Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 2 www.literaryhorizon.com May, 2021
Representation of Women in Beckett‟s Plays: Endgame and Happy Days
Aditi Banerjee Student, The Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata, W.B., India.
Abstract: Samuel Beckett is one of the most important modern absurd playwrights. His most significant play Waiting for Godot appeared in 1954 originally in French (En attendant Godot 1952). Beckett wrote his first novels and short stories during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He then wrote poetry and short story collections and novellas. Beckett‘s Endgame (1957) is a one-act play with four characters. It was originally written in French (entitled Fin de partie). Beckett himself translated it into English. Happy Days is two acts play written by Samuel Beckett. But women in Beckett‘s plays such as in Endgame and Happy Days are portrayed as outcast, not only with the voices but also with the space they belong to. They are either paralyzed or stuck to the ‗mound‘, which eroded the existential issue of gender in the plays. This paper will resist and discuss the Sartrean themes allowing the gaze of ―other‖. The woman in these plays is confined bodily, socially and psychologically in their esteemed space. This reading will examine the socio-psychological dystopian ambiguity of women along with the passivity of theatrical sidelines in Happy Days and Endgame.
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 2 www.literaryhorizon.com May, 2021
Keywords: Absurd, Dystopia, Existentialism, Female body, Psychological conflict, Marginalization, Space-location.
Introduction: ‗Woman‘ in Beckett‘s plays is the foregrounding study of the society of today‘s times. Understanding ‗woman‘ in Beckett‘s space needs the substantiation of ‗body‘, ‗space‘, ‗identity‘. This study beholds reader with the natural process of questioning the identity and cultural space of the women in Happy Days and Endgame. Beckett in his plays believed that the body connects with reality but rejected the notion of self or ‗I‘. The self in Beckett makes the darkness primary and the light something philosophical. Again, this study will aim to discuss the partitioning of the body through the light of horror of the World War II and the marginalization of Beckett‘s character like Nell in Endgame and Winnie in Happy Days. To give a reading of this two play, adaptation and translation to other languages is highly solicited in this paper. As a whole, two women characters will be contrasted on the basis of cultural hybridity, psychological reading and boxed space. The mention of Foucault, Sartre and other philosophers enrich the circularity of speech and voicelessness of Beckett‘s woman. The body, identity and gender will trouble the Beckett readings in order to represent Samuel Beckett, a misogynist. Objective: The objective of this paper is to impart knowledge to the study of Beckett‘s woman, not only in space or identity in Western thought but also in adaptations of Eastern culture. This study will surely help students dealing with existentialism and marginal studies in Absurd Theatre. In Gender studies, it is important to compare and contrast to every day‘s world issues and redefine the space and location of the characters. This paper also explores Beckett‘s entrapment of body of the female persona. This can again be expanded to the metaphysical or
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 2 www.literaryhorizon.com May, 2021
philosophical reading of the topic. The reading of Beckett‘s women such as Nell and Winnie particularly reads about the caricature of the middle-aged woman of Western and Eastern culture in theatre sidelines. Hypotheses: Are Beckett‘s female characters entertained by entrapment of the body or Partitioning of the self? The research in this perspective critically forewords to the inescapable involvement with the fundamental issues of body and self in Beckett‘s plays, such as Endgame and Happy Days. A central concern in Beckett‘s female character is the involvement of dualities, associated with binary oppositions such as macrocosm and microcosm, intellect and emotion mind and body. Earlier researches have worked with the subjectivity of the confined bodies in relation to resist Sartrean themes. Victorian Swanson, in her article, ―Confining, Incapacitating, and Partitioning the Body: Carcerality and Surveillance in Samuel Beckett‟s Endgame, Happy Days and a play‖ compared Beckett‘s partitioning of the body with Foucault‘s subjugation of a self. She talked about the construction of ―prison cells‖ and has given comments on Sartrean philosophy which denies subjectivity. Foucault‘s idea is curved out by the internalization and the social entrapment of self. But the figuring out sometimes get blurred when Foucault diverges with the opinion he made and insists that Sartrean ―other gaze‖ creates the subject of the women characters. In Sartrean module, the gaze of the ―other‖ objectify the readers in the same way, the characters do. Beckett‘s subjects are internalized not only with the self- consciousness but of the power structure, he demystifies the traditional conceptual machinery of thinking in terms of binaries. In order to deal with Nell and Winnie, Beckett placed them in an enclosed form dedicating their survival stories of all middle-aged woman. Winnie, in short may be compared with a healthy heart of a decayed body who refuses to stop beating in spite of longing for death. Martha Fehsenfeld, who played the character of first Winnie (Ruth White) in 1961, New York theatre, commented on the partition of Winnie‘s body in the act. She said,
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 2 www.literaryhorizon.com May, 2021
―Like the bird with damaged feathers, hers is a survival under the most difficult circumstances…She keeps up a struggle unaware that it is a struggle.‖Other articles showed that the partly damaged body which seeks freedom from life, that can be death is related with the discontinuity of time. This is what Foucault calls it, ―panoptic cells‖. On the other hand, to take, Nell to be concerned in Endgame, she is immobilized being enclosed in a lid. The stage imagery grasps the audience mind and harks them back through the reality. While watching once, it may seem like a comedy but when the conscious self-denotes the personality of the characters, it marks the fragmentation of the ego and unconsciousness that Jung spoke in his third Tavistock lecture. Very importantly, body represents the social space. It reads Beckett‘s belief that the voice is escaped by the confinement of the unconscious. This thought influenced by Jung‘s lecture where he spoke of dream, personality of women characters and psychology. Nell in Endgame is projected as the embodiment of the mental complexes and repression of the ego, much like uncanniness of the remaining body. Beckett‘s images are unexpectedly disoriented and defamiliarized. He showed the fear within oneself that Jung prescribes as ―fragmented personality‖. It can be well concluded that women in Ireland stands with the governed space of society and they did not make any further comments on their own enslaved situation. Apart from the notion of the female subject, there is a political problem that feminism encounters in the assumptions that the term women denote a common identity, which is what Judith Butler discussed in her book ―Gender Trouble-Feminism and Subversion of Identity‖. Coming back to the confinement, it is interesting to note that Ruby Cohn in their article, ―The femme fatale on Beckett‟s stage” which analyzes clearly that the woman characters are immersed in the earth mound losing the independence of their own self. Winnie and Nell are entangled with oeuvre of their own consciousness. Cohn puts light on the title of Happy Days and Endgame. The title is ironic pertaining to the women characters like in Happy Days, Winnie
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Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 2 www.literaryhorizon.com May, 2021
thought of her past memories but is living a badly happy day. Nell, in Endgame was the first to die. Her death marks the position of women in the society. They had been paralyzed but successfully driven out with the metaphysics of time. To Cohn, the female space also needs the reception of time and the timelessness. To different characters of Beckettian women, time serves them to be the most nuance that Beckett has created for fatal births. The self-partition, body collapsing, time enjambment and finally colonizing the thought process of women deconstruct binarism and the paradigms of suffering in Beckett‘s play, “Happy Days‖ and ―Endgame‖. Findings: This paper further investigates to the discussion of women‘s space and their body politics. Beckett‘s woman, especially Nell in Endgame when speaks, ―NELL (without lowering her voice): Nothing is funnier than unhappiness‖, she can be meant that her unhappiness which is bounded by a border is dystopic. Dystopian life agrees to the fact that they were always camped by ―others‖. Though she understood the ―funny‖ usual trauma of her life but she is habituated by it. The space and the trauma affected them so much that sheutters, ―It was deep, deep. And you could see down to the bottom. So white. So clean‖. Their location of suffering and trauma lead to the development of their stronger ego that will meet the end of life. But this end is their victory of new life. The traumatization is caused also by holocaust of marginalization. In the play Endgame, Nell‘s last words were ―So, white! Desert!‖. The desert can be a metaphor of peace or freedom which indirectly refers that their body which was under the dislocation of dystopian camera shifts to question their presence. The deserts can also be a result of ice that brings death. This paper includes the movement of diving deep into the desert to be fragmented. Beckett in these two plays never wanted to show the audience that movement of the women in Endgame and Happy Days are elegiac. Were they not dreaming? Do they enjoyed the
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partitioning? To this, the answer will be negative. For instance, Beckett‘s women characters are problematic. Some previous researches proved that they were not feminist but they had the desire to speak. To some extent, it can be referred that, if ―the birth of the reader must be at thecost of the death of the author‖ (19), then Beckett‘s work is from a feminist perspective, just to support the subjectivity. Beckett‘s women are always covered up like that of women in ―third world countries‖. In Happy Days, Winnie knew that she is governed by the political mound but the incongruity within her mindscape draws the line of the loss of sexual identity which is more tragic in women and is made clear on stage by the disappearance of certain parts of the body or by a dismemberment of the body itself or by a split between body and voice. Dr. Tapu Biswas, in his book rightly spoke about the influence of the traumatic injustice made to women characters. He discussed that in the Bengali translation of Fin De Partie, named as SheshKhela where the Bengali Nell, after being surfaced into the white, hollow land of Western dilemma, is a hopeless character but in spite of the hopelessness, she emerged into the spiritual center. According to the director of the adaptation, Endgame can be metaphorically described as KALI YUGA and the co-director symbolizes Endgame as the producer of soundless voice and structural entity. Dr.Tapu Biswas pointed out the translation of Happy Days in Bengali as AnandamayDinguli by Kabir Chowdhury where the characters like Winnie recapitulates her memory where she was a ball dancer and had a great time. The past memories struck her down in the mound from waist to neck, causing the pessimism fluctuating to reality. The eastern game of thought symbolically transformed their trauma into spiritual practices. Apart from the body and the claustrophobic location of women in theatre, it is urgent to keep a tract of the locale of both the play. Nearly all the characters from Endgame and Happy Days are nearly finished, more or less are standing on the verge of depopulated world. The eschatological frame of Beckett gives a picture of ‗Waste Land‘. Winnie recoils when she sees the egg, symbolizes
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fertility and birth in the scorched earth. The earth, in results, became archaic, whether it is for Winnie or Nell. These findings will certainly help the upcoming generation if they ever wanted to deal with the Gender Studies in respect to Beckett‘s woman. Beckett‘s woman is far-fetched to discuss. It may seem that woman, body and self are confined to the earth but if it is discussed from the subaltern point of view, it can earn fame through the voice of the characters. Not only the characters are taken into concern, the actresses dealt with their self-expression. This paper can also guide to the research of time shift in Woman‘s life. The audience strongly emphasized the gaze of the ‗others‘ who follows Sartrean gaze as a strong alienating force, condemned by the existential identity of the woman in these plays. Conclusion: To conclude, this paper discussed the Beckettian woman‘s problem associated with their space, setting and re location of their speeches. This paper used the primary sources for the collection of data to carry out the research problem. It can be well defined that Beckett‘s woman characters offer tenderness to their respected mates, despite of their nuances in their own life. The play‘s title ironically devote burial to their present condition. This is also contrasted through the vision of Third world culture where translators and adaptors deconstructed the Beckettian notion and added more Eastern gravity towards it. So, it can be well meant that this paper can be restudied several times to carry foreward the dystopic enrages towards women in twenty first century as well.
Bibliography: Ben-Zvi, Linda, ―Playing Happy Days, Interviewed by Martha Fehsenfield‖. Women in Beckett, (Critical and Perspective), Illini Books, 1992, p.p. 55-58 Ben-Zvi, Linda, ―The Female Fatale on Beckett‘s Stage by Ruby Cohn‖, Women in Beckett,
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(Critical and Perspective), Illini Books, 1992, p.p. 162-171 Biswas, Tapu. Indian Response to Western Theatre, ‗Theatre of the Absurd‘. Avantgarde Press, 2011. Ramakrishna, Lalita. Samuel Beckett: Time and Self in his plays. Harman Publishing House, 1997
Works Cited: Campbell, Julie. ―THE ENTRAPMENT OF THE FEMALE BODY IN BECKETT'S PLAYS IN RELATION TO JUNG'S THIRD TAVISTOCK LECTURE.‖ Samuel Beckett Today /Aujourd'hui, vol. 15, 2005, pp. 161–172. JSTOR. Sharma, P., Barua, A. Analysing Gaze in Terms of Subjective and Objective Interpretation: Sartre and Lacan. Hum Stud 40, 61–75 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9406 4 Weiss, Katherine. ―Beckett's ‗Happy Days‘: Rewinding and Revolving Histories.‖ South Atlantic Review, vol. 75, no. 4, 2010, pp. 37–50. JSTOR. Swanson, Victoria, Confining, Incapacitating, and Partitioning the Body: Carcerality and Surveillance in Samuel Beckett‘s Endgame, Happy Days and a play, Open Edition Miranda, France, 2011.
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