STILL HAUNTING THE CASTLE:

FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC THEATRE AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY

A Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Aoise A. Stratford

February 2016

© 2016 Aoise A. Stratford

STILL HAUNTING THE CASTLE:

FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC THEATRE AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY

Aoise A. Stratford, Ph.D.

Cornell University 2016

Abstract: Despite the fact that Gothic drama dominated London and American stages around the turn of the nineteenth century, Gothic is a critically disparaged term rarely used in contemporary theatre scholarship. This project seeks to reclaim the term in the context of certain twentieth-century plays by women that can be said to belong to a genealogy of contemporary feminist theatre. These plays use Gothic themes, images, and conventions to challenge dominant patriarchal ideologies in the postcolonial cultures of England,

Australia, Canada, and the USA. The playwrights primarily studied in this regard are Beatrix

Christian, Judith Thompson, Connie Gault, Alma De Groen, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori

Parks, Liz Lochhead, Adrienne Kennedy, Sarah Kane, and The Five Lesbian Brothers.

Analyzing this significant body of work, I argue for the presence of a Gothic mode across a range of plays that are variously consciously Gothic (in that they take known

Gothic texts as intertexts), evocatively Gothic (in that they present an accumulation of

tropes, images and conventions recognizable from earlier Gothic novels and examined in extant Gothic scholarship), or that use the Gothic as a significant dramaturgical strategy that interrupts and (re)frames the play’s narrative and meaning.

Working from the claim that the power dynamics of spaces and bodies are central to the intersection of Gothic literary studies, feminist theatre studies, and postcolonialism, and drawing on key critical texts from those disciplines, the first three chapters each examine a prominent trope of the Gothic: the dangerous Gothic space, the monstrous reproductive body, and the infectious body of the vampire. The first chapter explores postcolonial stagings of claustrophobic interiors, abject landscapes, and polyvalent spaces with unstable borders. The second chapter looks at constructions of race and gender in contemporary American figurations of monstrous mothers in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Red

Letter Plays. The third chapter moves from literal to figurative evocations of the vampire and its relationship to upheaval, exploitation, and gender. The final chapter proposes Sarah

Kane’s Blasted as a case study for the feminist postcolonial Gothic theatre, looking at how the three tropes of the previous chapters coalesce in that play.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Aoise Stratford received a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honors from the University of New

South Wales, Australia, with a double major in English, and Theatre and Film Studies, in

1998. She completed an MFA in Writing, with a concentration in Fiction, from the

University of San Francisco in 2000. She is also a playwright and an occasional dramaturg.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is with much gratitude that I wish to acknowledge the support and inspiration of a good many people in the writing of this project. While the following expressions of gratitude may seem to fit neat categories, the truth is that many people have helped in many ways.

First and foremost, my thanks to my advisors, J. Ellen Gainor, Sara Warner, Phillip

Lorenz, and Catherine Burroughs, whose unflagging support of this project, unequaled critical input, and unflinching advice have not only helped shape this project but also shaped me as a scholar. I am forever in their debt.

Secondly, I wish to acknowledge the playwrights whose dramatic visions are at the heart of this project: Beatrix Christian, Suzan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill, Adrienne

Kennedy, Alma DeGroen, Judith Thompson, Liz Lochhead, The Five Lesbian Brothers,

Connie Gault, and Sarah Kane, along side those afforded less attention but still a key part of this discussion, Paula Vogel, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, J. R. Planché, Joanna Baillie, Colman the Younger, Hilary Bell, Kathryn Ash, Joan Schenkar, Carole Frechette, Beth Henley, Louis

Nowra, Daniel McDonald, and Jack Thorne.

Alongside the scholarship of my committee, I would also like to acknowledge my deep admiration and gratitude for the work of Cheryl Black and Kim Solga in particular, whose feminist theatre criticism has been so helpful to me in formulating my own response to our shared subject. Kathleen Perry Long has also served as a mentor, nurturing my interest in the Gothic when I arrived at Cornell, as has Nick Salvato, who fanned the flames

iv further still in relation to television studies. The daughter of an academic and an English teacher, I have benefited greatly also from the mentorship of my own parents, my first teachers and readers, Conal and Averil Condren.

Graduate school is its own particular journey, and I am thankful not to have had to make it alone. My heartfelt thanks to my brothers and sisters in spirit and AGITation, particularly Lindsay Cummings, Jimmy Noriega, Diana Looser, Wah Guan Lim, Stephen

Low, Erin Stoneking, Nick Fesette, Seth Soulstein, Honey Crawford, Jayme Kilburn, J.

Michael Kinsey and Kriszta Pozsonyi.

My thanks also to those who helped me think through the labor of scholarship by reminding me that I am indelibly connected to the subject of that enterprise because I also labor to make theatre: in particular Shawna Mefferd Kelty, Cheri Magid, Gary Garrison, John

Yearley, Gregory Pulver, Bruce Levitt, Austin Bunn, Wes Pearce, Emily Rollie, Sam Buggeln,

Godfrey Simmons, Beth Milles, Carolyn Goelzer, George Sapio, Donna Hoke, and Dawson

Moore.

I especially would like to recognize the veritable village that has supported me in ways that may be less visible in the pages that follow but without whom there would be no pages. My deep and humble thanks to those who have provided much needed balance, friendship, and parenting support: Alicia and Mark Wittink, Meloney and David McMurray,

Kathy and Peter Schwartz and Jessica Lucrayer, Alison and Brent Lemberg, Toby Ault,

Jenny Leijonhufvud, Karin Harjes, Sean Cunningham, Sarah Collins, Laura and Jason

Harrington, Amy Maltzan, Lisa Ellin, Kim Evans and David La Rocca, Justine Schwartz, Dee

Hay, Shelby Dietz and Eanna Flannigan, Meredith de Pol, Justine Lloyd, Juke Wyatt, Libby and Grandfa, Allegra Zakis, and my sister in spirit, Danny Kingsley.

v And finally to my family, whose sacrifices and compromises have been many: Jamie,

Rowena, Gwendy and Hugo Lloyd thank you from the bottom of my heart for the gifts of love and perspective (and tech support). Your presence is everywhere here. The somewhat unsettling experience of reading Freud while nursing an infant, the profound anxiety of caring for a sick child while writing my A exams, and the mixed blessing of explaining what a vampire is to a Halloween-obsessed six year old are--for better and worse--part of this project and the person I have become because of it.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch ….. iii

Acknowledgements ….. iv

Introduction: In Search of a Feminist Gothic Theatre ….. 1

Chapter One: Staging the Postcolonial Gothic Space ….. 71

Chapter Two: Monstrous (M)Others and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays ….. 134

Chapter Three: Vampire/Empire and Troubling Transformations ….. 201

Chapter Four: Sarah Kane’s Blasted: A Gothic Case Study ….. 271

Provisional Conclusion: ….. 311

Works Cited ….. 324

vii

INTRODUCTION:

In Search of a Feminist Gothic Theatre

“Wow. It’s so – Gothic” (Beatrix Christian, Blue Murder)

Introduction: Who’s There?

In Australian playwright Beatrix Christian’s Blue Murder (1994), when Eve arrives from the country and meets a reclusive man called Blue, the first thing she says when she enters his house is: “Wow, it’s so Gothic” (Christian, Blue 3). And from these four words we know just what to expect. The house will be vast and cavernous, but somehow also stifling. It will smack of the past. It will contain shocking secrets that hint at some as yet unknown and unreadable threat. The journey through this place will be familiar, yet strange, involving getting lost while seemingly going nowhere. And lurking in its unfathomable shadows there will be the erotic, elusive, and dangerous presence of an Other. By describing her surroundings as Gothic, Eve is telling us something not just about the house, but also about the world in which she finds herself, and in which we find ourselves—the world of the play.

Two hundred years ago, Eve’s reaction, along with the various structural, atmospheric, and physical trappings it evokes, and our immediate anticipation of the pleasurable thrills of terror that would surely follow, would have been a common occurrence in the theatre. By 1800, Gothic drama was a significant feature of both the

1 English and the American theatre landscape. Wildly popular and controversially subversive, Gothic dramas by serious poets, tragic playwrights, and sensational novelists dominated the theatre season in London and caused both delight and outrage in the public.

With its heightened emotional register, instability of form, preoccupation with the irrational, and mixed messages about power, the Gothic was perceived by many as a threat to the well-trod boards of the legitimate and patriarchal theatre.1 Indeed it is perhaps this alignment with the marginalized that attracted so many women both as audience members and as the progenitors of Gothic drama in their roles as playwrights and as popular novelists whose work begged for theatrical adaptation. The Gothic legacy Eve clearly recognizes at the end of the twentieth century is shaped by a genealogy that includes significant works by Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and Joanna Baillie, to name a few.

Yet despite its significance as a dramatic genre two centuries ago, little to no attention has been paid in either Gothic studies or theatre studies to a Gothic genealogy that includes contemporary drama, especially not as written by women. Contrary to suggestions that the Gothic died out on stage by the mid-nineteenth century because it was replaced with “better” forms (B. Evans 3) or, that after the social angst of the French

Revolution it was “displaced” by domestic dramas, surviving only in the marginalized horror theatre that became the monster movie (Cox, “Introduction” 70), it is my contention that Gothic drama is still with us. Eve is not alone in the darkened theatre.

Such a claim points, then, to a rather large hole in theatre scholarship—particularly in feminist theatre scholarship. The only book-length study of contemporary Gothic drama

1 More will be said on this, but Juliann Fleenor observes that the Gothic is in these respects aligned with the feminine outside the mainstream of culture (Fleenor 9-10) and the Gothic’s controversial reception is well known.

2 of which I am aware is MaryBeth Inverso’s The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama

(1990), which argues that a Gothic impulse is detectable in the work of several contemporary playwrights--primarily male and British in her study. The more recent

Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007) also includes a single rare chapter on

“Contemporary Gothic Theatre.” Emma McEvoy’s detailed analysis therein is limited to a small number of plays on the English stage that she sees as unusual for being both Gothic and drama: Stephen Mallatrat’s long-running and quite chilling intimate ghost-story The

Woman in Black (1988), adapted from a contemporary Gothic novel by Susan Hill, and a series of far less visible performances in site-specific “haunted” buildings, or in fringe theatres known for the grotesque, and for self-conscious theatricality (McEvoy 214-222).

Aside from these isolated cases, McEvoy concludes that the “main area of contemporary theatre in which Gothic (or Gothic pastiche/spoof usually lacking the element of fear) flourishes is the musical” (McEvoy 215).

Certainly it does exist there, though not always as parody, as Andrew Lloyd

Webber’s long-running The Phantom of The Opera and Stephen Sondheim’s deservedly acclaimed Sweeney Todd would seem to attest. So too, Charles Busch’s comedy The Vampire

Lesbians of Sodom (1985) speaks to the Gothic’s survival in politically charged non-musical parody.2 Yet, problematically analyses like McEvoy’s that align the Gothic with spoofs and musicals tend to perpetuate dominant highbrow/lowbrow divisions and thus run the risk of reinscribing a tendency to omit the Gothic from contemporary theatre scholarship.

These are tendencies this study seeks to resist in order to challenge the perception that the

2 While this comedy exploits the vampire motif in part to poke fun at a thirst for stardom and the theatrical comeback, it also uses gender-bending queer parody as politically subversive tools in its staging of queer sociality, marginalized identity, and the quest to survive in the face of zealous homophobia, as American theatre scholar Jordan Schildcrout has recently noted (Schildcrout 86).

3 Gothic has no real home in a politically engaged contemporary theatre. For one thing, the popular Gothic anti-hero Sweeney functions as an effective tool of social criticism, rebelling against corrupt Imperial and patriarchal power. And for another, important inroads have recently been made by theatre scholars such as David Savran into a re-evaluation of popular forms, paving the way, we might hope, for studies of the Gothic therein.3 However, more still needs to be done before Gothic drama, and particularly Gothic drama as written by women, might enter the critical fray.

My interest here is in expanding considerations of the Gothic to include examples of contemporary theatre that exist outside the lines drawn around popular entertainments and that have achieved a certain level of mainstream visibility and critical attention, while also making use of the Gothic’s subversive aesthetics and politics. Because the Gothic as a literary and dramatic movement at least ostensibly starts in Britain, spreading quickly to

America, it is logical to consider contemporary plays from these nations and from the places to which these locales have most readily exported their literary movements and theatre. The dominant theatrical forms of Canadian, American, and Australian theatre are inherited directly from the English stage and at about the time the Gothic was at its height.

Hence the plays discussed here are from these four locations. From Britain: Caryl

Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Mad Forest (1990), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Liz

Lochhead’s Dracula (1988, 2009). From the USA: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1996), In The

3 See, for example, David Savran’s recent article “Trafficking in Transnational Brands: The New Broadway-style Musical,” in which he examines the Broadway musical as a commodity that circulates in a global economy and thus has an important relationship to shifting constructions of national identity. Nonetheless, while the tide may be turning, much theatre criticism and scholarship still largely dismisses popular forms from considerations of what constitutes political theatre or high art, an argument that has deep roots in the Aristotilean tendency to privilege tragedy over comedy.

4 Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000), Adrienne Kennedy’s The Film Club (1992) and

Dramatic Circle (1992), The Five Lesbian Brothers’ The Secretaries (1993), and Paula

Vogel’s Desdemona (1994). From Canada: Connie Gault’s Sky (1989), Judith Thompson’s

Sled (1997) and Habitat (2001). And from Australia: Beatrix Christian’s, Blue Murder

(1994) and The Governor’s Family (1997), and Alma De Groen’s The Joss Adams Show

(1972). While these examples hardly exhaust the growing presence of contemporary

Gothic drama, considered together, these plays demonstrate the Gothic’s malleability for writers engaging the cultural politics of their contemporary moment, particularly as those politics pertain to issues of race, gender, place, and power in the wake of two significant late twentieth-century cultural developments in the locales under discussion: second wave feminism and the rise of postcolonial studies.

Postcolonial is, of course, a fraught term. Widely regarded to have emerged through

Edward Said’s foundational text Orientalism (1978), postcolonial studies as a school of critical theory is loosely concerned with the “unmasking of imperialism’s ideological guises,” in Eurocentric constructions of otherness and the perpetuation of marginality through cultural production (Singh and Schmidt 16-17). Imperialism is, as J. Ellen Gainor notes in her introduction to the anthology Imperialism and Theatre, “a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon” (Gainor, “Introduction” xii), making the study of imperialism—and of colonialism, which we might think of as imperialism’s dominant mode—highly relevant in an increasingly global culture. Further, as Helen Gilbert and

Joanna Tompkins helpfully explain in their foundational work on postcolonial drama

(1996), postcolonialism is not a “temporal concept” suggesting that colonialism is over, but rather is “an engagement with and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power

5 structures, and social hierarchies” (Gilbert and Tompkins 2). Alan Filewod, in his insightful analysis of the impact of colonialism on Canada’s ongoing attempts to define a national theatre, agrees and elaborates:

Post-colonialism is a problematic formulation, in part because it reductively equates very different historical experiences, and in part because it implies a state of emergence from colonialism, whereas in fact post-colonial societies find themselves defined and often confused by numerous intersecting and very present colonialisms….’Post-colonial’ then refers to the cultural experience of societies (and communities) struggling for definition after having identity displaced through colonialism, or (as in the case of the settler dominions of the British Empire) seeking an essential definition to legitimate the founding of the colonial state (Filewod 45).

Both on stage and in print, the Gothic as a literary movement in England emerged at the same time that the colonizing forces of the British Empire were invading and settling the vast and inhospitable landscapes of Canada and Australia, and the American colonies were emerging with nationhood from the Revolutionary War. The timing of these formative geopolitical phenomena suggests that colonization, too, may well have been a factor in the

Gothic imagination. As Gerry Turcotte and Cynthia Sugars point out in their recent collection of essays on the postcolonial Gothic in Canadian literature, “postcolonial and gothic discourses have for some time been paired in critical invocations of the ‘unhomely’ or ‘spectral’ legacies of imperialism and globalization” (Turcotte and Sugars vii). That the pairing of the postcolonial and the Gothic might exist beyond fiction—the primary object of study for Sugars and Turcotte—and be found in the theatre as well seems equally plausible, particularly given the political nature of theatre as a public medium, and the Gothic’s foundational alignment with drama. British, American, English-Canadian and English-

Australian theatre, from which the plays discussed here are drawn, trace this connection back to the Gothic heyday particularly clearly. Because the work of indigenous women

6 playwrights in these countries has been poorly represented in publication and critically received production at the end of the twentieth century, and because a wide range of

Gothic-aligned imagery and thematic elements in the work of indigenous writers often stems from a diverse range of cultural myths, geopolitical contexts, and story-telling traditions rather than from theatre traditions that might be traced back to the Gothic at its official inception, their plays largely fall beyond the scope of this project. 4

Nonetheless, the writers in this study are not entirely homogenous and the countries from which their work comes have different relationships to postcoloniality.

Some of the writers discussed here are writing in the context of England, a colonizing nation rather than a colonized one, with its own set of anxieties about borders, power, and

Imperial practices. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan note in their introduction to

Scattered Hegemonies (1994), “to keep [the term postcolonial] subversive, one would have to insist on its use as a term that includes literary production by First World subjects. Such a use resists a center/margin dichotomy that situates the postcolonial as geographically

4 The work of indigenous Australian playwrights, such as Eva Johnson’s Murras, and of Maori writers, such as Briar Grace Smith’s Purapurawhetu, have some similarities to the Gothic and directly address the postcolonial experience of Aboriginal and Maori characters dealing with displacement and relocation in predominantly white domestic spaces. However, some of what might be read as the Gothic in Murras is steeped in Aboriginal myth and culture and so diverges from fundamental Gothic conventions (such as live burial, or the trope of the space as body). So too, Maori culture’s relationship to myths, death and mourning prompts a different rendering of what western culture sees as abject, for example. Similar claims might be made about the work of indigenous Canadian playwrights, though scholars such as Jennifer Andrews see “distinctly Aboriginal reformulation[s] of the Canadian Gothic” at work in fiction. (Andrews 206). Hawaiian playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubhul’s play The Bones Live (Ola Na Iwi) may serve as a useful example of indigenous Gothic drama from the U.S. and has been discussed by Cheryl Edelson as reworking Victorian Gothic to “illuminate the horrors of Empire building” (Edelson 76). So too, as Gainor notes in her introduction to Imperialism and Theatre, which contains several essays that address indigenous drama in colonial cultures, “new theatrical forms” can be generated by “negotiating between indigenous performance modes and imported imperial culture” (Gainor, “Introduction” xiii). While these modes are not necessarily Gothic, some examples might be, suggesting the need for further study in this area.

7 and culturally ‘other’” (Grewal and Kaplan 15). So too, though there are many similarities between Canadian and Australian contexts, including the destruction and displacement of indigenous populations. One important distinction is that Australia was a penal colony, and as a result convicts, though white and English, were subjugated as part of a stratified colonial enterprise in which they had little power, a complexity that some of the Australian plays in this study reflect. America can be understood, as Ameritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt note, as “the world’s first postcolonial and neocolonial country” (Singh and Schmidt 5, emphasis original). As a nation-state recently unshackled from British colonial rule at the time of the Gothic’s inception as a literary movement, the U.S. “defined itself as the world’s first independent and anti-colonial nation-state [while] simultaneously incorporat[ing] many of the defining features of European colonial networks—including the color-line— into its economic and cultural life” (Singh and Schmidt 5). Certainly the legacies of slavery and an ambivalence about the relationship between national growth and subjugation mark certain plays in this study.

It is important not to generalize or erase distinctions between discrete and nuanced postcolonial positions, including those distinctions that mark off differences between postcolonialism and transnationalism. Yet while the concept of transnationalism has to some extent eclipsed postcolonialism in recent literary theory, and although distinctions between their respective emphases on global power systems and national identities remain significant, it is nonetheless productive to consider both in relation to the plays discussed here. As John McLeod notes:

The contemporary unequally globalized condition of the world, and…enduring exploitative cultural and national relations…suggest that, if the practice of colonial settlement belongs to yesterday, imperial pursuits continue determinedly today in

8 the guise of transnational corporations, global capitalism and the ‘war on terror’” (McLeod 7).

The Gothic’s function as a mode for articulating cultural anxieties about hegemony and power intersects with both postcolonialism and transnationalism. Thus it is my intention to identify postcoloniality in these plays in terms of their collective commitment to exposing and questioning the various structures and consequences of hegemonic domination that have arisen from colonial practices, and which feminism has a shared interest in challenging. However, by considering this group of writers as collectively questioning the postcolonial and transnational legacies of imperial practices, my intention is not to suggest a unified feminist front—the writers here often occupy quite different feminist positions— so much as it is to explore the Gothic’s tendency to repeat certain patterns of ambivalence, interrogation, and resistance.

The specific anxieties the Gothic addresses have, to some extent, evolved since the

Gothic’s heyday and so the Gothic has had to adapt. While cultural anxieties about race, community, gender, place and power have always existed, they are shaped at the end of the twentieth century in the countries studied here by the legacies of the slave trade and the direct and remote oppression of indigenous populations; the spread of violence and viruses across the surface of the globe; technology, capitalism and exploitative labor; land rights and resources; feminism’s second wave; violence in the media; abortion and birth interventions; and a host of other problems that intersect with postcolonial and transnational issues of national and personal identity. And yet the Gothic, like one of its most iconic figures, the vampire, has managed not just to survive the intervening centuries, but to thrive, finding in its own labyrinth of highly readable signs an ability both to

9 maintain its own identity and to reshape itself to speak to new audiences, in new theatrical and cultural environments. By shining the light of scholarly attention into a few neglected

Gothic corners, I hope to show that the term Gothic is a useful one to claim for a feminist and postcolonial theatre.

However, in order to establish why the plays in this study might variously qualify as

Gothic or as having Gothic elements, and how they might use that qualification to feminist postcolonial purpose in the theatre, I want to first preface my analyses with an attempt to ascertain what the Gothic is, and is not, and how its relationship to a contemporary feminist theatre might be understood.

I -- What is this Frightful Thing? Defining The Gothic

The Gothic is, and always has been, hard to define, and attempts to do so struggle to get past that strange blend of vagueness and specificity that marks Eve’s comment. As Anne

Williams explains it in her book-length study of the Gothic, Art of Darkness (1995), efforts to define the Gothic are plagued by the “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it” phenomenon (A. Williams 14). Originally meaning to do with the Goths, a northern tribe (or tribes) involved in the collapse of the Roman Empire and an early invasion of Britain, the term was even before its application to art and literature somewhat ambiguously used. As

David Punter points out in his comprehensive work, The Literature of Terror ([1980] 1996) writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century had “very little idea who the Goths were or what they were like” (Punter 4). Nonetheless, an interest in the Goths and their

10 legacy persisted in England. As Clery and Miles note in Gothic Documents (2000), “the impact of Gothic customs and institutions on the evolution of British political and legal structures remained a topic for impassioned debate--a debate which reached a climax in the 1790s, at the very moment when the Gothic novel achieved its greatest popularity”

(Clery and Miles 48). Various historical and socio-political associations of the Gothic, then, are ambiguously tied up in its emergence as a literary term.

“Gothic” is set into motion as a literary term5 by Horace Walpole who claims it for his novel The Castle of Otranto, first published in 1764 and then released as a second edition the following year. Since then, Gothic is a label mostly applied to a group of novels written around the turn of the nineteenth century, including Walpole’s and those by Ann

Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Jane

Austen’s parodic but nonetheless Gothic Northanger Abbey (1818).6 Significant for this study, however, is that the Gothic was also highly popular as a theatrical form, and had by the 1790s exploded into what theatre scholar Jeffrey Cox claims was “the dramatic form for the revolutionary years (Cox, “Introduction” 5, italics original). Key examples include

Colman the Younger’s Blue-Beard or Female Curiosity (1798), Joanna Baillie’s Gothic dramas De Monfort (1800) and Orra (1812), Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest (1816), J. R.

Planché’s The Vampire, or The Bride of The Isles (1820),7 and Richard Brinsley Peake’s

5 It is of course also a term used for architecture such as one sees in the iconic Notre Dame, which is also the setting for Victor Hugo’s fairly Gothic novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), and in the twentieth and twenty-first century as a music, visual art, and fashion sub-culture serviced by many online and magazine publications. 6 The fact that Austen is able to successfully parody the form while also contributing to it, speaks to the prompt popularity of Gothic fiction in English writing. 7 For clarity, Planché’s play will hereinafter be referred to as Bride of The Isles.

11 Presumption or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823).8

These plays and novels are, however, not homogenous, as they vary in tone, language, structure, and subject. Part of the difficulty of categorizing the Gothic stems from the Gothic’s willful copying and appropriation of other forms across a range of periods, thus confounding neat generic and historical borders. Multiplicity and hybridity govern

Walpole’s very conception of what the Gothic as a literary genre is. When first published,

Walpole claimed his story had been transcribed from an ancient and recently discovered sixteenth-century manuscript, the tale being set some time around the barbarous eleventh or twelfth century and presumed to be first penned some indeterminable time thereafter.

However, in the preface to the second edition, Walpole revises his fake claim that the manuscript was a real found text and says instead that The Castle of Otranto was “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success” (Walpole, “Preface” 43). Thus, though the Gothic is often considered to be in opposition to the novel, which attempted to, in Walpole’s terms,

“copy nature with success,” and show the real world rather than the improbable, several scholars point to the rise of the novel as having its own influences on the Gothic form, particularly in the work of Richardson (Punter 20; A. Williams 13). Certainly, hybridity and/or multiplicity, and an unstable relationship to the real, are recurrent features of the

8 Though drama is often overlooked in Gothic scholarship, Frankenstein offers a well-trod bridge between literature and theatre, having served for a host of stage adaptations from Peake’s Presumption, which had a highly successful run at the height of the Gothic Drama craze in London and itself sparked imitations (Cox 385), to contemporary plays about Frankenstein, such as Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice (1982), which takes a feminist look at the role of creation through the act of writing, and National Theatre Live’s recent internationally televised production of Nick Dear’s adaptation, directed by Danny Boyle, which harnessed considerable star power and technology to reach a wide audience (2011).

12 Gothic, and significantly they also come to underpin questions of postcolonialism, transnationalism and feminism at the end of the twentieth century.

Walpole’s claims to blending forms and his acknowledgement of multiple sources of artistic inspiration are particularly significant to a discussion of the Gothic as a theatrical form given that one of the sources he claims to have copied was Shakespeare (Walpole,

“Preface” 45).9 Indeed the influence of Jacobean drama on Walpole and his followers has been well noted (Punter 20; Ranger 5). Macbeth in particular was popular at the time of the

Gothic craze10 and shows up referentially in several texts.11 This is unsurprising when one considers its central act of regicide topically reflected in the French Revolution and Reign of

Terror, the heightened emotions of fear and guilt, the Gothic motifs of wild forests and landscapes, the witches and portentous visions gesturing to something beyond the real, and the spectacle of plenty of blood.

In addition to Shakespeare’s ongoing popularity, other plays by his contemporaries came into print during the eighteenth century, and as Clara McIntryre notes in her essay on

Radcliffe’s sources, “a revival of interest in them was also evident upon the stage,” – a

9 Interestingly, the Goths as a people are a feature of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 10 Judging from the number of entries in The Index to the London Stage, the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to surpass Macbeth in popularity during this period is Hamlet, which notably also has a ghost. Revivals and popular burletta versions of Macbeth were performed regularly throughout the second half of the eighteenth century (Index 768-769; Cox, “Introduction” 11), 11 Evidence of Macbeth’s resonance during the height of the Gothic is substantial, and not just in Radcliffe. William Godwin’s Gothic novel Caleb Williams is very evocative of Macbeth thematically, and makes several explicit references to Shakespeare’s play. Against the tyrannical and murdering Tyrrel people “muttered curses, deep, not loud” (Godwin 96; Shakespeare 5.3.27). Caleb directly quote’s Macbeth’s guilty cry of “sleep no more” (Godwin, 144; Shakespeare 2.2.34,39,42) and paraphrases Lady Macbeth’s “milk of human kindness” (Godwin, 222; Shakespeare 1.45.18). Baillie’s Gothic drama De Monfort, although lacking in plot similarities, abounds in Macbethian references: bloody hands (Baillie, 4.3.25; Shakespeare 2.2.60,63, 5.1.46,55,65), ravens as harbingers of murder and owls that “scream” as heralds of death (Baillie, 3.3.220, 4.1.15; Shakespeare, 1.5.39, 2.2.3, 14), and De Monfort directly echoes Macbeth saying “of fair or foul” (Baillie, 5.2.6; Shakespeare, 1.3.38, 1.1.10).

13 revival she argues would not have escaped the attention of Gothic novelists (McIntyre

647).12 For McIntyre, the influence of Elizabethan drama significantly complicates definitions of the Gothic: “the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers…are not an expression of the life and spirit of the Middle Ages, if this is what the term Gothic means.

They are, rather, an expression of the life and spirit of the Renaissance, as Elizabethan

England had interpreted the Renaissance” (McIntyre 646). Certainly the notion that the

Gothic already exists as an element in Jacobean drama is well supported by Webster’s The

Duchess of Malfi, for example. Set in Renaissance Italy, The Duchess of Malfi features a powerful obsessive brother who destroys his twin sister for marrying as she pleases. This revenge tragedy abounds in the sorts of unsettling images, perverted subject matter, aristocratic villains, sexually motivated violence, tropes of the monstrous, madness, the supernatural, ruined moonlit graveyards, and extreme emotion that also mark those novels most often considered Gothic. In one of the most striking similarities, the heroines of both

The Duchess and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho are terrifyingly confronted with waxen images that appear to be corpses, a motif that is unusual enough to be particularly notable in its duplication (Webster 210; Radcliffe 662). Though Webster offers what may be the most striking parallel between Jacobean drama and the Gothic, Shakespeare remains

12 McIntyre’s compelling article suggests that statistically the resurgence of interest in Elizabethan drama on the English stage was most marked in the decade preceding Radcliffe’s most productive period and further, that Radcliffe’s own familiarity with the theatre, her access to recently published volumes of plays through her editor husband, and her documented admiration for Shakespeare all support her claims to a non-coincidental connection between Elizabethan theatre and Gothic novels. See in particular 648-650. It seems likely though that Radcliffe read rather than saw Webster’s Duchess, as it was published in 1735 but the only production during the eighteenth century appears to have been Theobald’s remake, The Fatal Secret, at Covent Garden in 1733 (Index 833; MacIntyre 648).

14 the most widely noted point of overlap.13 A recent anthology of essays edited by John

Drakakis and Dale Townshend, Gothic Shakespeare (2008), contains discussions that link

Romeo and Juliet to The Twilight Zone, trace connections to Shakespeare in the novels of

Ann Radcliffe (including Macbeth in The Italian and The Romance of the Forest), and explore the somewhat symbiotic relationship between Shakespeare and the Romantic Stage. Such studies serve to deepen and illuminate the tendrils of influence that theatre--particularly in the form of bloody Early Modern tragedy--had on the Gothic on both page and stage, and they argue strongly for a reconsideration of the Gothic as a theatrical form with an ongoing history. We are, after all, still staging Macbeth.14

Unsurprisingly then, broad definitions encounter difficulty in distinguishing between Walpole’s Gothic and its predecessors in a way that complicates both generic and historical boundaries. As Punter notes, there is also a marked “continuity of tone and feeling between graveyard [poetry from the eighteenth century] and Gothic” (Punter 38).

Generic differences between graveyard poetry and the Gothic are superseded by thematic and tonal similarities, in part because Gothic writing was not restricted to the novel, but, as noted, also served the stage and the closet stage, where overlaps with poetry are particularly marked. The cult of sublimity, in particular Burke’s influential writing Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), emerges as an identifiable source in texts classified as graveyard poetry, Gothic prose, and Romantic drama alike. In all these

13 Graham Saunders proves an interesting exception as he briefly discusses The Duchess of Malfi in relation to the work of Sarah Kane, whose play Blasted is the subject of the final chapter of this project (Saunders 20). Critic Michael Billington also makes use of Macbeth to discuss Kane (Billington, Jan 20, 1995), though he seems not to be doing so analytically. 14 Other obvious contenders for Early Modern Gothic that have received recent productions include both Webster’s The Duchess and White Devil, Middleton’s The Changeling--which has some Bluebeard like elements and interestingly was, according to the Index to the London Stage produced at Drury Lane in 1789 (Index 564)—and Ford’s unsettling Tis Pity She’s A Whore.

15 supposedly varied forms Burke’s efforts to make connections between the sublime natural world and human wonder and terror are evident in the depiction of the grandeur of nature, the motif of decay, and the tonal importance granted to overwhelming fear—all of which might be thought of as common in Gothic writing, and all of which might equally resonate with early colonists’ experiences of vast and inhospitable landscapes and their peoples. For

Burke the sublime had the power to provoke astonishment and terror, “the kindred emotions that attend fear and wonder” (Burke, Enquiry 54). He writes:

The passion caused by the great and sublime…is Astonishment; and astonishment is that stage of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror…. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force….Whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime (Burke, Enquiry 53-54).

To a list of the Gothic’s influential precursors that includes Burke, graveyard poetry and Jacobean drama, Anne Williams adds Beowulf and Milton, among others (A. Williams

13). Further, I would suggest that Bluebeard, which Williams and Mulvey-Roberts both categorize as Gothic (A. Williams 38-48 and Mulvey-Roberts 98-112), is perhaps the quintessential Gothic tale, and it has found continued life in Gothic plays and stories from

1697, when it is published by Charles Perrault as La Barbe Bleue, to the present moment, where it seems to show up particularly in feminist and postcolonial fiction and drama.15

15 I’m dating Bluebeard in line with Marina Warner, who suggests that Charles Perrault’s collection Histories ou conte du temps passé, which was published in Paris in 1697 and includes La Barbe Bleue, “inaugurated the fairytale as a literary form for children” (M. Warner, xvi). Bluebeard shows up in the form of references in texts widely considered to be Gothic, such as Bronte’s reference in Jane Eyre (1847) to Rochester’s wandering in “some Bluebeard’s castle” (Bronte, 122) and in the form of retellings or adaptations, such as Angela Carter’s remarkable and decidedly feminist short story The Bloody Chamber (1979). Mulvey-Roberts also suggests that The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is “Radcliffe’s version of the Bluebeard tale,” a reading with which I concur (Mulvey-Roberts 103). In addition to being the subject of Christian’s Blue Murder, the tale of Bluebeard resonates in two recent plays by Canadian playwrights. The first is Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic’s The Drowning Girls (1999, rewritten in 2008), which is based on the case of wife- murderer George Joseph Smith and references both Shakespeare and Percy Shelley. The second is

16 Such texts Williams describes as having “achieved Gothic, to belong presently to the family, though not born in the direct line—or born B.W. (‘Before Walpole’)” (A. Williams 13).

Definitions according to historical period and genre (in the sense of novel or drama), or even geography (given the influence of the highly emotional and violent style of German

Sturm und Drang writers such as Friedrich Schiller on Gothic writers like Matthew

Lewis),16 are then of only limited use when it comes to defining the Gothic. Indeed if anything these markers become less useful as the Gothic continues after Walpole, through the nineteenth century. In America the Gothic emerges in novels like Hawthorne’s The

Scarlet Letter (1850), the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s creepy tale of postpartum depression and patriarchal medicine, The Yellow Wallpaper

(1892). A diverse but notably Gothic body of work also emerges during the fin de siècle period in England and includes The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1886) and

Bram Stoker’s landmark novel, Dracula (1897), both of which were also adapted for the stage.17 Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and H. G. Wells’s Gothic-Sci-

Fi-Horror story The Island Of Doctor Moreau (1896) can also aptly be described as Gothic.

In the twentieth century the term Gothic began to be applied to serious literature while continuing to be a term also used to describe mass-market, popular, formulaic

Carole Frechette’s sad, chilling and more direct revisioning of the Bluebeard story, The Small Room At The Top Of The Stairs (2008). With its themes of displacement, violence done to women at home, and its powerful, imperial patriarch, Bluebeard serves as a prime point of intersection for the Gothic, feminism, and postcolonialism. 16 See Punter on Matthew Lewis for a discussion of the back and forth relationship between English Gothic, Romanticism, and the German terror writers, whose plays Lewis translated (Punter 56-58) 17 Dracula has been continually adapted for the stage, Balderston and Deane’s 1927 adaptation, serving as perhaps the most successful. Bram Stoker himself organized a staged reading of Dracula at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1897. Not much is known about it, but David Skal notes the script as being “a cut and paste abridgement of the published [novel]” (Skal viii). Richard Mansfield achieved notoriety playing the title role in Jekyll and Hyde in New York (Madison Square Theatre, 1887) and London (The Lyceum, 1888).

17 romances.18 Thus the Gothic is found in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a slave mother, Beloved (1987), and in Elizabeth Jolley’s Miles Franklin Award-winning The

Well (1986), about two isolated women in rural Australia who may (or may not) have killed a man,19 as well as in mass-produced paperback hits like Virginia Andrews’s Flowers In The

Attic series (1979), which includes an incestuous relationship between adolescent siblings secretly locked in an attic for years, and which had wide appeal for high school audiences in the decade after its publication.20 In the twentieth century the Gothic also takes up unequivocal residence on screen, a move that starts with the German Expressionist films

The Cabinet of Caligari (Wiene 1919) and Nosferatu (Murnau 1922),21 and continues through a large body of Universal monster movies in the 1930s and 40s, occult horror movies such as Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski 1968) and The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973), the occasional Sci-Fi blockbuster such as Alien (Scott 1979), and a particularly dark strand of detective/suspense movie typified by Silence of The Lambs (Demme 1991).22 On smaller

18 This division of Gothic into “good” (a few) and “popular” (meaning not so good, and most of it) is particularly clearly articulated by Fleenor (“Introduction” 4). 19 The excellently Gothic The Well, was also adapted by Jolley as a radio play, suggesting that Gothic drama has a place in that medium too. See the collection Elizabeth Jolley, Off the Air published in 1995. It has since been made into a film as well, which makes good use of the story’s Gothic landscape in its cinematography, though the radio play’s evocative use of silence and sound and the visual uncertainty of the medium adds significantly to the creepy tone of the radio play. 20 I remember the debate over whether or not our all-girl high school library should have Flowers In the Attic and remember too that all of my friends were reading it anyway! The book has sold over 40 million copies, and been in print for decades, though it has been largely overlooked by literary awards and scholarship. 21 Misha Kavka notes that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which predates Nosferatu by three years, is a key early horror film (though she sees Nosferatu as more strictly Gothic) that points to the slippage between German expressionist techniques and Hollywood Gothic cinema (Kavka 215). 22 Alien’s treatment of reproduction, which is the focus of chapter two, is key to its classification as a Gothic text (Botting, “Aftergothic” 289). Similarly gender is significant for Silence of the Lambs; as well as its exploration of perverse criminality, patriarchal power, and its scenes of entrapment, it features a female detective. Though she doesn’t make the connection to Bluebeard’s snooping wife and her successors that I would argue is foundational to the female detective, Anne Cranny-Francis

18 screens the Gothic has been equally successful in a host of television series as varied as

Dark Shadows (1966-1971), Twin Peaks (1990-1991), The X Files (1993-2002), Buffy The

Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Top of The Lake (2013), True Blood (2008-2014), Game of

Thrones (2011--) and the anthology series American Horror Story (2011--).23 Interest in the

Gothic mode as it operates in contemporary fiction, film and television, and a related shift to address its range in those forms through the lens of various sub-categories, has opened a rich vein of related recent scholarship.24 Consequently, as Punter and others note, difficulties in defining the term Gothic arise in no small part from the fact that the term has been applied to a great number of very different texts (Punter 2-4; Sedgwick 10-11; Bayer-

Berenbaum 20).

The one seemingly common element in such a diverse list is fear. Ellen Moers, whose work on the Gothic in Literary Women (1977) launched a feminist study of the

Gothic and sought to broaden the range of texts considered as Gothic into the twentieth century, defines it somewhat loosely as “having to do with fear” (Moers 138). While fear unites the diverse texts Moers works with, the looseness of this definition problematically occludes the different kinds of fears that both writers and readers might hold across a variety of gender, geo-political, and racial subject positions. Film scholar Misha Kavka,

locates the roots of feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Detective Fiction in the Gothic (Cranny- Francis 39-40; 99-101; 144-149). 23 The predominance of American made programming here is largely representative of the idea that “Gothic…is more deeply embedded in the American televisual language than it is in Britain” (Robson 242). And of course, though these programs are U.S. made, they were and are transnationally consumed and very widely watched in the countries from which the theatre in this study is taken. Recent UK and Canadian examples are less widely known but might include Being Human (UK) and Lost Girl (Canada). 24 A look at the essays and entries in a number of Gothic companion guides makes the point. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy’s The Routledge Companion to Gothic, for example, includes essays on Gothic media, Gothic film as parody, Gothic horror cinema, Gothic television, and Gothic new media, alongside entries categorizing by period and place.

19 whose entry in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002) is also invested in a definition of Gothic that extends beyond the nineteenth-century novel, notes the insufficiency of Moers’s definition, but points to the difficulty of being both specific and inclusive. She writes: “it may be as much as one can do to say the Gothic is about fear, localized in the shape of something monstrous which electrifies the collective mind” (Kavka

210). For Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, author of the influential work The Gothic Imagination

(1982), fear is also “the central Gothic emotion,” (Bayer-Berenbaum 44). Particularly as it manifests in terror, fear is a key source of Gothicism’s appeal: “The terrified person, and the reader by identification, becomes suddenly alert. In terror a person feels powerfully present, starkly alive” (Bayer-Berenbaum 31). Punter also sees fear as central, so much so that in his attempts to reconcile what he has identified as five different and sometimes seemingly contradictory approaches to categorizing the Gothic, he notes fear as the one recurring common element, though again he construes fear broadly (Punter 16).25

Punter’s summary of the five approaches taken to the Gothic demonstrates the diversity of the field as follows: first, to focus on the Gothic as “a recognizable movement in the history of culture” linked to architecture; second, to see it as defined by advances in narrative achievement in plotting; third (and somewhat conversely) that it is a form

25 When one moves these definitive claims into the theatre, the significance of fear as the key emotion associated with the Gothic raises an interesting question about Gothic drama’s relationship to tragedy, the Aristotelian premise of which requires both fear and pity. To some extent this is a contemporary critical question; Gothic dramas were designed to evoke both, as Paul Ranger’s book title Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres makes clear. Further, as Cox has argued, many of its writers explored Gothic drama as a means to engage a potentially new kind of tragedy (Cox, “Introduction” 5). Importantly, Gothic drama, as noted, has more in common with Early Modern tragedy than with Greek tragedy, from which it differs in many regards, not the least of which being non-Aristotelian treatments of temporal and spatial reality and a tendency toward resolutions that remain somewhat ambiguous or uneasy rather than purely cathartic.

20 marked by the difficulty of plot; fourth that the Gothic is fundamentally “representative of a particular antagonistic attitude toward realism [as it was emerging in the novel]” (an attitude that is of significance for a consideration of feminism, Gothic drama and twentieth- century theatre as we shall see, though Punter’s approach here is historically contingent and so necessarily ignores Gothic texts in the BW category, such as Bluebeard); and last

(the school of thought to which arguably Moers and Kavka belong) that there are distinctly

Gothic themes that have “uneasy social and psychological” currency (Punter 16-18).

Applicable as these approaches may be to drama, Punter omits considerations of the theatre from his analysis, dealing only with Gothic fiction, though he notes a connection between Gothic fiction and film and television. Jeffrey Cox, on the other hand, whose

Introduction to the anthology Seven Gothic Dramas (1994) stands as one of the few substantial examinations of Gothic as a theatrical form, simplifies distinctions between approaches to definition by suggesting that attempts to corral diverse texts into a unified definition have followed two main paths, one the signifier, the other, the signified (Cox,

Introduction 6). In the first approach, the focus is on the features and trappings of the

Gothic. These might include castles, brooding and perverted villains, dungeons, ruins, monasteries, gloomy forests, stormy coastlines, bands of robbers, spectral presences, locked rooms, madwomen, curious but virtuous heroines, mountainous landscapes, monsters, doppelgangers, moonlit graveyards, secrets, and caves.26 Often criticized as a laundry list approach, a categorization of the genre based on shared atmospheric and plot

26 This is my list, but it has plenty of overlap with the lists of several Gothic scholars (Cox, Introduction 6; B. Evans 6; Sedgwick 9).

21 devices is clearly limited (A. Williams 14; Punter 14).27 Bertrand Evans, for example, in his early study Gothic Drama From Walpole To Shelley (1947) suggests that the ruin is the most fundamental item on the list, and even suggests that this feature alone marks certain plays by Joanna Baillie as Gothic (B. Evans 7; 204). However, not every Gothic novel or drama has a ruin, and not every ruin is Gothic—or for that matter postcolonial, despite the appearance of ruins in that milieu as well. In the contemporary theatre many of these tropes, particularly those that manifest in setting, have been radically re-imagined to accommodate changes in theatre budgets, sizes and practices, as the first chapter here will explore.

The second line of approach that Cox suggests occurs “when the focus shifts from signs, to what they signify” (Cox, “Introduction” 6). Attempts to say what the Gothic is about, not how it presents, have through the twentieth-century tended to see it as either about the religious or spiritual (best exemplified, according to Cox, by Devendra Varma’s

1957 book The Gothic Flame), the psychological and sexual (particularly in feminist and queer readings), or the political, such as Cox proposes for Gothic drama. In each case, Cox argues that “the Gothic unveils or recovers some unmediated absolute that stands outside the boundaries of the natural and social orders” (Cox, “Introduction” 7). This unmediated absolute, is, as Linda Bayer-Berenbaum frames it, “immanent, integral and inescapable” and can be thought of as a magnified or “expanded” reality, a kind of uber-real: “Gothicism insists that what is customarily hallowed as real by society and its language is but a small portion of a greater reality of monstrous proportion and immeasurable power” (Bayer-

27 Punter cites in particular Eino Railo’s 1927 study The Haunted Castle which he refers to as “a catalogue of themes and settings…[in which the author] lists instances indefatigably, but to very little effect” (Punter, Literature 14).

22 Berenbaum 21). Power, as Paula Backscheider has noted, is of key significance to the Gothic

(Backscheider 201). The civilizing social structures of institutionalized power are, in the

Gothic, challenged by the possibility of a power beyond their reach. This comes to have significance particularly in postcolonial drama, where the power structures of Imperialism are brought into question, and in feminist Gothic, where patriarchal power structures and perceived threats to them are similarly challenged.

For Cox, however, the uber-real of Gothic drama is immovably located in the French

Revolution, its reign of terror, and the cultural myths that surrounded it (Cox,

“Introduction” 8). This kind of historically situated analysis is more common in the consideration of plays than novels, and reasonably so, given that theatre is a particularly social medium, consumed publicly at the time of its production. Cox argues quite convincingly that Gothic drama coalesces more obviously within a discrete period (that of the French Revolution) than Gothic novels, and yet this necessarily raises questions as to how and why Gothic novels and Gothic plays were about different cultural myths, particularly given that many Gothic writers wrote in both genres. Such distinctions also raise questions about why the Gothic has been recognized in Victorian novels—leading to the term Victorian Gothic—but seldom in the theatre of that period, despite its presence there. 28 Furthermore, many of those Victorian novels might be seen as maintaining the early Gothic’s penchant for theatricality (and indeed some, like The Picture of Dorian Gray,

28 Catherine Wynne’s book Bram Stoker, Dracula, and the Victorian Gothic Stage is a notable exception. As noted, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was adapted for the stage, playing in New York and then at the Lyceum in 1888. Wilkie Collins’s Gothic novel The Woman In White was adapted (by the author) in 1872. Other plays of the period include Alfred Calmour’s The Amber Heart (1887), which Wynne says has vampiric and supernatural qualities (Wynne 98), and the plays of Dion Boucicault.

23 were written by playwrights) suggesting a classification based on form not on meaning.29

Too narrow a definition of Gothic drama also largely overlooks the potential relationship between the French Revolution and other socio-political contexts such as the colonial enterprise that had resulted in the exiling of supposedly bloody criminals to the penal colony in Australia and the forging of a new relationship to America in the wake of the

Revolutionary War.

The majority of twentieth-century scholarship, however, locates Gothic meaning not in the politics of national identity or the contradictions posed by spirituality and religion, but in anxieties of the psychosexual self. Indeed, psychoanalysis, which has had a significant impact on twentieth-century critical theory—particularly in relation to feminist theory—remains one of the dominant critical lenses in Gothic scholarship. Many scholars make particular use of Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as ways of distinguishing between the Gothic and other kinds of horror.

30 Jerrold Hogle, for example, sees the Gothic’s features and “symbolic mechanisms” as representations of the uncanny and the abject. Gothic tropes thus serve as defamiliarized, frightening manifestations of irresolvable contradictions, those things both feared and

29 The Penguin Popular Classics edition of The Woman in White calls the novel a “brilliant and thrilling melodrama” (Collins ii). 30 The regularity with which Gothic scholars cite Freud’s The Uncanny and Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is indicative of the widespread acceptance of these particular strains of psychoanalytical thinking for the decoding of Gothic conventions and tropes which deal with the threat of some excessive, transgressive and powerful uber-real. See in particular: Punter, “Uncanny” 129-136; Hogle 6-8; Edwards xx-xxi; 21-22, and Kavka, who says: “The notion of blurred boundaries, understood as the uncanny return of something which has been expelled or thrown off (ab-ject), may help to delimit the conventionalized themes or obsessions of the Gothic” (Kavka 211). Sedgwick’s Freudian/Queer/Feminist attempt at defining the Gothic in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions offers what Ellis Hanson astutely calls an “exquisite anatomis[ation]…of the paranoid rhetorical patterns of the Gothic closet” (Hanson 177).

24 desired that must be repressed--because they threaten constructions of self and society-- but cannot be fully banished (Hogle 6-8).

The uncanny, as a psychoanalytic concept, is set out by Freud in his 1919 essay “The

Uncanny,” in which he traces the German roots of the word unheimlich, meaning unhomely, in an attempt to explain a particular “species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known,” thus making a crucial distinction between the uncanny and other kinds of fear (Freud 124). Drawing in particular on the work of E T A Hoffmann, a German fantasy and horror writer of Radcliffe’s generation, Freud argues for the uncanny as a feeling evoked when something has been repressed and resurfaces so that “the term uncanny applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open” (Freud 132). Freud’s somewhat predictable conclusion is that the uncanny emerges from childhood psychosexual trauma, and he makes particular example of the castration complex and of female genitals being uncanny because they represent the womb-as-home (Freud 150-151).

While individual identity and psychosexual trauma certainly have relevance for the

Gothic in a postcolonial context, the uncanny in this context is also usefully applied to thinking through scary spatial representations of home and disruptions to socially constructed realities. The unhomely resonates strongly in postcolonial discourse particularly in those narratives examining settler/invader legacies of displacement, violence, and alienation. The complex political gesture of calling a place “home” can thus be traced through with the repressed trauma that accompanies the establishment or loss of that home (whether it is a womb or not).

25 Freud also posits the uncanny as arising from a blurring of the boundary between fantasy and reality, as “when we are faced with the reality of something we have until now considered imaginary,” or that we have previously dismissed as a primitive belief that has been outgrown, such as a return of the dead for example (Freud, 150). For Freud, “the uncanny…arises when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted appear to be once again confirmed”

(Freud 150, 155). Punter is one of many scholars to point out the importance of the notion of the uncanny for the Gothic, suggesting that it both distinguishes between fear generally and fear arising from “barriers between the known and the unknown teetering on the brink of collapse” (Punter, “Uncanny” 130). The uncanny suggests that “we are composed of the past and…cannot control the moments at which it signifies its presence…and threatens us with its unpredictable moments of recapitulation” (Punter, “Uncanny” 130; 136). In a

Gothic context, the notion that past fantasies might be real has obvious appeal, for example in the case of the castle haunted by the ancient curse. The appeal is arguably even more potent in a postcolonial Gothic context, where the castle and the ancient curse take on the tensions between the colonizer (civilized) and the Other--colonized, convict, or slave

(uncivilized). So too feminist theory’s investment in exposing the experience of women as that experience has been overwritten by normalized, oppressive narratives has a strong correlation here, demonstrating the overlap of key Gothic concepts as accessed by psychoanalysis with both feminist and postcolonial thinking.

Similarly, Julia Kristeva’s 1980 book The Powers of Horror, which draws on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as on Mary Douglas’s work on contamination to

26 propose a theory of abjection, has also proved very useful to scholars of the Gothic.31 For

Kristeva, the abject is neither subject nor object, it is “not me, not that, but not nothing, either” and it is that which is exiled and “lies quite close, but cannot be assimilated”

(Kristeva 2). Making particular examples of food, waste and corpses, Kristeva’s notion of abjection suggests a threat to our sense of being that is both fascinating and repulsive:

“refuse and corpses show me what I thrust aside in order to live…There I am, at the border of my condition as a living being” (Kristeva 3). The Gothic’s pleasures of terror clearly find thematic resonance in these images of life, death, sustenance and decay as threatening to the intact self. We might note Emily St Aubert’s fascination with the dead statue that awaits her beneath a veil in Mysteries of Udolpho, or Shelley’s corpse-composite monster in

Frankenstein, or vampires in general—and there are many of them across locations and periods—as examples of the abject in this regard.32

Though less focus has been given to Gothic form than theme, Kristeva’s theory also proves helpful for readings of Gothic’s convoluted, tonally ambiguous and hybridic literary and dramaturgical structures, which articulate the notion that abjection is caused by that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.

The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). In this regard we might think

31 Many of the texts Kristeva works with aren’t exactly Gothic (Proust, Dostoyevsky, Joyce). However, her theory has proved to have great utility for Gothic studies, as the title “Powers of Horror” might make obvious. 32 For Veronica Hollinger, whose essay “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire” (1997) explores vampires in a contemporary context, the resilience and current appeal of that particular Gothic monster comes from its challenge to categories--dead and alive, us and them being two of the primary ones. As Hollinger notes, the postmodern moment is one in which all categories can be found to be suspect and so the vampire functions particularly effectively as a metaphor for postmodern anxieties and experiences (Hollinger 201). Kristeva’s work, then, clearly has relevance not only for the Gothic in postmodernity generally, but for postmodernity in a postcolonial context, where the categories of us and them, and colonizer and colonized in particular, can be very fraught.

27 of the composite and recycled texts of Frankenstein, Dracula and Venus as tracing this formal tendency from the Gothic heyday, through Victorian Gothic, to its presence in the feminist postcolonial drama of the twentieth century. Kristeva claims abjection is essentially different from the uncanny in its “failure to recognize its kin,” so that it is less about something recurring as something else and more about something that cannot be distinguished from something else (Kristeva 7). In this sense it is a more inherently spatial concept than the uncanny. It is that which can neither be fully assimilated nor fully expelled, that which challenges the categories I/Other, Inside/Outside. Such spatial befuddlement becomes particularly obvious in the Gothic theatre so that in plays such as

Colman’s Blue-Beard or Kane’s Blasted distinctions between insides and outsides collapse, despite the stakes attached to keeping them separate.

Psychoanalysis is also central to Eve Sedgwick’s work, which has contributed significantly to attempts to understand a diverse body of Gothic texts as being unified by psychosexual meaning. In her renowned study The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986),

Sedgwick astutely points to the readiness with which the Gothic’s symbolic tropes, dreamlike narratives, and highly evocative imagery serve as particularly readable metaphors for psychoanalytical study, calling psychoanalysis a kind of “Gothic lens”

(Sedgwick vi). Drawing primarily on Freud and Lacan, Sedgwick argues that many of the

Gothic’s iconic tropes and images (such as subterranean rooms) are components of foundational Gothic conventions that also use formal devices (such as stories within stories) in the service of articulating central anxieties about sex and identity. Sedgwick argues that in the Gothic the self is blocked from something to which it normally would have access, and that the boundary that blocks the self can only be crossed with violence

28 (Sedgwick 12-13). For Sedgwick, Gothic images, narrative components, and formal elements work together to structure Gothic tales along key thematic lines, the primary two of which are live burial and the unspeakable. Both of these ideas articulate identity trauma, panic, and repressed sexual desire (Sedgwick 13-14; 19-20). Live burial is a key theme in novels like The Monk, in which incestuous rape is committed underground, and later in

Dracula, where the vampires rise from coffins, as well as in plays like Colman The

Younger’s spectacular Blue-Beard, with its sunken chamber that promises death. Sedgwick also sees spatially coded crises of the self as being particularly apparent in the problem of breeching the barriers between the unspeakable and speech. Hence novels like The

Mysteries of Udolpho have dimly lit passages that go nowhere, characters who fail to finish their sentences, and labyrinthine narratives that are not readily resolved.33

Importantly, while Sedgwick’s path to definition through analysis, like Punter’s, ignores theatre and focuses on nineteenth-century texts, the analyses here reveal that the conventions of live burial and the unspeakable are also readily traced in postcolonial and feminist texts, in which entrapment and erasure are recurring motifs. Hence Beatrix

Christian’s contemporary reworking of Bluebeard, Blue Murder, like Colman’s, has a submerged chamber as a site of sex and death. In a contemporary context, Sedgwick’s notion of the unspeakable is much in evidence in the fainting fits of Sarah Kane’s Gothic heroine in Blasted and in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A, which has its own invented language for discussing the unspeakable business of women’s bodies in a patriarchal

33 A good example of the trope of the unspeakable occurs in Percy Shelley’s The Cenci, the heroine of which is particularly persecuted by her inability to speak about incestuous rape. In Act Three, scene one, she explains her experience as “a formless horror…for there is none to tell [her] misery” (P. Shelley 239). It is Beatrice’s struggle with how to purge herself of this act while keeping its utterance contained that drives the play.

29 regime, and concludes with an unfinished sentence. Sedgwick’s approach has the merit of analyzing formal and narrative concerns in a way that also takes account of the plots, motifs, and prevalent images that are for so many readers the distinguishing “I know it when I see it” characteristics of the Gothic.

And yet, despite scholarly interest in Gothic literature, the Gothic as a significant theatrical mode remains overlooked. At the very least, this is puzzling when one considers the symbiotic relationship between the Gothic stage and its novelistic kin. Walpole was also a playwright and wrote The Mysterious Mother, which some might consider the first Gothic drama.34 Indeed most of the Gothic novelists either wrote for or were adapted for the stage, and the canonical Romantic poets of the day, including Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge and

Percy Shelley, also wrote Gothic dramas in what might be seen as an attempt to move the form more firmly toward a new kind of tragedy (Cox, “English” 140). Furthermore, it is worth noting that there is a good deal of inherent theatricality in and around Gothic novels themselves. In The Castle of Otranto, for example, the grand show that played out in the prefaces and surrounding literature, as Walpole revised his claims to the so-called discovered manuscript, demonstrates a pleasure in fakery and revelation, somewhat akin to an actor taking off his wig, or to the device of taking the stage to apologize in a tongue-in- cheek epilogue for deceiving his audience.35 But for another, The Castle of Otranto is, as much Gothic has continued to be, simply put, showy. The novel is about a sexually

34 The Mysterious Mother was, according to Cox, written in 1768 but only circulated privately, circulation being an active alternative to staging during this period (Cox, English 126). 35 For a particularly nice example of this convention in the Gothic see Fontanville Forest. Interestingly, despite the influence of stage realism resulting in a notable infrequency of asides, prologues, epilogues and the like in twentieth century drama, Balderstone and Deane’s 1927 adaptation of Dracula reintroduces this convention by breaking the fourth wall only once at the end of the play when Van Helsing directly addresses the audience to warn them, somewhat ironically, that “there are such things” as vampires (Balderston and Deane 74).

30 predatory aristocrat in a cursed castle who attempts to avoid a ghostly prophecy by setting aside his wife for his dead son’s betrothed. Otranto is riddled with spectacle, and with moments of watching, and with a sense that the characters are performing.36 With its self- conscious flamboyance, its insistence that what is not real is nonetheless visible before you, that indeed the boundary between reality and illusion might at any moment disintegrate, the Gothic and theatre were, and still are, in many ways an obvious match.

Some studies have sought to expose this synergy, at least in a historical context. Paul

Ranger’s book ‘Terror and Pity reign in every Breast’ (1991) is a useful source on Gothic stagecraft in the period 1750-1820, examining the logistics and politics of spectacle, performance, and set design. Paula Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (1993) also includes a chapter on stage spectacle and the artistry of scene design as well as a chapter on audience reception, political power and Gothic performance. M. Susan Anthony’s recent contribution to the field, Gothic Plays and American Society, 1794-1830 (2008), provides a much-needed look at Gothic Drama’s

American audience, which was extensive. A couple of recent collections of Gothic plays have also broadened the discourse: The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (2003), edited by Cox and Gamer, is helpful in providing multiple reviews and other appendices of period data (though not all of the plays in the volume might be considered Gothic). John

Franceschina’s Sisters of Gore: Gothic Melodrama by British Women (2000) adds to the specifically Gothic collection edited by Jeffrey Cox by being a rare collection of Gothic melodramas written by women. But although it includes introductory notes on each author, overall analysis is brief.

36 Speech sometimes even mirrors dialogue and stage direction format (Walpole 101). McIntyre notes a similar tendency in places in the work of Radcliffe (McIntyre 653).

31 One explanation for the scant scholarship in theatre studies is that the label “Gothic” is contentious not only in terms of literary form, but also in terms of literary merit. The term Gothic was often attached only upon reflection and to works that might not necessarily have been labeled Gothic in their day, but were certainly thought of as being bad art, as we shall see.37 In drama, it has very often been conflated with melodrama—a label which does not earn it serious consideration—but some Gothic dramas appear not to be melodramatic (De Monfort, for example, which might be considered a Gothic tragedy) and some melodramas are not Gothic. Indeed, as Cox points out, the domestic melodramas that dominated the Victorian stage shared some plot devices and conventions but were considerably tamer (Cox, “English” 141). And yet many, like Evans, have, as Inverso notes, found melodrama and the Gothic to be “seemingly hopelessly enmeshed genres” (Inverso

9). Attempts to distinguish between them tend to focus, as Inverso does on a distinction she credits to Peter Brooks between melodrama’s optimism and drive toward stability, versus the Gothic’s failure to resolve by allaying “the threat of moral chaos” (Brooks in Inverso

20).38 As useful and astute as this argument is for reclaiming the Gothic as a term for the

“legitimate” theatre, it is complicated by the Radcliffean Gothic tendency to restore order— unless we are willing to call Radcliffe’s novels melodramatic rather than Gothic—and by those texts, such as Planché’s Bride of The Isles, and Colman’s Blue-Beard, which seem to be both Gothic and melodramatic. Planché’s Bride of The Isles, which is about a vampire who

37 The term Gothic is very inconsistently used during Walpole’s time: As Ranger points out neither eighteenth-century playwrights, nor members of their audiences, used the term “Gothic drama” (Ranger 1) though the term was much used to describe scenic elements. Furthermore, the value of the term Gothic was also in flux, meaning both barbaric and therefore amoral, as well as chivalrous and therefore noble, as Burke’s allusions to the Gothic in his Reflections (232-234) suggests. 38 This is put in a slightly different way by Paula Backscheider, who notes: “every melodrama is about virtue, and every gothic is about power” (Backscheider 201).

32 attempts to marry and then devour a virtuous virgin, Margaret, in order to avoid annihilation, offers a good example of the problem. Inverso reads Planché’s play as a melodrama that “nicely illustrates…distinction[s]” between the unresolved chaos-loving

Gothic and the morally resolved justice of the melodrama (Inverso 9). However, Planché’s text is more complicated than Inverso’s investment in the artistic superiority of the Gothic over melodrama allows. As Inverso notes, a prologue in which two sprites send Margaret a vision to warn her of the coming trouble assures the audience that good spirits will protect the noble heroine from the evil vampire, who is, rather predictably, destroyed at the end of the play, getting his just deserts. Nonetheless, Inverso fails to note that the vampire does invoke sympathy periodically, and the penultimate line of the play is in fact the heroine saying to her vampire would-be husband “hold, hold, I am thine,” a sentiment she never recants, leaving much of the play’s moral ambivalence and troubling treatment of desire decidedly unresolved (Planché 13).

One of the possible reasons for Gothic Drama appearing to be a historically discrete form is this slippery relationship to melodrama, well demonstrated by Planché. Because melodrama has often been regarded as a lesser form and because many Gothic dramas at the peak of the Romantic period did have melodramatic elements (or vice versa), the conflation has resulted in a dismissal of the Gothic as somehow largely incompatible with legitimate theatre. Furthermore, as melodrama becomes tamer (as Cox notes) and more domestic, it becomes a less useful vehicle for Gothic sentiment, moving instead along the spectrum in the direction of realism. Perhaps then, the term Gothic is not used for theatre after the mid-nineteenth century because most melodramas were no longer particularly

Gothic and serious theatre was not thought to be where the Gothic might reside.

33 Romanticism, too, is sometimes conflated with the Gothic but is not necessarily accorded the same de-valued status as melodrama. Nonetheless, the relationship between the two terms presents some difficulty when one looks at the arguably Gothic dramas of the canonical Romantic poets (Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth) compared to the work of Matthew

Lewis, a hugely popular playwright and novelist, who was scandalously regarded and is now almost entirely thought of as Gothic although he calls his own work Romantic.39

Attempts to make distinctions between forms of high culture—associated with the critically lionized Romantic poets—and of mass culture—associated with the spectacle of

Lewis—have not only prompted overly narrow notions of the Gothic as a particular form, ignoring obvious overlaps between works, writers, and genres, but also impacted critical attention to the Gothic, marking the term as suspect. The plays of Joanna Baillie, many of which are now sometimes considered Gothic and sometimes considered Romantic, are, when referred to as Gothic, repeatedly pointed out to be exceptional of the form in that they are serious/good, or “sincere” as Evans puts it, while Matthew Lewis’s work is not (B.

Evans 201).40 Inverso claims Shelley’s The Cenci as a Gothic drama, a claim I am inclined to support (Inverso 16). Yet The Cenci, like Colman The Younger’s Blue-Beard and Lewis’s

Timour The Tartar, is included in The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, not Cox’s anthology of Gothic drama. Given that the term “Gothic drama” is so slippery in its application to what we might now regard as the foundational body of work from the turn of

39 Lewis’s Timour The Tartar, is labeled a “Grand Romantic Melo-drama,” while his novel The Monk is called “A Romance.” Such slippage has proved persistent: Timour the Tartar is, as noted, in The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, but Lewis’s more famous play, The Castle Spectre, which draws in part on material in The Monk, is in Seven Gothic Dramas. 40 Baillie, like Lewis, seems to straddle generic distinctions. Baillie’s De Monfort appears in Jeffrey Cox’s volume Seven Gothic Dramas, while her play Orra is in the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama.

34 the nineteenth century, it is perhaps less surprising that scholars are somewhat reluctant to apply it to an even more diverse and now distant group of plays today, many of which, as

I am arguing, might be considered to belong to a subversive, socio-politically engaged theatre, rather than a more broadly popular theatre.

Given the difficulty of generic definition and the wide range of texts being discussed, the approach I will take here is to argue that the plays in this study all engage the Gothic mode. By this I mean to suggest that these texts are united by their extreme and perverse subject matter (both explicit and symbolically coded), their interest in the largely unrestored transgression of fragile boundaries (aesthetic, political, formal, social, sexual, corporeal, etc), their innovative appropriation of and departure from traditional forms, and their ability to evoke excitement and pleasure through awe and terror. Certainly the distinguishing features, thematic conventions and symbolic mechanisms outlined above seem to varying degree and in varying number to coalesce in these texts in order to emphasize the unsettling and the excessive, and to challenge perceptions of the civilized, knowable world. To engage with the Gothic as a mode provides necessary flexibility, given the Gothic’s tendency toward hybridity and intertextuality as well as its ability to cross tonal, formal, and generic boundaries of all kinds. Such tendencies are much in evidence in the highly self-referential work of Adrienne Kennedy, and in the dramaturgy of Parks and

Kane in particular, who both draw on multiple theatrical influences and literary texts to produce plays with forms that defy easy categorization. Approaching the Gothic as a mode allows us to read exceptions, strangely combined elements and disruptions to form not as generic inconsistencies that break with the logic of a text and confuse the chain of signification, but rather as a strategy for multiplying signification that is internally

35 consistent with the Gothic’s history, its challenge to notions of controlled and constructed reality, and its delight in the exposure, distortion and amplification of troubling and transgressive ambiguities. With the obviously subversive possibilities of such a mode in mind, I want now to elaborate on the intersection of this approach to the Gothic with feminist critical theories and methodologies.

II -- Popularity, Criticism and the Other: The Gothic and Feminism

Gothic novels were, as I have suggested, enormously popular during the period on either side of the French Revolution, and with the rise of mass printing they became a powerful literary force--one that, importantly, reached women. Problematically, however, some held that their perverse subject matter made them inappropriate for their significant female audience. Coleridge’s review of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, for example, complains of the character Matilda’s “shameless harlotry” as a vehicle for “the most voluptuous images” that ultimately seek to “influence the fleshy appetites” of the reader. This slight is ostensibly aimed at male and female readers alike, but particularly telling is his reading of a passage in the novel in which the over-protective mother character, Elvira, deems the bible inappropriate to put into the hands of young, impressionable women because it is too graphic. Coleridge’s reaction to this passage and its depiction of Elvira’s conservative morality is essentially to accuse Lewis of hypocrisy: “this is indeed as if a Corinthian harlot, clad from head to foot in…transparent thinness…should affect to view with prudish horror the naked knee of a Spartan matron!” (Coleridge, “Review” 188-189). Lewis, the Corinthian

36 harlot in this analogy, is denounced as the author of a text that could both claim innocence and corrupt the minds of young women.

Closet dramas, too, that may not have been able to clear the censorship of the

English stage were able to get into circulation through print, and doubtless many a lady at home enjoyed them, contributing, as feminist scholar Catherine Burroughs has noted, to anxiety about women reading the “lewd and licentious” and the suggestion that such reading might result in psychological, sexual and physical harm (Burroughs 109). While closet dramas could avoid censorship to a degree, plays on stage could not, but even here the corrupting power of the Gothic for an increasingly female audience was roundly debated in the press. Henry James Leigh Hunt, one of the period’s vocal detractors of Gothic drama, compared the state of English theatre unfavorably to that in Paris where they had, in his view, had the good sense to “remove out of sight all that can offend the modesty, or raise the apprehension of decent families” (Hunt 338). Hunt expresses particular concern that “females” were at risk of being “shocked and terrified,” by a theatre designed to provide “an evening of debauchery” (Hunt 338).

The risk seems to have been that women (and children), considered to be more impressionable than men, would not simply be frightened but somehow influenced. Indeed as Cox notes, Gothic drama was viewed by many not only as potentially “morally corrupting” but also as “subversive propaganda” (Cox, “English” 138-139). For feminist

Gothic scholar Kate Ellis, the female Gothic’s popularity and its focus on the heroine in a dangerous home rendered it as potential propaganda in the debate about women and domesticity at a time when as other scholars have also noted there was a growth in the number of women in the workforce (Ellis x; Franceschina 4). The feminist implications of

37 this are underscored by the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of The Rights of

Women (1792) also emerges at this time. As feminist scholar Ellen Malenas Ledoux notes in her recent book, Social Reform in Gothic Writing (2013), the ideas espoused in

Wollstonecraft’s text and others of its kind were often dramatized in the behavior of the

Gothic heroine (Ledoux 56). Plays, like novels, were thought to be obliged toward moral instruction but just what was being instructed was ambiguous. That Gothic heroines were not modeling the behaviors that might “prepare female readers for their future domestic duties” (Ledoux 55) was a problem, as one anonymous critic’s complaint about the Gothic makes clear: “can a young lady be taught nothing more necessary in life than to sleep in a dungeon with venomous reptiles, walk in a [wood] with assassins, and carry bloody daggers in their pockets, instead of pin cushions and needle books?” (Anon in Ledoux 56).41

Gothic heroines gaining strength through physical exercise, roaming free of the domestic space, and thwarting male authority clearly hit a nerve with male readers, but as

Franceschina astutely points out, when staged, these behaviors are even more subversive:

“while the possibility of female movement, inside and outside the castle, is highly attractive on the page, how much more effective is it when seen in the public arena, with flesh-and- blood actresses representing the romantic aspirations of the women in the audience”

(Franceschina 5). From the outset, then, Gothic drama is rich and complex both as a venue for feminist expression and as an object of feminist critique.

The idea that the Gothic seems a particularly apt vehicle for feminist sentiment finds some support in the fact that even written by men it seems to espouse and dramatize some of the emerging feminist sentiment of the period, and--I’m suggesting not coincidentally—

41 This quote also appears in Clery and Miles 184.

38 to draw criticism from the (male) press. Colman The Younger’s Blue-Beard; or, Female

Curiosity, which premiered at Drury Lane in 1798, is a good example of Gothic drama’s polarized reception and ambiguous treatment of gender roles. The play tells the familiar story of a young woman who is married off by her father to a foreign noble with a blue beard and an impressive castle, despite the protestations of the young bride’s outspoken sister. The husband/patriarch (Abomolique) leaves on a trip, giving his new wife (Fatima) his keys and forbidding her to enter one particular chamber. Needless to say, under the guidance of her plucky and rebellious sister (Irene), Fatima enters anyway and comes across evidence of his murdered previous wives, punished for their own curiosity.

Abomolique returns, Fatima is found out, but just in time Irene scales the battlements to raise the alarm and the suitor Fatima had hoped to marry before her father determined a different matrimonial fate then rescues the sisters. Sexual predation, female resistance to authority, titillating moments of veiled anatomical innuendo, and mixed messages about marrying for money are everywhere and are emblematic of the Gothic’s ambiguous stance on gender politics—an ambiguity that was doubtless part of the problem with its reception.

If plays were supposed to offer moral instruction, the moral here apparently missed its mark; Hunt complained in his review of the revival that “the story has not even the usual moral of childish tales” because its treatment of female curiosity was too provocative and its treatment of punishment too violent (Hunt 338).

The play was incredibly popular both in its first production in 1798 and its most spectacular revival twelve years later. But this popularity did not endear it to the critics, whose reaction was to dismiss it as a bad play. As Franceschina implies in his introduction to Sisters of Gore, the popularity of the so-called childish nonsense of melodrama was

39 attributed in no small part to the gender of its audience, which by the 1800s included an increasing number of women (Franceschina 6). Much of the negativity that plagues the

Gothic is in some respects gendered. Often found to be inferior on the basis of feminine traits such as monstrosity, extreme emotion and instability,42 the Gothic’s heightened but unstable emotional register—alongside its rejection of the socially constructed real, and its interest in sexuality—has served to align it with notions of the female, marking it from the beginning, as feminist Gothic scholar Judith Fleenor notes, as “a feminine form outside the mainstream of literature” (Fleenor, “Introduction” 8). Of interest here is the fact that the dismissal of Blue-beard is characteristic of a reaction not just to Gothic content, but to

Gothic form, a fact that emerges as particularly important in light of the rejection of realism that characterizes many of the debates over contemporary feminist theatre, as we shall see, and aligns surprisingly directly with the problems of reception encountered by Sarah

Kane’s very Gothic play Blasted, which is the subject of the final chapter.

The story of Blue-beard is simple enough, but formally and tonally, the play is a feast of different styles and effects ranging from fairy tale, to pantomime, comedy, tragedy, and opera. Songs and moments of breath-taking spectacle break up speeches that range from standard dramatic dialogue to moments of surprisingly blatant political commentary about power and oppression aimed at the aristocracy, as well as comedy in the form of pun- driven, sexist humor, considered by critics to be inappropriate for the serious stage.43 The critics hated it. Or rather they hated bits of it. This play, and all the “monstrous

42 The equation of female with monster in a very ancient one, going back at least to Aristotle and will be discussed in the second chapter. See Fleenor (Introduction 8-10) on Gothic as feminine. 43 One character warns that if power “rears itself upon oppression:--the breath of the discontented swells into a gale around it, ‘till it totters” while another makes a joke that a man whose wife “got carried off by the plague” consequently got rid of his own plague (Colman 81 [Act 1.1.177-178] and 90 [2.3.20-25]).

40 melodramas” (Cox and Gamer xi; “Monthly Review” in Cox and Gamer 333) like it were labeled in the press as a “patchwork of buffoonery” (“Monthly Mirror” in Cox and Gamer

332) and a hodgepodge of styles and stories, "miserable trash," and "a torrent of nonsense"

(“Monthly Mirror” in Cox and Gamer 327). The Gothic’s rejection of the real and its formal hybridity certainly can be read as challenges to power, mingling as they do high and low culture in a way that must have resonated uncomfortably with issues of gender and class in

England, and probably in the heavily male-populated colonies as well. Punter’s observation that one of the principle ways of understanding the Gothic is to consider it as antagonistically antithetical to the classical and the real (Punter Literature, 17), suggests how deep and persistent the “patchwork of buffoonery” sentiment must have been. The view that Gothic dramas and melodramas were destroying real theatre—serious, artistic, legitimate, pure, patriarchal theatre—was widespread, and its popularity was seen as an indication of a general decline in the British population's sense, taste, and intellect. 44 What was wrong with the Gothic and with melodrama, then, was not just the bad jokes, the host of new special effects and the immoral goings on, but a failure to adhere to the traditions of a patriarchal theatre institution and (perhaps not purely coincidentally) an appeal to the assumed low intellect of an increasingly female audience.

Naturally, then, the women who wrote for the Gothic stage were not much better regarded than those who attended it, with Joanna Baillie’s dramas serving as a striking

44 As Cox notes, the Gothic attracted wide criticism because it “offended those who liked their dramatic genres pure” (Cox, English, 128). Coleridge saw the popularity and depravity of The Monk as an indication of the “decline of literature” (Coleridge, Review 185) and a letter to the Coalition of Managers in 1796 offers a fairly typical outcry about a decline in the quality of literature and theatre as an indicator that “every succeeding generation will be more and more inert and stupid” (in Cox and Gamer, 327).

41 exception.45 In general, the dismissal of women’s Gothic drama has persisted, resulting in plays such as Jane Scott’s very popular The Old Oak Chest (1816) having been branded as

“exhibit[ing] no pretentions to literary merit” and thus serving as the sort of play that

Evans had in mind when he writes that the neglect of Gothic drama is understandable because other “periods …left better plays, or at least plays less conspicuously bad”

(Franceschina 6; B. Evans 5). The literary merit of Gothic writings by women was doubly dubious as the Gothic, “already a suspect form” as Cox notes, was, when in the hands of women, tainted by another, more general backlash against women writers (Cox, “English”

139). For example, Thomas Mathias bemoans in The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames (1799) that women writers “forgot the character and delicacy of their sex” to take up “the trumpet of democracy and let loose the spirit of gross licentiousness” in writing that expressed political, feminist or subversive views, however veiled they presumably may have been in Gothic metaphor (Mathias in Cox, “English” 139). Mathias, a particularly vehement critic, is reiterating his earlier criticism of women and Gothic drama in his lengthy The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues (1798), in which he writes: “our unsexed female writers now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves in the labyrinth of politics, or turn us wild with Gallic frenzy” (Mathias, Pursuits 190).

Therefore considered inappropriate for the fairer sex and yet somehow strangely female, the Gothic has, since Moers, unsurprisingly invited strong interest from feminist scholars working on fiction and film, though notably less in theatre studies. Like attempts

45 Backsheider notes that the greatly revered Sarah Siddons played Jane DeMonfort in Baillie’s play of that name and that she was considered to be associated more with serious theatre than Gothic melodrama (she also played Lady Macbeth, for example) which is one of the factors that impacts the way Baillie’s heroine is characterized as transcending Gothic (Backsheider 204-205) but is, because of Macbeth’s notable Gothic associations, also somehow consistent with it.

42 to define the Gothic more generally, approaches to defining female Gothic as a literary style take a couple of different forms worthy of some brief analysis here. There is, in feminist discourse, particularly through the 1980s, a somewhat flawed trend to put female Gothic in absolute binary opposition to Gothic not written by women (and therefore dubbed by some as male Gothic), betraying an anxiety about distinguishing between male and female variants of the form that is itself very apt for a form so obsessed with permeable boundaries. This trend is perhaps most thoroughly articulated by Anne Williams, who draws on an Aristotelian sense of reality as ten pairs of opposites, and reworks it as a way of distinguishing between the (male) Gothic and its (female) other:

Aristotle Williams male / female male / female limited / unlimited Father / Mother odd / even house / secret room one / many univocal speech / written text right / left signifier / signified square / oblong Symbolic / Semiotic at rest / moving conscious / unconscious straight / curved horror / terror light / darkness culture / nature good / evil deployment of Alliance / deployment of sexuality (A. Williams, 18-19, 99)

Very often, Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe are held up as the defining examples of this divide (Punter, Literature 55). What seems to happen as a result is that everything associated with each of those writer’s aesthetics becomes gendered accordingly. Lewis is associated with horror Gothic in which the threat is actualized, while Radcliffe is associated with terror gothic, which is about imagined threat. (A. Williams 104). Other scholars, too, see this division between terror and horror as significant and gender-aligned (Botting,

Gothic 71; 76). However some scholars, like Jerrold Hogle, call the division between terror

43 and horror a continuum along which Gothic texts oscillate (Hogle 3). This can be seen to complicate theories that require gender to be absolute or that attempt to elevate certain writers accordingly, particularly given that much feminist theatre scholarship and feminist postcolonial scholarship takes a critical stance on essentialism—a point to which I will return.

Various feminist theorists also suggest female Gothic moves toward closure

(Radcliffe), while Male Gothic remains open (Lewis), both in terms of plot/status quo and in terms of the explanation of unruly supernatural phenomena (A. Williams 103–104). At the end of The Monk, for example, Ambrosio (the monk), who has spent the novel obsessing about, then raping and killing a young woman who turns out to be his sister, is thrown into an abyss to have his eyes pecked out, while the demon who throws him over the cliff is not tidily put away. Furthermore, the Bleeding Nun, who the novel’s subplot about two lovers first suggests might be made use of as mere suspicion, turns out to be horrifyingly real. On the other hand, both The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey, which feature heroines (Emily and Catherine respectively) tasked with exploring mysterious, imposing mansions ruled by sinister patriarchs, take careful pains to explain and ultimately resolve the sources of Emily and Catherine’s fears, which turn out not to be supernatural. To this way of thinking then, some theories assume that women use the Gothic to show a heroine ultimately reconciled to “reality,” to culture and the symbolic order, while men use the

Gothic to obsess about the irrational threat aligned with the female Other, who is still out there, lurking somewhere in the uber-real.

However, even if we set aside the problems of translating such distinctions to the stage where melodrama lurks as a potentially conservative offshoot, a binary system falters

44 repeatedly at the gates of definition. A good example of this is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is famously about a man’s attempts to create life by assembling dead body parts and animating them. Having succeeded, Frankenstein discovers he can neither love nor control the creature he has made, who sets out to get revenge for his rejection. Like the monster at its center, Shelley’s novel denies many definitive female Gothic binaries: it is horror Gothic, not terror Gothic, it focuses on men, not women, it is about exile, not entrapment and it pointedly fails to close in anything that resembles a marriage, leaving the creature bounding away across the frozen ocean. This is problematically true, too, of Charlotte

Dacre’s novel Zofloya or The Moor (1806), which tells the story of its proud and sexually manipulative heroine’s fall from grace and similarly fails to close comfortably. In a great many respects it looks a lot more like The Monk (right down to the voluptuous Victoria being pitched into a canyon by a demon in the closing pages) than it does like Emily St

Aubert’s nocturnal wanderings around Udolpho. This failure of key examples of female

Gothic to stay true to form should come as no surprise given both the willful hybridity

Walpole’s preface draws attention to, and the Gothic’s deep investment in transgressing boundaries, making Williams’s comprehensive binary of only limited use.

If anything, binary-based theories seem to be less helpful once we move the Gothic into the theatre, a place where fakery and authenticity come into particularly strident tension. To some extent the body of a real live actor will always offer a tangible negation and explanation of the supernatural ghost, scandalous as it might nonetheless be to put one on stage. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, then, closes the supernatural down in a way that The

Monk, its initial source of inspiration, does not, but it is equally blasphemous. Furthermore, several Gothic dramas, including Fontainville Forest (based on a Radcliffe novel and

45 adapted by George Boaden--thus an intertextual hybrid neither male nor female), favored post-curtain epilogues to explain things away and provide closure. In Fontainville’s epilogue, written for Mrs. Pope, the actress reassures the audience that her fears are resolved and asks them to forgive the writer for putting a spirit on stage while making tongue-in-cheek reference to Hamlet as a worthy precedent (Boaden 70). Notably these epilogues were scripted, and played by actors playing themselves, a veritable conflation of the authentic and the fake that is characteristic of the theatre in many of its forms.

Certainly the prologue was a familiar device from Shakespeare and Restoration drama, and the use of framing speeches may have served to validate the merits of Gothic drama. So too there are tonal and functional similarities. As Deborah Payne Fisk points out, epilogues, which were a standard device in Restoration drama,46 allowed actors to “banter with the audience, scold critics…defend the writer and debate politics,” effectively situating plays specifically in the real social context of their audiences (Fisk 83; 75). Yet in the Gothic, in which challenges to perceptions of reality are deeply embedded, the normalizing force of the epilogue delivered by a woman takes on a particularly charged quality.

The other, equally limiting though not mutually exclusive feminist approaches are to read female Gothic as an autobiographical or psychoanalytical exploration of the crisis of female identity. This is in fact where the seeds of the female Gothic theoretical school begin, in 1977 with Moers. For Moers, the Female Gothic,47 begun in Radcliffe’s narratives of the fearful/erotic wandering heroine, takes a new direction with Mary Shelley, who does

46 Fisk’s research suggests “some 1,200 prologues and epilogues are extant from 1660-1700 (Fisk 82). Familiar examples can be found in the work of Behn, Dryden and Congreve, to name a few. 47 Moers capitalizes Female Gothic as a genre or movement. However, the term has been taken up more broadly by other scholars without capitalization. Hence, I capitalize Female Gothic only when dealing with Moers’s taxonomy, and not when discussing other scholars or general trends in thinking about Gothic written by women.

46 something unprecedented in Frankenstein by writing about birth from a distinctly female perspective (Moers 193-196; 139). Importantly for any consideration of feminist approaches that critique essentialism (which Moers does not, but which becomes an issue particularly in postcolonial feminist theatre criticism), male and female distinctions are complicated by the fact that birth is rendered uncanny by being a masculine process in the novel. And indeed the indirection of Gothic metaphor and the collapse of gender roles give

Shelley some latitude to write about the horror and fear associated with birth; a novel about a woman rejecting her creation may have been unacceptable. Shelley’s take on birth, funneled through the Gothic’s unreal machinery, is marked by anxiety caused by the friction between the lived experience of birth and the happy cultural myth. In Frankenstein, birth and the maternal are articulated through “the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences” (Moers

142).48 Moers claims that Shelley’s unusual, miserable, and direct experience of birth, its connection to her own youth, and its disruptive power on the lives of those around her49 inform the novel’s terrifying dramatization of “dangerous oppositions through the struggle of a creator with monstrous creation” (Moers, 149).

For Moers, what links Frankenstein forward to Wuthering Heights and then to

Carson McCullers,50 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sylvia Plath is that all these writers

48 Here the language used is theatrical despite the absence of the theatre as an object of study. This is not atypical. The Gothic stage, one might argue, haunts the language with which we talk about all Gothic. 49 Her point here is not that losing a child in infancy, or a mother at birth, or miscarrying were unusual (they were not) but that it was unusual for women who were also writers to have any experience of birth, let alone one so accumulatively negative. Many women writers, Moers argues, were spinsters and virgins (Moers 147). 50 Moers’s notion of the Female Gothic as existing in “the literary mode” (Moers 138) is ambiguous as to the inclusion of dramas either for the public stage or for the closet. Certainly Moers does not

47 locate the feminine in “the haunted and self-hating self” for whom birth induces guilt, desire is perverse, the body is monstrous and youth is problematically sexual and violent

(Moers 160-66). Claire Kahane’s work on female Gothic, rooted in feminist psychoanalysis, is like Moers’s about the haunted self, specifically a fear of the mother from whom the daughter has difficulty establishing a separate identity (Kahane 23).51 For Juliann Fleenor, the “all powerful devouring mother” is also at the heart of a female Gothic, which “reflects a patriarchal paradigm that women are motherless yet fathered and…are defective because they are not males” (Fleenor, “Introduction” 15, 16).52 Arguments that the motifs of devouring mothers and anxiety about the maternal and reproductive function of women are a definitive feature of works that might reasonably be described as Gothic are compelling. Yet, attempts to unify texts into a cohesive genre are nonetheless problematic, occluding both differences between women and larger socio-political concerns. Such concerns are very apparent in the works discussed in the following chapters, even though the majority of those—especially Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays, Alma de Groen’s The

Joss Adams Show, Judith Thompson’s Habitat, and Connie Gault’s Sky—do take up the devouring, haunting mother in rich ways. What is particularly useful in the context of these contemporary plays is that the centrality of birth and reproduction that Moers, Kahane,

Fleenor and others have noted serves both as a means to articulate anxieties about the

make specific example of any, but her inclusion of poetry, the photography of Diane Arbus, and her mention of Carson McCullers’s The Member of The Wedding, which was adapted for the stage by McCullers, opens up the possibility for exceptions to the Gothic-as-novel assumption. 51 For Kahane both men and women have “an uneasy relations to femaleness,” the “male child can use the very fact of his sex to differentiate himself from this uncanny figure, [while] the female child, who shares the female body and its symbolic place in our culture, remains locked in a more tenuous and fundamentally ambivalent struggle for a separate identity” (Kahane 337). 52 There is some contention around this, however: Ann Williams aligns fear of a powerful mother with male Gothic, not female Gothic, which is for her about fear of the father (A. Willliams 107).

48 individual female body and psyche, and to engage tropes of postcoloniality. As Gilbert and

Tompkins have noted, rape, birth, and stillbirth have much resonance for the issues of colonial invasion and settlement, population control, and for nation building (Gilbert and

Tompkins 214-215; 218).

Further, although the emphasis of Gothic content on transgression, sex, identity and desire clearly makes the Gothic well-suited to exposing and abjecting repressed sexual taboos, problematically, psychoanalytical readings tend toward essentialism and constructions of gender in categories that are assumed to be universal. Questions of class and race, which are also prevalent in the Gothic, tend to get overlooked as a result. This is somewhat perplexing given that anxiety about the racial other, racial purity, and colonialism, for example, recurs regularly in vampire narratives, as chapter three will explore, and emerges also in novels like Frankenstein and Zofloya or The Moor. Some scholars are now critiquing psychoanalysis’s centrality to feminist criticism on the Gothic because of its “totalizing gestures and assumptions” (Wallace and Smith 6; Halbelstsam

31).53 A focus on the psychosexual self is also somewhat problematic for a feminist project that argues for the use of the Gothic by women in the highly social and political forum of the theatre. Sexist alignments of the female with the personal and the male with the social limit understandings of how women can and do use the Gothic form, as Joanna Baillie does, to reflect on gender within a socio-political and aesthetic context (Cox, “Introduction” 57),

53 Moers, Kahane, Fleenor, and even Williams, with their emphasis on the mother/daughter relationship, all in their varying ways suggest something archetypal about female experience. Ellis, with her interest in the Gothic as a debate about the oppression of women in the domestic/social divide comes the closest to opening things up, but is still dependent on the binary of inside/outside which is itself somewhat limiting.

49 or as Sarah Kane will much later do, in Blasted, to frame domestic violence in the context of global politics.

The longevity of the Gothic novel, particularly as written by and for women, and the recurrence of its patterns over two centuries may be one of the factors that has led to a tendency to universalize and ahistoricize the way the Gothic’s recurring themes of female desire, motherhood and gender oppression are read. Readings become disconnected from the specific cultural contexts in which those texts were written and received. Thus three notably different Gothic texts, Frankenstein (1818), The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), and

Beloved (1987), nonetheless share a genealogy because they all have to do with fear and all address the female experiences of birth and motherhood.

And yet, longevity has also lead to ruthless and obsessive subcategorization, giving rise to labels like Southern Gothic, domestic Gothic, F/female Gothic, postcolonial Gothic,

American Gothic, Gothic romance, Gothic horror and even Tasmanian Gothic. The widening of the field of Gothic studies to include contemporary work has resulted in some recent more specialized book length studies. Justin Edwards’s Gothic Canada (2005) is particularly concerned with postcolonialism, national identity and the uncanny in the fiction and to a lesser extent film of Canada, while Michael Pollak and Margaret MacNabb’s Gothic Matilda

(2002), looks at the Gothic elements of a group of late twentieth-century Australian crime novels. Both studies make use of texts by women, though Gothic Matilda’s focus on female writers is the more limited. Despite new interest in geography, medium and period, gender and sexuality remain important to the analysis of Gothic taxonomies. Hence the Routledge

Companion to Gothic offers chapters on Queer Gothic, Gothic femininities and Gothic masculinities, in addition to chapters on Victorian Gothic and the Graphic Novel. That

50 books such as the Routledge Companion and the Cambridge Companion tend to be structured according to sub-categories that divide the Gothic by period, place, medium, and the gender of the author speaks both to the persistent mutability and proliferation of the

Gothic, and to its ongoing concern with places and bodies across a wide variety of contexts.

Though some of the Gothic’s subcategories, such as “popular Gothic romance,” might at first blush seem to marginalize and dismiss the Gothic on the basis of gender in a way that continues to eradicate differences of class and race, nonetheless, by virtue of their more narrow focus, Gothic subgenres open up avenues for comparative study and more careful cultural and historical analysis, making the Gothic of ongoing interest to feminist scholars in a variety of fields, including postcolonialism and theatre.54

III -- The Real and Resistance: Feminism and The Theatre

Though feminist criticism of Gothic drama is hard to come by—with Catherine

Burroughs’s work on Baillie one of the more sustained and notable exception55--feminist criticism of contemporary theatre, like feminist criticism of Gothic fiction, presents a broad body of scholarship from which to engage contemporary plays by women working in a

54 Southern Gothic is one sub-genre that does seem to show up occasionally in relation to theatre. Beth Henley’s unsettling yet sometimes funny play, The Jacksonian (2012), features a convoluted non-linear narrative, claustrophobic interiors, sexual depravity, secrets and guilt, sleep-like/death- like states, and many other Gothic tropes. It is referred to as Southern Gothic by both Ben Brantley of the New York Times and by the Christian Science Monitor; reviews quoted on the published play’s back cover, suggesting something about the viability of marketing Southern Gothic as a dramatic form that might not stretch to marketing the Gothic more generally for plays outside the South. 55 See in particular Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and The Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (1997), which broadens theatre to include texts by women outside of public production,

51 Gothic mode. However, the term “feminist theatre,” like the term “Gothic,” is, unfortunately, a slippery one, and with significant debates about form ensuing during the period when many of the plays discussed here were written, first staged, and written about, it requires some outlining here.

Feminism, usefully set out by theatre scholar Jill Dolan as “a critique of prevailing social conditions that formulate women’s position as outside of dominant male discourse,” and which is founded on a belief that things can and should change, is, despite the simplicity of this definition, not simple (Dolan 3). As Patricia Schroeder noted in 1986, multiple schools of feminist thought exist, with “most commentators” (at that time) breaking feminism into three divisions: liberal, radical, and materialist (Schroeder 21).

These feminisms differ from each other in part because feminists differ on what needs to change and how change might best be effected (Dolan 3).56 Sue-Ellen Case offers a more comprehensive list of feminisms, including radical, liberal, materialist, socialist, Marxist,

Lesbian, and radical lesbian feminism as well as a couple of discrete critical positions (Case,

Feminism 63). Problematically, however, she does not see evidence of “a black feminist theatre movement” (Case, Feminism 105), a perspective with which black feminists have since taken issue (Anderson 13). Indeed several feminists, such as Barbara Christian, Lisa

Anderson and bell hooks have raised challenges to the assumed whiteness of the liberal/radical/materialist divide, suggesting that, as Anderson notes, “the feminism inherent in the works of black women is sometimes missed” by feminisms that see race and

56 It’s worth noting, too, that even the terms used to identify these various supposedly identifiable ideologies are unfixed: radical feminism is also called cultural feminism, liberal feminism is also called bourgeois feminism, and Materialist Feminism, according to Elaine Aston, “has been widely adopted as the nomenclature for the theoretical position which in the 1970s was labeled as Marxist or socialist feminism” (Aston, Introduction 8-9).

52 sex as separate issues (Anderson 13). Black feminisms have, from the 1980s onward, made some gains in visibility both in the academy and on stage.57

Liberal feminism, the most dominant feminist ideological model from the late 1970s on, and one with which two of the plays discussed here are directly concerned, “proposes the amelioration of women’s position in society” but “without any radical change to its political, economic, or social structures” (Aston, Introduction 8). In theatre, this meant and continues to mean greater visibility for female playwrights in mainstream forums, but for many feminists, liberal feminism does not go far enough.58 Visibility, legitimacy, and reception are issues that contemporary feminist theatre shares with the early Gothic stage, underscoring the compatibility of the Gothic with feminist ideology. Importantly, this

57 While the number of women receiving productions deemed significant by some measures may not have increased much in America in the last 30 years, there is more diversity in the female population being produced than there used to be (Suzan-Lori Parks’s and Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzers can be read as indicators here, but see also The Dramatist, as noted below). Gabriele Griffin also makes the claim in Contemporary Black and Asian Women in Britain (2003) that “Since the 1980s there has been a steady increase in the number of Black and Asian women playwrights working in Britain” (Griffin 1). There is no playwright of color from England in this study, an omission that could productively be addressed by further research. Books such as Griffin’s, and Lisa Anderson’s Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (2008) suggest a correlated increase in the intersection of critical race theory and feminism in theatre scholarship. 58 Helen Keyssar sees the liberal position, as it relates to the politics and practice of producing theatre, as unrealistically optimistic, saying “a few productions by and about women…mounted as tokens of recognition…ultimately undermine more revolutionary effort (Keyssar 149). Marsha Norman’s 2009 article in American Theatre, which bemoaned the state of the field for female playwrights in light of then recent surveys by NYSCA and Emily Glassberg Sands pointed out that 80% of plays were by white men, with “everyone else [sharing] the remaining 20%,” despite the fact that “women make up 60% of the audience” (Norman 30) Men sometimes attribute this disparity to “a problem of quality not gender,” (Morgan, SMH 2009). Hardly. Norman is wrong, however to suggest that this is a uniquely American problem in so far as “no other developed nation [ignores its women writers]” (Norman 30). Terms like “glass ceiling” and “theatrical boys club” have appeared in several recent articles in the mainstream Sydney Morning Herald about the state of Australian theatre (Huxley Dec 2009; Huxley Jan 2011; Blake May 2012). Elaine Aston points to a similar bias on the British stage arguing that the prominence of male reviewers in British theatre helps perpetuate that bias—a bias she notes isn’t likely to change “in the foreseeable future” (Aston, Lion’s Den 403). Nor has it changed in America, judging by the results of the most recent survey of gender and racial parity in the American theatre, “The Count,” published in The Dramatist (The Dramatists Guild, Nov/Dec 2015, 20-29)

53 shared tendency to be trivialized by the dominant press generates a likelihood that contemporary plays that are both Gothic and feminist may be marginalized even when not openly being credited as being either. This is particularly significant to the discussion of both Beatrix Christian, and Sarah Kane, the former having had her work almost entirely overlooked by scholarship, and the latter having been publicly vilified by critics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, radical feminists have been thus “concerned with providing feminist alternatives,” that engage as a mode of analysis and practice “the notion of a women’s culture, different and separate from the patriarchal culture of men” (Case,

Feminism, 63-64). The view that there might be a specifically female form of theatre, while highly attractive to some feminist theatre practitioners (and arguably compatible with claims like Fleenor’s that the Gothic is inherently a feminine form) also “attracts criticism…on the grounds of essentialism” (Aston, Introduction, 46). Collapsing all women into an essential, homogenous category in binary opposition to the category of “man,” is of course problematic for feminist theatre for much the same reason that it is problematic for

Gothic scholarship and problematic for postcolonial scholarship, where a reductive tendency to work within a colonized/colonizer binary equates all women with the colonized, erasing nuance and diversity (Grewal and Kaplan 3). Critical race theory also clearly calls for revisions to this position. Further, radical essentialism fails not only to account for class and race as points of difference, but also fails to take into account what

Judith Butler in 1990 famously termed “gender trouble,” the notion that gender is a site of negotiation that is socially, politically, culturally and discursively constructed, and “is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred” (Butler 18; 22). For the Gothic, in

54 which reality is also often regarded as a construct, and in which borders are constantly negotiated and meaning deferred, radical essentialism is clearly suspect.

Although Butler’s notion of gender as contextual and constructed works against categorization, it does have some overlap with the materialist position, from the perspective of which, “women’s experiences cannot be understood outside of their specific historical context” (Case, Feminism 83). In turn, materialist ideology would seem to have some potential overlap with black feminism’s ongoing investment in “real and imagined histories” (Anderson 116), and with postcolonialism’s interest in showing the effect of various constructions of history acting on the present moment. However, criticisms of materialist feminism as privileging class over both race and gender (Case 83; 84) arguably imply that such potential has been underutilized, at least in the theatre of the late twentieth century. Nonetheless, materialist feminist ideology has some relevance for the Gothic’s challenge to reality and interest in class, revolution, and institutionalized power.

Logically then, different feminist ideologies, with their different foci, tend to be aligned with different kinds of feminist theatre that receive different kinds of attention, and privilege some theatrical elements over others. Patricia Schroeder summarizes the variations by suggesting that liberal feminism puts heroic women on stage in traditional, often “realistic” structures, while radical feminist theatre uses fluid and circular narratives to reflect female experience, and material feminism disrupts narratives to emphasize the cultural construction of seemingly “natural” roles (Schroeder 21). Schroeder’s summary focuses on approaches to form and representation, rather than focusing as others have done on content or modes of artistic production and audience demographics as indicators

55 of a feminist agenda.59 Yet while Schroeder is not alone with that preoccupation, issues concerning what a play is “about” are difficult to disentangle from those concerning how a play is structured on the page or presented in performance.

Realism, still one of the most dominant modes of representation both on the page and on the stage is defined at the end of the twentieth century as relying on a primarily domestic set populated with realistic details and psychologically plausible characters whose dialogue mimics “real” speech. For many theorists, psychological plausibility in both text and performance is based on the (sexist) biases of a Freudian perspective on male/female psychology (Case 123-124). Additionally, realism offers a quest-driven plot that moves through crisis to reveal a singular truth and resolve the play’s tensions with closure (a structure that some feminists find phallic and ejaculatory),60 and an assumed fourth wall that sets up a one-directional relationship to a stable treatment of time and place. These elements combine to promote a fixed subject position, in which a singular, true reality is reflected for an audience assumed also to be stable and unified by a commonality that is, as Dolan notes, based on a spectator who is “white, middle-class, heterosexual, and male” (Dolan 1).61 Realism, which “reifies the male as sexual subject and the female as the

59 Janet Brown, for example, offers a definition of feminist theatre that determines inclusion based on devices: “(1) the sex-role reversal device; (2) the presentation of historical figures as role- models; (3) satire of traditional sex-roles; (4) the direct portrayal of women in oppressive situations” (Brown quoted in Canning, 23). These devices might be considered to be both formal and thematic, but for Canning they overlook “one of the hallmarks of feminist theatre: collective production” (Canning 23). Brown’s rubric, though contemporary with some of the plays discussed here, does not easily fit, though neither are the majority of them collectively produced. 60 Schroeder marks a progression toward closure as a contender for one of the key features of realism (Schroeder 17; 19) See also Case (Case, Feminism 129). Anderson notes that some influences on the development of a black feminist theatre aesthetic inscribe a view of time as circular rather linear (Anderson 14) which would argue for black feminist theatre aesthetics to be viewed in opposition to these second-wave definitions of realism. 61 Case’s critique is informed in part, as Aston notes, by a feminist engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the Lacanian system from a feminist perspective, as Aston neatly summarizes,

56 sexual other” has for many feminists served as what Sue-Ellen Case in Feminism and

Theatre (1988) famously called a “prisonhouse” for women—a term that we might note clearly has some resonance with the terrifying Gothic chamber (Case, Feminism 124).

Elin Diamond’s book, Unmaking Mimesis (1997), proposes an alternative: a materialist Brecht-influenced approach to form, and more specifically to representation, that makes use of devices like the gestus to alienate the spectator, making him or her aware of the historical, cultural, and representational context of performance. For Diamond this is preferable to mimetic realism because “the hackneyed ‘mirror of life’ conceit erases construction, point of view, and ideology (Diamond, Unmaking 29). An approach that interrogates constructions of reality is clearly of relevance to the Gothic’s concern with challenging what society thinks is real, as it is to the postcolonial’s interest in debunking historical narratives, and indeed Diamond’s theory of representation has some useful application to reading arguably gestic moments of Gothic interruption in some of the plays here, as I will discuss.

As Case’s criticisms, Diamond’s proposed alternative, and Schroeder’s careful reading of realism as a viable dramatic form for feminist theatre suggest, much feminist scholarship has tended to see realism as necessarily antithetical to feminism. This would seem to put the Gothic and feminism on one side of the equation, and realism on the other.

However, such an equation is problematically reductive in part because it typically treats realism as depending on Freudian paradigms. J. Ellen Gainor and others have called for a re-examination of the relationship between realism and feminist theatre, challenging the the child’s identity is formed when it enters “into language [metaphorically represented as the mirror stage, which] constitutes the entry into an external [Symbolic] order….The arbitrarily imposed Symbolic Order, in which all subjects as members of a communicating social order are required to participate, privileges the male at the expense of the female (Aston, Introduction 36).

57 “commonplace assumption[s]” that underlie much theorizing about theatre practice and psychological realism and have prompted an oversimplified privileging of Brecht over

Stanislavsky (Gainor, “Rethinking” 163). Freud’s relationship to popular definitions of realism either as a dramaturgical style or as a mode of representation notwithstanding,

Freud has utility for both the Gothic and the postcolonial, reminding us to be careful drawing lines in the sand that would dismiss Freudian concepts entirely, suggesting rather that we consider the uses to which those concepts are put.

Furthermore, though the Gothic is indeed invested in challenging constructions of reality in a way that can be well served by non-mimetic dramaturgy and presentation, the

Gothic delights in confounding distinctions and it is always more than the sum of its parts.

Walpole’s formulation of the Gothic as a blend of nature and imagination at the very least implies that both the real and the not-real can—and even should—co-exist in Gothic worlds. As Van Helsing reminds us by breaking the fourth wall in a curtain speech at the end of Balderston and Deane’s Dracula, for example, “there are such things” (Balderston and Deane 74). In this way, the postcolonial feminist Gothic offers an important point of intervention in debates about feminist form.

The plays in this study all have realistic and non-realistic elements, but they do not consistently privilege certain theatrical elements over others. They vary significantly in tone and subject, but also in terms of form, and they all exploit the Gothic to feminist purpose, though this does not make them all feminist in the same way. The playwrights discussed here range in terms of their work and their own feminist positions.62 All female

62 For example, while Churchill has been open about being both a feminist and a socialist (Reinelt 18-20), other writers here have at times rejected feminist labels, a point upon which I will elaborate.

58 casts in The Secretaries and Top Girls, for example, critique dichotomized notions of gender by doubling male and female roles and by staging patriarchal attitudes and behaviors as performed by women. The Governor’s Family also stages gender as a slippery category in its treatment of the Governor’s twin children, the daughter being figured in colonial rhetoric as masculine, while the son is figured as effeminate.63 Both The Governor’s Family and In

The Blood resist a feminist ideology that erases distinctions between women based on race, not only by staging indigenous and black bodies, but also by doing so in ways that challenge notions of an essential female sisterhood and openly critique the fetishizing of the racially

Other female body. Lochhead’s adaptation of Dracula, Parks’s Fucking A, and Churchill’s

Top Girls all address class as a division between women (something also impacted by race in the case of Parks) that results in different relationships to power and to feminism. Yet, many of the plays in this study, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Connie Gault’s Sky, and Sarah

Kane’s Blasted, make significant use of realism, proving that substantial realist dramaturgy can exist in a feminist Gothic play. Ultimately, what the plays discussed here suggest is that on a formal level they generate their Gothic effect and their articulation of postcolonial and feminist cultural critique in part by their hybridity, their ability to evoke the metaphoric and the literal at the same time, and their ambiguous relationship to recognized theatrical norms. This multiplicity and instability has at times confounded their analysis and tainted their reception—a situation that reading them as working in the Gothic mode might in part help to set right.

63 In production at Belvoir Street, the actors playing Lara and Gerald were physically similar and were similarly costumed and had their hair similarly styled.

59 IV – Locating Bodies: Approaches and Overviews

In using Gothic as an adjective to describe a methodology, Sedgwick’s suggestion that psychoanalysis is a “Gothic lens” (Sedgwick vi) highlights the important malleability of the Gothic: it is as much a way of reading, of viewing, and of making meaning through reading, as it is a way of writing. The plays discussed here are discussed as Gothic because it is inviting and productive to read them as Gothic, not because their authors necessarily claim them to be Gothic. Indeed, the Gothic and the contemporary theatre have, as I have noted, rarely been thought of in the same breath. This project seeks to put them in the same breath by moving between dramaturgical and critical approaches that link these plays with

Gothic discourse. In other words, my aim here is, like the Gothic, somewhat hybridic in that

I combine dramaturgical acts of Gothic reading with critical approaches (primarily feminist and postcolonial) that provide a broader theoretical framework through which to then view the plays’ various Gothic elements.

It is, therefore, perhaps helpful to think of the plays discussed in the following pages as intersecting variously with three different notions of what might constitute a Gothic text.

Some texts are consciously, or referentially Gothic in that they take other Gothic texts as obvious intertexts. Into that category we might put Suzan-Lori Parks’s In The Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000), both of which overtly take up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet

Letter (1850), Beatrix Christian’s Blue Murder (1994), which reworks the quintessentially

Gothic Bluebeard, and Adrienne Kennedy’s The Film Club (1992) and Dramatic Circle

(1992), alongside Liz Lochhead’s Dracula (1988, 2009) all of which make specific use of

Dracula (1897). Other texts are evocatively Gothic, making use of an accumulation of

60 tropes, conventions and structures regularly found in the Gothic, such as wild landscapes, burial and entrapment, monstrosity and amorality, collapsed boundaries, sex yoked to violence and death, the return of the past and so on. Connie Gault’s Sky (1989), Christian’s

The Governor’s Family (1997), The Five Lesbian Brothers’ The Secretaries (1993) Judith

Thompson’s Sled (1997) Parks’s Venus (1996), and Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) all “feel”

Gothic to varying degrees in their use of atmospheric elements, images and conventions, and so reading them as Gothic produces rich layers of meaning.

In other plays the Gothic emerges as an intervention that challenges the authority of constructed reality and reframes the narrative. Judith Thompson’s play Habitat (2001), for example, has a very Gothic opening that effectively sets up the concerns of the markedly less Gothic play that follows. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Mad Forest (1990) both use the figure of the vampire as a Gothic intervention in very different ways, and in Alma

De Groen’s The Joss Adams Show (1972), we might think of Joss herself as a Gothic figure in a straight play, whose presence there as both heroine and monster challenges the versions of reality that she is expected to live by. Helpful as they are, these categories are neither strictly hierarchical nor absolute. Blasted, for example, is both evocatively Gothic and uses the Gothic as an intervention, and is arguably a more thoroughly Gothic text than Dramatic

Circle even though Kennedy references Dracula directly. Parks’s Red Letter Plays are both consciously or referentially Gothic in their use of Hawthorne, but even as they depart radically from Hawthorne they are also evocatively Gothic in their production of a wide range of recontextualized classic Gothic tropes, The Secretaries is evocatively Gothic and takes obvious delight in its bloody atmospherics, but those evocations might also be thought of as interventions in a comedy about office politics.

61 Despite or perhaps because of their different approaches to the Gothic, these plays considered collectively demonstrate the utility of the Gothic for staging feminist and postcolonial questions about the power dynamics of a wide range of spaces--from offices and street corners to forests and frozen prairies--and the various gendered and racialized bodies that inhabit those spaces. It is their shared investment in an interrogation of these spaces and bodies as they are shaped by the legacies of patriarchal colonialism at the end of the twentieth century that unites these plays.

I started this introductory chapter with a place (Blue’s house), a body (Eve’s), and a standard Gothic question: “who else is lurking there?” Spaces and bodies are arguably fundamental to generating questions and answers in postcolonialism, and how we interrogate, navigate, reinscribe and dismantle the borders that differentiate between various places and people is much at stake there, as it is in feminism. In both discourses who has access to which place is a question of power, and as Paula Backscheider has noted, at its core the ”Gothic is about power,” too (Backscheider 201). Like the theatre, then, the

Gothic, feminism, and postcolonialism are all much concerned with spaces and bodies, and hence the three main Gothic elements I am interested in tracing fall into the categories of

“space” and “body.” These tropes, manifesting not only in Gothic imagery, but also in formal structure and ideology are: the Gothic world of landscapes and interiors; the excessive and hybridic monster, and the pervasive and invasive figure of the vampire.

Progressing from spaces to bodies is, perhaps, suitably theatrical; from lights up on an empty stage to enter the heroine. Yet this progression also traces a kind of colonial/postcolonial evolution. After all, the colonial and patriarchal ideology with which postcolonial critique is engaged often suggests pointedly that place comes first and people

62 come second. Terra Nullis: the unoccupied land ready to be populated in the name of expansion and growth. My goal here is of course not to validate such ideology, but rather to draw attention to it and use the progression it suggests to arrive at a place where distinctions and the power relationships they indicate collapse, a place where space and body are one.

Yet because the Gothic is willfully polyvalent and ambiguous, as well as highly self- referential, and because its own structures are thus often convoluted and labyrinthine, the task of untangling any one Gothic element and holding it up for isolated scrutiny is a challenging one. Furthermore, to do so only gets you so far; as Sedgwick and others have noted, recurrence is a key strategy of the Gothic so that it is through accumulation that the

Gothic achieves its power (Sedgwick 5-6; Cox, “Introduction” 6). The idea that the monster is always greater than the sum of its parts, that the Gothic tale necessarily has difficulty getting told, and that reality in any given moment is always part of some larger more powerful entity at the edge of articulation, are all significant for understanding the Gothic.

Consequently, what follows involves some loops and dead ends, and some gesturing forward and backward through the Gothic tunnels I am attempting to traverse.

Here’s a map:

In the first chapter, I will explore the Gothic’s enduring occupation with space. Full of icescapes, impenetrable forests, precipices, sea-swept headlands, caves, imposing abbeys, subterranean chambers, gloomy corridors, catacombs, locked rooms, and ruined castles, the Gothic is replete with iconic wild landscapes and claustrophobic sites of entrapment—and the all too ambiguous borders that separate them. Setting is a key vehicle for meaning in the Gothic and necessarily comprises notions of both place (geographic

63 location) and space (an area’s qualities) as signifiers for concerns about identity and cultural power. Movement between spaces is a notable feature of Gothic drama, which as

Jeffrey Cox notes, typically follows a trajectory from inside to outside, moving from “castle to open ground, from enclosed past to open future” (Cox, “Introduction” 23; 22). Such trajectories, Cox argues, though familiar from earlier forms,64 come at the turn of the nineteenth century to link English Gothic drama with the French Revolution (Cox,

“Introduction” 20). The anxiety that inside and outside might not be stable categories is definitive of the Gothic and has both socio-political and psychological implications. For

Sedgwick, throughout the Gothic, the concept of live burial spatializes anxiety about proprioception, sexuality and identity (Sedgwick 12-13). This chapter argues that Gothic settings re-emerge in feminist postcolonial drama to explore both the violence and oppression upon which patriarchal social order is founded, and anxieties about prescribed identity, the self, and the body.

In the first section, I examine the way in which Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection can be brought to bear on modern manifestations of the vast and spectacular Gothic landscape as it is reworked in small contemporary theatres. Consistent with recent postcolonial scholarship on the landscape as a site for restaging the colonial traumas of displacement, violence and erasure, and drawing on Canadian playwright Gwen Pharis

Ringwood’s Still Stand The House as a precedent, I look at how Beatrix Christian’s The

Governor’s Family has staged wild, uncanny landscapes in order to articulate anxieties about the failures of colonialism, and the construction of racial and gender identities in historical narratives. This chapter then examines the ways in which the Gothic interior

64 Cox is referring specifically to Shakespeare, which was of course a source for the Gothic.

64 serves as a site for live burial. Using Sedgwick alongside Shelly Kulperger’s work on the feminist postcolonial Gothic, I examine how Beatrix Christian’s Blue Murder and Connie

Gault’s Sky stage interiors to articulate anxieties about violence committed at home as both a domestic and a national idea. The Gothic’s metaphoric register allows space to serve as the contested female body, which is used in feminist postcolonial drama to critique colonial and patriarchal approaches to controlling female sexuality and reproduction. Moving from exteriors and interiors to the problematic indistinguishability of those categories, the chapter concludes with an exploration of Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s plays

Sled and Habitat as examples of the polyvalent space. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the uncanny, both plays call for non-mimetic approaches to staging the permeable borders between self and other, between here and there, then and now, mothers and daughters, home and away, in order to trouble notions of personal history and social identity.

The second chapter moves the focus from the landscapes and claustrophobic rooms of Australian and Canadian drama, to the reproductive female bodies that inhabit such spaces in contemporary America, where race relations and reproductive control function as prominent and intersecting sites of national political division. Suzan-Lori Parks’s In The

Blood and Fucking A both take Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic (and colonial) novel The

Scarlet Letter as a source, refiguring Hawthorne’s rebellious and adulteress single mother

Hester Prynne as variously a homeless black mother of five and a branded abortionist in an otherworldly colony. Drawing on Rosemary Betterton’s feminist work on the monstrous, I explore how Parks’s dramaturgy takes up an articulation of difference or divergence from nature that, from Aristotle and Pliny on, aligns the female and/or racial other with the monstrous. Trailing its long history of associations with race and gender, the trope of the

65 monster becomes indelibly linked to the Gothic in 1818 with Frankenstein. While Parks’s plays both take Hawthorne as an overt intertext, Fucking A in particular also bears strong correlation to Toni Morrison’s contemporary Gothic novel about a slave mother, Beloved, and to Frankenstein, which Moers considers a foundational text for the Female Gothic and its anxiety about bodies. 65

The first section of this chapter looks at the ways in which Hawthorne’s novel depicts unruly female sexuality as a racially coded divergence from the norm that gets reworked in Parks. The second section then explores how this racially coded primitive sexuality becomes linked to Frankenstein, particularly in Fucking A, evoking a Gothic monstrous mother that refigures Victor Frankenstein’s technological intervention in the processes of birth to comment on twentieth-century strategies for controlling reproductivity and female sexuality. The third section shifts the focus from the monstrous mothers to their monstrous offspring, tracing the ways in which the Gothic is refigured in

The Red Letter Plays to articulate sexist and racist cultural anxieties about parental freedom and responsibility, welfare mothers and the burden they place on the state, and the perpetuation of monstrosity through hybridity. The fourth section continues this exploration of hybridity and makes comparative use of Alma de Groen’s The Joss Adams

Show and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls to explore the ways in which Elin Diamond’s Brecht- based theories of feminist theatre practice can be used to read monstrous motherhood as a cultural construction in Parks’s work. The final section considers the choices and circumstances that monstrous mothers face and the role of infanticide in both plays.

65 In her comprehensive study of Parks, Deborah Geis also suggests that Parks owes a “debt to Morrison’s novel” in her evocation of the slave mother who saves her child (Geis 138) and Caroline Woidat links The Scarlet Letter and Beloved (Woidat 527-546).

66 A very particular kind of monster and its markedly different associations are the focus of Chapter Three. Working with the vampire both in Bram Stoker’s iconic Victorian

Gothic novel Dracula (1897) and as it appears initially on stage nearly a century earlier in

Planché’s The Vampire, or the Bride of The Isles (1820), this chapter looks at the vampire’s longevity and flexibility as an embodiment of anxieties about political upheaval, gender, race, and geography. In Stoker’s novel, anxieties about invaders from outside of the empire are a clear response to England’s fading power, opening the text for significant postcolonial readings. Stephen Arata has insightfully argued that Dracula poses a threat of reverse- colonization, where the troubling outsider infiltrates English shores, sways English women from their destinies, and begins to populate the Empire with his own kind (Arata 166).

Indelibly linked to both the sexual and the political, the figure of the vampire, which emerges directly and indirectly in several postcolonial feminist plays, can be seen as participating in an ongoing discourse of anxiety about the breakdown of heteronormative relationships that begins in the heyday of the Gothic, continues through the fin de siècle, and then into the end of the twentieth century where it resonates with questions of global strife and decolonization, women’s labor, feminism, and queer identity.

This chapter’s structure to some extent mirrors a vampiric trajectory in which the threat of infection spreads from host to victim. It opens by mapping the relationships that emerge between anxieties about female fidelity, the health of empire, and political upheaval in Dracula, exploring the way these anxieties are rearticulated and reimagined in

Liz Lochhead’s late twentieth-century adaptation. My analysis then moves to the ways in which the trope of the vampire has been deployed in postcolonial discourses by Frantz

Fanon and others to describe colonial power relationships. Starting with Caryl Churchill’s

67 Mad Forest, and Adrienne Kennedy’s The Dramatic Circle, I explore the evocation of the vampire in relation to revolution and decolonization. Tracing a move away from the overt presence of Dracula to an arguably more sinister and indirect evocation that points to a persistence in the indelible connections between gender, race and vampirism, the next section links colonial labor to vampirism and the complicity of the colonized subject in

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. Labor remains the central motif in the next section, which makes central a comparison of the evocation of the vampire in two seemingly very different plays,

The Five Lesbian Brothers’ comic romp The Secretaries and Caryl Churchill’s dark exploration of liberal feminism in Thatcherite Britain, Top Girls. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Paulina Palmer and Sue-Ellen Case, I also explore the figure of the queer vampire in these plays, drawing links between anxieties about liberal feminism, female labor, reproductivity, and female sexuality. At a time when all boundaries and borders seem permeable due to globalization and technology, and all categories have been found to be arguable, the vampire serves in postcolonial feminist Gothic drama as an articulation of late twentieth-century unease.

The final chapter offers a case study of British playwright Sarah Kane’s Blasted by exploring the connections between the foci of the previous three chapters. Blasted (1995), arguably one of the most Gothic and most misunderstood plays by a woman in a decade marked by bleak and violent drama in England, was much reviled for its shocking sex and violence and for what was perceived as the structural flaws inherent to its departure from realism. Much has been written about Blasted and its author since, yet like Parks’s work,

Kane’s plays defy easy classification. The Gothic, however, provides a particularly useful key with which to approach Kane’s work. This chapter analyzes Blasted’s use of space, the

68 monstrous hybridity of its form, and the ways in which the figure of the vampire resonates through its critique of the spread of violence domestically, nationally, and internationally.

In a consideration of the theatrical space, I propose a reading of Blasted’s hotel room as a claustrophobic interior and site of live burial in abject relationship to Kane’s version of the Gothic wilderness: an undefined and immeasurable warzone. I then show the ways in which the space also serves as the heroine’s own body, penetrated by violence, and subject to periods of darkness and visceral experience. This particular reading of the stage space illuminates the play’s formal oscillation from the mimetic realism that dominates the play’s opening to the collage of images operating beyond the language of narrative structures later in the play. This dramaturgical shift shows the spatial expansion of the set and the expansion of the play’s form to be linked expressions of an expanded Gothic reality that cannot be adequately contained by patriarchal structures and modes of expression. The third section of the chapter then looks at the way Kane’s preoccupation with ambiguous states of death emerges in Blasted through the oblique figure of the vampire. The vampire resonates through Blasted’s imagery of blood, biting, intimate violence and undead states, but it also underscores Kane’s critique of violence as contagious, muddying distinctions between villain and victim. Drawing on Stephen Arata’s reading of Dracula as expressing a fear of reverse colonization, my reading of Blasted traces the play’s ironic treatment of the vampire as a sexual predator who poses a racial threat to empire. This reading demonstrates how the behaviors and attitudes that normalize domestic violence bring global unrest over the national threshold.

Blasted, like all the plays discussed here, stages spaces and bodies to challenge the relationship between the colonial and patriarchal constructions of humanity we have

69 inherited, and the abject and uncomfortable questions about power and identity that arise from that inheritance. The claim that the way Blasted and the other plays examined in this study challenge that relationship can be productively illuminated by a consideration of the

Gothic is at the foundation of this project. Though few of the plays discussed have historically been addressed as Gothic, their use of Gothic texts, their evocation of Gothic tropes and conventions, and their incorporation of the Gothic as dramaturgical disruptions, argue strongly for their place in a significant feminist and postcolonial Gothic theatre. It seems remiss, then, that despite growing bodies of insightful scholarship on Gothic literature, postcolonialism and feminist theatre, the idea of postcolonial feminist Gothic as a stage phenomenon has not yet been explored. That oversight is what the following chapters hope to begin to address.

70

CHAPTER ONE:

Staging the Postcolonial Gothic Space

“A terrible place. Boiling mud. Lost Souls. … Haunted Forests. Human leg bones.” (Beatrix Christian, The Governor’s Family)

Introduction: The Gothic Space and Postcoloniality

Claustrophobic chambers and wild landscapes have been staples of the Gothic since its official inception as a literary and dramatic form in England in the late eighteenth century.

In fact, setting was and has remained such a highly recognizable feature of the Gothic that it’s hard to think of a Gothic novel that doesn’t have a gloomy corridor or a craggy precipice, or both.66 Owing much to the embattled castles of the nearby French Revolution, and to philosopher and political theorist Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime (1757), the early Gothic landscapes and architecture were iconically imposing, mysterious, and frightening. For Burke, “the passion caused by the great and sublime…is Astonishment; and astonishment is that stage of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some

66 This is the case for a range of contemporary fiction we might think of as being in the Gothic mode by writers such as Angela Carter, Daphne DuMaurier, Elizabeth Jolley, V. C. Andrews, and Anne Rice, as well as for those novels typically considered generically Gothic, such as Frankenstein, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Monk, and those that appear later in the nineteenth century in both England and America, such as Wuthering Heights, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and Dracula.

71 degree of horror” (Burke, Enquiry 53). The sublime landscape is one that is powerful, dangerous, and not fully known (Burke, Enquiry 58-59), often because it exists beyond the perceived boundaries of human control.

Like the awe-inspiring grandeur of the vast and untamed natural world, the French

Revolution and its aftermath similarly evoked feelings of wonder and horror, which found themselves well suited to articulation through the Gothic. Much of the spectacular and bloody violence of the French Revolution, particularly as observed from England, played out in castles, from the Bastille to the various palaces in which the monarchy sought refuge and were imprisoned. Castles are an almost ubiquitous feature of Gothic drama around the dawn of the nineteenth century, and one that signals tensions between past and progress.

In his introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas, Jeffrey Cox writes: “as the ruined nature of many of these castles suggests, [the castle serves as] an emblem of the past’s influence in the present, the hold that the old world—even in decay—has upon the future” (Cox,

“Introduction” 19). For Cox space is linked to form in Gothic drama: “the essentials of the

Gothic setting and plot—the castle, the villain, the heroine’s capture and escape—[can] be read as embodying the rhythms of the Revolution and its liberation of enclosed spaces from the powers of the past” (Cox, “Introduction” 19). Certainly plays like Colman The Younger’s

Blue-Beard, which culminates in a band of peasants dismantling foreign aristocrat

Abomolique’s fortress in order to free the condemned heroine from the castle’s innermost bloody chamber, would seem to bear this out. Nonetheless, reactions to the French

Revolution and its bloody aftermath were complex and conflicted. The rebel-led reign of terror, which resulted in the mass execution of political enemies (including the Queen, who was publicly beheaded in the town square) generated fear and ambivalence about the gains

72 and costs of such a bloody assault on national power and history. Burke’s writings on the

French Revolution expressed a popular view that while liberty and progress were much to be championed, there was something awful and barbaric about the reduction of the once revered institutions of the past to fodder for the guillotine (Burke, Reflections 232-233 in particular). Uneasy tensions between the barbaric and the civilized abound in Gothic writing and its approach to setting in general and borders in particular. Liberty, as represented by outside spaces, is often ambivalent in the Gothic and comes quite literally out of large-scale destruction as sets—like that of Abomolique’s castle—are dismantled, leaving a stage picture of ruin not easily separated from the violence that causes it.67

While Cox sees space in the Gothic as tied to socio-political anxiety, an approach that has the significant merit of not divorcing theatre from the social context in which it was produced and received, a number of scholars have instead, as noted, found psychoanalysis useful as a tool for reading the Gothic space. In these cases, the argument tends to be that anxieties about the self’s ability to maintain “proper” relationships to the outside get spatialized in the Gothic (Sedgwick 13; Kahane 336-338; A. Williams 74-76).

Psychoanalysis has proved productive for many contemporary scholars focusing on Gothic fiction from the eighteenth century onwards, finding in tensions between exteriors and interiors articulations of anxieties about the distinct, singular, rational self and repressed primal fears and desires. And indeed the breadth of scholarship and literature thus

67 While Cox sees Gothic drama as indelibly concerned with revolution, he does not necessarily see it as propaganda but rather suggests Gothic drama sought to “discover a new ground of high tragedy in the tactics of popular drama” by which to “represent the ideological struggles of the day” (Cox, Introduction 12). Despite what may appear to be happy, revolutionary endings, then, it is important to note that respect for power is elemental to the Gothic, and indeed Burke’s argument in A Philosophical Enquiry is that the sublime is always “some modification of power” and that that which is dangerous cannot be dismissed as “trifling or contemptible,” suggesting again that awe is fundamental to Gothic terror (Burke, Enquiry 59; 53)

73 engaged in the twentieth century and since attests to the continued appeal of the Gothic to writers and readers beyond the political moment in which the French Revolution dominated the social consciousness of England.68 Space in the Gothic, then, articulates anxieties about the socio-political world, and the psychological, personal world. Further, the possibility for those anxieties to exist concurrently and inform each other is greatly facilitated by the Gothic’s ambiguity and its persistent troubling of the boundaries between the internal and the external, signaling, like Cathy’s face at the window in Wuthering

Heights, the promise or threat of crossing a threshold.69

Like the Gothic, postcolonialism is much concerned with space and with borders.

The colonial project itself, as scholar Richard Calvell argues, has “a fundamentally spatial aspect” given that it is founded on taking territory, mapping places, and relocating people

(Calvell quoted in Kulperger 105). Somewhat inevitably perhaps, given that legacies of violence, political upheaval, and questions of power and identity are deeply imbricated in the heyday of Gothic literature and drama; and given that places in those early texts frequently serve as contested spaces for tensions between the civilized, rational new world and the monstrous power of the irrational and primal, postcolonial anxieties about displacement, settlement, cultural progress, repressed histories and fractured identities have found expression in the Gothic. The excessive, ambiguous Gothic mode undermines singularity, and so serves as an apt vehicle for staging the concurrent existence of multiple colonial and postcolonial constructions and identities, and the tensions between them. As

68 The Revolutionary Wars similarly might be thought to have informed an American taste for importing Gothic theatre during the same period, but they don’t account for its appeal now, further suggesting the Gothic’s longevity lies in its mutability and multiplicity. 69 Indeed, that Catherine Linton’s appearance at the window is one of the best known scenes in Charlotte Bronte’s mid-nineteenth-century Gothic novel, if not in Gothic fiction generally, speaks to how powerful the idea of the permeable boundary is to the Gothic mode. (C. Bronte 67).

74 Gerry Turcotte and Cynthia Sugars’s use of the phrase “unhomely” to describe the legacies of imperialism implies (Turcotte and Sugars vii), one of the most striking points of intersection between the discourses of postcoloniality and the Gothic is place, and as that term also implies that place is often associated with the domestic.

Place and space are also important to the intersection of both the postcolonial and the Gothic with feminism. As Joanne Tompkins and Helen Gilbert note, rape is a motif that occurs regularly in postcolonial drama as an expression of a history of invasion and exploitation, linking the land to the (indigenous) female body (Gilbert and Tompkins 213).

The Gothic interior has also proved useful to postcolonial writings on masculine authority and invasion because of its history as a metaphor for the female body in which it reads as a gendered site of identity, liable to intrusion, and subject to violence.70 As Catherine

Burroughs points out, the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 placed significant restrictions on sexual discourse, as well as on political expression (Burroughs, Erotics 110). The Gothic interior as a metaphor for the female body provided one way round, as is well exemplified by Colman’s Blue-beard, with its deadly and tempting bloody chamber: a closed and hidden space that must be penetrated with a key and where the walls drip blood.

In the postcolonial context, feminist readings of Gothic spaces often challenge not only the categories of self (or body) and place, interior and exterior, but also the linked ideas of public and private. In her work on domesticity, spectrality, race, and the uncanny in Canadian fiction, Shelley Kulperger points out that domestic violence can and does mean violence “enacted within the borders of the national home,” particularly for First Nations people (and I would argue Australian Aboriginal people as well). Such violence is also

70For Claire Kahane, for example, “the heroine’s active exploration of the Gothic house in which she is trapped is also an exploration of her relation to the maternal body that she shares” (Kahane 38).

75 enacted against women generally within the confines of a familiar, supposedly safe, domestic space (Kulperger 119). In the feminist postcolonial, home as both a domestic and a national idea converge. Kulperger notes:

A central message within the feminist postcolonial Gothic [is that] it is difficult to maintain distance—be it moral, critical, or spatial—from the various forms of trauma and violence that mark the existence of domestic spaces. Widely understood feminist definitions of domestic violence, then, arise and are informed by histories of colonial governance and the complex relationship of class and race to gender….What happens in the home is irrevocably sutured to wider cultured apparatuses and discursive frameworks…what terrifies and terrorizes us…is never far from home (Kulperger 120).

As her very language suggests, space is integral to what Kulperger regards as Gothic here: our inability to maintain distance is our inability to maintain distinctions between spatial categories, which in the Gothic mode always threaten to collapse. The suturing she sees as linking the domestic and the social, the self and the political, harks back to Linda Bayer-

Berenbaum’s insistence that the Gothic mode expands reality by making that which should be beyond, imminent, “integral, [and] inescapabl[y] connected to the world around us”

(Bayer-Berenbaum 21). Even the most ordinary space can be rendered threatening, contested, and ambiguous, embodying unvanquished anxieties about the colonial legacies of displacement and violence that mark postcolonial discourses.

Gothic theatre is a particularly apt vehicle for feminist postcolonial cultural criticism because it offers highly readable spatial metaphors and conventions. Unlike other kinds of narrative operating in the Gothic mode, theatre is uniquely positioned to realize space three-dimensionally, giving physical shape and form to the tensions between the various

“heres” and “theres” that are so significant to the Gothic and to postcolonialism. The theatre, too, is well positioned to use space to stage the containment and liberation of

76 marginalized bodies by both drawing on Gothic conventions like live burial and using metaphors of the space-as-female-body to disrupt, magnify and render uncanny colonial constructions of the female subject.

Still Stands The House (Gwen Pharis Ringwood), The Governor’s Family (Beatrix

Christian), Blue Murder (Beatrix Christian), Sky (Connie Gault), Sled (Judith Thompson), and

Habitat (Judith Thompson) all serve as examples of postcolonial Gothic drama to varying degrees. Taking up the very different landscapes of Australia and Canada, these contemporary plays use settings and spatial conventions to refigure the Gothic’s early preoccupation with the unstable borders between the civilized and the primitive, between the legacies of the past and social progress in order to explore and contest colonial constructions and discourses that erase histories, deny violence and subjugate those constructed as Other. In order to demonstrate how they do so, this chapter aims to identify and analyze three central spatial conventions at work in them: abject-offstage landscapes, onstage interiors as sites for live burial, and the polyvalent staging of unstable borders.

I -- Colonial Nightmares and Gothic Landscapes: The Abject- Offstage

Landscape is a prominent feature of both Canadian and Australian drama. As Michael

McKinnie points out in his recent study of theatrical geographies, the setting or presence of a rural landscape is often regarded as more or less definitive of Canadianness in drama, so much so that changes in the depiction of the land can be used to map shifts in Canadian theatre over time (McKinnie ix-xi). Australian theatre critic John McCallum, too, sees

77 landscape as a definitive feature of twentieth-century Australian drama. In his book,

Belonging (2009), he identifies the inhospitable, lonely, and dangerous Bush as a key element from the settler/invader dramas at the beginning of the century to the end of the century where the land emerges in plays like Hannie Rayson’s Inheritance (2003), the central crisis of which is the survival of a family sheep station in a politically and economically embattled rural landscape,71 and in a group of plays he aptly identifies as

“Bush-Gothic,” which include Kathryn Ash’s play Flutter (2004), set in far north

Queensland, and Beatrix Christian’s The Governor’s Family (1997) (McCallum, 328).

Nonetheless, despite the observation that landscape is a dominant feature of drama in both countries, where it serves to articulate feelings of isolation, fear, and struggle against inhospitable and “uncivilized” terrain,72 and despite the related recognition of the presence of distinctly Gothic landscapes in contemporary Australian and Canadian fiction,73 theatre scholarship addressing landscape’s correlation to the Gothic, is more limited.74

71 Although Rayson’s play features ghosts, a death, racial tension and secrets, it is not Gothic in tone or structure or ultimately in its meaning or politics. The above tropes work on a very literal level, rather than also functioning symbolically, and the play is invested in the dominant theatrical mode of mimetic realism. The ghosts are more of a memory than a supernatural and disruptive presence from an expanded reality. Nonetheless, the preoccupation with “land” and “past” are significant as markers for what makes the Gothic attractive in the postcolonial Australian context. 72 Both leading Australian theatre critic John McCallum and Postcolonial theatre scholar Alan Filewod suggest that a struggle between the nostalgia for belonging somewhere and the need to recognize that conflicting ideas of place might co-exist drives much contemporary Australian and Canadian theatre (McCallum vii-x; Filewod 56), 73 Justin Edward and others have followed the lead of Margot Northey, whose influential book The Haunted Wilderness (1976) looks specifically at place as a definitively Gothic element of Canadian fiction. Ken Gelder and Roslynn Haines have also documented an abundance of haunted places, unhomely homes, and unsettled geographies in the contemporary fiction and film of Australia. 74 In addition to McCallum’s notation on Christina and Ash, Veronica Kelly and others have also labeled the work of Louis Nowra as Gothic (Kelly, “Introduction” 20), a claim that is particularly well supported by his post-colonial allegories Inside The Island and The Golden Age, both of which prominently feature Gothic landscapes, among their other Gothic tropes. In the Canadian context, the prairie and the North both serve as Gothic landscapes and are more often discussed as such. One example of theatre criticism noting the use of setting as Gothic can be found in Wes Pearce’s

78 In part this oversight may stem from changes in the Gothic mode as applied to different forms, rather than from differences in the critical lenses applied to those forms.

Clearly contemporary plays, cinema, poetry and fiction can all offer up examples of landscapes that can be described as Gothic and read as postcolonial.75 Yet, landscapes are hard to stage, and changes in theatre technology, aesthetics, economics, and practices have resulted in a marked difference between the Gothic landscape as staged in 1800 with the

Gothic landscape staged two centuries later. Though Gothic drama was originally written for a small number of vast theatres technically and spatially equipped to stage waterfalls, ruined towers, intricately painted forests, fires, and parades on horseback, much of the contemporary theatre that now employs the Gothic takes place under radically different production aesthetics, budgets and realities.76 The theatre itself, as a social institution, like the postcolonial culture it engages, is in some respects more fractured and less homogenous than it was in the censor-controlled days of London’s Gothic stage, resulting in a larger number of small theatres competing for public funding and operating on much smaller budgets to stage work that often serves a smaller and/or niche audience. More traditional Gothic dramatic and melodramatic forms still exist in large scale productions for

Broadway, the West End (and their correlatives in Canada and Australia) such as Andrew

scholarship on Dan McDonald’s McGregor’s Hard Icecream and Gas, which features a frozen prairie and claustrophobic interiors. 75 Ken Gelder discusses Australian film in this regard (Gelder, Australian 121-122), and Justin Edwards draws regularly on examples from poetry, particularly that of Susanna Moodie (Edwards, Gothic Canada 27; 34-35; 44). 76 Paul Ranger’s book, ‘Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast’: Gothic Drama in The London Patent Theatres 1750-1820, provides one of the most extensive accounts of stage technology and scenography during the peak of Gothic drama, including several illustrations. His account speaks to some of the drawbacks and dangers involved in this sort of spectacle that obviously account for its reduced feasibility today—including the use of real fire, for example, the smoke from which made dialogue difficult to speak (Ranger 48).

79 Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of The Opera (1986), the Gothic plot of which was well served when I saw it at the Theatre Royal in Sydney in 1988 by the stage magic of a boat floating across the stage enshrouded in green mist, mysterious trapdoors, grand lighting and sound effects, and a haunted chandelier which swung out from beyond the proscenium over the audience. Such elaborate staging is hardly the norm in contemporary drama once one leaves the big theatres of Broadway and the West End behind. Nor is it particularly well suited to the more intimate and flexible spaces of theatres like Belvoir Street and Tarragon, which operate on much smaller budgets, and where the work of playwrights like Christian and Thompson has typically been produced.77

A different approach to staging place as Gothic space has been the relegation of the wild landscape to offstage, while simultaneously revealing the immediacy and threat of its presence, creating at the very edges of staged visibility a liminal and dangerous place with ambiguous borders. As Marvin Carlson notes, scant attention has historically been paid to offstage space with the exception in the last few decades of the space occupied by the audience (Carlson, “Space” 195-202). Carlson’s interest is primarily in the surroundings in which theatre events occur, but the deficit he notes also applies to offstage space as a dramaturgical construct. Studies like William Gruber’s Offstage Space, Narrative, and the

Theatre of the Imagination tend to focus on offstage space as an imaginary place where narrated events can be understood to have occurred or be occurring (Gruber 8-10).78 My interest here is in a particularly neglected area that I will call abject-offstage space, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as something that both fascinates and terrifies, and

77 Or, for that matter, of The Royal Court, where the work of Sarah Kane, discussed in the last chapter in this context, was typically produced. 78 An example of this kind of offstage space is the brook in which Ophelia drowns.

80 which “lies quite close, but cannot be assimilated,” having seemingly been “ejected beyond the scope of the possible…the thinkable” (Kristeva 1). The notion of abject-offstage space emphasizes the here-and-not-here, mine-and-not-mine liminality that is central to the

Gothic’s thrilling and disturbing effect and is rendered both by landscapes that contain unseen abject beings and more strikingly still, by landscapes that are themselves anthropomorphized as abject Others. Such an emphasis elaborates on both Tim

Fitzpatrick’s notion of “localized off” as an implied space contiguous to the visible onstage set which is an immediate but essentially unstaged part of the fictional world, and on

Andrew Sofer’s notion of dark matter as the “invisible dimension of theater that escapes visual detection even though its effects are felt everywhere in performance” (Sofer 3;

Fitzpatrick 58-62).79 The abject-offstage then, is spatial, as Fitzpatrick would have it, but also phenomenological, like dark matter.

Furthermore, as suggested by the Canadian and Australian postcolonial drama investigated here, the abject-offstage is also culturally contextualized by the location of the performance and the relationship of the theatre and its immediate surroundings to the landscape being treated as abject. Significantly for a consideration of the vast Gothic landscape, a conception of the offstage space as abject in this way disrupts binary distinctions between what is staged and what is not, and in so doing complicates Brian

Parker’s 1977 claim that the landscape of Canada’s frontier myth cannot be effectively staged, and Sherrill Grace’s compelling counter argument (2007) that it has been staged

79 For Sofer, dark matter is that which is both not there and not not there, or “whatever is materially unrepresented onstage but is un-ignorable” but is not necessarily (or even typically) spatial, being evoked instead through objects, like Macbeth’s dagger of the mind, or through characters, such as Godot (Sofer 9). It’s interesting that Macbeth, which I have suggested is a BW (Before Walpole) Gothic text, should provide such a very eloquent example of dark matter.

81 but that its staging is challenged by what an audience--and specifically an urban Toronto audience--might recognize as “North” (Grace, “Degrees” 127). While there are some climatic, geographic, and historical distinctions between the Australian “Bush” and the

Canadian “North” they both function as constructions that, when staged as abject-offstage landscapes, reflect and comment on dominant cultural anxieties about racial difference, violence, the process of settling, and survival.

An early example that serves as a useful archetype for this abject use of space is

Gwen Pharis Ringwood’s Still Stands The House (1939), the action of which plays out in the

Warren family’s civilized drawing room. In this Canadian play, Hester Warren locks her brother and sister-in-law outside to die in a blizzard in order to stop them from selling the unprofitable family farm. Hester, a spinster, is “much attached” and “never leaves the farm,” and is determined to keep it as it was in her father’s day (Ringwood 29). But her brother’s young wife, Ruth, whom the text implies is pregnant, feels isolated and afraid, and wants to build a new life closer to town. The visible interior of the farmhouse is surrounded by a hostile landscape, a fact made explicit through dialogue, but which also calls to be rendered by design elements, as the opening stage directions make clear in decidedly Gothic language: “The icy wind of a northern blizzard sweeps across the prairie…and howls insistently at the doors and windows…attempt[ing] to force an entrance…frost has covered the window in the rear wall with a wild and exotic design” (Ringwood 27) Nature here is represented as unnatural/supernatural/Other. The unfathomable landscape, present but invisible, like the monster under the bed, generates terror. And of course when Bruce

Warren and his wife move offstage at the play’s climax, the monster turns out to have real

82 power for all its unfathomable invisibility. We know but yet are left to imagine the Warren couple’s inevitable deaths, out there, somewhere, not here.

Still Stands The House is both Gothic and postcolonial in its use of a landscape that occupies implied, unassimilated space. The play’s anthropomorphized menacing prairie, deliberately abjected offstage and categorized as wild and exotic, though a little well-worn by now, nonetheless provides a useful precedent for staging the Gothic landscape. The implied wild exterior speaks both to the specific theatricality of a contemporary dramatic

Gothic mode as something that can be represented in smaller playing spaces and on smaller budgets, and to its application to postcolonial cultures. Certainly Ringwood’s play exemplifies what Sugars and Turcotte identify as an early response in Canadian Gothic literature to fetishize the unknown/other (Turcotte and Sugars xvii)—a tendency I suggest emerges in early Australian writing too.80 And yet the landscape’s function as an articulation of a returning colonial nightmare of thwarted progress and doomed settlement is complicated by the murder and erasure of Bruce and Ruth out on the prairie by Hester as she holds on to the patriarchal settler legacy of her father.81 Anne Nothof’s study of feminism and environmentalism in Canadian drama offers an astute summary of Still

Stands The House as “a stark portrait” of a woman who refuses to “surrender her patrimony” and is “consumed by [her] need to own or control the land” (Nothof 128).

While she doesn’t specifically call Still Stands The House a postcolonial play, Nothof’s

80 The frost’s fetishized categorization as wild and exotic resonates with racial tensions that postcolonial readings have unearthed in Gothic texts from Dracula, with its exotic Transylvanian invaders of London to The Scarlet Letter, with its abject and mysterious heroine, wandering exiled but strangely at home in the native-occupied forests of Salem (discussed in the next chapter). 81 Stage descriptions of old but faded furnishings and Hester’s unwillingness to replace curtains are indicative of Hester’s alignment with a colonial legacy, yet as a madwoman figure she is also paradoxically aligned with the forces outside.

83 characterization clearly points to the thematic preoccupation with colonial and patriarchal imperative that lies at the heart of the play’s social critique.

As Sugars and Turcotte note, the Gothic’s interest in the unresolved, the uneasy and the ambiguous suits postcolonial writing precisely because postcolonial histories are unresolved, their legacies are ongoing, and their narratives necessarily invoke the colonial past, “returning” to the site of trauma (Turcotte and Sugars ix-x; Gelder, “Australian” 121).

You can’t take the colonial out of postcolonial. By dismantling comfortable boundaries between outside/beyond/there, and what is inside/within/here, between me/us and you/them, Kristeva’s theory of abjection as applied to stage space illuminates not only how

Gothic space articulates psychological anxiety (Ruth’s fear that her house and therefore her self can’t withstand the winter, for example), but also how it articulates cultural anxieties about occupation, territory and identity. The hostility of the land indicates the landscape’s function as a returning colonial nightmare of thwarted progress toward agricultural production and thriving centers of settlement. Cox’s progression from inside to outside, from entrapment in antiquated systems to the dawning of a new age is thus interestingly dysfunctional here as the dream of prosperity offered by colonialism is critiqued by colonialism’s failures.

The unnerving spectral presence of offstage space is particularly fitting for not only

Canadian but also Australian drama, where the terrible sublimity of the land that won’t be colonized likewise stems in part from its sheer size, its harsh climate, and from the need for the settling population to live along the more livable, less arid and more accessible periphery—at that favorite Gothic site, the border. Diane Bessai’s observations about traditional prairie Gothic as a fictional mode might also usefully be applied to some

84 Australian drama. She writes: “the pattern is of life on the margin, most characteristically a harsh and imprisoning place, unhappily remote from some more desirable if vaguely identified centre” (Bessai 189). Problematically, of course, the Australian center is resistant to attempts to define it. As McCallum notes: “For the first invaders—convicts and their jailers huddled on the coast—there was at first nothing out there. The notorious ‘dead heart’ of the continent didn’t exist until a series of [white] narratives constructed it as a barren and empty landscape, waiting to be tamed and settled” (McCallum vii).82 The construction of the desert and the bush—“the outback”--through narrative, and the attempt to claim it and tame it through language, has a clear corollary in the prairie Hester and Ruth construct with dialogue as “different,” “almost frighten[ing],” and “a place you have to love…[in order] to make things grow” (Ringwood 28; 30; 32). Yet the prairie remains untamed and uncontained by the staged liminality of place in Still Stands The House.

Australian playwright Beatrix Christian’s play, The Governor’s Family, first produced at Belvoir Street in 1997 under the direction of Neil Armfield, takes up this representation of unfathomable, ungovernable landscape as a tool for critiquing colonialism more overtly in a play that is very evocatively Gothic. Richly visual, daringly imaginative, highly political, and unabashed in its efforts to grapple with Aboriginal relations in the context of a play ostensibly about a white family, written by a white and female writer, it is perhaps unusual in the landscape of Australian theatre. John McCallum, who rightly laments the play’s lack of attention (in either subsequent production or criticism), suggests that though more plays were being done by women in the nineties than previously, they did not generally coalesce as a movement and so playwrights have garnered less attention from a theatre

82 See also Roslynn Haynes, 76-78

85 culture that was more prolific, but disparate, and increasingly drawn to other forms of theatre-making (McCallum 329). It is, however worth noting that Hilary Bell’s play Fortune

(1993), which is about exploitation and racism in the nineteenth-century Australian Gold

Rush, and which McCallum aptly describes as a “savage revisiting of the Colonial legend” premiered a few years earlier, and Kathryn Ash’s decidedly Gothic family drama Flutter

(2004) premiered a few years later (McCallum 328), making The Governor’s Family unusual but not entirely alone.83 Nonetheless, The Governor’s Family, which features doppelgangers, sexual deviance and a host of other recognizably Gothic tropes, adopts a more deliberately

Gothic approach than either Fortune or Flutter in order to address its more deliberately postcolonial subject.

The Governor’s Family is set in “a fire blasted bush clearing where nothing will grow.

A strange mirage—a nineteenth century family, dressed in the architectural armor of colonial history…perform their rituals. In other words: NSW 1897, Government House”

(Christian, Governor 6). The plot traces the disintegration of the Governor’s already dysfunctional family--a term ironically extended to the colony as well as his wife and children84--when he takes in a young Aboriginal rape-victim, Frances. The Governor is pressured by a young newspaper printer, Tammey Lee, to request mercy for the white convict-descended rapists, some of whom are his brothers, but the Governor’s family

83 Fortune is more postcolonial than Gothic, though it definitely has its Gothic moments with Chang, an eleven foot tall Chinese boy, who is repeatedly referred to as monster, and a cut-throat society of exhibition, spectacle, violence and exploitation. Flutter is more domestic Gothic than overtly postcolonial, focusing on an isolated family, but both these plays might be considered kin for Christian’s feminist postcolonial Gothic masterpiece. 84 Christian’s title points to her very deliberate exploration of the relationship between family and the colonial/racist structures of society in exactly the way that Frantz Fanon discusses it in Black Skin, White Masks, where he writes” “The white family is the guardian of a certain structure…[it] is the educating and training ground for entry into society” (Fanon, Black 127).

86 thinks they should hang. Complicating racial and political tensions is a strong undercurrent of incest and madness running through the family. The Governor’s wife, Helena, reputedly of inbred aristocratic stock, is a miserable recluse who fears and resents Frances and indeed everything about Australia. The Governor’s twin children are, ironically, ungovernable; Gerald is a laudanum addict, and Lara is a revolutionary who goes about in boy’s clothes and orchestrates the Governor’s hanging of the rapists by burning the Queen’s dispatch advising clemency. Frances, who is aligned with the world beyond the colonial garden, is, however, the Governor’s illegitimate daughter (the result of the Governor’s visits to a brothel on The Dorrigo’s Road). An uncanny figure in the world of the play, her hair is shockingly white, like that of her half siblings, and she is similarly ungovernable, donning the mannerisms, clothing and accessories of the family in order to perform colonization rather than submitting to it.

The landscape that surrounds Government House is perceived by those in power to be a moral wilderness, the borders of which are marked not by scene design, as they are in

Still Stands The House, but by the play’s traffic in the theatrical space. The wild landscape is a place where characters (with the exception of Helena) constantly go and do things beyond the watchful eye of colonial authority, and the spectator (with whom colonial authority is thus somewhat uncomfortably aligned). When it premiered at Belvoir Street, the play used thrust staging with very little set. The actors made multiple entrances and exits through the voms, where the stage lighting and spectator sightlines intersect with the location of the audience, making the play’s borders and the audience’s relationships to them somewhat ambiguous.

87 Significantly, it is the white characters that most easily slip across the play’s spatial-- and therefore moral--borders. Frances may enter the house, but she does so only under the family’s instruction and is presented as out of place. Lara, on the other hand, comes and goes more or less as she pleases, although importantly her doing so is considered inappropriate behavior, something she only gets away with because of class. Gerald has absolute freedom, though he doesn’t need to use it, getting his drugs and his affection at home from his mother. Race, class and gender, then, determine the crossing of the play’s spatial borders. Lara and Frances might both be oppressed colonial subjects, as well as sisters in the more literal sense, but the play’s borders and traffic draw attention to the class differences afforded them based on race. Lara’s illicit and rebellious going out to where Frances comes from draws attention to the racially informed Colonial constructions of feminine behavior that both women reject. As Helen Gilbert has noted in her study of feminist postcolonial drama:

When white women evaded the imperial ‘duties’ or refused to comply with the normative gender conventions of their era, this frequently became the moment at which Aboriginality was invoked, whether as a site of gender solidarity or a yardstick for measuring the colonial woman’s recalcitrance” (Gilbert 147).

The relationship between Lara and Frances doesn’t offer much in the way of gender solidarity, thus avoiding the representation of a feminist sisterhood that belies the significance of race, but Lara’s non-normative refusal to wear dresses or watch her manners is underscored spatially with exits and absences that bring ironic comment to the perception that Lara might behave “like a native” (Christian, Governor 56). As the plot progresses toward the loss of Colonial authority and the disintegration of order (as Lara’s recalcitrance and her acceptance of Frances grow), the traffic across the play’s spatial

88 borders increases. Scenes become shorter and the rapid comings and goings of the characters between the supposedly civilized interior and the amoral wilderness signal a disintegration of borders between races, genders, generations, and class structures that takes up Cox’s sense of revolutionary rhythms being articulated by the movement from built interiors to open space.

In production at Belvoir Street, the spectator was positioned by the three quarter staging to be within the burnt clearing in which the play is set, and which is, from the outset, tangible as a problematically and increasingly porous and damaged membrane between the wilderness of the bush and the supposed civility of the house. It is a liminal space where, as described, nothing seems to grow. In this regard the burnt clearing evokes

Frantz Fanon’s tellingly spatial metaphor for the colonized Black subject’s psyche under colonialism. The “zone of nonbeing” is “an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential” (Fanon, Black xii). For Fanon, the zone of nonbeing is a manifestation of the psyche that the Black colonized subject must traverse, a place that must be devoid of the colonially constructed markers of identity—which in this context are embodied by the Australian Bush and Government House—in order to effect change.

The play’s dominant point of view, however, is white, and so the absence of scene design to articulate the clearing itself also allows it to dominate the play as a spectral presence that signifies a failure of the colonial imperative to erase or contain, to make nice, and to prevent, in the Governor’s words, a reemergence of “the savage under the skin”

(Christian, Governor 41). Edward Said’s observation that “almost all colonial schemes begin with an assumption of native backwardness and general inadequacy to be independent,

‘equal,’ and fit” is brought to ironic prominence in the Governor’s attitude toward his

89 colony as “treasured children” who must be educated and disciplined when they “cannot discipline themselves,” even as his paternal analogy is complicated by the play’s recognition of both Aboriginal and convict populations as oppressed colonial subjects

(Christian, Governor 41; Said 1888). The Governor’s words are amplified by the play’s use of setting and the constant almost-presence of a Gothic landscape that fails to transform into an English garden. Gerald, the Governor’s son, tells his mother, Helena:

“GERALD: They’ve finished clearing. You can see as far as the big bay from the garden. From the verandah. HELENA: Even after they’ve cut down every tree it will stay a wilderness. GERALD: Are you frightened of going outside? Lara says so” (Christian, Governor 25).

Helena is indeed frightened; the land is a primitive and hostile otherness that she can never call home, a “terrible place” where they are all “adrift,” where “it is not safe to leave the house” (Christian, Governor, 125). And of course, the land in this play is most closely linked to Frances, the wild child, who comes from out there, somewhere on The

Dorrigo’s Road.

Though her analysis problematically fails almost entirely to take race into account,

Anne Williams complicates readings of female Gothic that see the iconic subterranean chamber as the epitome of feminized space, by arguing that it is the Gothic exterior, not the

Gothic interior, which is gendered female. She writes: “aspects of nature characteristically associated with Gothic…signify the unruly female principle” (A. Williams 86). Drawing on

Freud, Williams’s interest is primarily in the terror-evoking mother of “mother” nature, but the Gothic landscape as an articulation of the fearful female is useful for both psychosexual and socio-political readings, and is an important trope for the postcolonial context.

90 Kulperger’s argument for a postcolonial feminist Gothic suggests that salience of the

Gothic to both feminism and postcolonialism is realized spatially, in part because the script of colonial rationalism typically frames both the female body and the colonizable world as

“sublime and dangerous, empty and wild” (Kulperger 111). This is particularly evident in the way landscape is rendered in The Governor’s Family. The metaphorical treatment that aligns the black or Aboriginal female body with the Gothic landscape both takes advantage of and satirizes a tendency that scholars have noted in early Australian writing to describe that same landscape in Gothic terms as a vast, silent void that was paradoxically stifling

(Haynes 79). For Gerald, who is of all the characters the most fascinated with Frances, the terror of the vast wilderness beyond the edge of the colony, and all it stands for, holds a destructive and exotic allure: “Out past the clearing, everything proliferates itself. Watching us. Waiting. For us to sail away again. It’s been here forever. We’ll never get the better of it.

That’s what I love. If you were to cross those hills, you’d be swallowed up. Not even a tiny bone would be hiccupped back out” (Christian, Governor 81).

Gilbert and Tompkins noted in 1996 that “until quite recently, many post-colonial plays devised by whites fell into th[e] representational trap [of] depicting sentimentalized or exoticized versions of racial difference” (Gilbert and Tompkins 207). So too these versions often feminize and infantilize the racial other. The Governor’s Family, however, occupies a more complex position in this regard. The representational trap of exoticism, feminization and infantilization is presented not authorially but internally through Gerald and the Governor. As members of the colonizing class, the Governor and his son articulate what Frantz Fanon describes in The Wretched of The Earth (1963) as a colonial construction of native women functioning as space, a part of the wild land on/over which

91 the colony presides. Fanon writes: “In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. The

Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French” (Fanon, Wretched 250).

However, while Fanon’s analysis doesn’t push particularly hard on the question of gender, it is central to Christian’s exposition of fetish as a function of the gendered discourse of colonialism. Gerald’s fascination with Frances is apparent in the way he speaks about the land with which she is aligned and the Governor’s infantilization and fetishization of

Frances resonates with his descriptions of his colony as wild and childlike, and his “delight” in taming an “unspoiled place” (Christian, Governor 23).85 Land is thus yoked to the female body, but although the men’s language may fetishize Frances through heightened geographical imagery, the play’s women carefully counter those constructions. Helena’s terror of the landscape is a fear of the racial Other, to be sure, but it holds no exotic allure for her and is neither overtly gendered or infantilized, Lara’s attitude to both Frances and the land is largely one of unsentimental indifference. Frances, as the embodiment of place, might be the “dramatic and political centre” of the play, around whom “the other characters are all moving “ as one of the play’s very few reviews notes (Myers 1997), but variations in the construction of her centrality are most pointedly grouped along gender lines. Certainly the fact that it is the male characters who use the Gothic landscape to fetishize the indigenous female draws attention to such representations as colonial and specifically patriarchal constructs.

85 The connection between land and the sexual female body is complicated by the play’s backstory: that the Governor used to play with (and ultimately molest) his naked daughter Lara on an unspoiled beach while the natives looked on.

92 By anthropomorphizing the abject-offstage Gothic landscape, Christian’s postcolonial/colonial drama brings uncanny embodiment to the notion of Terra Nullis, a term that translates literally as “nobody’s land” and was the basis of England’s legal claims to Australia as a place uninhabited by a recognizable organized society.86 Christian’s ironically staged version of Terra Nullis as a place in which the white explorer can be rendered nobody, “swallowed up” in Gerald’s words, and erased as if never there, activates the term “dark” in Sofer’s concept of dark matter and reflects the significant influence of postcolonial ideas outside the academy in the public sphere (Christian, Governor 81). While

Sofer makes little mention of the way race might function as the elephant in the room in his concept of dark matter, here the dark matter of the play emerges very clearly in the abject- offstage landscape, which becomes conflated with the black bodies that occupy it and both there, and not there at the same time. In this way the black-body as abject-offstage landscape brings striking theatrical resonance to the debates around Terra Nullis and

Aboriginal land rights that dominated Australian politics during the Mabo V Queensland case in the eighties and nineties, and which occupied a significant place in the popular consciousness when this play was written and first produced.

86 Questions of native title, land ownership, and occupancy have dominated Australian politics for much of the twentieth century. The landmark and highly visible case of Mabo V Queensland, which played out in the Australian courts for most of the eighties, challenged Terra Nullis as a justification for white settlement. Prime Minister Paul Keating’s famous Redfern speech (1992), in which he publicly acknowledges (and calls for all Australians to acknowledge) the wrongs done to Aboriginal people by European settlers, mentions Mabo as a significant historical moment and as a chance for change. The speech, and the Mabo case, are part of the climate in which Christian’s play revisits Australian history, and in which the question of Aboriginal land rights and the treatment of Aboriginal people occupied a place in the popular consciousness, as is indicated by its presence as a subject of mainstream fiction, film and music by both Aboriginal artists like Yothu Yindi, for example “Treaty” (1991), and by white artists, such as Midnight Oil, for example “Dead Heart” (1986) and “Beds are Burning” (1987).

93 The image of land-as-body and the construction of land as a no man’s land to be entered and claimed is of course dramaturgically underscored by the fact that the crimes committed against Frances, out there in the abject-offstage, include rape. As Kulperger notes, the body of the indigenous woman “like the land itself, is invariably seen [in the

Colonial imperative] as…requiring the taming and penetrating effects of masculanist imperialism” (Kulperger 111) That taming also involves exploitation, something that postcolonial drama has repeatedly used the trope of rape to expose:

Rape is a prominent signifier in a number of [postcolonial] plays, particularly in countries where settler’s annexation of so-called ‘unoccupied territories’ disrupted not only the culture but also the livelihoods of indigenous peoples. Both native and non-native dramatists have featured inter-racial rape as an analogue for the colonizer’s violation of the land, and also for related forms of economic and political exploitation” (Gilbert and Tompkins 213).87

Certainly, Frances’s rape is figured this way as a crime inflicted by white invaders, though the archetype of the Colonial patriarch as rapist is complicated by the fact that Frances’s attackers are the descendents of Irish convicts, not English citizens, and thus occupy a somewhat ambiguous position in the socio-political power structure of the colony--one in which to be white does not necessarily mean to be unoppressed.88 Nonetheless, those in direct power exploit Frances and almost everyone uses her and her identity as a rape victim for their own ends. For the Governor it is a chance to exercise his legal powers and

87 One of the earliest examples of this is Katherine Pritchard’s Brumby Innes (1927), in which the titular character, a white sheep station rancher, rapes an Aboriginal woman and then marries a white woman who becomes trapped with the Aboriginal woman in the interior of his small house, surrounded by outback. The play certainly has its Gothic moments, and is interesting in that it precedes a lot of consciously postcolonial writing. Like some Gothic plays during the 1800s, it was considered too shocking to stage when it was first written. 88 The ambiguous status of the white invader who is also oppressed because he or she is a convict is a feature of the Australian postcolonial context that, while not unique, is unusual, and is particularly inviting for Gothic narratives, which are invested in ambiguous identities and might be thought of as addressing the anxiety generated by rebels-turned-opressors during the Reign of Terror.

94 for his children it’s a chance to manipulate their father. Helena, who has Frances thrust upon her, appropriates her as a servant, though of course she is not a very satisfactory one.89 The dramaturgical significance of rape as the event that organizes the plot serves strikingly to link the play’s cultural critique of Colonial land-grabbing and the exploitation of human resources to the resonant Gothic metaphor of the abject landscape that won’t submit to representation and cannot be fully rendered into the world of the play.

The violation of Frances’s body ostensibly destabilizes the sanctity of the boundaries between the abject-offstage and the domestic civility of Government House as it results in Frances’s being brought inside. But of course Government House is already far from the civilized haven it is supposed to be, as the perverse transgressions of its occupants—the laudanum abuse, sodomy, incest, cross-dressing, social rebellion and drunkenness--attest.90 A dream sequence near the end of the play further exemplifies the ways in which the play’s spatial borders are dangerously unstable, as things cross from inside to outside, and outside to inside:

Government House. The Feast Table. FRANCES, in her finery, sits at the head of the table. Lara takes the silver covers off the platters on the Feast Table. A universe of decay – soft turquoise mould, deliquescence, surly bone, a fine patina of maggots. GERALD enters. We hear the exquisite sound of a boy soprano singing the prayer that

89 Frances’s position in the house as a servant places her in the context of white convict women who were “assigned” as an alternative to incarceration and put into the service of freed men and settlers. This social position is a complicated one in early Australian colonial history and as Kay Daniels notes in Convict Women, some saw assignment as little better than slavery (Daniels 71). The Governor’s protection of Frances by bringing her into Government House as a servant is thus ironic. She is socially elevated but remains vulnerable to the kind of exploitation that assigned women were subjected to, including sexual exploitation and separation from family (Daniels 102). 90 The motif of corruption inside the domestic space is important to the Gothic, where the home is often rendered as a site for both real and imagined threat and for sexual fantasy. As Burroughs points out, the equation of sexuality with domesticity has problematic resonances on a number of levels, including incest as a sexual fantasy that to some extent legitimized sexual initiation, keeping “the erotic within the home” (Burroughs, Erotics 120-121). Certainly Helena’s refusal to go outside because she imagines perversity and danger out there is juxtaposed with representations of the house as a place where fantasy, degradation, and sexual misconduct are contained.

95 TAMMEY LEE’s brother prays on the scaffold. ‘Sweet Jesus is Holding My Hand’ (Christian Governor 106).

Here, the home is rendered unhomely through the domestic space’s inability to keep corruption out. The decaying dead things are inevitable products of the external, natural world, and ones that are emblematic of the abject, making manifest Kristeva’s claim that

“excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death (Kristeva 71). Both Tammy Lee’s lawless, dying brother and the meat prepared for the table come from out there, but are rendered eerie and uncanny having crossed the threshold.

While this moment arguably stages an anxiety that danger and corruption are already inside—a notion familiar from the heroine’s terror of the patriarch in the castle in many a classic Gothic novel91—it also stages a critique of the colonial imperative to appropriate and assimilate. In Edward Said’s reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park he notes a pattern of “the outside becoming the inside by use,” which he sees as indicative of the importance of spatial representation to the imperialist project as it is articulated in literature. For Said, such spatial transgressions speak to a dependence of the smaller, domestic space, on outside sources—a dependence that justifies the imperial imperative for expansion and colonization (Said 1899). This movement from outside to inside is reworked with ironic comment in The Governor’s Family. Helena and the Governor might hope that things (and people) coming in from outside will become suited to the inside through use, but the colonial logic that underlies the desire to domesticate Frances and all she stands for is satirized here by the bounty of food from outside that lies rotting on the

91 See A. Williams 38-48 for an analysis of Bluebeard’s house as archetypal in this regard.

96 table, and the sound of a convict rapist’s dying prayer transformed as cultured, choral music. The inherent perversion of the colonial civilizing project and its failure to tame and contain that which is associated with the abject wilderness and “make things fit” is well- served by the uncanny and decidedly Gothic stage imagery in this moment of death, ruin, sublimity, and excess.

The play’s unsettled, and unsettlable abject-offstage spaces are further complicated by one other consideration of space worthy of mentioning here. Marvin Carlson’s assertion that the physical and cultural location of theatre spaces can contribute to our understanding of the theatre events that take place in them has some relevance for the abject-offstage as a dramaturgical idea (Carlson 207). In the Australian postcolonial context, this relationship between the location of the theatre and the fictional location of the play results in what Joanne Tompkins refers to as the contested space of Australian theatre: a theatricalized and polytopic landscape, the many layers of which refuse mimetic representation even as they insist on an “awareness of what lies beyond the theatre’s site”

(Tompkins 4). Tompkins is particularly interested in mapping a contested or unsettled space that takes up notions of multiplicity explored in Una Chaudhuri’s significant book

Staging Space: The Geography of Modern Drama. Tompkins draws particularly on

Chaudhuri’s notion of geopathology, as a formal and thematic preoccupation with place as problem in modern drama that results from the ways in which place is used in media and theatre to construct and assert identity (Chaudhuri 55-90).92

Certainly the abject-offstage of the Australian bush in The Governor’s Family is both evocatively Gothic and monstrously fantastical for the play’s white inhabitants, though the

92 Though it has some application here, the primary focus of Chaudhuri’s book is American culture and theatre.

97 same space registers differently for the play’s most elusive character, Frances. While walking outside the house at the edge of the clearing, Frances offers Gerald some fruit she finds. It is, to her, ripe, sweet and perfect. To Gerald, though, the seeds inside it look like worms and it is already rotting, and “pongs like old socks” (Christian, Governor 114). Their argument over the fruit stages place-as-problem by means of a conflict that is spatially coded as a clash between the house and the bush, between the natural world (fruit) and the domestic world that has been built upon it (socks), and--in a subversion of the Colonial perspective--between future (seeds) and past (worms). Thus the abject-offstage landscape from which the fruit comes in this moment is seen from Frances’s perspective, reinforcing its very abjectness to be a construction. While the play presents a colonially asserted version of place that deems the landscape as wild, it also uses Frances and the non-mimetic representation of place to draw attention to this construction as a construction, effectively staging Chaudhuri’s claim that “the construction of cultural otherness is also a mapping of the world” (Chaudhuri 3). The Governor’s map has no relevance for Frances; for her it is

Gerald who is the foreign specimen “out of a bird book. A golden crest of a cockadoodle”

(Christian, Governor 115).

The abject-offstage landscape, then, is a polytopic space that denies a singular, fixed identity--a multiplicity that serves its function as both an “unreal” fantastical space and a politically and geographically “real” space. The spectator, sitting in a Sydney theatre, with the bay on one side, and the hills on the other is therefore located at the problematic intersection of the abject-offstage with both the onstage interior world, and the geographical world beyond the theatre’s walls. That the spectator is implicated in the socio-politically contextual spaces as well as the constructed fictional spaces of the play is

98 made clear in the play’s closing moments, which render the audience part of the colonial history that the play stages:

FRANCES: Ghosts. All round us now. TAMMEY: Only the insatiable smoke strains at its moorings, eager to set sail for the grand new century. The actors look into the future – at us. GERALD: We are alone. LARA: We are alone. (Christian, Governor, 130).

Ending in a moment of revolution that leaves the anti-establishment children of the colony standing in an open space and pondering their uncertain future, The Governor’s Family’s

Gothic roots are obvious in its use of settings, plot structures and spatial metaphors to engage the postcolonial moment.

II -- Bloody Chambers And Live Burial: Staging The Gothic Interior

If wild landscapes serve as one of the most recognizably Gothic articulations of space, the claustrophobic interior, be it a locked chamber, a subterranean passage, or a coffin, is certainly its counter. Abomolique’s bloody chamber of closeted domestic violence in Blue-

Beard is perhaps the most ghastly and striking claustrophobic interior on the early Gothic stage, but other examples abound. In Joanna Baillie’s Orra (1812), the heroine is deliberately driven mad by being locked in a room, and in Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest,

(1816) a parade of characters is concealed in the play’s titular object--which also serves as a trapdoor to a secret passage for escaping banditi. In these plays and others, interior spaces exemplify the Gothic’s (often feminist) preoccupations with the stifling effects of the domestic world, struggles with coming to terms with intimate sexual and familial identities,

99 and the motifs of displacement, entrapment, and violent escape that marked the socio- political world of the British Empire during a period of local, nearby, and colonial unrest.93

Contemporary examples, which, as noted, are typically staged in smaller spaces than were their predecessors, are similarly abundant, and in a broad geographical context. One significant effect of the vast and threatening abject-offstage landscape, which eliminates in contemporary drama the need to stage expensive and expansive wild exteriors—whether it be the Canadian North, the prairie, or the Australian Bush—is that it serves to frame the onstage space as a place under pressure; a claustrophobic place where, in the words of

Hester Warren’s hapless sister-in-law in Ringwood’s Still Stands The House: “the four walls

[can] close in on you, bury you.” (Ringwood 38) The contemporary Gothic offers many examples of the dramatic space functioning this way—so many in fact that it is worth pointing out several to indicate both the prevalence and the range of this recurring motif across a variety of geographical and cultural contexts. In addition to the two plays to be discussed here, Connie Gault’s Sky (1989) and Beatrix Christian’s Blue Murder (1994), we might also think of Canadian Dan MacDonald’s MacGregor’s Hard Icecream and Gas (2007), set in an unhomely home in an isolated, snow-bound town. The action of the play moves from secret room to secret room; the house is comprised of small chambers including a mysterious parlor behind a closed door, a basement, and an attic that contains Dad

McGregor’s coffin, another claustrophobic interior itself awaiting burial when the ground

93 As noted, during the period of 1765-1810 people were deported to Australia and there was unrest in the American New World, in Ireland and in others of the British colonies. With the French Revolution and then rise of Napoleon just across the water, a series of unpopular prime ministers (particularly Pitt the Elder) and a mad king (George III, 1760-1820), one can well imagine people feeling surrounded by disquiet and somewhat uncertain about the possibility of national violence.

100 thaws.94 Or we might think of the confined interior of a small hospital room at the beginning of Judith Thompson’s Habitat (2001), in which a mother and a daughter headed for a new foster care facility are trapped at the edge of life and death, past and future. Or similarly, Joss, the young unsupported mother of Alma de Groen’s The Joss Adams Show

(1970) for whom the one-bedroom flat where she is trapped with her new baby is a place where “the walls begin to close in and the sound gets louder; you don’t know what it’s like in that room when it cries” (de Groen 209). The confined hotel room of British playwright

Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), the subject of the final chapter, also serves as a site of rape and entrapment from which there is no safe way out, surrounded as it is by an indeterminable global warzone. Another self-consciously postcolonial example is Louis

Nowra’s Inside The Island (1981), the title of which speaks to the isolation of a group of settlers who go mad and, trapped together, slaughter each other when they are affected by contaminated wheat. Surrounded by wild exteriors, these plays all stage the Gothic interior as a site for live burial and unrestful entrapment that revisits early Gothic preoccupations and reframes them in the context of a postcolonial world in which ideas of home are problematized by the struggle for identity and survival in a hostile place. The contemporary Gothic interior is shaped by the legacies of bloodshed and displacement and by the high stakes of family and reproduction that accompany colonial conflict, settlement, and exploitation.

For Eve Sedgwick, the recurring motif of live burial is evident in the way formal and thematic elements as well as images are spatially coded in Gothic literature, resulting in a

94 In McGregor’s Hard Icecream and Gas, the faltering town surrounded by frozen prairie, loved and feared by the McGregor family, not only profoundly drives the play but is also what makes it both Canadian and Gothic, as Wes Pearce rightly points out (Pearce 167-168).

101 plethora of stories within stories, coffins, chests inside chambers (which also frequently contain secrets, or dangerous figures, as in The Old Oak Chest), and dreams that seem to continue after waking and cannot be fully distinguished from external reality (Sedgwick

28). The site of live burial, which is often “equated with rather than differentiated from its surrounding space,” creates ambiguity and doubleness, and “functions to undermine the sense of inside and outside, the centerdness of the ‘self’” (Sedgwick 24-27). Claire Kahane, as noted previously, locates live burial particularly in what she sees as the female Gothic’s primary preoccupation with a crisis of separation from the inescapable figure of the mother whose body serves as both a habitat and a prison (Kahane 337). Setting aside for a moment the issue that such readings can tend to be somewhat essentialist, if we follow this thinking to its logical conclusion, we can see that pregnancy serves as a potent spatial metaphor for female entrapment and live burial in the Gothic, and one which may have particular as well as general application.

This is clear in Canadian dramatist Connie Gault’s Sky, a play in which pregnancy is articulated not only by the actor’s body, but also by the play’s setting to suggest the entrapment of not just pregnant women, but of women in the social context of remote and rural Canada—a recurring location for Gault.95 This evocatively Gothic device thus conflates the key postcolonial concerns of space and body for feminist purpose. In this play,

Blanche, who has been repeatedly raped and sexually exploited by her father (or so it is implied) in their insular and isolated town on the Canadian frontier, is married off to

Jasper, a naïve young man, after she becomes pregnant. In an attempt to ward off any sexual interest on his part, she appeals to Jasper’s alignment with the ideology of colonial

95 In Gault’s fiction in particular, place also looms large and indeed she has said that across forms she tends to start with “characters in a particular setting” (IFOA.org, Five Questions, June 10 2015).

102 missionary imperatives by telling him the baby is God’s, and so he can’t get her dirty. In a scene that exemplifies entrapment and lends itself well to a Sedgwickian reading of the nightmare as a manifestation of the spatial convention of live burial, Blanche finally leaves

Jasper’s tiny house and crosses the stage to stand by the arch that marks the border of the small yard and “leads nowhere” (Gault 11). It is a snowy night, shortly before her due date, and shortly before it becomes clear that the baby has recently died inside her:

BLANCHE: I came out here in my dream with these heavy white wings hanging on my shoulders, dragging my shoulders down and back so it was hard to walk. They were real big wings. […] BLANCHE: And I came over to this arch and looked out. JASPER: What did you see? BLANCHE: Nothing. But I had this feeling I had to leave. JASPER: What? BLANCHE: I just had this feeling that I was supposed to walk through here and…and I don’t know what after that. Just keep walking, I guess. JASPER: Where? BLANCHE: I don’t know. Don’t matter anyhow, because I couldn’t get through. The wings were in the way. I got stuck. I got stuck right here in the middle of the arch and I couldn’t get out and I couldn’t get back either. (Silence) JASPER: What did you do? BLANCHE: Woke up. (pause). Do you truly believe there is anything at all out there? JASPER: There’s stars. BLANCHE: Not them. In the world I mean. Cities. Places where people…Sometimes I get this scary feeling I’m all there is. (Gault 61)

Blanche’s pregnant body is never able to move through the arch at the edge of the yard, and so just as she can never have her baby, she is denied a birth of her own. Until this moment Blanche has primarily been positioned in the doorway or looking out of the one kitchen window and her movement across the stage is largely restricted to the “strip of bright new flowered linoleum running between the door of the house and the stove” (Gault

11). The domestic setting is very much a site of live burial for Blanche, a fact that should be

103 made obvious in production by her limited movement within the theatrical space. The set called for by Gault seems deliberately reminiscent of short fiction writer Alice Munro’s memorable image of the Gothicized domestic interior as a “cave paved with kitchen linoleum” (Munro quoted in Howells 105).96 Set is important to the realization of Blanche’s trauma, as the prairie and the claustrophobic cottage function as extensions of her physical and mental state: her entrapment, her fear there is nothing out there, and her desire to lose herself in that frightening nothingness.

Anne Nothof notes that reviews of the original production took issue with the way the world of the play was realized, saying the house was “unnecessarily capacious” and

“took up most of the stage,” a point that emphasizes just how significant the theatrical space is to rendering the play’s meaning and mood (Marian Endicott quoted in Nothof,

136).97 To stage Blanche in a capacious house (in a not overly large theatre) not only diminishes the vastness of the world beyond the claustrophobic interior, and the claustrophobia of the domestic sphere itself, but it also limits opportunities to show her trapped by her pregnancy as her large belly becomes all the more significant, unavoidable and awkward in a cramped space.98 When the play was revived in Toronto at the Tarragon

96 There is a striking resemblance between Blanche’s house and Canadian short fiction icon Alice Munro’s image of the domestic in her 1982 collection Lives of Girls and Women, cited here as exemplifying Canadian Gothic (Howells, 105). Like Gault’s play, Munro’s stories, which are often cited as examples of the Gothic, are heavily shaped by place, which is for Munro, as for Gault, a specifically Canadian and “crucial” element of the work (Howells, 105). This similarity says less about any direct influence of Munro on Gault (though Munro is a very well-known and influential writer, and Gault is certainly no stranger to Canadian fiction) than it does on the strong sense of place that repeatedly emerges as a Gothic element in Canadian writing, and its connection to the lives of women, particularly in remote areas. 97 I have been unable to locate a copy of the original source. Nothof lists it as: “Saskatchewan: SKY” Theatrum, April/May 1989: 44. 98 Sky premiered at the Twenty-fifth Street Theatre Centre, Saskatoon, in its 144 seat warehouse theatre and was then transferred to the slightly larger Theatre Network in Edmonton. Kathryn Ash’s play Flutter (2004), which stages a cramped and isolated domestic interior in far North

104 Extra Space in 1995, it was staged in the round, with the bed, kitchen sink and wood stove all visible from all sides, making Blanche effectively trapped by the audience.99

Domestic violence is, as Kulperger notes, a recurrent theme in the postcolonial feminist Gothic, which seeks to link violence in the home to the patriarchal and colonial structures that engender that violence on a socio-political level (Kulperger 116). It is thus important that Blanche’s pregnancy serves as a constant visible reminder of her status as a victim of patriarchal abuse, trapped and contained by the stifling theatrical space and by a culture that yokes notions of territory to the domestic and reproductive function of women’s bodies. While Chaudhuri’s claim that “the construction of cultural otherness is also a mapping of the world” is concerned with how the racial Other is constructed, this notion seems applicable also to the representation of gendered, white bodies (Chaudhuri

3). Blanche’s reaction to her patriarchally imposed pregnancy is one of deep despair and isolation, but for Jasper the construction of Blanche as mother, and one who literally embodies the colonial imperative to bring the civilizing force of Christianity to the frontier, is going to “make the world a different place” and “put Linton on the map” (Gault 77; 42).

The prevalence of dysfunctional pregnancy within stifling and dangerous domestic worlds is notable across several of the plays discussed in this chapter, suggesting it to be a recurring theme in the postcolonial feminist Gothic. Ruth Warren’s pregnancy in Still

Stands The House serves as a catalyst for her desire to move to what she sees as the comparative safety of town, and in Blue Murder Eve, the heroine, is warned that she risks

Queensland, also specifies “the roof of the house is visible and the big sky beyond it” (Ash 16) suggesting both a similarity between prairie and bush Gothic, but also the importance of a design that honors the proportions between inside and outside spaces in this kind of Gothic landscape. This play also premiered in a small theatre, the JUTE theatre, in Cairns. 99 H. J. Kirchhoff’s review of this production approved of the set’s domestic details and the use of the round, though nothing is said about the arch. (Kirchhoff 3/2/95).

105 being murdered by her husband if she becomes pregnant. One might argue, too, that the specter of pregnancy gone wrong casts a stifling net over Helena in The Governor’s Family.

Like Blanche, Helena almost never ventures beyond the domestic space, remaining inside to mourn one dead child and infantilize another grown one. So, too, Alma de Groen’s Joss, the titular figure in her gripping and bizarre short play about infanticide, The Joss Adams

Show (1970) appears as a pregnant woman and a young nursing mother very much trapped in and by her body, something reinforced by the play’s spatial structure. Joss is only allowed to leave the stage twice and both times is instantly returned, surrounded by the physical presence of other bodies—her doctor, her abusive and negligent husband, a media interviewer—who overpower her. One can imagine that the play’s first Australian audience, sitting close together in a small theatre in an old pram factory, would have found the play in production to be particularly striking. For de Groen, the play “is about claustrophobia, being trapped and not being able to make yourself understood when you’re in pain” (de Groen quoted in J. Palmer 166). These trapped pregnant bodies certainly signify a profound anxiety about female sexuality, vulnerability, and maternal identity, and lend themselves well to analytical approaches that deploy psychoanalysis as a means to unpack the spatially coded personal traumas that for Moers are foundational to the Female

Gothic (Moers 147-149).

However, as noted, much of the Gothic’s ambiguous complexity stems from its specific ability to sustain multiple readings simultaneously, and the Gothic stage is, from its inception onward, a place that allows for both personal and socio-political anxieties to be

106 articulated spatially.100 In the postcolonial context, pregnancy articulates standard colonial anxieties about hybridity and racial purity, as Helena’s observation in The Governor’s

Family that “becoming white can only happen with time…and judicious breeding” exemplifies (Christian, Governor 47). Here, Christian’s treatment of reproduction--in the form of illegitimate mixed-race Frances, and in the form of Helena’s own abnormal and dead child—satirizes the Australian colonial idea that Aboriginality was a flaw that could be bred out if one tried hard enough, for long enough.101 Similarly, in the figure of the

Governor-as-father and the children he produces, Christian satirizes the idea that the sexual needs of convicts and officers could be served by Aboriginal and Pacific Islander women, but that white women were required for the growth of a healthy colony (Daniels

42-43). Thus reproduction is not only a personal trauma for women and families (though it is that, too), but also a source of political trauma in the colonial system that postcolonial writers seek to expose and reconsider, and they are, consciously or not, evoking the Gothic in order to do so.

As well as articulating anxieties about national identity that are founded on race, so too pregnancy intersects with a rhetoric that tends to see England as the mother country and her fragile, emergent colonies as offspring, so that anxieties about the health or future

100 Notably, psychoanalysis has also proved useful to postcolonial criticism, taken up by theorists such as Franz Fanon and Homi Bhabha as a way of thinking about colonial power and the formation of postcolonial identities (Turcotte and Sugars vii). 101 This idea is at the root of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families (The Stolen Generation) and the subsequent placement of those children in white families. This relocation policy is the topic of Jane Hamilton’s play Stolen, first produced in Melbourne in 1998 at the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Theatre Co-operative and Playbox Theatre Centre. Stolen has some Gothic elements, mostly in the language and imagery of some of the monologues and in some aspects of its interrupted narrative structure which gestures toward the unspeakable, but its over all tone, use of space, and production elements owe more to docudrama, leading me not to include it in detail here. The publication of Stolen used here includes background material to introduce key concepts, events, and details about the writing of the play, appealing to a non-local audience.

107 of the colony might be framed in a way that not only hinges on but also replicates concerns about birth, positing the state as a larger version of the family. In postcolonial narratives, pregnancy and birth are reemployed as motifs for addressing the emergence of a young, independent nation. For Gilbert and Tompkins, “the unborn, stillborn, or otherwise incomplete child has special significance” in postcolonial drama as an articulation of stalled progress toward decolonization (Gilbert and Tompkins 219). Consequently, the female body on stage in Sky, pregnant with a dead baby and going nowhere, serves as a manifestation of stalled progress, as the tiny town of Linton that Jasper wants to see “put on the map” by the event of the baby’s birth remains unable to gain a foothold on the vast prairie. The patriarchal legacy of Blanche’s father’s territorial abuse of her body is a deadly and unproductive force in the play and one from which the resistant prairie landscape, as

Nothof notes, offers the only respite (Nothof 135).

The ominous, overseeing patriarchy, captured in Sky by the offstage father whose presence resonates in Blanche’s pregnancy, is an important source of danger in feminist

Gothic readings. Kate Ellis’s study of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Gothic novels argues that what she calls Feminine Gothic uses the internal space to show “that the safety of the home is not a given,” an anxiety she sees as connected to what were at the time increasing levels of urbanization that resulted in an increased isolation for women in the domestic sphere (Ellis xiv-xvi). Similarly, for Anne Williams, the ruined Gothic castle with its endless passages is a frighteningly unknown domestic space presided over by a sinister patriarchy. Anne Williams suggests Bluebeard, as a tale of domestic violence in which the setting of a house is highly significant, establishing the tone for the Gothic:

Bluebeard’s secret is the foundation upon which patriarchal culture rests: control of the subversively curious female…therefore his house, with its

108 secret room is not merely background…instead it ‘realizes,’ makes concrete, the structure of power that engenders the action within the social world” (A. Williams 41).

The idea that the domestic sphere might be invaded or threatened in some way and become a site over which a sinister patriarchy has dominion has clear significance for the postcolonial context, particularly amongst indigenous writers and in texts by white writers, like Christian’s The Governor’s Family, in which sexual violence and the subjugation of

Australian Aboriginal women is a central concern. The “ordinary” patriarchal home is trapped inside the colonial state like a Russian doll inside a Russian doll, creating a labyrinthine set of spatially coded relationships between bodies, spaces, and cultures that is an enduring manifestation of live burial for the feminist postcolonial Gothic. The domestic space, which as noted has been claimed as a foundational element of realist dramaturgy, has remained a notable staple of the Gothic across the work of many writers for its ability to articulate anxieties about the power structures of patriarchal culture and the subjugation of the gendered and/or racial Other. Kulperger’s argument that domestic violence in the postcolonial feminist Gothic serves to make the ongoing legacies of colonial violence visible by grounding them in “the brutal realities” of the familiar, points to the longevity and significance of the house as a site of terror and violence (Kulperger 98).

The action of Beatrix Christian’s play Blue Murder (1994) takes place in just such a house, thus sharing Gothic territory with Gault’s Sky, but staging a specifically Australian postcoloniality that locates terror more directly in the staged domestic space than in the contested site of the body. In Christian’s consciously Gothic contemporary retelling of Blue

Beard, Eve leaves her dead-end rural town for Sydney, hoping to escape the stifling lack of opportunity for the bustling progress of the city. Upon arriving she takes a job with Blue, a

109 reclusive writer of children’s stories who lives in a gloomy subterranean castle in the middle of Sydney Harbour. But employment as an opportunity to act in the public rather than in the domestic world is quickly redefined by Blue who gives Eve a job because, by his own account, he needs a woman for both sex and inspiration. Blue asks if Eve “has what it takes to start a new life,” an arguably loaded and ultimately deadly question (Christian,

Blue 12). Once Blue and Eve become lovers, the ghosts of Blue’s three murdered wives emerge to warn Eve of the danger she’s in. That Blue represents the past’s ability to interrupt the future is underscored by the fact that Blue’s wives were murdered when they became pregnant. Blue wants to control Eve, but when she, too, becomes pregnant, Eve must kill Blue, or be killed. Blue is a ruler, user and consumer of women, and Eve’s ability to bring about change, “breeding the future which would destroy [Blue],” puts her survival in jeopardy, as the ghosts of his murdered wives attest (Christian, Blue 49).102

Bringing the well-known tale of Bluebeard from its European and English roots and relocating it in contemporary Sydney, Blue Murder stages a story about female subjugation handed down for centuries, a sort of ancien regime narrative, uneasily transplanted across cultures and histories. Like a transported convict, the story thus trails something of its debt to the motherland, while also being inevitably changed by its new surroundings. Both mythic and specific, as Joanne Tompkins points out, Blackrock’s “imaginary existence in

Sydney Harbour is framed by well-known Sydney landmarks….The mythic geography exists side by side with the actual Sydney topography, each contributing to the…uncanny,

102 It is worth noting here that the threatening and ultimately interrupted births of Frankenstein and The Red Letter Plays (to be discussed in the next chapter) arguably belong in the same register. Moers’s sense of the Female Gothic as a form in which the traumas of sex, pregnancy, birth and motherhood are central certainly qualifies Blue Murder as Female Gothic, though like Parks’s plays, Blue Murder is more consciously about socio-political control of the female body than Moers’s definition suggests.

110 so that the politics of location in Blue Murder is both specifically defined and metaphorically resonant” (Tompkins 156).

Both mythic and specific, familiar and strange, the haunted claustrophobic interior of Blue Murder is decidedly uncanny. According to Freud, the “idea of the ‘double’ (the doppelganger) in all its nuances and manifestations” is perhaps the most “prominent motif

[to] produce an uncanny effect” (Freud 141). Consequently, a profoundly doubled sense of space points dramaturgically in Blue Murder to the inherently uncanny nature of the contested postcolonial landscape--a place where the past returns in the present, and where home is unhomely, despite its apparent domesticity. Eve’s position is, as Blue insists somewhat ironically, “live-in” and like some kind of hired help, she must share Blue’s home with Roy, Blue’s butler, who is permanently occupied with sweeping. This domestic duty, done at the patriarch’s behest to maintain order in his outpost, takes on double meaning in its evocation of the colonial practices of land-clearing and racial cleansing, making Roy’s sweeping uncanny and ambiguous. At first Eve finds it comforting and “like[s] the feel of a room after [Roy has] swept.” But Roy’s response to Eve taints that calm: “If you sweep away strong feeling and worldly desires you can find peace,” he tells her, linking order to erasure (Christian, Blue 21). But desire—punishable female desire and male desire for the oppressed female subject—invades this space perpetually like a choking dust. And so the sweeping goes on; this domestic space may seem to promise a future for Eve, but Blackrock is steeped in history and tied to a bloody past that can never be clean.

Blackrock’s interior is not only uncanny but also highly abject in its unstable spatiality. It defies attempts to define it according to binary definitions of here and there; it is not the city, but it’s not not the city either. Blue’s cathedral is in, above, and under the

111 harbor at times almost entirely submerged, despite having “stone roots that go right under the harbour” (Christian, Blue 19). It rises and falls unpredictably, like Blue’s desire, like the tides, and is a place where people become lost, where one can watch the boats, yet where there is danger: “wrecked ships in the vestry” as Blue’s dead wife, Rose, tells us (Christian,

Blue 37).

The uncanny and abject spatial slippage of Blue Murder is accomplished in production in part by a set design that allows for ambiguity and doubleness, with walls that move, stairs that go nowhere, and fog that lingers between scenes. Like Colman’s eighteenth-century stage version, Blue-Beard, Christian’s Blue Murder was first produced

“on a grand scale,” (Payne 1994). This “grand scale” is a hallmark feature of the heyday of

Gothic drama, and of Colman’s Blue-Beard in particular, the set for which featured a sinking chamber, a long parade, and castle walls that were dismantled during performance. In production Christian, too, calls for a set that makes good use of spectacular spatial transformations, and “eerie” atmospherics (O’Shea 1994).103 Lighting design contributes to the duplicity of the interior world, so that the Gothic conventions of the claustrophobic space are polyvalent. As Pamela Payne notes in her review, one minute “the stage seems a benign and reassuring place; the next furtive with shadow and threat” (Payne, April 9,

1994). Sound plays an important role in destabilizing boundaries between places. Deep in

Blue’s lair, the play’s dialogue is punctuated by the constant drip of water as if the sea, to which the bodies of Blue’s used and discarded wives will be committed, has its own voice.

103 The set for Colman’s drama is well-documented in the various letters and reviews appendixed in Cox and Gamer (329-341), and in Ranger’s book of set mechanics, which includes illustrations (Ranger 57-60; 78-80). Mina O’Shea also comments on the spectacle of the set in her review of Blue Murder, calling it “effective” and “eerie” and describing the play as a “contemporary Gothic peep show” (O’Shea, Greenleft.org, 1994)

112 Foghorns blast during sex, collapsing distinctions between spaces and the bodies that occupy them. In a striking use of theatrical space, the set of the Belvoir Street production had walls of billowing canvas, which seemed to move with life and out of which the ghosts emerged, making domestic violence and murder literally part of the patriarchal architecture.

The ghosts also serve as doubles for Eve—or what she might become if she gets pregnant—and are manifestations of the domestic space itself. Consequently, they function more like the figure of “Jane” who emerges from the walls of the bedroom where the postnatally distressed narrator is being kept in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s feminist Gothic short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (Perkins Gillman 88) than they do like Bluebeard’s collection of inanimate corpses. While Colman’s use of the chamber in his Blue-Beard also stages a disturbing domestic interior that serves as a metaphor for the female body,

Colman’s chamber is updated by Christian’s feminist dramaturgy to be a place where female desire and life cannot be fully silenced or erased. Blue’s former wives Angel, Leura and Rose might be dead and buried in the walls of the house, but they are also still very much alive, and the space vibrates with their paradoxically buried and exhumed presence.

Though women are ultimately liberated from the claustrophobic site of Blue Murder it is nonetheless a space that contains domestic violence, staging it behind closed doors—or in this case behind walls—and drawing attention to its invisibility. Blue has been murdering his subjugated colony of wives for a century or more, and thus the Gothic interior is a site of domestic violence as colonial legacy in just the way Shelley Kulperger suggests, so that Blue’s home is an empire founded on the domestication and entrapment of women. In this way it stands along side another play worthy of a brief mention in this

113 regard: Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About A Handkerchief (1993). Desdemona, which is a reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello and a “tribute” to Wolfgang Bauer’s play Shakespeare

The Sadist (Vogel 4), takes place entirely in a small back room in the palace, in which

Desdemona remains throughout. She uses her class position as lady of the house to push around her maid (Emilia) and friend (Bianca), who are the only other characters in the play, perpetuating in microcosmic form the very culture of oppression that also traps her as a domestic subject.104 The architectural space that contains her functions as a metonym for the idea of household as an expression of the domestic authority held by her husband, a general engaged in the business of exercising Imperial power. The claustrophobic interior defines Desdemona’s limits, making manifest Anne McClintock’s claim that domesticity

“denotes both a space (a geographic and architectural alignment) and a social relation to power” (McClintock 34). By keeping Desdemona on stage, and Othello offstage as a kind of abject presence/threat that emphasizes Desdemona’s subjugation, entrapment and isolation, the play effectively stages domestic violence as both connected to larger forms of patriarchal power and operating intimately and invisibly, behind closed doors.

Christian’s claustrophobic interior as a site for hidden violence has clear overlap here, arguing for a category of feminist postcolonial drama that uses Gothic spatial conventions to address domestic violence and the social forces that facilitate it, but in Blue

Murder, the treatment of the private interior is also rooted in its own specific socio- historical context. Blackrock, Blue’s strange domicile in Sydney Harbour where the first white settlers landed, pointedly conjures several important colonial landmarks, though its elusive and fantastical quality at the edge of visible representation makes it somehow all of

104 This theme of women perpetuating the ideologies of the same patriarchal and colonial systems that oppress them comes up again in Venus and in The Secretaries and Top Girls, as we shall see.

114 them and yet none of them at once. The actual locations that Blackrock appears to reference include the rocky island fortresses of Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, which was home to a convict built prison, and Fort Denison, a small but still prominent island in the heart of

Sydney Harbour that was known by the local Aboriginal population as Mattewai. With the arrival of Captain Cook and the First Fleet in 1788, Mattewai was claimed for use as a defense point and a place to hold convicts. Blackrock also brings to mind Black Rock House, an allegedly haunted Colonial family home with fortress-like walls, built in the 1850s by

Victoria’s first Auditor General near the sea in Victoria. The alignment of Blackrock with these symbols of colonial authority invests Blue with a certain patriarchal power.

Blackrock is, after all, a strangely phallic mass of rock thrusting up out of the harbor. Blue’s home is a place that does not recognize external laws, a place where Blue can “do as [he] please[s]” (Christian, Blue 29), where women have no rights and are indefinitely detained in the walls. Its resonance with places like Cockatoo Island and Fort Denison make it a kind of colonial outpost for holding back Others that intersects with contemporary transnational narratives of immigration, a final halting stop on the journey to citizenship. Eve, who starts her journey by leaving her home in rural New South Wales and coming to the city in search of a new life, is an immigrant whose status as a citizen is ambiguous. Eve’s struggle to resist the identity proposed by Blue is a struggle not only to refuse the identity of muse and battered wife that Blue has in mind for her, but also to contest an ongoing community narrative in which women—the indigenous mothers of the stolen generation, the convict women who labored in the female factories or were married off to serve the colony105 (a

105 Only about 20% of the convict population was female, so “women convicts were assumed to be most useful [to the colony] as wives and mothers” See Australian Government’s “Convicts and the British Colonies” at www.australia.gov.au. Indeed as Daniels claims, the politics of reproduction

115 death sentence in the world of the play), the asylum seekers who were held in quarantine on Cockatoo Island awaiting processing—are denied visibility.

In fighting to rejoin the world beyond Blackrock, Eve survives in a context where to be visible means to be recognized by the state, and in doing so she makes visible not just

Blue’s dead wives, who hope that “the world would know our names,” (Christian, Blue 32) but all the women who have been denied citizenship, trapped in the spatial and political limbo of Blackrock’s powerful interior. Cox’s observation that Gothic drama echoes themes of revolution in its plot progression from interior to exterior emerges here to signal a break with the past. Eve’s act of bloody revolution against the ruling patriarch results in us finally being above ground, outside, beyond the torture chamber of Blue’s domain. But where

Colman’s Blue-Beard, working with the same archetypal Gothic source material in the wake of the French Revolution, ends his play outside with the destruction of the defeated tyrant’s castle, Blue’s death does not signal an end to colonial oppression. Instead, the bodies of a thousand women appear in a bay turned red, indicated by dialogue and supported by light and sound. After invisibility and silence, the bodies remain out of our field of view, but the blood upon which Blackrock is founded is finally visible. In the postcolonial political moment of the nineties, with Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Redfern speech on Aboriginal reconciliation just a few years earlier, the move toward visibility and recognition of a history that tended to relegate women—black and white—to violent oppression and anonymity is culturally resonant.

influenced British Authorities to deport more reproductively active women, particularly those who might qualify as “the more virtuous” convict women who the men could then be enticed to marry in exchange for plots of land (Daniels 42). Many women assigned to husbands became victims of domestic violence (Daniels 237).

116

III -- Unstable Borders And Uncanny Places: Staging The Contested Space

One of the key problems of place for the postcolonial world is that it is not a singular construction. Instead, a place’s meaning, identity, and ownership are constantly contested through the awareness and re-emergence of erased histories, such as the erased history of violence that turns the sea red at the end of Blue Murder, ironically staging Blue’s own claim that, “history is a tidal wave of blood and free will is the little white flag we wave at it before it breaks. Again” (Christian, Blue 7). The contested meaning of space, not only its ownership, is a key concern for contemporary drama, as Una Chaudhuri notes, because the construction of cultural identities is often founded on and derived from geography and location (Chaudhuri 3). Struggles over cultural identities, then, are struggles over how we define place and thus can be spatially coded. In the Australian postcolonial context the act of settling the land is also paradoxically an often violent and disruptive act of unsettling, as the title of Joanna Tompkins book Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary

Australian Theatre, suggests. Space, then, is inherently unstable and unsettled in the postcolonial Gothic, and the theatre is well situated to represent that instability through staging choices that recognize the polyvalence of the theatrical space and work beyond the confines of strict mimetic realism’s imperative to create actual, singular environments, suggesting a feminist Gothic staging that both engages and disrupts realism, particularly when dealing with domestic interiors.106

106 For an elaboration of the paradoxical impossibilities of stage-realism as a means to include audience in a space that claims not to be fictional, see Chaudhuri (8-10).

117 The staging of dramatic struggle as the struggle over place--its meanings, identities, and significance--is not restricted to Australia, and indeed is also recurrent in the work of

Canadian playwright Judith Thompson, though it manifests in her various plays in different ways. In Habitat (2001), Lewis Chance, a middle-class social-worker and activist, battles a well-to-do community on Mapleview Lanes lead by matriarch Margaret, in order to establish a group home there for at-risk youth. Raine, the play’s sixteen year old heroine, and the daughter of a working-class broken home, loses her mother to cancer in the beginning of the play and ends up in Lewis’s charge, where she becomes embroiled in the struggle for a place to call home. The play’s title, Habitat, rather than Home--which is in fact the last word of the play--suggests, as Kim Solga astutely points out, a space that is marked by notions of “shared enterprise, utopian potential” (Solga, “Ethical” 136). Yet “habitat” also, significantly, implies a sense of the endangered, of a species surviving precariously; at the risk of destruction and invasion, it suggests contested space, and according to at least one review this aspect of Habitat was reflected in production by a set design that staged “a diamond of real grass with a few trees. Margaret's living room is in one corner of the grass and Chance's on the other, thus suggesting the artificiality of borders and divisions of land”

(Hoile 4 Oct. 2001).

For Solga, Habitat’s central social dilemma is that “this community isn’t big enough for the both of us; there simply isn’t enough space here to accommodate our differences”

(Solga, “Ethical” 137). Somebody has to go and it is those less fit, in the Darwinian sense, who must move over. This concern emerges repeatedly in the postcolonial Gothic as a struggle between existing native populations, such as Frances represents in The Governor’s

Family, who are, as Said argues, positioned by the imperial narrative as less fit, and the

118 colonial settler/invaders (Said 1888). What is particularly striking in Habitat is that this motif is reworked ironically here so that the “we were here first” tribe is the well to do, and the invaders are the uncivilized youth. Habitat stages a battle for territory at the level of both the individual and the community, asking questions not only about Raine’s individuation from her dying mother (a classic Gothic trope as we have seen, and one that decentralizes the arguably dominant struggle of father and son in much twentieth-century western drama) but also about who belongs on Mapleview Lanes.

The idea of home (for an individual) as threatened habitat (for a community) pointedly renders the notion of home unhomely. And indeed nobody feels quite at home in

Habitat. Freud’s theory of the uncanny, drawing on the German term unheimlich

(unhomely), and dealing with frightening feelings of unease, has much relevance for the

Gothic, as I have noted. Things that we find uncanny are, Freud argues, things that were once familiar but have been repressed and now return (Freud 147). Certainly postcolonial

Gothic drama is full of instances of the uncanny. For example, Frances in The Governor’s

Family, with her dark skin and white-blonde hair, signals a return of the Governor’s repressed infidelity with an Aboriginal woman, and the family’s repressed trauma of a dead child. But particularly significant for the postcolonial Gothic is the way in which spaces articulate the uncanny. Frances’s appearance in the displaced English oddity of

Government House, itself an unhomely home, signals a return of the repressed narrative of the unsettling presence of indigenous Australians on a land being settled as much as it signals a return of the repressed narrative of familial infidelity. Indeed for Edwards the uncanny helps articulate what is Gothic about the postcolonial experience: “The sense of the unsettled in the word unheimlich invokes a challenge to the colonial project of a settler

119 nation…[and so] the uncanny is tied to the unsettled, the not-yet colonized, the unsuccessfully colonized, or the decolonized” (Edwards, Gothic Canada xx).

While Habitat is not consistently or self-consciously Gothic in its aesthetic the way

The Governor’s Family is,107 it is important to the discussion here because it demonstrates the extreme suitability of the Gothic to postcolonial discourses on stage. It is the Gothic as a kind of uncanny dramaturgical eruption that provides us with access to the play’s spatially coded postcolonial struggle, setting up the play’s central concerns by yoking space and identity in a moment that is dramatically compelling and politically thought-provoking. The opening scene takes place in a hospital room where Raine speaks to her dying mother, trying, in the way of an alienated teenager to say goodbye without saying goodbye, to separate herself from a death-tainted maternal presence—a separation that, as I have noted, many critics argue is at the heart of the Gothic. Her monologue, peppered with “I can’t stay too long” and “I really gotta go” is interrupted only by her mother, Cath’s, very labored breathing, a sound that reminds us of Sedgwick’s insistence that Gothic narratives have a “difficulty in getting told” (Thompson, Habitat, 3-5; Sedgwick 13). Halfway through the scene, however, when Raine begins talking about having to go to Cath’s funeral, she

107 It does follow a typical Gothic trajectory: a young, motherless heroine journeys from claustrophobic interior to the liberation of burning down a house, presided over by an ambiguous patriarchal figure. Nonetheless, despite a very Gothic first scene, full of danger and power and passion and the irrational, the rest of the play doesn’t embrace a Bayer-Berenbaumian sense of expanded reality much and it becomes more rational and less powerful. Certainly not all feminist postcolonial drama is Gothic, but the Gothic mode nonetheless serves postcolonialism very well. Habitat is nowhere more thought-provoking, moving and troubling than in its opening scene and in those moments where we really don’t sense that reality can be captured by the spatial conventions of realism on stage. If one considers Habitat a stop on the way from The Crackwalker and Lion in The Streets to her most recent plays, such as Watching Glory Die, Habitat’s hybridity may reflect a move in Thompson’s work generally from highly Gothic, experimental and dark, to stories told in more conventional narratives, a move that detracts from the kind of vigorous writing for which Thompson became known and ultimately respected. In an interview shortly after Sled premiered in 1996, Thompson gestures toward this progression but felt that she should “stick to magic realism. It’s what I love. It’s what I love to watch and what I do best” (Thompson in Fletcher, 88).

120 tells her distressed mother “You are not the only tragic figure in the world. I was right where you are, remember?” Cath sits bolt upright and mother and daughter slide into an urgent, painful dialogue that makes immediately present a moment when Raine, as a baby, almost died in a hospital room, presumably like this one:

RAINE: Disappearing! I could feel myself disappearing- CATH takes RAINE in her arms CATH: …I thought it was just a virus, they said she would be fine, she’s not fine, she looks like a dying baby – should we wait until morning? She might be DEAD by morning – RAINE: - and I lay beside you my face in your neck breathing with you and I dreamed I was drowning – CATH: -and I couldn’t breathe in my dream and I was way underwater and and and oh my GOD she isn’t breathing – RAINE: -no breathing disappearing disappearing- … RAINE: …low oxygen, dehydrated this is very serious she is sick didn’t you know how sick she was? Didn’t you know this baby is sick? CATH: Let me have her, please, I want to nurse her – RAINE: You might lose her- CATH: -might lose her? No no no no no no no no. RAINE: I might choke, Cathy, choke on your MILK- CATH: I have lost my milk! I have LOST MY MILK!! (Thompson, Habitat, 6-7)

It’s a disturbing and frightening scene, full of fear and anger and sadness, full of memories that might be dreams or that might be happening now, of drowning, of dying, of choking on life-giving milk so that nurture turns to ruin. The dialogue, though it tells a shared story, is not a shared enterprise but a contested narrative hashed out in a shared space that is haunted by past trauma. That trauma, moreover, causes boundaries between past and future, between life and death, between self and other, here and there, to become suddenly very ambiguous. Raine’s sense of her own survival depends very much on whose space this is, on her own insistence that the hospital room, a claustrophobic interior that begins her journey toward some kind of liberty no less, is her mother’s place, and not her

121 own. Time and place are rendered uncanny as the hospital room, as a location, is destabilized for the spectator, who perceives the moment as suddenly doubled. And it is this terrifying and highly Gothic conflict over the narratives of space that sets up the broader stakes of the rest of the play and arguably informs design and staging, as the polyvalent space of the play’s initial Toronto production, and the sound of breathing as a recurrent motif in a later Winnipeg production suggest.108 The non-mimetic theatricality of this scene takes up the Gothic’s insistence on challenging, expanding and disrupting what is perceived to be real. In so doing, it effectively stages the contested space as abject, ambiguous, and in line with Freud’s sense that “an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary” (Freud 150). Though the dramaturgy and staging here reject mimetic realism, they aren’t in line with the kind of

Marxist feminist theatre practice that I have noted was controversially regarded as emblematic of western feminist theatre practice at the end of the twentieth century and which I will discuss in more detail in relation to Caryl Churchill and Alma De Groen in the next chapter. Thompson characterizes her style as “The opposite of the Marxist view that everything is contextual” being more invested in the psychoanalytical idea of a collective unconscious where people know and feel things as if in shared dreams (Thompson in

Zimmerman 15). This emphasis on expanded reality, unstable boundaries and dreams, though Thompson doesn’t call it Gothic, nonetheless aligns very neatly with the Gothic— and serves the play very well. The fact that the play becomes less compelling as it gives way to more conventional realism later—a form that leaves the door open for a lot of fire from

108 The Winnipeg production, a much scaled down production in a small performance space over a bookstore, was better received (Mayes, Jan 5, 2010).

122 critics about the play’s inconsistencies and illogicalities109--does not argue for the feminist failures of realism as much as it simply underscores the efficacy of the Gothic for articulating postcolonial anxieties.

While in Habitat the ambiguous, uncanny, and doubled sense of space in the opening scene ultimately gives way to a more mimetic and singular narrative to follow, Judith

Thompson’s play Sled (1997) brings unstable borders and polyvalent spaces on stage throughout, presenting a narrative that spills over its own spatial boundaries. In Sled a disturbed young man, Kevin, returns to the Toronto neighborhood from which he was kidnapped as a child. His return results in a web of violence that has at its center Kevin’s incestuous rape of his half sister, Evangeline, with whom he is reunited, and the murder of

Annie, a local lounge singer married to a cop. Kevin and his friend, Mike, shoot Annie one night in the Ontario wilderness when they come across her out on their snowmobiles, and claim to mistake her for a moose. The play ends with Kevin on the run from a trail of bodies and apparently dying, with Evangeline, heavily pregnant (a recurring motif as noted), out in the snowy wilderness together.

The play is told in thirty-two scenes, and the production notes call for transitions between scenes to be “instantaneous.” (Thompson, Sled 330). This kind of temporal flow is facilitated and reinforced by ambiguous spatial borders. The wilderness and the suburb exist together, each encroaching upon the other and upon what we might normally characterize as the non-theatrical space of the audience. Thus the stage directions specify

”white birches, snow, a great snowy owl, and a trail, with a hill, running around, behind, or

109 See in particular Christopher Hoile’s review for “Stage Door,” which calls Habitat “muddled” and “riddled with errors” most of which have to do with the kind of psychological plausibility that we demand of realism and none of which take particular issue with the first scene of the play (Hoile, Oct 4, 2001).

123 through the audience” (Thompson, Sled 331).110 The play opens with Annie singing to us, from a somewhat ambiguous location before a wolf howls and the scene shifts visually to “a residential street with mostly red brick houses…two story workers houses…which look as though they are in the middle of a forest. The birches remain” (Thompson, Sled 331). As in

Blue Murder, in which the sounds of foghorns and dripping water similarly disrupt borders between above and below, in and out, past and present, the sounds of the landscape in Sled infiltrate the visually domestic and urban.111

However, while Blue Murder can be thought of as using sound, light and scenic elements to create one uncanny space with multiple meanings, in Sled the anxious duality of the theatrical space is held in a different tension, more specifically staging a problematically porous border between conflicting ideas of home. Here and there are particularly difficult terms in Sled, and the borders between wilderness and the urban are kept deliberately ambiguous so that, as Susan Walker suggests in her review, the play’s contradictions and locations appear seamless (Walker 9 Jan. 1997). Mira Friedlander describes the set as “bleeding” into the audience, “creating a closeness that is at times appropriately claustrophobic,” a description that illuminates both the spatial ambiguity and the Gothic affect it generates (Friedlander, Jan 26, 1997). The play’s polyvalent staging of location implies that whatever danger lurks outside is also inside; like all things abject, danger and violence defy attempts to keep them there and not here. This implication is

110 Sherrill Grace has suggested in her article “Going North on Judith Thompson’s Sled” that these directions work hard to establish something Thompson’s audience will recognize as fitting with their ideas about north, which Grace argues Thompson can only stage as a composite construct beyond representation. While I find Grace’s argument compelling, my argument here is not particularly invested in “North” as a real or knowable category. (Grace, Going 59-63) 111 Tompkins reads Blue Murder’s doubled and contradictory location as an example of polytopic space that situates both the metaphorical and the actual (Tompkins 156).

124 arguably typical of Judith Thompson’s plays (at least the earlier work) and is one of the features that opens her body of work to both postcolonial and Gothic readings. Robert

Nunn’s important article on Thompson’s spatial metaphors (1989), which predates Sled, notes a recurrence of multi-level staging and of sets that “called attention” to borders of various kinds (Nunn 21). Nunn is concerned in this article particularly with The

Crackwalker (1982), in which cracks in the pavement resonate socially and psychologically as “the gaps and fissures in a surface that allow it to be breached” and with White Biting

Dog (1984), in which a sidewalk runs through the audience “connecting the fictional world of the play with the real world outside” (Nunn 22, 29). In both these plays the theatrical space is used to articulate anxieties about above/below and inside/out as psychological and social categories.

Nunn’s argument that Thompson’s work renders spatially its preoccupations with the abject contents of the unconscious and their relationship to the conscious mind might usefully be applied to Sled, too, but here the spatial metaphors are concerned with repressed memories as facets of fractured social identities. While the troubled characters in The Crackwalker risk falling down into the sewer beneath the sidewalk that serves as the play’s most metaphorically resonant and abject location, the characters in Sled drift strangely between places, repeatedly and visibly transgressing the play’s unstable and ambiguous spatial and temporal boundaries. In so doing their identities are constantly shifting, and their bodies are displaced so that, as one reviewer noted in production “the past comes alive in the present” (Walker 9 Jan. 1997). Annie is a particularly striking example of the way in which bodies are constantly recontextualized as out of context by their movement in the theatrical space. Her mobility and spatial contextualization

125 repeatedly renders her ambiguous and uncanny, and nowhere is this clearer than in her death scene, in which reality and visibility are highly questionable spatial qualities. Having left the lodge where she is staying and where her husband has had a run-in with two snowmobilers, Annie wanders “all alone, in the woods, in the dark. In the middle of North

Ontario by [herself] at night” where she has a vision of her emigrating Irish ancestors, mostly dead aboard a “dark, battered, dying ship” (Thompson, Sled 343). Annie, aligned with wild animals throughout the play, then sees the shadow of a moose (we don’t see the animal, but she does) and reaches out to touch it just as the two snowmobilers, Kevin and

Mike, arrive on the scene. Mike, sunglasses and headphones on, stays back as Kevin hunts her through the birches until he “has quite a clear view of Annie”:

ANNIE: My husband will kill you. KEVIN: I want the antlers. ANNIE: I’m sorry about the thing at the lodge, my husband went too far. He will apologize to you. KEVIN: We split the meat. Shove it in the freezer, that’s supper all winter. Moose and chips, moose and fries, moose and rice, moose and Yorkshire pudding. ANNIE: Please. MIKE: Why isn’t she moving, man? What’s wrong with her?” KEVIN: She’s froze; in the light of the sled. She’s froze. MIKE: I can’t fuckin’ see her. KEVIN: Ek skal skjota ther huortu i gegnum [this is Norse and pronounced: Yeg skal skeeota tear hurtu ee gagnum.] Let’s shoot her man. Right through the heart. (Sled 344-345)

Boundaries between the visible and the known are deliberately fraught here, again lending credence to Sedgwick’s reading of dream-like states as manifestations of spatially coded anxieties about locating the borders of lived experience. Juxtaposed with a moment in which Annie sees her Irish ancestors dead on the ocean, Kevin’s final words, uttered in

Norse, complicate the ways in which this space might be seen or known as “Canadian” and as “home,” and for whom (and when). Annie, after all, is not First Nations, but rather is

126 herself an immigrant who is in the woods because she is, quite literally, away from home.

Such a destabilization of the idea “home” recurs again near the end of the play when, somewhere out in the snowscape, Kevin tells his half-sister, Evangeline: “take me home. I want to go home.” But the visual uncertainty of locating home is reinforced by her response: ”We have no home. You know that” (Thompson, Sled 400).112

Penny Farfan sees the slippage between urban and wilderness that the play renders visually and audibly as an exploration of “the monstrous wilderness within the urban heart,” a subject she observes is also explored in Thompson’s earlier play, Lion In The

Streets (1990), another play with strong Gothic elements that explores the impact of a murdered child on an urban community (Farfan 99).113 The tellingly Gothic language

Farfan uses here points to the way space can be read as body, a spatial metaphor that is, as

I have noted, familiar territory for Gothic scholars, emerging in the postcolonial context especially in the motif of rape as colonial violence and in the motif of the domestic site of live burial that signals stifling and/or stalled maternity. Yet importantly for a consideration of the postcolonial Gothic, the body here is a social one. Certainly Kevin can be read as a kind of lion in the streets, a wild predator who descends from beyond on the urban neighborhood and tears it apart. Yet importantly, a monstrous wilderness exists in Kevin,

112 Australian playwright Louis Nowra’s excellent play The Golden Age, about the rediscovery of a lost tribe in Tasmania, also emphasizes the ambiguity of boundaries between civilized and wild spaces to great effect, staging displacement as we see the lost tribe at a formal dinner table, etc. Like Christian’s The Governor’s Family, the location of Colonial architecture in the wilderness is one way in which space stages that juxtaposition. 113 Thompson has said that the lion is the cruelty within all of us (quoted in Farfan, 99). This theme persists in her work and is particularly clearly articulated in Capture Me (2004), in which Dodge a wife-killer and one of Thompson’s most unlikable characters (which is saying something) describes violence as something that causes men to “lose our human shape” and become “wolf-monsters” (Thompson, Capture 43). As Dalbir Singh notes, the critique here is of western patriarchal violence as an evil that is located not outside--as colonial political rhetoric suggests--but inside. (Singh 109).

127 as well as because of him. Furthermore, uncivilized violence exists also in Annie’s husband

Jack, a cop with a temper, and in the stories of the neighborhood’s violent history: Kevin’s abduction, an accidental shooting, and so on. Like the Governor’s fear that savagery is inside all of us, necessitating vigilance in civility, violence here is latent and has been assimilated into the body of the community as what Ann Wilson identifies in Lion In The

Streets as “a culture of abuse” (Wilson 160-161).

Farfan’s claim that Sled stages a contemporary, civilized Canada marked by a repressed history of barbarism from first contact hinges in part on her analysis of that trauma being restaged in the murder of Annie by Kevin out in the woods--a claim stemming from Kevin’s use of Norse but that we might read as complicated by the fact that Annie is

Irish not First Nations (Farfan 101). But Farfan also sees Kevin’s murder of Annie as an extension of a kind of violence that occurs in Sled and elsewhere in Thompson’s work, in which acts of violence effectively kill the human spirit. In Sled this violence happens in the process of settling and civilizing Canada, and can be seen to emerge in the repressed and violent histories of the neighborhood characters whose European heritages link them variously to different places (Farfan 99; 101). What seems significant here to a postcolonial

Gothic reading is the notion of the monster as a composite being, like Frankenstein’s creature, more excessive and less fathomable than the sum of its parts. The designation

European is itself a multiplicitous and fractured one in this play, variously altered and repressed in the struggle of the different immigrant families to settle in Toronto, and woven into the identity of the neighborhood. The conflict between past and present, which stems back to Walpole and to the Gothic stage’s preoccupation with the revolutionary unshackling of French politics from the ancien regime, is also a conflict between

128 geographically and culturally different categories. Thus categories such as French and

French Canadian are geographically and temporally fraught, so that the past always exists uncannily in the present. Postcolonial and multicultural anxieties about identity rooted in place collide so that the category of difference, which might be abjected as monstrous, is a highly ambivalent one held in tension with the idea of a homogenous Canada. Significantly, the idea of homogenous Canada, too, can be thought of as monstrous. As Justin Edwards notes, the concept of the monstrous occupies a dual position in Canadian postcolonial discourse, being used as both a label designed to exclude minority groups, and a characterization of the nation itself as threatening and powerful (Edwards, Gothic Canada

111-112). Sled’s theatrical space problematizes borders between these various categories of Otherness and between applications of monstrous difference and the spaces with which they are reductively associated.

Yet while Sled does indeed interrogate notions of the colonized urban environment as settled and progressive, raising questions too about displacement, relocation, and constructions of home in ways that bring postcolonial discourse productively to bear on the issue of multiculturalism, the play does not disrupt gender binaries with quite the same rigor. As Sherill Grace’s feminist reading of Sled astutely notes, there is something problematically simplistic and gendered in a binary construction of the frozen north as exotic and transformative and the urban as patriarchal and violent (Grace, “Going” 68).

While Sled in many ways attempts to resist binaries between here and there, these characterizations nonetheless hold to some degree. Annie’s connection with the wildlife and her vision of her ancestors work to characterize the natural world as spiritual in a way the urban world is not. It is also a feminine and exotic place, linked to Evangeline, who is

129 half Cree, and who leads Kevin there at the end of the play when she is pregnant with the daughter she will call Annie. Evangeline’s journey into the woods and toward birth as the play’s final gesture is somewhat at odds with the more subversive and less optimistic treatment of motherhood that Gilbert and Tompkins identify as typical of postcolonial drama, which “tend[s] not to centralize birth,” presenting it as a “mixed blessing” that challenges images of Mother Earth and idealized maternity (Gilbert and Tompkins 220).

Evangeline’s pregnancy is depicted as transcendent, a depiction that is dependent on setting:

EVANGELINE: I have plans for Annie, Kevin. Annie will be just fine. Now can you please try to walk? EVANGELINE decides to carry him. She lifts him over her shoulder. She sings to him, a Cree lullaby “Evangeline Carries Kevin.”…they climb the hill where Annie was killed. KEVIN wakes, a final burst of energy before dying. He hears wolves. The Northern Lights light up the sky. KEVIN: What’s that sound, ‘Vangeline, it’s the wolves. Oh yes. There they are. In the blizzard, can you see them? EVANGELINE: Oh, no, my little brother. No! It’s something else. Something kind. Yes. Cheepyuk, neemeetowuk. They’ve finally come for us. Oh, dancing spirits. Yes. (Thompson, Sled 401)

Like Blue Murder, which navigates an uncanny, doubled space in order to reach the ocean, Sled also mirrors Cox’s progression and closes with a transformative landscape rather than stifling built environment. Unlike Blue, however, Kevin dies in the open and is thus claimed by the transformative and feminine space although he cannot see the lights and hears only predatory wolves in the sounds around him. Certainly the space here signifies something of a transformation, if not a reconciliation or moment of forgiveness, and in so doing it signals a kinder end for Kevin than the one Christian deals to Blue. But what is problematic here for Grace is the way the space “mystifies ‘North’ as Other, that space at once Canadian and yet unheimlich, the site of our uncanny ‘home and native land,’”

130 which Grace suggests Thompson relies on as a symbolic device to invoke communion with nature, ecstasy and fear rather than dealing with social realities that might undermine the idea of “North” (Grace, “Going” 63). The alignment of the native with the feminine is problematic in part because the landscape is deadly. The men cannot conquer it for all their hunting and sledding and women who “escape into this feminine North…find that it is

[them]selves—as welcoming Mother or devouring Monster….escape from the masculanized [urban] ‘South’…is an escape into death that is figured as regression (a kind of return to the womb),” (Grace, “Going” 64).

Nonetheless, the Gothic hybridity of the theatrical space Sled inhabits, and the play’s insistence on staging porous borders, complicates binaries and can be read as an attempt to stage Edwards’s observation that “Canada is an in-between space” (Edwards, Gothic

Canada, xiv). Spatial duality visually signals the failure of singular narratives, and stages the temporal, cultural, and political complexities that accompany claims to postcolonial places and attempts to define home. Sled’s Toronto neighborhood, like the blighted Warren farm and the decaying glory of Government House, strives for a more complex view of the legacies of colonization marked by violence than perhaps the play’s treatment of gender suggests. In staging the struggle to call something unhomely home, Sled draws our attention to the role of place in postcolonial trauma and anxiety, even as it underscores the unique ability of the multiplicitous and polyvalent theatrical space to restage those traumas and anxieties in Gothic terms.114

114 Interestingly, Turcotte and Sugars evoke a theatrical metaphor to explain the purpose of their book on postcolonial Gothic in Canadian literature: “to explain the way a modern nation might stage a literary rehearsal of the past as mediated through the gothic mode” (Turcotte and Sugars xx).

131

Conclusion

The Gothic space then manifests in contemporary drama as abject-offstage landscape, as its counter in the claustrophobic site of live burial, and as a polyvalent space with unstable, ambiguous and highly permeable borders. None of these theatrical approaches to the

Gothic space necessarily works to the exclusion of the others, and indeed many of the plays discussed offer simultaneous and/or multiple approaches to the Gothic space, with the tensions and shifts between them serving to structure the narrative. Repeatedly in the contemporary Gothic the spatial conventions of the claustrophobic domestic interior, the abject-offstage landscape, the polyvalent theatrical space and the space-as-body are brought into the service of postcolonial and feminist cultural criticism. While early Gothic spaces revealed anxieties about the struggle for liberty, the power of the sublime and primitive world, and the deterioration of the structures of civilization, in the postcolonial feminist Gothic the horror of a domestic space as a site for entrapment and abuse is particularly resonant in the motif of domestic violence as normalized oppression and subjugation in the name of the national home. So too the wild landscape, read in the context of early Gothic work as being the sublime and powerful female and/or an ambiguous site for liberty, resonates in the postcolonial moment with critiques of colonial abjectifications of the indigenous other and/or the female body as territory for conquest and production.

The question of who or what occupies territory—who or what invades the home—is thus clearly central to postcolonial and feminist manipulations of the Gothic space and the real

132 and imagined bodies it stages. Those real and imagined bodies are the subject of the next two chapters.

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CHAPTER TWO:

Monstrous (M)Others and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays

“Theatre is an incubator for the creation of historical events--and, as in the case of artificial insemination, the baby is no less human.” (Suzan-Lori Parks, Possession)

Introduction: Gothic Births

Suzan-Lori Parks’s In The Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000) both stage Gothic bodies. Less concerned with Gothic spaces in the form of wild landscapes and hidden chambers (though these also manifest in these plays), The Red Letter Plays (as these two works are collectively known)115 abound with imagistic, thematic and structural elements that render the reproductive female body in Gothic terms. A list of these elements includes prophetic wounds that weep, gigantic hands that block the light, bands of marauding hunters, families in crisis, illicit sexual encounters, rape and murder, births and deaths, stories too terrible to be told, and plenty of blood. The array of Gothic elements here makes it clear that Parks’s plays can and should be read as evoking the Gothic, but because Parks is openly working

115 They have been published by TCG as a pair in The Red Letter Plays—a title that acknowledges their shared source material and their intertextual relationship with each other. The label has also been used in scholarship when the plays are being discussed collectively, so that “The Red Letter Plays” or “Red Letter Plays” is at times treated as plural, rather than as a single title.

134 with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early American Gothic novel, The Scarlet letter (1850), we might also consider these plays to be consciously Gothic. By situating The Red Letter Plays and their engagement with the monstrous both alongside other texts generally considered

Gothic and in the context of other plays by contemporary women playwrights, we can productively see The Red Letter Plays as working in a contemporary feminist Gothic register. Furthermore, The Scarlet Letter’s significance as a text that engages “the thesis of the Puritan origins of the American self” (Simon 420), and in which the heroine lives at “the rough edge of Puritan civilization” (Herzog 116) where she breaches the

“coloniser/colonized split” (Mackenzie 19) has prompted both overt and implicitly postcolonial (and in the case of Herzog, also feminist) critical engagements with

Hawthorne, to which we might read Parks as contributing further.116 Though U.S. cultural productions have only recently begun to be viewed through the lens of postcolonialism, as I have noted previously, uneasy tensions between the barbaric and the civilized abound in

Gothic writing and the idea of liberty is often ambivalent and yoked to revolution and violence. While the Revolutionary wars might well be a factor in the Gothic imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, in a contemporary context the long shadow of the civil war and the legacy of slavery inherited directly from European colonialism encourage the application of postcolonial theories to readings of race and gender in American texts.

116 Herzog’s essay (1990) does not explicitly claim to be using a postcolonial lens, though it is directly concerned with the ideas of colony, civilization and nineteenth-century white constructions of gender and indigenous otherness. Mackenzie (1994) and Simon (2000), whose essays follow Herzog’s by several years, both overtly take up postcolonial theories and Simon in particular is interested in feminist and postcolonial re-tellings in the work of novelists Bharati Mukherjee and Maryse Condé. Herzog’s perspective, then, may have less to do with the potential of The Scarlet Letter as a key text for postcolonial critique than it has to do with the fact that the shift in American studies toward postcolonial considerations of U.S. literature is, as Singh and Schmidt note, a recent development (Singh and Schmidt 45).

135 Of particular interest to the intersection of Imperial and/or patriarchal constructions of racialized and/or gendered bodies with the Gothic, is the trope of the

Gothic monster. The monster—most famously articulated in fiction in Frankenstein— comes from what critics have identified as a deeply entrenched history as an articulation of anxieties about both race and gender. As Marie-Hèlene Huet points out, from very early in the history of the monster, Aristotle’s reasoning that women are deviations from nature makes “a decisive association between the monstrous and the female as two departures from the norm, as two exceptions to another tenant of Aristotelian doctrine, namely, that

‘like produces like.’ The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity” (Huet 85). Also on the side of dissimilarity is the racial Other. Thus, in

Pliny, we find deviation from the norm in the “monstrous peoples” who populate the central part of the world and in the observation that “a foreigner is hardly a member of the human species” (Pliny 75). Significantly for a reading of Parks in particular, then, the notion that like produces like also has a long history of linking anxieties about racial categories to anxieties about sex and reproduction.117 The idea that babies deemed monstrous due to deviations in the form of physical deformities, sexual ambiguity, or racial difference are the result of their mothers’ inadequate or excessive genetic material, narrow wombs, moral weakness, forbidden desires, and overactive imaginations occurs in scholarly and scientific writing from the medieval period through the height of the early Gothic period, and

117 A particularly striking example of this link is found in Ambroise Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels, which was very popular in the late sixteenth century, and briefly documents the case of a white woman absolved of adultery although giving birth to a black baby, because she was thought to have looked at a portrait of a Moor that hung in her bedroom while she was conceiving (Pare 38-40).

136 arguably later still.118 Certainly anxieties about race and gender collide with class to underlie the trope of the amoral, poor mother and her terrible offspring in the discourses surrounding the twentieth-century American cultural attitudes toward welfare policies and reproductive politics that Parks’s work engages (Gilliam 1999). Excessive and unfathomable, the Gothic monster exists at the center of The Red Letter Plays where it serves to critique, challenge, and complicate socially constructed notions of motherhood, abjecting those constructions so that we might confront them.

Fucking A, first produced by DiverseWorks (2000) and then brought to wider critical attention at the Public Theatre in New York three years later, tells the story of

Hester Smith, a socially outcast abortionist branded with the letter A on her chest, who is saving up to pay for her estranged son’s release from prison. Her son, who is serving time for a theft the First Lady claims he committed, escapes before his mother can free him and the play traces the unwitting intersection of their lives and his eventual reunion with his mother as he comes to her for help while on the run from hunters. The son in this play is tellingly called Monster, a label that calls into question the structures of power and difference that define someone as monstrous. In The Blood (1999), which as a written text indirectly follows Fucking A but was produced a year earlier and brought Parks a Pulitzer nomination (a prize she later won for Topdog/Underdog), also has monstrosity at its center in the form of its homeless protagonist, Hester La Negrita. This Hester is a black woman119

118 For an elaboration on the history of theories of the monstrous in this regard see particularly Huet (84-87), Park and Daston (58-59; 175-190), and Betterton (83). Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels, offers anecdotes and sketches of monstrous children (often in the form of cojoined twins, hermaphrodites, or babies with birth defects as well as animal hybrids). For his analysis of the causes see pages 4-8. 119 La Negrita, being Spanish, complicates and opens up this designation somewhat, a move that is consistent with Parks’s stated intentions to represent Blackness on stage in a way that moves

137 trying to improve her situation living under a bridge with her family. She is an object of awe and fascination even as she is vehemently shunned as an antisocial and unnatural

Other by the chorus that represents her society. Themes of monstrosity are embodied both by her and by her mixed race, differently fathered, unruly children who are made physically monstrous by the adult actors who play them. Unable to read past the first letter of the alphabet, and unable to assert herself with her society, Hester’s constant down- trodden state leads her to eventually snap, beating one of her children to death. The Red

Letter Plays, as a pair alongside the more often discussed Venus (1996), serve to mark a shift from Parks’s earlier work toward slightly more narrative plays featuring female protagonists. Venus tells the story of the relocation, exploitation and eventual death of

Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman who was renowned for her supposedly unnaturally large genitalia and buttocks, and who was exhibited as a curiosity in the early

1800s both during her life and after it in England and Europe. In all three works, verbal and visual elements evoke questions about monstrosity, appropriating the Gothic’s rich imagery to challenge the real as a social construct that normalizes misogynist and racist attitudes toward women.

That anxieties about reproduction are central to The Red Letter Plays’ exploration of these attitudes is underscored by Parks’s own account of how the plays came into being:

I had trouble writing [Fucking A] at first….At one point, I decided to change all the characters’ names and cut Hester out….Then Hester said ‘So what about the play I’m in?’ and I’m like, ‘Bitch, you’re not in a play.’ And she said ‘Oh, yes I am!’ Then it was like bleahuh! In The Blood was my alien baby, because it leapt out of my chest, you know—the writing of it was that strong, painful and scary. (Parks quoted in Fraden, 438-439).

beyond the black/white binary (Parks, Equation, 19). So, too, it references the economics of immigrants, undocumented labor, and welfare.

138 Parks’s anecdote is a Gothic birth story, complete with violent female labor, and a struggle for identity.120 There are two products of this difficult birth--two plays, two Hesters, both of them murderous mothers.121 The Red Letter Plays, then, can be seen as distorted intertextual doppelgangers for each other. Thus intertextuality functions as a kind of formal monstrosity, signaling both traumatic revision and the inability of the singular, linear text to contain the horrors it describes.122 Aliens leaping frighteningly out of chests reference Ridley Scott’s series of sci-fi horror films,123 whose treatment of “maternal bodies…as sites of abjection,” and questions of “reproduction and cloning,” lead scholars to categorize them as Gothic--and speak to the ways in which the Gothic’s articulation of anxieties about bodies and reproduction have notable traction in the twenty-first century

(Botting, Aftergothic 289). Additionally, though, Parks’s analogy also puts us in mind of

Mary Shelley, who called Frankenstein her “hideous progeny,” and whose novel is of much importance here not just as a historical point of reference for the monster and for Female gothic, but as a text that brings with it resonances that speak to contemporary social anxieties (M. Shelley 173). Written at a time when partial birth abortion was being hotly debated in Congress, when sterilization for incarcerated mothers was being encouraged by

120 This account resonates strongly with the first scene in Habitat, discussed in the previous chapter, in which birth and death and identity are all locked in struggle. 121 Here the doubling articulates what Sedgwick notes as a central organizing convention for the Gothic, live burial, in that In The Blood sprang from inside the body of the other play. For more on live burial as a Gothic convention, which for our purposes here brings to mind the containment of the child in the mother’s pregnant body, and the way in which the narrative of Frankenstein is organized, see particularly (Sedgwick 18-28). Interestingly, Fraden also suggests that The Scarlet Letter proved a difficult birth for Hawthorne, and that both Parks and Hawthorne became “so attached” to their Hesters that they “couldn’t let them go” (Fraden 441). The usurpation of birth as a metaphor to describe the creative process of male writers is certainly familiar, but it has a particularly interesting resonance here with Frankenstein as a novel about male creation/birth given that both The Scarlet Letter and Frankenstein can be read as intertexts for Parks’s plays. 122 This traumatic revision and capacity for the monstrous to spill over textual boundaries also emerges again in the work of Adrienne Kennedy, discussed briefly in the next chapter. 123 See Alien (Scott, 1979), which was followed by three sequels in the eighties and nineties.

139 prison doctors, and when the image of the welfare queen was impacting efforts toward welfare reform and reproductive freedoms for women, these plays reconfigure the monster they evoke referentially in their exploration of the place of reproduction and women— particularly women of color—in contemporary urban America.124 In order to see how they do so, we might begin, as Parks does, with what ostensibly appears to be the mother text for The Red Letter Plays: The Scarlet Letter.

I -- Hawthorne’s Proto-monstrous Hester

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) provides the seeds from which The

Red Letter Plays spring, but the plays are not so much faithful adaptations of that novel as they are unfaithful, mutant offspring. Parks’s plays share with their source an exploration of anxiety about race, gender, family and social transgressions. However, in Parks’s work those anxieties and the lens through which they are presented get significantly refigured so that Parks’s Hesters draw on their namesake, but also “displace” her (Kolin and Young 15).

The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts at what

Kristin Herzog aptly characterizes in her analysis of race in the novel as “the rough edge of

124 Legislation banning the practice known as partial birth abortion was passed in 2003 after two earlier attempts in 1995 and 1997 were vetoed by President Clinton. Welfare reform legislation introduced in 1996 established work requirements and term limits for welfare recipients. Franklin Gilliam’s work on media and public perception suggests that erroneous and widespread assumptions about the typical welfare recipient as being a black woman, established by what he terms the “narrative script of the welfare queen,” helped shaped the discourse surrounding welfare reform during the nineties (Gilliam 1999). Also at this time, advances in long-term birth control were being taken up as punitive alternatives to incarceration for welfare mothers—particularly those who were women of color—who were found negligent (M. Young 259-260).

140 civilization” (Herzog 116). The novel tells the story of Hester Prynne’s shunning from her community because of adultery, and it opens with her being released from prison and publicly humiliated on a scaffold with her illegitimate baby, Pearl. Hester is ordered to wear an embroidered scarlet A on her bodice as a symbol of her shame and banished to the outskirts of the colonial settlement, where frontier meets forest. The novel then follows the intersecting trajectories of Hester’s isolation, her refusal to name her lover and her life with her daughter, her attempts to find freedom and independence, her estranged husband’s secret quest to identify and destroy Pearl’s father, and the fatal decline of the town’s minister, Reverend Dimmesdale, due to his guilt over the affair with Hester.

Hester violates her society’s mores not only by committing adultery but also by bearing a child, making her infidelity impossible to ignore, challenging the institution of family, and creating a potential burden for society. The person seduced by Hester’s desire and sexual power, remaining unidentified, might be any man in the community, any member of any family, making the boundaries between social groups unclear. For Judith

Fryer, “Hester’s life-giving but threatening sexuality [stands] for the hazard which individuality poses to the very survival of community” (Fryer 107). Hester’s unrepentant disruption of social boundaries makes her an object of awe and fear, and her ejection from society can be seen as the attempt of that society to defend itself from the threat she poses, a theme Parks will later make central to both Red Letter Plays. For Elin Diamond, Hester’s defiant individuality is politically charged; “sexual transgression expresses and covers over the more shocking social sin of agitating for women’s suffrage” (Diamond, “Aprons” 17).

Certainly, Hester’s uncontrolled sexuality defies colonial authority, which as Helen Gilbert has noted was much invested in controlling women’s reproductivity as a means to ensure

141 the health and purity of the colony, and which, through the colonial lens, resulted in an alignment of sexual misconduct with racial otherness (Gilbert 147).125 As a crime of unauthorized female sexuality and social defiance, Hester Prynne’s behavior inhabits what

Judith Halbelstsam points to in her work on monsters and the Gothic as being one of the key sites of the monstrous: “monsters play precisely upon the boundaries that seem to neatly delineate family from class, personal from economic, sexual from political”

(Halbelstsam 30).

Sexual non-conformity marked as abject otherness comes in The Red Letter Plays, through reference and evocation, to reflect contemporary attitudes to women in poverty as straying from family values. Parks’s Hesters, like their namesake, are regarded as sexual wrong-doers and identified by marks—a branded A for Hester Smith, and the word “slut” scrawled on the wall where Hester La Negrita lives. Their crimes similarly occupy socio- political territory. In The Blood, like The Scarlet Letter, opens with a public shunning in which the chorus denounces Hester La Negrita, the protagonist, as a “shiftless, hopeless, bad news, burden to society, hussy, slut” who “dont got no skills, cept one” (Parks, Blood 6-

7) As a poor, black, and homeless single mother to five different bastards, her attempts to

“get a leg up” in a society that repeatedly takes advantage of her even as it finds her abhorrent are futile (Parks, Blood 28). In Fucking A, Hester Smith, like Hester Prynne, is also a single mother living on the rough edge of civilization in a small un-named country that we presume is a colonial outpost somewhere, where she makes a meager living doing work for the women of her town, in this case in order to regain rather than keep her child.

125 Gilbert’s observation, as I have noted elsewhere, is made in relation to Australian Aboriginality as a correlative for the sexual misconduct of white women, but the same correlative emerges strikingly in Hawthorne’s novel.

142 However, Parks makes her Hester Smith an abortionist rather than a seamstress, and her job, though similarly requiring the skills of repair and restoration, more overtly occupies the charged border between the social and the sexual, the personal and the economic, and makes her both a necessary member of her community and a despised one. What contemporary scholarship on Parks tends not to address, however, is how the visibility of

Hester’s position as a social threat in Hawthorne is reworked in Parks to align her Hesters and their scarlet letters with other Gothic monsters—a point to which I will return.126

The otherness of all three Hesters, their alienation and abjection, is evident in the way their communities shun them. In The Scarlet Letter this is perhaps most clear in the way that Hester Prynne is banished to a cottage at the edge of town, a location where one might expect to find socially suspect enterprises like brothels, and theatres, which put bodies on display and exist as specters of the social contradictions that abject them as both dangerously attractive and repellent. For Herzog, this location on the fringe of civil society speaks to the defining mood of the novel: “The dark forest is still ominously near, and the dark dangers from foreign servants, untamed children, stubborn heretics, idle Indians or hell-bound witches seem to threaten the progress of Puritan civilization’s sacred new orders” (Herzog 116). Positioned geographically on the outskirts of a vulnerable world and shown to be thriving there, Hester Prynne is linked with the unlawful and the irrational, the primitive and the antisocial--central themes of the Gothic. As Judith Fryer points out:

“Hester’s deviance from [her community’s] norms represents not an alternative community…but the wildness of the forest…[and in fact] she is more at home in the nearby forest than she is in the town; it is there that she removes the scarlet letter

126 In addition to Frankenstein’s creature, which I will discuss, visibly marked Gothic monsters also include the horrifying Bleeding Nun of The Monk, and interestingly the male but powerfully erotic/exotic figure of Bluebeard who is identified as suspect and unnatural by his blue beard.

143 and the cap which confines her luxuriant hair. Hester’s familiarity with the forest stands for the unrestrained quality of her nature” (Fryer 109; 113).

Certainly the wild, dark forest, where mysterious creatures dwell in impoverished abodes, is an archetypal Gothic image and one that uses place to align the sexually unacceptable body of Hester Prynne with the non-human despite her humanity.127

However, more significant for reading The Scarlet Letter as an intertext for Parks is that

Hester Prynne’s unchecked female sexuality is coded through her relegation to the outskirts as a dark and distinctly primitive force that is not just sexually but racially other.

As Herzog observes, “the image of the Indian appears at the beginning and at the end of the novel, and throughout the story a certain wildness and passion in Hester’s character is, directly or indirectly, identified with the American Indian” through their mysteriousness, their hidden passions, their embroidered garments, the way they stand apart from the crowd (Herzog 117). We might usefully add to Herzog’s list of identifying links the dark color of their hair and eyes, which importantly Hester also shares, and which the novel offers as a part of Hester’s unusual female beauty and appeal.

Indeed this racial othering not only makes Hester dangerous and objectionable, but paradoxically it is also the source of her power and appeal, making her in Herzog’s words

“aboriginal and awesome” (Herzog 116). Hester is an object of awe, evoking dread as well as fascination, just as apparitions, villains, and monsters often are in the Gothic, particularly

127 Often in the Gothic, forests are populated by outlaws, villains and monsters who live in ruins, hovels, caves and other makeshift shelters. Frankenstein’s monster, for example, flees civilization and takes refuge in a hovel that is set in opposition to the fine buildings of the nearby village (M. Shelley 71). Hester La Negrita’s makeshift home under a bridge offers an urban equivalent.

144 when female.128 It is racial association that puts Hester in that group, as the scene that constitutes the turning point in Reverend Dimmesdale and Hester’s reunion shows:

Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope and joy shone out...but with fear betwixt them and a kind of horror at her boldness….Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity…outlawed from society, had…wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest…. where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods…. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers— stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong but taught her much amiss. (Hawthorne 136-137)

The spatially coded moral wilderness—a familiar Gothic trope to both contemporary and early works in the Gothic mode as the previous chapter shows—equates Hester’s breech of gender norms with the primitive through race.

Problematically then, while the novel is ultimately sympathetic to Hester and questions the Puritan response to her perceived wrong-doing, her association with the noble savage motif of the Indian, while generating awe, is nonetheless affirmative of a culture that would eroticize and oppress her. As Sander Gilman notes in his study of nineteenth-century iconography, race, and female sexuality, there was at the time of

Hawthorne’s writing a hegemonic depiction of non-normative female sexuality in art and literature as excessive, exotic, and physically differentiated along racial lines. Physiognomy was thought to indicate primitiveness, and thus prostitutes were represented in art, literature and science as having thicker jaws, attached earlobes, misshapen noses, and a

128 Matthew Lewis’s scandalous novel The Monk, for example, typifies this Gothic figuration of awesome and monstrous women in the figures of the sorceress Matilda, the Bleeding Nun, and the villainous prioress, Mother Agatha. Burke’s theory of the sublime is foundational to the imagery and mood of the Gothic, as I have argued, and is well articulated in the duality assigned to The Monk’s various female figures and to Hester Prynne, all of whom are women who evoke astonishment, wonder, and fear. This is also articulated in Pearl, Hester Prynne’s child, whose otherworldliness is depicted as mesmerizing and unsettling.

145 hereditary tendency for their genitalia to become diseased, enlarged and otherwise anomalous. Such features and anomalies marked them as “atavistic throwbacks to the

Hottentot, if not the chimpanzee” (Gilman 224-227).129 The Gothic’s preoccupation with the primitive as an abject presence that compromises the civilized world emerges in The

Scarlet Letter in racially coded constructions of untoward female sexuality.

The Gothic trope of the monster similarly emerges in Parks’s Red Letter plays where it speaks back to insidious notions of racial difference as both a physical marker of sexual depravity and a justification for colonial subjugation. Like Hawthorne’s proto-monstrous

Hester, Hester La Negrita has an individual power that thwarts the rational and undoes the mandates of social institutions, resulting in a dangerous and uncivilizing force that must be brought to heel. Here, however, Hester La Negrita is specifically a woman of color and

Parks insists that we read her alleged threat to her community—a welfare worker, her friend, her doctor—as the appeal of a powerful and detestable erotic object that is racially constructed. Amiga Gringa, Hester’s ironically named white friend, articulates this when she recounts staging a peep show, the specific appeal of which is the “dirty” thrill of the transgressive offered by Hester’s race and gender: “Chocolate and Vanilla get into the ugly….Girl on girl action is a very lucrative business” (Parks, Blood 71-72).

The typical contemporary American representation of black female sexuality as

“animalistic and wanton” is a key site of struggle for black feminists, as Lisa Anderson notes

(Anderson 123), and one that, in the American postcolonial context, marks “the woman of color, unlike her white counterpart, [as] ‘doubly other’” (Singh and Schmidt 32). This

129 The so-called Hottentot is the subject of Parks’s play Venus. Interestingly, Baartman was a contemporary of Hawthorne’s, and in Parks’s oeuvre to date Venus is arguably the play most closely related to The Red Letter Plays, also focusing on a female protagonist as a site for contesting constructions of black female sexuality and challenging anxieties about women’s bodies.

146 stereotype correlates with the implicit link between sex and race offered in The Scarlet

Letter’s white construction of Hester, and is, as Brandi Catanese identifies, a stereotype repeatedly contested in Parks’s work through multiple layers of representation (Catanese

113-115).130

In In The Blood those multiple layers are rendered particularly obvious through dramatic structure, with each character having a monologue called a “confession” in which they justify their interactions with Hester to the audience. Hester La Negrita’s sexual activity is repeatedly stressed as overwhelming yet variously categorized by the other characters in the play as driven by lasciviousness, charity, or economic opportunity. The relatively powerless and inactive Hester we see (she is always tired and often in pain) is shaped and reshaped by the indulgent and often hyperbolic confessions of her abusers, and by the reactions of the characters to Hester as a figure that overpowers any ability they might have to resist her. The chorus in the prologue parts “like the red sea” when she enters and the members of her community repeatedly abdicate responsibility for their own actions in the face of what they claim as Hester’s unstoppable sexual power. When the ironically named social worker in charge of Hester’s case, Welfare, confesses to a threesome involving her husband and Hester she says “The thrill of it…I was so afraid I’d catch something, but I was swept away” (Parks, Blood 62) and Hester’s Doctor also claims in a way that draws pointedly on Dimmesdale, that he had sex with Hester because he

“couldn’t help it;” Hester is “phenomenal.” (Parks, Blood 45)131

130 Catanese’s analysis is of Venus, specifically, but she suggests this is indicative rather than exceptional (Catanese 113-115). 131 in Venus, the title character is characterized by the chorus as “a spectacle a debacle a priceless prize, thuh filthy slut” (Parks, Venus 7).

147 In The Blood’s dialogic structure, then, stages Hester specifically as constructed by language, drawing attention to the way cultural scripts inform racial attitudes in contemporary America and reinforcing Edward Said’s foundational postcolonial claim that ideas of otherness depend directly on the “western techniques of representation that make the [Other] visible, clear, ‘there’” (Said, Orientalism 1883). The monologues, delivered directly to the spectator for his or her implied acceptance or rejection, present multiple and varied accounts of Hester’s past, drawing attention to the intervention of the community as authors in the process of selecting, arranging, and editing Hester’s accumulated history.

Such a structure exemplifies Parks’s staging of the representation of black women in a way that aligns with Marxist, feminist and critical race theories that call for class, race and gender to be presented so that the processes and mechanisms that construct those categories are visible, exposing the role of selectivity in the making of cultural history.132

For Lisa Anderson, the construct of the black welfare mother is an overdetermined stereotype that is both “highly visible and invisible in American culture” (Anderson 120) and arguably it is this very (in)visibility that Parks stages by showing Hester’s identity being shaped by the forces around her. This structure is a fitting vehicle for the Gothic impulse toward deliberate omission, multiple, excessive and fragmented narratives that

132 Marxist critic Raymond Williams argues that cultural narratives are constructed as “certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain others…excluded [and] even more crucially, some…are reinterpreted…or put into forms that…do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture” (R. Williams 1429). Similarly, feminist theorists like Judith Butler point to the ways in which gender is constructed, leading some feminist theatre scholars to call for representations of women on stage that make the mechanics of their representation visible (Dolan 1-3; Diamond 43-45). Similarly, for some black feminist theatre scholars, a black feminist theatre aesthetic calls for the direct confrontation of images of black identity as projected by the dominant culture—a confrontation that can be staged through deconstruction (Anderson 116-120).

148 point to the inadequacies of “reality” to convey the sublime and terrible experiences that constitute the unspeakable heart of the Gothic story.

In the case of Hester La Negrita, the process of cultural construction is all that is visible; we don’t see Hester do anything sexual. Ironically, her supposed monstrosity cannot be adequately contained or conveyed by language, despite multiple attempts to do so. In The Blood has some overlap here with Venus, which also, as Brandi Catanese notes, contests the “reduction of black women to the sexual utility of their bodies” (Catanese 115), and does so by constructing the female body across multiple lines of sight and frames of reference so that it remains irreducible and multifaceted. But in In The Blood Parks presents Hester’s sexuality as uncanny diffraction, detaching the stories from their subject, producing Hester’s sexuality without her body. Andrew Sofer’s term “dark matter,” which as previously discussed refers to the “invisible phenomena” of theatre that are “materially unrepresented on stage but un-ignorable” (Sofer 3-4), is a fitting way to read the rendering of Hester’s unstoppable transgressive sexuality. Hester’s complicated partial invisibility exists at the border between the gaze (the audience’s, other characters’) and erasure, signifying a concern with the visibility of contemporary black women and their construction by the white gaze. It also points to what is Gothic here. As Sofer suggests,

“terror is what we know is there though it remains unseen (Sofer 5).133 The delusions, excuses and gossip that characterize the confessions of the characters—the doctor who perceives sex as charity, the welfare worker who is excited by the perverse, and the friend who claims sex with Hester was for economic advantage--that construct Hester, like the miscellaneous body parts that are stitched together to make Frankenstein’s creature, result

133 It is important to note though that Sofer doesn’t talk much about erasure as it intersects with race and/or gender.

149 in the making of a monster who is never fully visible to us, despite the fact that her sutures

(unlike Hester Prynne’s) are very much on display.

In addition to challenging constructions of black female sexuality as excessive, primitive, and potent by showing the ways these narratives are socially constructed, The

Red Letter Plays are equally concerned with the consequence of potent sexuality in the form of reproduction. Here The Red Letter Plays depart from both Venus, which deals with abortion only parenthetically, and from The Scarlet Letter, at the center of which is infidelity. Reproduction certainly has a significant presence in The Scarlet Letter in the form of the wild child, Pearl, and her mother’s fierce relationship with her, but motherhood is ultimately a redemptive and humanizing force for the adulteress, saving her from “Satan’s snare,” even though Pearl herself is often characterized as having “witchcraft in her,” being

“elfish” or having a “freakish nature” (Hawthorne 80; 79; 123; 146). Motherhood in Parks’s plays, on the other hand, evokes the monstrous.

Mothers and potential mothers are frequently significant in the Gothic, whether they be present or strikingly absent—as they are in Frankenstein--as objects of conflicted desire, awe and terror. The monstrous double and the frightening chamber--favorite Gothic tropes--can be read as signifiers for the powerful mother or the doubled and excessive pregnant body, as Kahane and Fleenor have noted. Importantly the double is, as critical race theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr. has noted, a “recurrent trope” for articulating Black experience also (Gates 2434), reinforcing the alignment of race with gender in considerations of the monstrous.134

134 Frightening mother doubles are everywhere in the Gothic from the veiled replica Emily encounters in The Mysteries of Udolpho to the various kinds of doubles that occur in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic stories about postpartum trauma. See Fleenor’s analysis of Gilman in “The

150 The association between mothers and monsters in the Gothic is, as I have noted, a particularly strong one that harks back to the classical era. The etymology of the term monster is thought variously to come from monstrare (to show) or monere (to warn) and thus can been seen to gesture toward the pregnant woman whose large misshapen body serves both to show what she has done (though conceal with whom--a recurrent dilemma in the confused, identity-obsessed world of the Gothic) and warn of the oncoming dangers posed by the inevitability and uncertainty of birth.135 Rosemary Betterton’s work on pregnancy in the visual arts points to the utility of the association of monsters with mothers for feminist critiques, noting: “the trope of the monstrous has had close connections with pregnancy,” which serves as “the most embodied and least rational of all experiences,” making it monstrous precisely because of its opposition to the masculine, rational, disembodied subject (Betterton 81).136

Hawthorne’s treatment of transcendent motherhood is clearly denaturalized and deromanticized by Parks. The themes of sterilization, infanticide and abortion in both Red

Letter Plays are rendered through bloody and corporeal tropes, such as Hester Smith’s bucket and apron, dripping from her work at the abortion table. Here the bloody apron serves as a variation on her boyfriend Butcher’s bloody apron, ironically aligning her with his profession and underscoring the economy of the world of the play as one preoccupied, as slave-based economies were, with meat and bodies as tradable commodities. So too,

Gothic Prism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic Stories and Her Autobiography” (Fleenor, Prism 227-241). And as mentioned elsewhere see Kahane’s work on Gothic mothers, which draws on doubles in Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. 135 For a more thorough account of the etymology of the term monster, see Huet (87-88) and Park and Daston. 136 Betterton is pointing here to feminist theories of the body offered by Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, and Elisabeth Grotz, among others.

151 Hester La Negrita’s much inspected, sexualized and reproductive body is also, ultimately, stained with blood. Both plays thus situate motherhood at the disturbing and blurred boundaries between life and death, and at the edge of socio-politically charged medical intervention. Thus, in Parks, the explicitly female body becomes the site for earlier anxieties about scientific technology as a tool in the control of human reproduction.

Historically, in the Gothic these anxieties played out in male-centered narratives like

Frankenstein, and later in H G Wells’s tale of vivisection and near-human hybridity, The

Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).137

Unlike Hawthorne’s rendering, pregnancy and motherhood are not transcendent in

Parks but are instead bound by the cultural power structures that control money and medicine. In Fucking A, Hester is denied access to her child, Monster, who is incarcerated and whom she is struggling to buy visiting rights to see. This contrasts with the story of the

First Lady, who, charged with providing her callous and power-hungry husband the Mayor with an heir, uses her privilege to pay for IVF in order to keep her social position. In The

Blood’s Hester is exploited by a social system that wants her sexual labor but punishes her for its consequences, a paradox indicative of the way America has embraced the tenants of colonialism by “appropriating the labor of racially defined ‘aliens’ not allowed the

‘inalienable’ rights of full citizenship” (Singh and Schmidt 5). In Bayer-Berenbaumian terms, Parks’s plays evoke the Gothic in their representation of mothers to show that

Hawthorne’s palatably constructed reality of motherhood as normalizing salvation is only one small part of a greater “monstrous” reality (Bayer-Berenbaum 21).

137 Wells’s tale is a good example of the links between Sci-fi and the Gothic. Incredibly disturbing, it features a host of Gothic themes and conventions. Though some of the animals that Doctor Moreau is using to make people-like beasts are female, the principal characters here are all male, as they are in Frankenstein, which predates it and may have been an influence.

152 One of the most striking ways in which motherhood is rendered in Gothic terms is through Parks’s trademark approach of repetition and revision, which destabilizes the trite normalized discourse of motherhood and ultimately links it to impulse, rage, and murder.

As Parks explains, “Rep & Rev” is a central element in her work in which “characters refigure their words and through a refiguring of language show us that they are experiencing their situation anew” (Parks, “Elements of Style” 9). Hester La Negrita’s repeated references to her children as her “treasures,” language that repeats and revises

Hawthorne’s use of “pearl,” take on new resonances, as the play progresses, becoming slippery, fraught and unstable with each new utterance. What starts as an expression of maternal joy at the birth of a child is repeated as the confession of an overwhelmed mother for whom treasure is an economic strain rather than something with monetary value: “my five kids. My treasures, breaking my back,” (Parks, Blood 7; 50). Treasure is repeated again as a ploy to gain financial security by appeasing Chilli, one of the fathers, whose lack of interest in children presents an obstacle to Hester’s possible marriage to him. To convince

Chilli to go through with it, Hester singles out Jabber, Chilli’s child, saying: “Jabber. Hes my treasure,” a claim she reverses again in the bloody aftermath of Jabber’s murder with the statement that her children are in fact “five mistakes” (Parks, Blood 7; 50; 89; 109).

Rep & Rev also spills out beyond the text itself, transgressing the boundaries of

Parks’s plays to emerge in the form of intertextual resonance and multiplicity, appropriating and challenging other constructions of motherhood.138 Such referential and

138 For a more detailed definition of Parks’s strategy of “Rep & Rev” see “Elements of Style” (9). Brandi Catanese notes that Venus challenges previous textual productions of black female subjectivity in part through its intertextual use of historical sources including scientific papers and a period melodrama that is adapted and staged within Venus (Catanese 125). This argument

153 polyvalent formal characteristics are typical of the Gothic, which frequently references both real and imagined texts. By raising the specter of external points of reference, Rep &

Rev clearly has the potential to evoke the uncanny through its sense of déjà vu, and Parks’s

Hesters--both of whom are distinct and unique characters in new and separate stories--are nonetheless shaped not only by each other and by Hawthorne’s novel, but also by the other

Gothic texts they repeat and revise, most notably Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Mary

Shelley’s monster narrative Frankenstein.

II -- The Mark of Frankenstein

Frankenstein, occupying as it does the place of the quintessential monster story in western culture, is a key text here, though one that Parks’s work evokes rather than one that she directly references. Fucking A, like Frankenstein, depicts human reproduction not as a happy myth but as a bloody, deadly business in which physical and psychological survival are much under threat. In the dystopian world of Fucking A, women are marginalized just as they are in Frankenstein, where women are literally banished to the margins of the novel. Despite this marginalization, women in Fucking A are necessary commodities, valuable for sex and reproduction. Hester’s job as an abortionist on the edge of society is necessary but highly problematic; as she puts it, “their troubles yr livelihood, Hester…there aint no winning” (Parks, Fucking 117). Hester’s work is shameful and conducted out of sight, and so just as Victor works away secretly in his laboratory, so too does Hester Smith supports claims that the challenge to previous textual constructions of Black womanhood is a pattern.

154 deal secretly with death and birth in her workroom. Importantly, though, the resonance here highlights difference as well as similarity: Hester’s labor, taking life in the service and employ of others, offers a stark contrast to Victor’s entrepreneurial desire to make life, appropriating women’s labor for himself. Further entwining these texts, abortion, for which the A in Fucking A stands, is a troubling motif in Frankenstein, too, seen particularly in

Victor’s ghastly dismemberment of the incomplete female monster and in the creature’s reference to himself as “an abortion” in the novel’s closing pages (M. Shelley, 155).139

The consideration of Frankenstein as a Gothic intertext for Fucking A is productive on several levels. Certainly it expands genre and genealogy beyond the well-trod paths of reading Parks’s work in terms of its Brechtian elements, or its relationship to digging up

American history, neither of which are negated, but rather are enriched by thinking about the Gothic. The resonant evocation of Frankenstein also draws our attention away from adultery as the central concern of The Scarlet Letter to reproduction, and thus offers a comparative reconsideration of the crimes of female sexuality. Frankenstein is a cultural myth with particularly strong currency in the contemporary moment—a moment in which, as Rosi Braidotti notes in “Mothers, Monsters and Machines,” “biotechnology displaces women by making procreation a high tech affair” (Braidotti 63). The National Theatre’s production of Frankenstein (2011), which was itself a high-tech event, televised live in the

US and elsewhere while playing in London, garnered a lot of attention, testifying to the persistent longevity of Shelley’s tale and its contemporary appeal. Nor was that production an isolated case; as Liz Lochhead writes in the introduction to her own Frankenstein play

Blood and Ice (2003), the Frankenstein myth is particularly potent now in “our nuclear age,

139 In Skin Shows, Judith Halbelstsam offers a compelling feminist analysis of the bloody and sexual imagery in the scene in which Victor aborts the female creature (Halbelstsam 47).

155 our age of astonishment and unease at the fruits of perhaps beyond-the-bounds genetic experimentation” (Lochhead, Blood “Introduction” vi). That Frankenstein addresses big questions about scientific intervention, reproduction, and the place of women in the future of humanity makes it clearly evocative at the close of the twentieth century.140 Parks’s unique contribution here is to locate those thematic resonances in contemporary class, race, and gender politics, exploring the cultural power relationships that impact scientific and economic interventions into birth via sterilization and abortion in particular.

Of further importance here is the fact that Frankenstein is a key text for feminist theories of the Gothic. As noted, for Ellen Moers, Frankenstein typifies the Female Gothic in that it is about the “revulsion…guilt [and] dread surrounding birth and its consequences,” funneled through the Gothic’s fantastical lens (Moers 142). Certainly The Red Letter Plays depict birth and its consequences in this light, and pregnancy in particular is posited as a key vehicle for monstrous power in both Red Letter Plays.

In Fucking A, the First Lady’s status and power as a first lady, married to the presiding mayor of the land, depend entirely on her ability to get pregnant and give the mayor an heir. When she is pregnant out of wedlock, that pregnancy is initially presented as a state to be feared and avoided; putting her in need of Hester’s services as an abortionist, which are much in demand from her typically less wealthy clientele. Indeed in one sense, Hester’s customers come to her to be cured of their monstrosity, or at least, of

140 For an interesting take on these questions consider the ending of Richard Brinsley Peake’s adaptation, Presumption or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), in which male creator and unnatural offspring are literally crushed by nature at the end of the play: “an avalanche falls and annihilates the Demon and Frankenstein.—A heavy fall of snow succeeds.—Loud thunder” (Peake 425). This is delightful as an opportunity for characteristically spectacular stage mechanics, to be sure, but the retribution implied for messing with the natural world is striking and suggests the potency of both the anxiety and the Gothic as a means of expressing it.

156 the economic, personal, and risky burden of their monstrous potential, even though it is this potential that promises the continuation of family, political institution, and arguably human life writ large. This seeming contradiction is in keeping with the paradoxical nature of the abject and the monstrous. As Betterton points out, pregnancy has a long association with the monstrous in part because the “pregnant woman, like the monster, is split with contradiction” as both threatening and desirable (Betterton 83) So too Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject sees the maternal as foundational to abjection (Kristeva 70-72; 77). In turn, abjection is monstrous; the abject is that which is neither subject nor object but is a

“nonassimilable alien” inside the body, a “monster, a tumor” (Kristeva 3-11, my emphasis).

Like Fucking A, In The Blood also positions pregnancy as a powerful but terrible state that must, according to the social fabric of the world of the play, be controlled. In In

The Blood the most monstrous category of pregnancy is specifically the pregnancy of black, poor women, bringing Gothic anxiety about race, class and traceable bloodlines to bear on contemporary assumptions about the face of poverty in America.141 Amiga Gringa, Hester

La Negrita’s white so-called friend, finds a certain economic power in pregnancy where

Hester can’t because her black babies aren’t worth selling in the context of white, urban

America—even if she were able to try.142 Somewhat ironically, although one might think a woman like Hester Smith might be seen as socially acceptable for vanquishing the threatening pregnancies of women like Hester La Negrita, as a female abortionist Hester

Smith also oversteps the bounds of social order in a way that the male doctor of In The

Blood, who prescribes Hester La Negrita’s sterilization on behalf of “The Higher Ups,” does

141 See Gilliam’s discussion of the pervasive “welfare queen script” (Gilliam 1999). 142 The idea of selling babies here evokes the economics of slavery with ironic distance. Black babies would have had some value in a plantation or slavery economy as gris for the capitalist mill, though of course the money from doing so would not have gone to the Black mothers.

157 not (Parks, Blood, 43). In both plays birth, although the territory of women, is supposed to concede its power to the authority of men, such as the dictatorial mayor of Fucking A, and the presumably white male gatekeepers of the law in In The Blood, who are in a position to impose sterilization or birth control on welfare mothers and women of color like Hester La

Negrita.143 And yet ironically, Hester Smith’s labor as an abortionist—a job she gets as the result of sentencing by the “Higher Ups”—problematically usurps male authority in much the same way that Victor Frankenstein usurps the power women have over the birthing process. Hester Smith’s affinity for dealing with female bodies, though deemed a social service, problematically excludes and resists the patriarchy.

In Fucking A, this usurpation is also, like the pregnancies it seeks to prevent, marked as monstrous, and that mark is a physical one. Hester’s weeping, stinking scarlet A labels her as unclean. Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is her socially unacceptable body, carrying like his does a visible disfigurement that speaks of rot and death, which serves to distinguish her from the society in which she lives. When Hester, who is illiterate (as

Frankenstein’s creature initially is), goes to the tavern looking for a scribe to help her with a letter to her son, the hunters drinking there are disgusted by her: “Wait for him outside.

Yr stinking up the place” they say. There is bravado in the exchange, but also fear. “Cover up yr A or something” one Hunter says, then later “She’s a babykiller, that’s what she is.”

(Parks, Fucking 145-6) Being a babykiller makes Hester an unnatural mother—pointedly not a nurturer or life-giver. Thus monstrosity is not simply a product of her identity as an abortionist but of her identity as an abortionist as it intersects with her gender. While the A

143 As Margot Young points out in her study of the impact of Norplant’s long-term birth control technology on reproductive freedoms for women of color, women on welfare have a disproportionately high rate of sterilization, as do women of color (M. Young 264).

158 serves as a visible manifestation of the rot and death that links Hester to Frankenstein’s creature, unlike the creature, who is at least predominantly male, Hester’s stinking A is, in

Freudian terms, an uncanny vagina. An indicator of her taboo sexual knowledge, Hester’s A is a wet and bloody opening to the female body that should be covered, and thus it marks her monstrous otherness as a facet of her gender.

Freud’s essay, The Uncanny, has much to offer readings of the monster in the Gothic as something once familiar that is linked with the primitive and “was intended to remain secret, hidden away, [but] has come into the open,” re-emerging in a disturbing, mutated form to “evoke fear and dread” (Freud 132; 123). In addition to drawing on the tales of

Hoffman--tales themselves closely aligned with the Gothic--Freud supports his theory of the uncanny with his male patients’ claims that “there is something uncanny about the female genitals,” a reaction Freud reads as repressed anxiety about the sexuality of the maternal body (Freud 151). What we would later identify as Freudian iconography shows up regularly in the Gothic, such as in Blue-Beard, where the secret chamber that

Abomolique forbids his virgin brides from exploring has walls that drip blood (Colman 84).

The strong correlation between the uncanny and the Gothic demonstrates that the Gothic is a mode particularly adept at articulating and confronting anxieties about gender, sexuality, and women’s bodies, suggesting that psychoanalytical concepts, such as the uncanny and the abject, might be underutilized as tools for reading Parks’s Red Letter Plays. We might attribute this oversight to the dominant association of Freudian psychology with the tenants of dramatic realism and the rejection of that form by many feminist theatre

159 scholars.144

In addition to a shared emphasis on reproduction as a ghastly, unspeakable business articulated through Freudian iconography and manifestations of the female body as a site for terror and disgust, Fucking A also conjures up the sub-conscious terrors evoked by

Frankenstein in that it deals directly with the relationship between creator/parent and monster/child. Hester is, literally, the sole parent of a murderous monster from whom she is estranged. At the beginning of the play, unbeknownst to Hester, Monster escapes from prison where he has been serving time allegedly for a litany of taboo offenses including

“murder, necrophilia, sodomy, bestiality…and cannibalism-“ (Parks, Fucking 143). He comes looking for her just as she has been trying to free him, and indeed as in Frankenstein, parent and progeny spend much of the play’s narrative in elusive pursuit of each other.

Furthermore, when Hester is finally reunited with her son at the end of the play she kills him in order to save him from the hunters, a killing that serves as an interesting echo of

Frankenstein, in which the destruction of the monster/child is also the parent/creator’s responsibility. It is further complicated here by its intertextual resonance with the slave narrative Beloved, to which I will return later in this chapter.

What is monstrous in Frankenstein, Moers argues, is not necessarily just the child

(or the parent), but motherhood itself, which she sees in the struggle between creator and creature:

The material in Frankenstein about the abnormal, or monstrous manifestations of the child-parent tie justifies, as much as does its famous monster, Mary Shelley’s reference to the novel as ‘my hideous progeny.’ Mary Shelley transform[ed] the

144 J. Ellen Gainor speaks to this problematic dismissal of realism as Freudian and therefore not feminist in her article “Rethinking Feminism, Stanislvasky and Performance (165-170). Cheryl Black’s essay “A is for Abject” is a noteworthy exception in Parks scholarship in that it takes up Kristeva’s notion of the abject, an application that will be discussed in more detail following.

160 standard Romantic matter of incest, infanticide and patricide in to a phantasmagoria of the nursery” (Moers 151).

Here too the psychological struggle of child and parent is regularly theorized in Gothic criticism through the body, making it particularly open to metaphors of the monstrous. For many feminist Gothic scholars, the mother as both a monster and a double is at the core of the Gothic. For Juliann Fleenor, the “all powerful devouring mother” is…at the heart of a female Gothic, driving plots, settings, and imagery” (Fleenor, “Introduction” 15-16),145 and for Claire Kahane “the [mother-woman] is the body, awesome and powerful, which is both our habitat and our prison…. This ongoing battle with a mirror image who is both self and other is…at the center of the Gothic structure” (Kahane 337).

With the exception of Jon Dietrick, whose essay “A Full Refund Ain’t Enough: Money in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays” takes a primarily Marxist rather than psychoanalytical approach to the relationships in Fucking A, and who notes that Monster is denied a “separate and distinct” identity, scant critical attention has been paid to the ambiguities of the mother/child relationship in Fucking A despite what I am arguing here are somewhat obvious Gothic qualities and references (Dietrick 98). Similarly, what is missing from the more dominant reading of Hester, also typified by production reviews such as Michael Feingold’s, which finds Hester “devoted,” (Feingold, March 18 2003) is that maternal devotion in fact makes her monstrous. The monstrous duality of pregnancy that

Betterton writes about, and which she cites as located in the female body’s function “both as a protective filter and as a…sensitive conveyor of impressions, shocks and emotions”

(Braidotti quoted in Betterton 83), persists beyond pregnancy, investing mothers with

145 Ann Williams aligns fear of a powerful mother with male rather than female Gothic, a difference of opinion that points to the Gothic’s defiance of easy binaries (A. Williams 107)

161 frightening power. Hester Smith’s motherlove is a dangerous force with violent consequences, particularly troubling for the ways in which it blurs the unstable borders between protector and harmer:

Just before they took him, I bit him. Hard. Right on the arm just here. I bit hard. Deep into his skin. His blood in my mouth. He screamed but then he was screaming anyway. After theyd tooked him away I went and bit myself. Just as hard and in the same place exactly. See the mark I got? My boys got one too. Identical (Parks, Fucking 166).

Hester Smith uses the frightening power of her motherlove to injure her child, to mark him as hers, biting him hard enough to leave a significant scar and making her a literal manifestation of the devouring mother.

While some kind of doubled mark or token that reveals identity is a highly recognizable convention from Shakespearean drama and melodrama—both of which

Feingold suggests as generic lenses through which to view this play (Feingold, March 18

2003)—its use here points out some of the problems of reading formal conventions in terms of genre in work as willfully intertextual and hybridic as Fucking A. Often in

Shakespeare and nineteenth-century melodrama such devices serve to restore order, such as they do in Twelfth Night and East Lynne, for example. Yet in the Gothic, which as a mode also shows up in both early modern drama and in melodrama, the convention of mistaken identity, or the existence of long-held familial tokens tends to be more fraught.146 The signification of identity in the Gothic generates anxieties associated with the instability of social categories and the highs stakes attached to misrecognition. Such stakes might include the murder or rape of a family member, as in The Monk.

Certainly the violence attached to the sign here resonates with Gothic anxieties

146 The likeness of siblings is sexually problematic in plays like The Duchess of Malfi, for example.

162 about slippery familial borders. When Hester visits the prison to have her much- anticipated picnic with her long lost son she is sent another prisoner, Jailbait, in Monster’s place. Hester hasn’t seen her son in years and clinging to the scar from the bite as a symbol of their bond, she asks Jailbait to “let[ her] see [his] mark,” (Parks, Fucking 181). Jailbait flirtatiously and slyly deflects Hester’s request, biting her playfully on her arm and then burying his head in her lap. His attempts to seduce Hester are made particularly uncomfortable by the spectator’s awareness that Hester is misreading Jailbait’s intentions because she is misreading his body as her own flesh and blood. Parks is thus using the

Gothic device of the long lost child and the mark of identity to feminist effect by disrupting social clichés about motherhood that would have a mother always recognize her child as if by sixth sense. Hester, abiding by institutional word, takes Jailbait as her son even when everything in his behavior reads to the contrary. Even when his intentions can no longer be denied, Hester doesn’t want to risk getting her son in trouble and so she tells him to stop:

“Theyd lock you up for good if they came out here and saw you getting fresh with your own mother” (Parks, Fucking 183). Jailbait cruelly reveals that he is not Boy after all, and lies about having killed him before he forces himself on Hester, who is too stunned to fend him off. Hester’s misreading and Jailbait’s ability to manipulate it lead to a rape tainted with the taboo specter of incest, which cannot be fully exorcised from one of the play’s most Gothic and disturbing scenes about motherhood. In this way, the twin scars of mother and son put the Gothic in the service of cultural criticism, pointing to the instability of the body as a readable text and suggesting that identity--even the identity of one’s own child or parent-- is complicated by circumstance rather than simply corporeally transparent.

As if to compound this point, later in the play, Hester performs a vengeful abortion

163 on the First Lady in a moment that brings abortion out of the clinical and into the bloody and passionate realm of Victor’s dismemberment of the female creature. In the process,

Hester aborts her own grandchild—the fetus resulting from a sexual encounter between

The First Lady and Monster—but conventions for identification are pointedly absent. There are no tests, no testimony, and presumably no visible markers of sameness in the undeveloped child, denying Hester the technological and legal power to navigate and determine familial, sexual, and racial identities. In a defiance of conventional expectations,

Hester never learns that she has destroyed not only the future of her family but perhaps her last bargaining chip for power and economic mobility.

III -- Hideous Progeny

Moers’s claims that contemporary writers have, since Frankenstein, continued to find the

Gothic a fit vehicle for exploring both the “trauma of inexperienced and unassisted motherhood,” and the friction between assumptions about female sexuality, and lived female experience (Moers 147-150), is well demonstrated by The Red Letter Plays. Yet such a claim is complicated by these plays, too, as they show female experience to be socially, economically, and racially contingent in a way that Moers largely overlooks. Parks’s work requires us to move beyond the largely essentialist deployment of psychoanalysis that shapes the female Gothic as a means to articulate a repressed common trauma of female identity. Yet key psychoanalytical concepts such as the uncanny and the abject have been helpful to postcolonialism too, and can have utility for Parks’s work. Cheryl Black, one of

164 the few scholars to engage psychoanalytical concepts in a reading of Parks, notes that “the concept of abjection has been increasingly deployed to illuminate cultural processes of exclusion” and thus has something to offer as a lens through which to view “the cultural criticism” of Parks’s plays (Black 34). Consequently, the psychoanalytical lens of the female

Gothic can be used to deepen rather than negate the Marxist and critical race readings that dominate Parks scholarship, focusing on her works relationship to constructions of history and racial exploitation, sometimes at the cost of significant feminist analysis, such as in the case of Dietrick’s Marxist reading. Indeed the Gothic’s polyvalent sign systems support both socio-political and personal/sexual readings, as the previous chapter makes clear.

For Jon Dietrick, the insistence on readability in The Red Letter Plays is about the socio-economic boundaries that mark citizens from each other. He writes: “the desperate and dangerous need for fixed signs and self-evident identities that obsesses Hawthorne’s characters likewise informs In The Blood and Fucking A. But Parks’s plays locate the root of this attitude in economic life” (Dietrick 89). Important for a feminist reading, economic life here is framed as a force that impacts a woman’s identity as a parent. Poverty is a driving force in these plays, with both Hesters trying to generate enough cash to support or free their children, and consequently money serves as a sign of good mothering in the worlds of the plays. Dietrick’s Marxist argument that money is the foundation of an unstable sign system that can “monstrously transform” human relations into abstraction (Dietrick 90), supports a reading of “mother” as a social category constructed and assessed along economic lines, just as wife and mistress or free man and prisoner are. Money marks the presence of an unstable border between social categories, and the act of transgressing that border can be seen, in Marxist terms, as an act of opposition to the dominant culture

165 resulting inevitably in attack (R. Williams 1433). So, too, money can be seen as an unstable border between the socially prescribed categories of good and bad motherhood, where bad mothers are written into the cultural script as a threat to the social fabric.

Certainly Hester Smith’s world attempts to keep her in her place and prevent her from transgressing social boundaries by “getting a leg up”—to use a phrase from In The

Blood. Her bloody A serves to indicate her status as someone whose abject livelihood relegates her to a particular socio-economic group just as much as it marks her as someone dealing dangerously with the irrational and unspeakable. Women’s bodies are so monstrous that they can only be discussed using TALK, a secret female language that the play’s women use to cuss and to discuss bodies and sex. Parks provides a glossary for

TALK in the text and specifies that when spoken in the play it should have “a non-audible simultaneous English translation” in production (Parks, Fucking 115).

In the postcolonial context in which it serves here, TALK functions as a vehicle for communication among subjugated members of society who are denied the ability to talk in the dominant colonial discourse. Marxist feminist Gayatri Spivak’s persistent work on the shortcomings of discourse for giving voice to the postcolonial subject has shaped much postcolonial theory and is relevant here. In “Can The Subaltern Speak?” (1999) Spivak argues that postcolonial discourse participates in a silencing and erasure of the voice of the subaltern subject, who, as a member of the “sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space,” is “a being on the other side of difference” (Spivak 2125; 2124). So too, the subaltern voice,

Spivak claims, is muted by its own efforts to communicate, which require that it start down the “long road to hegemony” in order to be heard as a citizen, and by other emancipated voices who have entered the mainstream (Spivak, 2125; 2124). For the women in the

166 world of Fucking A, the road to hegemony silences them; their bodies and experiences cannot be put into the dominant cultural language, and as subaltern subjects they are only heard by us in translation.

That the postcolonial subject position is Gothic in this way is clear enough. Here women’s bodies are treated as so monstrous that the uncanny effects of attempting to put them into language rupture the visible and audible worlds of the play. Labels and language are notoriously ambiguous in the Gothic, which trades on collapsing the boundaries between the rational/real and the experiential/unreal. Moreover, as Sedgwick points out, the Gothic tends to collapse those boundaries by attempting to put irrational and unspeakable things into words only at the cost of great violence (Sedgwick 13). Hester’s bleeding A, carved into her skin and only one letter long, certainly exemplifies this, as does the single letter A painstakingly written and rewritten in In The Blood. However, her wound also weeps when business is coming in, serving in a sense to mark others as potential economic resources, and TALK, in which Hester is necessarily proficient, provides women with some freedom to talk to each other, protecting their conversation from the ears of patriarchal power. 147 Indeed it is this uneasy ambiguity, the threat of empowerment, that makes Hester’s marked body a particularly dangerous one that must consequently be subjected to efforts to control it. Thus she is by law required to display her A at all times, a step intended to enforce borders between her and those to whom she poses a threat, exposing her, preventing her from passing.

147 The spontaneous weeping of Hester’s wound is an interesting manifestation of the monstrous as an omen, one here that plays ironically with stigmata as a Christian omen of spirituality and martyrdom, usually in women. The resonance with stigmata also evokes stigmata as the plural of stigma, in the sense of branding and negative identification. More significantly, perhaps for the Gothic, is that the spontaneous weeping also echoes the Romantic notion that matter can be affected by the power of the mind and spirit.

167 Hester’s child, Monster, is also ambivalently marked. His maternally inflicted scar is mistaken for a birthmark by The First Lady and is unfamiliar to his mother, who at first denies its message saying, “My mark looks like a heart. His looks horrid. Like a gash”

(Parks, Fucking 209). Devoid of references to iconic gang or prisoner tattoos, the script implies that Monster ironically has no scarlet letter indicating his own livelihood, and so he must be read by other means.148 Monster is first introduced to us as Hester’s “Boy,” a name that signifies his dependence on her as a child, the interruption and loss of his growing up, and Hester’s dependence on her son to make her a “a true mother” who can only be whole in his presence. (Parks, Fucking 120). However it also conjures up the lexicon of plantation owners and slavery, indicating subjugation. Here, the name Boy has a socio-political resonance as well as a familial one, complicating the battle for identity between mother and child that is central to the Gothic for theorists like Fleenor. Hester’s attempts to keep her boy, and his attempts, as a grown man, to find his own freedom are rendered particularly potent in the postcolonial context of contemporary America, a supposedly anti-colonial country where freedom and democracy are concepts permanently tainted by the colonial legacy of the slave trade and its engendering of global capitalism.149 Yet the name Boy and its multiple resonances are superseded in the written text and in the world of the play by his social function as a criminal “Monster,” and one effect of this is the overwriting of

“progeny” with “hideous.” Like Victor’s creature and unlike Hester Prynne’s Pearl, he is named as something socially abject, rather than something maternally valued, raising the question of whether monsters are born or made, and if made, then by whom and how. Like

148 We might expect an identifying mark for convicts in a world where abortionists are branded. 149 Several scholars note that America’s foundational relationship to slavery subjects it to postcolonial scrutiny (Looma 20-24; Singh and Schmidt 5; McLeod 2).

168 Victor’s creature, Monster grows into his status and becomes a monster seemingly because he is labeled as one—an act of subjugation that is offered as a given of this world, and by implication of our world, too.

However, the name Monster proves no more reliable or stable than the name Boy.

The truncated and decontextualized language of Monster’s rap sheet sends mixed messages; along with cannibalism and murder, he is supposedly guilty of the far less monstrous crime of “diddling in public,” bringing his criminality comically but forcibly into question (Parks, Fucking 143). Although he is a thief and we see him in action, robbing both his mother and the First Lady, in a play where everyone is in pursuit of money by whatever means are available (even the bounty hunters who function as the Mayor’s colonial foot soldiers, and for whom Monster himself represents money and its transformative power) stealing seems somewhat pedestrian rather than monstrous. Furthermore, the First Lady is willingly seduced by him, suggesting that whatever scarlet letter should mark him--his familial identity, his race, his criminality, his poverty--is either not particularly distinguishable, or not serving as a reliable boundary between classes. These observable contradictions support Marshall Brown’s notion of the monster in a more general sense as that which by its very nature operates beyond language at the borders of the knowable, defying easy definition and pointing to “the proclivity of names and language to mislead in dealing with unfathomable things” (M. Brown 198).

The inconstancy of names signals a border between constructions of “Monster” and

“Boy” that is highly unstable and easily crossed as Monster himself points out:

HESTER You used to be so good. What happened? MONSTER Oh—this and that. (Rest) Better a monster than a boy. I made something of myself. It wasnt hard. (He sings ‘The Making of A Monster’)

169 MONSTER: Youd think itd be hard To make something horrid Its easy. Youd think it would take So much work to create The Devil Incarnate Its easy. The smallest seed grows to a tree A grain of sand pearls in an oyster150 A small bit of hate in a heart will inflate And thats more so much more than enough To make you a monster (Parks, Fucking 218)

If “Monster” is preferable to “Boy,” arguably because monster constitutes some kind of power or freedom that boy does not, then the question is, how bad is boy? Such a question in its very unasked presence foreshadows the play’s evocation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which the category of child slave is so bad that Beloved’s mother, Sethe, would rather kill her children than see them taken into slavery. The yoking of Boy to Monster through the suggestion that boys become monsters, then, not only alludes to the history of slavery, and to the specter of an aftermath that sees escaped slaves running antisocially and lawlessly amok, but also to the contentious subjects of racial profiling and incarceration rates for black men, suggesting a comparison between the two forms of subjugation.151 While

Hawthorne’s novel, as several scholars point out, seems almost to avoid the subject of slavery with its historically inaccurate absence of slaves (Woidat 535; Simon 420), Fucking

A is haunted by it. Indeed, allusions to slavery abound: Hester is branded and labors at her society’s demand, Canary Mary, the Mayor’s mistress, is by her own account his “exclusive”

150 This reference to Hester Prynne’s offspring inverts the notion that Pearl is born precious and valuable—or even that she is innately who she is, rather than shaped by other forces. 151 A recent report from the National Association for The Advancement of Colored People cites racial disparities in sentencing practices and incarceration rates saying that “African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites” (NAACP).

170 property, and Monster’s freedom is a tradable commodity that supposedly can be bought— though only those in power are able to afford it (Parks, Fucking 122). The entwined motifs of exploitative labor, economy, incarceration, the commodification of bodies, and legalized violence all serve to make slavery an unspeakable but persistent and complex presence in

Fucking A’s allegorical world. An application of Andrew Sofer’s concept of dark matter, which functions as the invisible phenomenon around which the visible elements on stage coalesce, would suggest that slavery is a significant absent presence.152 That a haunting, absent-presence is Gothic needs little reiteration here. However, such a correlation between the unexorcized horrors of slavery and the Gothic is further strengthened by Cox’s argument that Gothic drama is largely definable by dramaturgical tensions between entrapment in antiquated systems and liberty bought with violence. (Cox, “Introduction”

19).

However, it is highly important to note that race and slavery, though strongly alluded to, remain deliberately ambiguous here. The text’s ambiguity emphasizes the unspeakability of race, and its problematic visibility, leaving much for consideration in the reading or staging of the play. How the play ultimately figures the anxious site of racial borders where monstrosity emerges may well vary in production. Nothing in Parks’s text specifies that Monster is Black, and indeed in the Diverse Works premiere in Texas, directed by the playwright, he was played by a white actor, Troy Shulze. When the play premiered in New York, Monster was played by Mos Def, a black actor. Though it was not

152 Slavery is of course the overt subject of Beloved, and interestingly these themes are common to both Morrison’s novel and Parks’s play. In Diamond’s transnational reading, this imagery is less about the history of African-American slavery in general than about the global traffic of women’s labor and bodies, which can also be seen as a kind of slavery that affects many different racial groups, and which she sees as signified by the play’s blood (Diamond, Aprons, 20).

171 the first production of the play, the New York production has in some respects become the definitive production text. Because it was staged at the Public--a well known theatre where much of Parks’s work is done--with strong performances by high-profile actors, and reviewed by the New York Times, the casting choices made for the New York production cast longer shadows than those for the world premiere. Subsequent productions have had both white actors and actors of color, complicating the play as written, and reminding us of the importance of the actor’s body as part of the play’s process of signification.153

Such textual openness is a dynamic symptomatic of Parks’s refusal to reduce characters to Black/victim, white/oppressor binaries. Productions are therefore faced with certain variables as part of what Parks calls “An Equation for Black People on Stage,” where:

“black people + x = new dramatic conflict (new territory)” and “where x is the realm of situations showing African-Americans in states other than the Oppressed by/Obsessed with ‘Whitey’ state, where the white, when present, is not the oppressor, and where audiences are encouraged to see…these dramas in terms other than the same old shit” (Parks, “Equation” 20).

Clearly the fluidity and multiple possibilities for race and Parks’s determination to stage things that resist the representation of a single black experience--a singularity which

Parks calls “bullshit”--is a significant aspect of Parks’s work, particularly as viewed through critical race theory. Brandi Catanese argues that Parks engages in what she calls transgressive black performance: “Rather than transcendent ignorance or reiteration without contestation, transgressive black performance has a historical efficacy that transforms our relationship to black presence and the black past” (Catanese 113). Parks’s

153 Dan Zeff’s review of Urban Theater’s Chicago production goes so far as suggest (erroneously) that “there is no racial element to the play” by which he seems to mean either text or production, an observation made more puzzling by the production’s multi-racial (and presumably consciously so) casting (Zeff, March 24 2012)

172 treatment of race in Fucking A is not a matter of colorblindness, so much as it is of complicating the way we read the signs of blackness by foregrounding the signs, even as it uses ambiguity to destabilize them, forcing us beyond “the same old shit” to consider the power dynamics of class and gender as well as race, and to read bodies as contextually situated at the intersection of multiple forces. A strategy of ambiguity sits well with the

Gothic as a means to undermine assumptions, and articulate and generate anxiety about that which is not fully known or knowable.154

One particularly ambiguous body is that of Lulu, Butcher’s daughter, whom we meet only through description in a scene in which Butcher and Hester bond over their incarcerated children. Interestingly, Lulu is presented as the worst monster in Fucking A, a progeny so hideous we never see her, rendering her racial background at best only partially readable in the skin color of the actor playing Butcher (which is unspecified). Her gender, however, appears fixed and is clearly at the heart of the problem. She is a “bad seed” from birth according to her father, a claim that contributes further to tensions between claims that monsters are birthed or made (Parks, Fucking 160). A stunning single- sentence, page-long monologue, whose moments of dark humor unsettle the play’s tonal register, provides a litany of transgressions that Monster’s female double is guilty of:

“selling herself without a license, selling her children without a permit, unlawful reproduction, having more than one spouse, claiming to have multiple parents, claiming to

154 While ambiguity contributes to the exposure and amplification of ambiguity that is key to the Gothic’s generation of fear and unease, it has been a frustration for critics who have failed to read the play as engaging a Gothic sensibility. Michael Feingold, reviewing the New York production, suggests the play falls short of greatness because the “social and political set up…barely rates a mention” (Feingold, March 18 2003). The New York Times’s Ben Brantley hints at a similar dissatisfaction with the play’s allegorical non-specificity when he calls “tedious” the play’s noted setting as a “small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere” (Brantley, March 17 2003).

173 have multiple orgasms…standing on one leg in a two-legged zone, jumping the turnstile, jumping the turnstilee” and the list goes on to conclude with “envisioning the future, remembering the past, speeding—huh” (Parks, Fucking 160-161).

Here the female monster is presented, as indeed she is in Frankenstein, as an ungovernable and uncontainable threat that must be erased because of her reproductive potential—so great a threat in fact that she is kept off stage, making Butcher’s description of her particularly striking in a play in which the visibility of monsters is at issue. Theatre is, after all, a visual medium, but as Kathy Sova notes in an interview with the playwright,

Parks is notable for her tendency to “write about what’s not there, what we don’t see”

(Sova 99). Lulu’s invisibility, then, comments most specifically on erasure as it applies to gender, even as it is compatible with what Harvey Young and Philip Kolin rightly note as

Parks’s ongoing “investigation into why and how black figures have been erased from history” (Kolin and Young 4). Because many of Lulu’s crimes involve reproduction, the implicit charge that she is a bad mother coupled with her striking invisibility is particularly poignant in a play about abortion. As Betterton notes, the dominance of the ultrasound image and the subsequent erasure of the mother’s body in pro-life political campaigns have been key sites of struggle for feminists such as Barbara Duden, Peggy Phalen, Carole

Stabile, and others. Indeed, we might further consider the privileging of the fetus over the invisible mother here in terms of Sofer’s work on phenomenal invisibility in drama

(Betterton 92; Sofer 3-5). Lulu’s invisibility aligns her with the trope of the powerful but absent Gothic mother (including her own) as well as with the invisibility of incarcerated mothers (mothers of color and white mothers alike) and of other women whose pregnancies are considered socially problematic. Her invisibility is thus highly significant,

174 even as it may account for why she is erroneously overlooked in extant criticism.155

The monologue’s structure as one uninterrupted sentence, piling image upon contradictory image, points to the sublime and awesome nature of the monster as a creature that is excessive, powerful, self-contradictory, and elusive, and thus the monstrous can be seen as a thematic element that structures the language of the Gothic text as well as one that inhabits it, underscoring its significance for Parks’s dramaturgy.

IV -- Hybridity and the Monstrous Gestus

Formal monstrosity has always been amongst the most striking and purposeful features of the Gothic, emerging in its unstable tone and its often hybridic and non-linear structure, a form that aligns it with certain definitions of postcolonialism that offer the term as a “name for certain textual moods (ambivalence), style (hybridity) and tendencies

(interdisciplinary)” (Singh & Schmidt, xvi).156 The Red Letter Plays’ intertextuality, their polyvalent language, shocking sex and violence, moments of dark humor as well as their mix of generic devices and influences, align them with both this view of postcolonial writing and with Gothic dramas like Colman’s Blue-Beard, which, with its own mix of

155 Christine Woodworth offers an unusually detailed study of the representation of children in Parks’s work and makes the helpful observation that sometimes they are “seen and not heard or heard and not seen,” but unfortunately she does not consider Lulu in this light (Woodworth 141). At the time of this writing, the most recent report, “State of Abortion,” from the National Right To Life Committee (1/21/14) features photographs of an unborn child but no photographs of the pregnant woman that is presumably carrying it (NRTLC.org 1/21/2014). 156 Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt are summarizing a view of postcolonialism as a mood, style and tendency that they suggest is rooted (in more complex ways) in the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha.

175 playful puns, horrific spectacle, music, political commentary, and dramatic struggle has many elements in common with Fucking A. Despite its popularity, Blue-Beard was one of many Gothic dramas routinely criticized as unoriginal for its appropriation of existing stories and as a jumbled “patchwork of Buffoonery” due to its tonal variety in the form of humorous songs and moments of terrible spectacle (‘Monthly Mirror’ in Cox and Gamer

332). Fucking A elicited a more respectful response, but criticism of the Public Theatre production, such as Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times, locates the play’s flaws in its non-uniformity, conscious artificiality, and “awkward” mix of forms. Brantley writes:

“The script awkwardly mixes Brechtian distance with the kind of intense social melodrama associated with Clifford Odets. Mr. Greif…hasn't steered his performers into a uniform style, which is essential in putting over a work this consciously artificial… Ms. Rubin-Vega [who plays Canary, Hester’s friend and the Mayor’s mistress] adopts a sassy, B-movie attitude that doesn't jibe with the goofy, cartoonish style of Mr. Cannavale's colonialist Mayor” (Brantley, March 17 2003).

Brantley’s assumption that uniformity is “essential” privileges homogeneity and overlooks the possibility of excess and juxtaposition as strategies that disrupt audience expectations and comfort, both at the level of text and performance. Similarly, a recent Chicago review felt the play had a “disjointed narrative” that relied on shock with “bits of humor” and

“attempts to liven the bleak atmosphere by occasional insertions of music,” (Zeff, March 24

2012). In both reviews it would seem the problem is not only that the play fails to be homogeneous but that in that failure it feels inorganic, not believable—not real. As Cox notes: “trailing its debts to the novel, to other literary forms, and to developing tactics of stage sensationalism, Gothic drama was seen as an impure generic hybrid, a kind of monstrous form, oddly appropriate to the chamber of horrors it displayed on stage” (Cox,

176 “English” 128).157 And certainly Fucking A’s blatant and bloody depiction of oppression, hatred, poverty and violence counts as a chamber of horrors.

To read Parks’s The Red Letter Plays as modally Gothic helps to overturn the dissatisfaction that comes from attempts to read them from a pure, generic standpoint, as scholars such as Carol Shafer have attempted to do (Fraden 435; Schafer 182).158 Schafer’s arguments for classifying In The Blood as classical tragedy and Fucking A as Brechtian epic are problematic because they become bound by the rules of those forms. Thus she reads

Hester Smith’s rape at the hands of Jailbait as an alienating device, which closes off an alternative reading of her response as one consistent with paralyzing grief and deep shock—a shock that might also shock and move the audience (Schafer 197). J. Ellen

Gainor’s warning that “the privileging of Brechtian dramatic techniques [in feminist theory] has had a profound influence on both feminist dramaturgy and on feminist critical praxis” might be brought usefully to bear here (Gainor, “Rethinking” 173). This moment, where

Hester is unable to do anything more than flick at Jailbait’s hands occasionally “as if she were flicking at flies” while he rapes her, is well served by realism as a mode of representation, and has more in common with the powerless grief of a mother in Beloved than it does with the political strategies of Brecht (Parks, Fucking 184). Just a few pages in to Toni Morrison’s novel, we learn of Sethe’s emotionless coupling with the engraver, who coerces her into sex in the graveyard as payment for the seven letters carved on the headstone of her dead baby girl (Morrison 5). Similarly, Schafer’s claims that In The Blood is classical tragedy require her to locate a tragic flaw in Hester La Negrita that reduces the

157A hybrid lion with human heads was the basis for a popular cartoon for the “monstrous melodrama,” considered an abhorrent formal blend of tragedy and gratuitous spectacle at the height of the Gothic. (Cox and Gamer, xi) 158 The way this claim for genre aligns Hester with Medea is also problematic, as I discuss later.

177 role of social forces and overlooks the play’s many Brechtian elements, suggesting, for example, that the chorus must function as it does in Euripedes, not as it might in Brecht

(Schafer 190; 192). To read In The Blood and Fucking A as working in the Gothic mode not only adds to what Cheryl Black identifies as “a burgeoning body of genre criticism” on

Parks’s work, but importantly it also complicates notions of genre that tend to privilege certain formal conventions or affective and tonal registers (Black 32). In this way the

Gothic mode makes sense of Parks’s formal variations as reflecting the excess, unnerving uncertainty, and anxiety about hybridity that the plays deal with thematically at the intersection of race, class and gender.

The hybrid violates boundaries, and has for centuries brought together anxieties about race and procreation through the trope of the monster.159 As Harry Elam points out in his analysis of race in The Red Letter Plays, hybridity is an index of cultural power and position (Elam 116). Certainly Parks’s exploration of hybridity exercises what Helen Gilbert identifies in postcolonial literature as a critique of imperialist regimes in which “unruly women become particular sites of anxiety because their failure to control wanton sexual urges threatens to actualize the possibility of miscegenation” (Gilbert 154). In the context of contemporary urban America this unruly reproductive mother is typified, as feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins notes, by the image of the Black welfare mother, who

“represents a woman of low morals and uncontrolled sexuality” (Collins 84). The threat of mixed-race children in this context positions the Black woman’s motherhood as both an appropriation of and a drain on white resources. Elam’s reminder that “the original meaning of hybrid is…pejorative. It designated the progeny of genetically disparate

159 See particularly, Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels which features sketches of hybrids such as “Figure of a child, part dog” (68) and “picture of a Triton, and Siren, seen on the Nile” (Pare, 108).

178 parents” is an important one for the consideration of the contemporary Gothic, particularly as it intersects with postcolonialism and feminism (Elam 120). Indeed as Bruce Simon argues in his postcolonial reading of Hawthorne, “if there is one word postcolonial theory has disseminated throughout the U.S. academy and beyond, that word is hybridity” (Simon

412). Hybridity crosses and erases boundaries and while it may be taken up as a way of talking about multiculturalism or desegregation, it remains a highly charged word tainted with scientific racism, eugenics, biological supremacy, and antimiscegination (Simon 414-

415). The dangerously charged idea of hybridity as it relates to race and gender shows up in the Gothic across periods; anxieties about reproductive purity are constantly worked and reworked through the tropes of transgressive sex, racial uncertainty, and monstrosity, which intersect emblematically in Frankenstein’s unnaturally bred composite of implicitly racially different corpses, with its “yellow skin,” “lustrous, flowing black hair,” “pearly white teeth,” “straight black lips” and “dun white eyes” (M. Shelley 34).

Racial uncertainty is at issue in figurations of reproduction and cultural power in

Fucking A that we can thus see as postcolonial. The First Lady is obligated to produce an heir for the Mayor so that he might expand and strengthen his regime, as is suggested by the Mayor’s reference to his sperm as “an army” that will “lay down their lives” for the state

(Parks, Fucking 128-129). In the middle of the play, when the First Lady discovers she is pregnant with Monster’s child, she considers keeping it and passing it off as the Mayor’s, saying “one seed is as good as another. And when the husband resembles the lover he wont be none the wiser” (Parks, Fucking 191). In a production where Monster is Black and the

Mayor is not—which seems a likely configuration--the possibility of a mixed race baby hangs in the air. The unspoken threat that Monster’s child poses is directed not just at a

179 marriage but also at the social structures of power, succession, and privilege in which that marriage exists.160 Parks’s use of the Gothic here draws on familiar postcolonial and feminist territory, staging what scholar Anne McClintock notes as a particular anxiety of the

British colonies—and, for my purposes here, one worth noting as prominent during

Hawthorne’s era—namely that “controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity, and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic” (McClintock 47). By intertextually referencing anxieties about empire-building and reproduction in the colonial/postcolonial context of The Scarlet Letter, Parks draws allegorical parallels to contemporary America that raise questions about who gets to reproduce and why— questions that challenge constructions of the U.S. as anti-colonial.

As with Fucking A, there is some ambiguity about the race of Hester’s lovers in In

The Blood, but what is most significant here is the way in which In The Blood stages the fluidity of race in contemporary America through the hybridic nature of Hester’s children.

Because the play calls for the actors who play Hester’s children to also play the adults who manipulate and oppress her, the children appear excessive not just because there are five of them but because they are embodied by adult bodies, and therefore monstrous, over- sized, unnatural, like Frankenstein’s monster whose “stature…exceeds” acceptable limits

(M. Shelley 65). Importantly, this doubling complicates the children’s identities, blurring lines between child and adult, and reminding us that they are constructions embodied by

160 In The New York premier, the Mayor was played by Bobby Cannavale, who is Italian and Cuban. A recent production in DC cast Asian and Indian actors as the Mayor and the First Lady, and a Black actor as Monster. Other productions at UC Berkeley and the Lida Project in Colorado have both cast white actors in the role of Hester, though Monster in the UC Berkeley production is played by a black actor. The Urban Stages production in Chicago had a large, racially diverse cast of black, latino/a and white actors.

180 actors and thus already multiplicitous. 161 Though Chilli is the only adult character the play actually suggests as the father of one of Hester’s children, all of the adult characters with whom Hester’s children are doubled stand in as lovers. However, even more significantly, the abnormal and contradictory signification of these bodies in undermining singularity underscores that Hester La Negrita’s children also fail to fit easy racial categorizations. It is not only their size but also the fact that their size highlights their excessiveness as a factor of their hybridity—both real bodies and constructed fictions, both adult and child, both oppressor and oppressed—that marks the children as monstrous.

The play’s world premiere at the Public Theatre in 1999 featured a mixed race cast, and notably Chilli in that production was played by Rob Campbell, a white actor, making

Jabber white too. Though other productions might cast differently, Amiga Gringa is specifically white, and as Cheryl Black astutely observes “the Amiga/Beauty doubling is textual evidence of at least one sexually taboo relationship” between Hester and a white man, that repeats and revises Hester Prynne’s progeny with a socio-historically contingent anxiety about race and cultural identity in contemporary America (Black 37). For Elam, In

The Blood engages in a “postmulticultural” moment that “offers space for new explorations of cultural and ethnic hybridity,” by staging the “fluidity of race and underscoring the problematic nature of racial categorizations” and revealing Hester’s problems (and, I would argue, the overlooked problems of her children) to “simultaneously involve and obscure race” (Elam 116-117). As Elam reminds us, Mulattos were historically marked with scarlet letters to identify them as “aberrant products of ‘illegitimate’ liaisons between slaves and

161 The use of doubling to disrupt the linear and singular narrative and thereby reveal narrative, identity (and history) to be constructed is certainly one point of formal overlap between Churchill and Parks that points to the shared thematic and political territory of institutionalized power and oppression. More on Churchill to follow.

181 their white masters” (Elam 120). Furthermore, by displaying the A not on Hester’s body but on the ambiguously public/domestic wall of her home, “Parks shows that Hester’s marginalization impacts her entire family” (Woodworth 147)--including her impure and monstrous children.

Parks’s treatment of the monstrous child situates her in a contemporary feminist tradition that finds expression in a variety of geopolitical locales and moments and includes playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy (whose children in A Rat’s Mass (1967, 1988) are part rat),162 Australian playwright Hilary Bell (whose plays Wolf Lullaby and Fortune depict unusual child figures) and Caryl Churchill, upon whom more will follow. Parks, like some other playwrights whose work makes a rich and important contribution to feminist theatre, doesn’t consider herself as writing feminist plays: “To me it’s not a critique, it’s a show…I like to see characters who are complex…clichés are dumb. And I don’t think that’s feminism, that’s just intelligence” (Parks quoted in Savran, “Suzan-Lori” 93). Nonetheless,

Parks’s plays have what David Savran suggests is “feminist content” (Savran, “Suzan-Lori”

93), and arguably they can and should be considered in terms of a feminist genealogy that includes politically motivated approaches to staging, and to reading as well as text.

Sharing the Gothic’s concern with the disruption of (masculine) order, Elin

Diamond’s theory of feminist mimesis allows us to read certain Gothic elements in contemporary drama heuristically, making visible Gothic signifiers, feminist signifieds and the chain of dramatic and social signification that links them. For Diamond, feminist

162 Incestuous children, hiding in the house in A Rat’s Mass also appear in the popular novel Flowers In The Attic. Kennedy’s play and V.C. Andrews novel have very little in common in terms of audience, language, political meaning, or narrative form (rats and flowers are pretty different, after all) but they do both qualify as Gothic because they evoke terror and pleasure through their exploration of the taboo, and their shared central motif (incestuous/perverse/monstrous children in a secret chamber) resonates with the abject and the uncanny.

182 mimesis is “a mode of reading that transforms an object [line or tableau] into a gestus.” The gestus demystifies theatrical representation, working against the assumed singularity of conventional realism to reveal the apparatus of representation and calling for meaning to be “produced in engaged interpretation” (Diamond, Unmaking ii).163 The gestus is “that moment in theatrical performance in which contradictory social attitudes in both text and society are made heuristically visible to spectators,” and we can perceive both the distinguishing marks of the past in making the object, and our own present perception, with all the implications for change that gap might offer (Diamond, Unmaking 49; 77).

In The Blood deploys the gestic device of doubling to disrupt and contextualize notions of female monstrosity, transforming the bodies of Hester’s mixed-race children into monstrous hybrids, making the invisibility of socio-historical constructions of miscegenation visible. In so doing In The Blood contributes to a genealogy of feminist theatre that includes not only Adrienne Kennedy, but also writers like Australian playwright Alma DeGroen and British playwright Caryl Churchill, both of whom offer clear examples of the gestus as an articulation of monstrous mothers and children, and both of whom have written postcolonial feminist drama that makes use of the Gothic.164

Alma de Groen’s The Joss Adams Show (1970), like In The Blood, addresses unassisted motherhood, the fetishizing and demonizing of mothers, and socially contextualized infanticide. Written while de Groen was living in Canada, The Joss Adams

163 The gestus is, arguably, a recurring feature of Parks’s dramaturgy and several moments in Venus could be described as Gestic. While Top Dog / Under Dog may be the play of hers most invested in the dominant theatrical conventions of realism, Lincoln’s act of taking off and putting on his white face and costume is arguably a moment of gestus in which we see the intersection of a character undressing after a day at work and a suddenly apparent vision of the nexus of racial exploitation, political history, and minstrelsy (Parks, Topdog 9). 164 Interestingly, De Groen, like Parks, sites Kennedy as a significant influence on her work. (De Groen quoted in J. Palmer 167) and (Parks, Adrienne 60)

183 Show was first workshopped at Stanford in Ontario in 1970 and then produced in Australia

(where New Zealand born De Groen is based) at the then recently opened Pram Factory, a horse-stable-turned-factory-turned-blackbox theatre which accommodated a little under

150 people in a working-class section of Melbourne. The Pram Factory, home to the

Australian Performing Group (APG) and now an icon of Australian theatre history, quickly became known for more experimental work and a commitment to producing plays by

Australian writers. They also had a commitment to producing more work by women, which was highly unusual at the time.165

In this play, which Australian theatre scholar Elizabeth Perkins describes as “a compelling piece of theatre” that “encourage[s] the [audience] to see Joss’s history as an entertaining horror show,” Joss appears on set at a TV interview carrying her six-week old dead baby in a canvas bag (Perkins 31). Joss’s husband, Neil, sits at home entirely unimplicated by society and eating while he watches his wife literally holding the bag and displaying it so the people at home “can take a peek” (De Groen 202). As in Venus, Joss is displayed as a sideshow freak—a commodity subjected to the morbid scopophilic desires of implied and actual spectators. Throughout the nonlinear sequence of scenes that follows,

Joss carries the bag, which doubles as a handbag, a bag of groceries, etc., as the play pieces together a collage of moments surrounding Joss’s pregnancy and infanticide. The bag is a strikingly gestic object, its multiple and socially contingent meanings coexisting as it transcends narrative temporality as a constant but shifting reminder of death and violence

165 The Pram Factory, which opened in 1970 at the same time as the other pillar of home-grown, experimental, and political theatre, the Nimrod in Sydney, was unusual in their commitment to producing women in a very male-dominated Australian theatre scene. They can’t really be called a feminist theatre, in the sense that WOW Café might be described, but like the Royal Court, they did produce some controversial and feminist plays, Joss among them.

184 in the theatrical present. Just as any banal female accessory might be read as an index of identity, the bag shows dead baby Susan and her monstrous mother as uncanny social constructions--like Hester and her children--assembled by a society that won’t help them and a culture that fetishizes them. Indeed De Groen is specific about her intention to debunk the monstrous mother as constructed by media and society, saying, “I…wanted to provide…a talking point so that people could see this woman’s point of view and realise

(sic) that she wasn’t a monster” (De Groen quoted in J. Palmer 166).166 In this way, the monstering of Joss functions as a Gothic interruption that undermines the social constructions of motherhood that otherwise comprise the mundane world of the play and its reflection of late twentieth-century attitudes toward gender and motherhood in

Australian culture.

Such a realization comes, as Perkins astutely notes, from the play’s investment in disrupting “absolutist notions of reality, the assumption that an objective reality actually exists” (Perkins 32)—an investment that aligns De Groen’s dramaturgy with Bayer-

Berenbaum’s vision of the Gothic. In a move that is therefore Gothic and feminist and

Brechtian and indexes realism, the Joss Adams Show stages impossible realities and collapses borders between mundane existence and nightmare visions of rape, birth, entrapment and violence. For Perkins, “The Joss Adams Show must justify its own part in displaying Joss….and it does [so] through its non-realistic dramaturgy” (Perkins 32).

166 Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s play The Crackwalker, first produced at Theatre Passe Murraille in Toronto (1980) is also quite Gothic in its treatment of unassisted motherhood, mental illness, and the social conditions that lead to infanticide. The Crackwalker, like In The Blood, explicitly explores the notion of the unfit mother, and though in this case the baby is killed by its father, like De Groen’s play, Thompson’s play also stages the dead baby in a bag (Thompson, Crackwalker 76-77) but here the device is not Gestic and indeed Thompson has claimed to work in a way that is “the opposite to Marxism” (Zimmerman 15).

185 Though it was not “conceived as a feminist play,” (Perkins 31)167The Joss Adams Show’s

Brechtian aesthetic and Gothic thematic concern with the instability of reality render it very readable as a feminist play situated in the context of a postcolonial society where the specters of institutionalized oppression, entrapment, displacement, inequality, reproduction as domestic service, and unhomeliness linger unbanished over the experience of women in patriarchally constructed interiors.

Caryl Churchill also regularly uses Gothic tropes and imagery in the service of the feminist gestus, and although she is rarely discussed in relation to Parks, their dramaturgies bear significant similarities. In Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), the Gothic and gestic character is Angie, the sixteen-year old bastard daughter of Marlene. Given up at birth (a fact which is kept from Angie), Angie has been raised in the suburbs by Marlene’s sister, Joyce, while Marlene pursues a career as an employment agent. Angie is about the age her mother was when she became a mother, and like Parks’s Beauty or Jabber, Angie is in the process of transgressing the boundary between child and grown up, an ambiguous and unsettling transgression that is, as it is in Parks, marked by the Gothic and the monstrous. Desperate to escape her stunted life in the suburbs as Marlene appears to have,

Angie fantasizes about killing her mother (Joyce) and fashions herself as a creature of

Gothic horror, licking menstrual blood off her friend Kit’s finger, saying: “Now I’m a cannibal. I might turn into a vampire now” (Churchill, Top 90). Angie wants to be a monster, and the play conflates this desire with her desire to be a grown up “top” girl, a point that warrants elaboration in the next chapter. Like Parks, Churchill uses doubling to

167 De Groen has said that she doesn’t purposefully have a feminist agenda in her work and that she has “never thought of [her]self as having a particular commitment to write about women’s problems” (De Groen in J. Palmer 165).

186 theatricalize the monstrous contradictions of the child/adult by having the same actor play

Angie as plays Dull Gret, an awkward historical figure in an apron and armor, whom

Marlene invites to a fantasy dinner party in the first act of the play.168 Angie, not invited to the fantasy dinner party, doesn’t fit the top girl ideal, and her failure to do so is presented as a gestus in one of the play’s most striking images as Angie, performing for her aunt, puts on an old, best dress that she clearly loves. The dress, a gift from Marlene, is ill-fitting and not appropriate for anything Angie might ever do, and it turns Angie visually into a misshapen freak, too big and awkward for the delicate femininity of the costume. In a moment that exemplifies Diamond’s observation that “the gestic moment in a sense explains the play, but it also exceeds the play” (Diamond, Unmaking 53), we see that

Marlene’s world is never going to be a fit for Angie. The social conditions the gestus performs are those that suggest women grow into their feminine roles; that things that fit are worthy of desire and things that don’t—like Angie, like Hester’s family—are monstrous.

In Top Girls we see those attitudes fully realized historically, culturally, theatrically, and personally in the jarring figure of Angie, functioning as a Gothic and gestic interruption to the mundane “reality” of the world.169

To consider Parks alongside Churchill and DeGroen situates some of Parks’s dramaturgical strategies as belonging to a feminist genealogy of theatrical representation.

Verna Foster’s analysis of maternal rage in The Red Letter Plays, which constitutes one of

168 Dull Gret is based on the subject of Brujl’s painting, “Dulle Griete” in which a woman chases devils out of hell. She is, in Top Girls, a strange figure, not quite fully formed somehow and quite disturbingly at odds with the rest of the articulate, specifically situated historical figures attending the event. 169 Churchill also uses doubling to jarring effect in Cloud Nine, another decidedly postcolonial and feminist play, and one in which awkward costuming again draws attention to the “fit” of gender roles, particularly through the doubling of Clive with a young girl.

187 the few pieces of scholarship to interrogate the role of the mother in Parks’s work, suggests that In The Blood’s doubling helps highlight a mother’s rage as a function of social conditions. She writes: “When Hester finally breaks down and batters her beloved child to death, she is really striking out at all the trials she has been made to endure….In fact, since

Jabber is played by the same actor as Chilli, the audience sees Hester killing the father as well as the son” (Foster 81). While Foster’s reading comes close to overlooking both

Jabber’s and Hester’s own complicity in Hester’s suffering, the point that doubling serves to offer the child as an uncanny and monstrous double for social injustices—and for us, and for that same child in the future—is a good one and made clearer by a consideration of feminist mimesis. This moment is highly readable as a gestic moment that makes visible both the theatrical apparatus of representation and the historical and cultural forces that shape the representation of Black mothers, non-normative motherhood, and mixed-race children.

V -- babykillers

Both Fucking A and In The Blood portray worlds, like the world of Frankenstein’s creature and the world of Pearl, in which monstrous offspring have no place. Hester Prynne contemplates exactly this problem: “The world was hostile. The child’s own nature had something wrong in it, which continually betokened that she had been born amiss,--the effluence of her mother’s lawless passion,--and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness

188 of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little creature had been born at all”

(Hawthorne 113).

In In The Blood, however, despite Hester La Negrita’s conflicted wavering between her kids being “mistakes” she should never have had and her “treasures,” the problem of whether the world should contain monstrous children or prevent and eliminate them is presented not just as a mother’s personal dilemma but as an issue of social and economic concern. “Riffing” on the image of the welfare queen, as Diamond has put it, Hester is a threat because public money might be used to support not only her poor, mixed-race, bastard children but also the supposedly bad mother who bears them (Diamond, “Aprons”

16). From the outset Hester complicates the bad mother stereotype of the welfare queen as a promiscuous, immoral, lazy and excessive Black woman.170 For one thing Hester fails to manipulate the system and struggles throughout the play to “get a leg up” a sexually loaded term that offers ironic contrast to the ways in which she is manipulated, often through sexual transactions initiated by others (Parks, Blood 43). As Diamond notes, “Hester’s prolific maternity makes her a debtor,” and for women in Hester’s position, sex is a means of trying to pay those debts (Diamond, “Aprons” 19). Sex and Motherhood are inextricably bound. Throughout the play Hester’s construction as a good/bad mother is problematically yet strategically inconstant, not only in her own attitude to parenting but in the ways in which her string of doomed sexual transactions present her as a nurturer, most strikingly in the Doctor’s account of Hester as “very giving very motherly very obliging very

170 Cheryl Black offers a brief but helpful summary of the stereotype and its falsity that points to excess as a key anxiety (Black 36). See also Gilliam’s study of the perpetuation of that stereotype in the media, and Patricia Hill Collins, in particular chapters 4, 6 and 8.

189 understanding very phenomenal. Let me cumm inside her. Like I needed” (Parks, Blood 45, my emphasis).

The Doctor, however, like almost all the characters in the play, embodies the cultural hypocrisy that makes a society dependent on those citizens it abjects, and thus he calls for “the removal of [Hester’s] womanly parts,” because her kids are “five strikes against” her already (Parks, Blood 43, 41).171 The chorus agrees: “5 bastards and not a penny to her name somethings gotta be done to stop this sort of thing” (Parks, Blood 7).

Poverty, represented as a value system by which mothering can be judged, makes sterilization a means to alter Hester’s worth, changing her debt to society and in the process making Hester a better mother by un-mothering her.172 Here Parks’s confronting

Gothic imagery at the end of In The Blood, as Hester is imprisoned for infanticide, asks us to link the metaphorical gigantic and portentous hand of fate that Hester sees coming down on her with her own hands, soaked in the blood of her dead child and her own surgery.

Parks’s use of Gothic imagery to address imprisonment and terminated reproductive agency reflects the contemporary moment very well here. The Center for

Investigative Reporting recently found that 148 women were sterilized in California prisons between 2006-2010, and that while medical administrators felt that “there was no

171 Interestingly, it is also a doctor who takes sexual advantage of his patient and insists on repeated abortions in Venus. This articulation of the female body as both a site of conquest and a source of threat is recurrent in postcolonial drama as Gilbert and Tompkins point out: “enforced sterilization,” and the “medical management of pregnancy and childbirth” bring “the bodies of indigenous women under control” (Gilbert and Tompkins 1069). Though Gilbert and Tompkins scope of study does not include the USA, it is clearly applicable here, although the black bodies are not indigenous. 172 Dietrick also makes the observation that in what he aptly terms a “reproductive economy,” where babies are commodities with dollar values, a black baby isn’t worth as much as a white one (Dietrick 91) However, it is worth noting that Hester seems neither to understand how to engage this economy nor to be particularly motivated by profit. Amiga’s babies are viewed as investments; Hester’s are “treasures,” a metaphor that evokes a different scale of currency and shows Hester’s alienation from her world.

190 intent to coerce the women into sterilization because of their race, ethnicity or troubled past…nobody at the prison had any intention of doing anything but what was in the best interest of the women,” some inmates reported being “tricked” (McGreevy, LATimes.com).

As if In The Blood were itself a portentous omen of things to come, one woman’s story closely echoes Hester’s: “As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date the more he talked about it. He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn’t do it” (Christina Cordero, quoted in Liss-Schultz, msmagazine.com)

In its treatment of sterilization as an issue to control race and class, Parks’s play resonates with Victor Frankenstein’s penultimate dilemma that if he makes the Creature a mate, as requested, “a race of devils might be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (M.

Shelley 114). The fear expressed here is in part a fear of colonization by the formally colonized Other, a fear of being out-numbered, a fear rehashed by the welfare debates. The crime is not just in having monstrous children but also in allowing those children to multiply and breed subsequent generations. Worse still is the fear that those children might themselves cross racial boundaries, “turning with disgust” from their own monstrous kind to “the superior beauty” of those in power (M. Shelley 114).173

173 This fear of racial hybridity is tellingly an important factor in Frankenstein’s decision to abort the nearly completed female monster as he contemplates that the inevitable result of the monster’s “thirst for sympathies” will be children: “She…might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other…might he not conceive an abhorrence for [deformity] when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him” (M. Shelley 114).

191 In The Blood certainly stages the anxiety of monstrous reproduction as an exponential problem: Hester La Negrita, after all, has five children, not one, several of whom are imagining their place in the world as sexually active adults--a fact that is effectively staged as monstrous by the use of adult actors, with grown up bodies, to play children--and imagining too that as reproductive adults they might gain access to a society currently denied them:

BULLY: When you get married you gonna have to get on top uh yr wife. JABBER: I’ll get on top of her all right but I’ll keep it in my pants. TROUBLE: Jabber, you uh tragedy. BULLY: When I get married my husbands gonna get on top of me and— HESTER: No ones getting on top of you, Bully. BULLY: He’ll put the ring on my finger and I’ll have me a white dress and he’ll get on top of me— HESTER: No ones getting on top of you, Bully, no ones getting on top of you, so shut yr mouth about it. TROUBLE: How’s she gonna have babies if no one gets on top of her? (Parks, Blood 83)

The problem with children is that they don’t stay children for long and Jabber’s status as a child or an adult is deliberately fraught here, a tension greatly underscored in performance.

The confused statement of Jabber, who at thirteen still wets the bed, suggests not only how conflicted and childlike he is, but also that he might already be sexually active. This failure of the adult body to mesh with adult psychology raises questions about what constitutes adulthood, what constitutes normal or healthy childhood, and what happens if a person is sexually mature but psychologically undeveloped.174 Cheryl Black takes up Lisa Anderson’s reading of Jabber, suggesting that Amiga may be abusing Jabber (Black 38). This reading

174 Notably, alongside the parallels with Victor’s emotionally newborn adult bodied monster, Beloved also embodies a similar contradiction in Morrison’s novel about a slave who murders her child to free her. When she returns in corporeal form, Beloved is both big bodied and sexually mature yet emotionally childish, reflecting the fact that she had her life cut short as an infant.

192 certainly has some validity: Amiga comments when she sees Jabber naked that “Jabber aint bad looking,” and Jabber apparently goes “out with” Amiga alone at least once toward the end of the play, situating him somewhat beyond the world of children (Parks, Blood 34; 95).

Jabber’s ambiguous status as a child/adult accomplishes much dramatic tension in the play;

Jabber is ultimately beaten to death by his mother for what the stage directions specify in a moment of chilling irony as a “child’s joke” (Parks, Blood 106). In The Blood’s ambiguous signification in the staging of the killing of a sexually aware monster-child by his own mother speaks to a complex web of debates in contemporary American culture. Through the monstrous gestus, Jabber’s death reworks Gothic anxieties about the instability of identity and family to embody contemporary cultural anxieties about motherhood and childhood as socially defined and controlled states. During the decade in which Parks was writing The Red Letter Plays, Republicans called for a ban on partial birth abortion. Ongoing state-by-state variations in the age of consent and the age at which children can be found culpable for harm to others also impact how notions of maternal responsibility are affected by social and legal attempts to determine the ages at which a person is considered a child.175

While abortion, although at issue, is to some extent overshadowed in In the Blood by the treatment of sterilization and attempts to curb future rather than existing pregnancies,

Fucking A tackles society’s attempt to control reproduction through abortion more directly.

Hester is after all a babykiller, and while her services are for the most part presented

175 Anti-abortion advocates maintain that life begins at conception, but whether that life is entitled to rights before it is viable outside the womb is contentious at best and varies greatly in legislation from state to state and country to country. See NRLC.org. Similarly, the age of consent varies from state to state and The US Department of Justice reports a wide variety in the ages at which juveniles have been transferred to be tried as adults. Overwhelmingly, juveniles tried as adults are black and male, see Rainville and Smith, Special Report (1998)

193 deceptively benignly as requested and merciful, she nonetheless forces The First Lady into an abortion against her will—an abortion that as I have already noted crosses over into the realm of infanticide, a favorite Gothic theme. Furthermore, “emphasizing the importance of reproductive freedom,” is one of Lisa Anderson’s ten elements of a black feminist aesthetic, but as she also notes:

Abortion is a contentious issue in the history of African Americans. On the one hand, the choice by black women slaves to abort rather than bear children who would become slaves, or who were the result of rape, was an important one. On the other hand, abortion has at times been considered a practice aimed at genocide. The origin of the birth control movement in the United States was linked to the eugenics movement and was in some quarters strongly resisted (Anderson 122).

This is further troubled by what can be read as the abortion of Monster himself, who ends up losing his life in his mother’s workroom just as he comes metaphorically to term by emerging from prison and standing poised to enter into the world. Certainly the staging of his death reminds us of his status as an infant, dependent on his mother, devoid of power.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, he is oddly childlike and sympathetic: “When they catch me they’ll hurt me” Monster explains to Hester, pleading for her help. “Us killing me is better than them killing me…please” (Parks, Fucking 219).176 Monster’s submission to Hester’s power over life and death effectively infantilizes him even as it underscores her role as a babykiller, a point emphasized by the arrangement of the actors’ bodies as Hester holds her dead child in her lap. This staging evokes images of Madonna and Child particularly those as archetypal as the Pieta. But it also resonates with another image of infanticide, that of slave mother Sethe’s killing of her child in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and her discovery by the band of white men who have come looking for her and find her in the woodshed

176 The recent National Theatre production of Frankenstein strongly emphasizes the terror, sadness, and shock of the physical contradictions of the monster-as-child.

194 “holding a blood-soaked child to her chest” (Morrison 175).

Morrison’s acclaimed novel uses the Gothic to speak about the unspeakable horrors of slavery, and by staging Monster’s death as an evocation of the shocking event that anchors Beloved, Fucking A not only participates in a broader project to represent hitherto omitted Black histories in American literature, but evokes the experience of slave mothers in an ambiguously ahistorical moment, transgressing boundaries between past and present, rendering slavery uncanny in what Parks calls her “otherworldly tale” (Parks,

Fucking 113). Hester hasn’t been able to buy Monster’s freedom—she’s oppressed by her poverty and he’s worth more to the prison system on the inside where her can generate income, and so, like Sethe, her child is owned by someone else and can, under society’s laws, be taken away, tortured, or killed. Better a monster than a boy. The dilemma of the slave mother who is powerless to prevent her child’s suffering is palpable in the closing scene of Fucking A, just as it is in Hester’s numbed response to Jailbait upon being told her child is dead. By yoking abortion to the problematic narratives of slave mothers like Sethe-- who kills her child to spare her from slavery--the death that ends Fucking A complicates cultural anxieties about abortion and infanticide as monstrous acts of maternal agency.

Monster’s death bears an ambiguous relationship to borders of social acceptability, and maternal responsibility in a society founded on exploitation in the name of expansion.

Certainly intertextuality contributes to the destabilization of infanticide as a signifier here. Verna Foster’s reading of The Red Letter Plays as evoking Beloved and Medea as well as The Scarlet Letter makes the compelling point that by drawing on these conflicted mothers The Red Letter Plays ask us to question and evaluate the cultural meanings of contemporary motherhood and the role of social conditions in the production of the

195 murderous rage that serves as a contradictory but coexisting maternal experience alongside intense love (Foster 77). However, Foster’s reading of rage as a factor that links the five texts, while valuably applied to In The Blood, problematically erases differences between Parks’s two plays. Furthermore, Medea, which serves as a somewhat inevitable and ultimately distracting echo in any play that stages a mother killing her child, shares some thematic territory in its treatment of a shunned outsider but otherwise has little aesthetic, generic, tonal or political overlap.177 And significantly, unlike Medea, Parks’s

Hesters pointedly have no husbands and fathers against which these crimes are supposedly committed.178 In fact, that Medea is such a strong point of reference speaks to the dominance of white male narratives of motherhood and the erroneous designation of those social constructions as universal. Medea might be a powerless outsider who kills her children so that someone else can’t have them, but her actions are not motivated by the circumstances in which Sethe experiences her “thick love,” or in which Hester Smith responds to her persecuted child’s plea for help (Morrison 194). As Woidat neatly puts it,

“to love your children enough to kill them is to redefine motherhood from the perspective of the slave” (Woidat 533). An emphasis on Medea in an attempt to articulate Parks’s recognized debt to the Greeks can eclipse important differences between the politics of infanticide amongst ancient nobles and the politics of infanticide for poor single mothers

177 Several scholars cite Medea, including Elam, Schafer, and Foster, but interrogation of the comparison is short-changed, particularly in Foster and Schafer. Parks claims a debt to the Greeks, but her appropriation is far more selective than is often noted. For example, Parks’s observation that “the Greeks understood distance and journey; their plays often include events that happen off stage” is given to explain why she was drawn to the confessional writing in In the Blood (Sova 100). However, it clearly has no bearing on the graphic onstage violence that ends Fucking A 178 To read Hester as a vengeful Medea, one must embrace Foster’s reading of Jabber’s murder as directed against Chilli, which seems a little reductive given that Chlli is arguably only one factor in the play’s treatment of unsupported motherhood.

196 like either of Parks’s Hesters. So too, a comparison with Medea can result in a tendency to overlook the freedom Medea ultimately achieves when she is rescued by a divine hand of fate, quite unlike the monstrous and portentous one that ultimately descends on Hester La

Negrita. Indeed Parks’s use here of a giant descending in retribution or warning is more clearly linked to the Gothic: The Castle of Otranto starts with the wrong-doer’s child being crushed by an enormous helmet that indicates the appearance of a giant as evidence that a curse has been activated.

It’s worth remembering another constellated act of infanticide that has been paid far less attention than Medea’s--the one Hester Prynne considers. Hawthorne writes: “At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide” (Hawthorne

114). And yet Hester Prynne’s murderous ideations are themselves aborted and her conflict largely overcome. That Parks takes Hester’s musings and has her act on them serves as a striking reminder of Hester Prynne’s relative privilege and the less radical ideology the novel ultimately affirms, while still making use of the undercurrent of terror that the Gothic brings to bear on mother/child relations in a world that finds them both monstrous. Sethe in Beloved is not pulled by doubt as Hester Prynne is, racing instead to the shed as soon as she recognizes her owner’s hat. Similarly, Hester Smith responds to

Monster’s suggestion that she kill him with horrifying calmness: “I have a way to do it that wont hurt. Give me your knife. Sit in my lap” (Parks, Fucking 219). While Hester La Negrita is driven momentarily by a rage in which social conditions can be seen as causal, Hester

Smith is not wrathful. A reading of this killing as a calculated act of agency does much to align it with Morrison’s novel, but such a reading also frames abortion as a crime not of

197 passion but of reason. Monster’s death is, after all, framed as prevention.

The Gothic’s tendency to villainize institutional power has some significance for the ways in which Parks’s Hesters’ acts of infanticide resist social mores. Often highly provocative, Gothic dramas were heavily censored during their heyday not only for being too sexual and violent, but for the revolutionary sentiment they expressed.179 Importantly, however, rather than serving strictly as political propaganda, Gothic dramas also staged the terror and bloodshed of revolution, revealing an ambivalence that implicated revolutionary sentiment even as it condemned oppressive power.180 What is particularly striking in The

Red Letter Plays, however, is that revolutionary sentiment is staged not alongside or against the sexual and violent vehicle of the monstrous maternal, but through it. At the end of In

The Blood, after she has killed one of her own children who has been chanting the word slut, Hester La Negrita imagines her own reproductive power in terms that are awesome and frightening to be sure, but the imagery here is also highly postcolonial and suggestive of revolution and resistance. Imprisoned and denied further children, Hester La Negrita’s final monologue offers an intertextual counter challenge to the institutionalized power of

The Mayor’s sperm as a “little army” of potential colonizers and dictators in Fucking A

(Parks, Fucking 128-129):

179 For a particularly clear example of responses to inflammatory political content in Gothic dramas, see responses to Colman The Younger’s popular Blue-Beard, which passed the censors despite its sexually adventurous heroine and serial-killing foreign aristocrat—probably because it made good use of metaphor and innuendo and was framed as a fairytale, and therefore fantasy rather than a reality. Perhaps also because Colman was well-connected to the theatre and had been asked to provide something. Interestingly, one line in the play “oh what a fine thing it is to be a great minister whom no one dares turn out,” was widely reported in the press as a “political allusion” that incited the evening’s most notable and mixed response. Certainly some thought the censors should not have let the line through. See The Morning Chronicle and The Morning Herald as quoted in Cox and Gamer, 330. 180 Indeed one might consider Marie Antoinette, attempting to flee, being captured and imprisoned in a castle, and then killed, as an ambivalent shadow over the Gothic heroine on the run, and one which persists uneasily in Monster’s own ironic journey from incarceration to freedom.

198 HESTER LA NEGRITA: I shoulda had a hundred-thousand a hundred-thousand a whole army full I shoulda! I shoulda. One right after the other! Spitting em out with no years in between! One after another: Tail to head: Spitting em out: Bad mannered Bad mouthed Bad Bad Bastards! A whole army full I shoulda! (Parks, Blood 107)

So too Hester Smith’s killing of her child is both an act of monstrous motherhood and an act of political resistance, although it comes from inside a broken system. Hester kills her son the way Butcher taught her to slaughter a pig, reducing him to an animal in a way that momentarily uses the tools of oppression that Sethe experiences when she is milked “like a goat” and overhears Schoolteacher instructing a student to make a comparative list of her

“human characteristics” and “her animal ones” (Morrison 237; 228). Merciful as it is,

Monster’s death serves as a moment of ambivalent Gothic revolution in which the tools of the master are taken up against him, underscoring that Gothic aesthetics can be read in the postcolonial moment where the impacts of both colonization and decolonization are felt.

Critical race theorist Henry Louis Gates argues that Black resistance can be made by taking up White discourse, but that it must be seen as a tool of empowerment that enables a new

Black discourse to emerge (Gates 2438). To some extent, Hester’s murderous action functions in this way. Monster’s death is a protest that nuances Christine Woodworth’s assertion that “Parks indicts the penal system and corrupt government officials” as

“Monster is sacrificed” by showing not only, as Diamond suggests “the system and the suffering” but also by showing Hester momentarily aligned with the violence of oppression even as she thwarts institutionalized power (Woodworth 146; Diamond, “Aprons” 20).

199

Conclusion

Foster finds the acts of infanticide in The Red Letter Plays to be “meaningless” because “no one will mourn” the dead beside their mothers (Foster 87). Yet this somewhat depressing assessment negates the power of these deaths to remain as active sites of potential revision. To assume them meaningless is to banish them to the past, to bury them, which works against Parks’s own tenant of history as “time that won’t quit” (Parks, “Elements of

Style” 15). Such an assumption also privileges the enclosed world of the individual play over the social world in which that text circulates along with the works of other writers where it is read, produced, and written about. The intertextual bond between these mothers—Hester Prynne, Hester Smith, Hester La Negrita, Sethe and the troubling Gothic monster mother embodied by Victor Frankenstein—puts them into active and dynamic relationship with each other as part of a Gothic genealogy that is ongoing, finding in the overpopulated, biologically manipulated, troubled, and inequitable twenty-first century plenty to address. Further, these monstrous mothers and their hideous progeny are to some extent undead, participating in a continuing narrative that problematizes constructions of the female body as an object of awe and terror. Yet their undeadness in this regard is spectral, rather than vampiric as they haunt, rather than feed on the texts they touch. Nonetheless, like the monstrous mother--and yet functioning as a figure of lack rather than excess, of sterility and infection rather than reproduction, of death rather than birth--the vampire is a key figuration of the monstrous in the Gothic, as the next chapter will demonstrate.

200

CHAPTER THREE:

Vampire/Empire and Troubling Transformations

“I might turn into a vampire now” (Caryl Churchill, Top Girls)

Introduction: The Undead, Live on Stage

Unlike the monsters of the previous chapter, whose terror is generated by their anomalousness and by a hybridity that springs directly from the excessive maternal body, the vampire proliferates not by breeding but through infection and assimilation--through contact with what is already there. Driven by hunger, it is a monster not of excess, but of lack. A figure that embodies not birth, but death (and paradoxically ever-lasting life), the vampire’s power stems in part from its ability to disrupt bodies and interrupt cycles of human reproduction through its often pseudo-sexual contact with the living. The idea that we, “normal” human beings, might be swayed from our destined paths, converted, or

“turned” in the lexicon of HBO’s series, True Blood (2008-2014), seems to be a compelling one for the contemporary moment. A spate of vampires has enjoyed widespread visibility and success in the fiction, film and television of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, as exemplified not only by the politically charged vampires next door in True

Blood, but also by Anne Rice’s sophisticated Interview With a Vampire (1976) and its many

201 cinematic and literary descendents, the subversive Girl-Power of Buffy The Vampire Slayer

(1997-2003) and the sparkly teenage appeal of Stephanie Myer’s Twilight (2005) and its sequels and films, to name but a few. A highly malleable monster, as the variety of texts suggests, the vampire’s appeal stems in part from its place as a kind of uber-human. The vampire is able to keep one foot in our world, one in the next—able to survive by having its blood and drinking it too. In this way, it is the very essence of Bayer-Berenbaum’s notion of

Gothicism. Both real, and uber-real, often the only thing standing between the vampire and us, is us.

The vampire’s ability to embody binaries by functioning in two mutually exclusive worlds is framed by Cultural Studies scholar Veronica Hollinger as an ability to disrupt boundaries—an ability that speaks specifically to its popularity in the postmodern moment. In her essay “Fantasies of Absence, the Postmodern Vampire” (1997), Hollinger writes:

Certain previously sacrosanct boundaries—political, philosophical, conceptual, ethical, aesthetic—have tended to become problematized; postmodernism has undertaken to undermine and/or deconstruct innumerable kinds of inside/outside oppositional structures. This deconstruction of boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is a monster of choice these days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure: it is the monster that used to be human, it is the undead that used to be alive, it is the monster that looks like us (Hollinger 201).

In our current skeptical moment, with globalization and technology disrupting borders like never before, the vampire as a body not bound by space is particularly at home in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in general and in postcolonial and feminist writing in particular, where the ability to recognize and maintain borders between places, histories, identities, and positions of power is much at issue. So too, the vampire resonates with questions of transnationalism, expanding its insidious terror beyond postcolonial

202 cycles of violence that are rooted in place to embrace cycles of exploitation across global boundaries. Indeed, the vampire’s own characteristic of infectious proliferation, and its occurrence across a range of cultures and geographies, as well as its representation as a traveler in many of its narratives181 make it a particularly apt metaphorical vehicle for global exploitation, violence, and assimilation as they pertain to transnational cycles of production and consumption. Moreover, as a subversive figure praying on the human society from which it is marginalized, the vampire has a certain appeal for narratives of revolution and resistance, a trait that has synergy both with the formative political backdrop during the heyday of Gothic drama, and also with queer narratives.

But so too is the vampire a particularly apt object of study for the theatre, though that tends not to be where it is thought to live. Roxana Stuart’s atypical book-length study of the vampire play, Stage Blood (1994), offers a helpful summary of the vampire’s history that highlights the significance of both cultural cross-pollination and dramatic representation in the vampire’s development:

The vampire of western culture originates in Eastern European folklore as a kind of beast or walking corpse; is transformed by German Sturm und Drang writers such as Goethe, and Burger and by the English Romantic poets into an outcast wanderer, a destroyer of women who is tortured by remorse; by the French writers of melodrama into a sexual polygamist and suave serial killer; by the English dramatists and later gothic novelists…into a sophisticated, continental, sexual deviate, seducer of women, and spreader of contagion (Stuart 2).

181 The Vampire as traveler is really introduced by Byron in the fragment that gave rise to Polidori’s story The Vampire (1819), regarded as the first vampire fiction in England but certainly not the first vampire ever. This image is cemented a year later by Planché’s play, The Vampire, or The Bride of The Isles (1820). Before that, as Nina Auerbach attests, the vampire tended in folklore to be a homebody, something that she sees reflected in Byron’s earlier fragment, The Giaour (1813), which interestingly is quoted but not referenced by Seward in Dracula (Stoker 197) illustrating that it was an influence despite the fact that Dracula is very specifically a traveler in this novel. See Auerbach (16). Since then, however, and certainly with Dracula’s status as a foreigner, the vampire has largely been a creature not bound by geography—as I have said, a body not bound by space.

203 While Stuart’s succinct history captures the importance of theatre, it nonetheless underplays the significance of slippage between these various and arguably indistinct phases of development (the romantic poets also wrote Gothic drama, for example).

Moreover, Stuart focuses on twentieth-century theatre in the latter part of her book only in the context of adaptations of Dracula. Of those she surveys, with the exception of Liz

Lochhead’s adaptation, which will also be discussed here, she finds theatrical versions of

Stoker’s legend lacking in comparison to their cinematic siblings (Stuart 207). And yet, despite the apparent domination of the vampire on screen, where the medium itself allows the vampire to cross thresholds and arrive via Netflix or HBO in people’s living rooms, the permeability of boundaries between the categories of “us” and “them” remains particularly pertinent on stage. In the theatre boundaries between formal and aesthetic elements, between reality and representation, audiences and actors, onstage and off, are often tangibly thin. So too, as performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider has recently noted, the theatre has always been a place for negotiating the precarious spaces between modes of liveness and deadness (Schneider 150-151, 157). Arguably it is its trade in illusion, its ability to confound boundaries and reanimate the dead in a live space, that accounts for why much associated with the vampire in western culture today has its roots in Gothic drama, with its own deeply entrenched relationship to both the psychosexual complexities of identity and the revolutionary politics of power hierarchies in national and international contexts. On the English stage, the vampire’s birth (or-rebirth) is marked not by the now ubiquitous novel Dracula (1897),182 but by the symbiotic product of French melodrama and

182 Balderston and Deane are credited with the first stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s seminal 1897 novel, but Stoker himself saw the novel as suitable for the stage, and made several efforts to dramatize it (Wynne 36-38). Stoker’s chosen theatre for Dracula was the Lyceum, where Planché’s

204 Gothic fiction that coalesces in James Robinson Planché’s influential though often overlooked drama, The Vampire, or The Bride of The Isles (1820).183

The Bride of The Isles tells the story of Ruthven, an earl and passably human vampire who has to return home from Europe to his native soil in the Scottish islands in order to marry the virtuous daughter of his friend and traveling companion, Sir Ronald. This marriage to the initially resistant Lady Margaret is a necessary step toward killing his bride and drinking her blood, which would then buy him some more time to wander abroad as a vampire. Ruthven is, of course, foiled, though interestingly as I have noted the play ends with a distressed Lady Margaret calling out to her vanishing husband, “hold, hold! I am thine” (Planché 13). Clearly a trailblazer for the vampire on stage, The Bride of The Isles introduced the vampire trap: “a pair of spring controlled doors cut into the scenery, which allowed the [vampire] to disappear through apparently solid walls” (Kendrick 126).184 In addition to the significance of making tangible through live performance the vampire’s ability to cross boundaries with terrifying ease, Planché arguably set the stage for the other highly successful and popular vampire dramas of the nineteenth century185 and set in

drama was first produced and then enjoyed multiple revivals. As Roxana Stuart puts it, “The Lyceum…was the vampire theatre par excellence” (Stuart 254). 183 As noted, Planché’s text is an adaptation of Polidori’s short story written a year earlier (itself based on a fragment by Byron), but it also made considerable use of a French melodrama by Charles Nodier based on the same source. Wynne notes several similarities between Dracula and The Bride of the Isles and notes the direct influence of Gothic melodrama in general and of Bourcicault’s The Phantom (1857), a descendent of Planché’s drama, on Stoker (Wynne 18-28). 184 The play may well have made use of a grave trap also, for his appearance in the prologue and disappearance in the last scene. See Walter Kendrick for a brief discussion on the various traps used by theatres in this period (pages 125-126). In his introduction to The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas, Stephen Wischhusen specifies that Planché made significant contributions to the way costume and scene design worked in the theatre (Wischhusen 9), and for my purposes here, costume that indicates “foreigner” or “local” is the most significant of these innovations. 185 Dion Bourcicault’s drama, The Phantom (1857), in which the title character is a vampire quite similar to Ruthven, like The Bride of The Isles, had multiple productions in London and New York, and was well known by Bram Stoker (Wynne 24-25).

205 motion many of the tropes and thematic concerns of the vampire that serve our contemporary stage today. The play is aquiver with anxieties about marriage, desire, female autonomy, and the homoerotic, and with a tension between home and away that significantly establishes the vampire as a transient figure with an ambiguous relationship to the domestic.

Like a virus adapting to a new host, the vampire changes to reflect and respond to the particular fears, pleasures, and contextual expectations of the culture that feeds it

(Auerbach 1; Day viii). Thus the anxieties central to Planché’s important drama find new articulation through the trope of the vampire in late twentieth-century culture, and in feminist drama in particular, in ways that reflect contemporary concerns. Consequently, domestic and familial sites of invasion are complicated by a greater awareness of home and the domestic as impacted by national and racial strife. Anxieties about sexuality emerge in narratives that more openly examine same-sex desire in the cultural context of dominant heterosexist gender roles, reclaiming and challenging the vampire’s historical place as a harbinger of same-sex desire and a threat to the supposedly natural reproductive potential of female biology. So, too, anxieties about marriage address not the virginity of the bride but infidelity, childlessness, and divorce, while anxieties about female autonomy become less rooted in domestic spaces to engage critiques of the role of women in the work place as commodities and players in a global economy, and the spreaders of feminist ideology.

Certainly these are the themes that underpin and unite the readings of the diverse body of contemporary plays discussed in this chapter. Nonetheless, identifying the vampire is not always easy; after all, it can pass as human or draw on its strong cultural currency and metaphorical resonance to appear merely through inference. Moreover, its roots in

206 folklore make its relationship to reality an ambivalent one from the outset, raising questions about whether what we see when we go searching is really a vampire, or not.

Indeed much that has been written about vampires engages them not as literary constructs, icons of subculture, or metaphorical figurations, but as explanations for ritual, superstition, and historical events and people—such as Vlad the Impaler—that might be subject to verification or dismissal.186 Yet if we follow the vampire’s trail through postcolonial, revolutionary, and transnational narratives, through direct and metaphorical incantations, through its many points of contact with the real and the imagined, the range of texts in which the vampire emerges attests to the continued utility of the trope in the theatre.

The first text to be discussed here is Liz Lochhead’s Dracula (1985, 2009), which, as a direct adaptation, offers the most overt use of the vampire in a contemporary feminist context and is thus clearly consciously working in the Gothic mode. Caryl Churchill’s Mad

Forest (1990) and Adrienne Kennedy’s The Film Club and Dramatic Circle (1992) all reference Dracula directly or indirectly in the context of world violence linking Dracula in particular as a signifier for vampirism more generally to political violence in the Romanian

Revolution and Africa respectively. Yet while Kennedy’s texts are both more consistently and evocatively Gothic, despite its referential quality Churchill’s text is one in which the vampire functions as a Gothic interruption, a little like the lava beneath the earth’s crust that breaks the surface and reshapes the ground in the process. Indeed the Vampire’s ability to show up in a non-vampire play is significant. Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1996)

186 See Day (vii-viii) for a slightly more detailed discussion of the vampire as a figure of mythic status that operates as both a “real” and a “fictional” figure, and Gelder for a similar discussion in addition to a more detailed analysis of Transylvanian history, Vlad the Impaler, Nikolae Ceausescu, Elizabeth Bathory and their influence on productions of vampire mythology (Gelder, Reading x-xi; 2-8; 24-25).

207 plays with tropes of consumption, contagion, and undeadness at the level of both imagery and dramaturgical structure to evoke the vampire metaphorically in its postcolonial and transnational treatment of slavery and exploitative labor. And finally Caryl Churchill’s Top

Girls (1982) and The Five Lesbian Brothers’ The Secretaries (1993) also deploy images associated with vampirism in their treatment of the impact of growing liberal feminism on women’s labor in the context of empire and capitalism. The Secretaries is more thoroughly and deliberately evocative in its use of the Gothic, while Top Girls, like Mad Forest, invites the vampire into a non-vampire narrative as a Gothic interruption that effectively bridges the ways in which both Churchill’s text and the world of her play oscillate between fantasy and reality.

This varied list of titles is not exhaustive, but it underscores the pervasive utility of the vampire for twentieth and twenty-first-century dramas as a trope that invites the examination of gender, race, and class in the perpetuation of cycles of violence.187 In this way, the vampire serves as a site for feminist cultural criticism in the theatre. Read together these plays suggest that, despite the absence of the vampire trap in many modern theatres,188 and despite significant differences between the ways in which the Gothic is

187 Migdalia Cruz’s Salt and Josefina Lopez’s Lola Goes To Roma also specifically make use of the vampire in isolated scenes, while Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life is worthy of some discussion here because it has much overlap with Venus, but has arguably been misread as a vampire play. Blasted’s relationship to the vampire will be addressed in the final chapter. 188 A trap in the floor of the stage was used in the 2003 production of Lochhead’s Dracula at the Derby Theatre, but later productions, working with a revised script, don’t seem to have used this device. There is no mention of a trap being used for Dracula’s entrance in reviews of the recent production at Keswick on The Lake, for example (Vallely, 2014) though reviews for the earlier Derby production, while finding Dracula’s entrance through a trap to be effective and “startling,” later complain that his exit, “simply disappear[ing] through the hole in the stage from which he first appeared,” is disappointing (Orme, 2003). It’s interesting how much like Ruthven’s exit that is. Lochhead’s stage direction for Dracula’s entrance in the revised and published script a decade later simply says “Nothing. No one. Suddenly, Dracula himself is there” (Lochhead 20) and his exit is not specified at all.

208 deliberately manipulated or emerges across a range of works, vampires still exist in body or image in the shared time and space of the theatre. Their power comes from their ability to hold a mirror up to the mechanisms by which violence and oppression are transmitted in our postcolonial and globalized cultural moment, reflecting us back to ourselves.

I -- Sex and Empire: (Post)coloniality in Dracula and Dracula

Although Planché’s 1820 drama has an essential place in a genealogy of vampires on stage, in order to understand the link between the vampire and the postcolonial in particular, it is to the novel Dracula, itself born out of a Gothic theatre during a period of colonial decline, and much adapted for the stage since189--that we must first turn. The figure of the vampire has great utility for expressing not only the kind of psychosexual anxiety for which Dracula is well-noted but also anxiety about cultures under threat, collapsed racial categories, national instability, and the decline of social progress. Stephen

Arata’s influential 1990 essay on Dracula, “The Occidental Tourist,” points to the significance of the novel’s national/political commentary, suggesting that “the blurring of psychic and sexual boundaries that occurs in Gothic [literature] is certainly evident in

Dracula…but for Stoker, the collapse of boundaries resonates culturally and politically as well” (Arata 164). Indeed in Dracula, concerns about gender and sexuality and concerns

189 Some argue that Dracula’s longevity is actually due to its having been adapted successfully to the stage by Balderston and Deane in 1927 (Kendrick 216) Catherine Wynne’s book Bram Stoker, Dracula, and the Victorian Gothic Stage articulates the ways in which Stoker is indebted to a Gothic theatre, see particularly in summary pages 9-11. The clear throughline of influence linking these texts makes generic distinctions based on period difficult.

209 about empire and identity are linked by the vampire’s infiltration of England and attempt to gain control through its women in a way that establishes an important precedent for the vampire as a figure in feminist and postcolonial drama. In the contemporary theatre, then, the vampire’s subversive attack on dominant culture, its position as a marginalized other, its violent revolutionary power, and its seductive allure, all make it well-positioned to examine the roles of race, gender, and class in the power structures of dominant culture.

In Stoker’s highly influential novel, Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, is sent abroad to assist Transylvanian aristocrat, Count Dracula, in his purchase of an old

English estate. While there he narrowly escapes Dracula’s vampire brides, to be eventually reunited with his wife, Mina. Having purchased the estate, Dracula heads to London, and once there, Dracula turns Lucy, a marriage-eligible young London debutante, into a vampire who roams graveyards preying on children, rather than bearing or nurturing them. He then gets his teeth into Harker’s wife, Mina, and his reign of terror is only ended when Harker, his male friends, a foreign vampire expert Van Helsing, and Mina herself are able to use Mina’s feminine vulnerability to the vampire as a means to chase him back off

English soil and destroy him. The novel’s epilogue gives us Mina as a mother, her child (a boy) named for the band of vampire hunters that defeated Dracula.

Count Dracula, then, poses a threat to empire through his characterization as a potentially colonizing force; a troubling outsider who avails himself of English resources, infiltrates English shores, and begins to populate the country with his own kind. Dracula’s homeland has been bombarded by invasion to the point of exhaustion by those who sought to conquer and subjugate his people. In a moment that arguably reflects Stoker’s own upbringing in tumultuous Ireland, he tells Harker that “there is hardly a foot of soil in all

210 this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders…is it a wonder that we were a conquering race?” (Stoker pages 29-38).190 And, of course, the implicit question here is “is it any wonder I’m a vampire?” Vampires, then, in Dracula’s world, are predator/victims brought into being as a consequence of invasion, political strife, and the disruption of power established by national identities, geographical borders, and the purity of bloodlines. Thus, as Arata notes, “with vampirism marking the intersection of racial strife, political upheaval, and the fall of empire, Dracula’s move to

London indicates that Great Britain, rather than the Carpathians,191 is now the scene of these connected struggles” (Arata 166).

The centrality of empire and national identity is always just under the surface of

Dracula where it has much to do with female sexuality, articulating a patriarchal and empirical fear of losing control and authority over the subjugated other through sex. A subject long understood to be a favorite preoccupation of vampire narratives--which, in

Stoker’s period, depended on accessible but thinly veiled metaphors to pass censorship-- sex is represented in intimate acts of oral violence and in the bodies of women in sleep-like states being repeatedly penetrated and made to bleed.192 The prominence of female

190 Wynne notes that Stoker’s interest in the Gothic was informed by growing up in the “Gothic landscape” of Ireland, which was during his formative years a site of famine, religious unrest, and violence (Wynne 9). Some branches of postcolonial studies omit Ireland as a postcolonial location because of its union with Britain and involvement in expansion (Arias in McLeod 110-111). This is however a narrow view and it is difficult not to see it as a place marked by colonization and violence during Stoker’s early years, particularly given the ambivalent relationship to empire that emerges here in Dracula’s justification for war. 191 The Carpathian mountain region stretches across much of Eastern Europe, so is home to many different racial groups and national identities. 192 As Robert Tracy notes in his study on perverse sexuality in nineteenth-century fiction (1990), “the vampire story supplies a metaphoric vocabulary to represent certain obsessions and anxieties not otherwise admissible into literature” allowing writers like Stoker to explore perverse sexuality in a way that writers working in naturalism could not (Tracy, 35). Tracy points to Zola as one writer

211 characters as much-valued commodities under threat in Stoker’s narrative attests to a patriarchal anxiety about policing the boundaries of female desire; a fear embodied by the figure of Dracula, as a dangerous foreigner, who is somehow managing to appropriate and assimilate English women in his attempts to establish a colony of vampires in London.

The novel is thus ultimately concerned with upholding the English patriarchal institution of marriage as a means of controlling and limiting female sexuality, making female bodies, families and homes impenetrable by outside forces. This is evidenced by one of the novel’s most chilling moments, in which Lucy is symbolically penetrated by a stake--an honor reserved for her husband--in no small part because of her troubled relationship to monogamy (Stoker 256). Lucy, after all, wants to marry three men at once and ends up adulterously with a vampire in her bedroom.

One of the more enduring and interesting aspects of vampire lore that plays a direct role in the vampire’s threat to patriarchal power is the suggestion that a vampire can only cross a threshold if invited in. It is from this conceit that the vampire gets his or her skills as a seducer by virtue of necessity, and from this conceit that the victim resonates as, say,

“easy,” or as a force complicit in his or her own oppression. The conceit of invitation is in evidence as early as Planché’s Bride of the Isles (a source for Stoker), in which Ruthven is only able to “drink the purple stream of life” from his victims if they agree to marry him first (Planché 7). Much of the play’s dramatic struggle hinges on the problem of being invited in—to the bride’s home, family, body—not the problem of getting the blood per se.

Certainly this element of invitation is important in Dracula’s treatment of female sexuality

whose content was tamer than Stoker’s but banned because it wasn’t vaguely veiled in metaphor (41).

212 and its role in demonstrating the weakness of Imperial borders, which might fall, it is implied, because women can’t say no.

For Scottish playwright Liz Lochhead, whose adaptation of Dracula was first performed at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh in 1985, it was “Rule One for becoming a vampire victim: First of all you have to invite him in” that really “attracted [her]… to the story” (Lochhead, Dracula “Introduction” vii). In her version of Dracula, the bed-ridden and nearly naked Lucy’s final line to Dracula at the act break is: “Come in. Come to me, my love.

Come in” (Lochhead, Dracula 47). In its willingness to stage female desire openly,

Lochhead’s play offers a treatment of desire and marital fidelity that is more overtly feminist than Stoker’s. Lochhead holds up for scrutiny the anxieties about female sexuality that demand Lucy’s staking, staging them in juxtaposition to the normalized misogyny that generates those anxieties in Stoker’s cultural moment—and remain all too recognizable in

Lochhead’s contemporary play. Lucy might be fraternizing with a vampire, but Harker is also presented as a potential philanderer who, while on the verge of marriage himself, regards his secretary, hungrily, as a “peach…quite quite delicious,” (Lochhead, Dracula 12).

He then tries to convince Mina to sleep with him before marriage, which she does not want to do, and later rejects her when she is bitten by Dracula, yelling at her “you wanted him!”

(Lochhead, Dracula 18; 74) What is clear in Lochhead’s treatment, and not in Stoker’s, is that it is Harker’s lust, his equation of consumption with desire, his own perverse attraction to Dracula’s vampire brides, that allow him to recognize Mina’s desire for Dracula. In this way, Lochhead plays with the notion that vampires cast no reflections, a conceit that

213 suggests both invisibility and doubleness, so that when one looks for the vampire, one sees only oneself.193

While Stoker’s novel does position Harker as a parallel for Dracula, as several scholars have noted, Stoker’s doubling does not examine misogyny in that comparison.

Dracula, as Arata points out, positions both Dracula and Harker as travelers to a foreign land, a comparison that invites the reader to see “in the marauding, invasive Other, British culture’s…own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous form” (Arata 162).194 Yet in highlighting Harker’s behavior toward women, Lochhead aligns him with the marauding

Other through sex, linking invasive imperial practices and colonization abroad with attitudes toward gender at home.

In so doing, Lochhead makes Harker, and not Lucy, the character who embodies critiques of (and anxieties about) marital infidelity. The play’s closing moments are less about triumph over evil than they are about the problematic relationship of desire to the patriarchally controlled institution of marriage. Dracula’s destruction is overshadowed entirely in the final moments of the play when, as one reviewer notes, “husband and wife struggle to forgive the attractions each has had to the dark sexuality of the vampires”

(Vallely 2014).195 Stoker’s use of the vampire as a metaphor for the dangers of unchecked

193 In a famous scene in the novel, Harker looks in a mirror expecting to see Dracula reflected behind and sees only himself (Stoker 34). This conceit does not appear explicitly in Planché or Bourcicault, though the vampire’s ability to seem to be there and not be there at the same time, which this scene in the novel plays with, is indicated by the then state of the art stage mechanics that allowed for instant entrances and exits. 194 Dracula has the advantage in this slippage of identity in that he more efficiently manipulates these parallels. 195 An earlier version of the play had a slightly different ending. The first production at the Royal Lyceum was followed by the text being published by Penguin Books in 1989. However, the edition from which I am working is a later one. Lochhead revised the play and republished it with Nick Hern Books in 2009, and that 2009 version has been reprinted three times since. That is also the

214 female desire and unsanctioned female sexual activity is transformed by Lochhead from a warning into a critique of the Victorian—and still current—attitudes that sanction female desire only inside of appropriate marriage. Lochhead’s virginal Lucy, clambering from her bed naked, drapes herself in her sister’s wedding veil before swooning in Dracula’s arms while “blood pumps out of her in a flood” (Lochhead, Dracula 47). Such rich imagery in the live environment of the theatre—where the nakedness of actual bodies has a power it does not have in fiction—delights in literally tearing the veil away from Stoker’s more evasive rendering of female sexuality in order to display a punctured image of the heterosexist marriage ideal with unmistakable clarity.

While Stoker’s novel is conservative in its approach to marriage and fidelity, it is also open to postcolonial readings that expose the novel’s anxious recognition of the failures of patriarchy. As several feminist scholars have noted, the control of female sexuality toward the production of offspring that maintain the colony’s borders and expand its efforts is central to the empire’s power (Gilbert 147; McClintock 34). Though vampires can’t reproduce (being dead and therefore presumably sterile), Dracula nonetheless represents a threat to paternity that reflects anxieties about national identity, proving somewhat better at proliferating than the Englishmen. Of the men in the novel, only Harker marries and produces a child, whose determinable paternity is undermined by the novel’s closing gesture that the baby be named after Harker’s team of Vampire hunters—two of whom are not English and all of whom have given blood transfusions (a veiled metaphor

version of the play most recently produced, and my references here are to the most recent production I was able to locate, which took place in 2014.

215 for intercourse) to Mina.196 The foreign blood entering the veins of first Lucy, then Mina can be read as an articulation of the Victorian colonial anxiety that “body boundaries were felt to be dangerously permeable and demand[ed] continual purification, so that sexuality, in particular women’s sexuality, was cordoned off as the central transmitter of racial, and therefore cultural, contagion” (McClintock 47). The transfusions may appear to attempt to purify, but as surrogate sexual acts, they mix English and non-English blood, nonetheless, reducing racial purity and, as the women languish, colonial potency. Indeed England in

Stoker’s novel is alarmingly impotent; parents seem dead or absent, and non-breeders far outnumber children.

Lochhead doesn’t stage Mina and Harker’s isolated case of reproductive success--a choice that allows her conclusion to focus on their relationship--and instead makes the interesting move of situating the only viable reproduction in the play in the body of Florrie,

Mina and Lucy’s maid. A figure invented by Lochhead, Florrie is in love with a soldier, Jem, who is off fighting a foreign war somewhere and whom we never see, though he is a topic of conversation, particularly between the sexually curious Lucy and Florrie. Then, early in act two, Florrie receives a telegram:

FLORRIE: (waving telegram). Can’t read. Can’t read. Don’t need to read. Telegram from the military, it mean just one thing. Dead. Dead, you bastard. Torn up bits of you all over some patch of dirt other side of world. Bloody generals! Bloody Empire! Dead and me three weeks late. (Lochhead, Dracula 51)

Here the paternal potency of the British Empire is undermined by the promise of a child with no father, underscoring a critique of English patriarchy as lacking. The impending and unhopeful labor of childbirth and Florrie’s fate as the mother of a bastard

196 The transfusion scenes, in which the women’s bodies are penetrated with needles and injected with blood are disturbing and are widely considered to be metaphors for rape (see Tracy 42).

216 implicitly stage decline and death as consequences of the Empire’s own behavior.

Lochhead’s addition of a maid who is in this way positioned as a victim, but whose victimhood is notably contrasted to that of her lady, is a significant one, revealing in

Lochhead’s feminist politics an interest in the visibility of class. Florrie gets her telegram as she tends to Lucy’s soon-to-be-(un)death bed, lamenting her own state of unbleeding as she frets over Lucy’s penultimately fatal blood loss, exploiting a long-standing link between menstrual blood and vampiric bleeding to which I will return. This moment in the play sets up a juxtaposition between Lucy and Florrie that frames them both as victims of invasion and violence linked through the motif of blood as it flows—or doesn’t—through specifically female bodies. Yet significantly, these women are divided by class. The threat that Florrie’s unborn child poses to English culture is not one of impure blood but one of economic strain. Florrie’s baby is a bastard to be born out of wedlock to a woman with no legacy of class to fall back on, framing the impact of colonial violence on working-class women as an unheeded threat to empire in the world of the play.

That the British Empire is to blame for its own undoing underscores the significant legacy of Stoker’s Dracula to the postcolonial moment. In Stoker’s novel anxieties about invaders from outside of the Empire are complicated and amplified by parallels between

Harker and Dracula, which, as Robert Smart astutely notes, allow Harker to “occupy the position of both the victim and the vampire, something key in [a] postcolonial reading of the story” (Smart 32). Here Harker’s parallels to Dracula are duplicated in Jem, who is positioned as a victim even as he is disembodied and also off invading a distant land in the name of empire. The systemic violence of a world in which Jem’s death in the course of imperial activity is little more than a footnote to most of the characters, suggests a Gothic

217 world that in its very attitude toward colonization, class, and citizenship effectively establishes a precedent for Dracula’s appropriation of English women for his own advancement.

II -- Dracula At A Distance: Vampirism beyond the bedroom

While Lochhead’s feminist revisioning of Dracula focuses on issues of gender and class at home, British playwright Caryl Churchill and American playwright Adrienne Kennedy both draw on or evoke Dracula to explore violence outside the domestic sphere in a broader international context. In so doing they manipulate the trope of the vampire to focus on the

Gothic preoccupation with the uber-real of political violence, rather than on the coexistent

Gothic interest in the psychosexual.

The impact of distant Colonial violence on women’s bodies is explicitly and strikingly yoked to vampirism in both of Adrienne Kennedy’s short Dracula plays, The Film

Club and Dramatic Circle (1992). These short plays, like much of Adrienne Kennedy’s work, rarely see production (though Dramatic Circle has been produced as a radio play by WNYC) but they are part of a cycle of four plays known collectively as The Alexander Plays, which share the same protagonist, Suzanne Alexander, and several motifs including pregnancy, illness and violence.197 Read as uncanny intertextual siblings for each other, The Alexander

Plays mirror a kind of traumatic repetition, returning the reader to familiar but different

197 The other two plays are She Talks to Beethoven, first produced in1989 by River Arts in Woodstock, NY, and Ohio State Murders, which premiered at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in 1992.

218 dramatic territory and suggesting that the violence the plays address cannot be adequately contained within textual borders. In this way the textual bodies themselves function as vampiric, their motifs and meanings spreading from host to host, body to body. In People

Who Led To My Plays (1987) Kennedy makes clear that vampires are a significant influence on her writing, saying that the power of metamorphosis and altered identity became a key theme in her work because of vampires, werewolves, and other monsters (Kennedy,

People 16-17). In these plays vampirism is linked to the vulnerability of pregnancy, as it is in Lochhead’s depiction of Florrie, but here it is race, not class, that renders the body vulnerable. In both pieces, written during a period in which there was widespread unrest in

Africa,198 the central character, Suzanne Alexander, waits in London for the return of her husband from Ghana, where he is imprisoned. Suzanne, like Florrie, is pregnant—a state that suggests transformation and is as we have seen a key trope of the postcolonial199—and while she waits for her husband she reads Dracula to pass the time, at the advice of her male doctor. As she waits and reads she begins to exhibit some of Lucy’s symptoms, which are identical to the symptoms apparently exhibited by the black political prisoners in

Africa: “States of agitation, rages, immobility, tears, attempted suicides, lamentations,

198 The events of the play are set in the sixties and situate David, the missing husband, in Ghana (also referred to more broadly in the play as West Africa). These events are also concurrent with ongoing violent protest against apartheid in South Africa and the crisis in the Congo that followed independence, as well as decolonization in Algeria, about which Fanon wrote extensively, but there was also widespread trouble in Africa in the late eighties and early nineties when Kennedy is writing, building toward events like the Rwandan genocide despite concurrent moves to end apartheid in South Africa. Thus Kennedy’s plays resonate with a variety of decolonizing movements. 199 Just at the postcolonial was an influence in the writings of Frantz Fanon, the Gothic appears to have been a significant influence on Kennedy also. In addition to horror movies and figures like vampires in general and Dracula in particular, Kennedy cites Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Shelley and other Gothic sources as influences (Kennedy, People 14; 24-25; 36-37; 58-59). Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbrevilles is an intertext for Ohio State Murders. In Kennedy’s play the character Professor Hampshire reads to Suzanne from Hardy’s arguably Gothic novel about pregnancy out of wedlock, secrets and murder, and Suzanne becomes obsessed with it.

219 appeals to mercy” (Kennedy, Film 179). Suzanne’s embodiment of Lucy’s victimhood and the torture of her husband in an African prison rework Mina’s psychic link to Dracula in

Stoker’s text (a kind of telepathic wound that Mina develops once bitten and that allows

Dracula and Mina to access each other’s thoughts) in a way that positions Suzanne ambivalently as the pining wife and yet also as a direct victim of colonial violence.

This slow but draining and unmitigated violence is framed as vampiric, a languishing that is ongoing with no immediate diagnosis or cure, but it is pointedly colonial, as the similarity of symptoms makes clear. The link is further underscored by

Suzanne’s repeated references to Frantz Fanon, an anti-colonial intellectual best known for his writings Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of The Earth. Kennedy’s reading of

Fanon draws attention to the impact of colonialism as an ongoing penetration of the body.

“The war goes on,” as Fanon writes and Suzanne reads; “and we will have to bind up for years to come the many sometimes ineffaceable wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people” (Kennedy, Film 181; Dramatic 136).200 Thus it is the symptoms of oppression in both those texts that Suzanne replicates in her breathless, powerless, and traumatized female body.

Kennedy’s Suzanne Alexander plays participate in what we might consider an important and recurring revisioning of Dracula, distilled helpfully in Höglund’s and Khair’s assessment of the vampire in postcolonial cultures. They write: “While the colonial, late

Victorian vampire embodies the geopolitical fears that Arata termed ‘anxiety of reverse

200 Although Kennedy does not reference it directly, there is also a dream about a vampire in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Further, the connection between these plays and the evocation of the vampire in Fanon’s own writing is very striking. In addition to the above metaphor of colonialism as a slow bleeding, as noted in the first chapter, For Fanon, the experience of the Black subject under white colonization requires entry into a “zone of nonbeing” as the only site from which the violence of transformation can occur (Fanon, Black xii).

220 colonization,’ the modern, post-colonial vampire can be imagined as a white colonizer”

(Höglund and Khair 6).201 Nonetheless, the Gothic’s persistent obfuscation of binaries should be taken into account even here. Höglund and Khair’s assessment, while pointing out the trope’s redeployment and manipulation in the contemporary moment, risks being simplistic. Samira Kawash’s analysis of the trope in Fanon in her essay “Terrorists and

Vampires: Fanon’s Violence of Decolonization” (1999) is useful here:

One cannot simply identify the vampire with either the colonizer or the colonized; the threat of the vampire is equivocal, identified more properly with the entire scene of colonial non-existence. The vampire is simultaneously the force that threatens to drain the life from the colonized, and the condition of the colonized as living dead (Kawash 249).

By linking Fanon to Dracula, Kennedy offers vampirism as an effective metaphor for the consuming and spreading power of white colonialism in a transnational context.

Suzanne is, after all, an American visiting England when she succumbs to a threat that is taking place in Africa. The reach of white colonial vampirism is both insidious and long, and its impact is felt across borders, and particularly by women, dispersing the effects of colonial upheaval transnationally across the surface of the globe.

Here Kennedy’s plays gesture toward an important use of the vampire trope into the early twenty-first century, where it has been read as a global phenomenon, involved in a kind of world-wide imperial practice that engages terrorism, the spread of technology and disease epidemics, and the domination of western ideologies.202 Postcolonial scholar John

201 For other examples see Maureen Clark’s reading of the vampire in Canadian and Australian Indigenous fiction: “Postcolonial Vampires in the Indigenous Imagination: Philip McLaren and Drew Hayden Taylor,” in which she explores vampire narratives as critiques of white colonial practices. 202 For readings of the vampire that exemplify this trend, see in particular Justin Edwards’s “Canada, Quebec, and David Cronenberg’s terrorist-vampires.” Edwards’s reading here addresses postcolonial Quebec and postcolonial Canada but it does so in the context of contemporary global phenomenon and anxieties.

221 McLeod argues for the ongoing importance of postcolonial thought in his introduction to the recent Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007), saying:

Transnational economic inequities, patterns of migration and demographic change, racism and its murderous consequences the world over, poverty and disease in Africa…unresolved military conflicts…[have] at least a part of [their] origins in the consequences of colonialism, and [remain] hinged to that history in a changed and changing world today (McLeod 4, emphasis original).

In Kennedy’s work we can see this connection between global misery and colonialism evoked by the tensions and overlaps between Stoker and Fanon.

In part what the evocation of Dracula does for Kennedy in this postcolonial/ transnational context is to invest her play with the resonance of the repeated transgressions of geographical boundaries in Stoker’s novel. That Dracula is not the only character in Stoker’s novel to be a foreigner at one point or another heightens the novel’s anxious rendering of a world on the cusp of globalization and postcolonialism; a world in which a human population on the move complicates the ability to identify people by race and place, and to keep borders safely closed from invasion. The vampire’s ability to mix bloodlines--established in Stoker by Dracula’s foreign identity, and by the troubling contamination of Mina’s blood that results from her contact not just with Dracula, but also with two other men of foreign blood--203 offers a legacy to the postcolonial moment.204 In

Kennedy’s plays, these unstable borders of racial and national identity are taken up by

203 The scene in which Dracula feeds on Mina’s blood, and then cuts his own breast so he can force her to drink his clearly conjures, sexualizes, and subverts images of breast feeding in a way that resonates problematically with notions of Mina as a mother later, but also in ways that suggest miscegination. As previously noted, also significant is that Van Helsing and Quincy Morris, two of Mina’s transfusion blood doners, and named as symbolic fathers of her child, are not Englishmen (Stoker 333). As noted, the identity of Van Helsing and Quincy as foreigners belies an anxiety about sex (transfusions) spreading impurity, a common concern at the time as noted (McClintock 47). 204 True Blood’s treatment of segregation, mixed marriages, and racism, as thematic threads in a story about vampires trying to live openly in the American South, is a significant indication of this legacy.

222 Suzanne Alexander, a woman who identifies with both African prisoners and with the very white Lucy Westenra. Kennedy’s dreamlike and ambiguous borders—between countries, cultures, bodies, and texts—make use of the vampire to speak to the role of colonial violence in a broadening context.

Caryl Churchill’s evocation of Dracula in Mad Forest is somewhat different from

Kennedy’s directly referential use of Stoker as a means to explore the impact of colonialism as a kind of insidious and psychic transnational violence. Yet Churchill, too, draws on the vampire’s relationship to national violence and political upheaval that Arata has noted as central to Dracula’s colonial/postcolonial anxiety. In a brief, single scene in Mad Forest, an unnamed and ordinarily dressed vampire comes across a dog on a street one night during the Romanian Revolution. By virtue of the setting (Romania) and subject (revolution) of

Churchill’s play, Dracula resonates in the presence of the vampire in Mad Forest because

Dracula is originally and indelibly connected with that region and its violent political landscape. Further, because Dracula is a story with significant English cultural currency, its implicit reminder of the violence that travels from East to West in that novel resonates in the uncanny evocation of Stoker’s villain in Mad Forest. That Mad Forest is not the only contemporary feminist drama to evoke the vampire specifically in the context of national violence suggests that vampires are particularly relevant to political theatre at a time of unprecedented globalization and ongoing international unrest. In addition to the upheaval in west Africa that is the backdrop for Kennedy’s plays, and the un-specified war in which

Jem dies in Lochhead’s adaptation of Dracula, Sarah Kane’s highly Gothic play Blasted also makes specific use of a war zone in its imagery of vampirism, as I will discuss in the final chapter. Churchill also yokes the vampire to national upheaval, both in Top Girls, where a

223 war in progress and the threat of invasion overshadow the life of a girl who claims to want to be a vampire, and more specifically in Mad Forest.

Mad Forest is about the revolution that occurred when Romania’s military defected from duty and joined with rebelling civilians to violently overthrow the country’s oppressive Communist regime, executing its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife Elena in 1990. Here the threat to empire comes from inside, not outside, but as with the French

Revolution that helped shaped English Gothic drama, that threat in Romania was made very visible to outside onlookers. Mad Forest is written in the immediate aftermath of the

Romanian Revolution, at a time when it was still widely discussed in the media around the world. Mad Forest adds another layer of complexity to a genealogy of postcolonial and/or transnational vampires as it is about Eastern Europe, but written by an English playwright and performed by an English cast for first a Romanian and then an English audience.205

Thus, the labor and consumption of the performance text cross international borders, bringing it resonance in a global context.

At the most obvious level, however, Mad Forest stages the vampire in the context of a contemporary version of the Gothic’s political roots--revolution. Like the French

Revolution and ensuing Reign of Terror that overshadowed the heyday of early Gothic drama, and the Congo crisis and other rebellious efforts in Africa that surface in Kennedy’s plays, the Romanian Revolution was troubling for the widespread violence and oppression that accompanied the potential for political change, and for the difficulty that accompanied

205 Churchill traveled to Bucharest with some British students in 1990 to research the play and interview Romanian students about the events of the revolution. The play was then performed at the National Theatre in Bucharest (1990) by a cast comprised largely of those students, and produced again at The Royal Court in London a month later with the same actors.

224 attempts to determine who was fighting who in the streets.206 Churchill’s vampire’s contemporary presence as a restless figure—one that cannot rest in peace--is linked to a long history of such difficulty. Set in Bucharest, where a wild and labyrinthine forest once stood, the play takes place in the ancient stomping ground of Vlad the Impaler, who is widely considered to be a historical model for Dracula. In addition to evoking both “real”

(Vlad) and “fictional” (Dracula) vampires, the play’s subject directly engages another figure linked to vampirism as a metaphor for terror and tyranny—the figure of Ceausescu himself.207 Thus the play’s use of a vampire sets up an uncanny relationship to fiction and folklore as well as Romanian history, destabilizing our relationship to all of them. The figure of the vampire allows the Gothic to intervene in what is otherwise a play born of documentary and interview, thus doing what the Gothic does best—challenging and expanding constructions of reality.

The vampire’s appearance occurs in roughly the middle of the play, at the height of the revolution when he comes across a stray dog outside one night, explaining to it that: “I came here for the revolution, I could smell it a long way off…nobody knew who was doing the killing” (Churchill, Mad 137-138). The dog is starving, having been abandoned by its

206 This theme recurs in one of Churchill’s most Gothic plays, Far Away, which starts with a young girl seeing her uncle beating some people in his shed and ends with her on the run from a war of such epic global proportions that everything is against everything (insects, gravity, cats, the French, etc) and allegiances are almost impossible to fathom. This play does not evoke vampires, but its descriptions of animals in the final scene certainly evoke monstrosity as a feature of the uber-real reality of global violence (Churchill, Far Away 152-159). 207 Gelder makes the insightful claim that western journalists reporting on the Romanian Revolution took advantage of “the easy availability of ‘on site’ vampiric iconography” in their representation of the Romanian Communist dictator (Reading 5-6). Gelder also cites several film and fiction narratives that take up this connection, but he does not mention Mad Forest, which is a pity and says much more about the problematic general tendency to overlook contemporary theatre (particularly supposedly “serious” theatre) than it does about Churchill.

225 owner in the fighting, and it too has “tasted man’s blood…thick on the road” (Churchill, Mad

137). The dog, homeless and hungry, tries to get the vampire to take it with him:

VAMPIRE: You want me to make you into a vampire? A vampire dog? DOG: Yes, please. Yes, yes. VAMPIRE: It means sleeping all day and going about at night. DOG: I’d like that. VAMPIRE: Going about looking like anyone else, being friendly, nobody knowing you. DOG: I’d like that. VAMPIRE: Living forever, / you’ve no idea. All that DOG: I’d— VAMPIRE: happens is you begin to want blood, you try to put it off, you’re bored with killing, but you can’t sit quiet, you can’t settle to anything, your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster, that eases the pain, seeking. And finding. Ah. (Churchill, Mad 139).

In a war zone, nobody notices the vampire because violence is everywhere, and the confusion provides him ample cover to travel, “looking like anyone else.” The war in the streets has effectively opened the door to whatever bloodshed the vampire might inflict by establishing a precedent of habituated and generative violence-as-survival. For the dog, to be the victim of the vampire means the comfort of the familiar even though it means a kind of suffering; it is for the dog easier than the challenge of adapting to change, of making a life on its own. It is used to submission and at least this way there will be food. In Sian

Adiseshiah’s analysis of Mad Forest, “the play dramatizes the revolution as a utopian moment of possibility but also as a vulnerable space, a space of disputation, a space that is ultimately lost to forces of tradition and anachronism, most potently symbolized by the vampire who smells blood and comes to feed” (Adiseshiah 296). As a revolutionary Gothic narrative, then, Mad Forest articulates an anxiety about the ability to overcome the forces of tradition and the cost of trying.

226 Although the vampire’s success here does not explicitly hinge on his ability to take control of women, it is worth noting that, in some ways, Mad Forest’s vampire articulates not so much a departure from ideas about female subjugation and national power, as a variation on a theme.208 The victim of a vampire, as scholars have noted, has historically tended almost always to be female--even when the vampire is female (Stuart 22).209 On stage this precedent goes back to Planché and is reinforced by Bourcicault, and later by

Balderston and Deane and the trail of Draculas that followed. Thus to some extent the dog can be read as standing in for women displaced in war, simply by virtue of being a vampire’s victim. By biting the dog, the vampire marks as his own a creature associated with submission, domesticity, and loyalty, and a creature, as Mary Luckhurst notes,

“habituated to subjugation” (M. Luckhurst 67).210 Importantly it is not just the presence of the apparently unbanished ancient figure of the feeding vampire that articulates the horror, violence and opportunism of political upheaval, as Adiseshiah’s reading suggests, but also the ease with which he finds a complicit victim.

III - Colonization and Complicity: The Vampire and Exploitation in Venus

208 Though my argument here is not undermined if the dog is male, the text in fact does not specify or even imply the Dog’s sex. 209 Interestingly, this is the case for the most prominent historical figure who serves as a source for vampire mythology, Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, whose victims were also female. 210 Despite Churchill’s vampire’s claims that vampires don’t keep pets, there is a strong association of dogs with vampires. Dogs, while loyal to their masters, are dangerous and opportunistic and can tear out a person’s throat. Dracula controls wolves and wild dogs, and the Count in Angela Carter’s radio play Vampirella, keeps “a great, slavering, fanged monster” of a dog, which begs for bones with the flesh still on them (Carter 8). Thus the dog is a like being, but a subservient one, and one that resonates with Harker’s impressions of the vampire brides and with the subservient Renfield. As Mary Luckhurst also notes, packs of wild dogs were common on the Romanian streets during the revolution, so the appearance of one here is very apt on a number of levels (M. Luckhurst 67).

227

The evocation of the vampire in Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus (1996) is far less obvious than Churchill’s scene with the dog, and does not necessarily conjure the figure of Count

Dracula either by direct reference or by virtue of geo-historical context. And yet this play also draws on the cultural currency of vampire imagery cemented by Dracula to show a woman similarly complicit in her own oppression and to raise contemporary questions about the oppression of women in the context of national and international politics and power. Like Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, Parks’s work aligns more closely than Lochhead’s does with an exploration of the vampire as a racially charged figure, but Parks’s treatment is far more allusive, and thus demonstrates the way in which the trope of the vampire detaches from Stoker’s iconic text to emerge as a metaphorical frame of reference in the context of the play’s subject matter: sexual predation, subjugation, and colonization.

Venus, first performed at the Yale Repertory theatre in 1996 and then produced to mixed response at The Public Theatre in New York, tells the fictionalized story of Saartje

Baartman, a Khoisan woman who danced in freak shows as “The Hottentot Venus” in

England and Europe in the early nineteenth century. Baartman was exhibited as an object of fascination and perverse curiosity due to buttocks and genitalia that were perceived as extremely large by western standards. After her death, her remains were put on display in a French science museum and only returned to South Africa at the end of the twentieth century. Parks’s play presents Venus as she is manipulated into leaving Africa to make money and then exploited in Europe first at the hands of the Madam Showman who takes advantage of her economically in her Chorus of Wonders, and then at the hands of The

Baron Docteur, who exploits her sexually, economically, and for the advancement of his

228 own scientific career until and even after her death. Venus complicates the motif of the excessive, life-producing monstrous body of the sexualized black woman that it also stages—a trope that was the focus of the second chapter—by drawing our attention not to birth, but to death, staging the body as lacking, absent.

Venus’s death is, however, a highly ambiguous point in the play’s timeline. The play is told in an oddly open-ended cyclic fashion moving forward in time while counting down from scene 31, so that death as a linear and fixed event is dismantled, and life--or rather the state of not being dead--is endless. Venus starts with the chorus telling us “there wont be inny show tonite” and then presents a show, moving through Venus’s death to the end of the play when Venus herself announces “The Venus Hottentot iz dead” (Parks, Venus 3,

160). The last line of the play shows Venus, not dead, calling out “kiss me kiss me kiss me kiss” (Parks, Venus 162). Spoken footnotes and scenes from a melodrama called “For the

Love of Venus” also disrupt the narrative, confusing the relationship between reality and representation (much to the consternation of some critics),211 life and death, event and repetition, in a way that is familiar to the readers of the labyrinthine plots and convoluted narratives-within-narratives of the Gothic novel. As Julian Wolfreys notes, the Gothic has always delighted in fragmentary, disjointed narratives and disembodied voices, and in the modern moment such formal concerns well serve “the constitution of modern, fragmented subjectivity” (Wolfreys xviii-xix).

211 Greg Evans of Variety, for example, was highly critical of the play’s “hyper-stylization” (G. Evans May 2, 1996), and in her review of The Steppenwolf production for Chicago Theatre Beat, Catey Sullivan complains that the “heightened theatrics and linguistic acrobatics” of Parks’s script detract from the story, which is nowhere stronger than when the dialogue is “straightforward” (Sullivan, June 12, 2011).

229 This disrupted linearity not only serves to render Venus as a fragmented subject but also to present her as an undead figure in the world of the play. This is ultimately exemplified by her calling for some kind of oral satisfaction from beyond the grave: “Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me kiss” (Parks, Venus 162). The narrative form of Venus thus accomplishes a temporal liminality that critics have noted as a feature of the postcolonial

Gothic. Speaking particularly about the anxieties about Ireland as a British colony that are articulated in Dracula, Robert Smart notes that, “the point of a postcolonial reading of

[Dracula and Carmilla] is in part that dangers are never truly gone, never completely destroyed” (Smart 12). Smart argues that, in the Postcolonial Gothic, we find “misaligned temporal plates” that defy closure and resolution, offering instead narratives in which time is frozen, and “the past is constantly revealed in the present” (Smart 13). Certainly that describes the dramaturgical strategies of Venus.

Parks’s play, then, evokes vampirism through the motif of troublingly ambiguous longevity in both character and narrative, and, in both cases, this vampirism is reinforced by the motif of consumption. The scenes from the melodrama, for example, serve as an interwoven play-within-a play, watched by the audience and by the Venus and the Docteur, in which a bride-to-be performs for her soon-to-be husband as his sexual fantasy--the

Venus. The gaze is significant in this play as a predatory and consuming force that, from its various vantage points, raises questions about watching, visibility and performance.

Indeed, as reviewers have noted, Richard Foreman’s direction in the Yale/Public production drew attention to this “emphasizing the dangerously tight circle of spectator/object relationship,” with “wires strung above the audience…connect[ing] them

230 to the stage action [which] is turned outward for the audience’s direct consumption”

(Basting 223).

Laura Wright’s article, “Masceration’s French for Lunch: Reading the Vampire is

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus” (2002), points to a connection between exploitation and feeding in the play that underscores the play’s exploration of the devouring gaze and bears some examination here. For Wright, presenting the body of Venus on stage resurrects her, even as she claims it forces the audience to participate in “vampiric voyeurism” (Wright 70).

Wright sees this voyeurism as an act of consumption that operates as a feminist critique of colonialism:

Parks…employs the trope of the vampire, effectively demonizing colonial power while simultaneously subverting it: while she condemns the vampires that drain women’s blood, she is also able to resurrect the bodies of the women on stage through the very act of vampirism (Wright 72).

In Wright’s analysis, the act of watching is an act of consumption, yet as Sara Warner has noted, the play has many sightlines, not just the ones between the spectator and the play or between the play’s primary colonial figure, the Baron Docteur, and Venus, to whom his devouring gaze is directed (S. Warner, “Disinterment” 194). The problem of isolating the vampire is therefore perhaps more complicated than Wright’s analysis allows.

Nonetheless, the visibility of Venus’s body on stage as both alive and yet not alive makes her an interesting and troubling figure of the undead, to be sure. Her unequivocal yet ambivalent undeadness intersects with the play’s motifs of feeding and consumption in a way that supports a reading of the play that includes vampirism as a significant image.

For example, toward the end of the play, troubled by the medical language she hears from the chorus of anatomists when she is being examined, Venus asks for a definition of the

231 term maceration. The Baron Docteur replies “’macerations’ French for ‘lunch,’” (Parks,

Venus 139). When the anatomists say “the measurementsll be corrected after maceration,” they mean that the size of Venus’s bones will be better determined when they are stripped of flesh after death. But maceration is also a step in food preparation and wine-making, one in which food is treated to release flavor, soften, and yield its juice. The Baron Docteur’s playful lie, invested with gallows humor through polyvalence, positions Venus as both erotic object and food to be prepared and consumed through the act of observation—his, that of the other doctors, and of course of the spectator. The Steppenwolf Theatre’s 2011 production made much of the play’s scientific/Gothic tensions: the set design by Scott Davis and Emily Tarleton locates the play largely in a nineteenth-century lab, complete with organs preserved in jars like pickles, skeletons, medical paraphernalia and high contrast lighting that is both stark and ominously shadowy.212 The colonizing figure of the Baron

Docteur, who so casually and frighteningly collapses distinctions between maceration and lunch can, as Wright suggests, be read as a vampire who seduces his victim and then feeds off Venus, exploiting her for his own power, and weakening her even as she sustains him.

The connection staged between the colonizer’s gaze and exploited female labor is interestingly also rendered through motifs of human consumption in Joan Schenkar’s comedy of menace, Signs of Life (1979). This less well-known play is about the lives of two female patients being treated by Doctor Sloper, a character based on the controversial

Victorian gynecologist, J. Marion Sims.213 The female characters are Jane Merritt (a female reimagining of the Elephant Man) and Alice James, the sister of writer Henry James and the

212 See production stills published in Miller’s review. 213 Sims experimented on enslaved women but also contributed to advances in women’s health (see Barron Lerner, October 2003). Schenkar does not take up his connection to slavery, but it does strikingly link these two plays.

232 partner of Katherine Loring. Jane, like Venus, is exhibited as a freak and used for scientific and surgical experimentation. Alice is being treated for a litany of ills--some diagnosed and some unspoken--including various forms of hysteria, lesbianism, depression, and breast cancer. She is much despised for non-conformity by her brother who nonetheless freely appropriates Alice’s diary entries for his own novels.214 Much of the play involves conversation between Henry James and Doctor Sloper over tea, during which they toast

“the ladies.” These scenes in particular use blood imagery to present Sloper and James as consumers of these women’s labor:

DOCTOR: I’ve often wondered what it was in Jane Merritt’s expression that moved me to explore the secrets of her bones. […] HENRY: I’ve always wondered what it was in Alice’s eyes that drove me to pursue the secrets of her journal. She wanted it published, you know […] naturally, I…burnt it to a crisp. […] HENRY: Doctor Sloper, there is blood in my cup. And there is bone in my biscuit. DOCTOR: Just deserts, Mr. James. HENRY: (calming) Ahhh yes. Quite right, doctor. DOCTOR: (the toast): The ladies, Mr. James. HENRY: (remembering) Ah yes, the ladies, Dr. Sloper. They raise their cups (Schenkar 53-54).

The term “burnt…to a crisp” and the repetition of “bone” in the context of first Jane and then biscuit, take the civilized act of taking tea—like reference to the civilized act of lunch in Venus--into the realm of Gothic horror.

However, while the parallels between Schenkar and Parks are very striking indeed and worthy of more in-depth analysis than the scope of this study permits, it is important

214 The motif of literary vampirism, sucking up the creative ideas of others rather than their blood, is also the subject of Robert Reece’s satire of Bourcicault, The Vampire (1872), which as Roxana Stuart notes, contains a “mean streak of female-intellectual bashing” in its treatment of the male vampire’s appropriation of women’s writing (Stuart 166). Given that Reece is a contemporary of Henry James, one wonders if Schenkar is playing with The Vampire as a source.

233 to make distinctions between cannibalism and vampirism. Wright briefly mentions Signs of

Life as a play in which “the character of the vampire appears explicitly,” supporting her claim that links Venus to a genealogy of work that also includes Churchill’s Mad Forest,

Kennedy’s Dramatic Circle as well as Signs of Life (Wright 69). Yet, what Wright’s reference to Schenkar and more detailed reading of Venus overlook, perhaps, is that vampirism is transmitted.

In Venus, the fact that visual feasting is not only deadly but also potentially contagious--like the bite of the vampire--is made clear when Venus’s health starts to decline:

THE BARON DOCTEUR: She’s not feeling so well. Said so herself. THE GRADE-SCHOOL CHUM: She’ll probably outlive us all. THE BARON DOCTEUR: Shes—Shes got the clap. THE GRADE-SCHOOL CHUM: The clap? From you? THE BARON DOCTEUR: Perhaps. (Parks, Venus 143)

The above discussion takes place while Venus sleeps--a set up that evokes the hushed bedside musings typical of vampire narratives215--and it makes clear that the Baron

Docteur’s intimate contact with Venus has infected her. Further, this infection will slowly cost her her life although of course the play’s denial of closure as we are left with the undead Venus means that, as the grade-school chum ominously predicts, Venus will outlive them all. Parks’s play brings irony to a link between the patriarchal denial of sexually

215 The image of the languishing victim being discussed while she lies, insensible, in bed, is a recurrent one and often the vampire himself is present as is the case here. Van Helsing in Stoker’s text is a familiar example dramatized in both Balderston and Deane’s and Lochhead’s Dracula, but even earlier we see various discussions about the unconscious Margaret in Planché’s Bride Of The Isles. The victim in bed is a notable motif, and one that as Catherine Wynne observes, puts the victim in a place of sin as well as a place of suffering (Wynne 92).

234 transmitted diseases and vampirism established in Dracula,216 by having Venus’s cause of death serve as a subject for speculation amongst the population of the play: “perhaps, she died of drink” and “23 days in a row it rained…it was thuh cold I think” (Parks, Venus 3-4).

But there is more at stake here (pun intended) than whether or not Venus dies (or doesn’t) of the clap. The spread of disease in Venus also functions to draw attention to the transmission of vampirism itself in the form of the infectious corruption of colonization. As

Höglund and Khair note, in transnational and postmodern Gothic narratives, “imperial practice, as an aspect of the spread of Global capitalism, can be pictured as vampiric,” but so too those colonized can be seen to be “affected by this plague” (Höglund and Khair 6). To be clear, the circulation of resources, money, and products in Venus as embodied by the motif of the vampire feeding is both colonial and transnational here, the latter depending in part on the former. As a colonized subject exploited as a resource by Europe, Venus is indeed infected by the transnational plague of global capitalism and ultimately participates

(or wants to) in its circulation, a fact emphasized in some productions by costuming designs that make use of gold or, as in the case of a production at De Paul University, an increasingly European wardrobe. To be the victim of a vampire, one must either be destroyed or be transformed through the process of being fed off, becoming a vampire oneself, ready to feed off others. Thus Venus fantasizes, “come here quick, slave and attend me! Fetch my sweets! Fix my hair!” as she imagines having her buttocks sprinkled “with

216 As Day notes, the vampire as a figure in folklore was often used to explain the spread of disease when the mechanisms of contagion were unknown (Day 12). This fearful uncertainty is reworked in Dracula to mask the unspeakable transmission of sexual disease. In Robert Tracy’s convincing reading, Lucy’s destruction is an articulation of “Stoker’s fury at the prostitutes who had infected him [with syphilis]” (Tracy 52).

235 gold dust” (Parks, Venus 136). It would seem that the colonized victim has at least in intent become the colonizer.

The interplay between the contagious effects of colonization and consumption is further illustrated in a scene in which the Venus consumes chocolates while the Baron

Docteur masturbates:

THE BARON DOCTEUR: Here. Yr favorite: Chockluts. Have some. (The Baron Docteur turns his back to her). THE VENUS: Petit Coeurs Rhum Caramel Pharaon Bouchon Fraise Escargot Lait Enfant de Bruxelles. (Rest) Do you think I look like one of these little chocolate brussels infants? THE BARON DOCTEUR: You cant stay here forever you know. THE VENUS: Capezzoli de Venere. The nipples of Venus. Mmmmm. My favorite. THE BARON DOCTEUR: Ive got a wife. Youve got a homeland and a family back there. THE VENUS: I dont wanna go back inny more (Parks, Venus 105).

The Baron Docteur’s chocolates, exotic and produced by the labor of slaves in the colonies, have given Venus a taste for the social position of the colonizer. The chocolates function as ironic symbols of romantic love—a love “infected by death” as Greg Miller’s insightful reading of the play’s stylistic and linguistic structures terms it (Miller 132).217 And as symbols of love they affirm for Venus her view of herself not as a colonized subject, but as worthy of the white gaze, of entering the white world. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon

217 Greg Miller’s essay, “The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks” discusses Venus as a play dealing with colonialism, but he approaches it not from a history-centric postcolonial perspective, but rather by focusing on patterns and experimentation in the play’s language, motifs, and structure. While he does not mention vampires, his language and the themes he focuses on (devouring, love infected with death, contagion, etc) are strongly compatible with their presence.

236 argues that a Black woman entering a relationship with a white man does so to claim “a little whiteness in her life” making her less inferior (an inferiority that Fanon argues is felt economically), and therefore less Black by association (Fanon, Black 25-31). In not wanting to “go back inny more,” Venus exemplifies Fanon’s archetype of the Black woman’s quest to move herself (and her race, Fanon claims) toward whiteness,218 a move that would make her body perceptibly less monstrous in the world the play presents, but what is significant here is that she must do so on the backs of others, slipping from excess to lack, from monster to vampire.

The chocolates are significant here as a cliché of romantic love that embodies not devotion but enslavement. Anti-slave-trade rhetoric during the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth century established a powerful and widely circulated metonymic connection between the sugar produced in the colonies and the blood of the African slaves laboring to produce it--so much so that in much of the period’s discourse, as Timothy Morton suggests in Blood Sugar, “sugar stands for the blood of slaves,” (Morton 88). An extremely potent and much-used metonym, “sweetened drinks of tea, coffee, and chocolate were rendered suddenly nauseating by the notion that they contained the blood of slaves” (Morton 88).219

218 Fanon’s claim that Black women are trying to save their race by whitening it (Fanon, Black 37) is clearly a provocative one, and not entirely born out here by Venus, though it is worth noting that any attempts to do so via reproduction, thus generating children who may become white, are terminated by the Docteur and not by Venus herself, who has little choice in the matter. 219 Morton cites in particular Coleridge’s writings and lectures, and the sonnets of Southey, but he also makes it clear that the blood sugar analogy, and the fear that sugar had in fact been tainted by the body fluids of its producers, was widespread. Appeals to abstinence as a means of lessening dependence on colonies and abolishing the slave-trade were printed in magazines and elsewhere. Coleridge’s lecture on the slave trade delivered in 1795 was held in the Assembly Coffee-house in Bristol, an interesting location for his speech in which he denounced both sugar and coffee as the unnecessary products of a barbaric slave-trade (see Coleridge, On The Slave Trade 289).

237 In addition, Wright reads Venus’s consumption of the chocolates as “an act of self- silencing cannibalism,” taking up Fanon’s negative dialectic of colonization, in which “the colonized individual turns against the self and embraces his or her desire to become the colonizer” (Wright 79).220 However, while Venus’s consumption of the “nipple of Venus” certainly evokes the motif of cannibalism, those are not the only chocolates in the box.221

To instead read the chocolates as blood sugar suggests Venus’s participation in an ongoing perpetuation of the cycle of colonial exploitation, slavery and women’s labor embodied by her willingness to consume the blood, sweat and tears of other women—not just herself-- and other slaves. Here the chocolates serve as an important nexus for postcolonial and transnational readings, functioning as a trope of an expansion effort fueled by slavery, and the circulation of goods detached from their source of production in a global economy. As

Greg Miller notes, child slavery in the cocoa fields of western Africa is a contemporary issue, suggesting that while “the history of chocolate [in Venus] clearly suggests a history of colonization, [that] history…is in no sense behind us” (Miller 134). Venus’s consumption of slave-produced sugar thus serves as an act of transnational and colonial vampirism, as she feasts remotely on the labor—and by extension the blood—of others subjugated in a colonial system.

Furthermore, Wright’s reading insists that the vampire is gendered male because it expresses colonial patriarchy. She writes: “Woman, who can be read as a colonial subject in a patriarchy, is constructed as sustenance for the colonizing man, who is always the bearer

220 Wright draws attention here to a tendency in colonial and postcolonial rhetoric to position the colonizer as a vampire (as per Hoglund and Khashir, as noted) and the native as a cannibal, justifying the colonial imperative to civilize them. (Wright 71; 80). Miller also refers to this moment as “self-devouring” (Miller; 134). 221 One might also read the consumption of the “nipple of Venus” as evoking lesbianism, certainly a sexual behavior linked to motifs of vampirism.

238 of patriarchy: the fangs of the vampire are synonymous with the phallus, and both are the implements of domination used by the colonizer” (Wright 71). This is, however, a somewhat reductive line of thought. As Grewal and Kaplan have argued, feminist uses of colonial discourse that “equate the ‘colonized’ with ‘woman,’ creat[e] essentialist and monolithic categories that suppress issues of diversity, conflict, and multiplicity” (Grewal and Kaplan 3). Furthermore, Venus asks us to take Höglund and Khair’s assertion that the modern vampire can be thought of as “a white colonizer” rather than a dark invader as

Dracula is (Höglund and Khair 7), and then take that further to consider how the vampire’s victims, the subjects of white colonization, might themselves become vampiric. Certainly the decision by Foreman and Parks to cast Peter Francis James, a light-skinned black actor, as the Doctor suggests the ways in which Parks is willing to complicate easy racial absolutes and power roles,222 even though it seems that many productions cast a white actor as the Doctor, as would fit more easily with Wright’s analysis. Wright’s reading arguably occludes more nuanced considerations of the way vampirism and colonialism can and are spread among women, a question this play raises in the very least in the figure of the Mother-Showman, and again in Venus. Since at least Bram Stoker, the female vampire has notably feasted on children, with Dracula’s dreadful brides fighting over a baby in the

Count’s castle and Lucy transforming famously into the Bloofer Lady who lures children into graveyards.223 What is most troubling about Venus’s consumption of the little infants

222 According to Foreman, the casting of James became an issue, not because of the actor’s skin color but because he was not enough of a “distinguished English gentleman” when the play opened in New Haven, causing him to be pressured to adjust the performance for the Public, a decision he claims to regret (Foreman quoted in Garrett 84). The problem, in other words, was that James’s performance was not white enough. 223 In Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), the first English vampire novel with a female protagonist, Carmilla prays on Laura, who is on the verge of adulthood at the time of the story’s telling, but who also

239 of the Enfant de Bruxelles is precisely that they are infants.224 Venus’s action here consequently draws attention to gender in a way that resonates with Gothic precedents that posit her as a vampire, not a cannibal.

Venus, powerless and desiring of power, is “complicit in her own oppression,” as

Sara Warner points out (S. Warner, “Disinterment” 183), and she is so in part because she is willing to perpetuate the system, preying in turn on the labor of others if the opportunity arises. Indeed, this has been an issue for critics on the grounds of both race and feminism.

Jean Young’s article “The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartje Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” takes a historiocentric view of the play to suggest that Parks downplays Venus’s victimization for Parks’s own ends, effectively exploiting her all over again (J. Young 699-700). Reading the play’s feminist Gothic elements, however, jives better with a consideration of Baartman that situates historical reality in the context of something larger and not fully knowable or resolvable. Read as a postcolonial Gothic figure of liminality, neither alive nor dead, here nor there, Venus is in the uncanny space where we are asked to confront the past in the present. As Warner argues, the play’s controversial treatment of Baartman “calls into question the notion that historical trauma is a wound that must be healed in the name of unity” (S. Warner, “Disinterment” 183). That wound, like the bite-mark on the neck of the vampire’s victim, is a site of potential transformation that won’t quite heal. Venus’s closing line and gesture, as she is resurrected again and

remembers her first contact with Carmilla as coming when she was bitten as a child, something she recounts as a dream. The narrative thus straddles both the female vampire as the unnatural and nonmaternal predator of children, and as harbringer of lesbian desire. 224 The image of Venus eating little chocolate babies is uncomfortably complicated by Venus’s own aborted babies, terminated by the Baron Docteur to prevent miscegenation and preserve his marriage and his reputation. Importantly, the abortions here intervene in the usual narratives of life, death and normal reproduction--narratives that the vampire’s presence interrupts.

240 calling for kisses, brings emphasis to her ongoing undeadness, and to the oral intimacy we associate with the vampire’s point of contact even as it positions her as the one still hungry for some kind of sustenance.

So too, the legacy of colonial vampirism is ongoing. Venus is, of course, set primarily within the borders of the British Empire and then the French Empire a century ago. Yet in the American postcolonial context in which the play was written and performed, the specter of slavery in the play and the resistance to absolute white (colonizer) and black

(colonized) binary constructions jive well with the ambivalence captured by Singh and

Schmidt’s claim that the US ”may be understood to be the world’s first postcolonial and neo-colonial country” (Singh and Schmidt 5). As John McLeod bluntly notes, “colonialism could not have prospered without the Atlantic slave trade” (McLeod 4-6). This reading of slavery as a tool of colonial expansion that has shaped the modern world contributes to the insistence posed by Venus’s nonlinear, non-closing, undead narrative that we read colonialism contemporaneously and transnationally rather than banishing it as “post.”

III -- Labor and the New (Feminist) Woman

The scene in which Venus eats chocolates evokes the vampire in a way that yokes labor to blood and consumption. This particular evocation of the vampire through the image of women feeding on the labor of other women also emerges as a central concern in two seemingly very different plays: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and The Five Lesbian Brothers’

The Secretaries, both of which suggest that oppressive systems arising from Imperial

241 ideology perpetuate themselves by seducing women to be complicit in the processes of exploitation.

Top Girls premiered at the Royal Court in London, 1982, to mixed reviews and initially sluggish box office sales despite the success of Churchill’s earlier plays. It gained momentum when transferring to New York billed as a “London triumph” and then transferring back to London as a “New York Success,” and is now widely regarded as one of the most significant and accomplished English plays of the twentieth century (Dorney and

Gray 116).225 Top Girls is a bleak socialist drama about Marlene, an ambitious employment agent, and her daughter, Angie, who has been raised in the suburbs by Marlene’s sister,

Joyce. The play opens with a fantasy dinner party for extraordinary women from art and history, which Marlene throws to celebrate her own recent promotion, and at which consumption is very much on display as the women eat and drink until one of them throws up. The play then shifts to a series of scenes rooted in the unattractive reality of Marlene’s office and Joyce’s house in the suburbs. In the second half of the play, we see job interviews and water cooler gossip, contrasted with the hopeless circumstances of Joyce and Angie’s life in the suburbs. These scenes are non-chronological so that, like Venus, Top Girls offers an endless and cyclic narrative that defies closure and exemplifies the postcolonial Gothic’s tendency toward staging scenes in which the past lives in the present (Smart 13).

To appropriate feminist critic Peggy Phelan’s description of The Secretaries, to which we will return, Top Girls explores “routine cultural misogyny,” an insidious hatred that is both directed at women and “more darkly, sustains violence between women”

225 Benedict Nightingale’s review of the London premiere for the New York Times provides a helpful overview of initial responses to the play. Most complaints were about the perceived structural disconnect between acts, though some critics, including Nightingale, who much admired the play, also found the politics a little heavy-handed, or “crude” (Nightingale, Sept 19 1982).

242 (Phelan xv). Written in the context of England’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret

Thatcher, and her conservative and individualist policies in the Eighties,226 Top Girls pointedly critiques liberal feminism’s push for parity instead of change, suggesting that such an ideology reaffirms patriarchal norms, rather than dismantling them. Marlene, in order to be a top girl in the business world, uses the girls below her: her junior colleagues, the trail of secretaries who come to her employment agency to have their market value assessed, and Marlene’s own family. As Sue-Ellen Case writes in her overview of the play in

Feminism and Theatre, “Marlene’s upward mobility is characterized as a colonization of her own sister…She is using her sister as a kind of surplus labor that increases her own opportunities for profit” (Case, Feminism 87).

In a Marxist reading of the play, Marlene, busy amassing capital from the marketable skills of other women while her sister raises her kid for her, embodies the figure of the vampire—a figure that brings an important element of Gothic intervention to an otherwise largely realist attack on British economic policy. “Capital is dead labour,” Marx argues,

“which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks…and will not lose its hold…so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited” (Marx 475).227 Certainly Marx’s appropriation of the vampire for

226 Margaret Thatcher is noted for her uncompromising approach to economic growth based on free markets and her opposition to trade unions and socialism. Under her leadership and in the years directly following it, as political economist Mark Reiff notes, economic inequality significantly increased with the percentage of the national income that went to the wealthiest one percent of the population almost doubling (Reiff 6-8). 227 Marx makes this observation in “The Economics,” written between 1857 and 1867, so his use of the vampire here predates Dracula but comes a few years after Varney The Vampire, which was serialized in 1845 and which Auerbach notes as being particularly resonate with images of vampirism as social and economic predation (Auerbach 31).

243 social critique seems an obvious fit, and one easily reinforced in Churchill’s play.228 Marx’s metaphor is, after all, referencing what is already visible in the Gothic, from Varney the

Vampire’s social climbing to the archetypal Dracula’s embodiment of “true monopoly,” as

Franco Moretti notes in his compelling Marxist reading of Stoker in Dialectic of Fear

(Moretti 149).

So too the vampire emerges in The Secretaries at the site of exploitative labor, again as perpetuated by women inside a capitalist system. The Secretaries, which premiered in

New York in 1993, is a very dark, very funny comedy that follows the journey of Patty

Johnson, from her first day in The Cooney Lumber Mill’s typing pool to kill night--the secretaries’ once a month ritual slaughter of a lumberjack. Under the ever-watchful eye of

Susan Curtis, office manager, new girl Patty has to learn the ropes—what to eat, when to menstruate, who not to sleep with—in order to make the transition from lumberjack loving secretary-in-training to slim-fast swilling, chain-saw wielding, blood-thirsty lesbian.

While Churchill’s openly socialist politics and previous productions on reputable

London stages make the feminist criticism embedded in Top Girls perhaps less of a bitter pill for the audience of the Royal Court, who might already have been tiring of Thatcher when it was first performed, the success of The Secretaries is arguably more complicated.

The Secretaries was initially staged at the WOW Café, which though a popular part of the

East Village theatre world in New York in the eighties and nineties was nonetheless, as

Jordan Schildcrout notes, on the margins of an already marginalized queer theatre scene

228 This image has recently been reframed by Rebecca Schneider in her article on the Occupy Wall Street movement, “It Seems As If…I am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labor,” in which she traces the connection between the way theatre performs deadness in a way that describes “capitalism’s precarious relations to what counts as live and what counts as dead” in Wall Street’s reanimation and circulation of capital to “suck the lives” out of the worker (Schneider 157).

244 (Schildcrout 92). The play went on to have productions at a similarly popular but marginal space in Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco, as well as productions in Los Angeles, Seattle and Houston.229 The Five Lesbian Brothers report that this play, which went on to win an

OBIE Award, also gave them their “first walk outs” (Brothers, “On The Secretaries” 119).

The hostility of some audiences was something that the Brothers had worried about during the writing process when they debated whether their confrontation of body issues and women’s cruelty to each other were “promoting violence and/or betraying the feminist movement” (Brothers, “On The Secretaries” 119). Yet while male reviewers sometimes missed the point of the feminist critique, focusing on the violence toward the lumberjacks rather than on the internalized and institutionalized violence of the secretarial pool

(Brothers, “On The Secretaries” 119) the play’s subversive political critique rendered through the Gothic has nonetheless brought the play some lasting success.

In her article “Rage Slaves: The Commodification of Affect in The Five Lesbian

Brothers’ The Secretaries,” Sara Warner analyzes the play in terms of its treatment of the exploitation of women’s emotional labor, saying: “yes, patriarchy is to blame, but the question The Secretaries prompts us to ask is to what extent have women, and in particular feminists, contributed to this surplus army of super exploited female laborers?” (S. Warner,

“Rage” 25)230 Echoing Case’s observations about feminism and colonization in Top Girls and

229 The Houston production was at DiverseWorks, which was also premiered Suzan-Lori Parks;s Fucking A, discussed in the previous chapter. Of the Houston production, brother Dominique says “they like it in Houston…where gun laws are less restrictive” (Brothers, On The Secretaries 120). 230 Her language here echoes the claim that play shows the depiction of “women as the footsoldiers of the patriarchy,” as Brother Maureen Angelos notes (Angelos quoted in Solomon). This image of an army is recurrent in vampire narratives, which as noted evoke a connection between vampirism and invasion, particularly in Eastern Europe.

245 Phelan’s observations about routine misogyny in The Secretaries, Warner’s remarks resonate strongly with both plays, further underscoring their kinship.

This kinship between two plays so seemingly different in tone, style, structure, and cultural context becomes evident in the way both plays engage the trope of the vampire.

Considered together, they reveal the specific utility of the vampire for a contemporary feminist theatre looking at women’s labor. In both plays the vampire is used to critique the patriarchally constructed engines of exploitation, serving as a figure that illuminates the ways in which women, operating through an ideology of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them, participate in the socio-political machinery of oppression. Terrence Rafferty’s article in the

New York Times, “The Thinking Reader’s Guide to Fear,” offers an insight into the contemporary cultural context in which this particular reading of the vampire metaphor serves: “To get anything out of horror, you have to be willing to surrender to those metaphors. Vampires may not be real, but the voracious, apparently unkillable, only nominally human predators they represent certainly are. (Chances are you’ve worked for at least one of them)” (Rafferty 6/4/2006).

Central to the way the vampire functions in both plays is that it can only exist in a culture that has, effectively, already invited it in. Top Girls’s socially predatory Marlene is a product of the Regan and Thatcher years, who believes in an every-man-for-herself mentality and sets her sights firmly on going “up, up, up” and “want[s] to be free in a free world,” (Churchill, Top 137; 140). Thus, like Dracula, who reflects England’s own imperial practices, and the nineteenth-century English serialized villain Varney the Vampire before him, who similarly circulates easily in London’s greedy society, Marlene is preying on other

246 members of an already predatory system.231 So too are Susan Curtis and the secretaries who work for her at the lumber mill, a place, we might note, where they provide support services to an industry in which living things are literally cut down, chopped up, and transformed into commodities to be sold for gain.

Importantly, Marlene and Susan have the capacity to perpetuate the culture that invited them in and feeds them, infecting other would-be-secretaries with their own greedy, predatory behavior. The vampire’s ability to transform others thus serves as a vehicle for a feminist critique of the perpetuation of sexist hegemonic ideology. Varney the

Vampire, being the first of his kind to have the capacity to turn others into vampires, provides the template for the vampire as an embodiment of a fear of the contagious. This embodiment has been widely appropriated and refigured in the contemporary moment, particularly in the late twentieth century with the spread of blood-borne diseases like AIDS, and with international fears (themselves transmitted by media), about global pandemics.232

As Lorna Piatti-Farnell points out in her recent book, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular

Literature, vampirism’s resemblance to viruses is striking: “The liminality of the vampire is transmitted…as the human cells die the virus lives….Vampires are often referred to as

231 Varney the Vampire, most likely by James Malcolm Rymer (Ryan 25), and originally published in 109 parts as a penny dreadful between 1845 and 1847, is in many respects about ordinary life in an opportunistic and capitalist society. As Nina Auerbach notes: [Varney The Vampire] normalizes its vampire by placing him in a feasting society….Hungrier for money than blood, Varney…lives in intimacy with mortals, embracing…all the greedy strata of England’s hierarchy” (Auerbach 33). 232 Auerbach attributes this observation about Varney to scholar Robert Tracy (Auerbach 196) and I have not been able to turn up any evidence of a contagious/generative vampire earlier, though the spread of disease exists as trope in Gothic writings before Varney. See also her discussion of the intersection between AIDS and vampirism in the eighties (Auerbach 177-180).

247 ‘unnatural’ [and] that sense of the ‘unnatural’ relates to that which is not born as such, but is transmitted, recreated, redrafted” (Piatti-Farnell 40).233

Significantly, when this ability to transmit and transform into something “unnatural” first emerges in Varney, it evokes a fear that the vampire can turn women into NOT women.

This is greatly amplified in Dracula, which cements a useful precedent for contemporary feminist theatre in the image of vampirism as an attractive yet dangerous form of gender transcendence.234 During the period in which Stoker was writing, the New Woman, which

Ken Gelder neatly defines as “a designation for the late Victorian feminist – unmarried, sexually independent, career-minded,” was a popular and much criticized figure in the

British press and in literature (Gelder, Reading 78). Some scholars see the New Woman as a figure repeatedly demonized in Stoker’s fiction (Wynne 124). Certainly, women in their vampiric state pose a resistance to patriarchal order, due to their aggressive, powerful, undomesticated, lustful behavior and their tendency to exhibit non-normative relationships to institutions such as church and marriage.

However, as is so often the case in the Gothic, while readings that depend on clearly delineated binaries such as good/evil are tempting, they rarely capture the complex ambiguity upon which Gothic representation builds its atmosphere of fear. To be sure, Lucy very effectively yokes the figure of the New Woman to an ideology of degeneration, articulating a horror of the sexually empowered woman as unnatural that was popular during the fin de siècle and arguably remains so. Yet Mina’s relationship to the figure of the

233 For Piatti-Farnell, the most recent manifestations of vampirism as a virus in fiction serve as a warning about the “unnatural” production of genetic engineering (see her discussion of Vector Theory and DNA 39-40). 234 As Tracy points out it’s worth noting that Dracula’s name is actually feminine (Tracy 42).

248 New Woman is more complicated.235 Mina is, after all, the novel’s working woman. A consummate typist who practices stenography and short-hand so she can work professionally as Harker’s secretary, Mina is responsible for the production and analysis of much of the documentation the vampire hunters amass in their attempts to track Dracula.

She is active and intelligent, or as Van Helsing describes has “a man’s brain” (Stoker 278).

In Gelder’s reading, with which I am inclined to agree, the novel’s heroine is the most modern figure in the book and an ambiguous one, since she is “maternal…passive and submissive…and yet also sexually independent and in touch with feminist thinking”

(Gelder, Reading 79). Throughout the novel Mina’s own relationship to the figure of the

New Woman is thoughtful and aware. One of Mina’s journal entries makes the comment:

“Some of the New Woman writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that” (Stoker 110-111)

While neither Top Girls nor The Secretaries references Dracula directly, their appropriation of vampire imagery nonetheless makes it tempting to see a connection between Mina’s working-woman feminist aspirations and the office girls of these contemporary plays. Certainly Mina’s albeit playful characterization of the New Woman as someone who “won’t condescend” serves as a precursor for the kind of feminism ultimately subverted in Top Girls and the rather aptly named The Secretaries. While there is arguably a legacy of inherent misogyny in the characterization of Lucy’s sexuality that is both

235 As Luckhurst observes, Victorian Gothic “never simply confirms the ideology of degeneration, as so much…criticism risks asserting” (R. Luckhurst 165). Degeneration, most famously articulated by Max Nordau, was a popular idea during the fin de siècle. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity discusses Victorian images linking women through vampirism to degeneration (Dijkstra 333-358).

249 perpetuated and parodied in contemporary vampire imagery, it is the vulnerability of

Mina’s so-called man’s brain to Dracula’s powers of persuasion, and not the vulnerability of her body, that offers the more interesting model of the vampire victim to the contemporary moment.

While the figure of the vampire poses a physical threat, the idea that women’s brains are also vulnerable to vampirism goes back to Margaret’s dream-like confusion in the presence of Ruthven. For Roger Luckhurst the vampire narrative’s fascination with trance- like states is a highly significant feature, which he goes so far as to argue explains the re- emergence of the Gothic in the Victorian period when there was a surge in public and scientific interest in hypnosis and Dracula’s victims were subject to mind control (R.

Luckhurst 148). If Luckhurst’s theory were mapped on to the contemporary moment, it seems likely that the remote power of technology to disseminate information and influence thinking and behavior on a global scale might replace hypnosis as one possible explanation for a surge in Gothic narratives at the end of the twentieth century. If so, it also illuminates the ways in which vampire narratives actively critique the power relationships inherent in the production and consumption of information. Certainly the secretaries, like all good potential vampire victims, are persuadable, as their endless references to nationally and internationally marketed brand names suggest. In the postcolonial context, this dissemination and consumption of information on a transnational scale seems to serve as an extension of the colonial missionary imperative to spread Christianity and educate, convert, and assimilate native populations. The persuasion and ultimate assimilation of

Patty into the lesbian cult serves with comic irony in just this way.

250 That television shows up in several contemporary vampire narratives similarly seems more than merely contextual. Lenora Ledwon’s article on Television Gothic posits the television as a particularly apt tool for domestic Gothic as it brings horror literally into the home (Ledwon 263-264). Although her interest is in Twin Peaks rather than vampire narratives, the myth of the vampire’s need to be invited in makes the vampire narrative strikingly relevant to this line of thought. As Thomas Fahy neatly puts it in his recent collection of interviews, The Writing Dead (2015), “more horror shows are on air now than at any point in television history” and vampires in particular “enjoy a thriving afterlife on

TV” (Fahy, Xi-Xii). The connection between vampires and television emerges most obviously in the debates about vampire culture that are repeatedly observed on television in True Blood, a motif that stages the impact of media on popular thinking, but does so via the medium with which the spectator him/herself is engaged. In this way True Blood creates, as Parks does in Venus, multiple lines of sight, highlighting the gaze with self- conscious irony as a troubled form of consumption.

The Gothic potential of television to disrupt and affect is put to use in plays as well, underscoring its significance. The secretaries all abandon what they’re doing mid sentence when Patrick Swayze appears on television. Susan Curtis’s idea of seduction is to watch

Blood Sport on television with Patty (Brothers, Secretaries 143). So too, Marlene’s co- worker Nell explicitly rejects men (two offers of marriage so far) because she prefers “telly”

(Churchill, Top 102). Unlike Susan, Nell doesn’t tell us what she watches, but clearly something in these mass-marketed and culturally constructed narratives for consumption prove a viable alternative to male company. In these plays, then, the television serves ironically as a kind of feminist threat to society that intervenes in the domestic and

251 disrupts familial structures. The worlds of both The Secretaries and Top Girls are shaped by a climate of information disseminated through patriarchally sanctioned channels from the television to the office PA system and the Victoria’s Secret catalogues that conveniently appear in Susan’s office. Significantly both these contemporary plays use this environment to frame narratives in which feminist ideology is a kind of contagion that can spread vampirically from woman to woman through bullying and brain-washing. As Marlene prepares Jeanine to interview for a job she doesn’t want, she tells Jeanine to believe in herself (even though it’s clear neither of them does), saying “you could make me believe it if you put your mind to it” (Churchill, Top 87). Similarly, brainwashing and bullying bend

Patty’s spirit toward participation in the hours before kill night, and ultimately equip Patty to take over as office manager.

In both plays the office spaces are populated by casts that are all female, suggesting ironically that women have somehow taken over the public sphere. And yet any triumph they might have from leaving behind the mundane drudgery of the domestic and moving to parity in the work place is presented as hollow and something of an (un)dead end for feminism. The workers might be women, but the infrastructures and technologies that enable their careers are still entrenched in capitalist and patriarchal ideologies of consumption and competition. Marlene charts her success by the size of her office and her ability to displace other people to get it, and at the mill the women compete for a secretary of the month award in the form of a new sweater that effectively pits the women against each other rather than fostering collaboration. Furthermore, though Patty might be hired for her “advanced degree in secretarial sciences with an emphasis on foreign study and international keyboards” it is what she does with her body, not her intellect, that

252 determines her success in the office (Brothers, Secretaries 129) To get ahead, Patty must adhere to “guidelines for dress code and nail length” and keep her weight down and her legs ostensibly closed, factors that serve to remind us that the norms for acceptable female behavior in the office have more to do with sexist constructions of woman-as-object than they do with Patty’s ability to speak six languages, even as they are enforced by other women (Brothers, Secretaries149). In this way, “The Secretaries parodies the absurd logic that something can’t be sexist if it is done by a woman” (S. Warner, “Rage” 35), and Top

Girls critiques that same assumption, showing the workplace as a site that fosters and spreads misogyny amongst its female workers in order to increase production, which, in turn, generates more laborers.

And once a vampire, there is no way out except a stake through the heart. Patty’s narrowing and harrowing transformation to “fit in with the rest” in The Secretaries firmly shuts the door on her life outside of the mill (Brothers, Secretaries 190). Once Patty becomes a Cooney Lumber Mill girl, she is stuck being that and nothing else, endlessly. As

Warner notes, “there is no start or stop time for the secretaries’ shifts at the mill” (S.

Warner, “Rage” 39). Similarly, Jeanine, the secretary who dreams of change in Top Girls, faces a future in the business world of terrifying and never-ending sameness. Asked if her ten-year plan is to be “a personal assistant to a top executive in a multi-national,” Jeanine replies, “I might not be alive in ten years.” To which Marlene says somewhat ominously

“Yes, but you will be” (Churchill, Top, 86). In this way, while the business-woman-as- vampire is a figure of fun and terror, both plays also complicate the trope by reminding us that the vampire is also a victim. Life as a personal assistant to a top executive, as Jeanine and Patty (like Mina before them) both aspire to be, might seem like an escape from the

253 death sentence of life in the suburbs, but it is presented paradoxically as a form of exploitation that is like the life of the vampire, endless. Such representations support Nina

Auerbach’s claim that vampires “embody not fear of death, but fear of life…vampires long to die, at least in certain moods, infecting readers with fears of their own interminable lives” (Auerbach 5).

IV -- Feminist Rebels and Lesbian Vampires

As well as serving to critique exploitations of women’s labor, the re-imagined image of the vampiric New Woman deployed in Top Girls and The Secretaries also draws on the pervasive stereotype that feminist equals lesbian, as well as on the long-standing association of vampires with the homoerotic. Certainly, The Secretaries use the lesbian vampire to satirize contemporary homophobic representations of the all-female work place as a nest for breeding lesbians and to confront violence between women. However, in Top

Girls, the queer vampire serves as a Gothic amplification of Marlene’s daughter Angie’s vulnerability, and underscores her emergent alienation from contemporary social constructions of womanhood in a postcolonial society supposedly liberated from class and exploitation. Vampirism, then, is offered within these narratives as a means to stage a rebellion against aspects of the dominant heterosexist economy, as is suggested by the secretaries’ blood-letting and feasting escapades at kill night, and Angie’s running away to become a top girl. In a contemporary feminist theatre, the vampire as an ambivalent departure from the norm resonates with critical and satirical force through three entwined

254 themes: performing womanhood, rejecting marriage and motherhood, and embracing same-sex desire.

The vampire, as a figure of female rebellion, makes a brief but specific and significant appearance right in the--dare I say—heart of Top Girls.236 In Act Two, in what is effectively the central scene of the play, Angie, who is sixteen, and her friend Kit, aged twelve, are playing in a small shelter made of junk in Angie’s backyard. Angie has just made the claim that she can see and hear in the dark (a dead kitten specifically), and she explains this unique ability as a result of her not being a baby and not being scared of blood:

ANGIE: I’m going to kill my mother and you’re going to watch. KIT: I’m not playing. ANGIE: You’re scared of blood. Kit puts her hand under her dress, brings it out with blood on her finger. KIT: There, see, I got my own blood, so. Angie takes Kit’s hand, licks her finger. ANGIE: Now I’m a cannibal. I might turn into a vampire now. Then later: I don’t mind blood. If I don’t get away from here I’m going to die. (Churchill, Top 90)

A lot happens in this brief but purposeful exchange which precipitates Angie’s own flight to

London to escape death and become a top girl, and which simultaneously establishes the vampire as Angie’s self-chosen marker for her otherness, her quest to not “die,” her homosociality if not her homosexuality, and her potential to “turn into” something else. It’s a funny yet uncomfortable moment. 237 Angie is putting on a show, trying to elicit a reaction

236 Interestingly, the vampire’s appearance in Mad Forest is also brief but central and linked to rebellion. And it is worth noting again the presence of war in Top Girls here, yoking the emergence of the vampire to sites of political upheaval. The shelter Angie and Kit have built appears from their conversation to be a bomb shelter of sorts. 237 One reading of the Kit/Angie scene suggests that it shows “their love and strong connection” and that the blood tasting gesture is a pact to “seal their bond” that opens an admittedly small possibility that the smarter and more ambitious Kit might “extend a hand” to Angie later in life (Ammen 92) but if it is a pact, it is one Kit does not enter into willingly.

255 from her friend with her posturing and bravado. In evoking the figure of the vampire, Angie is trying to claim the power to make herself visible in a particular register. She is performing, or trying to, but that performance functions to facilitate the deadly serious business of trying to construct an alternative reality for herself, or simply put, of trying to pass. That this might prove a useful site for resistance from a queer or feminist perspective is obvious enough, and resistance is clearly on Angie’s mind.

Churchill’s evocation of the vampire through Angie here reworks what Robert Smart notes as one of “the Gothic’s most ubiquitous characters,” and one he considers central to the postcolonial vampire narrative: the orphan who is cut off from his or her history and yet who yearns for a missing identity and can only vanquish the vampire when that missing element has been resolved, through discovery, adoption, or marriage (Smart 14-15). As

Smart notes: “the orphan has no past, nothing from which to determine a current identity, and no prospect for a future because of the orphan’s misalignment with the familial structures that are the targets of most Gothic texts” (Smart 14). Angie’s status as a daughter is one of the key sites of her resistance, and is much in question in the play. She wants to

“kill [her] mother (who is not actually her mother) and she has no father. Consequently,

Angie serves as a figure of disruption to the standard familial structures of patriarchal culture, structures that would position her as a daughter, or as a wife.

Top Girls presents Angie with a lose/lose choice between marriage and vampirism, and, significantly for a feminist postcolonial reading, it is not marriage that Angie seeks as a means to construct her identity or secure her future. Angie’s life in the suburbs centers around whether or not she has “done it” and with whom—though she doesn’t seem to want

256 anything to do with boys—and the problematic proposition bluntly spelled out by Joyce that “she’d better get married” assuming she can find someone “who’d have her” (Churchill,

Top 97). Angie, continually framed as “odd” in the world of the play, sets her sights on

London, and on Aunty Marlene who has “balls,” “refuses to turn into a little woman”

(Churchill, Top 100), and is “not natural,” according to the wife of the man Marlene beats to promotion (Churchill, Top 113). In rejecting matrimony in favor of an identity aligned with the top girls, Angie embodies the willing victim of the vampire, who--from Le Fanu’s lesbian

Carmilla, to Stoker’s archetypal Dracula, to heroic refigurings like True Blood’s Bill

Compton—is a figure that threatens a woman’s hegemonically prescribed path to marriage, swaying her from the pursuit of an appropriate role in life, and investing her instead with new power.238

And to be sure, there is something vampiric about Marlene, whose own rejection of the class-bound domestic world of the suburbs, as I have noted, has allowed her to move up the food chain and survive. The women throughout history from the fantasy dinner party, who function as Marlene’s family by association, are also all undead. They form a strange community of ageless survivors that has come together to feast--one or possibly two steaks for Marlene, “rare” as she specifies twice—and celebrate that they have, in Marlene’s words

“all come a long way” (Churchill, Top 59; 67). Clearly immortality, being known beyond the grave, involves outlasting the oppression of a patriarchal culture—something that must

238 In a postcolonial context, the complexities of anxieties about marriage, sexuality and reproduction are closely bound up with anxieties about colonization, empire, race, and social progress, as I have note elsewhere. True Blood offers a nice example of the vampire as a figure that embodies alternatives to heterosexist assumptions, with one of the background themes being vampires fighting for the right to marry, a satirical take on the debates around gay marriage. There is also something rebellious about both this fight for rights and the allure of the vampire that might put us in mind of the right to life (endlessly), liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—a resonance that signals the US’s own decolonization.

257 appeal to the prospect-less Angie whom Marlene cruelly dubs as “not going to make it”

(Churchill, Top 120). Making it, defying erasure in Marlene’s world, is not accomplished by passing on one’s DNA or leaving a family legacy; Marlene, after all, has abandoned one child and aborted at least two others. Rather, it is accomplished, as Janet Brown suggests, by performance and deception, by assuming masculinity in various ways—and by negating the maternal (J. Brown 127). Survival, then, is theatrical and pointedly non-reproductive.239

The vampire’s unlife-giving interactions are also pointedly non-reproductive. In her significant queer analysis, “Tracking the Vampire,” Sue-Ellen Case claims that queer theory works “at the site of ontology, to shift the ground of being itself, thus challenging the

Platonic … binary of [life and death] as the ‘natural’ limits of being” (Case, “Tracking” 382,

383). Case’s argument is that queer has been constituted as unnatural because homosexual sex, which cannot produce babies, was mandated as sterile, “an unlive practice that was consequently unnatural” (Case, “Tracking” 383). The point here is not that Marlene is a lesbian—it is her identification with economic power not her sexual identity that is gendered male in the play. However, Angie’s self-chosen alignment with the vampire, sealed with the menstrual blood of another woman, invites a queer reading, and serves as an articulation of her status as someone beyond the heteronormative world, at the ontological limits of being, appropriately enough at the age of emerging sexuality.240 In

Churchill’s play, Angie’s queerness is categorized as marginality, exemplifying Hughes and

239 Brown points out that several of the women gave up children (not necessarily willingly) and/or passed as men (J. Brown 128). Most of the women at the dinner party are either childless or were in some way separated from their children, unmothered, like Pope Joan. 240 Menstruation is a key image here—a point to which I will return—and importantly the vampire has a strong association with teenagers in recent cultural imagery, the most recent stage examples being Jack Thorne’s play, Let The Right One In, about a teenage victim of bullying and the vampire girl next door, and Joseph Wilde’s Cuddles, about a thirteen year old vampire, also female, who depends on her sister for blood.

258 Smith’s argument that “the queerness of Gothic is such that its main function is to demonstrate [not exclusively queerness in the sexual sense, but] the relationship between the marginal and the mainstream” (Hughes and Smith 4). The evocation of the vampire in this scene helps shape Angie’s unnaturalness as an unstable site of doomed resistance to heterosexist gender norms, marked by lesbian possibility.

However, while Angie as a would-be vampire is engaged in rebellion by rejecting heteronormative domesticity, Patty as a would-be-vampire in The Secretaries makes overt what has long been implied in the trope of the vampire; that this rejection leads to a fully articulated and dangerous embrace of same-sex desire. This is not so much a complete reimagining of the vampire metaphor so much as it is a feminist satirical explication of what is an arguably fundamental element of the Gothic--homoeroticism. Indeed, part of the reason that the play’s campy horror/humor works is that it is generically referential, trading on the queerness of vampires evident in the Gothic from at least the early nineteenth century. Marriage in Bride of the Isles functions solely as the mandatory step that facilitates the vampire’s ability to continue his life of indulgence, making Ruthven, and his “generous friend” Ronald, who admits to “an infatuation” with Ruthven, distinctly closeted figures in the world of the play (Planché 7). 241 So too, the homoeroticism of the

241 Auerbach argues that typically in the nineteenth century “the need to feed on women is an annoying distraction” for the male vampire, whose desire is not really directed toward his victim as “men have their most complex identities as friends” (Auerbach 18). However, Auerbach’s assessment that this homoeroticism, which threatens “the hierarchical distance of sanctioned relationships” (60), is cleaned up and toned down in the theatre by Planché and his followers only goes so far. Auerbach does the subversive power of Planché’s text a disservice, I think, when she says “ Lord Ronald loves Ruthven only for his solicitude toward his dying son” (23). He doesn’t care enough about his dying son to mention him more than once in passing and without a name. There is no grief to justify the “infatuation.” And indeed there is something highly suspicious about that son’s death, occurring as it does with Ruthven “hanging over his sick couch” (Planché’, 1.2).

259 merry band of men with their various instruments of penetration in Dracula is indelible to the story and was presumably part of Stoker’s vision for the stage as well as for the page.242

Despite the fact that depictions of lesbian desire as vampiric were probably too controversial for the nineteenth and early twentieth-century stage, lesbian vampires also have literary precedents.,243 Paulina Palmer’s Lesbian Gothic offers one of the first full- length queer theory studies of Gothic fiction focusing on the figure of the lesbian. Palmer suggests that Carmilla, the titular vampire who forms an obsessive friendship with a sheltered girl on the verge of womanhood in le Fanu’s canonical 1872 vampire story, provides an early model for the female vampire of the twentieth century. For Palmer, the female vampire can serve as “a signifier of an alternative economy of sexual pleasure which is more emotionally intense and fulfilling than its heterosexual counterpart”(P. Palmer

102). The Secretaries certainly has fun with proposing lesbian sex as an alternative economy, as office lesbian Dawn Midnight’s seduction of Patty makes clear:244

PATTY: Well, what about the celibacy rule? Have you forgotten about that?

242 Stoker’s novel, as Wynne argues, is influenced by and returned to the Victorian Gothic stage, so it is hard to imagine how the novel’s continual exploration of the sexual could be omitted from the story in performance (Wynne 10, 12-24) 243 Auerbach suggests that the first appearance of the vampire in what we might now consider the Gothic period in English literature is in Coleridge’s Christabel, which she convincingly explains has been largely overlooked as a vampire text because the vampire is female, making it “both too strange and too disturbingly familiar to be acknowledged as the origin of the nineteenth-century vampire legend” (Auerbach 48). Auerbach notes that the poem was familiar to Byron, Shelley and Polidori, claiming that Byron apparently recited part of it “to great effect” at the gathering that gave rise to Frankenstein and Byron’s fragment (48). In this genealogy, then, it is an indirect source for Planché. 244 Phelan categorizes The Secretaries as “serious comedy of hope” (Phelan xiii) and Warner in her recent book Acts of Gaiety calls it a “spin on the lesbian comedy of terrors” (S. Warner, Gaiety 167) As Palmer notes, humor is a familiar device in lesbian vampire novels, undermining the stereotype of lesbian feminists as dreary and humorless (P. Palmer 105). But perhaps what is being mined there is something latently queer and comedic in the vampire genealogy in general; from Gilbert and Sullivan’s satirical romp Ruddigore (1887) to Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, there are plenty of funny vampires, though they don’t all derive their comedy in the same way.

260 DAWN: It doesn’t count as sex if it’s two women, Patty. I can’t believe you didn’t know that. PATTY: Well, Ashley said – DAWN: Ashley! Ashley is such a fucking Moonie, Patty. Don’t listen to her. Listen, I’m the lesbian and, believe me, it doesn’t count. (Brothers, Secretaries 164).

And clearly this sex-that-doesn’t count—just as vampiric interactions in the Gothic don’t count as sex—is a regenerative experience for Dawn, who, like a vampire flushed from feeding, is greeted the next day with repeated observations that she looks “different” and

“great” (Brothers, Secretaries 165). Perhaps it’s the blood.

That Dawn might be visibly and physically transformed by swapping body fluids with Patty carries an ironic weight. Blood can mean both death and survival. Vampires serve as a paradoxical site for queer resistance in the contemporary moment partly because of their ability to proliferate through blood. As Palmer notes, “particularly in the present era of AIDS, male homosexuality and lesbianism, like vampirism, tend to be associated with sterility and death,” an association that Jonathan Dollimore notes is

“common in discussions of same sex desire throughout history” (Dollimore in P. Palmer

103). And yet Palmer goes on to assert that such associations “also paradoxically carry connotations of immortality as lesbians and gay men resist…persecution, and survive” (P.

Palmer 103).245 As a disease of the blood, of forbidden sex, AIDS resonates strongly in contemporary uses of the vampire metaphor.246 The political parody of The Secretaries

245 Case also notes the importance of AIDS to contemporary uses of the vampire suggesting that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, “the lone vampire, or the family of vampires…is replaced by a proliferation…the undead overrun things, proliferate wildly, are like contamination, pollution, a virus, disease—AIDS…AIDS as a construction that signifies the plague of [same sex desire], specifically among men” (Case, Tracking 396). 246 True Blood depicts vampires not necessarily as carriers but as susceptible to blood-borne diseases (though they can’t be killed by them, just weakened) and this is an interesting resistance to Piatti-Farnell’s assertion that vampires embody a desire to be resistant to disease in the age of

261 reworks the deadly, sexually transmitted disease at the heart of queer vampire imagery, to be not AIDS, but lesbianism itself.

The vampire’s history as a site for the destabilization of sexual identities and gender categories, particularly as exercised in the theatre where real bodies engage in performance, is overt throughout The Secretaries. While Angie’s self-conscious performance for Kit serves as a queer moment of rupture from which the motif of the vampire emerges and spills across Top Girls, in The Secretaries vampirism and violence yoked to theatricality and passing are both subject and form. Warner cites Kate Davy’s observation that “in The Secretaries it is the lesbians who are in drag, playing out the gender marked categories of ‘woman’ and ‘secretary’” (S. Warner, “Rage” 31), and importantly that performance facilitates, stages and critiques violence in a way that marks this play as both Queer and Gothic. As William Hughes and Andrew Smith point out in their introduction to Queering The Gothic:

The camp quality [with which the Gothic is associated, and] which proclaims, often self-consciously and even humorously, both an awareness of difference and an expression of the power to mock…and shock, may well be a key to the…queerness of the genre….Queer, like Gothic…is both performance and style, and the very nature of this process means that it will exist in a tense space between referential association with the normative and absolute separation from its morals and aesthetics (Hughes and Smith 3).

The parody of The Secretaries certainly plays with referential association with the normative, offering secretaries that are recognizable as secretaries but are also entirely other—murdering monsters.

cancer and other widespread and often incurable afflictions (Piatti-Farnell 42; “Mine” 2008). Furthermore, the link between vampirism and AIDS established in the eighties resonates under the surface of True Blood because anti-vampire sentiment is continually framed and reframed very transparently in the context of homophobia and racism.

262 Vampires have to go unrecognized, keeping their true identities in the closet in order to get close enough to seduce and strike. For the vampire, performance is a survival strategy. The perfectly named Dawn Midnight makes the mistake of letting Susan Curtis, the office manager, go down on her at the end of a particularly difficult day. Susan, performing desire, gets close enough to bite and draw blood. When Dawn screams in shock and pain, Susan’s agenda emerges. Dawn has broken the Cooney Lumber Mill Secretarial code of celibacy by sleeping with Patty at The Hollyhock Hideaway Hotel. Susan is pissed:

SUSAN: Dawn Midnight just can’t get enough of straight pussy can she? If it’s straight, or better yet married, you just have to fuck it. Well, don’t fuck with me, Dawn. Don’t fuck with my rules. Don’t fuck, period. End of discussion. Dawn gathers her things and hobbles to the door. Susan pulls herself together. SUSAN: Dawn? I hope you know how much I love you. I make these rules for a reason. DAWN: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Susan. SUSAN: Sleep tight. I’ll see you in the morning. Dawn exits. Susan licks the blood off her fingers. (Brothers, Secretaries 170)

Susan might lose her cool, but only for a moment; the skill with which the vampire performs makes her dangerous and allows her to collapse distinctions between love and violence, and to cross enemy lines—sexual, spatial, biological and geographical borders-- with seemingly imperceptible ease. Just as Marlene, Louise and Pope Joan are top girls because they can pass as men at work, (Churchill, Top 106)247 Susan can pass as…well as human of course, but just as importantly, like Marlene, she can detect those who cannot.

Passing is power, and anxieties associated with keeping women in their heteronormative place are deep at work in both these plays where the borders of that mythical place are deceptively policed by other women.

247 For Janet Brown, several of the dinner guests (not just Pope Joan) “pass” as men (J. Brown 127).

263 Part of the power of the vampire for a queer reading, and part of its ability to articulate the Gothic’s insistence that what seems real is not the whole story, arises from the fact that the vampire, as Veronica Hollinger explains, is both intimate and ordinary: “is the monster that looks like us” (Hollinger 201). This ability to pass also makes the vampire easily represented on stage. Vampires who look like ordinary people don’t call for much in the way of special effects, and so a pared down contemporary theatre functions more than adequately for staging the vampire and emphasizing its proximity. In her production notes for Mad Forest, for example, Churchill is careful to point out that the “Vampire was not dressed as a vampire” and indeed the stage directions describe him simply as “a man” who

“is a vampire” (Churchill, Mad (production note) 104; 137).

And yet the vampire is particularly well suited to the feminist stage precisely because it intervenes in narratives of realism, even as it finds accommodation in them. As

William Day notes in his examination of the vampire in American culture, “to engage with the vampire as a writer, director, producer, actor or audience is to consciously choose to enter this realm of fiction where we know meaning can be made rather than, as is the case with realism, appear to be found” (Day viii). The vampire, from Planché’s Ruthven on, is a subversive figure who performs in order to pass, and as such the vampire is inherently both a self-conscious vehicle for performance, and “a mindful response to culture” (Day vii- viii). In this way, the vampire both stages reality by looking like us and at the same time shows that reality to be a construction, a performance, simultaneously supporting both

Gothic and feminist critiques of reality as absolute and unconstructed.

Clearly the feigning, concealing, and controlling of emotions involved in passing is part of the work of the vampire—just as it is the work of the actor—and emotions are

264 regulated in The Secretaries, appropriately, through blood. To make sure that nobody is pregnant (which would threaten the workforce with loss of productivity and displaced emotional energy) and to ensure that the office is subject to only one disruptive bout of

PMS per month, Susan Curtis does a tampon collection to make sure her girls are in sync, as she puts it to “use people’s natural body rhythms to facilitate a more cohesive work unit in the office” (Brothers, Secretaries 156). Hideous and hilarious as this image is, it’s only a slight tonal adjustment to imagine Marlene ordering one of her underlings to do the same at her agency, where, as Janelle Reinelt notes, competition, mistrust, and power underlie what might otherwise appear to be just such a cohesive female work unit (Reinelt 31).248

Cohesive or not, blood in both plays is a marker of a woman’s place in the unit (or pool, or nest). Marlene’s top girls menstruate offstage, but having rejected reproduction, they have to menstruate all the same. Menstruation, like the vampire’s bloody bite, is a sustained and recurring bleeding that is discrete but taboo, sexual and ultimately transformative, facilitating the crossing of boundaries between categories: girl, woman, top girl, secretary, lesbian, vampire. As I have noted, menstrual blood marks Angie’s vampiric transformation,249 and for Patty, who “syncs up,” after she has slept with Dawn and succumbed to Susan, her period marks her readiness to participate in kill night, an event that will complete her transformation from rooky to full-fledged secretary—and murdering lesbian. This transformation is emphasized by the transformation of the theatrical space, as the walls of the office give way during the kill night scene to the murder site, a moonlit

248 Marlene is not the type to get her own hands dirty if she can make someone else do it, and she claims a dislike of talking about messy stuff, blood and gynecology (Churchill, Top 135). 249 Angie is of course an adolescent and so the vampiric intake of menstrual blood that occurs in her backyard complicates what might otherwise be a standard marker of her transformation from girl into the culture of women, with all the potential danger of reproduction that signifies.

265 clearing. This staging resonates with the Gothic’s typical progression from interiors to exteriors and is here linked to the missionary-like assimilation of Patty into a colony of lesbians as a kind of uncivilizing enterprise. Warner’s observation that “in this play, secretaries are transformed into lesbians (aka nonreproductive women) and rage slaves simultaneously,” resonates with this transformation as a site of violence and proliferation

(S. Warner, “Rage” 40). Getting your period in this play signifies not a coming of age story but a coming out story, supporting Palmer’s claim that lesbians, like vampires, are produced—rather than reproduced--through their contact with others (P. Palmer 115;

122).

Case dates the link between menstruation and vampirism back to Carmilla where

“the kiss of blood…played into male myths of menstruation, where women’s monthly loss of blood was associated with their pale, weak image” (Case, “Tracking” 386). Further, such female weakness is linked to desire as expressed through hunger, as Bram Dijkstra notes in his fascinating study of images of femininity during the fin de siècle. Dijkstra writes: “the supposedly invigorating nutritive qualities of blood…made it particularly easy for men to suspect women, with their generally aneamic constitution…and their inevitable periodic blood loss, of having a constitutional yearning for this tonic,” and indeed the practice of drinking ox blood at slaughterhouses during the late nineteenth century perpetuated this thinking, giving rise to further fears that “one could actually acquire a taste for such practices” (Dijkstra 336-338). The rhythms of the female body, then, can be read as the rhythms of the vampire who seeks, and is satisfied, then seeks again.

That women’s bodily rhythms (and therefore behavior) might be affected by the moon is a common enough idea, and one satirized in The Secretaries through the full moon

266 that dominates kill night, which occurs, cyclically, like a period, when the women release their own stored up rage along with the blood of their victim. There is of course a well- worn yet complicated link between the moon and ideas of transformation and the feminine.

In a sense, The Secretaries parodic debt to the lunar presence in pop culture and horror movies can be traced back to the early Gothic stage. The moon is a significant and meaningful object in The Bride of The Isles, as Ruthven, despite needing blood to avoid permanent annihilation, is upon death restored by affectively drinking in moonlight, not by drinking blood. Even at the point of annihilation he is feminized as his own bodily rhythms are ultimately governed by its movements.250 This connection between vampirism, blood, consumption and the moon--performed as an effeminate oscillation between weakness and strength--resonates particularly strongly through Victorian attitudes toward gender and blood drinking, before landing in the contemporary moment.

The vampire’s hunger, then, has inherent gender implications, and the vampire as a figure that anxiously articulates lack as a particularly feminine hunger for blood is at the heart of contemporary critiques of consumption in The Secretaries. Kill night, which

Warner describes in aptly vampiric language as: “an orgiastic free for all…where the secretaries gorge themselves” comes every 28 days, so that regulating the flow of blood also means regulating consumption (S. Warner, “Rage” 35).251 At kill night, as Peaches

250 for Auerbach, “the presiding moon is Planché’s most important addition to the vampire legend” but my contention here is that at least retrospectively it might not be quite as bloodless and inorganic a symbol as Auerbach has proposed it to be (24). It is also reinforced by Bourcicault’s The Phantom, in which the vampire, Raby, must “bare [his] breast” to the moonlight in order to be restored (Bourcicault, 18). Much is made of his “heaving chest,” (14, 28), a part of the body that is, during the heyday of Gothic drama, as Backsheider notes: “In contrast to the [hero’s] eyes, the audience of Gothic drama is directed to the heroine’s breast” (Backscheider, 193). 251 Once kill night is over, the office clock resets to “zero accident free days” – a delightful polyvalent joke that riffs on office safety, safe sex, culpability under emotional duress and, ironically, the

267 notes, “there’s food. [you] can eat!” (Brothers, Secretaries 181). The fact that she is referring to pizza, a forbidden food in the weight-obsessed culture of the office, is deliberately troubled by the play’s continual conflation of food and violence. As Susan tells a horrified

Patty when she realizes that kill night is about killing lumberjacks “Don’t act so surprised,

Patty…how do you think we got to be so self-possessed and strong? From drinking

SlimFast?” (Brothers, Secretaries 180).252

In a move that almost anticipates the synthetic, bottled blood consumed in bars by the vampires of True Blood, the ever-present and visible consumption of SlimFast serves as a constant reminder of the socially inscribed need to curb your appetite, to perform acceptable restraint, at least in public, and the fact that such mandated restraint is enforced through capitalism. As Aspasia Stephanou notes in her recent book-length study of blood in vampire narratives, synthetic blood in True Blood might enable vampires to integrate and conform in mainstream culture, but it does so by “facilitating the accumulation of capital through production…and creat[ing] a new category of consumer…which [is controlled] by…conforming to a consumerist ethos” (Stephanou 127). While the vampires of True

Blood drink their brew in order to “mainstream,” passing in the dominant culture by denying their vampire instincts, for the secretaries the attempt to mainstream is linked specifically to constructions of gender, which also highlight the way in which the control of excess is managed through excessive consumerism. The target market for the commodities endlessly displayed and referenced in The Secretaries, is invariably a female one.

uncontrolled leaking of body fluids—a use of the term accident that might be particularly familiar to parents and thus reveals itself as pointedly at odds with the queer sociality engendered by the Cooney Lumber Company. 252 Barbara Creed points out that lesbian vampires often attack men in order to “assume their masculine virility” (Creed 99).

268 The representation of women as consumers is, however, complicated by the ways in which the products they consume alter appearance and therefore impact constructions of female identity. As Sandra Tomc insightfully points out, dieting in twentieth-century vampire narratives is linked to corporeal modification and androgyny, suggesting that dieting is a way of denying (or liberating oneself from) the physical markers of female reproductive identity, such as big breasts and hips (Tomc, “Dieting” 96-98).253 Certainly

Peaches, the biggest of the secretaries (and the one who bleeds the most) “fingers bread like a foot fetishist fondling a T-strap” linking her failure to overcome hunger with the identity of the lesbian (Solomon 62). Similarly, Aspasia Stephanou employs Lacanian psychoanalysis to link the insatiable hunger of vampires to eating disorders such as anorexia, suggesting that refusing food signifies a problematic attempt to separate from the mother (always a troubled figure in the Gothic narrative as we have seen) and to form an independent female identity (Stephanou 77-82).

Certainly the links between blood, violence, gender, sexuality, consumption and exploitation that emerge in both plays are particularly compelling for reading these texts as vampire plays. The scenes involving menstruation and tasting another woman’s blood resonate backwards and forwards through these plays, investing the other conspicuous acts of controlled and uncontrolled consumption with richer meaning. The all-out gorge fests that compose Marlene’s dinner party and Susan’s kill night extravaganza can be read, in a postcolonial feminist Gothic theatre, as feeding on the lives of others. The ominous claim that any woman can be successful if she’s “got what it takes” (Churchill, Top 140), a

253 Tomc’s very interesting essay focuses primarily on the work of Anne Rice and links a liberation of the vampire from hunger to narratives offering “a means of contemplating the socio-sexual alternatives available [to women] through corporeal alteration” (Tomc 97).

269 sentiment expressed in the final scenes of both plays, is ultimately subverted by the presence of the vampire, for whom “taking” means drawing someone else’s blood.

Conclusion:

Nina Auerbach argues that each age embraces the vampire it needs (Auerbach 145). If so, then it would seem that the vampire we need on the postcolonial feminist stage is, like

Venus, like Marlene, like Lucy, a deceptively familiar figure who struggles to break from oppression even as she replicates cycles of abuse. Further, if we accept Hollinger’s claim that the vampire is an inherently and perennially deconstructive figure, then late twentieth-century feminism would seem a logical place for the vampire in this regard.

Certainly feminism is concerned with cycles of oppression, and as a consequence many branches of feminism have been and continue to be productively engaged in the deconstruction of boundaries, particularly those limiting sexual and economic independence. In all these plays, however, the problematic duality of the postcolonial and transnational vampire also suggests that women have crossed these boundaries and transformed by feasting on the lives, labor, and circumstances of others. The cycles of oppression the vampire replicates spread in widening circles from person, to community, and around the world. And indeed in the play that is the subject of the final chapter—Sarah

Kane’s Blasted—the vampire’s presence is felt most keenly in the deconstruction and transformation of the very world around us.

270

CHAPTER FOUR:

Sarah Kane’s Blasted, A Gothic Case Study

“Looks like there’s a war on” (Sarah Kane, Blasted)

Introduction: Blasted

British playwright Sarah Kane’s work is difficult. Bold, unsettling and highly experimental, like the plays of her Gothic predecessors, her work has been both reviled and revered—and often misunderstood. To think of her plays as operating in the Gothic mode, however, reconciles many of the difficulties that have confounded reception and analysis, and deepens our understanding of Kane’s dramaturgies and subjects. While playwrights like

Suzan-Lori Parks, Liz Lochhead, Beatrix Christian and Adrienne Kennedy invite Gothic readings in part because they consciously manipulate and recirculate Gothic narratives and characters, Kane’s ouevre taps into a deep vein of Gothic without being particularly referential. Rather, her plays evoke the Gothic to reveal that elements of contemporary existence simply are Gothic.

271 Kane’s first play, Blasted (1995), which has since had multiple revivals in England and the US, 254 offers a particularly striking template for seeing the Gothic at work on formal, aesthetic and thematic levels, in the service of postcolonial and feminist cultural criticism. Of Kane’s other four plays, Cleansed (1998) is the most obvious contender for membership in a genealogy of Gothic theatre, and, like Blasted, Cleansed exhibits several

Gothic features aesthetically, formally, and thematically without directly referencing existing Gothic narratives.255 While Phaedra’s Love (1996) might be read as a Gothic take on Greek tragedy, her last two plays, Crave (1998), and 4.48 Psychosis (2000), increasingly appear to be less indebted to the conventions of the Gothic theatre, largely because Kane departs from recognizable dramatic structures and conventions, and moves from a visual articulation of the world to an internalized one offered only through fragmented lyrical dialogue. Nonetheless, even Kane’s most oblique and least play-like play, 4.48 Psychosis, indexes the Gothic with its troubling formal fragmentation, liminal reality, and preoccupation with staging disrupted boundaries between life and death. Indeed, Kane’s entire body of work remains strongly marked by the Gothic in its capacity to both articulate and evoke fear, its persistent deconstruction and transgression of borders, its often

254 Notable productions include a 2001 revival at the Royal Court in their Upstairs theatre, directed by James MacDonald, who also directed the premiere for the Royal Court in 1995, a production at SoHo Rep NY (2008), Lyric Hammersmith London (2010), Cryptic Fascinations production at the Duo Theatre in New York in 2013 (herein after referred to as the Duo Theater production) and most recently a production at Sheffield Crucible Studio (2015). There have also been two productions in Europe. 255 There is not the room here for a detailed analysis of Cleansed, but it has a great many Gothic features, including doppelgangers, a setting at a site of imprisonment, an evil presiding patriarch, an exploration of physical experimentation on the human body—a theme that harks back to Frankenstein, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, spectacular violence, transgressive sex and gender- bending, an ambiguous treatment of the state of death, strange events, confused familial identities, and interrupted or unfinished dialogue signaling the unspeakable and the failures of language to contain reality. These forces are brought to bear in the play on the contemporary issues of gender identity, the treatment of mental illness, and links these thematically to the kinds of behaviors that facilitate the ethnic cleansing of national and global body politics.

272 sensational excess, its preoccupation with sex and death, its bold formal experimentation, its questioning of reality, and its anxiety about what we might regard as Kane’s primary subject: human connection in a deteriorating world. Kane’s worlds are always concerned with external and internal realities, and with the ambiguity of the boundaries between inside and out, and this preoccupation is part of what marks her work as Gothic. As Linda

Bayer-Berenbaum notes:

Mental disorders appeal to the Gothic temperament in much the same way as do ruins. Insanity is a form of mental deterioration, an internal ruin….The instability of the deranged in the Gothic…is generally matched by the instability of the world outside the self, so that strange, unpredictable happenings reinforce the obsessions of the disturbed. At the same time that the Gothic writer penetrates the world of the twisted mind [he/she] enlarges the outer world to include abnormal, bizarre occurrences, simultaneously plunging inward and outward…thereby developing the dimensions of reality in both possible directions (Bayer-Berenbaum 39).

Kane’s plays abound in unstable figures and bizarre events that resonate on the plane of individual anguish and on the plane of widespread global violence. Considered both individually and together as a body of work, Kane’s plays offer an in-depth exploration of reality terrifyingly expanded in both directions in just the way Bayer-Berenbaum describes as typically Gothic.

Despite what I am arguing here is a rich debt to the Gothic, Blasted, in which the heroine is raped in a hotel room that is then destroyed by a war, and which stages socio- political, mental, and physical deterioration, has not yet been approached as Gothic. None of the original reviews of the play when it opened at the Royal Court’s small upstairs theatre in London referred to Blasted as Gothic, yet nearly all of them commented on or complained about typically Gothic features such as bloody spectacle and sensationalism, supposedly immoral characters, shocking sexual transgressions, violence, a heightened emotional register, an ambivalent relationship to reality, and confusing formal instability.

273 Blasted has instead been lastingly branded as in-yer-face theatre, a term made popular by Aleks Sierz to describe a prominent trend in British theatre in the nineties that

“takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message…a theatre of sensation [that] affronts the ruling idea of what can or should be shown on stage and…is experiential, not speculative” (Sierz 4). While links to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty are obvious enough, importantly Sierz also sees in-yer-face theatre as a movement linked formally to Gothic fantasy, melodrama and Grand Guignol—a connection he offers as evidence that “the thrill and chill of gore [continues past the Jacobean age], like an impoverished vampire feeding off a richer host” (Sierz 11).

Sierz’s assessment of in-yer-face theatre’s roots draws more on the Gothic’s investment in excess to evoke shock and outrage than it does on the Gothic’s investment in fear and terror. Certainly the Gothic was excessive and shocking and perhaps even in-yer- face in its willingness to stage taboos—bleeding nuns, disfigured monsters, re-animated corpses, killings, and compromised women, for example. However, in focusing primarily on the shock value of the external, Sierz’s categorization diminishes the importance of the internal as a source of terror, as emphasized in Bayer-Berenbaum’s conception of bi- directional expansion. This kind of emphasis on Blasted’s explicit violence and visceral sensationalism has similarly prompted Andrew Sofer to categorize Blasted as “traumatic realism,” a kind of theatre that “insists on staging the irreducible trauma-event,” but which runs the risk “that explicit brutality compounds trauma, assaulting (and alienating) the audience without transforming or purging it” (Sofer 122-123). While such a categorization accommodates Kane’s depiction of the internal landscapes of trauma, to categorize Kane as a traumatic realist overlooks the deeply metaphorical level on which the Gothic in general

274 and Blasted in particular function. The claim that “traumatic realism’s simulations threaten to capsize theatrical illusion” overlooks, for example, the way that the stage serves as a body rather than as simply the mimetic illusion of a bombed hotel room—a coded use of the Gothic space to which I will return. So too, the suggestion that the play stages “graphic horror” rather than “unseen terror” compounds a problematic and narrow reading of the play as being about war, not about rape, which is pointedly treated as unseen in Blasted’s commentary on routine misogyny as a factor that contributes to war (Sofer 122-123).256

For this reason, a Gothic reading of Blasted is particularly helpful. Not only does such a reading model a useful critical approach to Kane’s work over all, but it also more thoroughly reconciles elements of Kane’s dramaturgy that other approaches, like Sofer’s, do not, making room for the Gothic’s formal and symbolic elements, while still acknowledging the play’s shocking explicitness. Blasted is in fact arguably Gothic in its capacity to offer both the explicit and the implicit, and it generates much of its power by troubling the boundary between these things, between the real and the imagined, the external and the internal, trading on a Gothic legacy cemented by Walpole’s previously noted claim that Otranto was a blend of imagination and nature. The purpose of this case study is not to place Blasted in a strict generic category or historical movement, which both

Sierz’s and Sofer’s nonetheless insightful and engaged readings do, but rather to demonstrate the ways in which a consideration of the Gothic mode illuminates meanings that might otherwise be overlooked or dismissed. Thus, what follows is an examination of the play’s Gothicism in terms of three different dramaturgical features: its use of theatrical

256 Though Sofer does not make this connection, arguably Cate’s unstaged but central rape is the “dark matter” of the play going by Sofer’s own definition of dark matter as the “’not there’ yet ‘not not there’ of theater,” that which is not staged but which is “un-ignorable” (Sofer 4).

275 space, its deliberately monstrous formal and narrative structure, and its connected evocation of one of the Gothic’s most malleable and persistent bodies: the vampire.

I -- Gothic Space: Blasted and the Theatre of the Body

As previous chapters make clear, space—or better yet contested space—is a particularly significant concept for the intersection of the Gothic with feminism and postcolonialism, as both those discourses are invested in exploring the relationships between power, access to territory, and mobility across borders. Yet Blasted does not draw on specific iconic images of a colonial past like many of the plays discussed in earlier chapters. Nor does it make use of recognizably Gothic locations such as cathedrals, gloomy mansions, sublime frozen landscapes, and blasted forests, all of which as we have seen occur in various forms in the work of many playwrights working with a contemporary Gothic approach to space. In some ways the omission of recognizable Gothic architecture may contribute to the ways in which

Blasted has been dismissed and misunderstood. Nonetheless, Blasted’s spatial conventions are, I suggest, both Gothic and postcolonial. The hotel room, Kane’s version of the claustrophobic Gothic interior that serves as a site of live burial, and which is locked, invaded, and destroyed during the course of the play, is surrounded by Kane’s version of the Gothic wilderness—an undefined and immeasurable warzone. The boundaries between in and out are unstable and contested in Blasted; it is not that the hotel room is offered as an alternative to the warzone, or even that once the room is destroyed the warzone serves as a replacement; we don’t have a complete scene change. Instead, Kane’s Gothic stage

276 space is a hotel room, a warzone, and a metaphor for the female body—all at once. And indeed how quickly the stage becomes not place but polyvalent space is part of the play’s horror. Connections between Blasted’s shifting aesthetics, its dramaturgical structure, the characters’ psychological interiority and the exterior of the socio-political world the play occupies are all made clear in a postcolonial feminist Gothic reading of the play’s spatial conventions.

At the beginning of Blasted, the lights come up on the (Gothic) interior: a standard but expensive hotel room somewhere in Leeds, “the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world,” with a “large double bed, a bouquet of flowers, champagne on ice”

(Kane, Blasted 3). This space says “sex,” and more importantly it says culturally normalized sex. Yet repeatedly in the Gothic, interior spaces are not private, domestic havens, but threatening socially constructed sites of subjugation, through which the heroine wanders, free but not free, under the constant threat of patriarchal violence—and this interior, with its banal promise of romance, is no exception. Into this space come Cate, a naïve young woman in her twenties, and Ian, a middle-aged, emphysema-riddled tabloid journalist from

Cate’s past, from whom she has apparently accepted an invitation. Like Bluebeard’s curious wife, Cate wanders about the hotel room, “bouncing on the bed, looking in every drawer, touching everything,” and though the room’s clichéd images of romantic femininity—the flowers and domestic details—align the space with Cate, the hotel room is nonetheless under Ian’s control. Ian is clearly the one who has paid for it, helping himself to the mini- bar and remarking with dismissive familiarity, “I’ve shat in better places than this” (Kane

Blasted 4; 13). From the first line of the play, then, space is contested, and its contestation signals to us that the representation of heteronormative romance has been set up for

277 critique. Cate, like all good Gothic heroines, has somehow strayed into a space where her containment in the power structures of patriarchal culture is frighteningly visible and becomes more spectacularly so as the play progresses.

And indeed Cate is pursued though this interior. Mere lines into the scene, before

Cate has even spoken, Ian has taken off his clothes and is holding a revolver, which he puts under his pillow. The first scene then plays out the seduction attempts of Ian toward Cate, whose cues we are encouraged to read as “friendly” rather than seductive, and whose thumb-sucking, stuttering and fainting fits mark her as vulnerable (Kane, Blasted 15). The seduction, staged as standard mimetic realism, proceeds along the typical Gothic lines of

Villain/Predator, Heroine/Victim familiar from iconic Gothic novels such as The Castle of

Otranto and The Monk. In textbook Gothic fashion, Ian makes advances that he frames as legitimate (he says he would marry Cate) and then, when he pushes his case, he is rejected by the heroine, a rebuttal that challenges patriarchal authority and thus sets the stage for the domestic and political violence to come:

IAN: (…stands in front of her naked.) Put your mouth on me. CATE (Stares. Then bursts out laughing.) IAN: No? Fine. Because I stink? CATE (laughs even more). IAN (attempts to dress but fumbles with embarrassment. He gathers his clothes and goes into the bathroom where he dresses.) CATE (eats and giggles over the sandwiches). IAN (returns fully dressed. He picks up his gun, unloads and reloads it) (Kane, Blasted 7-8).

Cate’s naïve and notably unspoken reaction to Ian makes it clear that Ian’s attempts at intimacy are not going to go well. Yet sex—or more accurately sexual violence—is ominously foreshadowed here by the intimate and domestic world with its bed and gun and exposed bodies—which are hard to escape in an intimate theatre space—and by Ian’s

278 attitude to the external world beyond the bedroom.257 Throughout the scene Ian’s attempted seduction of Cate is contextualized by brutally racist, homophobic, and misogynistic dialogue. Ian challenges Cate for dressing “like a lesbos,” and bullies Cate for being nice to an unseen hotel clerk because she wants “a bit of black meat” (Kane, Blasted 7;

17). Ian has slept with Cate before, a fact that he claims “makes [her his]” and thus distinguishes her from the world he sees outside the hotel window—a world he feels he has no territorial control over, a place where the “Wogs and Pakis [are] taking over” (Kane,

Blasted 16; 4). While Blasted obliquely references the Bosnian War, the mass violence, rape camps and war crimes of which were much in the media at the time of Kane’s writing, Ian more overtly embodies English anxieties about war as a threat to empire. Ian’s obsessive and racist remarks about the world beyond the hotel window set the hotel room up as a site where domestic violence collides with notions of home as a national idea, a collision

Shelley Kulperger sees as definitive of the postcolonial feminist Gothic (Kulperger 120).

Cate’s body, aligned with the feminine décor and domestic interiority of the hotel room, and established as belonging to Ian and not to the racially different men on the other side of the door, is thus set up as a contested site, something for Ian to compete with other men for—men Ian wouldn’t define as English. In this way, bodies—specifically female bodies— are linked to racial identities, national borders, geography, territory. Bodies thus become politically charged spaces upon which the politics of occupation and identity play out.

Space as a manifestation of the violable female body is a highly recognizable feature of the Gothic, dating back to its heyday around the end of the eighteenth century. Plays such as The Castle Spectre and Orra, for example stage a violent struggle over female

257 Most of the plays productions have been in smaller venues. The Royal Court, where it premiered, seats under a hundred.

279 sexuality and servitude, and can be seen as using spatial tropes to do so. Though many

Gothic plays and novels from that period seem to reinforce the value of female fidelity and the heteronormalizing powers of the institution of marriage, they also explore the possibility of female independence and offer not-so veiled critiques of patriarchal power as the heroine roams forbidden chambers to defy male authority. In Colman’s Blue-Beard, though the heroine is sentenced to death for disobediently entering the chamber that functions as a metaphor for sexual self-discovery, it is her husband who is ultimately executed for his crimes. Ann Radcliffe’s iconic Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho also uses the forbidden room as a metaphor for the female body in order to stage the terrors and thrills of emerging female sexuality and sexual identity in conflict with patriarchal authority.258 Here Radcliffe’s quintessentially Gothic (and, like Cate, fainting) heroine,

Emily, is staying in a gloomy house, where she suspects the residing patriarch of murdering his wife. She is sure a mystery is afoot and curiosity has her exploring the cracks and crevices of Udolpho in an attempt to learn the truth. But she is also terrified of the knowledge she may gain, and in particular her fear is aroused by the discovery that her

“chamber is liable to intrusion” (Radcliffe 242). Indeed anxiety about people (men, apparitions, Others) invading the heroine’s private domain is rife in Gothic drama and novels.

Such vulnerability of the home and self to outside forces attaches readily to the uniform big-chain luxury hotel brand of home-away-from-homeness that is implied by

Blasted’s initial setting in a hotel that is neither unique nor cheap, where all rooms and keys

258 Because feminist scholars have paid more attention to Gothic novels than dramas during this period, Radcliffe’s novels are the most discussed in terms of space-as-body metaphors (Kahane 338; Griffin Wolff 210) though the motif is clearly in evidence in a number of plays, including Blue- beard as noted, and so is well-established as a device of the Gothic theatre.

280 presumably look alike and all manner of strangers wander the hallways.259 Indeed, the play calls attention to this anxiety, and to its racist as well as sexist implications, through the repeated referencing of unseen hotel staff and Ian’s worry about keeping the door locked against the threat of dangerous foreign men, like the presumably black bellhop, a fear made ironic by the room’s ultimate invasion by a soldier. Cate’s body, then, to which Ian stakes a claim, is a room vulnerable to occupation. There is, after all, a war on, so territory is up for grabs. Importantly, the Gothic also often posits the invasive outside source as troublingly already inside, as indeed Ian is. Ian is thus exemplary of Anne Williams’s sinister Gothic patriarch who presides over the passages and chambers of a frighteningly unknown domestic space (A. Williams 38-48). Ian, like Bluebeard, controls the key—a phallic symbol to be sure—framing Ian’s control of the physical environment as an extension of his sexually abusive behavior. Control of both room and body allows Ian to keep his territory defended and his acts of domestic violence closeted from the outside world.

Ian’s control of the space is, however, not absolute. The first scene, which we might think of as the seduction scene, ends with Ian picking up the flowers that have been placed in the room and holding them out to Cate, saying “these are for you,” a pathetic gesture that satirizes the tropes of heteronormative romance, and is greeted with the play’s first blackout (Kane, Blasted 24). The blackout, a seemingly standard theatrical structuring device, is in Gothic terms particularly interesting here and is important to my argument that Blasted uses the theatrical space to stage the female body. Narrative interruptions are a regular feature of the Gothic, as Eve Sedgwick notes, serving as tropes of the unspeakable

259 Set design seems to vary little from production to production, most of which seem to offer a non- descript but not cheap hotel room with a bed, minimal furnishing, and nice linens. The most recent production at the Duo in New York in 2013 was typical in this regard, with a large bed and a prominent and quite lavish mini-bar.

281 and symptoms of the difficulty and inadequacies of language when it comes to expressing the unfathomable (Sedgwick 4-5; 16-17). Cate, like many a Gothic heroine, is prone to the deathlike state of fainting—a state Sedgwick also links with the unspeakable, and which has relevance for the evocation of vampirism, as I will discuss later in this chapter

(Sedgwick 12; 15).260 Her fits can be seen as an amplification of her tendency to stutter, for her mind to apparently go blank, tendencies that we might label as reactions to stress but which prompt Ian to label Cate as “thick, a spaz, a retard, and stupid,” (Kane, Blasted 5; 8;

10). Here, tellingly, the blackout comes abruptly before Cate is able to offer any reaction to the flowers, interrupting the standard romantic narrative, but the blackout also serves as a kind of negation, a theatrical and technical substitution for Cate’s reaction to Ian’s repeated and escalating attempts to pressure her into sex. The first time she faints, mid argument,

Ian is terrified, and she explains the experience to him:

IAN: Thought you were dead. CATE: [I] suppose that’s what it’s like. IAN: Don’t do it again, fucking scared me. CATE: Don’t know much about it, I just go. Feels like I’m away for minutes or months sometimes, then I come back just where I was. IAN: It’s terrible. CATE: I didn’t go far (Kane, Blasted 10).

And then later:

CATE: “…when I have a fit […] The world don’t exist, not like this. Looks the same but – Time slows down. A dream I get stuck in, can’t do nothing about it (Kane, Blasted 22).

260 Sedgwick notes death-like sleeps as a spatial convention that show the self blocked off from something (so-called reality) that is traumatic. She notes, too, a tendency for characters to faint or go in to convulsions at crucial moments in the narrative (Sedgwick 16; 148). Emily St Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho, is a nice example of a character who repeatedly faints when presented with a shock, thus interrupting the narrative’s trajectory.

282

Cate’s explanation of the fainting fit as an episode of uncontrolled absence, of interruption to the existence of the world as perceived reality, in which some uncertain measure of time passes, in which she has the sense of being both relocated and returned, describes the behavior of the theatrical space during a blackout, thus establishing a correlation that prepares us for reading the stage space as an amplification of Cate’s own body. Further, because the blackout affects the audience’s sensorial experience, we are asked to feel--not just read—this amplification, engaging a kind of visceral empathy as a way of understanding that which is unspeakable in the play.

A brief comparison to Paula Vogel here helps situate Kane’s Gothic dramaturgy in a significant feminist body of work, as the invisibility of domestic violence behind closed doors is also much at issue in Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (1993).261

Though Desdemona is not evocatively Gothic throughout, it does have its moments262and it certainly ends on a powerful note of Gothic terror that stages invisibility through spatial disorientation and temporal interruption in a very similar way. At the end of a play in which Othello is always out there somewhere, and in which Desdemona appears to be perpetually contained in the back room of the palace,263 Vogel shows us Desdemona and

Emilia waiting for Othello to arrive and respond to his wife’s perceived (and in this case

261 Vogel, unlike Kane, is explicit about her feminism, and the reworking of canonical texts to make women’s marginalized stories central, as Desdemona does, is a highly recognizable feminist tactic. 262 For example, the scene with a wine bottle and laundry in which Desdemona is stained with red wine in a tonally ambiguous comic/frightening symbolically resonant moment (Vogel 217). 263 This play holds a distinctly Gothic tension between the claustrophobic interior (in which the three women’s lives play out) and the offstage and imperial exterior, which is somewhat interchangeable with General Othello, whom we never see, and whom we might think of in this spatialized construction as a kind of dark (!) matter, as per Sofer’s account of that which is unstaged but phenomenally central to the play’s meaning (Sofer 3-5).

283 actual) wanderings. Yet by creating and withholding audience expectations of violence,

Vogel’s refusal to stage Desdemona’s murder reworks Shakespeare’s scene of horrific domestic abuse to effectively stage that abuse as invisible. As they wait for Othello to come home, knowing all is lost, Emilia brushes Desdemona’s hair. One hundred strokes: “One, two, there, four, five, six…” (Vogel 46). The counting is interrupted by a jump cut that stops, skips, and restarts the sequence so that sudden and unaccountable absence constitutes a highly gothic interruption to the text. These disorienting, time-skipping moments of unspeakability frame the moment when the invisibility and inevitability of domestic violence converge—a moment dramatically deferred by a black-out at ninety nine—as a hellishly expanded-but-shrinking reality, a dream we too are stuck in.

While the counting shows us how long we were gone (and how long she’s got) in

Desdemona, in Blasted, when the lights come up on Scene Two the next morning, we don’t know precisely how long we have been away, we only know that we didn’t go far and that we are back, still trapped in the claustrophobic Gothic interior. Shortly into the new scene

Cate calls Ian “Cunt” (Kane, Blasted 25). Something has clearly changed and an attempt to bridge the narrative gap caused by the blackout results in a suspicion of rape that we piece together through language that seems inadequate to the task of accounting for what we have not seen, but are challenged to recognize anyway:

IAN Loved me last night CATE I didn’t want to do it. IAN Thought you liked that. CATE No. IAN Made enough noise. CATE It was hurting. (Kane, Blasted 31).

284 Cate’s unstaged rape, an ordinary yet unfathomable act of violence, precipitates the play’s descent into chaos. After Cate’s rape, the play’s structural, formal, and spatial elements change very quickly. Plot events become more bizarre and violence appears meaningless.

The sexualized and mundane hotel room is now openly a stage for physical violence as Cate retaliates, biting Ian, and then hides in the bathroom moments before a soldier forces his way in at the door. The soldier breaks into the bathroom to discover Cate has escaped through the window and a few lines later a bomb blast goes off. Scene three reveals a large hole in the wall and general destruction—an image of the space-as-body and initially normalized sexual space torn apart. With the bomb blast and Cate’s disorienting absence we move away from mimetic realism, and the narrative expectation for cause and effect explanation that that form invites is denied and obfuscated. The soldier rapes Ian, in a moment that is both terrifying and tender, and then eats his eyes, evoking two key tropes from postcolonial critiques of empirical exploitation: rape and cannibalism. By the fourth scene the soldier has shot himself, and it is no longer clear how much time has passed in the blackouts between scenes. Cate, bleeding again, returns to the blind Ian with a baby, who dies, is buried in the floor—the first of two burials to take place in this collapsed interior—and is later eaten by Ian. Ian attempts to shoot himself but the gun is empty and the play eventually ends with a series of vignettes in which we see Ian masturbating, burying himself in the floor, dying, coming back to life, and finally being fed a sandwich by

Cate.264 Dramaturgically, then, the violation of space—which is the violation of Cate’s body-

264 Blasted lends itself well here to a Sedgwickian reading, in which the hotel room is a deadly site of entrapment that is somehow nonetheless participating in the illusory live world--and indeed it literally becomes a site for live burial at the end of the play with the set largely dismantled and Ian’s bloody head poking out of the floor.

285 -changes the play in a profound and complex way, amplifying its politics, and altering its pace, its aesthetic, its form and tone.

Critics, much bothered by the visible male rape in scene three, have tended to overlook the significance of Cate’s rape. Indeed, as Kim Solga argues, the tendency has been to misread visibility as an indicator that the male rape is somehow inherently more shocking than the female rape, eclipsing feminist critiques of the play’s sexual violence

(Solga, “Hysteria” 347).265 The fact that some critics seem not even to recognize Cate’s rape as rape, characterizing her interactions with Ian as “graphic sexual activity” and “mere unlawful indecency” which gives way to “vividly enacted male rape” (Tinker, Jan 19 1995) later in the play, supports Solga’s criticism and points to a problem of misogynistic normalization that is, ironically perhaps, common to both much of the play’s early reception and to the patriarchal attitudes and assumptions that the play so violently critiques through its semiotics of space.

Yet as attention to the play’s dramaturgical structures and spaces makes clear,

Cate’s rape is the most significant action of the play and its apparent invisibility is no accident. The room’s forceful penetration by the bomb blast brings visibility to an act that is rendered unspeakable because it can’t be contained by the play’s truncated language or adequately captured by its mimetic realism where Ian’s normative narrative dominates and the experience of women is subjugated to that narrative. As Solga attests, “it matters that the [hotel room’s] confined space is not simply destroyed but cut open, galled, visibly wounded, as Cate is wounded…the blast violates the stage’s body” (Solga, “Hysteria” 367).

265Solga notes Christopher Wixson and Sean Carney as exceptions that recognize Kane’s artistic intention to leave the rape unstaged but fall short in their exploration of why. It’s also worth nothing that Christopher Wixson sees the “staged sodomy as a metaphor for imperial conquest” (Wixson 83), but doesn’t discuss the rape of women as a war strategy, which seems remiss.

286 In a Gothic reading that posits the stage space as a manifestation of Cate’s now suddenly absent and violated body, Blasted depicts rape as an act of violence beyond the boundaries of social order, and simultaneously reveals the mechanisms by which that act is repressed and silenced by the very foundations of patriarchal power that constitute the real. By making erased acts of violence against the oppressed uncannily visible, Blasted uses space as a kind of spectral presence that signals, in feminist postcolonial terms, “a traumatic past whose traces remain to attest the fact of a lack of testimony” (Kulperger 101).

The way Blasted makes the rape visible, then, is by turning the set into a ruin. The ruin is one of the most regularly occurring of all Gothic images though not a particularly common image to contemporary theatre. Bayer-Berenbaum, as I have noted, sees the ruin as a significant image in the Gothic, and it is worth noting that for some scholars, Bertrand

Evans, for example, the ruin is in fact definitively Gothic (Bayer-Berenbaum 39; B. Evans 7;

204). And certainly Blasted’s use of the ruin here has clear Gothic precedents. In Joanna

Baillie’s Gothic drama Orra, for example, the appearance of a ruin in the set at the start of

Act III works as it does in Blasted to mark an important turn in the story. Baillie’s ruin heralds the unraveling of the hitherto headstrong heroine who is now being slowly but devastatingly frightened out of her wits by a relentless patriarch and a string of wildly imagined Gothic terrors (Baillie, Orra, Act 3.1.1). Similarly in Shelley’s play The Cenci, in which a father relentlessly pursues and rapes his own daughter, he threatens to “make

[her] body and soul a monstrous lump of ruin” (P. Shelley Act 4.1.95). Ruins, then, offer a readable sign of disintegration, trauma and decay--a failure of the world and the self to stay intact, signaling the kind of “end of insulated interiority” that, as Christopher Wixson has argued, so profoundly shapes Blasted (Wixson 86). And we feel it; in production, a great

287 deal of real sound accompanies the transition from intact wall to ruin, effecting multiple senses for the audience.266 The broken space that functions in the place of Cate’s violated body underscores with monstrous amplification Cate’s shattered exposure, her psychological anguish, and the traumatized physical reaction with which she initially responds through retching, coughing and spitting as a result of coming into contact with the fluids from Ian’s own decaying body. The state of Ian’s decaying health and his stink are, as Graham Saunders notes, a metaphor for his state of moral ruin. Here, in the act of rape, that corruption crosses the corporeal boundary between Ian and Cate and affects her physically (Saunders 43).267 In Blasted’s domestic/national postcolonial political register, that corruption is also political and is passed from the dying empire that Ian embodies, to the colonized subjects who remain marked by that legacy of violence.

The ruin, then, is an unstable, polyvalent space, neither fully inside nor fully outside, neither fully private nor fully public. It makes visible the anxiety that borders are transgressable, allowing whatever had once been safely beyond—the uber-real of monstrous proportion and immeasurable power—to cross over into what was only ever ostensibly a personal, interior space. In the Gothic such polyvalent spatial tropes stage the ways in which the boundaries between body, home, and outside world are dangerously indistinct and permeable, dissolving binary distinctions between private and public, between personal and political. Blue-Beard’s castle functions as the flesh that houses his

266 The theatre vibrated slightly during the “blast” for the 2013 Duo Theater production, an experience I imagine is not unique to that particular small theatre. 267 Saunders cites interview material to assert that Ian’s physical health is a metaphor for his moral health, something that was more overt in earlier drafts of the play and owes something to Ibsen’s metaphorical use of syphilis (Saunders 43). That the ruin is an image that signals moral decay, however, predates Ibsen, and was a feature of the Gothic, as The Cenci, Orra, and many Gothic novels make clear.

288 wife’s sexual secrets and as the patriarchally controlled domestic space that entraps wives and seeks to limit their agency, and as a seat of aristocratic power embodied by the castle- then-ruin that serves as stageable metaphor for the state. In this way, the Gothic is marked by the yoking of sexual and domestic violence to notions of political upheaval and national and international violence, a connection that is brought into stark relief in Blasted, but reworked so that the violence takes place in a surrogate domestic space, one that resonates with postcolonial anxieties in part because it cannot truly be called home by anyone.268 The ruined walls and gaping hole in the room-as-body in Blasted are dominantly present throughout the rest of the play, linking the violence done to Cate with the violence that follows. Violence may start in the rooms of the Gothic castle, but those rooms are quickly revealed to be part of an uber-real that challenges perceptions of the civilized world. Thus the distinction between the rape of a woman in a hotel room, and the violence of war collapses—a collapse rendered both metaphorically and literally by the explosive and dynamic theatrical space. Kane indicated the importance of a slippage between personal and political, saying of Blasted: “The logical conclusion of the attitude that produces an isolated rape in England is the rape camps in Bosnia, and the logical conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war” (Kane quoted in Sellar, 34).269

268 A particularly clear line can be drawn between the hotel and the quintessential domestic Gothic castle when one notes that very often the castle is not the heroine’s home but rather is a site of ambivalent displacement. Orra, for example, is an unwilling guest in her Gothic castle and Udolpho’s Emily and Northanger’s Catherine are both out of town visitors to the titular places central to those narratives. 269 This quote appears in numerous places; I’m using Tom Sellar, “Truth or Dare; Sarah Kane’s Blasted.” While I am suggesting this is a feminist sentiment, note that Sarah Kane did not claim to be a feminist or see this play as a feminist play, an identification that Elaine Aston reads as symptomatic of what she sees as a disillusionment with feminist politics reflected in the work of several British women playwrights of Kane’s period (Aston, Feeling 577). It’s worth noting, however, that Kane’s cultural moment is not unique. As noted elsewhere, Alma De Groen has claimed not to be a feminist writer but wrote several plays that could be considered feminist

289 It is important that the violence in Blasted, both the violence we see enacted by bodies and the violence signified by the space itself, is visibly represented in and by the mundane domesticity of a hotel room. In this way Blasted bears out Kulperger’s description of the postcolonial feminist Gothic as a form in which:

The familiarizing and domesticating of violence and fear—and its proper placement as an internal rather than external force—reflects the long abiding feminist critique of the division of public and private spheres and, particularly, the trivialization of domestic violence. It marks an extension—and intensification—of the traditional female Gothic’s depiction of the haunted and violent domestic space to include, specifically, postcolonial feminist critiques of the displacement and distancing of violence elsewhere” (Kulperger 116).

In Blasted, the violence cannot be distanced because the theatrical space is a place where distinctions disintegrate. We are always in that hotel room in Leeds, even as we are in a geographically ambiguous warzone. Kulperger’s claim that “widely understood feminist definitions of domestic violence arise and are informed by histories of colonial governance and the complex relationship of class and race to gender,” and that “what happens in the home is irrevocably sutured to wider cultured apparatuses,” makes clear the validity of reading Kane’s work in a postcolonial and feminist context where bodies and spaces fail to stay intact and what happens in the domestic space of that hotel room is indeed irrevocably sutured to the Gothic horror of the world beyond it (Kulperger 120).

including a very feminist play about the social conditions that imperil unsupported mothers and their infants: The Joss Adams Show. See De Groen in J. Palmer (166). Other playwrights of arguably Gothic feminist texts have also distanced themselves from what they perceive as feminist intentions (Savran, Parks 93; Tomc, Revisions 6-8), suggesting that the Gothic’s investment in gender, race, class and the disruption of social structures and the postcolonial’s investment in making the structures of oppression visible, are investments deeply aligned with various feminist principles, whether authors consciously embrace a particular school of feminist ideology or not.

290 Horrific and absurd as the narrative and iconography of Blasted may appear, 270 leading critics to declare the play a “disgusting feast of filth [that] appears to know no bounds of decency yet has no message to convey by way of excuse” (Tinker Jan 19,

1995),271 it is important to underscore how typically Gothic they are, too, and how spatial transformation helps us to recognize that. Comparatively, Blasted demonstrates the same kind of shocking violence that readers of Lewis’s The Monk experienced (and critics responded overtly to) 200 years earlier. In that novel Ambrosio, a snooty but pious monk in the opening chapters, later rapes and stabs his sister in the claustrophobic catacombs of a monastery and is pitched off a mountain by a devil in the wake of storms and fires and left in graphic torment to have the blood sucked from his wounds by insects and his “flesh torn piecemeal, and…his eyeballs [dug out]” (Lewis, Monk 442). This Gothic novel, too, featured dead babies and less overt moments of cannibalism, and the horror, which can be mapped by spatial shifts from containment to ruin, catacomb to mountaintop, secrets to open chaos, is similarly one of escalation and deconstruction. The novel’s shock comes from how quickly and utterly the world is revealed to be so hellish, and how fragile the boundaries

270 For many critics, Blasted’s investment in this kind of spectacular violence disengaged from realism reflects a debt to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (see Robinson, 10/15/2008; Saunders 16). It is important to note, however, that Artaud’s theatre can itself “aptly be described as NeoGothic” (Inverso 19-21). Artaud’s affinity for the Gothic is well-noted and is evident in his translation of The Monk, the influence of Poe on his work, and his own production of Percy Shelley’s Gothic drama, The Cenci. See Mary-Beth Inverso for a more sustained discussion of Artaud as a direct descendant of the Gothic. Interestingly, Kimberly Jannarone makes no mention of the Gothic and only a brief mention of it’s offshoot, Grand Guignol, in her recent book Artaud and His Doubles, finding Araud to share the Grand Guignol’s aesthetic of horror, but depart from its more playful eye for entertainment (Jannarone 152). While Blasted might not be “playful,” its tone is more slippery than Jannarone’s distinction would suggest for a direct descendent of Artaud, and it does have moments of gallows humor, again aligning it more with the Gothic’s hybridity. 271 Indeed, one thing that is particularly interesting here is that the Gothic prompts a reaction that is itself marked by Gothic excess. Thomas Mathias’s response to The Monk and to The Castle Spectre was to call for the total eradication of the Gothic as a “gangrene” in the “life-organs” of the national body (Mathias, Pursuits 191). A reaction notably similar to the one that greeted Blasted.

291 between the veneer of social civility and horror can be. In The Monk, too, the claustrophobic interior of the abbey is torn apart and set on fire at the novel’s climax—much the way

Abomolique’s castle is dismantled in Blue-Beard—bringing the chaos of the internal and external worlds together. The shocking violence in Blasted, then, particularly as it correlates to spatial changes, has clear precedents in Gothic fiction and drama. In a reading of Blasted that understands space as Gothic, the metaphorical register in which sexual violence, moral corruption and personal torment is spatially coded becomes clear. This register does not replace the literal, but rather works with it to amplify meaning, revealing

Blasted not to deliver a problematic version of the real, as Sofer’s categorization and some criticism suggests, but rather to articulate a vision of the world as an expanded reality that finds expression beyond the literal, in a form greater than the sum of its parts.

II -- Gothic Monsters: Blasted and Monstrous Form

Although the way people behave in Blasted is arguably monstrous, it is not so much the presence or absence of physical monsters with which I am concerned here so much as the centrality of textual monstrosity to an understanding of Blasted’s Gothic world. The formal instability of Blasted, directly set in motion by the destabilization of the theatrical space, is typically Gothic. Kane’s paradoxical logic that “war is confused and illogical,” and that

“therefore it is wrong to use a form that is predictable,” is, in fact, rendered coherent by an understanding of monstrous Gothic form (Kane quoted in Singer 146).

As I have noted elsewhere, scholars have argued that the awkwardly composite and

292 excessive Gothic text is an appropriately monstrous form for the terrors of the Gothic

(Halbelstsam 31; M. Brown 198; Cox, “English” 128). As a hybridic and composite form the

Gothic is both excessive and self-consciously artificial, making it unwieldy, jarring, unnatural, and above all unsettling. In Blasted, there is certainly throughout a formal hybridity best seen in the play’s unquieting ability to shift tonal registers, mixing jokes and gallows humor with bloody spectacle and with mundane conversation, a tactic familiar from Gothic dramas such as Blue-Beard.

Appropriately unsettling as it is, as Jerrold Hogle argues, the Gothic’s extreme instability, its hyperbole and excess, its apparent contradictions, deliberately forced unreality, and its lack of restraint are nonetheless also necessary “to [the Gothic’s]

“capacity to abject cultural and psychological contradictions” (Hogle 14).272 Because the

Gothic flaunts its constructedness, the extremes it deals with thematically are “blunted by transformative representation,” so that threats to identity and dangerous inconsistencies, which would otherwise be unacceptable to the conscious mind, are made symbolic (Hogle

14). The fact that the events are staged in a way that draws attention to their artificiality and construction distances the Gothic horrors of sex and death from direct social commentary, making them an allowable fiction that is nonetheless readily decoded by the

Gothic’s uncanny metaphoric vocabulary, as Robert Tracy notes particularly in relation to figures like the vampire (Tracy 35; 39). The extreme, exaggerated and sensational nature of the Gothic theatre in its heyday effectively staged the social and individual horrors of bloody revolution and national progress, and of troublingly violent sexual desires that threatened the integrity of the domestic world. Certainly Blasted stages a chamber of

272 See Cox for a discussion of the way “gothic structures resonated with revolutionary events” (Cox, English 134).

293 horrors, and those horrors are in part accessible through an exaggerated and symbolic unreality that is clearly Gothic. While their artificiality has led some to consider Kane’s plays difficult to stage, as David Greig points out in his introduction to Kane’s Complete

Plays, Kane’s “stage imagery poses no problems for theatre per se, only for a theatre tied to journalistic naturalism” (Greig xiii). The Gothic theatre is not that theatre.

A representation of reality as we ostensibly know it is not necessarily entirely antithetical to the Gothic, but rather must be contained, challenged and modified by the larger Gothic vision, functioning as one component of the hybridic or multiplicitous whole.

The Gothic, then, is never just unnatural but rather is in its very essence polyvalent, polyvocal, contradictory—never just one thing. Blasted has been viewed on both sides of the debate over its merit as being formally comprised of multiple parts, leading to criticisms on the one hand of it as being at best “unfocused” and randomly “strung together” (Joffee, Apr 12 1995) and to praise of it on the other as moving from Ibsen to

Brecht to Beckett in a way that deliberately “mirrors the formal developments of 20th century drama” (Stephens, Oct 24 2010).273 That Kane’s, work, like the work of Suzan-Lori

Parks, was influenced by a number of theatrical forms and playwrights is clear, and the names Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, Artaud and Brecht occur regularly enough to support claims that “Kane… knew her canon” (Wolf, Nov 16 2010).274 So readily do critics recognize

273 Stephens’s idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t really address how the play transitions between those dramaturgical forms or what the progression between the three writing styles he sees as representative here might say about the play’s treatment of social and domestic violence and how it is staged. Where division is a merit for Stephens, for The Guardian’s Michael Billington, even after revising his “initially dismissive tone,” the play’s “internal division” is an irreconcilable structural problem. (Billington, Oct 29 2010) 274 See also Robinson, who jumps from Godot to Gloucester (Robinson, Oct. 15 2008), and Sellar (who likens Kane to Bond, both in terms of the play’s approach to violence and its reception in the media (Sellar 31-34). Saunders makes a similar connection, aligning Kane with the “New Jacobean”

294 Kane’s multiple influences that it is perhaps surprising that none has noted a debt to the

Gothic, which might have been logical given that Kane was influenced by Gothic aesthetics and culture while at university studying literature and drama (Iball 5). The most accurate recognition of Gothic influence comes (perhaps unwittingly) from Michael Billington, whose initial review of the play suggests that by the end of Blasted, the audience “have supped…full with horrors” (Billington, Jan 20, 1995), thus linking Blasted to Macbeth, which is, as I have argued elsewhere, an important text in a Gothic genealogy. But as with Parks, what is more helpful to consider here is not with whom a particular dramaturgical moment in the play might be associated, but how it functions as part of the whole to collectively produce cohesive meaning.

To this end it is important to note that hybridity is achieved by transformation as well as combination. In the postcolonial context, hybridity is a key concept, and one that offers a way to think about cultural narrative constructions as well as race. For Looma,

“real or imagined ‘hybridization’ was a feature of colonial contact everywhere” articulating both narratives of assimilation and progress and anxieties about mixing (Looma 127). Thus the transformed narrative of Blasted in some respects perfectly embodies Ian’s own fears of an England transformed through its assimilation of the “wogs” he sees as part of the landscape beyond the hotel window. That something can start as one thing (Empire, realism) and transgress the boundaries of the supposed real to become something else, something uber-real, is a familiar Gothic conceit from Frankenstein’s reanimated collage of

playwrights Bond, Barnes, Brenton and Barker, a link that also places her in a genealogy with Jacobean drama, itself a source for the Gothic (Saunders 19). Annoyingly, having panned Blasted’s premiere, Michael Billington’s revised assessment of Kane depends almost entirely on seeing Kane as influenced by the great (men) of western drama, placing her in an “honorable tradition” (Billington, April 4 2001).

295 corpses to Lucy’s metamorphosis from coquette to the figure of horror that drinks the blood of small children in Dracula—and the excessive, hybridic and morphing narratives in which those creations exist. So too, Blasted’s violence, which starts out as problematically contained within spatial and narrative representations of patriarchal structures, reaches the limits of those representations and breaks its bonds.275

It is the play’s arguably Gothic transformation on a formal level that caused much of the trouble with Blasted’s initial reception. Sellar notes that (primarily male) critics complained about Blasted’s departure from mimetic realism, saying the play lacked “exact social observation,” and that there was “no sense of external reality,” while Wixson similarly notes that the play’s move away from realism’s “spatial intelligibility” was a key problem for critics (Billington, Jan 20 1995; Wixson 79). Graham Saunders takes up this same point, arguing that critics were wrongly preoccupied with the “niceties of plotting and the trappings of realism,” a fact demonstrated by their unfavorable comparisons of Blasted to Killer Joe by Tracy Letts, which was similarly violent and ran at the same time (Saunders

11). Certainly, one review in the Christian Science Monitor was quick to call Killer Joe the better play because “it has a beginning, middle and end,” and “stick[s] to theater basics”

(Joffee, April 12 1995). Similarly, Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail applauded Killer Joe for its psychological realism while complaining that “Ms Kane on the other hand, offers her

275 Interestingly, Judith Thompson’s play Capture Me (2004) explores similar territory to Blasted, exposing connections between domestic violence and terrorism by locating the terror in the play not in the behavior of a troubled Islamic migrant but in the brutal misogyny of a Caucasian professor who is, like Ian, aligned with the values of empire. Thompson’s efforts to dismantle an us/them binary that locates terror as external, suggesting instead that “we breed it right here” (Thompson in Singh, 107), is much in line with Kane’s critique of domestic violence in England. However, while Thompson’s play deals with overtly similar Gothic themes and imagery, and even frames violence as a “transmogrification” in which people “become monsters” (Thompson, Capture 48), that transformation is restricted to theme, imagery and character and does not affect the play’s form, which remains indebted to a kind of manipulated realism throughout.

296 audience scarcely a clue as to why her characters should behave as they do” before concluding that Blasted was by far the lesser play and “not fit to lick [Killer Joe’s] boots”

(Tinker, Jan 19 1995). As Solga explains, “critics who declared Blasted a failure tend to privilege the overtly realist first half as the ‘true’ play and then complain that the rest departs confusingly from this model: they charge in effect that Kane fails realism itself by breaking with her play’s own internal logic” (Solga, “Hysteria” 351).

Such reactions are, of course, short-sighted. For one thing, the bizarre horrors and excesses of the latter part of the play are implicitly foreshadowed early on by Ian’s own nervous anticipation of something out there and by Cate’s jarringly altered state during her fits. So, too, they are foreshadowed early on by the overt presence of the play’s most prominent objects: guns, food (and drink) and bodies—the same objects that dominate the latter part of the play in amplified and distorted form. Furthermore, even in a purely psychoanalytic reading, the irrational hellishness that follows Cate’s rape can be read as a kind of uncanny psychic response to trauma that is logical in its very illogicality. Textual monstrosity, a distortion that amplifies the failure of the structures of representation and language to articulate “real” experience, is in a sense necessarily unleashed by the monstrous act of rape that precipitates it.

Importantly for a consideration of the play as feminist Gothic, the play’s major formal shift stages a rejection of patriarchal structures. Realism as a mode of theatrical representation is often viewed by feminists as heterosexist and oppressive. Realism has occupied a dominant place in contemporary western theatre and in debates about feminist theatre theory at the end of the twentieth century. For some scholars, it inevitably “reifies the male as sexual subject and the female as the sexual ‘Other’” (Case, Feminism 124). The

297 stable subject position that stage realism proposes, in which a singular, true reality is reflected, privileges the male over the female subject, who according to feminists “is silenced” because her subject position is formed by her entry into the masculine symbolic order (Aston, Introduction 37). Mimetic play structure is often seen as phallic and ejaculatory in its escalating search for truth and return to masculine status quo (Schroeder

22; Case, Feminism 129)

Kane’s play certainly takes issue with traditional realism on what I am arguing we should read as feminist grounds. For one thing, a characterization of play structure as ejaculatory is ironically underscored by Blasted’s graphic and somewhat relentless portrayal of male sexuality. More significantly, however, the first scene of Kane’s play self- consciously uses realism to stage an ostensibly domestic story of woman as object in which the male as subject is reified, yet later scenes show the inadequacies of these structures either to articulate the experiences of rape and war or to offer an intact identity for Cate.

We should, however, as Gainor and Schroeder suggest, be suspicious of reductive reasoning that sets psychological realism writ large in a necessarily antithetical relationship to feminist dramaturgy and performance, or that assumes a Materialist or

Brecht-aligned mode of representation as the only alternative (Gainor 167; Schroeder).

Kane might reject standard realism half way through her play but she does not offer the kind of politically or intellectually oriented dramaturgical structure that seems in line with

Brecht as the alternative to realism privileged by many of its detractors in feminist theory

(Diamond, Unmaking ii: Case, Feminism 93). Likened as Kane has been to many playwrights and theatrical styles, Brecht is not one of them. Rather, I would suggest we are shifted into a more overtly Gothic mode that draws attention to patriarchally informed reality as

298 fragile, frighteningly partial and inadequate. In Blasted, the hybrid text of Walpole’s blended forms is here sutured at a point of transformation that expands reality, revealing its limits in the face of that greater reality of monstrous proportion with which the Gothic is concerned. Blasted becomes monstrous at the point at which patriarchally instituted modes of representation start to fray precisely because the monster, by its very nature, operates beyond the bounds of realism, at the borders of the knowable, defying easy definition and pointing, as Marshall Brown has noted, to “the proclivity of names and language to mislead in dealing with unfathomable things” (M. Brown 198). As Sedgwick has noted, the Gothic is consistently marked by “a kind of despair about any direct use of language” and Kane’s disintegrating language, as we depend on stage pictures of Ian weeping, laughing, masturbating, and so on, interrupted by blackouts, is certainly emblematic of that despair

(Sedgwick 14).

The border between the rational and the irrational is also where Blasted takes us. In

Ken Urban’s well-reasoned and articulate article “The Ethics of Catastrophe,” he argues compellingly that Blasted in fact prompts thought through the visceral: “thought comes later” Urban observes, noting that in the immediate wake of the play, “I didn’t really have any words to express what I had just undergone” (Urban 46).

III -- Gothic Vampires: Blasted and Contagious Predation

Certainly then, transformation through an act of sexual violence is a key component of

Blasted’s treatment of both space and narrative. The violent and terrible change to the

299 theatrical space and the connected change to the play’s form are profound and irreversible.

The change disrupts the temporal, too. Though the narrative is linear, there’s no real attempt to tie up the loose ends that the realism associated with the play’s early moments would insist get tied. The blackout that signals the end of the play in the theatrical space-as- body is yoked, as I have shown, to a deathlike state during which some unspecified period of time passes, a temporal glitch from which presumably we will at some point wake. The baby is dead, and the soldier is dead, but Cate isn’t and neither is Ian—at least not yet and/or, more importantly, not any more. Blood still flows; the war still rages. We go on.

The play’s very structure as something at first ordinarily human and then transformed by violent penetration to become monstrous and unending suggests a dramaturgical approach to representing sex, violence, transformation, and death that resonates strongly with the trope of the vampire. But this too functions mutually at the level of the personal and the political. That there should be a vampire in Blasted’s politically-charged, Gothic world certainly adheres to Stephen Arata’s assessment that “the appearance of vampires [is linked to] signs of profound [political] trouble” and national upheaval (Arata 166). That this upheaval reflects a postcolonial sensibility is, as I have noted, implied by Ian’s recurring racist and paranoid anxieties about the decline of the

British Empire. To that point, Frantz Fanon might be brought usefully to bear.

For Fanon, the violence of decolonization is a violence of “complete disorder,” attacking the constructed reality of colonialism, and as such that violence profoundly destroys both the colonizer and the colonized so that the “veritable creation of new men

[sic]” can emerge (Fanon, Wretched 36-37). Such is the violence of Blasted in which order is destroyed, the structures of the socially recognized real are dismantled and something

300 utterly different seems to emerge. In The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon records the dream of a patient who, fearing that his lifeblood is ebbing away, claims he is being continually pursued by a vampire. For Fanon, this condition is emblematic of the neurotic colonized personality, a state in which the colonized subject’s personhood is negated by colonialism, leaving him or her in a state of “living depersonalization” (Fanon, Wretched 261-262). In her reading of Fanon, Samira Kawash astutely points to the significance of multiple figures, both colonized and colonizing, in the patient’s dream, noting that the threat of the vampire permeates all the figures in the dream and that the flow of blood destabilizes identities

(Kawash 249). This multiplicity leads her to suggest that “the terror of the vampire marks the terror of ‘deposing,’ a violence that cannot be represented in the normal modes of representation but which nonetheless signals a dangerous gap in reality, that is to say, a gap dangerous to the continuing existence of colonial reality” (Kawash 245). In reconciling

Fanon and Kawash with Arata, then, the vampire is a figure of disorder that emerges at the site of political upheaval to threaten the very construct of the colonial real and everyone in it—in short, the world in which Blasted begins.

Recurring metaphors of the undead as manifestations of depersonalization, death as a state that destabilizes reality, images of transformation at the border between life and death, and the occurrence of paradoxical undeaths or rebirths are all notably frequent in

Kane’s work.276 In fact, they emerge frequently across form, plot, image, dialogue, and

276 In Cleansed, for example, Graham, the heroine’s brother, is dead but also not dead. Graham’s ambiguous state of being is consistent with the play’s treatment of death as highly ambiguous throughout. Mad Tinker’s torturous experiments on the inmates of the asylum over which he presides explore the limits of human survival, prompting one character to observe: “Death isn’t the worse thing they can do to you…can take away your life but not give you death instead” (Kane, Cleansed 136). And indeed several of the characters undergo various kinds of transformation, coming “back to life” in altered states (Kane, Cleansed 150). Crave also offers various non-linear

301 theme so that an obsession with the undead in Kane’s work takes on the same kind of significance that live burial does as a convention that structures the Gothic novel for

Sedgwick, suggesting that the Gothicism of Blasted is typical of Kane’s work rather than anomalous. Given this, the oblique but nonetheless pervasive shadow of vampirism in

Blasted is not easily dismissed, and so it is to the ways in which Blasted evokes vampirism through imagery of biting, blood, transformation, unhealable wounds, feasting, live burial, ambiguous states of death, and the conflation of desire and violence that I want now to turn.

Most obviously, Ian is aligned with the vampire because his violence toward Cate includes an act of erotically charged biting that results in transformation. Having bitten

Cate in the unstaged act of rape the night before, at the beginning of scene two Cate bites

Ian back during oral sex. A few lines later she tells him “You bit me. It’s still bleeding”

(Kane, Blasted 33). Consequently it is a bite that causes the first blood to flow in this play, and indeed Cate’s bite never heals. Like the tell-tale red dots that mark the victim of a vampire as vulnerable and available to predation on an ongoing basis, the last time we see

Cate returning from the warzone near the end of the play there is “blood seeping from between her legs” (Kane, Blasted 60). The infliction of Cate’s unhealable wound, like the unhealable wound that mars the theatrical space, also heralds her transformation, causing her to behave with a violence of her own, delivering her own biting wounds. While it might be possible to read this retaliation as something other than a symptom of permanent change—we don’t see her inflict any other violence during the play—it is nonetheless hard narratives that treat death ambiguously, with repeated references to dying and coming back. C voices the paradox of the undead: “Someone has died who is not dead,” (Kane, Crave, 157) and 4.48 Psychosis can be read as a contemplation of death that plays with death not as a future unknown but as a known event that has not yet occurred, rendering it somehow unfinal, nonlinear.

302 to dismiss its transformative powers entirely. Cate remains Cate in some recognizable sense, as does Mina in Dracula, but she is changed by the bite and that change is traceable through an examination of the motif of consumption, a theme prominent in the play’s continual depictions of insatiable thirst, hunger, and oral satisfaction.

Cate, at the beginning of the play, is a vegetarian who won’t touch a ham sandwich because she doesn’t want to feast on “dead meat. Blood” (Kane, Blasted 7). Yet by the end of the play, she is no longer horrified by blood and is restlessly driven by hunger to go out looking for food, not even flinching when she “eats her fill” of a sausage sandwich (Kane,

Blasted 61). So too, like Dracula’s victim-turned-vampire Lucy, Cate trawls the graveyard- like streets beyond the hotel for sustenance and returns with a baby. That Cate doesn’t want to hurt this baby simply makes her bringing it back to Ian all the more ironically disturbing, particularly when it dies, is buried, and then is dug up and eaten by Ian.

And if transforming Cate with his bite and then preying on the baby she brings him is not enough to mark Ian as a vampire, the fact that he cannot die surely is. Eve Sedgwick’s claim that live burial serves as a convention that organizes the Gothic structurally and thematically is well-served by Blasted (Sedgwick 24-28). Certainly distinctions between life and death are much troubled by the play as lines like the soldier’s succinct “I am dying to make love” and actions like Cate’s repeated fainting spells make clear (Kane, Blasted 42).

Yet these elements reach their most potent articulation in Ian’s own paradoxical relationship to death. Neither his disease, nor the war, not his own attempts to kill himself seem to work, despite his own longing to die, as, in Nina Auerbach’s assessment, all vampires long to do (Auerbach 5). Kane’s deftly drawn picture of Ian almost insists that in casting, performance, costume and make-up he look as much like death warmed over as

303 possible, or to put it as Ben Brantley reports of the Soho Rep production, Ian “wears mortality like a dime-store aftershave” (Brantley, Oct 10 2008).277 Ian’s belief that people

“can’t die and come back. That’s not dying, it’s fainting. When you die it’s the end” (Kane,

Blasted 56) is ironically undermined by the play’s most overt act of live burial, destabilizing and expanding the inflexible perception of reality upon which Ian relies.278 Thus, Ian climbs into the baby’s makeshift grave at the end of the play and “dies with relief,” only to emerge moments late, undead in the play’s final gesture (Kane, Blasted 60).

Ian’s limited perspective of life is socially situated (something to which his job as the mouthpiece for a wide-circulation tabloid attests) and so reflects and parrots social attitudes. Like Dracula, in which a primitive would-be colonizer terrifyingly and insidiously invades England, Blasted also uses vampirism to articulate what Arata notes as a “fear of reverse-colonization” (Arata 166). In Blasted, Ian’s fear of “imports” taking over England is part of what motivates his violent behavior and his attempts to claim Cate sexually for himself, something that certainly resonates with the battle played out over the penetration of women’s bodies in Dracula (Kane, Blasted 41).279 However, the postcolonial feminist

Gothic genealogy to which I am claiming Blasted belongs necessarily adapts this to its own political ends. Ian might see the “Wogs and Pakis” beyond his hotel room as evil, unclean, infiltrating monsters, but interestingly, his fear of being colonized by the primitive is critiqued by the play’s echoes of vampirism, rather than embodied by them, because it is

277 Kane is quite specific in places that Ian should actually “look very much as if he is dying” (Kane, Blasted 24). He didn’t in the Duo Theater revival, and the youth and vitality of Jason de Beer, who played Ian was one of the more problematic elements of the production. 278 Bayer-Berenbaum’s notion of the Gothic as troubling and expanding perceptions of reality is clearly evident here. 279 Sexual violence over contested territory is thinly veiled at best in the plotline of Dracula: every time Dracula penetrates Lucy in bed with his teeth, Harker and his band of vampire hunters penetrate her with their syringes, injecting her with their own blood.

304 Ian, and not the unseen Other lurking outside, who is most clearly positioned as a vampire in the play’s Gothic world (Kane, Blasted 4).

In the Gothic, however, positions, categories and identities are necessarily fraught.

Ian’s anxious insistence that Other be a readable category is frustrated by the play’s willful ambiguity. Arguably both the play’s ambiguity and the response that ambiguity generated during the play’s premiere in London support Graham Saunders’s observation that as a piece of political theatre, Blasted “asks uncomfortable questions about British identity”

(Saunders 51). The play’s refusal to provide a racial designation or national identity for the soldier both consciously stages a Gothic anxiety about the racial Other that surfaces in

Dracula, and comments on the racism that gives rise to that anxiety. In production, much depends on casting an actor whose looks and voice work leave racial categories ambiguous and costuming him in similarly non-descript military garb.280 And as reactions to Blasted make clear, anxiety about race is clearly a contemporary issue, striking a nerve with some of Blasted’s critics who faulted the play for not explaining “who exactly is meant to be fighting whom out on the streets” (Billington Jan 20 1995).

This challenge to distinctions is where much of Blasted’s Gothic meaning and much of its unease and power come from. Critics clamored for the absolutes of “the good guys, the bad guys, and the moral” (Singer 146), but as Ken Urban observes, the play is less concerned with moralizing absolutes than it is with an exploration of ethics and the contexts in which good and bad exist and are subject to change (Urban 37). This is in part what so strongly invites one to read the vampire here. Vampires are, as Veronica Hollinger

280 Several American productions, including those at Soho Rep and at The Duo Theater, have cast men with dark European looks, Louis Cancelmi and Logan George respectively, though the most recent production earlier this year at Sheffield Crucible Studio in England cast Mark Stanley, a fair, blue-eyed, and quite English looking actor.

305 notes, the ultimate deconstructive beings, and the modern vampire is more than ever before adept at problematizing the once sacrosanct boundaries between categories like Us and Them, Good and Evil (Hollinger 202). As critical as the play and the spectator might be of Ian’s racist and violent behavior, his alignment with the motif of the vampire reveals less a judgment of him as a figure of evil than a complication of Evil as a distinct or exceptional category of being. While Dracula also provocatively troubles categories of national identity and the binaries of foreigner outsider / local insider, Stoker’s novel is less invested in troubling moral categories than Blasted is. This is in large part because the novel presents the killing of vampires (Lucy, Dracula) as a justified necessity that is in some moral sense distinguishable from the violence Dracula himself inflicts. In Blasted, however, because both Ian and the Soldier are also positioned as victims in the world of the play, violence is an amplifying phenomenon as those infected in turn infect others with the same disease. In this way, the vampiric spread of Ian’s violence muddies distinctions between perpetrator and victim, corpse and survivor, local and foreigner, but also justified/good and unjustified/evil--categories that the play presents as far from stable.

The troubling ambiguity that makes categories indistinct prevents the spectator from being granted a certain safe distance from the figures that populate the play. The vampire is, after all, the once-was/might-be human, “the monster that looks like us”

(Hollinger 201). The vampire thus evokes an uncanny recognition, and ghastly as Ian undoubtedly is, that uncanny recognition is at work in Kane’s study of humanity. As Ben

Brantley notes of the New York production, “that Blasted still shocks isn’t because it traffics in visuals commonly associated with [horror] films...it is because those horrors are created by characters who are not, finally, so unlike us” (Brantley, Oct 10 2008).

306 The humanized and sympathetic vampire is, as many critics have argued, a significant characteristic of the late twentieth-century vampire (Hollinger 199-201; George and Hughes 3; Auerbach 131-137; 169-181; Day 7-8). The disturbing duality of the monstrous and the human that the contemporary vampire embodies is explicitly articulated in the theatre by Jack Thorne’s 2013 play Let The Right One In. Like Blasted, Let

The Right One In is about a culture of normalized violence and, explicit in its use of the vampire to explore that subject, it offers some helpful parallels. Here, a bullied teenager,

Oskar, becomes friends with (and ultimately falls in love with) a similarly isolated vampire,

Eli. Oskar, confused and upset by what he is learning about Eli threatens not to let her in:

ELI: Are you going to invite me in or not, Oskar? OSKAR: What happens if I don’t? ELI thinks and steels her jaw bravely. She steps into the room. She shuts the door behind her. […] Suddenly a tear falls out of the corner of her eye. A tear of blood […] Her lips twist in pain […] She’s bleeding out of all the pores in her body. OSKAR watches all this with mounting horror. OSKAR: No…No… I didn’t mean…You can come in…you can…you are welcome, you are…allowed to be here (Thorne 64-65).

The vampire’s troubling humanity emerges in part due not only to its physical vulnerability, but also its emotional vulnerability and its need for co-operation, while nonetheless having the power to evoke fear in the victim. Eli’s vulnerability complicates distinctions between victim and vampire based on suffering—even though we know she is a vampire and a killer. This complication, staged definitively in Thorne’s drama, is also fundamental to the more metaphorical evocation of the vampire on stage in Blasted, and to

Kane’s ongoing exploration of the existence of love in a hostile world. Here, the complication reverberates in the wracking coughs and retching of Ian, whose own battered body, which also cries tears of blood near the end of the play, evokes fear and sympathy in

307 Cate. Like Oskar’s sympathy for Eli, Cate’s sympathy arises from feelings of affection, and it is something Ian, like Eli, is not above manipulating. Having had his advances rebuffed by

Cate he tells her:

IAN: Don’t give me a hard-on if you’re not going to finish me off. It hurts. CATE: I’m sorry. IAN: Can’t switch it on and off like that. If I don’t come, my cock aches. CATE: I didn’t mean it. IAN: Shit (He appears to be in considerable pain.) CATE: I’m sorry. I am. I won’t do it again (Kane, Blasted 15).

Blasted, like Let The Right One In, troublingly evokes the vampire convention of invitation to blur distinctions between victim and oppressor and to suggest that the victim is in some way complicit in his or her own victimhood. Cate is, after all, there because she accepted an invitation, even if she didn’t give one—and Ian deliberately reframes his own arousal as

Cate’s fault, implying that it results from Cate’s unspoken come-on. Consequently Blasted’s evocation of the sexually predatory vampire treads territory familiar from the early nineteenth century onwards, in its suggestion that the vampire can only flourish where it is at least to some extent accepted. In doing so it terrifyingly foregrounds both sexist perceptions of rape as a crime that women bring upon themselves, and political characterizations of war and invasion as justifiable.

Consequently, this notion of invitation is important to the vampire narrative’s utility for addressing the nexus between the psychosexual and the political. Dracula articulates a patriarchal anxiety about control over women’s bodies that reverberates in questions of national virility and the future of empire (something with which Ian is also clearly concerned). But seduction only works where there is the possibility of desire; you have to let the vampire in first. Harker and his empire are threatened because Lucy and Mina

308 cannot or do not resist. And yet the vampirism of Blasted flourishes not because “no” means

“yes” in a misogynist culture, but because the human attitudes that make war possible pave the way for the vampire’s self-serving and self-preserving violence to be normalized, creating a world that extends acceptance if not invitation. We cannot be surprised by the extraordinary moment in which the solider penetrates Ian’s hotel room and then his body if we recognize that rape has, by Ian’s own actions, already been rendered ordinary in that space. Kane’s point that there is a connection between domestic rape and rape camps, between the behavior of normalized misogyny and the behaviors of war, is beautifully articulated by the vampire’s warning that one had better be careful what one invites over the threshold. This oblique but haunting evocation of the vampire who seems to already have come in is indelibly linked to Blasted’s use of space, which so completely and compellingly collapses distinctions between here and there to show (as Kulperger insists the postcolonial feminist Gothic tends to do), that national violence is in some senses always already domestic.

Conclusion:

In Blasted, then, the outward horror of a disintegrating social world reinforces and amplifies (and is reinforced by and amplified by) the disintegration of the self. What such dual disintegration makes clear is the play’s insistence that the personal is the political.

Through its motif of vampirism, its Gothic use of space, and its mutually contingent dramaturgical structure Blasted gives us space as both personal body and socio-political

309 territory, ruin as both individual trauma and social decay, and sexual violence as both domestic atrocity and oppressive contagion. The blasted stage body with its penetrated walls bears the mark of vampirism’s predatory and infectious violence. Rape, like the war it is linked to, and the colonial imperative it articulates, is hellishly viral, destroying both victim and villain, colonizer and colonized, and dismantling distinctions between them.

Blasted’s violence defies point of view and linear meaning to be instead horrifying at every turn, destroying everything it touches, making Cate’s contaminated body, the social body of our own world. Read this way it actually makes sense, not non-sense, that Kane blasts her play open, exploding the spatial and the rational narrative at the same time, and dismantling the boundaries between the play’s strident critiques of sexual abuse and the patriarchal structures that make war possible. In its terrifying exploration of the behaviors that lead to war, Blasted serves as a particularly strong case study for the ways in which a postcolonial feminist theatre can reveal to us the Gothic heart that beats not so far below the surface of our own contemporary society.

310

PROVISIONAL CONCLUSION

When Eve turns the sea blood-red, releasing the bodies of a thousand women into

Sydney Harbor at the end of Blue Murder, she effectively brings to the edge of visibility that which has been there all along, buried by prejudice and privilege: the presence of women in significant numbers. Like the theatre, the Gothic, feminism and postcolonialism are all much concerned with the power dynamics of bodies in places, as Eve’s act of sending those detained bodies across the contested waters of Sydney Harbour to the shore so evocatively reminds us. This act of Gothic exhuming is perhaps a fit way of thinking about bringing contemporary Gothic drama by women into visibility, too. Though the assessment of scholars like Bertrand Evans that Gothic dramas were “conspicuously bad” (Evans 5) has had a lasting impact on our ability to recognize and value the Gothic as it has evolved and flourished in theatres today, it is nonetheless there. As the work discussed in these pages attests, the Gothic’s presence is felt and seen in a rich range of plays by a diverse group of women writing evocative, engaged, and unsettling work for the stage at the end of the twentieth century. Its evident application to postcolonial feminisms and/or feminist postcolonialisms argues well for the Gothic as a significant object of study across a range of disciplines currently rethinking questions of bodies and spaces in the growing globalization

311 and ongoing disparity of our world in the twenty first century. It’s a fit time to reclaim the term Gothic for the theatre.

True, the writers whose work I have explored in the preceding pages don’t all engage the Gothic in the same way or to the same degree, making the act of taxonomizing the Gothic a challenging one. While some plays, like Lochhead’s Dracula, dive head first into the Gothic through intertextuality and adaptation, in other plays, like Thompson’s Habitat, the Gothic erupts in isolated moments, perhaps because the story just can’t get through any other way. Some, like Mad Forest, deploy isolated images or conventions to express specific political ideas, and others, like The Governor’s Family, ooze their Gothicness out of every consciously postcolonial pore. Even the plays here that are arguably the most thoroughly

Gothic and feminist and the most specifically postcolonial, those by Christian and Kane, are vastly different. Blue Murder and Blasted share subject matter, conventions, tonal qualities, as well as feminist outrage and postcolonial criticism of the violence at the core of the

British Empire, and yet while Blue Murder’s Gothic impact affects us emotionally and intellectually, Blasted works viscerally, beyond the reach of poised articulation.

Nonetheless, what I want to suggest is that these plays add up to something. Not a genre, with all the assessments of formal conformity that term brings, or a movement, with the implied coalescent focus on a geographically specific cultural moment. But something.

A Gothic body. To think of these plays as parts of a body of work emphasizes the hybrid and ambiguous nature of the Gothic, its penchant for composite monstrosity returning us again to Frankenstein’s creature, assembled out of bits and pieces, powerful and strange.

In having sketched the outline of this Gothic body, already greater than the sum of its parts, I want to make clear its imperfections. There are significant opportunities to

312 expand its reach and think contextually and comparatively about the theatrical work that indigenous writers are doing that might be in the Gothic mode, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s

Ola Na Iwi being just one possible place to start in that regard. So too the absence of a black writer from England in this study undoubtedly reflects my own shortcomings as a white scholar living in the U.S. far more than it reflects an unlikely absence of Gothic in the work of women of color living and writing in a postcolonial culture that has spawned the work of writers like Churchill and Kane. As Gabriele Griffin notes, there are more black and Asian women writing and being produced in England than ever before, though postcolonial theatre studies has till now paid them scant attention (Griffin 1-3). Both debbie tucker green and Tanika Gupta have been categorized alongside Kane as in-yer-face and alongside

Churchill as politically provocative, suggesting fruitful lines of comparative research.

So too, in terms of approach, there are unexplored corners and corridors yet to be navigated (to collapse spatial and corporeal metaphors for a moment). Marvin Carlson’s work in The Haunted Stage has championed an interest in the idea of intertextual resonance as a form of spectrality that has great significance for a study of Gothic drama and for undead histories as sites of feminist and postcolonial revision, as the labyrinthine network of connections and echoes in the texts footnoted and discussed here would surely indicate. Carlson notes that “certain stories or sets of stories in every era prove particularly attractive for retelling and for continued popular interest” providing dramatists with opportunities to shape familiar narratives to new contexts, encouraging audiences and critics “to pay closer attention to how the story is told and less to the story itself” (Carlson,

Haunted 22; 27). Indeed we might productively press further on when, where and to what

313 purpose Bluebeard shows up on stage, given its remarkable longevity in the Gothic and its striking visibility in Canadian drama in the last few years.

Furthermore, the number of texts in which these echoes and intertextual hauntings emerge is rapidly growing. In the first half of the 2015 season alone, the presumably small genre of “British vampire dramas with adolescent female vampire protagonists,” prompted not one but two critically received productions in New York: Cuddles and Let The Right One

In. This seems particularly apt for a mode of writing that embraces monstrous doubles. Or perhaps it is a calculated assault on Broadway on the part of the English undead. Or perhaps that’s cultural paranoia and it’s merely a coincidence. But if it is, it’s definitely nonetheless a coincidence just strange, puzzling and uncanny enough to be….well, Gothic.

314

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