healing properties in allowing his patients to talk, to share in the process of discovery as active agents. As Freud says in Dora: “I now let the patient himself choose the subject of the day’s work, and in that way I start out from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment.”43 Freud talks with his patients, listens to them, and becomes their confidant and psychologist in this brand new model of treatment.
Structural Ethics: Transcribing Convoluted Speech
A fascinating document, Dora offers a challenge for the academic writer hoping to encapsulate it within a brief essay. Freud writes his casebook in a form that seems to defy organization. Instead of presenting a chronological account of the sessions or of Dora’s past, he gives intermittent bursts of information and dialogue in a convoluted series of Dora’s biographical information, her dreams, and Freud’s speculations. In the 1962 introduction to
Dora, Phillip Rieff states that the layout of Freud’s casebook seems simple (1. Dora’s life and symptoms, 2. Dora’s dreams, and 3. A conclusion) but upon closer inspection proves a complex document. Rieff says:
42 This work included Anna O. and Emmy Von N.’s foundational case studies. 43 Freud, 6.
17 … there is a labyrinth into which the narrative thread soon disappears, replaced by a mode of presentation calculated to help us see events, remote and near, simultaneously—all having their effect upon Dora. This is literary as well as analytic talent of a high order; indeed, the fusing of these two talents was necessary to the case history as Freud developed that genre. A narrative account would have distorted the psychological reality that Freud wanted to portray; no linear style, however precise, could catch the eerie convergences of cause and effect sought by Freud.44
In this developing genre of case studies, Freud denies the reader the linearity of straight narrative, because he, as the analyst, did not hear Dora’s story in that fashion. As
Freud says: “If I were to begin by giving a full and consistent case history, it would place the reader in a very different situation from that of the medical observer.”45 While seemingly disorienting, Freud’s form intentionally reorients his readers as medical observers, meeting their patient in the moment, gathering information piecemeal, and slowly crafting the full picture.
Thus the following shifts between the common forms of case materials and Freud’s reinvention of the genre appear to take place simultaneously: the presentation of the hysteric changes from an eroticized spectacle of a hypersexual creature to a polite portrayal of a free-thinking woman; the patient in the spotlight has changed from a sensational case to a common one; the root of the illness moves from body to mind, making it a neurosis; the patient shifts from a passive, mute object to an active, talking participate; and the form of the casebook changes from linear to disjointed. Freud gives Dora what other physicians had denied their hysterics46 – voice, autonomy, agency, and respect. All of these elements join together in Freud’s portrayal of Dora, who is indicative of the common women in Europe suffering from hysteria. In Dora, Freud paints a textual portrait of a “hysteric” woman.
44 Rieff, viii-xi. 45 Freud, 9. 46 I use the term “their hysterics” purposefully, because for physicians like Charcot – who institutionalized the ill – hysterics were property. Though Freud at times believes Dora has projected the identity of her father onto Freud, he never claims ownership of her.
18 Freud’s Cubist Portrait of Dora
For years, certain extraordinary hysterics (like Augustine in Charcot’s Salpêtrière) stood in as representatives for the juggernaut of unexplained sicknesses – hysteria. Yet in one casebook, Freud attempts to alter that representational image by making Dora the new face of hysteria – though, ironically, her face is not important. In Dora, Freud aims to show the world the effects of the repressed subconscious – the invisible dimension of the psyche.
Freud’s goal in analysis is cubist in nature on two fronts. First, he searches for
Dora’s unseen dimension, and second, he reveals her multiple profiles. He believes Dora’s unseen dimension and multiple profiles manifest themselves in her dreams.47 In his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud establishes his theory of psychoanalysis48 – the study of the mind divided into the conscious and the subconscious. The latter manifests itself through multiple avenues including “free association, fantasies, slips of the tongue
(so-called Freudian slips), and especially dreams.”49 According to Freud, Dora’s mind is split. On one side lies her conscious psyche unaware of the foundation of her illness, and on the other side, her subconscious rules her neurosis and evades detection. Freud is concerned with Dora’s subconscious, the hidden dimension she cannot control.
This portrait of Dora has a cubist form: disjointed, dreamlike, and ever shifting. Like a cubist painter, Freud attempts to capture an invisible dimension of reality – Dora’s subconscious. While the cubists were influenced by multiple elements, one of the progenitors was the advent of non-Euclidean geometry – a response to the ancient Greek
47 While Dora’s stories and their dialog were not transcribed until January, after she ceased treatment, Freud recorded her two dreams directly after hearing them: “[Dora’s dreams] thus afforded a secure point of attachment for the chain of interpretations and recollections which proceeded from them” (Freud 4). Freud states that he has “learnt how to translate the language of dreams into the forms of expression of our own thought-language, which can be understood without further help” (Freud 9). 48 Gay, 103-4. First coined by Freud in 1896 and written about extensively in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). 49 Vincent B. Leitch, “Theory and Criticism,” in Theory & Criticism, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 15.
19 mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, whose geometry contained an unspoken “assumption
... essential to his system” that moving objects could not change shape.50 In an 1854 speech to the University of Göttingen, geometrician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann turned this concept upside down. Henderson says: “Riemann’s broad view of geometry had suggested the possibility of surfaces or spaces where curvature might vary. On such an irregularly shaped surface, a figure could not be moved about without changes occurring in its own shape and properties.”51 Space could be warped. Objects might not morph, but if space can morph, then objects in movement would appear to mutate. This discovery in Non-
Euclidean geometry blew open science, mathematics, and the art world.
Many cubists embraced this concept of curved space. Henderson says: “The suggestions that space beyond our immediate perceptions might be curved or that the appearance of objects moving about in an irregularly curved space might change had a natural appeal to early modern artists.”52 If space could be curved, artistic portrayals could take that into account, and suddenly a straight line is not straight anymore. Many cubists were disenchanted with the classical linear perspective in painting. The visible reality was not solid or unchanging; through curves in space and time objects could change appearance and shape, and now science could prove that. In his book Le Peintres Cubistes (1913), poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire states: “Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designed by the term fourth dimension.”53
Like the non-Euclidean geometricians, Freud believes in a scientific order to the invisible.
50 Henderson, 103. 51 Ibid., 103. This, along with mathematician Eugenio Beltrami’s pseudosphere, were the foundations of non-Euclidean geometry. 52 Ibid.,103-105. 53 Ibid., 178.
20 They focus on an unseen dimension that influences the visible, tangible world; Freud searches for the unseen dimension of the psyche that influences the hysteric’s body. His fourth dimension is the subconscious. Through Dora’s dreams, she comes in closest contact with the hidden dimension of herself.
The second cubist aspect of Freud’s presentation of Dora is his disjointed narrative, which changes shape as Dora remembers or forgets aspects of her dreams and memories.
Freud says hysterics commonly experience gaps in their memory:
Even during the course of their story patients will repeatedly correct a particular or a date, and then perhaps, after wavering for some time, return to their first version. The patients’ inability to give an ordered history of their life in so far as it coincides with the history of their illness is not merely characteristic of the neurosis. It also possesses great theoretical significance.54
This theoretical significance is three-fold, for the patient can have up to three ways of avoiding (intentionally or not) the truth. 1. The hysteric may consciously be aware she is evading the truthful answer, thus she knowingly verbalizes a lie, usually out of shame; 2.
The hysteric changes her story because in the act of telling it she remembers more details; and 3. The hysteric displays true amnesia – “the most vulnerable element in the stores of memory and the one which is most easily subject to repression.”55 Thus whenever Dora answers one of Freud’s queries with “I don’t know,” Freud cannot discount the possibility that her subconscious has hidden this information from her, or, perhaps she consciously lies to him. Fluid and changing, Dora’s memories are not reliable. Where they leave gaps, her dreams offer answers.
Freud believes Dora’s dreams will lead to her subconscious: “The dream is one of the roads along which consciousness can be reached by the mental material which, on account of the opposition aroused by its content, has been cut off from consciousness and repressed,
54 Freud, Dora: An Analysis, 10. 55 Ibid., 11.
21 and has thus become pathogenic.”56 According to Freud, Dora has divested her conscious self from her repressed self. The pathogen feeding on Dora’s mind and manifesting as symptoms of hysteria is a rejected part of her self. Due to this subconscious repression,
Dora has forgotten part of herself. Freud realizes the effect her subconscious has on her physical body, and he searches for moments where this dimension and the visible (or conscious) ones coincide. This intersection happens in her dreams.
The Interpretation of Dora’s Dreams
In the casebook, Freud transcribes two of Dora’s dreams. In the first, her father wakes her up, and they escape from a burning building; in the second, she finds herself lost in a city and discovers that her father has died. To give an idea of Freud’s process of dream interpretation, I will educe a few highlights from his analysis of Dora’s first dream. Because of his insistence on making the form of the casebook as similar to a live session as possible, he relates this dream by directly quoting Dora:
A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed myself quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel case.’ We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.57
Freud asks Dora to relate the circumstances surrounding the day she had the dream. This dream had recently revisited her in Vienna, but it had occurred three times in the K.’s house by the lake during which time Herr K. made a profession of love to Dora in the woods.58 After this proposal, which Dora flatly refused, Herr K had walked into her room while she slept, startled her, and said the room was his, and he could enter when he wished. This is when the dreams began. While her subconscious utilized multiple memories
56 Ibid., 9. 57 Freud, Dora: An Analysis, 56. Freud places this entire quote from Dora in italics, but for the continuity of lengthy quotations in this thesis, I had converted it to a regular font style. 58 Ibid., 19.
22 and fears in her life to construct this dream, I will focus on one of the major catalysts – her tense relationship with Herr K.
Freud connects this dream to another traumatic event with Herr K. When Dora was fourteen, she had agreed to meet the K.’s at Herr K.’s business to view a “church festival.”
But when she arrived, she and Herr K. were alone. Herr K forcibly grabbed Dora, pulled her against him, and kissed her. Disgusted, she ran from him.59 This visceral moment is just the sort of moment the subconscious would store and reconfigure in dreams. Freud says the house on fire could signify the kiss, since fire “serves directly to represent love.”60
Dora reminds Freud that the smell of smoke from the fire remains after she wakes up. Herr
K. smokes, and so his kiss would smell like smoke. Freud draws a connection between the smell of smoke and her memory of the kiss: “no doubt the kiss smelt of smoke; so she smelt smoke in the dream, and the smell persisted till after she was awake.”61 The smoke represents Herr K.’s presence, especially his kiss, and the fire represents passion for Herr
K. As Freud says: “There can be no smoke without fire!”62
After Herr K. had surprised her in her bedroom, Dora began locking the door when she dressed, but soon the key disappeared, and she had to dress quickly for fear of being seen by Herr K. She tells Freud: “I am convinced that Herr K. had removed [the key].”63
Freud finds the key a phallic symbol that opens a room, her room, and could fit a jewel case, both jewel case and room being metaphors for female genitalia.64 Freud believes Dora is both desirous and fearful of sex. Her fear has suppressed her desire, and so the desire only surfaces as metaphor in her dreams. In the same way, her subconscious has suppressed her
59 Ibid., 21. 60 Ibid., 64. 61 Ibid., 84. 62 Ibid., 65. 63 Ibid., 58. Dora quoted by Freud. 64 Ibid., 61.
23 desire to have Herr K. by her side, so in her dream she sees her father instead: “You are summoning up your old love for your father in order to protect yourself against your love for
Herr K. But what do all these efforts show? Not only that you are afraid of Herr K., but that you are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to yield to him.”65
Freud states that Dora’s subconscious mind placed her father at the side of the bed in place of Herr K. The last three nights she spent at the K.’s home, Dora continued having the same dream. She had determined to leave the home before she could sleep in peace, and this choice manifested as the adverse in her dream: “As soon as I was outside I woke up.”66
This dream revealed Dora’s fear of being caught in her room by Herr K. and her fear of her own feelings for him.
Freud’s Multiplicitous Nature
Scheman says that authority figures in Western culture often deny their inferiors the chance to have multiplicitous identities: “... we can see the splitting characteristic of multiple personality as a response to oppression that needs resolution by the achievement that requires the loving collaboration of others.”67 Freud does not fit neatly into Scheman’s conception of a Western authority figure. Freud presents Dora as a multifaceted person, because his theory of the mind predisposes him to accept the concept of multiplicitous identities. He presents Dora as a multi-profiled self. Freud’s analysis of Dora is not linear or encased in a single perspective.
Scheman does say that even authority figures can present multiplicitous tendencies:
“I want to suggest that, without blurring the specificities of such experiences, we can recognize that the experiences even of those who identify with dominant cultures can lead,
65 Ibid., 62. 66 Ibid., 59. 67 Scheman, 165.
24 in different ways, to multiplicitous identities.”68 Even as a dominant figure in history,
Freud chooses to portray himself within the casebook as a multiplicitous individual. Freud exists in the casebook at different times of his life, in different moments of his own growth and refinement as a psychoanalyst. Due to Freud’s process of writing—the temporal discrepancy of the case-writing process, his distillation of the case, and his retroactively metanarrative footnotes—his self is split (intentionally or not) into three distinct identities.
The first is the Freud of 1900 (which he often believed to be 1899), i.e., the Freud in Dora’s sessions who discusses Dora’s memories and dreams directly with her and asks her questions. The second iteration of Freud is the one writing immediately after the sting of rejection when Dora cut off treatment. The third identity is the editing Freud who enhanced the text with specific footnotes in the 1923 edition of the casebook.
Freud began writing the casebook in the beginning of 1901. The Freud of 1901 pulls from his memories of the case and his notes on Dora’s dreams. He changes names to protect the innocent, and he discovers how different aspects of the case fit or contradict. He is also the Freud with an audience in mind. He writes self-consciously, knowing his words will be seen by the current community of physicians and by future generations. This Freud also splits from himself to comment on the case further through an alternate line of thought in the form of footnotes running along the bottom of the pages.
According to his records Freud finished the casebook within one month on January
25, but he then waited until 1905 before he finally allowed it to be published.69 During these four years, he could have returned to the casebook to clean up anything—the body of the text, his recollection of the conversations in 1900, Dora’s own words, and his footnotes.
This gap between first draft and final publication blurs the demarcation between the
68 Ibid., 165. 69 Gay, 246.
25 second and third Freuds. Thus a multitude of different Freuds could be hypothesized.
Through footnotes, the Freud of 1901 engages both the 1900 and January 1901 Freuds’ hypotheses of Dora’s symptoms and dreams. This third Freud at times accedes to his past ideas and at others opposes them.
In his first lengthy footnote, Freud sees his past theories as arguable: “Such critical remarks as I have thought it permissible to add I have incorporated in these additional notes: so that the reader will be justified in assuming that I still hold to the opinions expressed in the text unless he finds them contradicted in the footnotes.”70 The footnotes reveal Freud’s most up-to-date belief about Dora, and as such may be thought to be the most veritable version. I would venture to say, in order to hold to the multiplicitous identity theory, each viewpoint of Freud along the spectrum of time has validity, and none can hold the prestige of summarizing Freud as a singular identity. The shift in ideology is not an evolutionary move reaching ever closer to the true Freud. His shifts should demarcate separate phases of his perspective, and like Dora’s story in the casebook, his phases should not be seen in a linear sense. While his story of Dora is convoluted, Freud’s opinions morph in understanding, proficiency, and accuracy. Is there one right analysis within the casebook? Can there be discrepancies? According to Freud, all versions of a neurotic’s story have merit. He would not consider himself a hysteric, but he does think different moments in the memory of an event can be seen at once, and it is better that way.
Not all of the footnotes were added in later editions. At times, the footnotes are
Freud’s commentary on a long quote from Dora and seem to be integral to the book’s argument. These footnotes may have been evident in the first printing. If so, Freud’s third self existed closer in time to the selves of 1900 and 1901. He may have found, in the three years leading up to publication, moments to expand on his ideas or reveal discrepancies in
70 Freud, Dora: An Analysis, 8.
26 his thought process and memory through footnotes. He may have second-guessed himself as early as 1901. If Freud’s footnotes show up first in subsequent editions, then the theory of a three-part Freud spliced by time holds true. The three-part theory becomes muddled if the footnotes show up in the first edition. Though this would show a greater sign of multiplicity in a temporally static Freud.71
Freud shifts his analysis of Dora as he attempts to understand her better. She is not a static person, and neither is he. Both, like objects in motion, morph as they move. Dora’s memories change along with the timeframes of certain problems, and Freud’s analysis, in reaction, changes as he moves further in time from the case.
71 Freud scholar Peter Gay makes no mention of the footnote discrepancy in Freud: A Life for Our Time. In an edition of Freud’s case first published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. in 1963, Philip Rieff notes that Freud, in a footnote dating 1933, “insisted that the case had ended exactly a year earlier than in fact it did” (vii). Oddly, Rieff does not distinguish which note was from ’33, and that heading does not show up in the edition. The only temporal distinctions among footnotes are prefaces that begin a total of five footnotes: “Additional note, 1923.” Might this mean every footnote without the temporal distinction was a part of the 1905 edition? When were the other footnotes written? They might have been created as early as 1901 and as late as 1905, or later. Due to the limited scope of this thesis, I will leave further investigation of footnote discrepancies to further studies.
27 CHAPTER TWO
CIXOUS’ DORA: COSMIC FEMALE, RESISTING BODY
“Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide.” Hélène Cixous1
It’s like a cave. Where are you? It’s like a cave; it’s me! Me inside of myself, in the shadows. Inside of you ... Sometimes full, sometimes empty, and always dark. One might understand everything. Then one might change the world. Dora, Portrait of Dora2
Introduction
Portrait of Dora by Hélène Cixous adapts Freud’s casebook Dora: An Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria for the stage in a time and place of radical upheaval of the gender binary.3
A part of the ephemeral movement of French feminism in the 1970s, Portrait marks Cixous’ entry to theatre. Her challenging and powerfully expressionistic play first drew me to the study of Freud’s historic case with Dora.
Portrait follows Dora and Freud through a series of sessions that bleed together and fade in and out of Dora’s memories. Her father, Herr B., and her family friends, Herr K. and Frau K.,4 all appear on stage and play out Dora’s memories and dreams, and their own past conversations with Freud. Cixous plays with the intentions, ambiguities, and uncomfortable relationships found in Dora, and she adds new dreams – three for Dora and
1 Hélène Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Theory & Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 1955. 2 Hélène Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” in Selected Plays, ed. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge: 2004), lines 35-58 and 383-85. 3 All subsequent references to Portrait of Dora in the text will be Portrait. All subsequent references to Freud’s casebook Dora: An Analysis will be Dora. 4 Different English translations use different terms for the Mr./Mrs. distinction concerning the K’s. My cast utilized Sarah Burd’s lovely translation of Portrait (published in Diacritics) for our experimental reading, fall 2013. Burd’s translation refers to the K’s as Herr and Frau K, which is more consistent with Freud’s use of the German honorifics in his casebook. But I find Ann Liddle’s translation of Portrait easier to navigate, because Liddle numbers the lines of text. For a postmodern one act with no written delineation of scenes, numbered lines become more than a luxury. Unless otherwise stated, I am using Liddle’s translation and reverting the honorifics to Herr and Frau. These augmentations are distinguished by brackets in direct quotes, i.e., [Frau] and [Herr].
28 one for Freud – all Cixous’ fiction. These dreams explore Dora’s fear of becoming a sacrifice and fascination with a tall, strong woman who reminds her of herself and Frau K. Freud’s dream reveals his desire for Dora. Portrait also focuses on Dora and Freud’s tense relationship during their sessions. In the end, Dora says she has had enough of his efforts to cure her, and she leaves him.
In the 1980s, Cixous would become the in-house playwright for Théâtre du Soleil and creative collaborator with the company’s founder Arianne Mnouchkine. From this exchange would arise such powerful works of theatre as The Perjured City (1994) and
Drummers on the Dike (1999).5 After joining Théâtre du Soleil, Cixous would refine her playwriting process into a metaphysical art, which she continually employs. As she states in her essay “Enter the Theatre,” Cixous embraces the writing process as an intuitive, existential journey into the world of the play in her mind where characters arrive like disembodied spirits:
My state can be compared to a kind of waking dream, very passive, patient, hallucinatory. I am the empty stage. This may last a long time until I hear footsteps. I see nothing. Enter Voices. Characters. I do not move .... I listen .... they speak .... I record as quickly as possible, I take note at full speed, I hear their thoughts pass, they are going very fast, I have just the time to note the ultra-rapid beginning, the thread, the end of a passionate confidence.6
Cixous writes as a reporter of the metaphysical and a scribe of her own subconscious. She connects to an alternate reality, and serves as “the empty stage” for the characters inside her mind. These characters arrive from her subconscious mind and play out their stories for her, and she races to transcribe them. In the process of writing Portrait, however, Cixous did not transcribe voices in her head; she adapted a novel.
5 Cixous has written other plays for Théâtre du Soleil including The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanauk, King of Cambodia (1985); The Indiade and India of their Dreams (1987); The Perjured City (1994); And Suddenly Waking Nights (1997); and The Castaways of the Fol Espoir (2010). 6 Cixous, “Enter the Theatre,” trans. Brian J. Mallet, in Selected Plays, ed. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 2004), 30-31.
29 Feminist director Simone Benmussa took interest in Cixous’ 1973 novel Portrait du
Soleil, a fictionalization of Freud’s casebook. Benmussa asked Cixous to write a version of
Portrait du Soleil for the stage. Cixous accepted, and in 1976 Portrait of Dora hit the stage.
In “On Theatre,” an interview with Eric Prenowitz, Cixous says at the time she wrote
Portrait she felt unworthy of the title of playwright: “I did not think of myself as a theatre writer. I though of myself as a theatrical accident.”7 Cixous considers Portrait her least theatrical play because it lacks the factors she feels playwrights need during the crafting process, i.e., an active and surprise-driven plot: “the theatre is itself an action, a drama, and one of the marks of the theatre is the unexpected intervention. The fact that at any moment characters enter or events take place which are completely uncalculated.”8 Cixous wants this surprise not only for the audience during the performance but for herself during the writing process. But since Portrait was only a reformation of the novel, her playwriting process did not surprise her: “I lifted Portrait of Dora from Portrait du Soleil, and I myself had no surprises, there was no surprise; there was sculpting.”9
In the process of sculpting her novel into a stage play, Cixous transferred her allegiance from the voices in her head to the static speech of prescribed characters in her novel, and by extension, to the characters in Freud’s casebook. This may mean Portrait carries a different kind of weight than her other plays because to write Portrait, she listened to different voices. Her characters no longer held the same sway over her as they might have in another play. So, what voices spoke to her? What led her? Without the characters, the only influence would be the prewritten texts—her novel and Freud’s casebook—and Cixous herself – her political message and ethics.
7 Cixous, “On Theatre,” in Selected Plays, edited by Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 2004), 2. Italics original. 8 Ibid. Italics original. 9 Ibid.
30 The first step in looking at Portrait through Cixous’ eyes involves finding out more about her own ethical stance concerning Dora’s unique case in particular and psychoanalysis, feminism, and Freud’s writings in general. Fortunately, Cixous wrote a manifesto laying out her views on the Western world’s treatment of women. This source may help us understand Cixous’s ethics and parlay into a greater understanding of the complexities within Portrait.
The Ethics of Écriture Féminine
What were Cixous’ ethical motivations for writing Portrait? How do they differ from or coalesce with Freud’s? The casebook exposes Freud’s ethics through his clearly articulated goals; Cixous’ play submerges her ethics in the dialogue of the characters. Her
Dora is multifaceted in a way that at one moment seems antiestablishmentarian and strong and at another weak and schizophrenic. Dora’s voice has a more condescending tone in the play, and has more lines than Freud transcribes in the casebook. Dora becomes the stronger of the two in the play. Consequently, after a closer reading of Portrait, Cixous’ treatment of
Dora appears fueled by anti-Freudian sentiments. However, is this assumption correct?
In Hélène Cixous: Live Theory, Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers state that engagement with Cixous’ fictional and theatrical works cannot have a preconceived notion of authorial intent or propaganda embedded in the text and waiting to be excavated: “Cixous’s inclusion of ... texts by other writers in her fictions takes place on a poetic rather than a critical level.”10 Does Cixous set her critical mind aside in order to be a poet? When she takes on the characters of Freud’s casebook, does she engage as an artist, not a critic? According to Blyth and Sellers, both the novel and the play are “reworkings of a meditation upon Freud’s first
10 Ian Blythe and Susan Sellars, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), 40.
31 published case study.”11 As both scholar and fiction writer, Cixous traverses the line between reality and fiction. Her complex characters cannot be relied upon to reflect her viewpoint or sympathies. She does not give the reader an easy job discerning whom to root for. But this does not mean her ethics concerning female representation are absent.
Cixous has strong feelings about the roles of women and female empowerment, and these feelings permeate her writings. Just one year prior to Portrait’s debut, she wrote “The
Laugh of the Medusa,”12 the most striking, forthright manifesto directly engaging her ethical motivation for writing. In it, Cixous lays out her understanding of how Western history operates and how women’s pasts imprison their futures. Cixous’ hard-felt ideology concerning writing influences her literary and theatrical works.
In her essay, Cixous observes that the act of writing creates an individual’s understanding of the past, others, and self, but men (as a whole) have reserved writing for their own benefit: “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition.”13 According to Cixous, the male-dominated
Western world constructs meaning in a linear pattern and establishes linearity as the most reasonable paradigm. This phallocentric society creates a linear model for the process of progress and the trajectory of history and narrative.14
In a format contrary to phallocentric reason, linearity, and logocentric logic, Cixous’ writing style in “The Laugh of the Medusa” seems to bleed, to swim, to soar as she champions women to free themselves from the gender binary. Cixous encourages women to
11 Ibid. 12 This female manifesto was published in 1975. 13 Cixous, “Laugh,” 1946. Cixous does not lump all men into this category of ruthless dictators. She believes both men and women have a duty to break the system. 14 Ironically, Freud, the king of phallocentrism, assented to Dora’s cyclic thought process in his convoluted structuring of the casebook.
32 break from the old forms of identity based on fear and control, which society has made for them. The new forms are not necessarily anti-domestic or anti-motherhood, but they are intensely personal and unique for each woman.
For Cixous, the patriarchy falsely appropriates female sexuality and creation as sinister and inferior activities: “Men have committed the greatest crime against women.
Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism!”15 Women must reclaim their sexuality, which has become taboo. Cixous encourages women to commit their greatest act of defiance by destroying the taboo without destroying themselves.
How will women reclaim their bodies? Cixous argues that, since men have dominated culture and the understanding of the sexes through writing, women must take back their socially constrained bodies and imprisoned identities through writing as well. A woman actively freeing herself from the gender binary and the patriarchy must write in a new, intensely personal way. Cixous christens this new writing écriture féminine. To accomplish écriture féminine, or “female writing,” women must write their bodies onto the page. The act of writing should be a fully personal, intimate, and physical process. Even breast milk takes on a literary significance: “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.”16 A uniquely female form of communication and nourishment, white ink should not be interpolated by male-dominated society as a miserable excretion. A woman’s form of writing does not simply appropriate phallocentric language; a woman’s writing is a biologically privileged writing that only she can accomplish. Only she writes in white ink.
15 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1944. 16 Ibid., 1948.
33 This new writing releases a woman of her individual oppression (a social pressure she has been forced to internalize) and disrupts the system at its core: “She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history.”17 Woman writes on two plains of disruption: by taking her selfhood back from a history of oppression and by speaking on her own behalf.
The first plain of disruption involves killing the woman’s socially-constructed avatar—the silenced, suppressed, hated female who lives on in literature and the minds of men. Cixous says: “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.”18 To survive, she must take back her own breath, or the false woman will suffocate her. The false woman – society’s model populating literature, media, and minds – feeds like a parasite on the living woman. Society forces women to become the false woman, and men, to desire her. She is the sublimated darkness of lack, a non-entity, a negative, a void. Cixous wants women to stop seeing themselves within this phallocentric construct, because it forces women into the non- identity of lack. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says: “Analytic experience attests precisely to the fact that everything revolves around phallic jouissance, in that woman is defined by a position that I have indicated as ‘not whole’ (pas-tout) with respect to phallic jouissance.”19
Like Africa to colonizing Europeans, she is full of mystery and danger, she is animalistic and erotic while remaining empty.20
In phallocentric society, a woman represents both the empty void and the object of fear. She is Medusa, whom men created through their mythos to remind themselves of their
17 Ibid., Italics original. 18 Ibid., 1947. 19 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998), 7. 20 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1951.
34 manhood. Cixous says, men “need femininity to be associated with death; it’s the jitters that gives them a hard-on!”21 This description by Cixous mirrors Freud’s own essay on
Medusa’s role as an exponent of manhood. In his essay “Medusa’s Head,” Freud portrays
Medusa, with the multitude of snakes on her head, as a symbol of castration: “a multiplication of penis symbols symbolizes castration.”22 The Medusa’s image also arouses erection. She must be decapitated for man’s benefit. Man destroys the castration symbol by castrating (i.e., beheading) the Medusa. Cixous adds that this false woman has been women’s role model for centuries.
The second plain of disruption calls for the new woman to begin “seizing the occasion to speak.” She must militaristically take over her self and the power of locution: “To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process.”23 Her voice is a weapon; her smile is one as well. Society would have women be fearful and monstrous creatures who, like Medusa, function as subjects for man’s domination. However, Cixous sees the Medusa transforming into a being of beauty and light: “She’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”24 Buy stating so, Cixous takes back the mythical Medusa from Freud’s phallocentric interpretation. Consequently, she also takes back another type of woman who has the potential to disrupt with her voice and her body – the hysteric.
In her manifesto, Cixous presents the diagnosed hysterics of history as women who physically embodied the possibility of écriture féminine, as warriors, not invalids. A uniquely female diagnosis, hysteria stigmatized its patients as naturally inferior in both mind and body to men. Cixous saw this diagnosis as a forced subservience of women and as
21 Ibid. 22 Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” Freud on Women, ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 272. 23 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1947. 24 Ibid., 1951.
35 a representation of the faults of the gender binary as a whole: “The hysteric is, to my eyes, the typical woman in all her force. It is a force that was turned back against Dora, but, if the scene changes and if woman begins to speak in other ways, it would be a force capable of demolishing those structures.”25 Cixous sees hysteria’s physical resistance to normalcy as a version of woman’s cognitive resistance to the patriarchy. For her, the now discontinued diagnosis of hysteria contains a social commentary from the past that transcends any physical malady. Hysteria as a physical manifestation symbolizes the disruptive power of female thought and speech. As an embodiment, hysteria questions male superiority.26
And Cixous names the hysteric with the most potential: “You, Dora, you the indomitable, the poetic body, you are the true ‘mistress’ of the Signifier. Before long your efficacy will be seen at work when your speech is no longer suppressed, its point turned in against your breast, but written out over against the other.”27 Cixous wants to see a day when Dora’s speech can stand alone as Dora’s écriture féminine, which can bathe and overwhelm “the other,” presumably Freud, whose construct of sexuality revolves around the phallus as the source of power and is fueled by castration anxiety as the source of all fears.
Freud, through concepts such as transference and repression, turned Dora’s speech against her breast. Dora is the “true ‘mistress’ of the Signifier.”
The signifier is part of the linguistic sign, as Ferdinand de Saussure says in Course in General Linguistics: “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image .... respectively ... signified [signifié] and signifier [significant].”28 Thus,
25 Cixous, “The Untenable,” 285. 26 “Yes, the hysteric, with her way of questioning others (because if she succeeds in bringing down the men who surround her, it is by questioning them, by ceaselessly reflecting to them the image that truly castrated them, to the extent that the power they have wished to impose is an illegitimate power of rape and violence).” Ibid., 285. 27 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1953. 28 Ferdinand de Saussure, “Object of Linguistics,” in Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 852-53.
36 the signifier, or sound-image stands in place in language for its referent, what it signifies.
Saussure goes on to say the signifier “is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.”29 When
Cixous crowns Dora as the “mistress of the signifier” she takes the Dora from Freud’s casebook (a transmutation from flesh-and-bone Ida Bauer to textual Dora) and transforms her from a singular woman into a metaphysical impression who signifies a concept. Dora symbolizes something bigger than herself. She stands in as the possibility of female resistance in general.
While Cixous claims to see Dora as a sign of female resistance, she does not claim to care for Dora as a person from history. In a discussion with Catherine Clement, Cixous says that though she writes about Dora, she is not obsessed with the personhood of the hysteric:
“I don’t give a damn about Dora; I don’t fetishize her. She is the name of a certain force, which makes the little circus not work anymore.”30 For Cixous, Dora is the icon of female strength in the face of oppression. Dora is not a living breathing person from long ago, but rather a force, an idea, a manifestation of resistance. Cixous lifts Dora outside of time and makes her the new icon for the new woman.
Dora, Meet Cixous
Cixous considers Freud’s casebook and case to be oppressive, and so for her to dismantle this oppression, she strikes at its heart – its claim of veracity. She turns Dora, a truth, into Portrait, a fairy tale. This transformation begins during Cixous’ first reading of
Dora. Cixous describes her experience of meeting Dora in the casebook as a disruptive one:
I immediately worked out a reading that was probably not centered the way Freud had wanted it to be. I had to bring center stage obliterated characters, characters repressed in notes, at the bottom of the page, and who were for me
29 Ibid. 30 Cixous, “Untenable,” 289.
37 in the absolute foreground. I read it like fiction. I didn’t worry about an analytic investment at that moment, and besides, I couldn’t have.31
Her choice to meet the text as a fictive work displaced the casebook from the realm of document to the realm of fiction. Cixous’ process of disturbance and transformation into fiction aligns with her message in “The Laugh of the Medusa” – women must write to upset the unjust gender binary: “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic: as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way.”32 She steals a once-living woman from the domineering clutches of a man and manifests her on stage. Outside of the patriarchal reality, Cixous creates her own reality. So while Cixous further distances Dora from her historic self by creating a fiction as opposed to a history, she does so in order to free womanhood in general, and Cixous in part.
The fictionalization of the casebook may be viewed as an exercise of Cixous’ own agency on history, as she says: “Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.”33 Thus Cixous must be present in Portrait, her rewriting of history. She imposes her body onto the scene and utilizes her “white ink” to give womanhood a champion in Dora. Near the end of the play, Dora says to Freud: “You don’t understand anything. That won’t prevent you from existing! Here is my revenge: I’ll go on ‘alone.’ I’ll get well ‘alone.’ And I’ve decided to abandon you on a day determined by me. It will be the 1st of January 1900.”34 Cixous’s stage becomes a veritable battleground between Freud the analyst and Dora the patient, because Cixous considers the struggle between them to be a war for Dora’s mind:
31 Ibid., 277. 32 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1954. 33 Ibid., 1942. 34 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” lines 998-1000.
38 In the front line was Dora, who fascinated me, because here was an eighteen- year-old girl caught in a world where you say to yourself, she is going to break – a captive, but with such strength! I could not keep from laughing from one end to the other, because despite her powerlessness and with (thanks to) that powerlessness, here is a kid who successfully jams all the little adulterous wheels that are turning around her and, one after the other, they break down. She manages to say what she doesn’t say, so intensely that the men drop like flies.35
The adulterous wheels Cixous references are Herr B.’s romantic relationship with Frau K. and Herr K.’s sexual desire for Dora. Herr B. offers Dora to Herr K. in exchange for Frau K.
They trade their women. In “Women on the Market,” French feminist Luce Irigaray states that women in societies around the world have primarily served as commodities for trade amongst men: “the economy—in both the narrow and the broad sense—that is in place in our societies thus requires that women lend themselves to alienation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not participate, and that men be exempt from being used and circulated like commodities.”36 Dora as a commodity form must find a way of escaping this cycle of trade among men, and she does so through the dismantling of the heterosexual desire Freud has forced upon her.
To further rescue Dora from this phallocentric exchange of women, Cixous turns the capitulation of Dora’s relationship with Herr K. from one of male lust and female compliance to one of female-imposed violence and male death. Herr K. desires Dora, but she does not desire him. Freud says to Dora: “It remains to be seen why you felt so offended by
[Herr] K.’s advances?”37 Freud wants her to desire him, but if she acquiesces she accepts a rule of phallocentrism – relations on man’s terms regardless of woman’s desire. Rapture becomes apropos for representing this rule: Herr K. becomes enraptured with the thought of having Dora, and so, in kind, he expects her to feel the same towards him, and as a
35 Cixous, “Untenable,” 279. 36 Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in Literary Theory, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 800. 37 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” line 714.
39 result, he attempts to rapture her—steal her away and rape her. Dora says Herr K.
“clasped me to him, he held me tightly against him, and he kissed me on the mouth. I felt such intense disgust then ....”38 Breaking from the phallocentric system requires that Dora reject this misogynistic conception of desire and love. She grasps this forced desire and kills it. She speaks of death as a necessity: “There will have to be a killing. It’s a law. It’s a key
.... I want to kill him. He knows it. He wants to kill me. I know it.”39 She knows what
Cixous has preached – the new woman is at risk of death. To secure her own life as the new woman, Dora must destroy the one who wants to control her. She must kill Herr K. In “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous says the hysteric is a person “who doesn’t leave you in peace, who wages permanent war against you.”40 In Portrait, Dora does just that. She fights for the autonomy of her desire. In a vision, she sees herself murdering Herr K: “I hold him tightly and I slit his throat.”41 In a reversal of roles, Dora becomes the one who appropriates the phallus: “The knife has become one with my hand,”42 and she beheads Herr K. as if he were the Medusa, as if he were the one being castrated.
Dora’s Discrepancies and Multiplicities in Portrait of Dora
In Portrait Cixous creates an effusive array of identities in staged dreams, memories, and visions. These multiplicitous identities coincide with Cixous’ concept of the new woman: “At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences.”43 Through contemplation, the new woman searches for a plural identity, and she inhabits these differences. Cixous disrupts the binary by making Dora the primary
38 Ibid., lines 111-14. 39 Ibid., lines 199, 201-03. Italics original. 40 “There is also the fact that there is no place for the hysteric; she cannot be placed or take place. Hysteria is necessarily an element that disturbs arrangements; wherever it is, it shakes up all those who want to install themselves, who want to install something that is going to work, to repeat. It is very difficult to block out this type of person who doesn’t leave you in peace, who wages permanent war against you.” Cixous, “Untenable,” 287. 41 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” line 228. Italics original. 42 Ibid., line 229. 43 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1959.
40 speaker, making the stage a place of flux, and splitting time. Cixous manifests Dora’s memories, poeticizes and increases Dora’s dreams, makes secondary characters like Frau K. primary forms of female desire, and turns Dora’s minor obsession for the Sistine Madonna into a driving force within Portrait. Cixous also makes manifest plural identities through
Dora’s voice.
As the play begins, Dora’s first lines overflow with complexity and variance of tone.
According to the stage directions, she speaks in “a voice that shatters silence .... a faraway voice .... an awakened voice .... a dreamy voice.”44 Her different voices within one page become an oral representation of hysteria’s effects, and, for Cixous, these voices could signify Dora’s resistance. Unpredictable, Dora’s voice changes and alters itself outside the context of conversation. At times, she finds herself a more agreeable conversationalist than
Freud. Dora’s multiplicity can seem schizophrenic when she questions herself out loud and answers, especially from the moment she relives Herr K.’s embrace.
As she relates her memory of when Herr K. held her and kissed her against her will, she splits her voice and verbalizes the process of self-questioning and memory exploration.
Freud asks her to tell him how she knew there was a man (i.e., Herr K.) pushing behind her door. She responds by answering Freud, questioning herself, and responding to herself:
“Pressing against the door with all of his weight. I felt his member stiffen. Who told you that? [Pause] It was [Frau] K. who told me.”45 Her memory is multiplicitous. Dora remains the sole speaker in this passage, and she verbalizes the multiplicity of her identity as separate personas who need one another to know the whole story.
Dora’s inner dialogue continues throughout the play, and because of her multiplicitous identity, the subject and object of her one-woman dialogue evade solid
44 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” lines 5, 9, and 15. 45 Ibid., lines 174-76. Italics original.
41 identification at times. After she leaves one of the earlier sessions with Freud, the stage goes black, and her voice takes on the timbre of a whispered chant:46
One never knows who the killer is, dying can kill. Who wants to kill who wants to die who wants to make someone die I don’t know who any more, did I know it before, I know that I did, I knew it before I wanted to, but as soon as I wanted to, what? What’s holding me back, if I am held back but I’m not, is the other. But is it, and the other if it is the other is it him or her or? One can kill by putting oneself to death.47
Her memories have become bound within different facets of her self, and so she must enquire after herself to gain information. Cixous’ fluidity of text, accentuated by the absence of punctuation throughout part of this passage, enhances the multiplicity of her voice, since she changes from questions to answers in a format that begs for a speedy delivery. The identity of the oppressor, “the other” who “hold[s] me back,” remains vague.
Her reference to a man, “him,” could be a reference to “the other” as well; the man could be
Freud or Herr K. Whom does she refer to as the woman: “her”? This could be Frau K., but because of the multiplicity enacted within this speech, the woman in question could be one of Dora’s own facets. If that is the case, then Dora suspects that her enemy/enemies could reside within herself.
Dora also shows her multiplicitous identity through the duality of her feelings. At the end of the play she has mixed emotions when she sees a carriage knock Herr K. to the ground. The Voice of the Play says, “It was the most horrible day of her life. It was the happiest day of her life.”48 Did Dora actually despise Herr K. like she said? Did she secretly love him, as Freud suggested? The play leaves this ambiguous but not indiscernible in the sense that her feelings cannot be understood. They can. They are not either/or, they are both/and. When she saw Herr K. fall under the carriage, she felt both horrible and happy.
46 Ibid., lines 716-18. 47 Ibid., lines 718-22. Italics original. 48 Ibid., lines 1048-49.
42 Not only does she split within herself in terms of feelings, opinions, and memories, she also splits in her dreams.
Multiplicity in Dreams
Freud’s casebook contains two of Dora’s dreams. In the first, Dora’s father wakes her up in the midst of a house fire, and in the second Dora is lost in a city and returns home to find that her father has died. For Portrait, Cixous includes these dreams and adds fictional ones as well. Two of her fictional dreams include a tall, mysterious woman. In one of these,
Dora finds herself running on a beach alongside a tall woman whom she calls “dear [Frau]
K.” This woman engages in actions of power, control, and, in the gender binary sense, masculinity. She does not fit neatly into the identity of the old woman. She is not afraid.
Who is this woman Dora runs beside? Does she represent the Madonna? Frau K.? Dora herself? Dora’s relationship to this woman is fluid, and Dora’s relationship to herself becomes fluid as well. Dora implies that the woman may be a part of herself: “She was what
I might have been.” This strong, powerful, and fast woman out-runs Dora. When Dora falls, she feels further from herself: “I, too, was abandoning myself.”49 By falling, she distances herself from the woman running beside her, as well. Does Dora further split her identity by seeing herself fall away from what she could have been?
This woman may be the same woman in another of Dora’s dreams. In this dream,
Freud is dead, Dora enters his office, and an “abnormally tall” woman greets her.50 Dora does not know her identity, but the woman begins to dance with her and places “her arm around [Dora’s] waist,” clearly playing the man in the dance. Perhaps this means Dora is also performing her own gender. In this moment, Dora expresses the need to know her own identity and to know how others perceive her: “Who am I? Who am I following? .... I wonder
49 Ibid., lines 453-56. 50 Ibid., line 780.
43 who I am to her.”51 Dora’s sense of identity hinges on her contact with this woman. If they are part of the same person, then Dora can find her self by learning who the woman is.
The woman could represent Frau K., a woman who stuns Dora with her beauty and pale white skin. Dora wants to become lost inside Frau K.’s eyes, perhaps so she could see what Frau K. sees. So she could be one with her. Dora says to Frau K.: “Look at me. I wish I could step into your eyes. I wish you would close your eyes.”52 Dora also tells Frau K. her fantasy of the two of them together: “One day, I would like to be lying against you. Not sitting – Lying against you. I close my eyes, and I see. There would be blood all over. I would have blood on my face.”53 Is this a violent sexual fantasy? Is this Dora’s desire to murder the old woman Cixous speaks of in “The Laugh of the Medusa”? Or does Dora desire to be reborn through Frau K. as the new woman? Regardless whose blood it might be, in this passage Dora desires a closeness that requires a mixture of body fluids – a merger that is visceral, bloody, damaging to both parties, but, as per Cixous’ manifesto, also powerfully fulfilling: “In one another we will never be lacking.”54 This imagery of the blood can also be nourishing, life giving, and self-affirming. To complete her becoming, Dora must join with her mother/lover Frau K. This mother/child relationship continues as Dora conflates Frau
K. with the Sistine Madonna.
The tall women in Dora’s dream could represent Rafael’s Sistine Madonna, a source of obsession for Dora in both Freud’s casebook and in Portrait. Cixous loves the Madonna in
Freud’s casebook, and she loves what the Madonna could represent: “It is the capacity for an adoration that is not empty—it is the belief in the possibility of such a thing.”55 The play takes this female-centric adoration to a new level by making it multiplicitous. Dora tells
51 Ibid., lines 783-86. Italics original. 52 Ibid., line 352. 53 Ibid., line 52. 54 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1959. 55 Cixous, “Untenable,” 286.
44 Freud that she sat in an art gallery “looking at a painting of the Madonna” for two hours.
When Freud asks her why she stayed so long, Dora says the Madonna’s “whiteness was so soothing.” Freud finds this phrase similar to one she had used to describe Frau K., yet
Dora’s response offers an additional possibility of identity conflation: “No, it’s me!”56 Dora redirects Freud’s focus from Frau K. back to herself. Is she the Madonna? Does she think she is Frau K. as well? Caught up “in the aura”57 of the Sistine Madonna, Dora becomes subsumed in the painting. She is immersed in the Sistine Madonna. Cixous lays out the stage directions in two columns to give the impression that Dora and Frau K. are both a part of the painting:
Suddenly, something obvious, which may Filmed sequence, in three scenes. The go unnoticed by everyone: the infant Sistine Madonna, substitution of the Jesus held by the Madonna is none other Madonna, and [Frau] K. DORA behind than a little DORA. the Madonna, seen in the mirror. The audience won’t know who is speaking, Mary or [Frau] K.58
Dora becomes both an onlooker in the background and the Christ child cradled in the
Madonna’s arms, while the Madonna becomes Frau K. Perhaps Dora’s earlier desire to be lying on Frau K. and covered in blood represents her desire to be born from Frau K. The
Sistine Madonna becomes a portrait of female relations as she and her child become Frau
K. and Dora. In this vision Dora imagines a utopian existence of female empowerment through the nurturing embrace of the mother and her child, and she also imagines a deep connection with both the Madonna and Frau K. as separate facets of herself.
A Cubist Portrait of Dora
In Chapter One, I centered my cubist analysis of Freud’s casebook on the concept of the fourth dimension as a spatial dimension. While Non-Euclidean geometry’s foundation of
56 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” lines 922-27. 57 Ibid., line 323. 58 Ibid., lines 327-30.
45 a spatial fourth dimension inspired some of the early cubists, Einstein’s theory of relativity would influence the minds of some artists and scholars to see the fourth dimension as a temporal plane. Henderson says: “Until 1919 the fourth dimension was generally understood by the public in the context of contemporary ether physics; in the 1920s, however, its primary scientific referent shifted dramatically to Relativity Theory, and its identity changed from space to time.”59 The temporal fourth dimension would remain the chosen dimension of most artists and scientists from the ‘30s to the ‘70s.60 I will follow this shift from space to time as I shift from Freud’s casebook (1904) to Cixous’ play (1976).
In Portrait, Dora’s multifaceted character has a cubist flare. She is visible in the painting of the Sistine Madonna as both onlooker and Christ child while the physical actor of Dora stands looking at the painting on stage. She is simultaneously multifaceted and displayed as many personages/profiles at once. Henderson says cubism embraces simultaneity: “... the term simultaneity did gain acceptance among the Cubists after 1912 for describing their juxtaposition of several views of an object....”61 Dora’s portrayal on stage combines concepts of simultaneity and the Theory of Relativity to construct her on stage as present living being(s).
The movement of time can be physicalized in cubist art, and Dora – as a cubist artwork herself – moves throughout time. In one scene, Dora’s younger self becomes a physical presence that coexists with the present-day Dora on stage. This memory self inhabits the stage when Dora attempts to remember her meeting with Herr K. Stage directions call for “a silence, during which, in another time (DORA at age fourteen) the scene by the door near the staircase is performed.”62 Though four years divide them, the two
59 Henderson, 94-95. 60 Ibid., 10. 61 Ibid., 201. 62 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” lines 87-89.
46 Doras talk with each other about the moment with Herr K. From this point the script’s text divides into two sections of the page. The following quote mimics the layout of their dialogue. 14-year-old Dora speaks on the right-side passage, and 18-year-old Dora speaks on the left:
Every morning when I wake up, I smell When I entered the store, there was a smoke. It’s always the same. I don’t faint smell of smoke. [Herr] K. was open my eyes. I sniff, and it’s him. alone. [Frau] K. and my mother were late. The time for the procession was drawing near.63
This partition of the page continues as the Doras relive their past together for Freud, who comments to both of them individually. He discusses the symbolic nature of smoke with the older Dora in his office, and when he urges the younger Dora to continue with her story, she complies.
Perhaps this moment may be enlightened by a passage from “The Laugh of the
Medusa” in which Cixous says that women, once themselves, will be visibly altered in a way that sounds uncannily like a cubist painting: “I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant.”64 The new woman should morph with both the passage of time and the change in the perspective of the viewer, who, according to this quote, has an agency in her appearance. According to
Henderson, cubism also embraces the morphology of the individual: “...Cubist painting, based on a higher dimensional reality, allows the painter ... to deform his figures and adjust their proportions.”65 Who is the painter in this scene? Does Dora risk handing over the power of her representation to Freud by allowing him to interact with her past self? Does he see only what he wants to see no matter what she says, shows, or hides? For Cixous, the new woman would not hide any longer. She would proclaim her self/selves loudly, ever-
63 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” lines 89-92. 64 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1959. 65 Henderson, 206.
47 morphing while surprising her viewers. Dora relives her memories as a cubist being on stage by multiplying her temporal manifestations and making them visible to Freud.
The final stage direction implies a cubist nature to Dora’s exit: “As she leaves
FREUD, she is repeating all her departures, she is already gone, she doesn’t look at him: she sees herself, moving away again, being abandoned.”66 This stage direction is consistent with cubist paintings—seeing all moments of an action, including the morphology of the object through space. This cacophony of temporal manifestations implies that Dora has always been absent and always been in the process of leaving. We as the audience, or the readers, have the privilege to see her multiple identities complimented with both the visual and oral manifestations of her cubist self in motion.
Resistance and Écriture Féminine
In their final exchange, Freud attempts once more to keep his connection with Dora:
“Do let me hear from me. Write to me.” Yes, Freud slips and refers to Dora as an extension of himself. When he says, “let me hear from me,” he reveals a subconscious belief that Dora is a receptacle for his hypotheses. He reveals a desire to both silence her speech and feed her lines so that he cuts her voice out of his dialogue. Dora asks: “Write?” then adds, “That’s not my affair.”67 Her rejection of writing appears to directly conflict with écriture féminine.
In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous champions women to write their bodies. Why then does Portrait’s Dora, created by Cixous herself, refuse to write?
Cixous has already fulfilled her own prophesy of écriture féminine by writing this play—dismantling and regenerating Freud’s casebook. She has written herself onto history by taking Freud’s case and making it fictional. If the act of écriture féminine equals success,
Cixous has succeeded no matter what Dora does.
66 Cixous, “Portrait of Dora,” lines 680-81. Italics original. 67 Ibid., lines 1035-1046.
48 Perhaps a passage from “The Laugh of the Medusa” will further illuminate this conundrum. Cixous says: “When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love.”68 In this beautiful and slightly cryptic sentence, love stands out as a major motivating factor for the process of writing. Cixous writes to share a knowledge beyond her and beyond the reader, and she writes to connect herself to the reader—to love the reader. Does Dora desire love? Perhaps.
She desires a deep connection with the women around/within her. These other selves, these sister selves, offer her something mysterious and intoxicating: themselves.
Freud, on the other hand, gives Dora grief in Portrait by interpolating her love as a heterosexual desire for a man: Herr K. And, as in the casebook, Cixous’ Freud also theorizes that Dora has transferred her desire onto her analyst. Applying his theory of transference,
Freud claims that Dora must have shifted her desire for Herr K onto him. This becomes paramount to understanding Dora’s silence at the end of the play. If Dora writes to Freud, she validates his theories of phallocentrism and transference. According to Cixous, écriture féminine searches for love, so if Dora writes to Freud, she searches for love from him. And if he represents Herr K, then by the act of writing, Dora searches for love from Herr K. Thus, any written communication with Freud would only validate his theories and keep her in a phallocentric cycle of desire.
Cixous creates a new relational construct between Dora and Freud that highlights
Freud’s misogyny. Dora strives to resist, and in this play her resistance is silence. Dora refuses to write, but she does not reject the art of writing itself. She refuses to write because she rejects Freud’s hypothesis of her desire. In this refusal Dora denies love to the man who would try to control her love.
68 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1959.
49 CHAPTER THREE
PHILOSOPHICAL AND PRACTICAL QUESTIONS OF THEATRICAL REPRESENTATION, JUSTICE, DIMENSIONALITY, FEMINISM, AND AESTHETICS.
Introduction
The ethics of reperforming/representing historic personages on stage are wrought with difficulty. Before venturing further into how I personally took Dora’s story and created a yearlong workshop with a team I christened “The Dora Project,” I will take some time to unpack a few of the issues of representation of and potential ethical obligation to Dora. The first will be the performativity of Freud and Cixous’ texts, i.e., how they manifest Dora and themselves. The second will be the postmodern nature of cubist ethics, i.e., how cubist ethics combats modernist power structures. The third will be the trouble of the male gaze in media and what role the theatre can play in dismantling it. Finally, I will discuss the process of exploring these themes in the theatre and the two phases of our exploration: a creative reading of Portrait of Dora and a workshop of The Dora Project.
Writing Dora, Writing Self: Creating History Through Speech Acts
In the previous chapters, I have proposed my approach to Freud and Cixous’ projects as performance through writing. Freud created a form of text that emulated his own labyrinthine experience in leading psychoanalytic sessions. Cixous created a play text as a personal expression of her own creative force to disrupt Freud’s phallocentric history. Each uniquely transcribes Dora’s story in a purposefully performative way. They interpret Dora’s character and surrounding facts. Not only do they say something about Dora, but they also do something to Dora. Cixous and Freud recreate Dora through a writing that performs action.1 Freud’s writing turns Dora’s speech into a matrix of unknown desires and turns her
1 Austin states that performative utterances are speech-acts: “If a person makes an utterance of this sort we should say that he is doing something rather than merely saying something .... in saying
50 thought patterns and physical tics into a neurosis. Cixous’s writing makes Dora healthy. In both cases, the text itself performs the body of the hysteric via the mind/pen/body of the writer, who also becomes a jointly-manifested being upon the page.
Freud and Cixous manifest themselves in this performative writing. Freud calls his manifestations a part of the case study. He offers his readers a casebook that documents his personal intersections with the case and his opinions as they occur over time. So, the result is Freud’s multiplicitous identity communicating with the reader, with Dora, and with himself, and the pattern of the casebook documents his sessions as they occurred. Freud embraces the illogical jumps of conversation, because within them, he discovers repressed aspects of Dora’s psyche (i.e., her desires and her memories). Freud’s interpretation of the individual facets of this multiplicity has been contested and labeled by many – including
Cixous – misogynistic, but his intent is apparent: Freud wants to show Dora’s complexity of mind in the text. He desires to help Dora, and his methods do not discriminate due to gender, since they not only reveal Dora’s multiplicity, they unashamedly show Freud’s complexity as well, even when his complexities contradict one another.
Cixous also writes in a multiplicitous way, forming the script as a site of polyphonic voices and offering Dora as a woman of severed memories and expressions who converse with one another. Cixous calls her manifestation écriture féminine. Cixous’ practice of
écriture féminine makes her script an intentional textual manifestation of the writer’s identity, which ebbs and flows like the ocean in a “self-seeking text ... rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves and rivers plunging into the sea we feed.”2 Cixous’
what I do, I actually perform that action.” J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Literary Theory, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1290- 91. 2 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1955.
51 polyphonic writing style embraces Dora’s own multiplicity. Perhaps only those who have embraced their own multiplicity have the power to accept multiplicity in others. If so, then both Freud and Cixous have freed their own multiplicitous identities. But, I do wonder if
Cixous’ display of Dora’s multiplicity was more of a projection of what she wanted Dora to be instead of what she thought Dora was. Either way, Cixous’ writing becomes more about
Cixous and is based more heavily on Cixous’ own climate of ethics, identities, and aesthetics than anything Dora may or may not have aligned with in her lifetime.
In other words, from the feminist critique point of view, Cixous and Freud have both written themselves. Others represented in their writings, which include Dora and the historic Ida Bauer along with Herr K., Herr B., Frau K., and Frau B., are merely agents in the writer’s hands, serving écriture. Though in questioning Dora’s multiplicity, I cannot forget that she is intimately connected to, and forever distanced from the real Ida Bauer.
Either Freud presents Dora as an exact replica of “Dora,” or he presents Dora as a fallible representation of Ida. Who is she? Her desires are hidden; her dreams and conversations are convoluted. Freud still attempts to affect change in her and struggles with the null result of their time together. His apparent lack of impact on her may signify a deeper veracity in his portrayal. Is disagreement a sign of autonomy? Would Freud create a woman who disagrees with him? Is the veracity of Dora’s portrayal important? Is it possible? Might Freud’s fictionalization of her be so muddled that it may have been fictional? Potentially, yes. Does a fictional being need ethical representation? Both Freud and Cixous thought so. They kept their ethical motivations in dealing with Dora.
Freud is determined to keep Dora’s manner of speaking in the casebook as close as possible to the discussions she had with him. He wants to present the case in a realistic sense, verbatim (as much as possible), because readers need a case with real dialogue to prepare for their own future cases.
52 Cixous’s presentation of Dora also deals with an ethical representation, though hers is more overtly fictional, as seen by the additional dialogue and dreams, but the fictional turn does not hinder her ethical motivation. Cixous’ story disrupts history intentionally. To write her body onto history, onto time and space, a woman must disrupt history. She must turn it on its head. So Cixous cannot give a concise, precise history of Dora’s case, since a man created it. Dora serves Freud as a phallocentric portrayal of a woman with a disease.
For the woman to regain her voice, she must take back her body out of circulation among men. For Dora to regain her body, she must be rewritten by a woman, even if this means that her story becomes even less historically accurate.
Ethics in the Gender Binary
Less historic than the casebook, Portrait contains a deeper ethical truth. The universalities of Dora’s story – i.e., misogynistic society’s control of her – trump Dora’s individual history. Cixous’ rewrite gives Dora more justice than Freud gives her. In “The
Narrative Imagination” philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum says: “If literature is a representation of human possibilities, the works of literature we choose will inevitably respond to, and further develop, our sense of who we are and might be.”3 From Nussbaum’s statement on the value of fiction, Cixous’ rewriting of history serves as a literature (both written and staged) that can influence the ethical outlook of its readers and viewers.
Nussbaum also says that literature has a role history cannot have in that literature places the reader in the shoes of someone different, and this altruistic process can result in a more humane society: “A society that wants to foster the just treatment of all its members has strong reasons to foster an exercise of the compassionate imagination that crosses social
3 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Narrative Imagination,” in Theory & Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 2323.
53 boundaries, or tries to. And this means caring about literature.”4 Thus literature, fiction, and by extension theatre can have ethical consequences on a society. For Cixous, society’s women need their voices back.
Cixous may believe she has the right to interpolate Dora’s story because Cixous is a woman. Does this mean only a woman can tell another woman’s story? If so, are there no other parameters or ethics of representation women must abide by? Are women immune to ethics of representation? A gendered noblesse oblige? Does this féminine oblige give her carte blanche to rescue other women with an instinctual sense of what constitutes injustice
– regardless of cultural or temporal differences? Cixous does not believe women incapable of committing violence or injustice to other women’s stories. The old woman still exists and still threatens to kill the new. Cixous does not even say all men are culprits of phallocentrism. Perhaps Cixous’ enemy is not men in general; perhaps he is Freud.
Freud and Cixous held oppositional views concerning sexual normalcy and female maladies, and even though Freud never knew Cixous, she made him her enemy due to their differing stances on the grounds of neurosis and desire. Freud encapsulated his theory within a heterosexual, phallocentric discourse—a sign of normalcy, of maturity. He saw homosexuality as an immature desire within people who had not yet fully established their libidos within the Oedipal complex, with the expectation that they would (and should) outgrow their urge.5 For Freud, heterosexual desire presupposes obsession with the phallus, either by wanting to grow one or by desiring to obtain one through relations with someone with a phallus. For a man, this means owning the phallus, and denying his partner ownership of one. For a woman, this means desiring the phallus, which she cannot biologically own, and thus desiring relationship with one who does own it. Freud developed
4 Ibid., 2312. 5 Freud, Dora: An Analysis, 43.
54 this concept of “penis envy” out of a desire to understand the psychological underpinnings of society.6 Whether he was naturally misogynistic is up for debate, and I do not see the need to prove him so, but what is sure is that misogyny does exist in the society Freud attempts to analyze. Cixous sees this misogyny in her society as well, but instead of studying it as a well-meaning function of humanity, she rails against it. She sets out to demolish it.
According to Cixous, Freud’s phallocentric heterosexuality places men in positions of active power and women in positions of passive weakness. As progenitor of the theory of penis envy, Freud becomes Cixous’ primary enemy because his psychoanalytic theory supports the gendered power struggle by accepting it as a legitimate, psychologically sound paradigm for relationships. Phallocentrism affects more than sexual relations. It also further widens the gender binary, the dichotomy of male/female, strong/weak, superior/inferior, ruler/ruled, master/slave. A better metaphor for phallocentrism is not a binary in which two sides of a circle or plane are divided by a gender line but one in which the entire society revolves around the worshiped image of the phallus, which in turn keeps its position as the domineering force of society. So, because of Cixous’ theory of écriture féminine, she saw historic accuracy in the Dora case akin to propaganda for phallocentric hegemony. Taking Dora outside of history means rescuing Dora from history, from the gender binary. This type of binary becomes a disk with the towering phallus standing as a mountain in the center of a swirling darkness of the female void.
The Postmodern Kickback – A Multiplicitous, Cubist Resistance
In his essay “Defining the Postmodern” Jean-François Lyotard defines the term postmodernism in three ways, adhering to three different paradigms he has observed: a new architecture, dissatisfaction with the modern belief in progress, and an inability to engage with modernist implications directly. Each of these paradigms reveals something
6 Edward Erwin, The Freud Encyclopedia, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 179.
55 interesting about postmodernism as it relates to the ethics of representation. In this postmodern age, the actual workings of postmodernism as a system (or anti-system) offer new avenues of representation and resistance.
Concerning the first paradigm, postmodern architects began employing differing techniques and aesthetics from multiple eras and styles of architecture simultaneously, and
Lyotard links this change to the revelation of the fourth-dimension: “There is a rupture or break, and this break would be the abrogation of the hegemony of Euclidean geometry.”7
Once the visible three-dimensional reality lacks full realism, and what cannot be seen – the traces of thought (Derrida), the morphing of space (Non-Euclidean geometry), or the impact of time (Einstein’s theory of relativity)—is just as real, then disparities in form no longer stand as inadequacies of aesthetics but point to a greater reality in which thoughts, space, and time affect creation. Postmodern architects interweave disparate styles in a cross-genre semblance of architectural hodgepodge. Lyotard compares this artistic movement to Freud’s dream theory: “a manner of forgetting or repressing the past. That’s to say of repeating it.
Not overcoming it .... The same procedure as the use of remains coming from past life in the dream-work as described by Freud.”8 Would Freud say Cixous’ postmodernist portrayal of
Dora betrays her unresolved issues with her past life? Cixous’s unresolved issues seem to revolve around the patriarchal exploitation of women. Lyotard goes on to identify postmodernism as an illness operating similarly to dissociative identity disorder:
Just as the patient elaborates his present trouble by freely associating the more imaginary, immaterial, irrelevant bits with past situations, so discovering hidden meanings of his life, we can consider the work of Cézanne, Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Maleitch and finally Duchamp as a working through—what Freud called Durcharbeitung— operated by modernity on itself. If we give up this responsibility, it is certain
7 Jean-François Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern,” in Literary Theory, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1466. 8 Ibid.
56 that we are condemned to repeat, without any displacement, the modern neurosis, the Western Schizophrenia, paranoia, and so on.9
For Lyotard, disenchantment with modernism, and modernism itself, is a neurosis—an illness in society’s outlook on humanity in general and in particular one’s assessment of one’s own accomplishments. Postmodernism suppresses the modernist’s woe beneath a conglomerate of styles thrown together without the aid of the conscious mind, perhaps because thinking through the art, one must come to grips with modernism’s failings in art and other areas of life. The problem arises when the subconscious takes control and begins to speak through the visual medium of art. This problem is not that the art is detrimental, but that it bares the unresolved wounds of modernism, technology, and the forces of a visual domineering reality on the artist.
I would liken subconscious desires to a subconscious breaking with postmodernism.
These could reveal new identity shifts, which, yes, could become a negative neurosis like paranoia or schizophrenia, but in a positive light, we could notice these seemingly subconscious schisms as a revolt against the pressures of progress, against the fallacy that reality has three dimensions. Euclidean geometry may have the same dehumanizing power that socially forced identity constructs have. The gender binary has kept people tied up within a system of phallocentric dialectics that stifle both men and women and force them to simplify their natural complexities. Cubism and multiplicitous identity seem to me to be the perfect forms of resistance against a domineering, totalitarian aesthetic.
The Male Gaze as Culprit
How can cubism and multiple identities become forms of resistance? What are they rebelling against in feminist terms, specifically? The dehumanizing of women in the arts has often arrived through both a denial of agency in the making of art and a denial of
9 Ibid., 1468.
57 complete personhood in the artwork itself. As a whole, phallocentric society relegates female roles in theatre and other media into two-dimensional, flat personalities. The number of female roles has been consistently less than male roles, and usually the female roles contain less on many fronts, so by comparison a female role (generally speaking) lacks psychological complexity, speaking lines, comedic opportunities, agency in the action, courage, a self-gratifying sexuality, and even triumph. If a female role contains any of these, it is in order to demote her. One who is courageous in this type of medium does so within the system of phallocentrism.
This system, in its continual need to keep the phallus as a source of power, requires its lacking subjects to become objects through the lens of cinema. In her work “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” feminist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey says that phallocentrism needs to gaze upon the female: “The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated women to give order and meaning to its world.”10 To Mulvey, cinema offers the ultimate misogynistic medium for voyeurism. And this objectification goes hand-in-hand with a modernist approach to classifying art: “The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of
Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.”11 According to this statement, the camera lens does three specific things: 1. The camera creates a flat, ordered and pleasing illusion of reality. 2. The camera insists it does not exist, and 3. The camera stands in place of the spectator by focusing the spectator’s gaze on the moments of “reality,” i.e., the camera pretends to be the
10 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” in Theory & Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 2084. 11 Ibid., 2094.
58 audience’s eyes. Like the totalitarian aesthetic of modernism, the cinema strives to control the gaze, thereby placing both audience and the object on camera under its power.
As a historically marginalized body, the female consistently becomes a symbol for male satisfaction and remains such through the use of close-ups and two-dimensionality.
Through the focused gaze of the lens, a woman’s image is “stylized and fragmented by close- ups” that fetishize portions of her for the voyeur.12 This totalitarian art form would deem a close up as a synecdoche of female lack and of male control—both of the gaze and, by result, of the butchering of the female form.13 In film, a woman’s sexuality serves male relations, male validation, and male voyeurism. The system of cinema began as – and continues to be
– a misogynistic tool of pruriency.
Does this mean that any female in the public eye or in the camera’s sights automatically becomes a voyeuristic object? Can women ever take their bodies back from this speculation? Should women reject films? Are films unredeemable? Far from it. Though the libidinous style of cinema and the flattening of female bodies and psyches into nonaggressive, non-confrontational objects in the phallocentric system exist in films today, not all film is instantly voyeuristic. Even in 1975, Mulvey says a sector of cinema had begun to reject to totalitarian objectification of women:
This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest’, and highlights the way film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms.14
12 Ibid., 2091. 13 To be clear, I am not saying all cinema adheres to this totalitarian form or that women must leave film in a mass exodus – just as I am not saying that Modernist styles of architecture dehumanize the people who live in them. I am offering, through a feminist and postmodern tradition, a way of identifying dehumanizing trends in film for the sake of growing beyond them. 14 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 2095.
59 The camera must be acknowledged as a machine capturing its own, not the audience’s, gaze. The cinema has served a Modernist agenda by displaying gendered power differentiations and denying women agency. The cinema has imposed a viewpoint on the audience that denies the camera’s existence. This system must be acknowledged, the camera must be acknowledged, the dehumanizing, fetishizing close-ups must be acknowledged before we can break from them. While there are those in the film industry who are striving to offer more complex views of women and to offer a metatheatricality in the filming process, another avenue offers an interesting alternative to film: theatre.
Theatre as an alternative to cinema offers a deeper dimensional reality. Unlike cinema, theatre acknowledges the variance of viewpoints and presents humans as live, fully-formed bodies on stage. The unhindered gaze of a theatre audience can break the voyeur’s role and the solid present body of the woman becomes loosed from the controlling camera gaze. Theatre can serve as a postmodern rejection of the voyeuristic gaze of cinema.
The best way to show the full dimensionality of an image, to keep from dehumanizing the image, is to show all perspectives at once, that is, to offer a cubist presentation.
In the Pursuit of Phronesis:
A Casebook on The Dora Project
In respect for Freud’s own casebook chronicling his sessions with Dora, I have structured the second half of this chapter as a miniature casebook of my own, chronicling the phronesis of my thesis. According to philosopher Lou Marinoff, phronesis concerns
“practical applications of wisdom.”15 While exploring concepts of multiplicitous identities, cubism, and metaethics as they concern representations of the fictional historic figure Dora,
I have put my knowledge to the test practically through directing an experimental reading of Portrait of Dora (fall 2013) and conducting a theatre workshop that resulted in an
15 Lou Marinoff, Philosophical Practice (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2002), 94.
60 original play with music, The Dora Project (spring 2014). Marinoff says, “The art of effective implementation itself reposes on reliable methodology – in this context is a manifestation of
Phronesis – which is precisely what philosophical practitioners have to offer.”16 As a theatre practitioner who engages with research and philosophy in my practice, I keep the channel open between my study and my theatre. I continue to ask: How can we perform Dora? How can we manifest her? This is my phronesis.
While writing the thesis, I explored Cixous’ play Portrait of Dora to find modes of multiplicitous and metaethical performance avenues. The casting began in the summer of
2013, through a campus and citywide search.17 I had very little response. I casted two women I knew prior to the project. We worked with Meisner repetition games to keep the actors present and focused on their acting partner. The Meisner repetition approach appealed to me, because it gave us an immediate, in-the-moment tool for keeping actor connections while also offering them the skill of being present and honest without becoming lost in the potentially static identity of their characters.18 The dynamic variance of character that occurred in this repetition was akin to my research into multiplicitous identity theory. Character fluidity became important both theoretically and practically.
Phase One: The Impulse Read
The mode of rehearsals, I thought, should mirror the metaethical analysis in my thesis. So I employed an egalitarian model of performance where each participant had an equal voice in the rehearsing process, which would become manifest in the performance.
16 Ibid., 162. Italics original. 17 I dislike the feminine derivative of actor, since actress implies a diminutive form of the craft. I will refer to my actors (regardless of gender) as “actors,” which should be a unisex term, in my opinion. 18 An axiom concerning Meisnerian presence on stage is beautifully articulated by Melissa Bruder et al., Practical Handbook (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 45: “If you are executing your action fully and living moment to moment, you are doing your job. Resist the desire to make things up for the sake of making the scene more interesting; if you do, you will engender in yourself the habit of accepting and creating untruth and hypocrisy.”
61 For this first stretch of rehearsals, I wanted to focus on process, not results. The present- moment nature of Meisner and the practice of egalitarian discussion seemed conducive to a process-oriented approach. One of the women from the summer rehearsals stayed with us for the fall, I invited another woman I had known through the University to be in the cast, a friend of mine suggested a stage manager, and then we held a final casting call. The casting was also an egalitarian process, with the decision of the final two actors made through a collective vote. This happened in September 2013.
With the metaethical approach present in rehearsals, I wanted to incorporate the other two concepts – multiplicitous identity and cubism – into the performance as well.
Concerning cubism, I toyed with the question: What if Dora were personified as a living cubist portrait on stage? A manifestation of her cubist portrayal would be multiple Doras in the space. So I cast the reading in an explicitly cubist way. I told each woman we cast that
“Everyone will be Dora.” This required a shift in our assumptions of character and identity as static, closed, homogenous spheres. Building from Constantine Stanislavsky’s belief that the actor should be both herself and her character, we not only attempted to portray both self and character on stage, we gave the actors multiple identities to portray—each had a different aspect of Dora’s character to portray along with the multiple voices of the other characters whom Dora spoke for.19
This practical engagement with cubist and multiplicitous identities on stage caused me to question my earlier notions of character. As an audience member, I tend to imply a distinction between personas based on the distinctions of separate bodies on stage. I also imply cohesion of thought and character within each person on stage. I wanted to question
19 The actor must be “in the given circumstances of the role. He has to create a characteristic image. But he remains himself. Whenever he withdraws from himself, he kills the role.” Constantine Stanislavsky quoted by Vasili Toporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal, trans. Jean Benedetti (New York: Routledge, 2004), 107.
62 these assumptions. To question the implied boundaries of personages and individuals, I wanted to articulate the adverse. I needed to populate the stage with women whose identities were separate but connected, with schisms within bodies, synchronicities without, and a constant fluidity of identification. The object of the rehearsals was to collectively create an experimental reading of Portrait in which every actor was Dora and each absorbed the other characters’ voices to the extent that new narratives would take place.
The process of creating our experimental reading of Portrait consisted of experimenting with the text itself. Finding ways to question it. While Freud and Cixous used text as a medium of expression, our expression was inhibited by the text. What I mean is, if we wanted to perform our own écriture féminine with the script, we had already failed, in a sense, since the words preceded us. Cixous had written the text. It was hers. Instead of rewriting what she had written – as she had done with Freud – I proposed a self-imposed constraint: We could only speak the words on the page. Our text could only come from
Cixous’ play. I wanted to explore the potential for artistic freedom within the confines of a predetermined text.
Our freedom came through our own rupture of the text. Even though the actors said
Cixous’ words, I encouraged them to break the words from the bounds of characters. If they were all Dora, then every line spoken could be Dora’s. All of the contradictions naturally found in Cixous’ Dora would become magnified and further complicated by turning all the other characters into Dora’s perceptions. What would the result be? Would Dora subsume the other characters within her own psyche as elements of herself? If so, her multiplicity could not be denied vocally as well as bodily. Would Dora take the other characters on as memories of discussions? If so, her control of her memories would become evident as she enacted a reverse power dynamic by regulating the transmission of her and others’ history
(as both Freud and Cixous had done to Dora). The dynamics of either approach might have
63 become rote depending on how we divided up the lines. If one Dora stood in for Herr K. at all times, she might begin to seem like a female Herr K. Her multiplicity might suffer.
Though that process could work—having one play Dora playing Herr K., while another played Dora playing Freud, and so on—I wanted a more fluid identity symbiosis. I wanted a physical and verbal portrayal of Cixous’ woman as all.
Our strategy for obtaining this fluidity came through a process of devised readings of the script. Jumping off of their Meisner exercises, I encouraged them to view the script as a pool of words, and to view their impulses to speak as their invitation to engage with the pool, while remaining engaged with one another in the space. We employed this taxing exercise for weeks of rehearsals. Rehearsal began with a few Meisner sessions and then moved into the impulse read. No one had any set character, and the script did not have to be spoken in order. Sometimes a character’s lines would begin in one speaker’s mouth and finish in another’s; lines would be shared; a monologue became a cacophony of voices.
Certain lines in the script gained or lost their meaning when actors spoke them out of order or in the voice of another character. The women also moved through the space and created relationships through their impulse reading. Their ephemeral restructuring of the text became impetus for new movements, for alliances, for battles with one another, for jokes, for laughter, for dancing. The rehearsals became temporal locations of surprise. And each reading preceded periods of sadness, because that reading could never be repeated. It was theatre in one of its most transient states.
Perhaps this next phase of the experimental reading killed much of the energy and surprise in the process, but at the time, I felt we needed something more concrete to rely on.
The constant sessions of Meisner-style engagement and fast-paced impulses were difficult to sustain. So, I proposed splitting the script into four parts, altering the text’s formation
(not by changing words but) by imposing moments of cacophony, unison, and new relations
64 in text based on what we had discovered in some of our more energetic sessions. We all agreed, and after a lengthy period of voting on who was to speak which lines, I split the text, reorganized it for our cast, and color-coded their lines so as to keep the text as free as possible. Below I have included a section of our cutting and recasting of Sarah Burd’s translation of Portrait. It was originally color-coded to differentiate who said which line.
Each actor’s words were highlighted in a different color. Here is what it looks like in black and white:
I, too, was abandoning me.
I, too, was abandoning me.
I, too, was abandoning me.
I, too, was abandoning me.
FREUD's voice As if she were running away from DORA (continuing, stranded)
herself. So as not to arrive. So as not to die, either. That's when I saw him again.
FREUD's voice Looking for him everywhere, forever. There! It was Him! So distant! A
As if He existed. As if he were waiting only for her. few yards from me. Still, too far.
Only for her arrival, before he'd disappear. So far. I knew that some day.
Everything that was happening to her was a happening There was no reason to hope.
from the past. She was living in her memory. Fallen Everything separates us. He told
prey to her past. Without any hope of ever reaching the me: (Frau K's voice) "'Thus,
present. nothing is different." And I
DORA She encouraged me to live, unaware of my couldn't reach him because, here
terrible suffering. Which I can't even express. I where I am, nothing is alive. I
couldn't even cry. was back in the past.
FREUD Completely lost, between desire and love.
Completely lost, between desire and love.
! These lines were broken up in the following way, with 1, 2, 3, and 4 symbolizing the different actors:
65 1. 2. 3. and 4. (simultaneously) I, too, was abandoning me.
3. As if she were running away from herself. So as not 4. (continuing, stranded) That's when to arrive. So as not to die, either. I saw him again. There! It was Him!
So distant! A few yards from me. 3. Looking for him everywhere, forever. As if He Still, too far. So far. I knew that existed. As if he were waiting only for her. some day. Only for her arrival, before he'd disappear. There was no reason to hope. Everything that was happening to her was a Everything separates us. He told me: happening from the past. She was living in her memory. Fallen prey to her past. Without any 1. "Thus, nothing is different." hope of ever reaching the present.
4. 2. And I couldn't reach him because, She encouraged me to live, unaware of my terrible here where I am, nothing is alive. I suffering. Which I can't even express. I was back in the past. couldn't even cry. ! 1. and 2. Completely lost, between desire and love.
! This restructuring of the text was enjoyable, but as soon as the parts were assigned, we found a new difficulty. They could no longer make the text their own through appropriating it anew. There were no more surprises, and the rehearsals felt more traditional, in the sense that I became more concerned with the pacing of dialogue and the blocking than with the exploration. If we had a longer period of living with the newly split text, we might have made a cleaner cut, more polished show, but perhaps that was not the point. The point was to experiment, and experiment we did. We discovered moments of life in rehearsal, moments of presence, and moments of vulnerability that were insightful, life- affirming, and exciting to witness. The point was not to create a show for the audience; the point was to create an experience for us, to manifest the phronesis of my studies, to ask how
Dora could speak anew in the confines of a text.
Phase Two: Work-shopping The Dora Project
While I loved the dynamic synergy of creation during our fall rehearsals, I also was struck by how tenuous it was. We might have a day of fast-paced dialogue and exploratory blocking and engagement among the actors – a full fifty minutes of lively creation – and then experience a rehearsal in which actors seemed static, tired, and disconnected. The
66 actors were engaging with the material, but the process itself was so demanding of constant creation that plateaus became inevitable. For the spring, I wanted to explore creation of a show through a group workshop, with a month or so of creation, followed by an editing period in which we would collectively decide upon the trajectory of the plot, the characters, and the story. This plan demanded that the cast become integral to the creation in a different manner. Instead of engaging creatively with a text, they became the creators of the text. With an all female cast, female director, and female stage manager, we embarked on an écriture féminine of our own.20
I had enjoyed the exciting ephemeral moments in-process during the fall’s devising rehearsals, but I was unsure how to both sustain that exploratory fervor that seemed to come and go in waves and to present a show that contained the same fervor, along with an actual story an audience could follow. While I understand narrative seems to have fallen out of vogue in fringe art, I myself have always appreciated the power of story, of characters whose depth can rival a real human’s psyche. A downside to experimental fringe theatre, from what I have witnessed, seems to be a reliance on stage pictures and noises that collectively offer an affect without much substance. Often the characters in these works seem to be random amalgamations of cloth, makeup, props, and voices. Often these works
20 To be clear, we did include a male in the rehearsal process. Charles Poole had joined the project for the fall to run Meisner exercises and offer feedback on the acting. One concerned with feminist issues as well, Charles offered great feedback and encouragement for the process in the fall. We kept him on for the spring as more of a plot consultant and acting coach. His experience with Aristotelian plot structures became invaluable during our editing process. He also showed himself to be quite adept during the composition and musical adaption process. While some might think that our écriture féminine was compromised by the presence and influence of a male in the creation space, I would disagree on two fronts. First: I have never believed that creation of feminist works should be anti-male. My feminist aesthetic is similar to Cixous’, which seeks for the dissolution of the gender binary as a source of contention, power-struggle, injustice, and forced character based on gender. Therefore the presence of a male is not automatically antagonistic. Écriture féminine is not only for women. To exclude men from the creation process entirely would continue the dichotomy of the gender binary, to which I am opposed. Second: Charles believed in our project and fully supported our positions as women seeking to empower women. His concerns, feedback, and criticisms were always intended as supplemental and for the greater good of the project.
67 rely on a gimmick—whether a repetitive action or an overwrought sense of irony evidenced in the mixture of adverse actions and songs. For The Dora Project, I wanted a story, a narrative, not necessarily in a linear sense, but one in which the historiography and research achieved was not lost beneath stage pictures and makeup. I knew more could be done with Dora’s story, and while Cixous’ own play was engaging for the cast, I wanted to explore creation in a more dynamic way than simply appropriating Cixous’ script.
I wanted this second phase to reveal the realities of the treatment of hysteria our modern-day media has ignored. Unfortunately, media portrayals have often veered into the realm of romanticized portrayals of the disease. They make illness romantic and turn doctor patient relationships into steamy romances with a binary of powerful, handsome men and weak, beautiful women. This has been the case with films like Hysteria (2011), A
Dangerous Method (2011), and Augustine (2012). The films themselves offer a fictionalized, romanticized version of life meant to sell tickets and get laughs. But they exclude the overwhelming realities of many hysterics who faced brutal treatments and were exposed to cruel psychologies. The current trend of the media plays up sexual tension in the doctor’s office, all but excluding the realities of treatment (besides genital manipulation21) and making the sufferers of the disease nothing more than sex-hungry women. The realities were much more disturbing than a quick session of orgasms in a doctor’s office. Women were treated with hydrotherapy—jets of cold water sprayed sometimes on their genitals, sometimes on their backs. They also could be electrocuted without the aid of anesthesia in a painful, physically scarring process, hypnotized, poked in the arm or leg with sharp needles, etc. As a moment in the distant past that still has no complete definition, hysteria
21 And even when Hysteria did represent Granville’s hammer, it did so within a completely fictionalized context concerning Granville’s identity, age, and ethics of medical practice. This film also neglected the seedy side of hysteria, the potential mental and physical disorders. In Hysteria, hysterics just need sex, and they are fine. This is nothing more than a repackaging of phallocentric propaganda that has circulated within the medical community since the ancient Greeks.
68 remains a mystery. My cast and I wanted to present hysteria as a complex matrix of mental illness, physical illness, and social pressures without explicitly giving a definitive answer as to what hysteria was. We needed things to be as complex as possible, and this meant taking our time to research the history of the disease.
The spring rehearsal process became much more intensive and far-reaching than I had originally thought. We began with a syllabus in which I articulated our trajectory: a month of research, a month of writing lines, lyrics, and songs, a brief editing period, and running rehearsals. We began in January, and we opened in April. At the time I created the syllabus, I must confess, I was not fully confident that my proposed time frame would achieve results corresponding with the deadlines. The four-woman cast, stage manager, and acting coach from the fall stayed on-board for the spring, so this second phase felt like a new level for an established group. We were ready for the workshop to begin.
The first month I led them in dramaturgical research about Dora, Freud, and hysteria. We began with an in-depth study of portions of the Portrait script, which we had become so accustomed to over the fall. Each actor took a portion of the script to read and to engage with theatrically. These sections became fodder for the cast’s creative works. They returned with brief responses to the reading. I encouraged them to make their responses theatrical in nature—whether written, enacted, embodied, or created as static art. These responses could be poems, songs, monologues, art, dance, or theatre pieces.
After finding areas of the script we thought could be reinvented for theatre, we dove into the history of the historic people Portrait was based upon. First, we explored Freud’s own writings. Since this was not a full-blown class, I did not want our research to become too time-consuming, so I kept the readings under ten pages at a time. With the help of my stage manager, who was also experienced in Freud’s works, I chose portions of Freud’s writings for the cast: The Uncanny, The Interpretation of Dreams, the full essay “Medusa’s
69 Head,” and the introduction to Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Next we focused on the history of hysteria, specifically where hysteria was between 1850 and 1900. I gave them sections from Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad & Sad: A History of Women and the Mind
Doctors, Georges Didi-Huberman’s Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière, and Hannah S. Decker’s Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900.
In February, we began plotting the story. One of the most difficult questions concerned our topic. My plot concept from January had been simple: “The story of a hysteric resisting. As the show progresses, songs reveal the story, and the blank canvas becomes a cacophony of color—the manifestation of her story. She is punk, she is raw, she is bold!”
This hysteric woman’s identity was a mystery to us. Her trajectory was also a mystery. I intentionally left the tenor of the ending vague. Resistance does not always end happily, and the resistor does not have to be in the right, have a heart of gold, or have a sterling character.
From our research on hysteria, the cast became enamored with the story of Charcot and Augustine in the teaching hospital. Jean-Martin Charcot would become another Freud for us, another man trying to cure hysteria, but I did not want either him or Freud to carry some instantly negative ideology. The plotting process became difficult, with each actor bringing her idea of a basic plot outline to rehearsal. We went through multiple concepts about who would inhabit the story. We wanted to nod to Dora and Freud and Charcot and
Augustine, but we also wanted to make a distinction between the textual Dora and the historic Ida Bauer. The question of representation also surfaced in this moment. We wondered what would be important for our show to symbolize. What/Who could we represent? What/Who should we represent? As we continued to meet and discuss possibilities of performance, the question of the ethics of representation influenced each one of us, and we each struggled to find a common ground of ethical representation.
70 One discussion we had was what plight we were to focus on. Did we want to use our platform to lend a voice to other oppressed women’s groups? Women of color, women fighting in third world countries against genocide and mutilation, queer women, women trapped in the current narratives of America’s date-rape culture? We were all moved by these stories, and we discussed in depth the trouble with representation when the one on stage is not an exact replica. We had discussed casting a woman of color to nod to the universality of female oppression, but we realized that would have been an unfair simplification. The myriad of social and racial injustices occurring globally cannot be encapsulated in one non-white body. We could so easily cheapen the complexity of injustices by encapsulating them all within one show. Include everything and nothing will stand out.
The audience becomes overwhelmed, and the message is lost. I suggested we keep our questions of representation centered on the women we had been researching with regards to hysteria: Dora and Augustine.
Again, the question of the veracity of representation arose. Did we need to be
Viennese or French to best embody Dora and Augustine? None of us was a perfect replica of
Dora. In fact, none of us had strictly European roots, though all could pass for “white” and its immediate Euro-ethnic implications. So, did this mean we did not have the right to portray Dora and Augustine on stage? There is a difficulty with assuming to know how to represent all injustice, but perhaps a certain type of universality can be applied. In
Morality: An Introduction to Ethics philosopher Bernard Williams says: “... it cannot be a consequence of the nature of morality itself that no society ought ever to interfere with another, or that individuals from one society confronted with the practice of another ought, if rational, to react with acceptance. To draw these consequences is the characteristic (and
71 inconsistent) step of vulgar relativism.”22 Dora and Augustine had stories that we all believed were still applicable today. The gendered social strata in our own communities still contain too many similarities to the strata that oppressed women in the 1800s with the diagnosis of hysteria. We may be different from Dora and Augustine, but we all felt their stories were the ones we needed to share. And after growing as a collective in the experimental reading process, we decided not to cast another person but to work with the small cast we had.
Though we were not identical to Dora or Augustine, we had researched them and attempted to know them better. Nussbaum says such an altruistic effort has humanizing effects. Certain differences such as “boundaries of race, of gender, and of sexual orientation” may seem insurmountable, but through literature and the imagination, we can find areas of intersection. As Nussbaum iterates: “In these cases, then, it is all the more urgent to cultivate the basis for compassion through the fictional exercise of imagination.”23 We cared about Dora and Augustine. We even cared about Freud. Aware of our differences but using our imaginations to bridge the gap the best we could, we began scripting our show.
The flow of our script took cues from the six basic elements of drama found in
Aristotle’s Poetics: “plot, characters, verbal expression, thought, [song-composition, and] visual adornment.”24 Though we in no way felt compelled to stick with every aspect, we, as
Aristotle does, found plot our primary focus. We made our plot complex by including peripety (or reversal), recognition, and pathos.25 Remaining faithful to cubism, we created separate moments of peripety, recognition, and pathos for each character, and we
22 Bernard Williams, Morality, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 25-26. 23 Nussbaum, “Narrative Imagination,” 2311. 24 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (University of Michigan Press, 1970), 26. In this list he inverts song-composition and spectacle. I have adjusted the list with brackets to match his latter fuller explanation of the tiered importance of each element (plot being the highest, spectacle being the lowest). 25 Ibid., 37.
72 attempted to keep these moments as fully dimensional as possible (these dimensions being differing perspectives or interpretations of what was occurring on the stage).
As a final nod to Poetics, and to the classical delineation of play structures, we ordered and titled segments of the play similarly: Prologue, Parodos, Episodes (separated by choral songs), and an Exodos.26 The Prologue and Parodos offered us a way of presenting both spectacle and character entrances before speeding up the plot. We decided to orient the production within the framework of episodes, rather than scenes or acts, for two reasons.
The first reason was the play-on-words of hysteric episodes, or episodes of illness. For our fictional version of Dora, these episodes also represent the episodes of treatment she undergoes to get well—beginning with episodes of electroconvulsive therapy and moving into episodes of hypnosis. Within each episode we created a choral ode in the form of an original song that the actors sang and played. The second reason for the episodes was that they offered an opportunity for Brechtian distancing by serving as stand-alone periods that have within themselves rising and falling action while advancing the plot of the whole.27
Bertolt Brecht desired to show his audience a theatre in which the characters, settings, and plot while entertaining were powerful vessels for change. He wanted an active audience who engaged mentally and vocally with the show before them. If they were unhappy with the way things were portrayed, he wanted them up in arms, because the theatre should represent reality. And the reality he saw was a false one imposed by a totalitarian society. Theatre could help people break free of their social bounds by showing them the illusion of reality. If the theatre space could present itself as an obvious space of imagination and constantly break any semblance of illusion, then the audience could not
26 Ibid., 76. 27 “As feminists looked to a theatrical practice rooted in a desire for political change it rejected the Stanislavsky-based legacy and found an ally in Brecht—not to adopt his performance methods, but to engage them in the staging of a feminist politics and aesthetics.” Elaine Aston, Feminism & Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 6.
73 help but view the theatre as a false space. Thus, they could begin to see society as an illusion as well, and then the revolution would come. In Brecht on Theatre: The
Development of an Aesthetic, Brecht says he trusts his audience to think for themselves:
The audience has got to be a good enough psychologist to make its own sense of the material I put before it. All I can guarantee is the absolute correctness and authenticity of what happens in my plays; I’m prepared to bank on my knowledge of human beings. But I leave the maximum freedom of interpretation. The sense of my plays is immanent. You have to fish it out for yourself.28
We also wanted to trust our audience to make decisions for themselves, to find their own conversation with hysteria, with the past, and to strengthen their personal ethical response. Yes, I did hope our theatre could motive people into action.
Part of trusting our audience involved offering a complex portrayal of the women in the play. The stories of Dora and Augustine in history often seem contradictory, and instead of imposing a linearity on them, we decided to show the contradictions, so the audience themselves could discuss the character changes. Multiplicity sometimes involves presenting quixotic personages. When these personages were historic, I felt a greater need to give voice to all of the facets we could find. Brecht also sees the importance of complexity in characters: “Even when [a] character behaves by contradictions that’s only because nobody can be identically the same at two unidentical moments. Changes in his exterior continually lead to an inner reshuffling. The continuity of the ego is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew. We have to show things as they are.”29
Again, the linearity of personhood is a myth, a construct which we combatted through the portrayal of multiplicitous identities. The characters also went through a process of distancing that included a further separation of their identities.
28 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 14. 29 Ibid., 15.
74 Concerning Brechtian distancing, we wanted to keep our audience actively engaged with the story while also trying to deconstruct the illusion of reality put forth by totalitarian aesthetics. These aesthetics (often found in film and other digital media) and the ways in which we have questioned them through theatrical engagement include the following:
1. The voyeuristic objectification of women through close-ups and forced perspective of the forgotten camera lens. We have kept our show free from forced perspective. We present women with bodies and minds intact, and we give the audience freedom from the camera lens. Through the use of metatheatrical scenes, presentational breaking of the fourth wall, and visibility of the lighting and effects apparatus, we also make the setting obviously theatrical to combat any illusion of reality. We are in a theatre space, and we make sure the audience does not forget that.
2. The Modernist ideology that our world is steadily progressing and humanity is always improving. We have brought our modern-day woman, Dora, into contact with the hysterics of the past. She suffers from some of the same psychological fears and wounds of these hysterics, so the concept of progress is thrown open to question. Have we really grown as a society? Has our conception of women’s health grown more humane? Has our treatment of psychologically disturbed women progressed? I left these questions intentionally unanswered in the play in order to encourage debate among audience members.
3. The false reality of a three-dimensional world. We question the three-dimensional reality with an expressionistic space on stage, which represents Dora’s mind, and with the conglomeration of differing times and places all imposing on one another (hopefully without the loss of impact from any one in particular) we show a world in which the separation of time, space, and invisible space is a construct of society. If we can, through a cubist
75 portrayal of Dora’s mental facets and of her relation to the past and present, question the reality of the linearity of time and the three-dimensionality of space, then we can begin to question the social structure that imposes this upon us.
4. The socially-imposed unity of identity. We have created a solipsistic mindscape where Dora is everyone, and everyone is Dora. The multiple identities are presented as her potential coping mechanism in a world that forces her to be singular, homogenous, linear.
We have written each character with a complexity we hope shows through in the performance. No one character is perfect or evil, each has a matrix of desires, fears, strengths, and weaknesses, and each one must find her own way of confirming these discrepancies within her own self, while Dora as the potential progenitor of these beings in her mind must find a way to survive and thrive with her other selves. Again, this multiplicity is not explicitly confirmed as a good coping mechanism or condemned as a disease. Is multiplicity a debilitating coping mechanism like post-traumatic stress disorder?
Is multiplicity a mental disorder that cannot be cured but only controlled by medication, i.e., is the only form of multiplicitous identity schizophrenia? Is multiplicity a strength or a weakness? I have attempted to pose these questions in the performance without offering definitive answers, again, so that the audience can begin to take a more active role and decide for themselves what they think about the characters.
The interludes between episodes became moments between sleeping and waking.
These moments were accentuated with the voice of Dora’s own doctor fading in and out, the voices of the other women, and the sound of the dragon. Setting Dora’s episodes in treatment-induced comas, we accessed certain symbols, references, and imagery that would be seen as fanciful expressionism, but the dream state made these also possible within a potentially realistic framework. The acknowledgment of being in Dora’s mind aided our suspension of disbelief.
76 For a long time the dragon was a mystery. We waited until the second-to-final draft of the script before I told the cast what I thought the dragon was. It began as an actor’s dream. She explained how she often could not see in her dreams. When she could see, her dreams would have odd creatures in them. Once, she saw a dragon. I was fascinated by the feeling of dreaming in pitch-blackness, since this phenomenon was one I have also experienced at times, sometimes coupled with sleep paralysis. Also, the sensation of being confronted with a dragon and then losing one’s sight seemed horrific. I decided to play with the concept of the dragon, since it was a symbolic being that could represent something or someone else. We often discussed the purpose of the dragon, what its function was, what it really was, and whether it would consume Dora in the end.
Happy endings became our cast and crew’s obsession. How would the story end?
Could Dora win? What would she be defeating if she did win? I think the rest of them had an easier time imagining Dora defeating the dragon than I did. At first, we all began toying with the idea that the dragon represented Dora’s doctor – the voice between episodes. Some wanted her to stand up to her doctor and reject treatment, with the implication that the doctor’s treatments were fraudulent. I immediately became concerned with this approach since our knowledge of these therapies was from a mainly historic basis. Yes, I would say electroshock treatment in the 1800s was harmful, since it often produced horrific, painful results, but I did not believe I would say the same about current electroconvulsive treatments. Since our Dora was a modern-day woman, and her treatments were not the ones Ida or Augustine experienced, her leave-taking would mean something quite different to an audience. Would our message to the audience suddenly become “Leave your psychiatrists, because they are all hacks.”?
In our discussions, we attempted to find common ground with Freud and Charcot, though Freud became easier for some of us to understand. Freud’s treatment of Ida might
77 seem by today’s standards cruel and dehumanizing, but he did not intend them to be such.
Our portrayal of Freud strove to be as balanced as possible. Charcot began to take on more of a comedic role, one in which we related him to a carnival barker, complete with a depersonalizing mask and magic tricks. Just because we attempted to create an ethically complex look at hysteria does not mean we did not shy away from presenting obvious injustices on stage – like Charcot’s treatment of Augustine. I would suggest that Charcot desired to fix hysteria, but his methods turned ill women into public spectacles, not only for scientists but for the ogling masses; and his scientific photographs became pornographic in nature and intentionally sensual. Charcot became a commentary on both the Salpêtrière and the current media’s state of female objectification.
The Dora Project succeeded because we met our basic goals of practice-based research. We researched, crafted, and wrote our own play based on the story of Freud and
Dora/Ida Bauer. We also exceeded our expectations by writing original song lyrics and musical compositions. What we began was a process of therapy on stage. A postmodern,
Brechtian therapy. We merged differing time periods, people, and ideas (as a postmodern painter or architect would), blended our own dreams and experiences with those of historic characters. and presented our story in a Brechtian form for the purpose of engaging an audience on a metaethical plane.
In the end, the dragon became something none of us could easily reconcile with—
Dora. If this is the solipsistic world of a multiplicitous mind in which her identities take on separate forms across eras like a cubist work of art, then what stops Dora from being her own enemy, too? Perhaps her own power and unpredictability frightens her in such a way that she has had to separate it from herself and conceptualized it as a separate being altogether. She has learned to see this side of herself as something evil, unpredictable, something that challenges the phallocentric totalitarian aesthetic. But when she finally
78 embraces it as part of her identity, we leave her in a moment of strength, punk rock expressionism, Brechtian verfremdungseffekt.30 Has she overcome? Has she fallen into the depths of madness? Has her madness saved her? Is the dragon a sight of pity or fear now that she wears its skin? Perhaps Dora’s dragon is like the Medusa – something who appears as a terrifying monster in the history books, but who is in desperate need of acceptance. As Cixous says: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her.
And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”31
30 Also known as Brechtian distancing effect. 31 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1951.
79 CONCLUSION
A MANIFESTO FOR CUBIST ETHICS AS A FORM OF THERAPEUTIC THEATRE
Multiple personality ... is a comprehensible ... rational ... response to an intolerable situation, a way of maintaining some degree of agency in the face of profoundly soul-destroying attacks on one’s ability to construct a sense of self. Naomi Scheman1
I have begun this thesis with a definitively proposed process of refraining from judging Freud and Cixous’ choices of representation. Instead, I have done my best to present the ethical matrix behind each of their representations of Dora and themselves.
Yet, in this conclusion, I feel I must bring up an important issue concerning representation of female resistance, not in an effort to exclude certain resistances, but to nod to the potential setbacks and injustices inherent in certain types of representation, i.e., a multiplicitous manifestation of illness as strength.
In Chapter Three I mentioned that multiplicitous identities could signify multiple possibilities for psychological health. Multiplicitous identity could signify anything from an artistic courage in the face of a totalitarian aesthetic to allegiance to one’s personal sense of self, from a post-traumatic stress disorder to a case of schizophrenia. According to
Scheman, multiplicity does have a dark side: “The most striking and clear-cut cases of internal multiplicity are cases of multiple personality, a pathological condition typically caused by severe childhood abuse, that is, by the most poisonous of pedagogies.”2 I have spoken of multiplicitous identities as avenues for transgressing the bounds of phallocentric society and the gender binary, but to speak of multiplicity without acknowledging it as characteristic as well of severe mental illness is to ignore a stark reality, an infection that feeds on the mind of the schizophrenic. Multiplicity can be resistance or illness.
1 Scheman, 164. 2 Ibid.
80 In “Re-imagining the female hysteric: Hélène Cixous’ Portrait of Dora” theatre scholar Sarah French evaluates Portrait of Dora as a potentially harmful portrayal of hysteria that sends the wrong message to women. French claims Dora was the poster child for subversive feminism since the ‘50s and continued to play this role well into the early
‘90s, with feminists interpreting Freud’s practice of transference on Dora as evidence of misogyny. French criticizes Portrait of Dora as Cixous’ attempt to glorify hysteria.3
According to French, “the female hysteric is not a viable model for contemporary feminism.”4 French saw Cixous’s play as propaganda for the valorization of the diseased and mentally disturbed. The historic person of Dora, i.e., Ida Bauer, suffered from the wounds of rape and neurosis, and yet feminists have interpreted her disease as the determined actions of a revolutionary for women’s rights.
Some women diagnosed with hysteria may have suffered from little more than dissatisfaction with their roles in the home. They were not socially acceptable models of ladies, mothers, daughters, or wives. For these women, multiplicity was a coping mechanism against a phallocentric society. Other hysterics, if diagnosed today, would be considered epileptics, schizophrenics, bipolar, anxiety or PTSD sufferers. Can we conflate them with the “indomitable” hysterics Cixous talks about?5 Should today’s female icon be the schizophrenic body? The PTSD body? Should women refuse medication because their schizophrenia or their epilepsy or their bipolar disorder is their écriture féminine?
Encouraging the symptoms of mental illnesses is a dangerous and potentially deadly pastime. I do not propose that mental illnesses stand in as signs of female strength. But illness should not be excluded from theatre. The representation of mental illnesses on stage does have a certain efficacy, but just like representations of Dora, these should be treated
3 Sarah French, “Re-imagining the Female Hysteric,” Traffic (Parkville) 10 (January 2008): 247-62. 4 Ibid., 259. 5 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 1953.
81 with metaethical respect and embraced as issues of a multiplicitous nature. The theatre has not yet fully embraced the many possibilities of approaching these issues. But the form of theatre is distinctively situated to begin this dialogue of cubist ethics.
Uniquely present, ephemeral, and live, theatre has the potential to soothe, confront, and connect that other media do not. Theatre can be therapy. Theatre scholar Fintan Walsh says that theatre and therapy are interrelated: “Theatre dialogues with therapy, positing itself as a related, if not an alternative practice for gaining insight into ourselves and our relationships.”6 Theatre has the power to reveal subconscious desires. Action in the theatre takes place in a dreamlike space between reality and fiction. Like Cixous’ mind, the stage becomes inhabited with characters. Like Freud’s office, the stage can be a battlefield or a secure shelter, and either way the patient’s psyche is the topic of the day. Who is this patient? Even if the patient is embodied on stage as a particular person, like Portrait’s
Dora, or as the entire cast, like The Dora Project, the patient is a collective. Everyone in the space, actors, spectators, and crew, embodies the patient. Theatre has the opportunity to engage with every participant at levels unplumbed by others. Emotions, thoughts, fantasies, desires, fears, traumas reside deeply within the theatre, and the collective process of joining together to engage in the story a certain form of therapy can happen.
Postmodern theatre and a cubist ethics form of therapeutic theatre are slightly different operations. Postmodern theatre is similar to therapeutic theatre in its confrontation of modernism – which, as I mentioned in Chapter Three, includes fallacies of forced perspective, progress, three-dimensionality, linear time, and unity of identity.
Modernism imposes a totalitarian aesthetic that postmodernism rages against. Postmodern theatre can represent psychopathological drama, as Walsh says: “Psychological drama
6 Fintan Walsh, Theatre & Therapy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73.
82 turns into psychopathological drama when the source of the suffering is no longer a battle between two obvious forces, but a battle between a conscious urge and a repressed one.”7
In contrast, through cubist ethics engages with multiplicitous identities in a self and socially aware therapeutic theatre. Great advancements can happen socially and politically when the theatre becomes a place of full engagement that exposes the fallacy of modernism, which would deny multiplicity. In the struggle to mold itself into a phallocentric, totalitarian utopia, society has taken a scalpel to the aspects that threaten it and labeled them tumors. We are all covered in blood. The cancerous tumors are malignant, they say, and so they chop them off. Our bodies, our memories, our characteristics, our clothing styles, our (non)religious stances, our (a)political desires, our (a)sexual needs, our taste buds, our voices, our identities all become expendable. All of these are signifiers of society’s inability to meet our needs as multiplicitous creatures. And the totalitarian aesthetic attempts to carve each of us into automatons.
The theatre is a bloody place filled with wounded people, some of whom have already participated in the group lobotomy. As Artaud proclaimed in his vision of a theatre of cruelty, the disease is the theatre. Artaud says the plague of theatre has the power for
“impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the masks to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world ... and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it.”8 In therapeutic theatre, we become aware of the bloody struggle within society, we see (in a Brechtian9
7 Ibid., 9-10. 8 Antonin Artaud, Theatre and it’s Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 31-32. 9 Though seemingly disparate in approach and theory, both Brecht and Artaud offered the tools we needed to stage our research for a certain affect. Through this process, I learned the value of
83 sense) the fallacy of civilization, the man behind the curtain who would kill us. And we also see the multiplicity of our selves. What we can become. Like Cixous’ new woman, we become reborn by taking ourselves back. In the theatre, this politically dangerous activity can take place. We have witnessed the fourth dimension, and we will not forget it exists.
The phallocentric machine has lobotomized many of us, and we are still waiting in line to hand over our brains, and with them our multiplicities. Running in the opposite direction is the path to the therapeutic theatre, not to be confused with modernist theatre or subconscious postmodern theatre. In the therapeutic theatre women engage on and off stage in a rediscovering of their subconscious desires. Irigaray says women specifically need
“to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language.”10 They do not keep themselves hidden anymore. They need not fear that men or other women will steal their minds. They take out the grey matter hidden in their pockets and they speak it, boldly.
In the theatre we can rebuild ourselves. We can offer an existential reversal of the lobotomy, but we never promise to homogenize sanity. This is our therapeutic theatre.
Scheman says: “Therapy can succeed not by integrating all the personalities into one, or by making all but one go away, but by creating the possibility for respectful conversation among them, facilitating their mutual recognition and acceptance.”11 Let us create this theatre, where we embody differences, disjuncture, not for the sake of temporarily soothing our postmodern confusion. We employ multiplicity consciously. We know where our shadows lie, what tore us apart, and we speak them plainly.
performance as research. Our practical experience raised questions for future work, exploring the collisions of dramaturgical and practical strategies in theory-based performance. 10 Luce Irigaray, This Sex, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76. 11 Scheman, 164.
84 APPENDIX A
THE DORA PROJECT
Concept by Evangeline Ciupek
Book and Lyrics by Evangeline Ciupek, Robin Mackey, Melissa Ordeneaux, Alexa Palmero, and Danielle Wirsansky
Music composed and arranged by Evangeline Ciupek and Charles Poole
Script Advisors Evangeline Ciupek, Marie Patrick, and Charles Poole
24 March 2014
Final Draft
Polyphonic Bonsai Productions
85 Cast of Characters:
DORA - A modern-day woman undergoing electroconvulsive shock therapy.
IDA BAUER - Based on Ida from Freud’s sessions. She has a special connection with Dora. After a childhood bout of appendicitis, she drags her right foot. She has moments of aphonia.
AUGUSTINE - Based on Augustine from Charcot’s teaching hospital, the Salpêtrière. Yes, perhaps the connection with St. Augustine is important. He is the patron saint of eye trouble. Like Augustine in Charcot’s hospital, she has one arm that, for some reason cannot feel anything. Through the process of the play, this arm becomes immovable.
THE MADONNA - A religious female Icon, a rock star, an addict, a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
CHARCOT - Based on head doctor of the Salpêtrière Jean-Martin Charcot. Wears a mask. Played by AUGUSTINE.
FREUD - Based on Sigmund Freud. Wears a mask. Played by THE MADONNA.
DOCTOR - Dora’s physician.
Dialogue in brackets [ ] optional.
86 PROLOGUE
(Darkness.)
DOCTOR: Are you ready? We’re almost good to go. You can have your dolly when we’re done. Comfy? Okaaaya. Well, (coughs) we’re gonna let you sleep now, and I want you to count backwards from 20 to zero, okay? Can you do that for me? I’ll count out loud with you. (Sounds of various medical instruments ramping up, clinking of metal, and the voice slowly becomes muffled)
(As DOCTOR counts down, the voices of the four women ebb and flow throughout the space, talking over the last words of the previous woman. This portion is timed so that the women are silent for the DOCTOR’s lines “three, two, one.”)
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,
IDA: (simply) Look at me.
THE MADONNA: (yelling) LOOK AT ME.
DORA: (whispering) Look at me.
IDA: Do I frighten you?
AUGUSTINE: Look me in the eyes.
DORA: (whispering) Why are you doing this?
THE MADONNA: (whispering) Look at me.
IDA: (yelling) Do I scare you?
AUGUSTINE: (whispering) Are you intrigued?
THE MADONNA: Would you like to know my mysteries?
DORA: (whispering) Look at me.
IDA: (yelling) Do I ... (whispering) intimidate you?
AUGUSTINE: The way I make you stand?
87 ALL WOMEN: (whispering) Erect.
AUGUSTINE: (whispering) Do I horrify you?
ALL VOICES: (yelling) LOOK AT ME!
THE MADONNA: I’ll turn you to stone!
AUGUSTINE: (whispering) I’ll stop you in your tracks.
IDA: (whispering) I won’t let you do this to me anymore.
DORA: Stop!
DOCTOR: Three, two, one.
(Doctor’s voice is interrupted by a flash of light and a sound like static electricity.)
PARODOS
(Darkness. In the distance, a low rumble is heard.)
DORA: (from the back of the audience) I can’t see. Hello? I want to go now. Turn on the lights!
(Pure white spot hits THE MADONNA from above and on the sides. She stands on the highest platform. She is crowned with glory. The projection hits both her and the white canvas behind her with an image of renaissance-style brilliant radiance. She appears like Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. She glows.)
DORA: Oh my god. (THE MADONNA smiles.) Where did you come from? (DORA shields her eyes from the brightness.) Who are you?
(THE MADONNA is silent)
DORA: Am I dead?
THE MADONNA: You are lost. I am here to save you.
(In the distance is the sound of something large approaching—the DRAGON.)
DORA: Why do I need saving?
(The sound of the DRAGON grows as if he is sprinting toward them. DORA becomes
88 uneasy on her feet as the ground shakes. She turns her back on THE MADONNA to look toward the sound.)
THE MADONNA: Keep looking at me!
(She raises her arms as if to bless DORA or shield herself.)
(AUGUSTINE runs up from Stage Left in a panic, as if running from the DRAGON. She is out of breath, holds a black blindfold, and meets DORA who is too scared to speak. Augustine tries to pull DORA away from THE MADONNA and out of the way of the DRAGON. The DRAGON approaches as lights intensify in red and orange. Smoke increases. AUGUSTINE tries to shield DORA’s eyes from the sight, but she gives this up and decides to blindfold DORA with a superhuman knot DORA cannot untie. DORA struggles to take it off, but she is helpless.)
(The DRAGON roars. DORA crumbles to the ground and cowers in the smoke. THE MADONNA exits Stage Right. AUGUSTINE runs off Stage Left. The only light is connected with the approach of the DRAGON. At the DRAGON’s arrival, a burst of fog jets out from above and behind the audience, and a red spot shines through it onto DORA, making the DRAGON felt rather than seen behind the audience. The DRAGON breathes heavily. IDA BAUER enters from Stage Left. She sees the DRAGON.)
IDA: I hate the smell of smoke.
(She discovers Dora and stands over her. She looks up at the DRAGON. Curses. Turns back to DORA. Frantically shaking her.)
Quick! Get up! I won't be burned because of you!
(The smoke increases, lights become intensely bright as the DRAGON roars.)
(Blackout.)
FIRST EPISODE
DOCTOR: Dora! Dora, calm down. (Hold her down.) You may notice a slight tingling on the sides of your, uhhhhm. Nurse get me some gauze; she’s burned a bit. Dora, can you see? Dora? Open your eyes.
(The stage is dark. We hear the voice of the doctor yet again.)
DOCTOR: She’s out. Just let her rest for now.
(The lights come up. Dora lies passed out center stage. She is covered in scars and burns from all the treatment. The other girls enter and go to her. She lies there peacefully.
89 There are tons of dolls scattered about the stage.)
IDA: (a heavy sigh.) Look, it burned her again. What a pity. … Should we wake her?
MADONNA: Yes, but she looks so peaceful. What if we let her sleep? If we didn’t wake her?
(AUGUSTINE walks carefully up to DORA and examines her, spots the necklace, and pulls it off. This wakes DORA. DORA is surprised, worried, and confused.)
DORA: Where am I? I can’t see. (She struggles to take the blindfold off.)
IDA: Augustine’s blinded you.
THE MADONNA: But everything is alright now. You’re safe.
DORA: Who’s Augustine? And who are you?!
(AUGUSTINE puts the necklace on herself, goes over to a doll, and begins distorting it.)
IDA: Patients. (This should sound like “patience.”)
DORA: Please, will someone explain what’s—
IDA: What is there to explain? Is there a problem with not being able to see everything from time to time?
(DORA wanders around the space, carefully feeling around, becoming frightened with each doll/object she touches.)
DORA: This feels like the dream I was having, the smoke and then …. I couldn’t see anymore.
MADONNA: You were blind in a dream?
DORA: I never see in my dreams. Whenever I’m in a dream everything goes black, gets suffocating. I can feel the eyelids opening and closing, but nothing registers. I go on like this every night.
IDA: If you can’t see when you’re dreaming, how do you know you’re in a dream?
DORA: Sometimes I don’t, but usually I can tell. Weird things happen. One time there was even a dragon.
THE MADONNA: How did you know it was a dragon?
DORA: I could smell the sulfur. There was this red glow.
90 THE MADONNA: So you could see?
DORA: No, I was seeing the back of my eyelids. They were lighting up, and the little veins were throbbing. The ground was shaking, and I could feel the heat of its breath. I could smell the smoke. I hate smoke.
(Struggles with her blindfold. She gropes around for something.) What are these?
IDA: Augustine’s dolls. She collects them.
MADONNA: Did you play with dolls as a child?
DORA: Yes, but not like these. They’re so cold…
IDA: Are you missing something?
DORA: I don’t think so. (She reaches to her neck.) Oh no! Where’s my pendant? Where is it?
IDA: Augustine likes things that sparkle.
DORA: (After ending up next to AUGUSTINE) Augustine?
AUGUSTINE: Yes?
DORA: May I have my necklace back?
AUGUSTINE: It’s pretty. It has my name on it. Let me play.
DORA: No. Give it back!
AUGUSTINE: No!
(AUGUSTINE screams and runs away with the pendent while DORA gropes to no avail. THE MADONNA shifts uneasily, amused yet agitated, jealous?)
DORA: (Dora falls to the ground) Ow!
IDA: Augustine! Do you want to give her back her necklace now? Augustine!
THE MADONNA: She’s only looking at it. Look, I’ve never seen Augustine so happy! Let her hold it a little while longer.
DORA: Give it back! I …. can’t be without it. I …. need... me …. so …. please …. (growing to a plaintive shout) Give. me.. the pendent. Now! (“the pendant” should sound like “dependent.”)
91 (AUGUSTINE lays on the floor and stares at the pendant)
IDA: You… need you?
DORA: PLEASE! You don't understand! (Dora begins to hyperventilate) I … want … out.
(AUGUSTINE quietly walks up to DORA, taps her on the shoulder, and offers the necklace. AUGUSTINE realizes she cannot see and helps guide her hand to the pendant. DORA clutches the pendant to her chest and calms down. AUGUSTINE unties the blindfold from behind. DORA kneeling looks over her shoulder at AUGUSTINE. Saintly light special on AUGUSTINE.)
AUGUSTINE: Are you trapped, too?
DORA: (Picks up one of the dolls. Embraces it tightly. She is still having trouble breathing.) It’s like his arms are still around me. I still feel the pressure, I can’t get out.
(Moment of understanding passes between them)
AUGUSTINE: His hands ...
DORA: At first inviting.
AUGUSTINE: His lips.
DORA: Wet.
AUGUSTINE: Can’t breathe.
DORA: Can’t escape.
AUGUSTINE: Can’t close my eyes.
DORA: Then going, he...He... The...And him.... I... I...My kiss felt... The wet .... From it, I ran .... And this embrace. Nothing. This. Free.
(Sings “That feeling you get in the fog of electroconvulsive therapy”)
The Doctors probed my body, poked my mind to find a saint in me Asked questions, ran more tests, pushed pills, now they plug a lamp in me A burst. I’m gone. And won’t come back. They say it’s just a side effect. I told you I don’t want to go, Mum and Dad, I told you so, No matter what you say, I won’t let them rearrange my brain into little boxes like the ones you store your bracelets in mum, you said try medication, now I’m prone to aggravation
92 Swallow again, we’ve upped your dose Well I’d rather not A high me asks please try me and he did Who?
Mum and Dad you never listened, why the sudden interest now? I tried to find the words, but tears and secrets came much easier. Then Dad decided maybe electricity was right for me. The pops and flashes really set off my eyes. Don’t they? Dump me off everyday, peel my skin ‘way from my brain.
I’m dying young. I want to sleep close my eyes And hope he doesn’t catch me Who?
I can feel that small electric eye Inside my head it swims around and catches memories and destroys them with its teeth. If I stay quite still, I’m quite determined never to be seen.
(At the end of the song, electricity pops, lights flash, DRAGON roars.)
DOCTOR: Dora? Can you hear?
DORA: What? What is it?
(Electric pops and spurts of light increase, and the women shake under its influence.)
SECOND EPISODE
(The Doctor counts down. A watch swings back and forth on the screen.)
DOCTOR: Listen to the sound of my voice. Thirteen, twelve, eleven. Go deeper and deeper into sleep, if you can, and breathe. Ten, nine, eight, seven… Deeper and deeper… six …. five …. four ... three… two…. one.
(Words flash onto the screen) Jean-Martin Charcot Pitié-Salpêtrière School Paris, France 1879
93 (Charcot’s teaching hospital. A lilting circus-style tune begins on the piano and cello. CHARCOT enters in a white mask, cane, and tails. Like a barker at a carnival, he begins selling the show with “Charcot The Charlatan.” DORA in a mask and AUGUSTINE perform a dance.)
CHARCOT: And now, ladies and gentlemen, our scientific research has found hysteria to be a complex neurosis in which the body is a machine triggered by the patient’s sick mind.
Aside Yes, sex has everything to do with it.
There are few willing to undertake this mission but I’ve always loved a challenge. You see here poor souls, unable to become the virtuous young ladies that the Maker intended them to be.
Afflicted with that most troublesome disease, hysteria, They are destined to a life of seizures, malaise, and countless other symptoms.
The next hysteric patient is close to my heart. Our Augustine has a most interesting case. She was raised in a convent, in the heart of religious security. The abbess continually had to … contain Augustine. She had a disrespectful, pardon my candidness, irreligious attitude in the convent.
Once under hypnosis, she can defy models of decorum, limits of the female sensibility. Rest assured, she has been exorcised by a priest This is not a demonic possession. Nevertheless, ladies, you may want to avert your eyes. She becomes enamored with an invisible lover, one who both loves her and hurts her. She goes into ecstasies for him.
(AUGUSTINE joins CHARCOT onstage. The others step aside to watch, and AUGUSTINE lies down on a “bed.” AUGUSTINE goes into an ecstatic vision. She lies on the bed and motions for her invisible lover to lie beside her. She hugs herself as if hugging someone lying down beside her. Then she begins to giggle, moving her hips, cries of happiness. She then sits up in bed and pleads to the air above her)
AUGUSTINE: You don’t want it anymore?
THE MADONNA: (Sincerely, to herself) So poetic! To be carried away in rapture like that!
CHARCOT: She is delusional. It’s the disease.
94 DORA: Augustine?
CHARCOT: She can’t hear you in this state of ecstasy.
THE MADONNA: What spirits she must see!
CHARCOT: The man is through with her.
AUGUSTINE: Don’t leave me here. I promise not to tell anyone. I love ……. (She screams and shuts her eyes.) Go away! Get your fucking dick away! (AUDIENCE OF hospital gasp.)
CHARCOT: Please do not be alarmed. I apologize for her sudden outburst, but I will not say it is an unusual occurrence for her. The same intensity of muscular frigidity and arc de cercle poses may be brought to life as soon as hypnosis takes hold of her. (To AUGUSTINE) My dear, to whom are you talking?
AUGUSTINE: (Still in her hypnotized state) Him.
CHARCOT: Would you like to talk with me instead?
AUGUSTINE: Will you lie down next to me?
CHARCOT: (with a patient glance at the audience) My dear, you know I will not do that. Why don’t you stand up? We want to have a look at you.
(AUGUSTINE stands and CHARCOT leads her by the hand.)
CHARCOT: Lift your arm up for us.
(AUGUSTINE raises her feeling arm perpendicular to her body. CHARCOT takes out a long needle-like instrument.)
CHARCOT: Do you see what this is, my pet?
AUGUSTINE: Yes.
CHARCOT: What is it?
AUGUSTINE: (Insinuating) You know.
CHARCOT: Of course I do. You won’t move this time, will you? (Not a question. He turns his attention to the audience) Now this is a simple sterile instrument meant to test pressure points, to test feeling. I will apply slight pressure to her arm, adding a little force at a time until she reacts. (He begins to touch her arm with the tool and rub it on her arm skin.) What do you feel, Augustine?
95 AUGUSTINE: A light tickle.
CHARCOT: (To the audience) Notice her sensitivity here. I will now apply pressure to the arm. Just lightly now. (He presses the arm with the tip of the instrument.)
AUGUSTINE: Ow.
CHARCOT: How does that feel?
AUGUSTINE: Hurts.
CHARCOT: See how sensitive? Now I shall apply more pressure. (He does so, and though it is not forceful, it makes her jerk her arm away.)
AUGUSTINE: (Still in a fog from earlier) Ow! Get off of me!
CHARCOT: Augustine, there, there, dear. We are through, alright? No more.
AUGUSTINE: No more?
CHARCOT: No more. Rest, my dear, rest. Can you hear me, Augustine? (She nods her head.) Lift your other arm for me. (She does so. He rubs this arm with the apparatus. She makes no sign of feeling. Can you feel anything on your arm? She shakes her head “no.”) Now, I am increasing the pressure. (He does so with the tip of the instrument.) What do you feel?
AUGUSTINE: Nothing.
(THE MADONNA changes into FREUD.)
CHARCOT: When Augustine came to us, she had begun losing feeling on this side of her body, and it has steadily worsened. Many hysterics are numb in particular areas on their bodies. These are areas of hysterical anesthesia. We call these areas stigmata. I am once again adding pressure. (He does so. She does not flinch. He continues pushing, then more forcefully, until the apparatus digs into her arm. Blood begins trickling down her arm in a small stream. Notices the blood on her arm. To a nurse/ DORA) Wipe this up for us. (CHARCOT turns to and addresses the audience.) We can pierce her as deeply as possible, traverse her thigh or arm from one side to the next, without provoking any manifestation of feeling. Take her away now. Clean her up. Ladies and Gentlemen, Augustine! She will be with us for a long time. I think we can learn much from these theatrical cases of hysteria.
(Augustine writhes on the floor as her arm is bandaged by DORA.)
IDA: (Turning from AUGUSTINE to the audience.) Nothing happened.
96 FREUD: (Facing the back wall and smoking a giant cigar—a brush of sorts that emits grey paint for smoke on the canvas.) When you say nothing happened, you mean something did. Please take a seat.
IDA: I don’t remember anything.
FREUD: That may be true, but begin with what you can remember, and we can remember together.
IDA: I remember seeing a woman, bright, like my friend.
FREUD: Like your friend’s wife?
IDA: I am not friends with him.
FREUD: But he is young, handsome, and you seem to be pleased in his company.
IDA: I see her, white, glowing, a woman holding a baby in her arms.
FREUD: Was this an occurrence in your memory?
IDA: I was dreaming.
FREUD: (takes notice with renewed interest) Would you share your dream with me?
IDA: A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed myself quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel case, but Father said, “I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up. (From Freud’s casebook 56)
FREUD: Often dreams reveal what we desire. Without dreams, memories would be forever trapped in the roiling sea of our unconscious.
IDA: I don’t like that idea.
FREUD: Why?
IDA: Because that means I can’t control my dreams.
FREUD: But your subconscious does control your dreams.
IDA: But I can’t control my subconscious!
FREUD: True. However, I can help you discover what disturbs your subconscious mind.
IDA: Will you make the dreams go away?
97 FREUD: They will be replaced with new dreams. You do want your symptoms to stop, don’t you? End your suicidal thoughts and bouts of aphonia?
IDA: I don’t feel like dying right now. I’m fine. Like I was in Dresden.
FREUD: But are not always fine. I would like to see you relieved of these thoughts. What happened in Dresden?
IDA: I was alone.
FREUD: I thought you said before that your cousin went with you?
IDA: I was alone that day.
FREUD: Continue.
IDA: I found an art gallery and sat there for two hours.
FREUD: Two?
IDA: Yes.
FREUD: What did you see there?
IDA: The Sistine Madonna.
FREUD: What else?
IDA: That’s all. I sat in front of her and watched her for two hours.
FREUD: What pleased you so much about the picture? (Taken from Freud’s casebook 88)
(Dora is silent.)
IDA: (After a long pause.) The Madonna.
FREUD: Ah, a virgin mother. Wouldn’t you say that signifies something?
IDA: What do you mean?
FREUD: How long have you had difficulty walking on your right foot?
IDA: Since childhood.
(FREUD Nods, uh-hums to himself.)
98 I twisted my ankle when I was a child, but I haven’t found it so swollen until a few months ago.
FREUD: How many months?
IDA: Nine.
FREUD: A gestation.
IDA: (laughing) That’s silly.
FREUD: You are swollen because your ankle is a displaced womb.
IDA: Wombs don’t move.
FREUD: (Picking up a doll) You like children, yes?
IDA: I am good at watching them.
FREUD: Especially his children.
IDA: Yes, I like them very much.
FREUD: You do? Then wouldn’t you like to be their mother?
IDA: No!
FREUD: It is your fear that betrays your desire.
IDA: Desire?
FREUD: For him. Why else would your ankle swell for nine months, a symbolic number for a woman? You are obsessed with The Madonna. She is the perfect vision of motherhood. You want to be her.
IDA: I don’t want to be with him! That’s what makes me sick? That doesn’t signify anything!
FREUD: It signifies everything! Come now, you must love him. You are a motherly, beautiful young woman.
IDA: What about his wife?
FREUD: As you’ve said, she loves your father.
IDA: I hate him for it!
99 FREUD: Why?
IDA: Because he traded me! He took that wonderful woman away from her children!
FREUD: Away from you?
IDA: And pawned me off on that man!
FREUD: He’s a good man.
IDA: He came into my room when I was dressing. He tried to kiss me.
FREUD: Came into your room? Like a necklace in a jewel case? A key in a lock?
IDA: I’m afraid. I …. if I try to remember that day, all I can feel is his body pressing against me.
FREUD: Where do you feel the pressure?
IDA: (lays a hand on her chest) Here.
FREUD: Are you sure?
IDA: I don’t like him. He disgusts me.
FREUD: That’s not healthy. A young woman feeling disgust in the embrace of a man?
IDA: I …. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
AUGUSTINE: (Lying in the dark, convulsing slightly. Her arm is bandaged with a red-stained piece of muslin. She holds it in agony.) Ppppppp. Pppppp. You’re so heavy ……… Ppppppp ….. pppppp. Get off of me! ------(She screams) I’ll tell Papa! Pig! Pig! …. I’ll tell Papa ….. Pig! You’re so heavy! You’re hurting me!(based on her actual words in dramatic fits--Appignanesi 134)
DORA: Augustine!
IDA: She’s having an episode.
DORA: But, she seemed so happy.
IDA: In some she is, but in most … she’s like this.
DORA: (Turns her attention to IDA. She sits next to IDA.) You were attacked by a man?
IDA: He held me close.
100 DORA: Did you like it?
IDA: No. He smelled like smoke.
DORA: I hate the smell of smoke. My dad smokes.
IDA: So does my father.
FREUD: I smoke as well.
IDA: I do, too. But I hate it. I dream of smoke. Waking up is my favorite part, because then I’m out of it. I’m in control again. (The illusion begins to break, to go on the fritz. Various pops and buzzes) I’d still be in the house if my father hadn’t come in to wake me up.
FREUD: You know what this could signify.
IDA: I knew you would say that!
FREUD: If you only accepted your desires, you would understand the dreams, stop losing your voice, and stop hurting yourself trying to deny the past. You have forgotten what happened that day.
IDA: Maybe I don’t want to remember.
FREUD: It may be painful, but the subconscious could make your life even more painful.
AUGUSTINE: (Off to the side. Waking up slowly.) I dream of eyes, green cat’s eyes. Mother Superior said it was the devil come to visit me in my dreams. He possessed me, the pig.
DORA: You still dream of the cat?
AUGUSTINE: Yes, when I am awake, I fall into these visions. Charcot says it makes me special, but even when I’m awake I see the eyes. I see them always.
DORA: I dream of eyes, too.
FREUD: (To DORA) Tell me about your dream.
DORA: There was a dragon covered in smoke.
FREUD: Was this a dream at home?
DORA: I can’t remember where I was.
FREUD: Let’s try to remember together.
101 DORA: There was a bright woman. She was some kind of icon.
FREUD: A virgin mother?
DORA: Someone I could never be. I feel her inside sometimes. Watching me.
THE MADONNA: (Freud takes off his mask to show he is THE MADONNA. She wraps a shawl around her head and stands similarly to the first scene.) Tell me more about myself.
DORA: You? You’re not here. You’re only in my dreams.... what’s going on?
AUGUSTINE: You see her too?
DORA: What?
AUGUSTINE: She must be a waking vision.
DORA: Waking vision? I don’t have visions.
AUGUSTINE: No my vision. (Aside) You’re not real.
DORA: Of course I’m real. I’m here.
AUGUSTINE: So is The Madonna. And she’s fake. [So you’re fake, too. I’ve made you up.]
THE MADONNA: I’m as real as they come. I am a spectacle, am I not? Look I can be in ecstasy! (She begins posing for them. Through this time, THE MADONNA has been trying to embody the other three women’s symptoms, refine them, and exaggerate them.)
DORA: Maybe you see things that aren’t there, but I don’t. I … I must be dreaming. None of this exists. (DORA begins to hyperventilate again)
IDA: (trying to calm her down) Hey, hey, girl. Hey, can you tell me your name?
DORA: (Still breathing hard and straining to catch her breath) My name …. is Dora.
IDA: Dora? Nice name. Now listen to me Dora,
(In unison with the DOCTOR’s recording:)
Listen to the sound of my voice.
(DOCTOR counts down slowly over the following dialogue: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)
IDA: Don’t go just yet. Breathe. Breathe. Deep breathes now. That’s it. Look, if it helps you cope with life, then you can say I’m in your head.
102 (Lights slowly fade with the sound of the voice finishing the count down. “9, 10” should be in complete blackout.)
THIRD EPISODE
(The stage is black. Very quietly, a slow heartbeat is heard. It grows louder. A spotlight goes up, revealing DORA sleeping on a gurney. She has more burnt spots on her body. The heart rate gets louder and a little faster. DORA starts to toss and turn. The tempo increases and gets louder still.)
(The room flashes white and hums with electric current. DORA is in a frozen and tense arc de cercle alone on stage. This holds for a moments then blackout.)
MADONNA: (Intently, a forceful whisper.) Why are you struggling? I thought you wanted help. I thought you wanted to fix this. I’m only doing what you would do for me.
(Slowly, lights go up. The room seems hazy and dank.)
I promised to help you, didn’t I? I’m helping. Arms up and out to the sides.
(DORA seems to hear it and wakes up with a start. She listens for a moment, and then looks around. She is frightened. Her heart rate speeds up and increases in volume.)
Good posture. Chin up but neck down. Feet shoulder-width apart. We will begin with the patient’s symptoms.
(We hear currents of electricity as well. DORA grips the blanket in her hands, hyperventilating. She starts to tremble. As it spirals out of control, she presses a hand to her chest, almost crying. She forces herself to breathe slowly and concentrate.)
After all, symptoms are in reality nothing but a cry from suffering organs. Observe the crazed look in the eyes, the tendency to dress indecently. I do believe this particular patient is suffering… from a mild form of schizophrenia.
(DORA pulls her knees to her chest. IDA and AUGUSTINE enter, but DORA takes no notice.)
DORA: I want to freeze. I want them to make it stop....make it all stop. I can’t take it anymore. Why can’t life just stop, for one second? I’m so tired of things changing…
IDA: What have they done to you?
AUGUSTINE: What they’ve done to all of us.
(Dora rises slowly, obviously in a lot of pain.)
103 DORA: It hurts.
AUGUSTINE: I know. They think it helps.
DORA: I don’t think I can take this anymore.
(THE MADONNA enters Stage Left-Center putting bright red lipstick on.)
AUGUSTINE: You shouldn’t have to. None of us should. They can’t keep us trapped here.
THE MADONNA: You are not trapped.
AUGUSTINE: I did not ask to be here!
THE MADONNA: Shhh, you’re overexcited. Sit down, love. This is a hospital. You are offering your life to science. It’s a privilege.
AUGUSTINE: Two meals a day, living in a stinking cell, being herded along the corridors like cattle is a privilege?
THE MADONNA: When you are up there on the stage, and all of Paris’ eyes are on you. Augustine, you glow. Those ecstasies! How do you do it? Can you teach me?
AUGUSTINE: You think it’s an act?
THE MADONNA: Of course not! It’s affecting you. I can see that! (Quietly, with sincerity) I want to be able to unlock that side of me, too. That secret subconscious that dares to feel, to rise and fall like waves. I want to be cured. (THE MADONNA reaches out to hold AUGUSTINE)
AUGUSTINE: I’ve been here half my life, (AUGUSTINE violently escapes her grasp) and I’m not cured!
THE MADONNA: Now calm down …
AUGUSTINE: I’m tired of playing calm! I’m tired of being static! I’m tired of being poked and prodded like I’m some kind of animal. I’m getting out! (offers her good hand to DORA) Dora?
THE MADONNA: Why are you trying to take others down a path you know will lead to criminal behavior? There are worse places than this!
AUGUSTINE: Dora, aren’t you tired of getting these burns? Aren’t you tired of seeing her face? Of the visions? We could escape. You and I. Disguise ourselves. Come with me.
DORA: You? Why would you want me with you if you made me up?
104 AUGUSTINE: There’s strength in numbers. Even if they’re invisible.
THE MADONNA: No. Don’t leave. We can still be powerful here. We can be in control.
AUGUSTINE: There’s no control in hysteria.
THE MADONNA: Yes, there is. Watch. I’ll make them look at me.
(AUGUSTINE & THE MADONNA sing duet: “Hagiomania; or, Bellum in Sancta Sanctorum.” This is a parody of “Vogue,” not as a lampoon of the song but as a critique of the mediatization of hysteria.)
THE MADONNA:
Pose, Pose, Pose Icon Eyes On Me Madonna Whore Di- Choto- my
Searchin’ through the centuries, Seekin’ to end this gendered disease, This diagnosis is ill, My own prognosis is nil, They say I’m insane in the womb, in the brain.
AUGUSTINE: Anger’s heat sparking red in your veins, The pulsating sound in your brain, Hard in your face, Bright in your eyes, Telling you there is war to wage and to wake up and ...
ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Pose!
105 ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Icon, Eyes On Me, Madonna Whore Di-Choto-my Ida Bauer; Augustine Granville’s Hammer on the silver screen Def Leppard, Muse, Charcot make disorders sexual Pose!
AUGUSTINE: Let loose, at last Erupting Uncontrollably Tethers ripping free Of their stakes in the ground. ROAR! Uninhibitedly, Doing what none others do No hu-man-i-ty No one on the same page. You gotta wake up and
ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and
Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Pose!
AUGUSTINE: Can’t understand why,
THE MADONNA: Don’t even try, Not you or I,
106 AUGUSTINE: Blood rushing to my head,
THE MADONNA: I guess you have to do What you have to do,
AUGUSTINE: And I…
ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Pose!
I’m leaving. Who’s with me?
(Dora stares back and forth between Madonna and Augustine.)
DORA: Augustine, please, don’t go. It’s too dangerous.
AUGUSTINE: Any more dangerous than what she’s doing?
(Dora stares at Madonna)
DORA: I….I don’t know. [We don’t know what’s out there! They’ll come looking for you. They’ll find you and drag you back.]
AUGUSTINE: [Not in this disguise they won’t.] It’s time to go. I’ve gathered up my broken parts, and I’m taking them somewhere else, somewhere where they aren’t broken.
(Augustine goes to Dora and embraces her gently. The buzzing of electricity begins to grow, accentuated by pops of light synced with an increase of sound. During these moments, the women tense up in odd positions)
107 AUGUSTINE: It’s okay to be scared sometimes. But now, you have to have courage.
DORA: Please, don’t go.
AUGUSTINE: Goodbye, Dora.
DORA: Wait!
(Augustine checks that the coast is clear, and then exits. The electricity increases, and the women begin to shake. A burst of light holds on the women frozen in poses. Blackout)
FOURTH EPISODE
(Sound of electric humming. DORA stands alone on stage. She looks straight ahead at the DRAGON, positioned behind the audience. She is terrified. Through the effect of smoke and red lights, the DRAGON breathes fire down upon her. It jumps into the air and lands behind her. Its silhouette is projected on the screen. DORA turns around and watches it approach. As it does, the DRAGON morphs into an unrecognizable human figure. DORA cowers. The person breathes fire at her. DORA screams.)
(Blackout)
DOCTOR: She’s not responding to ... I don’t ... Maybe it’s because (laughter) ...
(Lights up. Dora cowers in a corner, IDA holds onto a purse and stands in front of FREUD, who paints with smoke on the canvas.)
FREUD: Neurotics are dominated by the opposition between reality and phantasy. (Quote from Freud’s casebook 101)
IDA: Doctor? In two weeks, I’m gone.
FREUD: (Surprised.) But we have not finished! You still have too many unresolved issues.
IDA: I’m tired of waiting for the cure. I can’t do this anymore.
FREUD: Two weeks? Two hours? Two. Why two?
IDA: It’s my decision. I’m old enough now. You and father cannot force me to stay.
FREUD: Two …. weeks. Ah, yes, like the notice a governess gives before quitting. Please stay. You are trying to leave me as that governess left your friend.
IDA: My leaving has nothing to do with the governess.
108 FREUD: Yes, it does. You have transferred your hidden desire for your friend onto me. This romantic twist happens in the mind of a hysteric during psychoanalysis. No need to be afraid. You can embrace this desire. I smoke, too.
IDA: No, I’m leaving you.
FREUD: Like the governess left him when he proclaimed his love for her.
IDA: You love me?
FREUD: You think you love me, but in reality you love your friend. (DORA stands up.)
IDA: No! I don’t! He’s not my friend, and I have never felt anything but loathing for him.
FREUD: Quite an impassioned response from a young girl.
IDA: I am a woman now.
FREUD: Yes, and your time is fading. Will you tell him of your feelings?
IDA: What feelings?
FREUD: Love. Erotic passion.
DORA: (Enters the conversation) She just said she doesn’t feel that way about him!
FREUD: (To DORA) Her symptoms are nothing other than signs of her repressed sexual proclivity.
DORA: What’s the connection? Just because she’s been with him doesn’t mean she wants to stay with him!
FREUD: (To IDA) I have noticed you struggling to open your purse during sessions.
IDA: What does my purse have to do with it?
FREUD: You want to be open, but until you embrace your subconscious desires, you will remain locked, like that purse.
IDA: I’m done. I’m not staying here anymore.
FREUD: You don’t have a choice.
DORA: Of course you do!
FREUD: You would be walking out on someone who is trying to help you!
109 DORA: Maybe he’s the wrong one. (This “he” is intentionally ambiguous.)
FREUD: Never.
IDA: I have a choice, and I’m making it right now. I’m leaving you. (To DORA) I have to go.
Dora: But….I don’t know who you are.
IDA: My name is Ida, Ida Bauer. But that doesn’t matter.
FREUD: Wait! Look at me once more. Maybe you’ll change your mind.
(Takes off mask and is THE MADONNA. She is worn down, she has circles under her eyes, and her theatrical attempts to show off poses becomes an involuntary shaking. She holds a doll for comfort.)
THE MADONNA: You say you don’t, but you desire me. You want to be me.
DORA: Have you been in Charcot’s displays?
THE MADONNA: (Nods) I have a pain in my arm.
DORA: Did he prick you, too? Like they pricked Augustine?
THE MADONNA: They don’t know what to make of me. I tried not to flinch.
DORA: Maybe you don’t have hysteria.
THE MADONNA: Charcot says I have a complex. There are voices in my head.
DORA: What do they sound like?
THE MADONNA: You. (This “you” may be thought of as a plural you, but it is directed toward DORA specifically. THE MADONNA begins singing “Most Men Lead Lives.”)
(During this song, the women begin painting the figure of a woman on the canvas. They each use a different color—blue, yellow, red or green, and black—and work together to create the full image.)
My roving hands rub raw Circles into my shell, Blank and white and smooth
(AUGUSTINE, dressed as a man, & IDA reenter from either side of the stage.)
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. (quoted from Thoreau’s Walden)
110 DORA: And where I can’t be seen, Deep within my shell Wound up in a tight curl, Bedlam begins.
DORA & THE MADONNA: Flashing colors, and bright Lights, loud whooping Noises, I am blinded, I have nowhere to turn.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me.
AUGUSTINE: So I slither out of my rigid Coil and slide through the spirals and whorls, Out into the open, Out of my shell, Then close my eyes, And stay very Still.
AUGUSTINE, IDA, DORA, & THE MADONNA: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me.
IDA: And where I can’t be seen, Deep within my shell Wound up in a tight curl, Bedlam begins.
ALL: Flashing colors, and bright Lights, loud whooping Noises, I am blinded, I have nowhere to turn.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me.
So I slither out of my rigid coil and slide through the spirals and the whorls Out into the open Out of my shell
111 Then close my eyes and stay very still.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me.
(AUGUSTINE & IDA leave as the song fades out. DORA sits beside THE MADONNA.)
THE MADONNA: (holds DORA’s pendent to the light.) Hm, I feel I know this face, but I can’t say where I’ve seen him before.
DORA: My grandmother gave it to me when I was born. He’s supposed to be my patron saint.
THE MADONNA: Saint of what?
DORA: Sight.
THE MADONNA: I wish I could be more like you.
DORA: What do you mean?
THE MADONNA: You don’t have a past to worry about, just a dragon. At least your enemy is invisible. Not starving and beating you when the parents are away or skewering your body for applause.
DORA: You wanted the applause.
THE MADONNA: I want … A pretty dress. I had a pretty dress. It was my mother’s, and I wore it when he ….. no, no, no. (She breaks into a hysteric fit.)
DORA: Stop it.
THE MADONNA: I can’t
DORA: You’re faking.
THE MADONNA: (Stops) Am I?
DORA: Of course. You’re a bundle of different memories my subconscious threw together. You don’t have a past. There was never a man or a dress. You don’t even have a mother.
THE MADONNA: But I remember her. It was a lemon yellow dress I wore.
DORA: The yellow dress in the summer.
THE MADONNA: I wore it the day he stayed over alone. His name was ….
112 (Roaring in the distance. Smoke begins to flood in.)
DORA: Stop it! I don’t want to hear anymore.
THE MADONNA: I have a past.
(The DRAGON roars.)
DORA: No, you don’t!
THE MADONNA: Why does it scare you?
DORA: It’s too familiar.
(The illusion is crashing around her, smoke fills the room, and a red light shines on DORA.)
(Blackout.)
DORA: (An effect on the voice until DORA becomes the DRAGON.) No, no, no, no, no!
FIFTH EPISODE
(DORA screams the lights back on. Smoke begins to fill the stage, the dragon roars. She stands in white light while the DOCTOR’s voice is heard above her. She is expressionless.)
DOCTOR: I believe the treatment is starting to work. How’re you doing, sweetheart? A few more zaps and you’ll be good to go! Just think about how much better you’ll feel once you can face the world again.
(The lights fritz off. The women’s voices come from offstage.)
IDA: Dora.
THE MADONNA: What happened Dora?
AUGUSTINE: What happened to your arms?
IDA: Dora, remember.
(DORA collapses in a heap, worn out. She has barely enough strength to sing.)
And where I can’t be seen, Deep within my shell
113 Wound up in a tight curl, Bedlam begins.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but oh no, not me.
(Dora begins to sings “I Live, Motherfucker”)
I don’t know why people steal things. Probably because people need things 4X
Sanity, car keys, countries
I feel I feel This is the way I live, I live Motherfucker I feel I feel This is the way I live, I live Motherfucker I feel
Fuck ‘em if they can’t endure when you take up your own space Fuck ‘em if they think you’re cured when you’re not up in their face And fuck ‘em if they aren’t sure if you deserve to live your life or waste I feel I feel
I feel, I feel, This is the way I live, I live Motherfucker I feel, I feel I feel (DORA begins painting on the canvas.) This is the way I live, I live Motherfucker I feel
(Interlude: Dora splashes paint onto the canvas to symbolize her fire. DORA’s hands are red. She turns to the front and exclaims. She opens her mouth, and an orange glow like flames emanates from it. She wears Dragon wings. A black light reveals ultraviolet makeup on her skin. She looks like a DRAGON. When she takes out the mouthpiece, she holds it high above her head like a trophy, or a lighter at a rock concert.
‘Cause there’s only one you, you do you, that much is true 4X
You’re a woman who can’t be replaced 2X
You’re a woman you’re a woman who can’t be replaced 2X
You’re a woman that can’t be replaced
114 I can’t tell you Tell Us How many times Tell Us
I’ve backed out be -cause of fear today I’ve backed out ‘cause of fear today
You’re gonna be
Characterized Terrorized (Dora’s eyes glow in the dark) By those who are filled with hate
And if you think you’re gonna lose, you’d be right because it’s built that way
ALL: (facing one another)
I feel, I feel This is the way I live, I live Motherfucker I feel I feel I feel This is the way I live, I live
(At the end, the portrait is a mass of color making up the image of a woman/dragon/saint/doll. The four women stand triumphant with DORA center stage. The Dragon roars increase and on the third roar the stage goes black.)
115 APPENDIX B
THE DORA PROJECT LYRIC AND CHORD SHEETS
“That Feeling You Get in the Fog of Electroconvulsive Therapy”
Em G The Doctors probed my body, poked my mind to find a saint in me
C Am Asked questions, ran more tests, pushed pills, now they plug a lamp in me.
Em G A burst. I’m gone.
C Am (Pause) And won’t come back. They say it’s just a side effect.
Em G I told you I don’t want to go, mum and dad, I told you so,
C Am No matter what you say, I won’t let them rearrange my brain
Em G C Am into little boxes like the ones you store your bracelets in
C/Am Am C/Am Am mum, you said try medication, now I’m prone to aggravation
Em G C Am Swallow again, we’ve upped your dose Well I’d rather not
Em G C Am A high me asks please try me, And he did
Em G C Am Who?
116 Em G Mum and dad you never listened, why the sudden interest now?
C Am I tried to find the words, but tears and secrets came much easier
Em G Then dad decided maybe electricity was right for me
C Am The pops and flashes really set off my eyes. Don’t they?
C/Am Am C/Am Am Dump me off everyday, peel my skin ‘way from my brain
Em G I’m dying young.
C Am I want to sleep
Em G close my eyes
C Am And hope he doesn’t catch me
Em G C Am Who?
117 Em I can feel that small electric eye
G inside my head It swims around
C and catches memories
Am and destroys them with its teeth.
Em G Am If I stay quite still, I’m quite determined never to be seen
118 “Charcot the Charlatan”
A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# And now, ladies and gentlemen, our scientific research
A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# has found hysteria to be a complex
D Dm/F A Dm/F D Dm/F A-B-C# neurosis in which the body is a machine
D Dm/F A Dm/F D Dm/F A-B-C# triggered by the patient’s sick mind.
E-F#-G# (Aside) Yes, sex has everything to do with it.
A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# There are few willing to undertake this mission
A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# but I’ve always loved a challenge.
D Dm/F A Dm/F D Dm/F A-B-C# You see here poor souls, unable to become the virtuous
D Dm/F A Dm/F D Dm/F A-B-C# young ladies the Maker intended them to be.
E Afflicted with that most troublesome disease, hysteria, they are destined to
E7/D F/E E a life of seizures, malaise, and countless other symptoms.
119 A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# The next hysteric patient is close to my heart.
A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# Our Augustine has a most interesting case.
D Dm/F A Dm/F D Dm/F A-B-C# She was raised in a convent, in the heart of religious security.
D Dm/F A Dm/F D Dm/F A-B-C# The abbess continually had to … contain Augustine,
A Am/C E Am/C A Am/C E-F#-G# Who had a disrespectful, pardon my candidness, irreligious attitude in the convent.
E F/E Once under hypnosis, she can defy models of decorum,
G/E Am limits of the female sensibility. Rest assured: she has been exorcised by a priest.
E This is not a demonic possession.
Nevertheless, ladies, you may want to avert your eyes.
F/E G/E She becomes enamored with an invisible lover,
F/E one who both loves her and hurts her.
E She goes into ecstasies for him.
120 “Hagiomania; Or, Bellum In Sanctum Sanctorum”
THE MADONNA: Searchin’ through the centuries, Seekin’ to end this gendered disease, This diagnosis is ill, My own prognosis is nil, They say I’m insane in the womb, in the brain.
AUGUSTINE: Anger’s heat sparking red in your veins, The pulsating sound in your brain, Hard in your face, Bright in your eyes, Telling you there is war to wage and to wake up and ...
ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Pose!
ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Icon, Eyes On Me, Madonna Whore Di-Choto-my Ida Bauer; Augustine Granville’s Hammer on the silver screen Def Leppard, Muse, Charcot make disorders sexual Pose!
AUGUSTINE: Let loose, at last Erupting Uncontrollably Tethers ripping free Of their stakes in the ground. ROAR! Uninhibitedly, Doing what none others do No hu-man-i-ty No one on the same page. You gotta wake up and
121 ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Pose!
AUGUSTINE: Can’t understand why,
THE MADONNA: Don’t even try, Not you or I,
AUGUSTINE: Blood rushing to my head,
THE MADONNA: I guess you have to do What you have to do,
AUGUSTINE: And I…
ALL: Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and Crash, bang, boom, clang, Thud, whoop, holler, rang. Wake up and rage!
THE MADONNA: Pose!
122 “Most Men Lead Lives”
THE MADONNA: My roving hands rub raw. Circles into my shell, Blank and white and smooth
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me.
DORA: And where I can’t be seen, Deep within my shell Wound up in a tight curl, Bedlam begins.
DORA & THE MADONNA: Flashing colors, and bright Lights, loud whooping Noises, I am blinded, I have nowhere to turn.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. X2
AUGUSTINE: So I slither out of my rigid Coil and slide through the spirals and whorls, Out into the open, Out of my shell, Then close my eyes, And stay very Still.
AUGUSTINE, IDA, DORA, & THE MADONNA: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. X2
IDA: And where I can’t be seen, Deep within my shell Wound up in a tight curl, Bedlam begins.
ALL: Flashing colors, and bright Lights, loud whooping Noises, I am blinded, I have nowhere to turn.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. X2
So I slither out of my rigid coil and slide through the spirals and the whorls Out into the open
123 Out of my shell Then close my eyes and stay very still.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but not me. X2
124 “I Live, Motherfucker”
Am Am I don’t know why people steal things. Probably because people need things. X4
Am Am Sanity, car keys, countries
Em /G Em F# G Am I feel I feel
C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em F# G Am Mo ther fucker I feel I feel
C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em Mo ther fucker I feel
(MUTED Am) Am Fuck ‘em if they can’t endure when you take up your own space
(MUTED Am) Am Fuck ‘em if they think you’re cured when you’re not up in their face
Am Am Am Am A m Am Am And fuck ‘em if they aren’t sure if you deserve to live your life or waste I feel, I feel
Em /G Em F# G Am I feel I feel
C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em F# G Am Mo ther fucker I feel I feel
125 C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em A2 Mo ther fucker I feel
A2 ‘Cause there’s only one you, you do you, that much is true, X4
A2 you’re a woman who can’t be replaced X2
A2 you’re a woman (You’re a woman) who can’t be replaced X2
A2 Am D G you’re a woman who can’t be replaced
C Am - C G C Am – C (change to 6/8 time) I can’t tell you Tell us how many times Tell Us
Am D G I’ve backed out be-cause of fear today I’ve backed out ‘cuz of fear to-day
C Cm You’re gonna be
Cm Bm Em Am character-ized, terror-ized by hearts filled with hate
Em A2 Em Am And if you think you’re gonna lose, you’d be right
Em A2 Em A2 be-cause it’s built that way
Em A2 Em A2 (Yeah, yeah, yeahs)
126 Em /G Em F# G Am I feel I feel
C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em F# G Am Mo ther fucker I feel I feel
C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em Mo ther fucker I feel C C - B - G This is the way I live, I live
Em /G Em A2 Mo ther fucker I feel
127 APPENDIX C
COPYRIGHT APPROVAL FORM
128 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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132 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Evangeline Ciupek dabbles in the macabre in both research and performance. Her interests include cubism, expressionism, the ethics of representation, and gender roles regarding illness and madness. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of
Mary Hardin Baylor with a Bachelor’s degree in English, minor in Writing, in May 2011, with an honors thesis entitled “The Trouble with Man-ufacturing Virgin-Mothers:
Commodity Roles in Christmas Films from the 1940s to the New Millennium.”
She has presented scholarly papers, poetry, and fiction at multiple conferences. Her most recent presentations include an essay for the 2013 Performance Studies international conference, “’Do let me hear from me.’ The hysteric woman and the analyst race to fill temporary space in Portrait of Dora,” an essay for the 2013 Syracuse University
Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, “’My Form is a Filthy Type of Yours’: Freud, Dora,
Frankenstein, and the Teratology of Transgressive Female Bodies and Hearts,” and an essay and a collection of poetry for the 2011 Sigma Tau Delta International Convention,
“Frankenstein’s Fine China: The Man-ufactured Gloss of Elizabeth” and “The tongues of goldfish and other poems on sex and expectations.”
Her most recent theatrical expeditions include director, co-author, co-composer, and co-arranger for The Dora Project (2014), director of an experimental reading of Hélène
Cixous’ Portrait of Dora (2013), co-creator and performer in a simulated ghost tour for the
American Society for Theatre Research entitled “The Fairmont is Not Haunted” (2013), and dramaturg for Florida State University’s School of Theatre production of Timberlake
Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, directed by Matt Silva (2013).
133