BRECHTIAN/FEMINIST PLA YWRIGHTING: THE APPROPRIATION AND EXPROPRIATION OF FORM
By
MERRYNJOHNS
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Honours)
School of Theatre and Film Studies University of New South Wales
February 1995 CERTIRCATE OF ORIGINALITY
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text_
(Sig TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 11
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: Appropriating Brecht: The Possibilities of a Feminist Gestus 14-30
CHAPTER TWO: Historicism, Histrionics, and Herstory: Reconstructing the Female Historical Subject 31-54
CHAPTER THREE: Mimesis, Myth, and Truth: Deconstructing the Oedipal Narrative 55-71
CHAPTER FOUR: The Dialectics of Emotions: Conflating the Brechtian and the Feminist 72-91
CHAPTER FIVE: Breaking Frames: Pornography, Psychoanalysis, and Narrativity 92-120
CHAPTER SIX: Performing Bodies, Multiple Signs: The Pleasure of the (Feminist) Text 121-143
CONCLUSION 144-148
BIBLIOGRAPHY 149-161 ERRATA
p.6, footnote: for "Silva" read "Silvia" p.8, 1.27: for "de Lauretis" read "De Lauretis" p.21, 1.19: for "steretypical" read "stereotypical" p.22, 1.3: for "inscribe" read "ascribe"; 1.6 delete "through" p.23, 1.1: for "feminisng" read "feminising"; 1.2: for "involed" read "involved" p.24, 1.2: for "indicates" read "indicate" p.29, I. 12: for "her her" read "her" p.32, 1.22: for "Histrionic" read "Histrionics" p.34, 1.2: for "obscure" read "obscures" p.36, 1.22: for "of' read "to" p.37, 1.21: for "uderscores" read "underscores" p.41, 1.6: for "the the" read "the" p.56, I. 4: for "fulfill" read "fulfil"; 1.16: for "os" read "is"; "is" read "it" p.57, 1.4: for "delusory" read "illusory"; 1.15: for "prediliction" read "predilection" p.61, 1.5: for "hygeine" read "hygiene"; 1.28: for "oppresion" read "oppression" p.64, 1.3: for "performs" read "performing"; 1.19: for "assimlation" read "assimilation" p.65, 1.5: for "comopetitive" read "competitive"; "and" read "an" p.66, 1.12: for "overwheening" read "overweening" p.68, 1.15: for "assiting" read "assisting" p. 70, 1.19: for "psychserniotic" read "psychosemiotic" p. 75, 1.1: for "oppsed" read "opposed" p.81, 1.7: for "recrinination" read "recrimination" p.88, 1.21: for "fulfills" read "fulfils" p.89, 1.25: for "frought" read "fraught" p. 97, 1.15: for "harnesses" read "harnessed" p.122, 1.16: for "dialecticalism" read "dialecticism"; 1.18: for "vaildates" read ''validates" p.129, 1.3: for "appears is" read "appears there is" p.135, 1.25: for "virtuoisty" read ''virtuosity" p.146, 1.24: for "as case of' read "as a case of' p.147, 1.18: for "acknowledges" read "acknowledge"; for "dealt which" read "dealt with which" ABSTRACT
In the context of recent dramatic theory which seeks intertextual readings of critical inquiry and questions the politics of appropriation, this thesis will examine the purpose and results of an intertextual reading of Brechtian and Feminist theory and praxis. Drawing on current feminist academic debate, and influenced by theories of postmodernism and psychosemiotics, the validity of the Brechtian/Feminist theory/praxis will be assessed from two different perspectives: as a critical tool for reading a work of dramatic literature and as a practical tool, a dramaturgical guideline, for writing dramatic literature. To do this, a number of fairly recent plays by feminist playwrights have been selected to illustrate four main points: how the writer may have been influenced by a Brechtian approach to form; how they may have deviated from this approach to form; how they have transformed Brechtian notions in the process; and to what extent this process of appropriation/expropriation has helped the articulation of their feminist concerns. Chapter One demonstrates this process by focusing on gestus as a means of accessing the representation of women. Chapter Two focuses on Brecht's notion of historicism and the recovery of 'herstory' in feminist plays dealing with female historical subjects. Chapter Three examines the notion of mimesis as a restrictive theatrical form and how an appropriation of myth, in the light of Brecht'sfabel and Lehrstucke, may be useful to the feminist playwright. Chapter Four looks at Brecht's antipathy towards catharsis/emotion, but will find that feminist plays may use emotion to assist the feminist dialectic. Chapter Five focuses on the female subject and the role of the spectator by analysing plays about framing systems involved in pornography and psychoanalysis. Chapter Six turns to notions of the female body as it may inhabit, control, or produce the theatrical space, causing a conflation of body and text. The major conclusions reached are that appropriation of Brecht by feminist playwrights interested in radical/political theatrical form has incurred a transformation of forms which has helped give voice to the feminist theatrical practice and may have revived or re-radicalised Brechtian theory in the process. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to thank my supervisor Dr. Margaret Williams of the School of Theatre and Film Studies, UNSW, for her constant guidance, advice and support, and Dr. Jim Davis, who provided additional consultation.
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Thanks, also, to my family who were supportive, thoughtful, and patient during the time it took to complete the work. I
INTRODUCTION
"(T)he master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Amlre Lorde1
In her introduction to Acting Out, Lynda Hart considers the means and methods of a feminist theatre practice, and in doing so she suggests that "(i)t is time perhaps to rethink Audre Lorde's mantra for feminist praxis" since "(t)echnology and ideology change the function of tools, which in any case have no inherent instrumental function. "2 The following discussion will demonstrate the ways in which feminist ideology can be brought to bear upon Brechtian dramaturgy, and even alter the nature and function of the epic dramaturgical 'tools' as they were developed by Brecht, to suit the purposes of feminist theatrical praxis. This process may be seen as a 'feminising' of the Brechtian aesthetic which is incurred through appropriation, but which itself incurs, as its by product, through an immediate expropriation, the evolution of new forms. The term 'feminising' will not be used to suggest biologically determined approaches to aesthetics, but rather to emphasise the re-en/gendering of what has been interpreted as a largely 'masculine' domain. Contemporary male playwrights have, of course, also appropriated/expropriated Brechtian aesthetics to their own purposes. In this discussion, 'feminising' is a term which should be used with some flexibility, and perhaps even irony, suggesting that Brechtian form is open to interpretation and transformation, a suitable lens through which notions of "feminine" and "masculine" may be viewed as other than "natural". The notion of appropriation as a form of possession or ownership of aesthetic means to arrive at certain ends, of transformation as alteration of certain elements and means, and of expropriation as a purgation of unsuitable elements, will be considered. It will be argued that, with some alterations, the master's tools may be implemented to dismantle the 'master's house' of theatrical representation, effectively
1 See Hart, Lynda, Introduction to Acting Out, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p.11 2 Ibid. 2
altering the ways in which women are represented on stage. In particular, the architectonics of dramatic form and structure, and the ways in which the feminist playwright approaches the aesthetics of form, will be the main concern, since it is here that the possibilities of de/re-construction are most apparent. To what extent the altered 'tools' may construct a new "house" on the site of theatrical representation will also be considered.
For the purpose of introducing this topic of research and analysis, certain critical issues need clarification. While this dissertation will not provide an in-depth analysis of Brecht' s dramatic theory and practice or an exhaustive critique of either, it will take key principles of both in order to provide a framework for discussion and shed light on the more prevalent aspects of Brechtian dramaturgy in some contemporary feminist drama.
The 'post-Brechtian' work of Eliz.abeth Wright and Patrice Pavis provide departure points for notions of a post-Brechtian theory and practice by feminist dramatists and critics. Wright' s notion of discussing the work of Brecht in the light of postmodern, post Brechtian theories does much to inform feminist evaluations of Brecht's work and its usefulness to the feminist dramatic practitioner. Implicit in her re-presentation of Brecht is already the notion of an "elsewhere" practice outside of the dramatic canon. Pavis' reconsideration and clarification of Brecht's notion of Gestus in relation to semiotics, stage language and languages of the body provides a crucial reference point for those feminists concerned with the useful appropriation of Brechtian theory. However, Pavis suggests a holistic or dialectical appreciation of critical appropriation: It would be highly dangerous, moreover, to isolate a concept for the sole purpose of clarifying it only in the context of written works of theory, without verifying what use Brecht makes of it in his writings or productions, and without comparing it dialectically with other notions of his system. 3
Critical discussion of Brechtian theory can lead to a misuse of terms connected with Brecht's epic theatre, therefore the concepts isolated for discussion below will remain close to Brecht' s own definitions of their nature and function, taking into account that all
3 Pavis, Patrice, Languages of the Stage (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p.39 3 of these concepts were intended to operate both in concert and contradiction with each other, that is to say, dialectically. The aspects of epic/Brechtian theatre that will be drawn upon for discussion are: Gestus or gest, epic structure, non-mimetic theatrical forms, historicisation, distanciation, the role of empathy and identification and the role of the spectator. Definitions of these terms will be taken as needed from Brecht's own writings, especially the Short Organum and The Messingkauf Dialogues which most clearly display the dialectical intentions of Brecht' s theorising.
Although this thesis will not attempt a survey of Brechtian critical theory to date, it may be observed that Brechtian criticism has tended to fall into three camps: interpretations , critiques and validations of Brecht' s theory and practice. It is interesting to note that recent feminist dramatic criticism has mostly fallen into the latter group, seeking to recuperate Brechtian theory as a valuable forerunner to contemporary sign systems of the stage, and it is this aspect that will be dealt with. It would seem that the critical tradition which has, over the last decade or more, proclaimed Brecht to be dead, in eclipse, inflexible, outmoded, or fraudulent, has been mostly the product of debate amongst male critics and biographers, in what appears to be an almost Oedipal rebellion against the canonised patriarch, Brecht.4 To this purpose, a very brief history of feminist dramatic criticism engaging with Brechtian theory and practice is useful. The Brechtian/Feminist debate seems to have been sparked by Sara Lennox's seminal article of 1978, "Women in Bertolt Brecht's Works", 5 and while this article focused on content more than form, practice rather than theory, it generated notions that there was a fruitful dialectical relationship between Brechtian epic theatre, and questions of female subjectivity and dramatic form. Lennox was aware of the intertextuality existent between Brecht' s works and feminist theory, applying one of his own methods, historicisation, to the feminist purpose:
To ... understand ourselves and our lives as "changing and changeable" (Brecht), we must, as a necessary first step in feminist analysis, examine and criticize women figures in the works of male writers like Brecht in the light of what we know to be the real historical capacities of
4 These critics are numerous but would include Heiner Muller, Werner Mittenzwei, Carl Weber, Ronald Hayman, Klaus Volker, Martin Esslin, etc., and most recently, John Fuegi. 5 Lennox, Sara,NewGermanCritique, 14, (1978) 4
women in their time and our own. 6
Lennox's argument is, however, that Brechfs works contain, however rudimentary, the elements which illuminate yet exceed his own limitations regarding the cultural position of women. Volume 12 of the Brecht Yearbook was devoted to the issue of Brecht, women and politics7 , Sue-Ellen Case's and Sarah Bryant-Bertail's articles standing out in their linking of Brechfs theatre to questions of gender and theatricality. Bryant-Bertail takes Brecht' s Mother Courage and deconstructs its en-gendering of the spatio-temporal aspects of theatre, while Case analyses Brecht' s use of the cultural paradigm of "mother" (and woman), evaluating both the positive and negative handling of this signifier. Elin Diamond's article "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory"8 works towards formulating what she terms a "gestic feminist criticism" based on the 'readability' of Brechtian theatre and its intertextuality with feminist theories of positing a female spectator. Diamond seeks a balance in this intertextuality, asserting the "radical potential of the Brechtian critique and a discovery, for feminist theory, of the specificity of theatre."9 Diamond finds something invaluable in Brechfs experiments with representation and reception for the feminist theorist:
Demystifying representation, showing how and when the object of pleasure is made, releasing the spectator from imaginary and illusory identifications - these are crucial elements in Brecht's theoretical project .... (T)hrough Brechtian theory, (feminists) have ... a female body in representation that resists fetishization and a viable position for the female spectator. 10
As if in extension of this idea, Iris Smith 11 has advocated an adaptation of Brechtian ideas concerning the compatibility of social gesture (Gestus) with feminist spectatorial pleasure and finds that in The Good Person ofSzechwan, Brechfs own practice pioneers the way for a feminist model of the feminist gest, the split subject, and feminist spectatorial pleasures. Janelle Reinelt has found Brechtian influences in the roots of British feminist theatre that extend to the present day, and notes the overall compatibility
6 Ibid., p.83 7 John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, John Willett, (eds.), (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1985) 8 Diamond, Elin, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory'', IDR, 32:1 Spring 1988 9 Ibid., p.82 10 Ibid., p.83 11 Smith, Iris, "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theatre", Theatre Journal, 43:4, December 1991 5 of Marxist feminism and Brecht's application of dialectical materialism to the theatre. "For feminists, Brechtian techniques offer a way to examine the material conditions of gender behaviour (how they are internalized, opposed, and changed) and their interaction with other socio-political factors such as class."12 She finds that the work of Caryl
Churchill harbours the most consistent influence of a feminist playwright by Brecht13 , and this notion will provide a microcosm of discussion in the first chapter for the process of (sub)conscious appropriation and the feminist approach to theatrical form.
This dissertation will attempt to apply notions generated by this dialectic to a group of plays that represent some of the most experimental and interesting examples of drama by noted feminist playwrights of recent years which involve appropriations and expropriations of aspects of Brechtian theory. The feminist plays examined in this thesis are termed so for several reasons. They are all written by women, make women their subject matter, and, most importantly, the narrative structure and form of these plays reflects the ideological concerns of feminism. All of the authors in this study come from divergent backgrounds that have ramifications on the politics and aesthetics of their work. What is shared by all authors is a delight in experimentation with form and an adventurousness which challenges the dominant cultural mode of playwriting for the mainstream. It must be mentioned, however, that examples of contemporary plays by women of colour have not been included for in-depth analysis. This choice has been made because the aesthetic, cultural and political conditions that govern the production of such texts, as well as the specificities involved in their reception, open up an entirely new area of discussion to which the framework of this thesis could not do justice. It is also unfair to suggest that women of colour are necessarily engaged with, or sympathetic to, the largely white, middle-class feminist movement, simply by being female, or that they have been influenced (or can be contextualised) by a European writing tradition. The issue of a white researcher analysing plays written by and for black women also raises complications that could not be dealt with in the space allowed.
12 Reinelt, Janelle, "Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama", Theatre Journal, 38:2, May 1986 After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 13 After Brecht, p. 8 I 6
Marxist and non-Marxist feminist viewpoints will be examined as will the question of a gender specific way of structuring drama. Much debate surrounds this issue; the search for a female aesthetic seems to concern many commentators on women's playwriting 14 • It is a question which is impossible to answer and this thesis will not attempt to come to any conclusions regarding this issue. It will rather examine the ways in which selected female playwrights have sought to deal with dramatic form in terms of crafted texts for performance in order to demonstrate particular ideologies. To this extent, non-literary or non-text based forms of theatre such as women's performance art will not be included in the discussion. The potential of individual theatre texts and the material conditions surrounding their production (including public and critical responses) as well as their inherent theatrical and literary qualities for demonstrating and furthering an exploration of the feminist dialectic will rather be the focus. It must be stressed that the playwrights discussed below may not display or articulate a conscious debt to Brecht; rather, their work may be seen to respond to the alternative approaches to theatrical form his theorising ushered in from the late 1950s onwards. Also, Brechtian theory may be seen as a critical tool that can be applied to the analysis of texts that may not have been influenced by these theories in terms of their own practice. However, the texts discussed below engage with theatrical form in a way that may be read at least critically as Brechtian, or post-Brechtian. Caryl Churchill's explanation of her influence by Brecht may be extended to many playwrights working in theatre in the last two decades or more: I don't know either the plays or the theoretical writings in great detail but I've soaked up quite a lot about him over the years. I think for writers ... in the seventies his ideas have been absorbed into the general pool of shared knowledge and attitudes, so that without constantly thinking of Brecht we nevertheless imagine things in a way we might not have without him. is
Chapter One tests in practice Diamond's theory of the possibilities of a feminist gest, and how it may have expanded the possible approaches to form and representation for feminist playwrights. It will discuss plays which consciously experiment with the
14 This question was asked by Silva Bovenschen in her article "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic", New German Critique, 10, Wmter (1977) and by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koening of virtually every female flaywright in Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York: Beech Tree/Quill, 1987) s Letter by Caryl Churchill. After Brecht, p.86 7
Brechtian style and approach theatrical form from a Brechtian position, promoting a materialist interpretation of gender, a separation of theatrical elements and a stripping bare of the theatrical apparatus. Alterations of the Brechtian 'tools', and the intertextual re-radicalisation of feminist and Brechtian positions will be assessed. Chapter Two looks at Brecht's concept ofhistoricisation which lends clarity to interpretations of the material conditions of women, past and present. Chapter Three will focus on plays which explore female agency in myth and mythic structures as a way of resisting the mimetic, Aristotelian, classic realist text. Chapter Four considers plays that succeed in using empathy and identification dialectically, capitalising on the feminist polemic surrounding the issue of the personal as political. Chapter Five takes the principle of alienation and considers it in terms of a semiotic tool that may free sign systems and the codification of female, sexual identity. Examined will be approaches to space and theatricality which re engender the sign systems of the stage ( and by extension, society) through the use of multiple signifiers and a confounding of gestic principles. Chapter Six brings the discussion to a conclusion with plays that deal with the issue of framing the female subject, the form of these plays raising questions about the role of the female spectator and a dismantling of the male gaze for which theatre traditionally caters. Brecht' s notion of the self-aware reader (audience/performer) will be seen to be useful in reconciling the split female self of psychoanalysis and the objectified female subject of pornography.
Finally, the thesis will consider the issue of appropriation as creative/critical transformation and whether or not, as Toril Moi argues, "feminists can in a sense afford to be tolerantly pluralistic in their choice of literary methods and theories, precisely because any approach that can be successfully appropriated to their political ends must be welcome."16 Stephen Heath's influential article "Lessons from Brecht" (Screen, 1974) provides a starting point for debate on the value of critical and literary appropriation. Heath alleges that Brecht' s own methods relied on appropriation:
... did Brecht himsel( indeed, ever show the slightest regard for the author, for artistic
16 Moi, Toril, "Feminist Literary Criticism", Modem Literary Theory (London: B T Batsford, 1989), Jefferson, Ann & Robey, David (eds.), p.205 8
authority? throughout his work there runs a kind of practical disrespect,a 'fundamental laxity in matters of intellectual property' ... , the constant plagiaristic appropriation of previous works as material to be recast, rethought in new articulations: simply, it is to recall certain ideas, certain formulations, the example of a truly dialectical practice, a ceaseless process of theoretical production in the conjuncture of specific problems, . . 17 specifi c s1tuabons.
What Heath suggests is that appropriation may provide a basis for dialectical argument in the sense that it 'quotes' and generates contradiction rather than preserving the illusion of an organic whole, as witnessed in the masquerade of the narrative text as the stand-in for reality. Peggy Phelan seems to suggest that there already exists a fruitful cohabitation of stage sign systems and female identity in the very materiality of their relation:
By thinking about both notions of the performative we can see how thoroughly bodies inhabit signifying systems and how signifying systems are always organized as bodies. These are useful notions for people interested in reading how women are read as bodies and how most performing bodies are read as feminine. 18
If Brecht's theoretical 'body' of work has been read as 'masculine', it may be interesting to note that early criticism of his plays (Lennox, for example) centred on his female characters which were more often the locus of gest than the male -- think of Mother Courage, Grusha, Shen Teh, Johanna and Vlassova as bodies where the dialectical battle is fought. Brecht's characterisations of women have attracted the criticism of feminist theorists not so much because they seem stereotypical or lack dialectical import, but because they seem to lend weight to the outmoded notion that 'positive' images of women counteract the often misogynist presentation of women by plays of the male canon of classic realism. The issue of female visibility has been superseded by that of female difference and the questioning of what constitutes positivity as a mode of representation.
Teresa de Lauretis credits Heath's essay with recuperating the Brechtian political position as a way of critiquing the structures of representational, classic realist cinema. 19 Representational cinema, which envelops the audience in a false consensus, defeats the
17 Heath, Stephen, "Lessons from Brecht" Screen, 15: 2, Summer (1974) p.103 18 Phelan, Peggy, Acting Out (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp.15-16 19 De Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.161 9 dialectical process. The alternative would be a Brechtian cinema in which the spectator would assume a critical and contradictory role. The discussion of this thesis will utilise post-Brechtian theory of the cinema, since cinema is so obviously a social technology, and, as de Lauretis has found, is "an apparatus of representation, an image machine developed to construct images or visions of social reality and the spectators' place in it. "20 Such a model is useful to feminist theorists and practitioners within theatre because it scrutinises the ideological inscription of the social and the subjective onto the cinema screen, and consequently into the collective consciousness. As de Lauretis states:
If feminists have been so insistently engaged in practices of cinema ... it is because there the stakes are especially high. The representation of woman as image (spectacle, object to be looked at, vision of beauty -- and the concurrent representation of the female body as the locus of sexuality, site of visual pleasure, or lure of the gaze) is so persuasive in our culture, well before and beyond the institution of cinema, that it necessarily constitutes a starting point for any understanding of sexual difference and its ideological effects in the construction of social subjects, its presence in all forms of subjectivity. 21
The stage is also an imaging machine of women and although it does not involve mechanical mass reproduction of images it has contributed "before and beyond" cinema to the commodification of women. It does, however, have, already inscribed within its materiality, a tradition of woman as dialectical signifier, and the recuperation of Brechtian theory can only provide tools with which to intervene in the process of 1magmg.
Susan Bennett, in her work on reception theory, acknowledges the wide dissemination of Brecht' s ideas:
It ... seems as ifBrecht's name -- and ideas -- appear everywhere: in renaissance studies, in theories of postmodernism, in contemporary theatre practice and research, in cultural studies, in film theory, in Marxist studies and elsewhere. Certainly Brecht's work fore grounds the audience and it is in post-Brechtian oppositional theatre that the audience has taken an increasingly productive role. 22
20 Ibid., p.37 21 Ibid., pp.37-38 22 Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), p.21 10
Feminist theatre may be regarded as such "oppositional theatre" since it seeks to change more conventional modes of production and reception, and Brecht's epic theatre may be seen to have provided a sign system or narrative model for political theatre of different kinds such as that produced by feminist, gay or minority 'ethnic' groups.23 Such sign systems were developed for Brecht by Piscator, Meyerhold and Eisenstein, but Brecht seems to exceed his precursors in his focus on stage/audience relationships. Semiotics, the study of sign systems, may be seen to extend this investigation, as de Lauretis finds semiotics dialectical in nature as it is essentially "a system of oppositional values".24 Gest draws attention to the function of the signifier rather than taking it for granted that the sign or the gesture is a facet of reality. Brecht did much to investigate sign systems and the semantic universe to which they belonged and by which they were produced. In this sense, feminist psycho-semiotic theory can extend the inquiry into the nature and function of ideology and establish or recuperate a space for feminist practice. However, in spite of Brecht' s interest in the role of the spectator, the identity of the contemporary theatre audience is shadowy, with debates on the ideology of the gaze needing investigation into the nature and role of the alternative spectator posited by deconstruction theories and practice. Bennet finds that feminist literary critics beginning with Millett (Sexual Politics, 1969) encouraged a conflict between reader and author/text, breaking with dominant critical practice. 25 This paved the way for the female reader to position her own spectatorial identity in the construction and interpretation of text. The Brechtian notion of an oppositional reader/spectator has helped to inform this process and encourages not only the recovery of 'lost' female texts or the re-reading of the patriarchal literary/dramatic canon, but the appropriation of a dramatic form that promotes the identification of "alternative conditions of production and reception". 26 This has progressed the debate from one of readership to one of ownership of the means of production, from a process of dismantling the master's house, to building an alternative house.
23 Ibid., p.27 24 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, p.33 2S Bennett, p.60 26 Ibid., p.62 11
This raises a final point on the structure of the dissertation. As suggested by the quote prefacing the introduction, Audre Lorde's comment that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house will provide the point of inquiry for this discussion which will demonstrate how feminist playwrights have been able to appropriate and alter Brechtian theory in a way that deconstructs patriarchal theatrical form and suggests possible new sites and structures, and the construction of a feminist house/praxis. But how successfully this "elsewhere" of theatrical production will remain separate from the dominant culture will be considered in conclusion.
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John Fuegi' s recent book, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brechr7 makes many claims concerning the production of play texts by Brecht as sole author. Fuegi alleges that Brecht had several female collaborators who may be credited with producing up to ninety per cent of the written texts believed to have been penned by Brecht himself. Fuegi asserts that Grete Steffin "helped create" Mother Courage, The Good Woman ofSetzuan, Arturo Ui, The Private Life ofthe Master Race, and early drafts of The Caucasian Chalk Circle28 ,and should be considered as co-author of The Life of Galileo. 29 Ruth Berlau contributed heavily to The Days of the Commune30 and The Visions of Simone
Marcharcf 1 , while Elisabeth Hauptmann is referred to consistently throughout the book with many suggestions that she is the 'real' Brecht, supplying Brecht with eighty or ninety per cent of the written text for Man Equals Man, The Mother, The Exception and the Rule, St Joan of the Stockyards, Happy End (her 'sequel' to The Threepenny Opera) and shockingly, the majority of The Threepenny Opera, to which Fuegi claims Brecht contributed no more than the lyrics of 'Mack the Knife' and one or two other
27 Fuegi, John, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (London: Harper Collins, 1994) 28 Ibid., p.5 I 5 29 Ibid., p.370 30 Ibid., p.511 31 Ibid., p.438 12 songs. 32 Fuegi consequently credits Hauptmann with the shift in tone, form and subject matter of 'Brecht's' work following the Baal period (which is marked by Brecht's meeting with Hauptmann and their following association); Hauptmann is also credited with the 'invention' of the 'Lehrstiicke; the product of her interest in Chinese, Japanese 'didactic' theatre and the need to discover a form(ula) for the new drama. 33 Throughout Fuegi's book, one notion is recurrent: that Brecht 'colonised' the abilities of female writers who were dis/content to be produced/published under the 'great' author's name, for personal or political reasons pertinent to that time; but another notion emerges from Fuegi' s allegations and this, even if less than half of what Fuegi claims is true, concerns the subsequent 'aesthetic' to Brecht's works, and their approach to form, substantially provided by female 'assistance.' Hauptmann claims that Brecht was largely absent during the period in which she wrote The Threepenny Opera, translating from an English copy of Gay's play, which Brecht was unable to read fluently in English. Their 'collaboration' lasting more than a decade, this claim casts an interesting light on notions of 'Brechtian' ideology, dramaturgy and form, and Fuegi's argument would seem to suggest that the 'feminisation' of Brecht occurred long before the advent of feminist critical theory; it was a process that was initiated in approximately 1924.34
Fuegi' s allegations are very strong ones and should not be considered as established fact. This discussion does not challenge the authorship of Brecht' s plays. Fuegi' s 'discoveries,'(some already documented earlier by other sources but strongly resisted and challenged by many Brecht scholars), may be seen to stimulate ideas surrounding appropriation and politicisation. Fuegi offers an interesting possibility that casts another perspective on the Brechtian/Feminist debate. If it seems that a large number of feminist playwrights have borrowed from Brecht, there may be some irony in the possibility that they are actually borrowing from Hauptmann, Berlau and Steffin, whose contributions to key 'Brecht' works which address issues of the theatrical sign and the female subject may
32 Ibid., pp.192-205 33 Ibid.; Chapter Sixteen discusses Hauptmann's central role in consolidating much of what has been assumed was Brecht's theories and practice concerning approaches to dramatic form. 34 lbid. 34 13 be seen to have posited an aesthetic useful to later feminist playwrights. Such an aesthetic, Fuegi would argue, is largely absent from Baal, or Drums in the Night, plays produced before the process of collaboration with a female, and which display an aesthetic which Fuegi criticises for being misogynist and fascist, and by which few feminist playwrights would be inspired. Elin Diamond summarised her view of the correlation between the Brechtian and feminist poles:
I would suggest that feminist theory and Brechtian theory need to be read intertextually, for among the effects of such a reading are a recovery of the radical potential of the Brechtian critique and a discovery, for feminist theory, of the specificity oftheatre.35
Fuegi's book would suggest that the relationship between these apparently opposing poles be seen in the light of a double appropriation, and a re-appropriation: the "radical potential of the Brechtian critique" may be consequently seen as a conflation with feminist theory's focus on the specificity of the theatre, and of the cultural position of women. What Sara Lennox describes as her "discomfort" with Brecht36 1s counterbalanced by her feelings of a 'ghosting' effect in his work which seems to witness a concession of the 'masculinist' to the feminist:
Unbeknownst to Brecht and contrary to his conscious intentions, women in his work exert a subversive potential, pointing in directions qualitatively different from the position Brecht consciously represented in his theoretical writings. 37
Lennox believes that Brecht's female characters are "double-edged," perhaps the result of the female ghostwriters supplying the text with an additional meaning. Such observations are useful in that they outline some of the difficulties in determining issues of aesthetic 'ownership,' of the degree to which feminist playwrights have consciously drawn upon Brechtian dramaturgy, and of Brecht's firm position within the dramatic/literary canon as attributable to 'feminist aesthetics,' rather than the validation of feminist plays as attributable to the canonised, avant-gardist Brecht.
35 Diamond, Elin, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory," TDR, 32; I Spring (1988) p.82 36 Lennox, Sara, "Women in Brecht's Works," New German Critique, 14 (1978), p.83 37 lbid., p.84 14
CBAPTERONE
TESTING BRECHT: THE POSSIBILITIES OF A FEMINIST GEST
"Epic theater is by definition a gestic theater. For the more frequently we interrupt someone in the act of acting, the more gestures result." Walter Benjamin1
"To use Brecht without criticizing him is to betray him." Heiner Muller2
Taking Benjamin's notion of gestus as the key element of epic or Brechtian theatre, and the one aspect identified by feminists as being the most useful for appropriation or adaptation, further definitions may be useful. Throughout the course of his writings, Brecht's own definitions of Gestus appear many times with variation. It has been left to his commentators to concretize the term. Willett finds that Gestus "is not simply gesture, but a combination of gesture and attitude. A play, a person, a sentence can all have a Gestus."3 Willett's notion is interesting because although Brecht's epic theatre advocates a separation of the elements, each element must work in orchestrated contradiction with the other elements in order to produce the dialectic. Brecht believed that knowledge lay in contradiction4 and, to this purpose, what may be thought to be an unaesthetic collation between Brechtism and feminism itself produces such a dialectic. Benjamin has refined the use of the term to the "quotable gesture" and epic theatre, depending upon interruption of its narrative flow, is therefore a quotable theatre. 5 In other words the gestic unit -- the node which demonstrates attitude -- is a vertebra in the backbone of the
1 Benjamin, Walter, "What is Epic Theater?' Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p.151 2 Volker, Klaus, "Brecht Today: Classic or Challenge", Theatre Journal 39:4 Decemeber 1987, p.433 3 Willett, John, notes to The Messingkauf Dialogues (London: Eyre Methuen, 1965), p.46 4 Ibid., p.89 5 "What is Epic Theater?", p. 151 15 text. Through still photography taken of the 1957 production of Mother Courage, Roland Barthes has identified what he believes to be gestus in practice. It is "the social gesture ... the political test',6. Barthes finds gestus especially present in actors' gestures ('The Raised Finger'), in the stage mise-en-scene ('The Drawn Wagon'), in tableaux where particular character groupings occur ('Mother Courage Rejoices'), and in particular trans/ actions which have socio-political import ('The Sale of a Belt Buckle). Patrice Pavis finds that in spite of the variance in Brecht's use of the term Gestus/gestische, all definitions have "a common social dimension"7 which demonstrates social relations and material conditions. Eliz.abeth Wright finds that gestus is the "exaggerated ideological gesture" questioning social relations where we believe them to be at their most natural. 8 She finds in gestus as a raised inscription or reading an equivalent for the Freudian slip: it is the tell-tale sign that points to the concealed reality. It should be noted that although any definition of gestus acknowledges its illumination of social relations, gestus is also the element through which didacticism enters the Brechtian text. Gestus is the point at which the attitude of the text is visible, and Brecht has written that if the form is based around or on a series of gests, an "element of instruction and directness" will be brought into play. 9
If gestus is the element of epic structure which demonstrates the author's ideological stance on the subject the play deals with, as well as giving her/him a control of the form, it is obvious why gest may be seen as a useful sub-unit of theatrical form for appropriation by the feminist playwright. But feminist critics and theorists have found other reasons for its use. Elin Diamond finds that a gest could assist feminist thought as many of its goals overlap Brechtian goals or extend them. For example, a goal of feminist theory is "the passionate analysis of gender in material social relations and in discursive and representational structures, especially theatre and film, which involve scopic
6 Barthes, Roland, "Seven Photo Models os Mother Courage" TDR 12: 1 Fall 1967, p.45 7 Pavis, Patrice, Languages of the Stage (New York: PAJ, 1982), p.41 8 Wright, El.iz.abeth, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London/New York: Routledge, 1989), p.20 9 Brecht, Bertolt, "Notes to the Opera The Rise and Fall of the City ofMahagonny" Plays, Poetry and Prose Volume Two (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), p.88 16 pleasures and the body."10 To do this, Brechtian theory and feminist theory's shared goal of promoting multiple readings of the theatrical sign is the common ground justifying the appropriation. Diamond especially seizes upon the aspect of gestus which makes visible to the spectator social attitudes. It is this illumination or insight which complicates the viewing process in terms of production, representation and reception. The spectator no longer becomes part of the text. He/she supplements the text. 11 Iris Smith finds that since gestus provides the spectator with "a moment demanding special attention"12 it is a moment at which a gest can re-frame the subject with awareness of the production of sexual stereotypes. Smith finds this already implicit in Brecht's works (Mother Courage reveals 'mother', The Good Person of Szechwan reveals 'prostitute') but asserts that an element of change should occur to gestus that would compensate for the origins of the device in "the largely gender-blind experimental theater of Brecht's time."13 Smith argues that there is a trend in the contemporary theatre's approach to form that treats language, structure, and conflict as "form features" to be identified as separate elements and "moved about". 14 Surely this trend owes something to Brecht, but there remains the necessity for feminist theatre to adapt and combine Brechtian elements such as gestus with other techniques that are also receptive to and reflective of feminist ideology. To return to Diamond's vision for a gestic feminist criticism, there may be found the argument that gestic feminism itself questions appropriation as necessary, as appropriation is surely a seamless annexing of one position by another. 15 Diamond feels that a feminist use of gestus is not one that permits the feminist dramatist to 'master' the playtext. Rather, it is a lens which foregrounds the production of meaning, and generates meaning. The extent to which 'appropriated' gestus is used by feminist playwrights as a lens, as a touchstone, as a device, will be discussed below, rather than as an option on a reproducable theatrical formula. This is evident in the marked differences between the three plays.
10 Diamond, Elin, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory" 1DR 32:1 Spring 1988, pp.82-83 11 Ibid., p.90 12 Smith, Iris, "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theater" Theatre Journal 43 :4 December 199 I, p.492 13 Ibid., p.494 14 Ibid. 15 Diamond, p.91 17
Claire Luckham's Trafford Tanzi has its starting point in one of Brecht's meditations on the formal and aesthetic possibilities of the epic theatre. Luckham reveals that she "had often wondered what Brecht was on about when he talked about plays in boxing rings"16 and this point of enquiry was transformed without much difficulty into a metaphor for the feminist subject's gender position. Luckham had been commissioned to write a play for an active female protagonist, and the juxtaposition seemed a natural and telling one, gestic in itself The trials of a woman wrestler whose battle within the ring to attain champion status provides the extended gest pointing to Everywoman's struggle with her gender coding and her desire to attain independence, visibility, status. The play was first performed in 1978 (the height of the popularisation of feminist thought) in clubs and pubs around Liverpool and seems to bear out Brecht's ideas of a non-culinary theatre. Brecht's essay "Emphasis on Sport" (1926) recommends that theatre develop a relationship with its audience similar to that demonstrated at sporting events. Spectators of sport require entertainment as well as the display of skilled performance. Their attitudes may be ones of enthusiasm and involvement, but they are always critical , their eyes on the outcome of the display. However, the sporting dynamic, and the role of the spectator, comes down to a matter of barracking for one of two opposing sides, and this binary structure in itself is not one that fosters the dialectic. Although Luckham, in her selection of a female wrestler inhabiting the ring/stage, hit upon a powerful and ironically amusing twist of the theatrical signifier, she is also formally limited by her adoption of Brecht's sporting aesthetic, lending the play an obviousness, an inventive 'platforming' of issues.
Luckham's prolonged use of gestic tableaux which hammer home their points as relentlessly as the floor of the ring is hammered with the bodies of its opponents lends the play a mild didacticism. Its clear and entertaining instruction demonstrates a continuum with British left wing women's theatre practiced by groups such as Red Ladder who, as Janelle Reinelt has noted, also draw on Brechtian notions of social gest
16 Luckham, Claire, notes to Trafford Tanzi Plays By Women Volume 2 (London: Methuen, 1983), p.5 18 and alienation techniques in order to "examine the material conditions of gender behaviour (how they are internalized, opposed, and changed) and their interaction with other socio-political factors such as class. " 17 Roland Barthes has written on the semiotics of wrestling, finding that wrestling may be read as a text of the body, "by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which makes the intention utterly obvious."18 Wrestling may therefore be seen to operate on a structure similar to that of gestus, without the social pointer. By placing a female within the frame of the wrestling text, now written on/by her body, a cultural/social meaning immediately comes into play. The gestic 'language' of wrestling is based on 'holds', or grips, and footwork, which have their own significance in terms of status, strategy, etc. A comic, didactic tension is produced by a female protagonist enacting these gests and the everyday female rites of passage which they point to and criticise. The staging of the ring frames gender roles in terms of visceral, competitive, injury-inflicting sport, distancing them from notions of natural behaviour.
In order to distance the female protagonist further from her gender role, she is given the ambiguous name, or persona of a wrestler -- Trafford Tanzi, as if to point to her quest for eluding classification. Her more conformist female rival is named Platinum Sue, and alludes to this fact, suggesting that the performer would 'play up' the blonde female stereotype. Tanzi's male opponent is named Dean Rebel, pointing to the patriarchal active male protagonist. Tanzi's parents are conveyed as 'Mum' and 'Dad', humorously transformed from ordinary folk into savage wrestling opponents of Tanzi, their cultural construction brought to the fore. Tanzi is subjected to successive rounds which point to the fending off of peer, parental and conjugal oppression. Each character has a signature tune, and while wrestling holds take the place of much dialogue, songs replace monologues. 'Mum' sings of her disappointment at her child's gender: I wanted a boy,/ I wanted a lad, I wanted a boy,/ And so did her Dad. I wanted a boy,/ And look what I got,
17 Reinelt, Janelle, "Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama", Theatre Journal 38:2 May 1986, p.154 18 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973) Translated by Annette Lavers 19
Well I got a girl,/ All covered in snot." (79) Tanzi's lifelong/ match-long battle is to resist the negativity of this perception, and her mastery of wrestling suggests that appropriation of male tactics has been her means of doing so.
The wrestling holds illuminate social attitudes that demonstrate the appropriateness of gest to the materialist feminist position. 'Mum"s frustration with her daughter's 'inferiority' culminates in her administering of an 'Irish whip' and an 'ankle hold' to Tanzi. Tanzi also engages in necessary struggle with the school psychiatrist who gives her a 'stamping' and a 'nerve hold' as punishment for her refusal to conform to the behaviour of her socialised group. The wrestling holds implemented with Tanzi's encounters with oppressive male figures in her life have a separate gestic value denoting the underlying violence of male-female relations, and the often unacknowledged cultural tensions between the two roles of male and female. 'Dad' attempts to discipline Tanzi with a 'backhammer' for her adolescent rebellion, and then implements a 'crutch hold' when she announces she will pursue a career. The latter hold suggests the sexual domination of women by men with their 'superior' biological assertiveness. This gest also has connotations of a father reminding his daughter that her fate is determined by 'nature' and is unchangeable. But Tanzi overcomes her Dad's authority in Act Two with a 'flying tackle' and a 'drop kick', which signify the dispensibility of his advice. Tanzi's domineering husband replaces her father and Tanzi rejects his authority too. A gestic use of music underscores Tanzi's determination ("Ride of the Valkyrie") and 'Mum"s counsel ("Stand By Your Man") culminating in a series of wrestling throws, the last of which defeats Dean. It is Tanzi's secret hold 'The Venus Flytrap' that overthrows her husband, and through this gest, Luckham seems to suggest that there is some mysterious and powerful female force not registered by culture that may assist women with their ascent to their rightful cultural position.
In coming to terms with the message of the play, it seems that a Brechtian spectatorial attitude is required: "Do not worry unduly as to the motives of this struggle, but take part 20 in the human effort, judge the competitors' form dispassionately and concentrate your attention on the finish." 19 The play of course simplifies gender issues, its main purpose to find entertainment value in the spectacle of 'estranged' human relations, while making a point or two. The Referee concludes the match and the play: "And a big hand for the gallant loser and soon to be housewife, Mr Dean."(94) Tanzi's prize for winning is a reversal of roles which makes very clear who the 'winner' and 'loser' is in real life. It is at this point, the closure of the play, that the didacticism becomes apparent. Role reversal does not suggest changeability or the need for transformation of cultural limitations. It assumes binary oppositions are facts rather than constructs. However, the immediate, and often effective purpose of role reversal is to highlight or make visible that which was taken for granted. The achievement of Trafford Tanzi itself rests upon the Brechtian/Feminist cusp. The play toured working class pubs, the patrons of which were entertained by the form, and yet instructed by the ideology of the play.
Megan Terry is one of the few American feminist playwrights who has rejected Aristotelian/Stanislavskian approaches to dramatic form and displayed an influence by Brecht in their gravitation towards less naturalistic ways of approaching structure, style, and theatricality. Terry's affiliation with Joe Chaikin and the Open Theatre from 1963 exposed her to the working theories of Brecht whom Chaikin was "enamored of'.20 Although Terry claims to have been more interested in Strindberg, Ionesco and Sartre, her approach to theatre writing, especially the idea of 'transformations; seem to extend notions of Brechtian acting, form and the multiplicity of the theatrical sign: I started writing transformation plays because most plays are about one person - one person gets to show three or four aspects of the personality, while all the other people have supporting roles and usually are stereotypes. What ifyou could see all of the aspects of all ofthe people? ... What if there were plays with ten climaxes?21 Terry sought a departure from the Actors Studio hegemony of approach to stage character and performance and the way it limited approaches to form. Although her work seems to be placed a long way from Brecht, possibly due to her influence by group theatre and
19 Willett, John, Brecht on Theatre (London: Eyre Methuen, 1964), p.20 20 Savran, David, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), p.245 21 Ibid. 21
experimental acting techniques, her work bears out Brechtian principles of anti Aristotelianism, montage effects, episodic rather than dramatic structuring of form, and a use of social gest. Terry may not have aimed at populist audiences, her work being viewed by American 1960s alternative theatre audiences, but in a Brechtian way, sought 'popular' forms as a way of accessing instructive, experimental theatre form. Terry cites influences on her work: "movies, commercials, prints, advertising, jump cuts, dissolves, fades" which produce "a new kind of comedy by constantly changing the situation" and through which "the audience recognizes the reference or makes the leap. "22 Extensions of many Brechtian notions may be found here. Terry's 'transformations' suggest through their forms that 'nature' - human, social - is changeable. Her interest in multimedia gives her work a self-awareness and conveys a suspicion towards the seamless, falsely 'organic' structure of naturalistic works. She is also convinced that through discontinuous, interventionist theatrical form, the spectator is encouraged to supply the meaning to the text ( in Calm Down Mother there is an element of guessing, of filling in identity, context), to enter the text as observer, critic.
Calm Down Mother is a play which employs all of these techniques and applies them to the female subject, or rather, subjects. Because in this play, Terry's concern seems to be , the way in which women have been the "people" with limited representation in the theatre, supporting roles, usually of a steretypical nature. In Calm Down Mother, Terry gives three female performers the opportunity to demonstrate many aspects of 'woman' as she is found in culture, in nature, and in woman's own consciousness. The result is a highly engaging, performative, pluralist text, which seems advanced for the time i.t was written ( 1%5) in terms of what it demonstrates about the need for the theatricalisation of the female body and· a questioning of conventional staging and the way in which it frames the female performer/subject. The play requires the simple setting of an open stage and four chairs, the female actors supplying any other contextual information as part of the performance. It is their bodies and their voices which supply a suggested mise-en-scene, and in this way the women actually seem to control the flow of gests. They actually bring
22 Ibid., p.246 22
to mind Benjamin's requirement of gestus in which the actor "must be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type."23 The play's gests are less schematic than Benjamin's comment would suggest, and it is tempting to inscribe to them notions .of fluid, organic, non-linear, 'feminine' formal elements. The play examines the cultural construct of 'woman' but in a way which asserts the strength of whatever is underneath that construct. It is through the action of presenting, rather than the Stanislavskian process of becoming the character/entity that gives the female body presence in this play its strength.
The play begins with a taped speech that Terry instructs is to be "read with the attitude of an amused gentlewoman". 24 This demonstrates the presentational nature of the text; the characters are not characters, but attitudes towards particular subjects, aspects of subjects. The play refuses representation in this way, reflecting in its form an oscillation between the general and the specific, the anonymous and the named, theatricalising the gaps in between, ambiguity and difference, in a way that points to the multiplicity and potentialities of woman. We are presented with a woman named Margaret Fuller, an early nineteenth century American feminist, who announces to the audience that she feels assured of her place in the world because from the time she could speak her father addressed her "not as a plaything but as a living mind" (279). This speech raises questions of female in/visibility and the patriarchal construction of woman as social being. There is some irony in this presentation as it is Margaret Fuller's enlightened father who has granted her visibility/autonomy, and this is emphasised when the two other women take on the voice of the father, and repeat phrases of advice non/sensically until the end of the unit is signalled by a "freeze", a device Terry frequently employs in an interventionist way. The next episode presents us with a marked contrast -- a Jewish delicatessen in Brooklyn -- providing a change in socio-cultural values and setting. Two ageing Jewish sisters lament the loss of their mother's, and their own.,youth and beauty. The 'scene' offers what appears to be a naturalistic interlude (there are many local
23 Benjamin, Walter, Understanding Brecht (London: NLB, 1973), p.11 24 Terry, Megan, Calm Down Mother inP/aysByandAbout Women (New York: Vmtage, 1974), p.279 23 references to make the scene seem realistic) but also displays a 'feminisng' of gest. A young female customer enters and becomes involed in a group gesture of the stroking of hair which unites the women in an enactment of grieving/healing. Once again, the scene fairly rapidly ends with a non-naturalistic device. Woman Two "throws her feeling" to Woman One. It is both a gest -- a physicalisation of her verbal resentment at having to passively accept oppression, and a structural device to bring on the next theatrical node. An acting exercise becomes a theatricalisation of pent-up female rage, the thrown emotion culminating in a demonstration of shared anger: She doubles up her fist. . .. She brings her fist up and shows it to the audience. ... She paces back and forth slamming her fist into the other open palm. . .. She strokes the right side of her head. WOMEN TWO and THREE freeze .... Her hitting hand comes up across her chest, arcs under her throat and she opens her mouth as her hand and fingers splay open toward the audience. WOMEN TWO and THREE duplicate her gesture. There is a short freeze. (282) Such a gest has considerable theatrical impact precisely because the social context here is unspecified, but also because it offers a shock juxtaposition to the previous scene of gentleness and communion. The characters enacting the gestures of extreme anger are divorced, in mood and gesture, from characters in the preceeding fragments, and the element of stylisation and mirroring in these gestures increases the power of the 'scene'. It seems that the bodies of the performers dominate this episode, not the characters. The gest points to 'woman', the cultural signifier, and that 'she' should be capable of such an aggressive display is subversively shocking.
The form of the play continues to reflect the oscillation between 'woman' and women. The cultural signifier 'woman' appears to be re-presented through the more stylistic episodes through the use of mime, voice repetition, violent physical action, stylised walking/movement, chorus effects. Aspects of women are given some specificity -- New Yorkers in a flat, old women in a nursing home, call-girls in an apartment, women washing dishes in a tenement. There is also another category of re-presentation, when the female performers take on inanimate entities such as subway doors, plant life, a triangle formation, then return at its closure to a chorus speaking as "amused gentlewomen."(293) 24
The direct address the performers often use and Terry's directives on how certain actions are to be 'played' or how specific lines are to be delivered indicates that the text is to adopt certain attitudes. The play is a gestic tapestry presenting the identities and existences of 'woman' /women spanning age, race and class with the purpose being to free up characterisation and form, constantly challenging the spectator to identify and read each portrayal. A common thread runs through the collected gests - that of female biology. Each gest raises questions of gender incurring role or sexual function and ends with the issue of fertility, which mostly inscribes women with their cultural value:
I got everything I need right here in my belly.... Our bellies ... Our bodies ... Our funnies ... Our eggies ... Are enough ... ARE THEY? (293) The final gest of the play occurs when the three women tum their backs on the audience before asking this last question, the dialectic terminating with the need for the spectator to supply the answer.
Many critics have found that Caryl Churchill's plays illustrate a Brechtian influence and it is arguable that she is the feminist playwright who seems to have most consistently internalised and changed several of his ideas, especially alienation effects and gestus. Howe Kritzer feels that Brecht has provided a "clear reference point" for Churchill's plays, with a tendency to alter epic techniques with other forms after 1976. 25 Janelle Reinelt claims that Churchill was exposed to the work of Brecht while studying at Oxford, citing Caucasian Chalk Circle as the first play she encountered. 26 Churchill has admitted to a subconscious influence, and in the majority of her plays there is a detectable Brechtian element especially in the approach to form and what Reinelt terms "structural intervention". 27 Vinegar Tom, for example, employs alienation and historicisation to understand the witch as a cultural invention. The play is very obviously Brechtian with each scene arriving at a social gest, contributing to an epic rather than dramatic structure, and the overall form being fragmented by songs and ending with a
25 Howe Kritzer, Amerlia, The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre ofEmpowerment (London:Macmillan, 1991), p.3 26 Reinelt, Janelle, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1994), r.p-85-86; However, Reinelt does not say whether the play was text or performance. Ibid., p.87 25 music hall turn. This play demonstrates a formal compatibility of Brechtian form with feminist concerns, made smoother by Churchill's ideological position as socialist feminist. The material conditions of women as an oppressed class is the main focus of the play. But in spite of the affinities and the ease with which Churchill's plays may be perceived to have "an identifiable epic structure and syntax, clearly related to Brechtian dramaturgy" as Reinelt has noted28 , Churchill has been noted for her originality and her tendency to experiment with each new play. Cloud Nine is such a play that balances Brechtian techniques with further contemporary innovation and insight.
Cloud Nine employs historicisation in its structure by dividing the play into two distinct halves. Act One is set in Victorian colonial Africa and theatricalises the moral hypocrisy/confusion/decline of a British family. Act Two makes a time leap of a hundred years into 1970s Britain, preserving some of the characters from Act One, and their attempts to come to terms with their sexual identities/development. Reinelt finds that this is a formal strategy to position the spectator "to see contemporary experience at a distance, historically. "29 The two different dramatic styles heighten this effect, Act One borrowing from 19th century theatrical form such as melodrama, farce and music hall comedy, or forms which have parodied the 19th century, such as Pythonesque revues. Act Two is written in a more gritty, urban, realist way, taking into account economics, the contemporary urban landscape, and 'modem' concepts such as the 'generation gap' and the 'battle of the sexes.' It seems that Victorian gender oppression and political imperialism has been set up to chart the ideological progression and conditions of the present, finding more than a Victorian residue prevalent. As well as historicisation, Reinelt has identified in Cloud Nine a shift from 'pure' Brecht in order to arrive at "several imaginative solutions to the problem of character in feminist drama. "30 The problem Reinelt refers to is the theatrical representation of women through cultural and sexual stereotypes. The main way in which Churchill deals with this issue is through a version, or versions of Brechtian gestus. Stage images, tableaux, casting, action, acting,
28 Ibid., p.82 29 Ibid., p.87 30 Ibid., p.89 26 dialogue and music in Cloud Nine may all be said to be gestic. The ways in which these gests are specifically feminist will be examined.
The mise-en-scene of Cloud Nine, from the very first stage image it presents to us, has been constructed in a consciously gestic way. Clive's family is gathered round the Union Jack and sings the anthem "Come gather, sons of England".31 This gest structures a relationship between the individual and the Victorian society, with its patriotism and fixed roles mandatory. But this social pointer is not the extent of the gest. Churchill savages Victorian semblances in a way that privileges sexual politics over materialist politics. This she does with the use of associated gests. It is immediately obvious when the spectator is confronted with this grouping, that the gender of the characters has been scrambled through casting. Clive's wife Betty is played by a man, Clive's son Edward is played by a woman, his daughter Victoria is a doll/dummy, and his black servant Joshua is played by a white -- it may be male or female. The song is gestic because it refers to "sons" only, and Britain's rampant imperialism, and the dialogue is also gestic in the way Clive dutifully and proudly presents each member of his family as what he wants them to be. He is blind to what the spectator sees -- that they are nothing like he seems to imagine. The rhyming couplets of the opening speech emphasise Clive's inflexible vision, and the combination of these effects produces a multiple gestic overload which is rich in comic, satiric and subversive value.
Because it manifests itself visually, the cross-gender casting is perhaps the most powerful implementation of gest that Churchill uses, its effects resounding also in the dialogue, action, and acting style of the play. Brecht was aware of the power of cross-gender casting as a form of alienation, having admired its effects in Chinese theatre. When an actress plays a man, for example, the audience is made to realise that a lot of details which we usually think of as general human characteristics are typically masculine. When it's a matter of sex, therefore, actors must show something of what an actress would bring to the interpretation of a man, and actresses something of what an actor would bring to that of a woman. 32
31 Churchill, Caryl, Plays:One (London: Methuen, 1985), p.251 32 Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues (London: Eyre Methuen, 1971 ), pp. 76-77 27
In The Messingkauf Dialogues, the character of the Actress attests that the same effect may be achieved when grown-ups play children. Churchill employs all of the effects in ways that point to the cultural constructions of 'masculine' and 'feminine', 'child' and 'adult'. With these reversals in play, Reinelt has observed that the fabric of dramatic action is transformed: Simple actions become powerful social gests in Brecht' s sense of the term. The lifting of a Victorian skirt can "look" natural when a woman does it, but is strongly alienated when a man performs it as a learned behaviour.33
This gender gest/alienation is immediately apparent in the dialogue between Clive and Betty who is told that she is "delicate and sensitive" (253), challenged by the contrary image offered by the male actor playing Betty in Act One. A male actor also plays the girl child Cathy in Act Two, which highlights the ridiculousness of the enforced moulding of gender identity. However, a female actor plays Betty in Act Two, which is meant to suggest the degree of self-evolution achieved by Betty over the years of ideological progression for some women. But this form of gestus also articulates one of the concerns of contemporary feminist theory which Elin Diamond outlines as the need that the topos of sexual difference be understood "not as a synonym for gender oppositions but as a possible reference to differences within sexuality."34 Churchill's use of gestic cross-casting does more than highlight the social constructions of gender difference through a strategy of reversal. It also disturbs the function of the signifier within the linguistic order, and it is this that destabilises the world of Clive and gives Act One its chaotic momentum. The characters are therefore not seen to display a difference between one another, but express a difference within themselves, challenging the notion of fixed identity and the unified self. Churchill's characters suggest a multitude of possible variants. There is a tension between the characters and the metaphysics of their world, and this determines the shape of the plot in Act One.
33 Reinelt, p.89 34 Diamond, Elin, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism" IDR 32: 1 Spring 1988, p.85 28
What divides the identities of the characters is, as Reinelt has explicated, the strain between them as expressive, experiential selves, on one hand, and the conditioning of the dominant culture on the other. 35 It is the gap between the two that fuels the comic friction in the plot which is based on a playing out of frustrated desires, these desires being expressive of the oppressed selves. Clive desires Mrs Saunders, Edward desires Harry, Harry desires anybody, Ellen desires Betty, Betty desires Harry, and Joshua desires revenge and freedom. These thwarted desires provide gestic episodes in which the gap between the self and the social role is exposed. The notion of sexual difference within, as opposed to gender difference without, receives theatricalisation through the plot complications provided by several of the characters' aberrant sexual preferences. When Clive learns of Harry's and Ellen's suppressed homosexuality, he forces a marriage between them. This attempt to bury the Not/But is also overturned with a gest which brings the Act to a conclusion. Clive makes his wedding speech: Harry, my friend. So brave and strong and supple. Ellen, from neath her veil so shyly peeking. I wish you joy. A toast -- the happy couple. Dangers are past. Our enemies are killed. -- Put your arm round her, Harry, have a kiss - All murmuring of discontent is stilled. Long may you live in peace and joy and bliss. (288) But while Clive is speaking Joshua raises his gun to shoot Clive, and Edward, feigning not to notice, covers his ears. A blackout ends the scene. It is this scene of orchestrated gest that demonstrates that the characters are not in conflict with each other but in conflict with themselves. Harry and Ellen are so bound by gender or class roles that they are incapable of action against Clive's patriarchal restorative measures. It is the real outsider, Joshua, who gestically ends the oppression (for the moment), with the co operation of Edward. Perhaps coming from outside Clive's society enables him to do this, although his stage whiteness would, again, work to erase difference between the other characters and generate notions of a shared oppression. Through gest, Churchill portrays racial oppression as concomitant with sexual oppression, a view unusual perhaps
35 Op.Cit. 29 for a materialist, and Churchill explains that part of her interest in the topic of the play was to explore Genet' s notion of the affinity between colonial and sexual oppression. 36 Genet is on a different ideological and aesthetic plane to Brecht, his plays demonstrating an interest in interiorised sexual repression as an effect of cultural oppression, incurring representations of gender Brecht never really achieved In this way Churchill articulates feminist concerns of the female body as site of political struggle and the extent to which this struggle has been internalised. Gest may signify alternative representations of gender construction, as opposed to simply making them visible, and it is this function that is important to feminist drama. Churchill has not simply appropriated the Brechtian gest. Her examination of gender in Cloud Nine can not simply be viewed as materialist feminist. This is best illustrated with the gest that ends the play. Act Two had introduced another Betty, played by a female actor, and one who is coming to terms with her her husband's limitations, her suppressed sexuality and the evolving sexualities of her son and daughter. The final stage image of Cloud Nine is that of the old Betty from Act One, played by a male, and the new Betty, embracing. It is a rich gest/gesture which demonstrates many things at once, itself an example of the potential plurality of the theatrical sign. The embrace of the two Bettys is at once a juxtaposition and a union, a measuring of change and a reconciliation, a demonstration of male/female difference and sameness. It makes visible and concretises for one moment the notion of alteration, the possibility of change by juxtaposing the old with the new, and frames for the audience in one image the ideological journey charted by the form of the play. The seams between gender, eras and ideologies are theatricalised by one deft manipulation and alteration of the theatrical sign. This is where Reinelt's perception of Churchill's 'appropriation' of Brecht as being simply a socialist feminist reworking needs extension. Reinelt claims that "many feminist writers have moved away from Brecht in order to write more directly about women's inner psychological and subjective lives", whereas Churchill's approach has been more "classically ... Brechtian". 37 I would suggets that there is always a tension between Churchill's investigation of women's inner lives through the use of Brechtian
36 Churchill, notes to Cloud Nine, Plays:One, p.245 37 Reinelt, p.108 30 techniques (evident especially in Fen and Top Girls) and what is illuminated about the society to which these women belong. In this way Churchill exceeds a 'classic' interpretation of Brecht, which is achieved through the application of gest to the feminist paradigm. Churchill's gest does not only point to material conditions; it is not only a social gest. It points to the disjuncture between body and text, between self and conditions, and thereby suggests a space for the feminist subject position.
In conclusion, it may be seen that although the three plays discussed above all differ from each other in subject, structure and approach to form, what they all have in common is a transformation of Brecht' s materialist social gest into a feminist sexual gest. In Trafford Tanzi, a female wrestler inhabits the 'male domain' of a 'boxing ring' with her discordant, although able, body-presence. She masters the 'language' of wrestling in order to reverse the conditions which oppress her. The violent 'holds' of the wrestling match are appropriated by her, but her 'masterstroke' is the mysterious 'Venus Flytrap' hold, a superior, feminised version. In Calm Down Mother, the performer appears to produce the role, gest being interpreted as transformable in itself and applicable to female difference, without and within. In Cloud Nine, gest is applied to sexual difference as gender difference, but also sexual preference, allowing a theatrical site for its representation outside of materialist and mimetic frames. Terry's and Churchill's plays exceed Luckham, s ( and Brecht' s) through the ways in which they present inner and outer conditions governing gender experience. Brecht's social gest may have provided the foundations for a subversive feminist praxis. 31
CHAPTER TWO
illSTORICISM, illSTRIONICS AND HERSTORY: RECONSTRUCTING THE FEMALE illSTORICAL SUBJECT.
"(W)e must drop our habit of taking the different social structures of past periods, then stripping them of everything that makes them different; so that they all look more or less like our own, which then acquires from this process a certain air of having been there all along ... Instead we must leave them their distinguishing marks and keep their impermanence always before our eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too." Bertolt Brecht1
"Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history- by her own movement." Helene Cixous2
This chapter will examine Brecht's idea of historicisation and how it may be useful to notions of feminist historical revisionism and the inscription of women from history, factual or mythic, onto the theatrical space. Janelle Reinelt has highlighted the value of Brecht' s notion of historicisation for the feminist dramatist/critic:
Historicizing gender relations is a powerful way to change the field itself because it explicitly challenges the notion oftranshistorical male and female modes of being and recovers a marginalized alternative narrative of women as active subjects determining the concrete course of human events.3
Brecht's idea of historicisation was twofold: as an extension of alienation it advocated that everyday, contemporary existence be scrutinised in a manner usually reserved for the historian, that events be viewed as historical, these events thereby striking the spectator as odd and paving the way for a critical attitude (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is an
1 Willett, John (ed.), Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 190 2 Cixous, Helene, "The Laugh of the Medusa" in Feminist Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1986), p.225 Reinelt, Janelle, After Brecht: British Epic lheater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p.83 32 example of this sort). In another way, historicisation could be applied to the representation of historical events themselves by the theatrical text ( for example, The Life of Galileo). The historicising theatre would reveal the man-made forces that contributed to making a certain period m time compliant to the cultural/social/economic/political forces that characterised it. The historicising theatre would be markedly different from the classic realist history play, often termed by contemporary theatre as a 'period piece,' which functions as a branch of illusionist theatre ( allowing the audience a trip back in time) and subscribing to notions of inevitability of things passing away. In his notes to The Life of Galileo, Brecht instructs that the "stage decor must not be such that the public believes itself to be in a room in mediaeval Italy" but always remain aware that it is in a theatre. 4 The bourgeois historical play has traditionally centred itself on a male protagonist, his identity indistinguishable from the narrative mapping of events, which take place against a backdrop of mysterious Powers, which in reality are created and maintained by men "and will in due course be altered by them."5 . The characterisation of females by the historical play, as opposed to the historicised play, assigns them marginal, facilitatory or decorative roles, and this is a result of the narrative form of the play which is typically Oedipal, and may even consign that which is female to the category of mysterious powers mentioned by Brecht and with which the hero is embattled. For the purpose of de/re-constructing such a text through Brecht' s principle of historicisation, notions of histrionics are useful for the positing of female subjectivity that may thwart the male agency that has previously characterised the historical text. Histrionic, which I will take to connote performative strategies that are self-conscious, 'stagey', finds parallel with Brecht's formulations on acting,and a long tradition of female histrionic acting has done much to rescue female performers from the margins of the performative text and provide examples for female theatrical identity. The irrationality associated with the female and the histrionic poses problems for the rationality of Brechtian historicisation, which is sometimes queried by the female historicised theatre text. It would seem that critical distance is a difficult stance for
4 Brecht, Bertolt, The Life of Galileo (London: Methuen, 1963 ), p .13 5 Brecht on Theatre, p.190 33 women to take when their association with history has been, at best, marginalisation, a form of distance more akin to exile than critical detachment. Therefore histrionics, rather than rationalism or asceticism, becomes a necessary amendment to the historicised text. This chapter will deal with the form of historicisation that looks at the past with the critical gaze of the present and yet consequently also subjects the present to scrutiny, the historical/historicised narrative acting as a parable, or histrionic 'acting out' of anxieties about the present. It is this way that the feminist play texts below fulfil the double requirement of illuminating female historical identity, no matter how obscure or mythologised, while dealing with contemporary ways of seeing gender issues.
The complicity between history and narrativity has been observed by Hayden White,6 who argues that narrative is essential to history as it is the apparatus through which knowing is translated into telling. 7 History is merely a tale told, and since narrative includes less than it excludes, history becomes a convention-bound closed narrative not unlike the classic realist text. This notion inverted would explain why historical plays have relied heavily on the conventions of classic realism - they reflect the dominant notion of history as a tale told. History itself may be seen to be part of the illusionist narrative apparatus as the objective of histories should be that the events appear to 'tell themselves'. In this way, history has masqueraded as the 'true story', which does not acknowledge that the writing of history takes a literary form to fulfil our desire that 'real' events do not seem chaotic but display the narrative logic of a story. But history is 'his story', a narrative told by a male narrator and full of male subjects, necessitating the discovery of• her story'. This counterbalance suggests that the narrativisation of history is inescapable, and perhaps it is. The conflation of the mythic/historic text by scribes such as Herodotus has attributed to history Oedipal narrrative patterns, and White, surveying historical theorists, finds that history and narrative are inextricably interwoven: at worst "Where there is no narrative .. . there is no history" and at best "Historical narration
6 White, Hayden, "The Value ofNarrativity in the Representation of Reality" in Critical Inquiry 7, Autumn, 1980 71bid., p.5 34 without analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is incomplete."8 White's concern is that narrative be a tool of history that illuminates rather than obscure. And yet given that narrative is itself, in its impulses, Oedipal, of what consolation to the feminist is White's concern, since narrative conventions predispose the narrator to a pre-inscribed way of telling. To the feminist, verisimilitude becomes less of an issue in historical writing than conventions of representation. Mimetic history may still marginalise women as much as mythic history. If 'his story' reflects a desire for the real, then 'her story' may challenge the rules of narrativity by privileging female desire. White posits that history lends itself to narrative representation because it plays out a conflict between desire, on one side, and law, on the other. 9
This notion of historical narrativity as having already implicit in it a dynamic of desire opposed to dominant ideology is useful to feminist historians also intent on staging the conflict between desire and law. This is to suggest that the narrative dynamic of history is not totally unsuitable to the feminist author of herstory. However, notions of history and narrative tend to distill this conflict into a contest for authority, the supplying of a new moral principle and reconstitution of the power structure, this outcome coinciding with narrative closure and discursive resolution. There is a difficulty in writing about female subjects, rescuing them from the margins of patriarchal history, and yet avoiding this form. White has found that the "demand for closure in the historical story is a demand ... for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama." 10 If the morality play of history attempts to fill in the gaps of human doubt, error and confusion, a Brechtian historical narrative would attempt to highlight these gaps, show up the moral encoding as a desire of the narrator's. In the works discussed below, the degree to which the difficulties of the historical text are surmounted by the feminist playwright will be examined. It is through the Brechtian gaps that the female playwright will be able to, as Cixous suggests, put herself into the text and consequently into history. But whether or not the feminist
8 Ibid., p. l 0 9 Ibid., p.16 10 Ibid., p.24 35 playwright is able to work within the rational objectivity Brecht ascribed to the process of historicisation will be questioned, since the apparent objectivity of historical narratives is a construction, if not an illusion. The two plays discussed below take as their subjects female figures and their relationship with the particular historical context in which they existed. The discussion will examine the ways in which each playwright gives historical representation to their female subject, ways in which narrative structure is used to assist the construction of the female subject and the value of narrativity in truthful representation, and any tension that may be produced between the staging of •herstory' and the deconstruction of history.
Feminist historian Linda Gordon observed of second wave feminists a desire to criticise and deconstruct power hierarchies based on their incompatibilities with the essential qualities of the female, but is herself critical of this stance as it perpetuates the notion of female experience as powerless rather than as simply one of rejecting power: «women's oppression is assumed to make us all angels, without character flaws."ll Pams Gems' Queen Christina takes as its subject a real historical figure, Queen Christina of Sweden, who was born into a position of power and struggled to reconcile her gender with the role of political figurehead and military leader. But Gems' play is not a historical play or a documentary. Prefacing the play is a ..Chronology of the Life of the Real Queen Christina" which Gems inserts as if to distinguish her construction of Christina from that of the historically recorded queen. In Gems' notes to the play she stresses that some characters are composites and that she has altered events, and it is clear that she has employed narrative strategies in order to metaphorically invoke the issue of women, gender and power. Gems employs the narrative strategies of the fable to offer a parallel for the women's movement's struggle for liberation, and the price paid for politicisation: «the dilemma of the real CHRISTINA, reared and educated as a man for the Swedish throne, and then asked to marry and breed for the succession, is perhaps not irrelevent today."12 In this way, Gems takes up what Reinelt has found to be the most difficult
11 Gordon, Linda, "What's New in Women's History", in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) p.20 12 Gems, Pam, Notes to Queen Christina (London: St Luke's Press, 1982) 36 modality of Brecht' s historicisation: "the positioning of the spectator to see contemporary experience at a distance, historically."13 In Queen Christina this is not achieved directly throughjuxtaposition of time frames as is found, for example, in Churchill's Top Girls or Cloud Nine, but it is rather inferred: the parallel must be made by the consciousness of the spectator. Christina's dilemma invokes White's observation of the subject of the historical record -- the conflict between the desire of the historical protagonist and the law. Gems en-genders this conflict to reveal the constructedness of gender roles and how they conform to matters of state, the figure of Christina offering Gems a rare example of an individual expected to perform the duties associated with both genders without deconstructing either.
Gems releases the play from the historical/mimetic narrative framework by requesting that the staging of the play be "not naturalistic" and by fragmenting the structure in various ways. Each of the thirteen scenes is titled, giving them a gestic inscription rather than a dramatic subtext. The effect is similar to that achieved in The Life of Galileo, where historical scene titles announcing the principle action were employed to lend the groupings of figures the quality of historical paintings. 14 There are marked shifts in time between each scene, defeating the notion that the play can be read as a chronological history. Gems seems to emphasise the gaps and the lack of transition between narrative events as if to convey contradictions that the divided self of Christina undergoes. Each scene functions as a kind of tableau that stages the dialectical dilemma of Christina's conflict between desire and the law of Sweden. The play is not so much 'victim history' as an approximation ofBrecht's The Good Person ofSzechwan with its demonstration of the split in the female subject, the result of the social apparatus. From the first scene of the play, Gems demonstrates the political and cultural apparatus that grooms and oppresses Christina. The Queen delivers yet another stillborn child and appears to be dying herself, unable to produce another. The King makes an immediate decision: to train his only daughter for the throne. The scene operates gestically with action
13 Reinelt, Janelle, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p.87 14 Brecht, Bertolt, Notes to The Life of Galileo (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 13 37 counterpointing dialogue and making visible the cultural factors that divide Christina. The King's order to "Make a man of her" is accompanied by the action of putting on his gloves and resuming his duties; Christina the child, now left alone, hugs her doll as a farewell gesture to her gender fixedness (2-3 ). The next scene involves a time leap to an attempt to marry off the adult Christina so that she may produce a male heir and resolve the gender complications of the Swedish throne. But Christina's male attire and rough, 'masculine' manners offend her male suitor and the conflict is demonstrated gestically: Christina, in drag, takes her would-be husband's arm and "stands beside him in wifely stance"(6). The inappropriateness of the union becomes immediately apparent, gender visible as a construct in a way that recalls the first tableau of Cloud Nine, and yet Christina is not a man playing a woman or vice versa as a theatrical device -- she is a woman standing in for a man at the demands of her socio-cultural context. Later in the scene when she attempts to enact her masculine duties as a military leader resolving the country's conflict she doubles up with menstrual cramps. Such stage images chosen by Gems make visible the pragmatic codification of gender identity and its lack of flexibility. Christina is shown to be at odds with aspects of her biology, which is not catered to by the male structure within which she is asked to function. Such gest advances the feminist debate surrounding gender roles beyond the notion of role reversal as a viable solution to women's oppression, a theme later taken up by Churchill in Top Girls.
Christina's sexual relationship with her maid in waiting, Ebba, uderscores the notion of her slippage between genders and the resultant feelings of erasure. For Christina, Ebba ensures contact with her lost feminine self: "by God, when I'm with you I forget, you become my mirror, I see your face, your eyes."(10) Christina's very existence becomes a puzzle which she attempts to historicise in various ways. The thought of procreating as a female repels her and yet she is disturbed by her role as general and duties such as killing. She is equally uncomfortable as host to visiting dignitaries, and Descartes' view of human existence offers her no solutions to her own displacement: DESCARTES But with choice there is possibility. For change. And the concept of change 42
"(h)e is exactly like everybody; everybody is like him. Differences don't matter; it's all one to him. In all men he can see only Man, the singular of the plural word 'people'."20 Contrary to this notion, plays which historicise their subjects provoke a dialectic, and in Queen Christina, the subject provides a dialectical foil for the moral/historical problem, highlighting difference rather than universality. Christina exposes the falsity of the Everyman notion as a gender construction because Everywoman as a collective notion is not figured by the symbolic order, therefore the universal male perspective must be seen as a false consensus, concealing the historical with the moral. Rationalism operates in Queen Christina as a narrative strategy that fixes the sequence of incidents so as to clarify the social order; Gems looks at the Chronology of the 'real' Queen Christina with detachment and observes the social forces at work. But the female historical subject is historicised primarily in this text through the visibility of her difference, the illuminations occurring at gestic nodal points throughout the play where Christina's differences set her apart from the various moral, ethical and cultural expectations of her surroundings. In this way, like Brecht, Gems defeats the expectations of the Aristotelian narrative which "takes no account . .. of the objective contradictions in any process" and locates and resolves any contradictions in the subjectivity of the hero. 21 The spectator is not asked to empathise with Christina but to observe her with detachment, as a spectacle, her character 'flaws' enhanced into oddness, so that difference is scrutinised and notions of sameness questioned. The treatment of Christina's character echoes Brecht's approach to Galileo, which he advised should not aim at establishing the sympathetic identification of the audience with him; rather, the audience should be helped to achieve a more considering, critical and appraising attitude. He should be presented as a phenomenon, rather like Richard ill, whereby the audience's emotional acceptance is gained through the vitality of this alien manifestation. 22
The hysterical spectacle Christina's disintegration provides raises questions debated by contemporary feminism, from the split of the female self as •other', limited in her roles, to the nature of femininity itself. The need for feminism to clarify female/feminine/feminist is echoed in the crisis displayed in Queen Christina, and
20 The Messingkauf Dialogues, p.48 21 Ibid., p.103 22 Brecht, The Life of Galileo, p.14 38
implies the very world within our grasp. It is we who decide. CHRISTINA ... You may be right. .. : And how do I survive? (she stands and begins to shake uncontrollably) How? ... how? DESCARTES Perhaps, in the end, we must learn to love those things we CAN have. (18) Descartes' "we" is taken by Christina to exclude her. The philosophical model, a discourse which essentially seeks to place the male individual in the scheme of things, fails to inform Christina of her displacement or how she may go forward to the next moment in her life. Christina concludes bitterly that men may philosophise: "(A) man .. a philosopher. Runs down a pink road while the world gets the wheat in. What about me, the worms in my belly?"(l9) Christina's desire, her procreative impulses, at first niggling, then a force that eats away at her very essence, are what the worms refer to and the rest of the play resounds with this image of decay. Gender difference and transgression seem to stifle dialecticism, and the self-involved pursuit of utopia (the "pink road"), when exercised by Christina, accentuates her problems and does not put paid to the gnawing in her belly or the uncontrollable shaking which develops into the disintegration of the self Descartes' faith in choice and the possibilities for change it signifies must strike Christina as ironic, as she has been denied choice from the beginning of her existence. She is burdened by duty and even the traditional aspects of her birth gender may not be exercised by her.
It must be asked to what extent the form of the play and the episodes in which Christina searches for options to escape her duty as patriarchal monarch explore the viability of choice for women within the patriarchy. Christina abdicates and also rejects the offer to rule Poland. She travels and studies, but both the picaresque and academic roles fail to satisfy her. She visits a group of French bluestockings who invite her to join their cause, believing Christina to be representative of their form of feminism, but their hatred of men repulses her as she has mostly identified with the male gender. Gems suggests here that separatist feminism simplifies gender issues by favouring one sex over the other, and yet she is also critical of bourgeois/liberal feminism which envisages that women may achieve equality with men by infiltrating the structures that have historically excluded 39 them. Christina becomes a member of the Catholic Church, in spite of its repressive attitudes towards women, but the attraction of its doctrines for Christina lies perhaps in the fixedness of its view of gender roles which eludes her own situation. But Christina pursues a licentious, rather than pious, existence in Italy. It seems that she is engaging in an histrionic acting out of possible choices, but this gives way to hysteria, the manifestation of the untenability of female roles. These episodes, which are tenuously linked, without temporal flow or character 'development,' echo the fragmentation of Christina's identity, and the play culminates with Christina as she "becomes hysterica1"(78) over the issue of procreation. She craves the smell of babies and the wifely duties of housekeeping, and Gems demonstrates that whatever is denied becomes desired. Christina's final epiphany in the play is her obsession with the gender role she, like society, viewed as lesser: "I won't fight. I won't fight, I tell you, I won't fight! If you want arms and legs to blow up, make them yourself. I want my children, do you hear .. I want my children."(77-78) It is at this conclusion to the play that Gems' divergence from her own socialist/materialist standpoint becomes clear. Gems no longer holds on to an historical explanation of women's oppression in terms of the domination of the individual by socio-economic forces, but begins to consider, in Alison Caddick's words, "the conceptual lead of radical feminists on questions to do with the body". 15
Queen Christina, with its use of gestic stage images, its episodic structure which works in terms of leaps rather than linear development, its view of character as a social process rather than as a fixed point, displays in its approach to form the influence of Brechtian narratives. In The Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht's Dramaturg asks the Philosopher how a Marxist would go about presenting a play set in the past and receives this answer:
He'd treat it as a historical case, with causes from that period and effects in that period .... He'd treat the moral problem as a historical one too. He would observe how a particular moral system worked and what function it served in a particular social order, and would fix the sequence of incidents so as to clarify it. 16
15 Caddick, Alison, "Feminism and the Body'', Arena, 14, 1986, p.61 16 The Messingkauf Dialogues, p.37 40
Gems gives the spectator a picture of Christina's world but it is not a painstaking classic realist recreation of seventeenth century Europe. It is a montage of the dominating doctrines of the era, as Christina encounters them, and in this way Christina's character does not grow. The spectator is not intensely involved in her experience, but brought to recognise that this historical figure is the point of inquiry into the construction of socio sexual roles. Christina's consciousness does not determine her existence and it is this realisation that draws her into conflict with Descartes, who although a rationalist who anticipated materialist thought, postulated that mobility of matter could solve the problems of existence. The narrative arrangement of the text demonstrates that for Christina, mobility problematises notions of gender fixedness. Descartes' philosophy is based upon the assumption that the individual is male and Christina finds that it does not apply to her: "I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows . . the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored. "(75) Again, Gems seems to arrive at the notion that Marxist theory and its limitations in considerations of female subjectivity must be superseded by a new theory of the body, the territory which may be seen to map the struggle between the individual and social life in general.
Historical accounts portray Christina as a wise and enlightened ruler while conforming to her role as monarch, but capricious and extravagant for abdicating in favour of a career of dissipation. The issue of choice is not considered. The 1933 Hollywood film which takes Queen Christina as its subject dilutes the issue of choice to one of the pursuit of romantic sensuality without guilt. Gems' is the first narrative which 'reclaims' the figure of Christina "through feminist and class-conscious angles of vision", which Susan Carlson, in her discussion of Gems' Camille, finds to be the process of writing about a female subject concealed by the screens of history. 17 But the historical/popular frame that constructs Christina as a sensualist in conflict with the laws of her time, provides for Gems a subject with which to enact a redistribution of narrative emphasis in order to flesh out the truth of one woman's struggle in the past and how it may be brought to bear
17 Carlson, Susan, "Revisionary Endings: Pam Gems' s Aunt Mary and Camille" in Making a Spectacle (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989), (ed.}, Hart, Lynda, p.91 41 on the struggle of the present. Carlson notes that the figure of Camille had been lost "inside the series of ornate, literary, musical, and filmic frames her various male admirers have erected" but that Gems reclaims this figure in a narrative that has been engineered in a revisionist way. 18 This observation may be seen to parallel the Christina text, with the lush, historical mise-en-scene of the Hollywood Greta Garbo version of Christina's story being pared back by Gems and 'engineered' so that the the narrative structure, axis of relationships and portrayal of the female subject are considerably altered. Romanticism is replaced by historical feminism.
Elin Diamond has observed that in dealing with the female subject, the "romanticism of identity" needs deconstruction, in line with Kristeva's questioning of the relationship between women and textual production. 19 A materialist angle of vision may also be problematic in de/reconstructing the female historical subject because it may not demonstrate the psychoanalytic perspective, developed by Lacan, that the notion of identity obscures the lack inscribed by the symbolic order on the female psyche. It is to this notion that Christina alludes when she announces that 'woman' is a philosophy yet to be written. In this way Gems suggests that epistemologies of rationalism are limited in their figuring of the female subject. The narrative 'dissipation' present in the form of the play and the character of Christina precludes Gems' text from approaching the asceticism of the Brechtian historicised text and rationalism/distanciation are fractured by hysteria/histrionics as narrative strategies to figure this notion of refusing the romanticism of identity. Christina becomes less the historical subject than the hysterical split (female) self engaged in gender phases of Lacanian theory.
Brecht' s historicisation began to move towards notions of the split self through the narrative stance of dialectics. Brecht noted that conventional historical plays focusing on one protagonist, in Julius Caesar, King Lear, Richard III, Othello, Timon ofAthens, etc, forced the spectator to identify solely with the historical individual and conclude that
18 lbid., pp.108-112 19 Diamond, Elin, "Refusing the Romanticism ofldentity", Theatre Journal, October 1985, p.273 43 following Toril Moi's definitions of femaleness as a matter of biology, femininity as a set of culturally defined characteristics, and feminism as a political position, 23 Christina's 'journey' may be read as an attempt to map this uncharted territory.
Simone Benmussa's The Singular Life ofAlbert Nobbs takes as its subject the figure of a male waiter in a 19th century Dublin hotel who was discovered at the time of his death to be a woman. The story was apparently recorded in a newspaper of the time and fictionalised in George Moore's 1922 Celibate Lives. Benmussa's play offers a strong contrast to Gems' play in the way in which it focuses on a figure who is obscure and deceived his era by performing the gender which had the higher market value at the time. Like Gems, Benmussa uses historicisation as a narrative strategy to investigate gender construction in the historical/contemporary framework and arrives at a plurality of the female subject which contrasts strongly with representations of male historical figures. Elin Diamond finds that "(i)t is not suprising that feminist artists should tum to narrative as a means of incorporating and critiquing the problem of female identity and history", 24 and discusses Benmussa's play in terms of the difficulties inherent in "represent(ing) history without using the illusionistic apparatus of the stage to tell just another story in which female rather than male identity is valorized. "25 Diamond is understandably cautious of female centred narratives that 'romanticise' the position of textual dominance by the protagonist and advocates rather a radical representation of history as a narrative with its own strategies of illusionism in need of deconstruction. Brecht, also, was concerned that "the petty bourgeois conception of history ( and the proletariat's too, so long as it has no other), is a romantic one" and asserted that "(p)lain everyday logic must never let itself be overawed once it goes strolling among the centuries; whatever applies to small situations must be made to apply to big ones too. "26 It seems to me that Benmussa's use of narrative strategies to critically frame the narrative apparatus of
23 Moi, Toril, "Feminist, Female, Feminine" in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, (Macmillan, 1989) p.123 24 Diamond, Elin, "Refusing the Romanticism ofldentity", p.275 25 Ibid. 26 Brecht, Bertolt, Notes to The Resistible Rise ofArturo Ui in Bertoli Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose, Volume Six Part One, (London: Methuen, 1981 ), pp.108-109 44 history. and consequently the framing systems with which we see ourselves. is Brechtian in her insistence on shaping the theatrical narrative to intervene in the dramatic present. And while this influence may not be stated by Benmussa it is present in the play text and in her preface to the play which gives directives on the intentions of the narrative.
To deal with the preface as a separate document sheds light on the narrative strategies of The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, which display interventionist techniques which may be seen as Brechtian. Benmussa's first words settle on the use of costumes, which are the aspect of historical plays• mise-en-scene that signal the play deals with the past. Benmussa instructs that the costumes in the play have a role. not as "decoration. or historical reconstitution." but "as an intrinsic part of the text. of the gestures. and even of the scenic writing; they are a necessary point of departure for the expression of the other themes. All the characters wear professional clothes ... their clothes represent the force of work in society. " 27 This directive seems reminiscent of Brecht' s in The Life of Galileo, where he writes that "(s )ocial distinctions must be emphasised" by the costumes but that they must also "be individualised and show signs of having been worn. " 28 In this way Benmussa grounds the mise-en-scene of Albert Nobbs in materialism, preventing the costume from romanticising the body of the performer and instead connecting it with the play' s gestus or social signification system and the very materiality of the narrative itself Albert's guise as a man must be seen not as transvestism or cross-dressing but as an economic choice. Benmussa's intention is also to signal the dialectic from the beginning of the play, with Albert's slippage between genders the means by which socio-cultural conditions are exposed. The term 'perhapser' which defines Albert's ambiguity registers the dialectic; she is both uncomplicated in her centrality as head waiter dressed in black and white, and marginal, a woman "imprisoned in this costume, which is at the same time armour, yoke and defence"29 , a temporary pretension which must be maintained to preserve economic visibility. In this way. like in Queen Christina, the spectator beholds the spectacle of the historical narrative erasing the female body, as Albert's social
27 Benmussa, Simone, Notes to The Singular Life ofAlbert Nobbs in Benmussa Directs: Playscript 91, p.22 28 Brecht, Bertolt, The Life ofGalileo, p.13 29 Ibid. 45 context alienates her from her own biology, but it is costume, which has gestic import in its signification of gender, that Benmussa privileges as the crucial narrative element. Albert's disguise is not part of the theatrical tradition of travesty/transvestism, a temporary device which facilitates a plot change that assists closure through unmasking. Albert's disguise is not masquerade but erasure, and this erasure is the cost paid by the female in search of economic visibility. Benmussa stresses that Albert's disguise does not generate a narrative concerned with romantic complications fostered by an inversion of sexual roles, but demonstrates a woman's search for happiness: "For her, the image of happiness lies in the bourgeoisie in which she has served; this is the only model she has."30 If Albert's death, imprisoned in her disguise, seems inevitable, which is arguable, it is because she conceals her body, like the money she earns and cannot bring herself to spend. This is the final erasure, since her disguise has made her model of happiness no more relevant to her than it was when she was a woman.
In terms of other narrative strategies, Benmussa found the process of adaptation useful in developing the dialecticism and the plurality of the text. The newspaper article and then the short story, both belonging to different periods to her own, suggested issues through their own narrative contexts and strategies. Benmussa was distanced from the accounts and a meta-narrative emerged as she transposed Albert's story as told by others, to Albert's story as lived, on stage. The effect was both an intimacy with and distance from her subject, and Benmussa found that stage images took form that created a new kind of writing that surpassed Albert's story as 'told'. Benmussa observed that this had certain effects on notions of narrativity: The continual play between the distance implied by the narration, and on the other hand the identification with the characters demanded by the theatre, obliges this ubiquity to be both there, and elsewhere, and at the same time creates a conflict which on the one hand shatters the habitual structures of the theatre, and on the other hand shatters the traditional structures of the narrative form. In this way a new rhythm is created which is the opposite of the illustrative theatre, or of simple distancing. 31
30 Ibid., p.23 31 Ibid., p.24 46
Benrnussa is conscious of the fact that the process she developed while working on this play may have begun with a Brechtian view of the historicised play, but transgressed this rational narrative form as she became more deeply involved with the female subject. In portraying the character of Nobbs, Benmussa made a decision to depart from the earlier accounts of her physiognymy, which described Nobbs as old and ugly, as if her disguise had been an inevitable retreat from the feminine role which would have been impossible for her to attain. Benmussa explains: "I preferred to get together a young cast; to embody, that is, the interior of the characters, to embody the force of the transgression; it wasn't of the slightest importance whether Nobbs was beautiful or ugly."32 In the portrayal of Nobbs by the actor, Benrnussa decided upon a departure from Stanislavskian modes of acting, but without arriving at a fully Brechtian kind of performing: I preferred not to approach (perfonnance) in the usual way, where, starting from their appearance, actors express the inner life of characters according to the theatre's psychological laws, I chose the opposite approach: starting from their interior life, to make their exterior body plausible. 33
Benrnussa, like Gems, attempts to strike a balance between materialist thought with its notion of the individual as a social being, and radical feminist thought, with its notion of the female individual as a body, conditioned to be compliant and invisible, representing the primary instance of all domination under the patriarchy.
Throughout the text of Albert Nobbs, Benmussa's appropriation/expropriation of Brechtian devices informs the narrative in its process of arriving at some investigation of the female historical subject and its bearing on current debates surrounding representation. Elin Diamond has found that, in many ways, Benrnussa's objective is to foreground the narrative and expose the audience's own narrativity. 34 A kind of Brechtian interventionism is at work in Benrnussa's approach to form which utilises time leaps forward and back, flashbacks, simultaneous scenes and speeches, disembodied voices, stylised movements, characters speaking with their backs to each other and popular songs. The play is divided into scenes which are titled in the Brechtian manner.
32 Ibid., pp.25-26 33 Ibid.,p.26 34 Diamond, Elin, "Refusing the Romanticism of Identity", p.281 47
These titles do not reveal the entire contents of the scenic action but they do, however, function to crystallise each episode, so that there is narrative continuity without inevitability, each scene having its own focus, rather than an anticipation of closure. But the first section of the play takes the form of a prologue and it seems that Benmussa has worked to frame the narrative quite intricately, as if to announce the way in which society frames the female subject, and tells her story. The play begins with a conversation between two men -- Alec and George Moore, represented by voices only. It seems that they regularly tell stories to one another about social oddities, and 'today' the story is that of Albert Nobbs. The audience at first hears these voices in the dark and then the stage takes life, presenting the images as they speak them, or presenting the audience with the pictures the listener would imagine. This framing device plays on the idea that women subjects are captured by the patriarchal frame of history/narrativity. Including the author of the Albert Nobbs story as narrator in the play, rather than dispensing with him and directly accessing the 'her-story,' is a way of making this comment. But Benmussa does fracture the frame again to allow the dialectic of the narrative emerge and that is to have George claim that this story, unlike the others he has told, is true. This has two effects. One is to release the identity of Albert from mere fiction and validate her representation; the other is to subject Moore's authorial voice to scrutiny and read it as representative of the patriarchy itself. Elin Diamond has investigated this aspect of Benmussa's narrative choice:
Benmussa nominates her narrator "Moore" and circulates his voice through the episodic events which constitute the life of Albert Nobbs. Moore, aggressively omniscient, is every where: he opens and closes Albert's story, speaks for Albert in the first scene with Mrs Baker, articulates Albert's unconscious in the dream sequence, speaks contemptuously of Albert's appearance, just as though the Albert we see were absent from her own story, a mere diegetic description. 35
Benmussa frames Moore framing Albert, and in this way the spectator perceives Moore as part of the materialist apparatus oppressing Albert. Moore pretends that he is the producer of the story; his voice, "which penetrates her mind, and which utters the narrative that contains her becomes identified with the shackles of the gender code. "36
35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 48
The framing also works, consequently, as a distancing device, enabling the audience to observe the narrativity of history as it is produced. Brecht's Philosopher argued, "What's bad isn't that one should fail to see every link of the chain, but that one should miss the chain itself''37 But already, Moore's voice of the patriarchal discourse is challenged by the alternative voice in the play - that produced by the women who work in the Dublin Hotel, from its proprietor, to Albert, through to the maidservants. As Moore speaks, two chambermaids reveal the stage mise-en-scene, producing the first narrative image, and this done by drawing back the curtains "just as they would draw bedroom curtains in the morning. "(77) It is the mimetic action of women working that comprises a great deal of the stage action, and the speed and efficiency with which it is done may be seen to challenge the notion of the female operated hotel as simply a microcosm of the outside world. What the chambermaids reveal is given magical qualities by Benmussa, who suggests in her stage directions that the interior of the hotel be glimpsed in "half light", the revolving doors dominating the mise-en-scene as if to symbolise metamorphosis or cyclic change, and the worlds of the kitchen or hotel foyer revealed by the swinging doors which seem to "open of their own accord" to afford the spectators impressions of "ghostly visitors or maids, fairies or voices"(77). Already, Morrison's Hotel seems a place of strange possibility, a combination of physical toil and bodily illusion.
But the hotel scene is really a backcloth upon which has been painted in detail and with perspective the hotel interior, employees and customers. Benmussa instructs that the people in this scene should be "taken from English Paintings of the Victorian era"38 and the effect is to render the immediate historical context as a background while conveying the historical ambience. This was a device used by Brecht in The Life of Galileo, as well as the grouping of figures found in historical paintings of the era. The intention is not simply to aestheticise the past but to draw back from the past and regard it with critical distance in the way that at a spectator might gaze at a painting and perceive its conventions and tricks ( it is no accident that Benmussa describes the style of painting on
37 Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p.49 38 Benmussa, Simone, The Singular Life ofAlbert Nobbs, p. 78 49 the backcloth as trompe l 'oeil). The elaborately painted backdrop prevents the audience from 'going back in time' but instead foregrounds the events of the play, demonstrating the material conditions that control the characters as they are imprinted on the body of the performer through costume, action, performance. The effect is to foreground the narrative apparatus itself and make it distinct from history as past reality. History as narrative becomes apparent as does the audience's desire for closure, since a story told raises expectations of an ending. Benmussa directs our attention first to the live character of Albert, framed by the two dimensional historical mise-en-scene, and she describes her placement as if she must come unstuck from the backdrop before the spectators' eyes: "In the middle of the staircase, half way up, sitting on a chair but only just visible, a real character, a waiter, his napkin over his shoulder, as if he were an integral part of the centre of this backcloth, one of its painted characters."39 Albert's 'fate' is to be "just visible", in spite of her disguise (or perhaps because of it), and she only becomes animated when Moore's voice picks up the narration to introduce the character of Albert. But Benmussa has made the point: that it is an illusion that Albert seems to fit in with her social context. Moore reveals that he is telling the story "for the pleasure of looking back and nothing else"(79), and it is this assumption that Benmussa questions since it implies that narrativity is satisfying in its confirmation of the inevitable. Although Moore's voice instructs us as to what we see ( what he remembers) it is as if Benmussa is exhuming the figure of Albert, which walks away from Moore's narration just as it steps out from the backcloth to distinguish itself from its context. It must be this process of distinguishing the female subject from the authority of the patriarchal discourse of history/narrativity that contains the feminist dialectic of the play.
In the episode titled "The Flea", Albert takes over the narration and tells Hubert Page 'his' story of "how it all came about". Albert cannot frame the story traditionally with beginning, middle and end, since she does not know the beginning (her origins are unknown to her as she was an illegitimate birth and never knew her parents or to what class they belonged), the middle is the present, and the end is also unknown to her. Albert
39 lbid. 50 tells how she went to work as a servant for a barrister, and disappointed in her station and with her unrequited love for her master, she disguises herself in her master's old clothes and goes to work as a waiter. She tells of how the trade and the earnings convinced her to maintain the disguise but that life as a 'perhapser', neither man nor woman, made her lonely. She had hoped that "regrets ... passed away with the petticoats"(87), and Hubert suggests she marry a girl to consolidate her social and gender position. Albert thinks Hubert is joking but at this point Hubert reveals that 'he' is also a woman disguised as a man and has successfully married. With this new complication the narrative re-introduces Moore's voice and Albert's confusion is reflected in the split of voices: Moore's, her inner voice, the demanding voices of hotel employees and guests and her own attempt to narrate her existence through 'reverie'. Benmussa underscores this with the introduction of Albert's "feminine double", a housemaid who mirrors her actions as if to revive the ghost of her gender which Albert finally decides to reclaim through marriage to a woman. In the episode titled "The Meeting with Helen Dawes", whom Albert considers might be a suitable wife, Benmussa uses the voices of Moore and Alec to present the meeting and the figures of Helen and Albert 'freeze' as they are spoken of. The relationship is already framed as dubious and Moore intones "But Albert was always unlucky."(101) Helen seems already in the possession of Joe, also represented only as a voice, but controlling in manner, dissuading Helen from courtship with Albert whom he likens to a "cut fowl", lessening his market value as a male. Albert, even in disguise, can not seem to escape the framing systems of his social context and this is reflected in the constantly shifting frames of the narrative, the narrative voice changing according to who has higher social visibility. In many scenes, Benmussa describes Albert as barely visible, disappearing, motionless or silent. The multiple voices, the doubling, the degrees of visibility work to produce, as Diamond has found, a ·"collision between the "here" of theatrical representation and the elsewhere of narration (which) produces a play of signifiers that makes it impossible for the audience to consume a unified image of feminine identity.',4° This observation could be extended to suggest that the very
40 Diamond, p.281 51 materiality of Benmussa's narrative itself in some way works against the material relations of Albert's day, positing different readings of 'woman'.
The very impossibility of Albert's situation suggests what is possible. Her doubling with Hubert Page, a successful 'perhapser,' suggests this in itself, but it is as if Albert is the textual nexus for an intersecting of 19th century economic/sexual roles and contemporary views of progressive sexual politics. In terms of strategies of narrative and representation, Albert's body and her performance of gender offers a site for the textual negotiation of female subjectivity. Albert's character can not be looked at simply as a distancing device as such used by Caryl Churchill in Cloud Nine where the playing of gender roles is reversed in the casting of the performer to highlight the constructedness of gender roles. Albert has created herself. Her 'transvestism' enacts the historical drama of conflict between individual, desire and law. It also criticises what Alison Caddick has termed "the androgyny tendency" in feminism. 41 Caddick defines this tendency as one which preserves the rigid inscription of sexual difference in the form of binary opposition which also maintains other dualistic cultural notions. What Caddick is most critical of regarding this tendency is that "women are encouraged to 'learn the male role' or to unquestioningly take up technological solutions to the 'problem' of their bodies.',42 This is the process displayed both in Albert Nobbs and in Queen Christina, where material relations are seen to dominate and construct female identity but attempts to transgress this identity are also proved untenable. In both plays what is achieved is a display of narrative that challenges notions of unchangeability of such structures. In Albert Nobbs, Albert's death does not occur precisely in tandem with the play's closure. Although the audience does not witness Albert's death but learns of it through the narration of Moore (the patriarchy has entombed Albert), the closure of the play actually occurs with the return of Hubert Page, the successful perhapser. Upon Hubert's return Albert is visually present in the mise en scene: "dead, ... in her usual place, on the chair half-way up the staircase. As if she were pinned on to the backcloth, with her napkin over her shoulder,
41 Caddick, Alison, "Feminism and the Body'', p.64 42 Ibid. 52 sitting facing the audience"(l 17). Benmussa's stage direction signifies that Albert has become caught in the backcloth of history/narrativity, while the live Hubert, intended by Benmussa to be the double of Albert, carries on the transgression and feigns amazement when she is informed of Albert's 'secret': "How ever did she manage to play such a part for so long?"( 118). For Albert was performing, while Hubert attained a degree of reality with her self-same wife. The final image the play gives us is of Albert frozen in work "with the shoes to be cleaned on one knee and the napkin over her shoulder" and Hubert "dreaming", sitting on Albert's bed and pondering on her fate now that her wife is dead and she is alone as Albert was. It seems that the play returns to the question of how a woman exists adrift from her cultural signifier. Perhaps Benmussa, like Caddick, would argue for an embodied subjectivity that would see "the female's closer cultural association with the body as a means to revolutionizing both our conceptions and the actual constitution of the self. ,,43 The alternative to Hubert and Albert, the chambermaids, appear, drawing the curtains to a close just as they opened them at the beginning of the play. The narrative has been cyclic: it ends as it begins, with women working as underpaid servants, as if to re-inscribe the narrative and gender strategies of the 'perhapser'.
The divided character of Albert, and social transvestism, bring to mind Brecht' s The Good Person ofSzechwan and this play bears some similarities to Benmussa's play. Iris Smith finds that Brecht's play is "constructed on the close interrelationship of economics and the ideology of romantic love: only the former, money, makes possible the latter. "44 In The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs it is demonstrated that even money cannot fulfill expectations of romance, especially if the subject and object are woman. It is clear that where Brecht's premise concerns economics, Benmussa's focuses on subjectivity and releases the feminist gest of the sexually split character implicit in Brecht's Shen Teh/Shui Ta character. Benmussa continues the Brechtian project in her portrayal of Albert, for as Smith has found, "In epic theater, as in a postmodem context, there is no
43 Caddick, p.64 44 Smith, Iris, "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theatre", Theatre Journal, 43:4, December 1991, p.497 53
"whole" person. To be useful to Brecht or to feminist theory, character must display itself (at least in part) as a collection of signs. ,,4s In Brecht's theatre it is the body as signifier, but it is the body as text that feminist theatre seeks to explore.
In Queen Christina and in Albert Nobbs, we see Gems and Benmussa challenge White's notion of history as mere narration. There is far more, of course, to the writing of female characters within a historical context than merely a momentary seizing of the tools of story-telling and narrative making. In Gems' play we see a woman who did not put herself into history through her own actions, but who was put there against her will, of necessity to fulfil the law. Her attempts to fulfil her desires are represented as having failed. In Benmussa's play Albert's status after placing him/herself into history is that of the 'perhapser,' a victim of androgyny and the inflexibility of the law which forces fruitless deception or invisibility. In this way, Cixous' demands for woman to put herself into the text, into the world, and into history, are not represented as a goal achieved. These plays rather challenge White's notion and bear out Christine Delphy's observation that "history is more than a narration - it is a political stake .... (it) is ... a place of struggle in itself.'.,,u, Delphy's notion of history as a place in which an ideological battle/drama is enacted does not counter Brecht's. However, Delphy, like Cixous, views history through a feminist lens, inscribing it spatially with the female subject in a way that Brecht does not. History is also paradigmatic of the theatre, a like place of struggle, with the battle being fought over signification, narration and representation. Woman's "own movement," as Cixous terms it, is difficult when there are few narrative models of female agency. The narrative rule (like the cultural rule) is to punish woman for her agency ( even Brecht preserves the narrative lesson of Saint Joan in his Saint Joan of the Stockyards with the defeat of the the female agent). Female volition has few narrative precedents, but narrative itself is the site of this struggle, which in Queen Christina is histrionic and in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs is elegaic. The singularity, the oddness of both women in their times, however, provides an interesting parallel for the
45 Ibid., p.500 46 Delphy, Christine, "Women's Liberation in France: The Tenth Year," Feminist Issues, 1:2 Wmter 1981, pp.103-112 54- female spectator today who most likely fmds nothing odd at all about Christina or Albert, and it is through this historicising of subjectivity that some degree of volition must be measured. 55
CHAPTER THREE
MIMESIS, MYTH, AND TRU1H: DECONSTRUCTING THE OEDIPAL NARRATIVE
"The aim must be neither to copy the pattern exactly nor to break away from it at once." Bertolt Brecht1
"The "truth" is not going to set us free - unless perhaps we understand that the truth is always structured like a fiction and that it arises from misrecognition. The trick is to premeditate the misrecognitions, to interpret before, not after, the event." LyndaHart2
Having examined the challenges posed to conventional views of narrative and narrative structures by the elements of gest and historicisation, it is necessary to examine other ways in which the Brechtian text has rejected the mimetic narrative, the desirability of such a strategy for the feminist text, and the methods used by the Brechtian/Feminist playwright to challenge the conventions of classic realism. Many feminists share with Brecht a view of realism as a problematic mode of narrative representation. Hart's equation of mimesis with illusion is not unlike Brecht's criticism of Naturalism as a theatrical style, which he felt replicated 'reality' as if it were an unalterable fact governed by natural laws, and instructive simply through observation. Brecht envisaged a new realism which would be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of conventions. Realist means: laying bare society's causal network/ showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators/ writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society/ ... 3
1 Willett, John, ed. Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1974), p.214 2 Hart, Lynda. ed. Introduction Acting Out (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), p.10 3 Op. Cit., p.109 56
If 'bourgeois' naturalism relies upon the mechanics of illusion to create the impression of naturalness, then Brecht suggests that a consciousness of the illusionist apparatus and perhaps a self-conscious and selective employment of its devices, but with an interventionist restructuring of the narrative body, helps to fulfill the requirements of 'new realism.' Brecht's partial breaking away from the old pattern, or critical distance from its modes of representation, is both useful and problematic for feminist theorists and practitioners. Lynda Hart explains the desire for a total rejection of mimesis: "Cutting ourselves off from "reality" can be a way to escape our inundation in a masculine imaginary that passes as the symbolic order.',4 What Catherine Belsey has described as the classic realist text (characterised by story, plot, disclosure, dissolution and closure as key narrative elements) presents an obstacle to the materialist feminist and needs deconstruction because such a text is "among the ideological apparatuses which contribute to the process of reproducing the relations ofproduction. " 5
Like Laura Mulvey, Hart finds a connection between story-making and sadism: Getting raped, going crazy, and. of course, dying -- this is what women appear to do most often in realistic theater. The recurrence of these actions os often enough thematic, but is also indicates the space of representation for the female subject position. Within the psycho semiotics of theatrical realism, the "death-space," space of absence, negativity, unrepresent ability, is where femininity most often takes a place. Realsim like/as ideology, needs subjects, and subjects are constituted through divisions and losses that are always already gendered. 6
It is arguable that on the Brechtian stage, such a mimetic "death-space" for women still prevails. Sarah Bryant-Bertail offers that the women characters traveling over the various stages of the Epic Theatre can also be read as part of the even longer tradition of the picaresque, the literary genre of the exiled and powerless ... political and economic exiles doomed to travel through the changing historical tableaux of capitalist society. 7
Brecht' s theatre may aim at the dialectical, but in terms of the gestic function of his women characters, they are often didactic in their lack of dimension. Bryant-Bertail finds
4 Hart, p.2 s Belsey, Catherine, "Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text" Feminist Criticism and Social Change. Eds. Newton & Rosenfelt. (London: Methuen, 1985), p.53 6 Op. Cit., p.5 7 Bryant-Bertail, Sarah, "Women, Space, Ideology: Mutter Courage" The Brecht Yearbook Vol. I 2, 1983. Eds. Fuegi, Bahr, Willett., p.40 57 that all of Brecht' s portraits of women fall neatly into one of four categories: "the abandoned sex object, the prostitute, the capitalist entrepreneur, and the martyr mother. ,,g Mother Courage seems repetitive in her inscription of the theatrical space. Her autonomy and agency are delusory; she is adrift in the patriarchal landscape of the battlefield, and her attempt at a masculine role (the mercenary) is punished with the loss of her children. Bryant-Bertail notes that her mimetic action "consists almost entirely of repetitive and incessant physical work involving household objects", the path she follows having been "mapped out long ago by successive ideologies of bourgeois capitalist societies."9 Brecht's own use of mimetic action tends to re-inscribe rather than criticise, and demonstrates no way of releasing the female subject (even in The Mother, Vlassova's outlet is through the political interests of her son). Like the writings of Marx, Brecht's plays seem to speak of and on behalf of women; as if the female voice needs to be heard but must be interpreted by a visible, male authority.
In his notes to Mother Courage, Brecht writes of realistic theatre and illusion, of the prediliction of naturalistic theatre to use "aids to naturalness", borrowing from Goethe's phrase. 10 Brecht argues against Goethe and in favour of the •poor' Eliz.abethan stage which, lacking in illusionistic devices, forced the actors to narrate, to improvise their characters, to show events rather than enact them -- the result of which was to depend on their imaginations for the success of these "highly interesting fairy tales."11 Brecht, more enamoured of the Globe's Shakespeare than of the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century, was not opposed to the idea of interesting fairytales or other narratives with mythic elements that had the power to instruct by virtue of rising above, yet being able to comment upon, the everyday. Brecht attempted to reject mimetic signification through the adoption of elements of the mythic text, especially in his /abets and 'learning plays'. Brecht was probably aware of the potential for the mythic text to instruct, its elements more flexibly manipulated without needing to conform to the mimetic model. But
8 lbid. 9 Ibid., pp.58-59 ' 0 Willett & Manheim, eds. Bertoli Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose Vol. 5 Part 2, p.99 11 Ibid. 58
Brecht's female characters never really attain mythic status. In myth, plot often consists of non-mimetic personages testing the laws of the narrative's world. What is demonstrated may correspond to the world of the reader/spectator. But the danger of the myth narrative is its inherent didacticism, its fixed signifiers and laws. The desire of the female character is frequently defeated This is seen in Mother Courage with the character of Kattrin, who seems poised for mythic inscription, given a brief, but futile, chance at heroism. But Kattrin is deformed by dumbness and slain when drumming out a warning. Her role echoes DeLauretis' questioning of the "riddle of femininity" as it is posed by the mythic/Oedipal text12 : "Why did the Sphinx kill herself ... (with) disgust? Why did Medusa not wake up to her own slaying, or did she perhaps have to be alseep?"13 Why is Kattrin rendered silent by the text and killed off for attempting to 'speak'? Classical Greek tragedy, with its gods and monsters, erring mortals, and divine punishment (the dynamic of the text has the weight of myth), has provided a tightly constructed narrative centred on the male protagonist from which the classic realist text has taken its lead. Mimetic and mythic texts have in common the fact that they are 'hero narratives', reducing the female subject, as DeLauretis has found, to "figures or markers of positions .. . through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning."14 Aristotle's Poetics, unabashed in its privileging of mythic/tragedy as social commentary and instruction, has provided the foundations for the laws of drama aspiring to 'classic' status. The myth/parable of Plato's Cave is itself a lesson in the apparatus of mimesis. This is to say that notions of mimesis are informed by myth, or the awareness of the mythic potential of the mimetic signifier. If this seems a contradiction in terms it must be remembered that myth has been widely used by culture as a short-cut to 'truth.' Roland Barthes isolates the cultural function of myth: In passing from history to nature, myth ... abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back on what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without depth, ... it establishes
12 * The Oedipal text may here be defined as one which obeys Sophoclean/Aristotelian narrative structure, preserving the agency of the male protagonist often to the detriment of the female subject; one in which the patriarchal laws of society are reflected. 13 DeLaurretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 110-111 14 Ibid., p.109 59
a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves. 15
Barthes' opinion of myth would seem to counter any usefulness Brecht finds in mythic narratives. What Brecht is obviously attracted to is the fact that whoever makes the myths controls the truth. Like many playwrights, there is a point at which Brecht abandons the dialectic to deliver the opinion.
To return to Hart's notion that truth is structured fictively (and may even be manufactured), it must be asked how mythic narrative structures can be harnessed by the feminist playwright in order to demonstrate feminist 'truths'. Of most interest to the feminist theorist is possibly the way in which mythic narratives have constructed gender positions. Mulvey finds that in myth, "power relations (are) concealed behind the phoney balance between masculine and feminine" 16 which is the role of woman as 'other', reflecting the centrality of the male. In the three play s discussed it will be seen that each playwright has employed the 'master's tools' to dismantle the master's 'truth' and expose the feminist truth beneath. The plays deal with truth as misrecognition, and attempt to premeditate (and meditate upon) the flaws in the mythic fabric. To do so they have taken Euripides' The Bacchae and its notion of violent women, to dismantle the social myth that women are passive by nature and incapable of violent acts. It will be asked whether feminist playwrights can intervene in the pattern of myth (without breaking away from it entirely) to assume a subject position and access truthful representation.
Maureen Duffy has described Rites as "a version of The Bacchae set in a ladies' public lavatory." 17 This setting raises notions of female privacy and territory, but although men are absent from the narrative proper, they have a role in the framing of the play. Rites begins with a procession of workmen constructing the lavatory in full view of the audience, after performance time has begun. They are dressed uniformly in white, bow
15 Barthes, quotes by Laura Mulvey "Changes: Thought on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience" Visual and Other Pleasures, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p.166 16 lbid., p.161 17 Duffy, Maureen, Notes to Rites in Plays By Women Vo/.2 (London: Methuen, 1983), p.26 61 mise-en-scene is dominated by a steel flap concealing an incinerator which is referred to by the characters as a "great furnace", a "wild beast" leading "straight down to hell" (19). It is actually a sanitation unit but appears to have symbolic significance, anticipating the hidden female rage that explodes later in the play. Such signification suggests that female violence is as unspeakable a subject as female hygeine. The form of the play seems to be determined by the flow of characters and dialogue that inscribe the prefabricated stage space with their own socially prefabricated gender identities. The three office girls act as a chorus rather than as three separate, fully-rounded characters. They often speak in unison or echo and finish each others' dialogue. The young mother with her male child (represented by a doll) speaks in repetitive maternal phrases as if to suggest the role of motherhood is reductive. The women inspect the naked toddler, in protest of a 'male's' presence in their space. The 'boy' is placed on a chair and it is Ada who removes his trousers, these actions being performed with ritual slowness. The women vilify the 'boy' because of his gender, and it is at this point that the 'surrealistic' aspect of the text is at its strongest, it seeming most furthest removed from everyday reality. The theatrical tension has been building and escalates with the discovery of a near-suicide in one of the cubicles. The sight of blood triggers hatred in the women towards males (the girl had attempted to kill herself because of a man named Desmond) and they begin to dance ominously. They threaten a bundled up old woman who emerges from a cubicle, then attack another figure who emerges "suited and coated, short-haired and masculine"(23). The women think that it is a peeping tom, and it is only when they have rendered the figure tattered and broken that they realised they have killed a woman. It is important to note that it is the sight of a woman's blood that unleashes the real ritual of the play- the exorcism of feminine weakness and the admission of a repressed potential for violence. There are many connotations produced by the staging of the blood in the women's toilets. Symbolically, there is a link with the image of the sanitation unit, but what is also suggested are the cultural notions that surround menstruation, the attitudes and myths which deal with (un)cleanliness, fertility, and which have led to the oppresion of women. 20 The cultural associations surrounding menstruation suggest the patriarchal
20 Barbara G. Walker finds that in pagan, matriarchal times, the majority of cultures perceived female blood 60 ceremoniously to each other, their silence affecting a complicity between them. Their actions constitute the construction of a gendered site, the implication being that female identity is constructed by men. This prologue seems to comment on the en-genderedness of space, recalling the spatial characteristics of the mythic text in which the female constitutes the space of the male's movement. 18 Once constructed, the space is inhabited by female characters only, and their use of the lavatory as a safe haven, a separatist space to which they can retreat from the beatings of the (patriarchal) world outside and repair their self-images before re-emerging, is undermined by the audience's knowledge of the space's 'constructedness' and the triviality of the 'rites' which the females perform. Barthes has suggested that the everyday is infused with myths, and that the consensus of reality is in itself a myth. He observed that contemporary popular culture confounded myth with message, illustrated by modem information systems. 19 Duffy conflates the mythic with the everyday without resorting to uniformly mimetic narrative structures. She is wary of representation itself, and the action of the play is self-conscious in attitude. In Duffy's lavatory, the performative strategies of females, and the desires they signify, are staged. Ada's ritual of preparing her hair and make-up in front of the mirror every morning is raised above the familiar sight of a woman applying make-up, to one of a woman registering the male gaze. It becomes a ritual of self-construction controlled by cultural expectations. Ada's dialogue reveals that she is a part-time prostitute, and in this way her ritual is gestic: it denotes that her social and economic position depends upon attracting the gaze of the male. Ada is also the lavatory attendant, and she uses this role to assume a position of authority over the other females who enter the space. In spite of the physical absence of males, power and status are present in the text and foreshadow the violence which erupts.
The entrances and exits made by an assortment of females who would be found using such a convenience, and their apparently casual dialogue, lend the play a seeming naturalism which is, however, challenged by other textual components. The theatrical
18 DeLauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p.43 19 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies 62 perceptions of female functions, and the way they conflate women's "rites" with women's "rights".
In this last section of the play, Duffy reverses the gender of the Bacchae myth, complicating the dialectic of the play by positing a woman in disguise supposedly spying on other women, instead of a man. Duffy's choice makes for a stronger comment on the roles of women. The reactions of the characters to what they have done differ. Ada claims abruptly "she shouldn't have done it", but whether "it" refers to spying on women or dressing in drag to escape objectification, is not clear. One of the office girls concludes that "(s)he couldn't have been happy" to which Norma responds "Why not, she was alive"(24 ). The women have been angry at men, but have killed a woman. They have been deprived of the outlet enjoyed by the bacchic women of Euripides' text. This is perhaps best explained by the end of Duffy's play. After disposing of the body in the incinerator, the action returns circularly to the trivial rituals that began the play. It must be asked whether the women could return to their previous roles with such conviction if they had killed a real man. They have killed one of their own kind, which they have disposed of in their own territory. Nothing has been unbalanced in the cultural symbolic order. Ada's return to the mirror reunites her with social conformity. Duffy suggests that the repressive aspects of the female role are often those which women themselves protect from deconstruction. Catherine Belsey has commented upon the split female self and how it may be figured by the text: Women as a group in our society are both produced and inhibited by contradictory discourses. Very broadly, we participate both in the liberal-humanist discourses of freedom, self-determin ation and rationality and at the same time in the specifically feminine discourse offered by society of submission, relative inadequacy and irrational intuition. The attempt to locate a single and coherent subject-position within these contradictory discourses and in consequence to find a non-contradictory pattern of behaviour, can create intolerable pressures.2 1
It is these pressures which are figured by Duffy, and the cultural constructions behind them, that provide the differences between this text and that by Euripides. In the world of as bodily function and symbol, positive and essential to creation myths and the social infrastructure, whereas later patriarchal culture was to reverse these perceptions entirely. The Woman's F.ncyclopedia ofMyths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), pp.635-644 21 Belsey, Catherine, "Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text'', p.50 63
Duffy' s play there is no benevolent god to release the women from their oppression. The Pentheus figure remains absent from the text and therefore unpunishable. The women are left with their unsatisfied hunger that will burn ever-lastingly like the furnace.
Caryl Churchill's A Mouthful of Birds also has its narrative origins in Euripides' play. Churchill had long expressed an interest in women and violence and she mentioned the idea to director Les Waters who was reading The Bacchae at the time and saw a fruitful parallel. 22 For Churchill, ( collaborating with anthropologist David Lan and choreographer Ian Spink), the idea could be seen to continue her exploration of gender relations, which almost consistently over-rides purely materialist themes. The mythic framework of the play seems to fulfill several purposes: to find the revelatory in the everyday, a truthfulness that rises above the mimetic; to portray instances of revelation or violence with gravity; to access depths of meaning and being beneath the facade of gender construction. These are all achieved by the fragmented, ritualistic, non-mimetic nature of the text.
The structure of A Mouthful ofBirds is loose and fragmented, taking the notion that myth may take the form of a story told by a person or by a group of people. The play is shaped around stories told by seven people about their 'undefended' days. These are days when they are to release themselves from all social pressure, conditioning, submit to possession and desire, whether pleasurable or violent. Already the framework present in Duffy' s play is here absent. Churchill had admired the work of Pina Bausch with its orchestration of the separate elements of theatre - movement, text, light and music23 and applies similar techniques to this play which does not privilege written text above other performative strategies. Elizabeth Wright has found that Bausch's work is a good example of the post-modem Brecht -- a revitalisation and extension of Brecht's
22 Cousin, Geraldine, Interview with Churchill New Theatre Quarterly, 4:13 February 1988, pp.7-8 23 Howe Kritzer, Amelia, The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre ofEmpowerment (London: Macmillan, 1991), p.173 64
theories24 . Churchill's influence by Bausch's work can be seen in the way that the text recuperates emotion as a violent, or loving, force emanating from the body of the performer, and the body performs gender, the sensual, not the historical, is the focus. It seems that in this way Churchill follows Bausch's appropriation/interpretation of Brecht. Churchill uses possession as a way of rising above the everyday; it is both a motif and an effective theatrical device, a kind of supernatural form of distanciation. The text is inscribed upon, and produced by, the bodies of the performers so that like Bausch's work, A Mouthful of Birds becomes an "authorless, actorless, directorless theatre, in no way subordinated to a literary text. "25 Helene Keyssar has detected a Brechtian influence in Churchill's play, but also the desire to move beyond this influence: It is as if Churchill and Lan had combined ... Brecht's notion of the alienation effect, in which the actor stands outside the character he or she is presenting, with a decidedly non-Brechtian loss of control of the relation between the actor and the character. 26
The treatment of character in the play, and the way character is performed, may be seen as Brechtian - the actors seem to quote their characters rather than represent them. But Keyssar' s reference to the non-Brechtian element in the text refers to the use of possession and the exploitation of its affinities with performance art, which necessitate a blending of theories aesthetics and self quite different from Brechtian theory. And yet it is not the assimlation of actor and character found in naturalistic theatre either. Churchill's interest in performance art, which she exercised in Midday Sun two years before, echoes Artaud more than Brecht.
Possession becomes a device for character to transgress gender identity and role playing inscribed by the everyday. Characters undergo reversals and transformations, subverting their fixed roles. There is no rational explanation for this possession. Housewife Lena is possessed by insistent voices and murders her children. Nineteenth century French Hermaphrodite Hercule Barbin talks to Derek, who is preoccupied with living up to his
24 Wright, Elizabeth, Postmodem Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London/New York: Routledge, 1989), ff,·117-118 Ibid., p.121 26 Keyssar, Helene, "Doing Dangerous History: Caryl Churchill and A Mouthful of Birds' Caryl Churchill: A Casebook Ed. PhyllisR. Randall(NewYork: Garland, 1988), pp.141-142 65
'masculine' role in society. Derek listens to his/her story, repeating these words and experiences. Doreen spends a night out of doors after attacking and attempting to kill her husband. Yvonne is an accupuncturist/therapist to others, but is herself an alcoholic. A group of women read from newspaper reports accounts of women who have committed violent crimes. Paul throws in his comopetitive job and develops and obsession with a pig, saving it from slaughter. The group of women develop their telekinetic powers as a way of exorcising their own violence. Derek has a sex change operation and becomes a woman. Yvonne becomes a butcher as a way of coping with her fascination for bloodshed. The episodes are linked by the Dionysian figure of Dan, whose dancing administers pleasure to those who watch, but who 'die' from enjoyment. All of these episodes demonstrate that women suffer from repressed violence, and men, from repressed passiveness. For the women, repressed violence feels like choking on "a mouthful of birds". The notion of voyeurism is not the focus of the play -- inverted displays of gender charactersistics are. The killing of Pentheus becomes a ritual "fruit ballet" in which the tearing of flesh is transformed into the tearing and eating of fruit.
The undefended day, like the festivities of the bacchanal, has served to illuminate the constructedness of the everyday.Churchill finds that contemporary myths mask outdated and politically regressive attitudes towards gender:
Women have traditionally been seen as more peaceful than men, and that view has been politicised, particularly by women protesting against nuclear weapons. There is a danger of polarising men and women into what becomes again the traditional view that men are naturally more violent and have no reason to change. It seems important to recognise women's capacity for violence and men's for peacefulness.27
It is interesting to note that the scene in which Churchill's gender analysis is strongest is that between Derek and Hercule Barbin, surely an instance of Brechtian historicisation. Barbin balances the Pentheus figure. He/she is a figure denied any cultural space, but one which can expose the mimetic seam and the fiction of the unified self Possession becomes a starting point for a re-possession of the female - not just the qualities ascribed to her by culture - but all of her potentialities.
27 Cousin, Geraldine, Interview with Churchill, p.4 66
Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love ofthe Nightingale challenges the sacred notion that myth itself is unalterable. Although this play is often Brechtian, it also preserves the strong narrative elements of Sophoclean/Aristotelian drama, commenting, as it does so, upon the effects of the narrative on the female subject within it. Wertenbaker re-works myth from the inside as well as the outside, shifting and altering its narrative elements and creating a dialectic without a great deal of montage, songs, or any other immediately recognisable Brechtian elements. She achieves a simultaneous distanciation from, and closeness to, the workings of the mythic narrative through a cycle of twenty-one short scenes which re-address the instructiveness of myth-narratives. Although Wertenbaker refers to the Pentheus myth towards the play' s end, she focuses on another myth with two distinct female subjects - Philomele and Procne, two sisters whose relationship is destroyed by overwheening male lust (agency). This myth is interwoven with the Dionysian rites, and it is this principle of interweaving rather than juxtaposition, that provides the main shift from Brechtian theory, necessary for a narrative healing of the female subject. Wertenbaker splits the chorus (the locus of instruction in mythic drama) into male and female who focus, respectively, on 'masculine' and 'feminine' issues of state or subjectivity. The male chorus opens the play, framing it with the patriarchy:
MALE CHORUS: Everyone loves to discuss war... MALE CHORUS: Perhaps, but this is not our story. War is the inevitable background, the ruins of the distance establishing place and perspective. MALE CHORUS: Athens is at war, but in the palace of the Athenian king Pandion, two sisters discuss life's charms and the attractions of men. (1-2) Wertenbaker announces that this narrative will not present the patriarchal drama of war, but will focus on a comer of the master's house where two sisters are conversing. Wertenbaker builds the narrative superstructure of Nightingale on what Sue-Ellen Case has observed to be the fortunes of women within the father's/master's house. Case finds that the structure of classical Greek theatre was inscribed by Athenian inheritance laws, which favoured the son over the wife, effectively defining the woman as male property. 28 This is present in the play, where the women are shown to be treated like possessions,
28 Case, Sue-Ellen, Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 7-13 67 with no agency of their own. Narrative slippage must occur for the activities of female characters to be captured by the narrative 'eye'. Women are revealed to inhabit a different world to men, while expressing an interest in male activities. But the narrative continues to slip. Philomele's autoeroticism threatens to disrupt the narrative stability further: PHILOMELE: Oh, yes, I feel such things .... Tigers, rivers, serpents, here, in my stomach, a little below.... Sometimes I'm so happy. PROCNE: Quiet, Philomele! Never say you're happy. It wakes up the gods and then they look at you and that is never a good thing. (2-3) Female agency is punishable under the gaze of the gods, replicated on earth by men, who also punish female agency.
There is a degree of foreshadowing at this stage, a common narrative trope in myth enabling narrative closure. The male chorus functions to inscribe this inevitability: "It didn't happen that quickly. It took months and much indirect discourse. But that is the gist of it. The end was known from the beginning."( 5) Brecht sought to challenge such narrative inevitability, and thought that if the outcome of the 'closed' narrative was knowable, a form of story-telling that demonstrated the possibility of a different ending was necessary. This possibility is realised by the female chorus who warn "never rest in the kindness of history"(6). It is soon revealed that myth, the fictive shadow of history, is not kind to women ( a story demands sadism). On the boat to Thrace, Tereus prepares to rape his sister-in-law Philomele even though she desires the captain, not him. The male chorus withholds warning in spite of their foreknowledge, and retreat into complicity with the narrative: "Does Philomele know? Ought we tell her? We are only here to observe, journalists of an antique world, putting horror into words, unable to stop the events we will soon record."( 14) The function performed by the chorus is antithetical to that of the Brechtian narrator who asks the audience to criticise events as they occur or consider possible outcomes to what they are observing. But the notion of the chorus as 'journalists' of an 'antique' world is in itself Brechtian because they are self-aware, and historicise the narrative by acknowledging the past of the characters and the present of 68 the audience. The chorus describe myth as an unlikely story that contains an unwanted truth, and the audience is challenged to consider what truth this text may deliver through its narrative: "Tl\is one, you will say, watching Philomele watching Tereus watching Philomele, must be about men and women, yes, you think, a myth for our times, we understand."(19) Wertenbaker's text is self-aware in its historicising of contemporary issues of gender and in this way is Brechtian. But the emphasis on the "watching" brings up notions of the gaze and who is controlling it, an issue which eluded Brechtian drama. That visual pleasure results in rape in this myth, and in reality, is a concern of feminist theory. When the chorus advises the audience to "be beside the myth" throughout its telling, it is not asking the audience to simply be 'outside' of the narrative events, but to permit a degree of cathartic engagement as well. Critical distance and catharsis are necessary as dual narrative elements in order to understand Philomele's 'fate'.
This narrative strategy of within and without as beside finds its metaphor in the play within the play device. King Pandion, the Queen, Tereus and Philomele watch Euripides' Hippolytus. The king claims that the plays help him think, their instructiveness assiting him, in the Aristotelian manner, in the process of decision making and exercising his patriarchal rights: "That's the phrase. Philomele, you must not leave your father's lands. You'll stay here."(12) Philomele is drawn into the process of identification and catharsis. While watching the play, she identifies most strongly with Phaedra, yet in her own life she lacks Phaedra's agency. Tereus, untouched by the play, echoes Phaedra's actions in his own life. He now has a model for his actions. In this way Wertenbaker demonstrates the (mis)instruction of myth; for Tereus, it "began then, in the theatre, the chorus told (him)".(29) The play leaves Philomele with a sensation, "the beating of wings". Her desire is not translated into agency but seems restless, stifled, desperate for freedom in a way that recalls the image of the "mouthful of birds". Inevitability in its most extreme narrative form is tragedy, and in Wertenbaker's text, the fact that Philomele does not die but is disfigured and then mythically transposed into the form of a songless nightingale, indicates Wertenbaker is exploring the delicate balance between tragedy and myth, and the extent to which myth, not mimesis, can avert the narrative patterns of tragedy. 69
It is Philomele's silencing by the symbolic order that Wertenbaker focuses on in most of the text. Her desire to know is seen as problematic by those around her. Like Philomele, the chorus have difficulty matching their consciousness with the external world: HERO: Sometimes I feel I know things but I cannot prove that I know them or that what I know is true and when I doubt my knowledge it disintegrates into a senseless jumble of possibilities, a puz.zle that will not be reassembled, the spider web in which I lie, immobile, and truth paralysed. HELEN: Let me put it another way: I have trouble expressing myself The world I see and the words I have do not match. (20) Only when it is "too late", when the myth has unfolded itself, is it "easy to find the words." Luce Irigaray, (following Plato and Freud), has examined the silence which characterises women as a form of castration and the breaking of such silence as perceived hysteria. This notion is figured in the text of Nightingale. When Tereus rapes Philomele and she threatens to denounce him he silences her by cutting out her tongue. This action could be perceived as gestic as it refers to the social silencing of women as an oppressed class. Mythically, this act demonstrates culture inscribed on the body. While Philomele crouches in a pool of blood, shocked and terrified and forever deprived of speech, Tereus talks: You are more beautiful now in your silence. I could love you. You should have allowed the god to have his way. You should have kept quiet. I was the stronger. And my desire ... You are mine. My sweet, my songless, my caged bird. (37) Philomele is exiled and reported dead by Tereus. But just as Wertenbaker seems about to allow the mythic narrative to dominate her own she mobilises hysteria as a trope of female subjectivity. Philomele joins the female 'hysterics', the bacchants. As part of the festivities, Philomele re-enacts her violation with two life-sized dolls, mimicking the actions performed upon her by Tereus. Her estranged sister Procne, attending the festivities, recognises Philomele and they are reunited. The two join the bacchants and while they are celebrating they are spied upon by Tereus' son, Itys. Philomele kills Itys with his own sword in a reverse castration ofTereus. When Tereus enters, Procne reveals she knows the truth about events. 70
It is after this restoration, recognition, of narrative truth on behalf of the female subjects that the female chorus is able to take control of the narrative from this point on. They give the play its closure by narrating the fate of the subjects and ensuring an avoidance of tragic outcome in a way that the male chorus could not: HERO: Tereus pursued the two sisters, but he never reached them. The myth has a
strange end. ECHO: No end. IRIS: Philomele becomes a nightingale. JUNE: Procne a swallow. HELEN: And Tereus a hoopoe. HERO: You might ask, why does the myth end that way? IRIS: Such a transformation. ECHO: Metamorphosis. (47-48) Wertenbaker has siezed upon one element of myth, and that is its magic aspect which allows its subjects to become transformed, in a liberating result. This is one way female subjects may escape mimetic erasure by the male protagonist, and Wertenbaker has appropriated it with success. Metamorphosis, changeability, as Echo intones, is the clue.
Lynda Hart has identified the problem of mimesis as its inability as a mode of representation to empower the female body as any more than a psychsemiotic component of the broader narrative structure. 29 DeLauretis has seen the need to question whose desire propels the mythic narrative30 • If female desire is articulated through mythic narrative structures, then in the mimetic order, women become representable and more than a 'component'. This is the area the three plays chosen for discussion have dealt with. In Duffy's Rites, gender is revealed as mimesis, and the backing of a myth-narrative is used to affirm the inescapability of it. In A Mouthful of Birds, the nexus between mimesis and the myths of the everyday is explored and questioned by the surreal, imagistic and irrational construction of the text which dominate the Brechtian elements. The unexplainable is revealed as a force which may challenge society. In The Love ofthe
29Hart, p.5 30 DeLauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't, p.112 71
Nightingale, myth is demonstrated as both a destructive and regenerative force, depending on who controls it. The seizure of the narrative by an act of female 'hysteria' which challenges, and yet promotes a form of mimesis, allows the narrative to pass from the male protagonist's hands into those of the female subject. All three plays centre, through the anti-mimetic gest of woman as violent, on the notion that the cultural marking of 'woman' is a construction. The treatment of female characters in these plays in relation to broader narrative patterns which govern representation marks a progression from what Iris Smith has identified as the "mimetic pull" of Brecht's plays when they deal with women. 31 In the case of feminist playwrights, the motifs and structures of possession, ritual, hysteria, mimicry, provide subversive flaws in the mimetic weave. Appropriation and transformation of myth allows opportunity for the premeditation of the construction of truth.
31 Smith, Iris, "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theater" Theatre Journal 43:4 December 1991, p.491 72
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DIALECTICS OF EMOTION: CONFLATING THE BRECHTIAN AND THE FEMINIST
"I don't let my feelings intrude in my dramatic work. It'd give a false view of the world." Brecht1
"(L)et's share our feelings and pool them. Let's let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings will lead us to ideas and then to actions." Feminist Consciousness Raising Group Motto2
This chapter will examine the role of empathy and emotion in Brechtian theory and what their dialectical possibilities may be for the feminist playwright. Having examined the recovery of identity and space practised by feminist playwrights in the previous two chapters this discussion will focus on narrative strategies associated traditionally with Aristotelian, classic realist texts in which reception depends upon the creation of catharsis and identification or empathy and which may be useful to the feminist playwright in the representation of the female subject. Brecht was highly critical of the use of emotive strategies in the aesthetic and political arenas but feminist theatrical and political groups have had no choice but to use the realm of the personal ( defined and governed by the emotions mostly) as the starting point for criticism of and entry into the public sphere to which they had been denied access. It will be seen in the discussion that follows that the Brechtian/Feminist playwright must conflate notions of rational dialecticism with emotive and empathetic strategies in order to construct female subject/spectator positions. This issue has been broached in Chapter Two with the notion
1 Willett, John (ed.}, "Conversation with Bert Brecht" in Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1974), f.14 Evans, Sara, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred Knop( 1979), p.214 73 of female histrionics and will be developed into the notion of validating the female subject position through opening up the experience of the personal.
Brecht' s cautious attitude toward empathy was due to its central role within illusionist theatre and to this extent, he deemed it unsuitable as part of the apparatus of epic theatre since the epic spectator was not to be carried away by the protagonist and the events with which he was embroiled. Brecht focused on the alienation devices employed in Chinese acting to prevent the narrative centrality of empathy. The Chinese method of acting precluded audience identification with the stage characters:
Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead ot: as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious.3
The actions and utterances of the Chinese actor would be stylised beyond mimetic representation and function gestically which would also hinder the transference of emotion from actor to spectator. But it must be emphasised that Brecht did not advocate the banishing of emotion from the stage entirely: The alienation effect intervenes, not in the form of absence of emotion, but in the form of emotions which need not correspond to those of the character portrayed. On seeing worry the spectator may feel a sensation ofjoy; on seeing anger, one ofdisgust.4
The Brechtian actor should exhibit the outer signs of emotion and this is to say that emotion should be rendered gestic - to be read as a social signification and not as an instance of personal representation with which the spectator must identify in order for the piece to be effective theatrically. Brecht's writings on Chinese acting essentially recommend an inversion of the use of emotions by the dramatic theatre~ he does not seem to consider the dialectical possibilities of character identification. However, within the debate structure set up in The Messingkauf Dialogues Brecht addresses the issue more fully. The Philosopher (the doubting Brecht) challenges the Dramaturg (the didactic Brecht):
You can't possibly confine criticism to the intellect. Feelings also play a part in the process, and it may be your particular job to organize criticism by means of feelings. Remember that criticism originates in crisis and reinforces it. 5
3 Brecht on Theatre, p.91 4 lbid.,p.94 5 Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues, pp.88-89 74
And as the consciousness-raising motto of feminist groups quoted above suggests, crisis brings emotions to the fore and criticism will proceed from the emotional state. Drama is based on conflict and the dialectical (the state of contradiction and weighing up of opposites) suggests the dynamic of crisis, the definition of which is a turning point or moment of critical decision (the word derives from the Greek /crisis or 'decision'. ) The etymology of the word crisis suggests that emotion and decision making go hand in hand.
But Brecht asserts that catharsis in its pure form of emotional infatuation of spectator with actor/character defeats the dialectical purpose. The Philosopher reconsiders: One has to be able to see the laws that decide how the processes of life develop. These laws can't be spotted by the camera. Nor can they be spotted if the audience only borrows its heart from one of the characters involved. 6
Brecht was not against the actor portraying emotion, nor the spectator responding emotionally, but the Philosopher does deliver a final caution: "Only one out of many possible sources of emotion needs to be left unused, or at least treated as a subsidiary source - empathy."7 It is this 'subsidiary source' and its use by feminist playwrights in conjunction with other elements of epic form that will be examined in this chapter. It is not uncommon for the feminist playwright to harness the forces of empathy, identification, and histrionics to foster a deep emotional bond between performers and audience and use it as a foil for the rational or more clearly epic elements of the play. Such a process is at work in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and in Pam Gems' Dusa, Fish, Stas & Vi, and yet the effect produced by these plays' approach to form can not be classified simply as Brechtian. For there is an overlapping between the emotional and the epic; it is as if the epic is located within the emotion of the play. It is not as clear as juxtaposition, montage, or irony. In Top Girls, Janelle Reinelt rightly observes the process of historicisation in which the first scene acts as a "curtain raiser" populated by women of the past which contextualises the feminist trajectory of the contemporary part of the play. 8 But even in the first scene, histrionics and subjectivity reign, anticipating
6 Ibid., p.27 7 Ibid., p.57 8 Reinelt, Janelle, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p.87 15 the painful foray into the personal lives of the two ideologically oppsed sisters in the play's last scene. But ideology definitely takes a backseat to emotion in this play, in spite of the socialist feminist convictions of its author. In Gems' play, a similar tension is at work with the play enquiring into one woman's fatal romantic involvement with a left wing male. It is the neglect he pays to her emotional needs which seems to spark her suicide, and Gems' point seems to be that socialist ideals and social reality kill women. Gems surrounds her character with a house full of emotionally dissatisfied women, their interactions with each other at first lacking emotional warmth, but who, through the course of the play, gradually establish emotional bonds with each other that provide mutual support through understanding and the sharing of personal experience. In Ntoz.ake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf it seems that the 'cool' Brechtian element is absent, and a technicolour 'wash' of emotions, articulations, recriminations, proclamations, and celebrations provides the dialectic of the play. But there is in fact a balance between the rational and the emotional, which generates a powerful dialectic. This play itself is difficult to appraise from a white, middle-class perspective as it is aimed at a black working-class one. It fosters an empathy between women of colour, and yet in the specificty of its spectatorial context, may provide an alienation effect for white female spectators who may, to a certain extent, find themselves distanced from the action. However it is interesting to note that many elements of the text such as the use of music, poetry and movement, as well as the intensely emotional subject matter concerning male-female relations and the abuse of a child, transcend these barriers of understanding. Shange, like the playwrights discussed below, uses interventionist devices to structure the highly charged material and push it beyond sentime~tality.
The plays discussed below focus on issues of female body and female biology, and these are subjects which conventional plays may deal with using narrative strategies that attempt to provoke emotional responses in the spectator, or appeal to the emotional, rather than rational faculty. It is interesting to examine the way in which Brecht deals with female productivity in Caucasian Chalk Circle by isolating the 'warm' notion of 76 empathy and placing it in contrast to the 'cool' elements of epic theatre. In his notes to this play Brecht discusses this strategy of juxtapositio~ the structure of the play "partly conditioned by a revulsion against the commercialized dramaturgy of Broadway. "9 Brecht has taken the parable of the chalk circle from Chinese theatre and the biblical counterpart of Solomon's test of the sword from the Old Testament, both "valuable tests of motherhood" in an attempt to display motherhood as socially rather than biologically defined. 10 When Grusha takes into her care a child that is not hers against a socio historical backdrop of social upheaval, economic hardship and class inequities, Brecht aims to expose the constructedness of the social role 'mother' and arrive at a 'true' narrative on the subject via the parable form. Brecht displays that "maternal instincts ... prove very nearly fatal" within the society to which Grusha belongs, a society which has sacrificed rationalism to the emotionalism of totalitarianism:
The more Grusha does to save the child's life, the more she endangers her own; her productivity tends to her own destruction. That is how things are, given the conditions of war, the law as it is, and her isolation and poverty. In the law's eyes the rescuer is a thief Her poverty is a threat to the child, and the child adds to it. For the child's sake she needs a husband, but she is in danger of losing one on its account. 11
Brecht's summation of Grusha's situation touches upon many of the hardships experienced by the mother in capitalist society, few of which are not emotionally and morally coloured. Brecht's comments would suggest that his play attempts to present such issues rationally and through the materialist lens. Caucasian Chalk Circle could be seen as an attempt at validating the rationalism of Marxism to which "Fascism's grotesque emphasizing of the emotions" posed a direct threat. 12 But the extent to which it voices feminist concerns about the debate surrounding the constructedness of the role of mother is arguable, as is the extent to which Brecht successfully excludes Aristotelian tools of empathy and identification from invading the text and actually abetting his cause.
9 Brecht, Notes to The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in Bertoli Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose Volume 7 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), p.299 10 Ibid., p.300 11 Ib"dI ., p.304 12 Willett, John, "Conversation with Bert Brecht", Brecht on Theatre, p.145 77
In the chaotic political landscape of Caucasian Chalk Circle, the only just figure who may rescue Grusha and reward her rather than punish her for her instincts is Azdak, whom Brecht describes as "utterly upright, a disappointed revolutionary posing as a human wreck, like Shakespeare's wise men who act the fool." 13 Azdak's apparent irrationality is set in direct contrast with the 'truth' and wisdom of his judgement and contradictions seem to generate the dialectics of the play. Brecht instructs that the play should use music to "display a cold beauty (-) should be cold, so that the girl Grusha can play against the grain of it. " 14 The play also contains contradictions in the form of dialectics and ironies, present in situations of conflict and character oppositions. But the play returns to the one paradox, which Brecht sums up as: "Evil times make humane feelings a danger to humanity." 15 Grusha is a pre-Marxist vision of womanhood, set in opposition with the Peasant Woman and the Girl Tractor Driver at the play's opening, products of Marxist rationalism which was meant to re-envisage female roles. Grusha and her world are invoked by the narrative frame of "Once upon a time" and it is through the 'play within the play' device that Brecht historicises the narrative and the construction of"humane feelings". But Simone de Beauvoir has been critical of the value of Marxist thought to the feminist position, finding that even in the Soviet Union, real equality between men and women had not necessarily been achieved by the implementation of the socialist state. This observation caused de Beauvoir to reverse her political priorities: I said I wasn't a feminist because I thought that the solution to women's problems must depend on the socialist evolution of society.... Today ... I have come to realize that we must fight for an improvement in woman's actual situation before achieving the socialism we hope for. 16
Brecht views women through a Marxist lens and the result is Grusha, a component in the significatory process of dialecticial materialism, and necessarily reflective of capitalist framings of gender. In terms of the feminist inquiry into subject positions, Grusha as theatrical and gender signifier does not offer an insight into "woman's actual situation"
13 0p.Cit., p.301 14 Ibid., p.301 15 Ibid., p.307 16 de Beauvoir, Simone, Interviewed by Alice Schwartzer in New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken, 1981), (eds.) Marks & DeCourtivron, p.143 78 as alterable in the way Brecht theorised about 'man's' situation. She is a two dimensional figure, an abstraction of the notion of empathy/emotion to be set in juxtaposition with other abstracted elements (the rational, 'cool' elements of the epic text). But Brecht's intention was not to inquire into the female subject position. 'Woman' is a signifier viewed externally to illuminate the socio-political apparatus. Sue-Ellen Case finds that
Grusha's motherhood is "created by law and myth" 17 , and the feminist appropriation of the dialectics of emotion necessitates a recuperation of empathy from the subject position, yet displayed by the narrative in a way that avoids Aristotelian dramaturgy and the validation of the patriarchal symbolic order. To do this, the feminist insistence on the personal as political offers a useful perspective.
The notion of the personal as political emerged as one of the key concepts of second wave feminism in the United States in the 1960s in a way that addressed the position of woman in capitalist society. It validated consciousness raising groups which sought to educate women that their marginalisation was culturally constructed and was not the result of some inherent lack. It illuminated the construction of women as inherently good, non-violent, passive beings and offered a position which may challenge Brecht' s circulation of feminine traits in the dialectic of his plays (Azdack as a rational male with legislative power is used by Brecht to absolve Grusha of her "humane feelings" and tends to perpetuate notions of cultural oppositions criticised by feminism). Feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous have found rational discourse problematic and conservative in terms of political thought:
Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history ofreason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism. 18
Cixous goes on to describe rational thought as an "enormous machine" churning out its 'truth' for centuries, and does not distinguish it from epistemologies which validate the capitalist apparatus. According to Cixous, women writers must necessarily escape
17 Case, Sue-Ellen, "Brecht and Women: Homosexuality and the Mother" in 1he Brecht Yearbook Volume 12, 1983, p.66 18 Cixous, Helene, "The Laugh of the Medusa" in New French Feminisms, p.249 79 rationalist thought and the oppressive structures it reflects. If rational thought and dialecticism are not essential to the feminist writer it must be asked to what extent a Brechtian revision of the role of empathy may be useful in feminist theatre practice and how it may work toward reinscribing female subject positions. There is essentially some tension and difference between Brecht' s practice of this theory and the practice of the feminist playwright. And yet not all feminist playwrights would agree with Cixous, or demand a total abandoning of reason within dramatic form. It seems that the plays discussed below use a combination of emotive and rational elements that operate in accord with each other.
Julia Kristeva has written that "(w)omen generally write in order to tell their own family story .. . a woman . .. creates an imaginary story through which she constitutes an identity". 19 This statement seems particularly relevent in relation to Charlotte Keatley's play My Mother Said I Never Should which could be described as a 'domestic epic', after the term used by Max Stafford-Clark to describe Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. 20 This term suggests the familiarity of the female playwright with Brechtian dramaturgy, but also the recentering of this dramaturgy around the subjective sphere of the domestic - the site at which much female experience has been located. This is not to say that female playwrights write almost exclusively narratives set in domestic scenes and populated by family figures. Indeed, this description brings to mind many plays by major male dramatists of this century working in the naturalist mode. The domestic sphere is traditionally the sphere within which the female exercises a degree of power, yet it also reflects the power structures of society itself and may act as a microcosm of it. The dichotomy between public and private, male and female, social and domestic, is in many ways a false construction, and the domestic, as a site or as a paradigm of cultural experience and relations, is dualistic in nature. It may reflect women's isolation and marginalisation, and it may act as a model which displays broader social structures. The term 'domestic epic' draws attention to the fact that women playwrights have been able
19 Kristeva, Julia, New French Feminisms, p.166 20 Kritzer, Amelia Howe, The Plays of Caryl Churchill (London: Macmillan, 1991 ), p.138 80 to yoke subjective experience to epic form in a way that Brecht did not envisage. This model may be seen to reflect that of the consciousness raising group in which what were thought to be the individual fears and sufferings of women were demonstrated as shared, in effect as a social, and therefore, political problem.21 This is illustrated particularly clearly in Keatley's play, especially in the author's approach to narrative form and structure. The play is set primarily in a house although scenes do occur in a wasteland which has been made a playground by children. The major characters comprise four generations of women and the setting demonstrates the way in which the house functions as a focal point for their lives; how it has accumulated their history and seems to almost actively expel it under the weight of years of domestic deceit. Keatley seems aware of the 'traps' inherent in dealing with such subject matter, which could manifest themselves in a conservative form with a reliance on naturalistic tropes of time, place, characterisation and exposition. Keatley seems to have sought a non-naturalistic style and form for the play in order to give the domestic an epic interpretation and elevate the subject - women's familial experience - beyond the domesticity reinscribed by mimetic theatre. In the stage notes to the play Keatley specifies that there be "no sofas in this play. The setting should simply be a magic place where things can happen. "22 The theatrical mise en-scene of the play is consequently not fixed. Domesticity is evoked by the characters themselves; their reminiscences bring it into being, which is to say that they have narrative power over their context, suggesting that the domestic sphere is the world of their own making, a kind of refuge from and reflection of the pressures of the patriarchy 'outside'.
The structure of the play is fragmented beyond chronological order. Every scene in the play involves a leap forward or back in time. No two scenes share the one temporal frame, and this device seems to embody memory and experience as active presences in the play, giving the form its structure from the subjectivity of the characters from which each scene emanates. There is not the feeling of a dramatic imperative or inevitability
21 Eisenstein, Hester, Contemporary Feminist Thought (London: Unwin, 1984), p.36 22 Keatley, Charlotte, My Mother Said I Never Should (London: Methuen, 1988) 82
The structure of the play is not rational but it utilises juxtaposition; the spectator is able to order the episodes and 'read' relationships and events in a way that challenges the predictability normally assigned to mother/daughter relationships or dramatic incidents such as teenage pregnancy, etc. The fragments of action set in the house which vary in temporal setting from 1923 to 1987 are further broken by surrealistic interludes where the female characters of grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter become children of similar ages playing together in the wasteland, rendered magical and illuminated by a circle of light, and demonstrating through song, 'play' and incantation, social attitudes towards the traditionally female role of nurturing. Fairly frequently the female characters express strong desires to kill their mothers, and to reconcile with them, and struggle with the burden of 'femaleness'. These scenes work to comment on the more fixed roles the women engage in in the other scenes of the play and the dissatisfaction buried beneath duty. A 'scenario' emerges from the fragments: after a teengage pregnancy, Jackie has handed her daughter Rosie over to her mother Margaret so that she may improve her chances as a young woman. This covert transaction is kept secret from Rosie and Jackie's father Ken, but Jackie's grandmother Doris warns that "truth will out" and only make for complications in the future. This is proved to be true and the lack of faith in the family's female relationship structure deprives Jackie of the experience of motherhood and burdens Margaret with extra nurturing responsibilities as she approaches middle age, putting a strain on her marriage and health, both of which eventually fail.
Keatley does make connections between the personal/emotional and the social, for embedded in the text of the play, and the reminiscences thrown up by the women, are flashpoints of historical background and social mores which may have been seen to leave imprints on the lives of the characters regarding cultural expectations of their roles. Personal turning points in the lives of the women coincide with the optimistic Jazz Age, the second world war, second wave feminism, the sexual 'revolution' and an era of Thatcherism. The fragments cohere to convey a cycle with the play ending with the 81 that would 'place' these women in the broader social context and 'fix' their subjective positions. It seems rather that the women are attempting to place themselves and each other over a period of sixty or more years. They are attempting to historicise themselves, and male figures and public structures play a marginal role in this process, both in the play's form and in the world evoked by the women themselves. Emotion is present as a force in the play in two ways: the characters' relationships with each other seem to be defined essentially by emotion - feelings of love, loyalty, regret and recrinination seem to drive the activity in the play, and each episode seems to aim at evoking an emotional identification from the female spectator. Keatley is appealing for recognition and understanding from her audience. Rational choice is displayed as compromise and sacrifice in the lives of the female characters as a way of highlighting women's limited choices both personally and socially. Keatley has explained that the narrative is structured by emotion: her own, as well as the characters', and finally, by the audience itself: Inside us we have a way of rating experiences according to different emotional intensities, not according to linear time. If you like, that's what this play does. . .. The process is one of trying to hone down emotional expression to the minimum, trying to find the objects or gestures which vividly express whole histories of emotion. 23
It would seem that Keatley is suggesting that as part of the historicisation of women's personal, domestic lives, gest may become divorced of its social referent and function to signify the female self as a way of inscribing identity. This 'personal gest' takes the form of stage action/business which is not simply mimetic. The domestic activities of cleaning, packing, unpacking, preparing meals and even folding sheets become, especially during moments of communication, strategies of avoidance or displays of emotional conflict. Keatley intends these actions to be gestic, demonstrating that "women themselves have come to believe that their ideas and emotions aren't enough in themselves, aren't worth giving time to"24 or for the female playwright, aren't worth theatrical representation. By appropriating Brechtian dramaturgy and applying it to the domestic/personal sphere Keatley inscribes female identity theatrically, not merely mimetically.
23 Keatley, interviewed by Lizbeth Gordon, "ArtForm or Platform? On Women and Playwriting", New Theatre Quarterly 6:22, May 1990, pp.132-133 24Ib·dI ., p.130 83 eldest character Doris, again a young woman in 1923, about to be married, exclaiming "Oh Mother, I'm so happy, SO HAPPY! I suppose, really and truly, this is the beginning of my life!"(53) The play's closure is ironic, as marriage as a structure which shapes the 'narrative' of women's life has been thrown into question by the preceding fragments, and this line of naive and empty optimism has a similar effect to the closure of David Hare's Plenty in which Susan Traheme, destroyed by her culture's expectation of her gender role, appears as a young woman announcing "There will be days and days and days like these. "25 Both authors mock dramatic closure as resolution and appeal to their audiences through the emotional recognition of irony that change is essential to break the endless continuum that threatens at the end of play. However, Keatley's ending to the play seems to suggest the possibility of change. Within the narrative itself there has been reconciliation and recognition, and the youthful Doris is revived to mark the change that has occurred over the generations rather than the lack of change.
Empathy and the cathartic process play an important part in this play and Keatley found that audience response to the play indicated that it operated by way of audience members identifying with characters and situations: "People seem to have taken it to heart and made it theirs". 26 In realising the dialectic of the piece the play depends upon recognition from a female audience (the Lacanian self-same) to allow it to be inscribed into the symbolic order. Teresa de Lauretis finds that emotion is central to the feminist debate of personal as political and the attendant exploration of female subjectivity: (C)onfigurations of subjectivity, patterns by which experential and emotional contents, feelings, images, and memories are or'anized to form one's self-image, one's sense of self and others, and of our possibilities of existence. 7
Liberal and radical feminist theories diverge from materialist feminism in this relocation of the notion of change and the possibilities of existence in the female self. This notion involves the necessary reclaiming of the production of female images and a deconstruction of the practice that produces significatory images of women. This process
25 Hare, David, Plenty (New York: Plume, 1978), p.86 26 lbid., pp.137-138 27 De Lauretis, Teresa, Introduction Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, p.5 84 of deconstructing the materiality of the female self to control the production of images of female subjectivity in theatrical narratives seems a long way from Brecht and the Brechtian treatment of character. The feminist/domestic epic is consequently the converse of the Brechtian epic, and Keatley displays the technique of appropriation/expropriation of narrative strategies in order to feminise the theatrical signifier.
If Charlotte Keatley's play takes the domestic as a site of female subjectivity, Louise Page in Tissue claims the body of woman as the site of subjectivity that has been masked by other constructions. She focuses on the breast as part of a woman's body the visibility of which is cloaked with notions of male desire, cultural symbol, sexual fetish, marketable commodity, icon of perceived female biological constructedness, mark of 'beauty', joke, object of derision -- all of which contribute to the construction and visibility of woman herself, and of her self-image. Page exposes these constructions through the subject of breast cancer, a contentious issue which has been problematised by patriarchal framing systems of the female body which have involved both colonisation and aestheticisation of female flesh. These constructions are thrown into a critical light by the life/death situation of breast cancer as it is experienced by one woman, Sally Bacon, and the subject matter of the play is one that involves intense emotions, the formal and narrative reverberations of which are the main focus of this discussion. This play also values aspects of the consciousness-raising group model, linking the personal to the political. According to Eisenstein, the process of consciousness-raising had its roots in the revolutionary Chinese practice termed "speaking bitterness. "28 Such a sharing of dissatisfaction was intended to fuel rebellion having exposed the faults of the unjust system. In the case of the female consciousness-raising group it may be seen to illuminate the previously invisible faults of the patriarchy. Both processes locate the subversive in the proclamation of pain and suffering - the site of emotion. In many ways, Tissue draws on narrative strategies which resemble those of "speaking bitterness," and of purging the
28 Eisenstein, Hester, Contemporary Feminist Thought, p.35 85 self of pain; focusing on the female self as locus of unacknowledged political or cultural struggle.
One of the narrative strategies Page implements that turns on notions of emotion is that of identification and catharsis. Page has commented that it is the "thrilling ... transference of energy between actors and audience" which most interests her about the theatre. 29 This transference of energy occurs especially through the process of identification and catharsis and engages the emotions of the audience. The production process to the play reveals the extent to which these notions were central to the development of the text. Tissue was commissioned by the Birmingham Arts Lab who wanted Page to write "something specifically feminist. "30 Page met with the group and they discussed women's body images, especially the impact of advertising and how disfigurement as socially undesirable because it lessened the value of a woman's body as a marketable commodity. The discussion finally settled on breasts because "they were such a universal symbol of womanhood. "31 Page wrote a first draft for the company based on their discussions but this text was criticised for being over-researched and slightly 'academic'. It seemed essential that an issue such as breast cancer (not given a high profile in 1978 when the play was written) not be dealt with in a rational manner from a detached point of view, but theatricalised from the very site of its occurrence - a woman's body and her subjective experience. To this extent it was suggested that Page interview women who had actually suffered from breast cancer or were recovering from mastectomies, and the personal accounts Page received lend the play its intimate, subjective and highly emotive scenes. It was only through speaking to women with such experience that Page began to understand the taboo nature of the subject she was writing about32 , which in turn raised questions about the source and reasons for such taboos. The play scrutinises the embarrassment and secrecy that surrounds female 'disorders' and asks for an end to the
29 Page, Louise, Interviewed by Elizabeth Sak:ellaridou, "Emotion is a Theatrical Weapon" New Theatre Quarterly, 6:22 May 1990, p.174 30 Page, Louise, Tissue, author's notes in Plays By Women Vol. l (London: Methuen, 1982), p. l 00 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 86 false politeness that considers such matters 'unspeakable' and relegates them to the private, passive and silent domain of women.
Page uses both intense subjectivity and objectivity to structure the play. The emotional nature of the material is held in check by the cycle of short, sharp scenes of which the form is comprised. Each of the fifty scenes is brief and dramatic rather than instructive (or so it appears at first) but they don't allow empathy to develop too far so that objectivity and rational perspective are impossible for the spectator. Many different perspectives of similar situations are shown, some appearing to lack emotion, and others, directly emotional. A situation is shown and an attitude demonstrated in a way that encourages a 'felt' response from the audience. But it also contains an idea or conveys an attitude. The play's rehearsal process incurred many rewrites which seemed aimed at getting to the 'heart' of each scene rather than building the episodes into a dramatic chain of events. A scene was thought to have been brought to fruition only when it succeeded in capturing "a moment or feeling". 33 The heart of each scene does consist of an emotion/gest, a contradiction in Brechtian terms, but it seems that this is what Page aims at and achieves, with the truthfulness of the emotions portrayed becoming the main weapon of the play and the vehicle of its meaning. These emotion/gests (they may be realisations, accusations, exclamations, revelations) are the points at which each scene climaxes or concludes and form a chain of instructive nodal points, but only instruct after they are 'felt.' These function to lock the spectator into Sally's subjectivity so that they experience her pain, so that Sally's realisation in Scene One "But it is me. And I am here" (77) is shared by the audience.
But Page was concerned that emotion also be balanced with instruction: (B)ecause it was a very emotive subject, a very oblique play, I did not want to write a play where everybody would have a terrible time and be put through the mill, because the purpose of the play was in a sense to inform. But also a play has to be entertaining. 34
33 Ibid., p.101 34 "Emotion is a Theatrical Weapon", p.175 87
The play does balance emotion, information and entertainment, and this is achieved through the structuring of the play. Page's feeling that the play is indirect stems from the way in which the form seems to circle its subject and return to the same issue: most of the scenes are out of chronological order ( childhood, adolescence, pre-op and post-op are all jumbled) so that the effect is that of a montage, but there is also a dancing pattern to the arrangement of scenes as if the play is now approaching, now retreating from the highly charged and sensitive material; and yet then it will suddenly embark on the most confrontational scene. The effect is also repetitious: we discover the lump many times; we seek diagnosis over and over again, experiencing Sally's fears and frustrations. If occasionally the play's tone lightens with childhood scenes that find comic value in some of the attitudes towards the female body, these in effect work to deepen the impact of other scenes. Scene Four in which Sally's mother instructs her to wash herself with minimum body contact is balanced by Scene Forty in which her mother reveals that her mother died of a "wasting disease," but since they never spoke about their bodies, it is not known whether or not it was breast cancer. Along the way, many myths surrounding the cause of breast cancer are exploded ("He said it was because I was frigid, that I wanted something wrong. An excuse. {81 }). And in this way the play is instructive. The culturally inscribed aversion to matters of female health is revealed as a culprit in the controversy of breast cancer, its cure hindered due to the fetishisation and moralisation of the female body. These structural effects are heightened by the use of doubling with one male and one female actor playing all the roles ( doctors, nurses, relatives, friends, lovers), while one female actor plays Sally, so that it seems Sally is embroiled in a conspiracy against her body. The play informs essentially when the emotional insight of certain segments is juxtaposed for maximum impact. The instructiveness of the play works in tandem with the emotiveness to produce the 'against the grain' effect used by Brecht, but in a way which is not as simple as Brecht outlined in his discussion of the transference of emotions during performance. Brecht has described the epic approach to empathy as it occurs with the intervention of alienation devices:
(E)motions ... need not correspond to those of the character portrayed. On seeing worry the spectator may feel a sensation ofjoy; on seeing anger, one of disgust. When we speak of exhibiting the outer signs of emotion we do not mean such an exhibition and such a choice of signs that the emotional transference does in fact take place because the actor has managed to infect himself 88
with the emotions portrayed, by exhibiting the outer signs .... 35
There is a balance of catharsis and confrontation as the audience is subjected to the same feelings as Sally in their struggle to identify with her, rather than the contradiction of emotion Brecht describes in this passage.
The body of the text seems disfigured, carved up, reflecting the process Sally's body endures subjected to the gaze of her boyfriend, her brother or his friends who appraise her body parts, and that of the medical system ("A surgeon is a man who must like cutting or stitching" {80} ). After her operation Sally experiences more keenly the gaze of the public and suffers feelings of agoraphobia at the thought of walking in the street. The different characters presented by the play also bring in differing views and attitudes which lend the play a kind of distanciation from its subject. The title of the play itself bears many connotations: it suggests the de-sensitising of the emotional female body. "Tissue" may refer to the cultural assumption that women tend towards emotiveness in general, medically and psychoanalytically, towards 'hysteria'. The image of tissue as fragile flesh, something easily tom, suggests the idea that women are perceived as weaker, more delicate, and envisaged and often treated as victims. There is also a callousness displayed towards the diseased female body, no longer desirable, and easily shed of its fetishised status: the breast which Sally must lose is suddenly described as only "a bit of tissue" or "a pound of flesh". The play is not overtly didactic but the dialectical is replaced by a demonstration of the inherent contradictions in cultural constructions. Perhaps in this way, Page fulfills Brecht's observation that "(t)he contradiction between empathy and detachment is made stronger and becomes an element in the performance. "36
Page has sought the connection between the personal, the site of the emotional, and politics:
I believe very strongly that people's politics tend to come from things that happen in their lives. I know people say that I am a writer who deals with minutiae, but it seems to me that it is
35 Brecht on Theatre, p.94 36 Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p. l 02 89
those moments that actually do radically affect people. 37
That is, recognition through identification. In the play's first run it became obvious to Page that she had created a piece that was able to affect people through their emotions, and if this seems to have little political significance, it is interesting to note that the company organised audience discussion to follow each performance and address the issue of breast cancer, vocalising what had been shrouded in silence in the public sphere. The women who were silent during the play found the opportunity to "pour their hearts out in the bar"38 , perhaps a step towards the politicisation of the female self Brecht conceded that "(t)eelings are usually the product of opinions". 39 The female spectator may not be simply identifying with a fragmented, dissected female character. The portrayal of Sally, in spite of the narrative form, is one which demonstrates a figure which addresses her status, often stands outside of her predicament and narrates her situation in a way that reclaims her subjective status. Sally exclaims, "I don't want to be a victim without a struggle!"(96), and the play ends with an assertion of individual strength and identity: "Then I think what does it matter that a breast is not there, because I am alive." (99) Aware now of the cultural significance attached to a piece of tissue, Sally renounces "the catharsis of tears that is encouraged in women" which Susan Brownmiller has observed in patriarchal society. 40 Sally had earlier asked, "Why do people keep telling me that I'll feel better after crying?"(84), and refuses the emotive behaviour ascribed to her gender. The play has taken the place of this "catharsis of tears." It both at once utilises and questions the usefulness of emotional purgation.
The essential achievement of the play is the way in which its form, its tissue, re en/genders the body of woman: the body of the text with its layers of time, place and voice, seeks to grow over or heal the cultural carving up of Sally's body. The way in which culture views a woman's body is frought with contradictions, and this is revealed especially through the tissue of images that also comprises the play. Are Sally's breasts
37 Op.Cit., p.174 38 Page, notes to Tissue, pp.101-102 39 Brecht on Theatre, p. l S 40 Brownmiller, Susan, Femininity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p.209 90
"minutely complicated. Their components interlaced like a clump of trees on the skyline before the dawn. Blue, blues and bluish"(84), or are they simply "the corporate identity of the mammary glands. Corresponding nerves, blood vessels et al. Two"(94 )? But in spite of the wariness displayed towards expectations of culturally encoded behaviour from the female subject, Tissue recuperates some of the power inherent in the cathartic acting out of stereotypes through the process of identification. Eisenstein believes that there is something therapeutic about the process of "speaking bitterness" and of the consciousness-raising group: a centering of collective female emotions which helps women to "heal some of the wounds inflicted by their experiences." She also goes as far as to say that it can be utopian, carving out a space for women amidst the patriarchal network within which communication between women could be validated. 41 The gestic climax of the play captures such a moment of communication between women. Sally's mother asks her daughter to examine her breasts and when the mother comments "It's too close for comfort" (95) we acknowledge the difficulty of this sudden intimacy between the two women, the discomfort that surrounds the subject, and the necessary airing of this pain. Sally narrates the emotion/gest:
I place my skin on the flesh from which it came and can feel her heart beating under my pulse. (95) The play returns to the strongest site of empathetic connection - the mother/child relationship
The structure of the consciousness-raising group is one which suggests that women experience similar things, or at least have a comparable emotional life. Breast cancer, on which Tissue focuses, is the one disease which fosters between women an immediate and powerful sense of empathy. Female relations within one family and the unspoken pain shared by and passed on to the next generation of women (A{y Mother Said I Never Should) is also a subject that creates an empathetic bond. Therefore, in terms of such subjects which deal with women's experience and address themselves to the female spectator, Brecht's dictum that empathy should be "usefully indulged in" at rehearsals
41 Eisenstein, p.41 91 but avoided in performance42 is highly inappropriate and not true of his own work. What some feminist playwrights have successfully achieved is a balance between a lack of distance, an intense emotional focus, and flashpoints of critical distance provided by an interventionist approach to form. The fragmentation of form through short scenes and a disruption of temporal and spatial continuity is common to both Tissue and My Mother Said I Never Should. Both plays demonstrate a resistance of reverting to an argument based on binary opposites. Rationalism, and emotionalism, when used solely, do not tend to make for effective or subversive theatre. It is the juxtaposition of both that produces a fruitful dialectic.
42 Willett, John, "The Short Organum" Brecht on Theatre, p.195 92
CHAPTER FIVE
BREAKING FRAMES: PORNOGRAPHY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND NARRATIVITY
... "(Y)ou are sitting in a theatre, and not with your eye glued to a keyhole." Bertolt Brecht1
"How, as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal ... structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of a victim? Helene Cixous 2
The following discussion will examine the ways in which feminist playwrights have further investigated the process of de/re-construction in plays which tackle, as their subject matter, two key patriarchal systems of representation: psychoanalytic and pornographic practices. The connection between pornographic and psychoanalytic framings of female subjects is not an arbitrary choice. In his writings, Freud stresses the pornographic nature of the male subconscious as providing the basis for male desire as it is enacted socially and culturally. Freud explains man's propensity to objectify as essential to his pursuit of pleasure:
... the man ... only develops full sexual potency when he finds himself in the presence ofa lower type of sexual object ... to whom he need ascribe no aesthetic misgivings ... 3
1 Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p.52 2 Cixous, Helene, "Aller a la Mer," Modern Drama, 27:4 December 1984, p.546 3 Freud, Sigmund, Sexuality and the Psychology ofLove (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p.64 93
There exists a triangular relationship between psychoanalysis, pornography and the female subject, framed by the male economy of desire and the male gaze, and embedded in cultural edifices which may be identified as Oedipal. To this extent, Brecht's aversion to illusionist narrative practice is useful to the feminist playwright, who may appropriate distanciation devices in order to prevent duplicating these framing systems in her own constructions. But she must necessarily expropriate Brecht's 'woman as signifier' practice which can be seen to co-operate with culturally established ways of seeing gender roles.
Dolan's awareness of the narrativity ofpornography4 provides a palpable critical meeting point with Brecht' s observation, by extension, of the pornography of narrative. In The Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht suggests that fourth wall theatre encourages the process of objectification and voyeurism as opposed to criticism: he alleges that in establishment theatre of the naturalist kind, "girls show their bottoms exclusively to their fellow actors, with whom it's perfectly respectable to identify oneself'.5 It would seem that Brecht strikes on an interesting and valid point: that in illusionist theatre, the potential for and practice of sexual objectification and identification is the most persistent, alluring and self-validatory aspect of its narrative apparatus. The fact that theatre is a 'bought' experience, that is, it is a commodity, demonstrates the dangerous collocation between economics, desire and representation. Brecht would have been aware, obviously, that theatre was not very different to other 'bought' experiences of female spectacle (the peep show, the strip show, the burlesque) available to the Berliner or European male spectator of his time. It is more difficult to ascertain, however, whether or not Brecht was really concerned with the representation of women, or whether he was simply attempting to 'lower the tone' of the bourgeois theatre establishment by comparing it to a pornographic spectacle. The validity of the observation lies in the fact that fourth wall theatre encouraged spectatorial habits that inextricably linked catharsis with desire, a process oppressive to the subject who was desired. There was the need for the (female) subject of
4 Dolan, Jill, "Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat" Acting Out (Ann Arbor: The University ofMichigan Press, 1993) 5 Ibid. 94 desire represented by the narrative to be made 'available' to the spectator just as she was to her fellow actor, through the process of identification, if this structure was to function successfully as a commodity. The desired subject needs to conform to cultural stereotypes, enabling quick recognition by the spectator as validation of authenticity of the 'purchase'. When viewed through the feminist lens, this pact between economics and representation has contributed to the consolidation and fixedness of gender stereotypes, and, on a more sinister level, perhaps even to a transmission of this transaction into the social sphere. 6
Feminist theorists of theatre and film have, following Laura Mulvey, noted that Western theatre ( and much of Western culture) is preoccupied with the 'look' and the 'gaze'. In this process, Mulvey explains, the male is both the maker of the spectacle and the spectator, while the woman is the object of his gaze, a structure which capitalises upon, and reaffirms, notions of sexual difference: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly .... Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle ... she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. 7
Mulvey finds that this 'erotic spectacle' is prevalent in mainstream cinema, just as Brecht alleges it is central to theatre that does not acknowledge its audience's presence. Such an apparatus of the gaze is the staple of the pornographic spectacle, and the crude codification of sexuality Dolan finds in pornography may be seen simply as a blatant extension of that found in other narrative where both genders are constructed in relation to each other. Brecht once described the male spectator as having to hand in his hat at the cloakroom along with his normal behaviour when entering a theatre. 8 But what of the female spectator who is consistently asked to hand in her gender at the cloakroom, a clear viewing position for her often conspicuously absent, or undesirable, in texts which
6 Feminist allegations of the connection between pornography and violence against women in society have been discussed since second wave feminism by leading proponents of the movement such as Andrea Dworkin. 7 Mulvey, Laura, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Screen 16:3 1975, p.11 8 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p.39 95 cater to the male gaze. In many ways, the lack of appeal of narrative conventions for the female or feminist playwright becomes obvious in the light of how conventional approaches to form preclude a female spectator position. The two plays that will be discussed below represent the effects of the male gaze on the female subject, unmasking the workings of the scopophilic apparatus through textual and formal experimentation. Both plays attempt to resist framing the female subject, and frame pornography instead.
Psychoanalysis, in theory and practice, was not deliberated upon by Brecht, but like Meyerhold, he shared an abhorrence for Stanislavski' s approach to acting from the psychological rather than the social position. But Brecht may have been as wary of psychoanalytical discourse and practice as feminist theorists have become, especially in the light oflrigaray's criticism of Freud:
Now Freud ... does not invent female sexuality, nor male sexuality for that matter. As a "man of science," he merely accounts for them. The problem is that he fails to investigate the historical factors governing the data with which he is dealing. . .. (H)e takes female sexuality as he sees it and accepts it as a norm. (H)e interprets women's sufferings, their symptoms, their dissatisfactions, in terms of their individual histories, without questioning the relationship of their "pathology'' to a certain state of society, of culture. 9
Freudian psychoanalysis, with its framing of patient history in concordance with its own data that rests upon fixed cultural assumptions, defies Freud's stance as "man of science". Brecht's theories, made for the 'scientific age', work to deconstruct cultural assumptions by demonstrating that human and social nature are alterable. Irigaray suggests that psychoanalysis and its narratives aim at closure -- the closure of diagnosis, of identification of pathology. Even notions of 'curative' psychoanalysis imply returning a patient to their previous stabi_lity within the socio-sexual status quo. The narrative patterns produced by the framing systems of psychoanalysis are extremely limiting to the female subject and the feminist position, and as Irigaray has summarised:
As a result, he (Freud) generally ends up resubmitting women to the dominant discourse of the father, to the law of the father, while silencing their demands. 10
Human nature, especially female nature, is seen to be unalterable.
9 Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 7 10 Ibid. 96
But psychoanalytic discourse, especially post-Lacanian, has been incorporated to work in tandem with post-Brechtian theory, evident in the critical writing of Laura Mulvey and Stephen Heath, who have employed a combination of the two to investigate the scopic apparatus of film narratives. Elin Diamond has extended the investigations of Mulvey, underlining the value of the Brechtian perspective with the term "Gestic Feminist" criticism. This lens allows an analysis of "gender in material social relations and in discursive and representational structures, especially theatre and film, which involve scopic pleasures and the body" 11 , via a necessary conflation of the Brechtian and feminist positions. Elizabeth Wright has found that the classification of Brecht as "rational, ascetic, and distanced" has prevented his theories from being regarded in relation to "the body image as granted to the subject by society"12 In fact, Brecht's socially interventionist thinking may be seen to parallel Lacan's interventionist investigation of the symbolic order posited by Freud, and enable a reconstitution of the female subject, to whom Freud denies a materialist base, and yet to whom Brecht assigns a culturally reflective rather than deconstructive role. Brecht's foregrounding of the spectator and the disruption of spectatorial relations ( especially the process of identification) corresponds with the disturbing of the Imaginary mirror-relation of the spectator/self with image/self-same in Lacanian theory. Diamond has seen the V-effect, by way of psychoanalytic theory, as informing feminist theory, since "by alienating (not simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance, the ideology of gender is exposed and thrown back to the spectator."13 But the origins of these expectations of resemblance must be ascertained, and this is where dialectical materialism, in John Strachey's opinion, "provide(s) the only possible rationale of the findings of psycho-analysis". 14
11 Diamond, Elin, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory", p.83 12 Wright, Eliz.abeth, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (Routledge, 1989), p.17 13 Op.Cit., p.84 14 Osborne, Reuben, Marrism and Psychoanalysis (New York: Octagon), p.x 97
However, it is necessary that the twin frames of psychoanalytic thought and dialectical materialism be 'feminised', since the languages of both are primarily phallocentric; they are thought systems created within and dependent upon the patriarchy. Marxist thought 'includes' women15 in its doctrines by virtue of their being social entities, engaging in labour/capital relations: both the mother and the worker are defined by labour in Marxist thought and may be seen as equal. This is too utopian because men and women, even working side by side, are not 'read' as equal due to cultural constructions of biological 'fact'. On the other hand, psychoanalytic thought has posited woman as marginal (the Other), defined as such by her difference to the male. Barbara Freedman has observed that the task confronting the feminist theatre practitioner is "how to intervene in the cultural reproduction of sexual difference without always already being entangled in it."16 To this task, Brecht's strategies of narrative intervention and experimentation with the theatrical signifier, in spite of the shortcomings of materialism, offer their assistance. The two plays discussed below break the objectificatory frames of psychoanalytic (Freudian) thought, having harnesses the voice of its female incarnation, the hysteric, and utilised this figure to posit a space for the female subject.
If pornography, as Jill Dolan has concluded, "helps to construct subject positions that maintain the strict gender divisions on which the culture operates"17 , then Clare McIntyre has taken one step towards defeating the persistent framing of gender by not giving male characters physical representation in her play Low Level Panic. Male presence is inferred, somewhat ominously, through voices and the suggestion of offstage space. The effect is reminiscent of that in Nell Dunn's Steaming, where the fragility of notions of female 'territory' is conveyed. It is a play containing only women characters. Males are absent or invisible and the women narrate their experiences with men themselves, without dramatisation. The play focuses on three women in particular who
15 See Marx's The Woman Question which frames its subject in a way that may even be seen to approximate Freud's essay on the 'problem' offemininity. 16 Freedman, Barbara, "Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theatre" Theatre Journal, 40:3 October 1988, p.382 17 Dolan, Ttll, "Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat", p.105 98 share a house, and how they are affected when one discovers a pornographic magazine in their rubbish bin. A 'low level panic' begins to set in when Jo and Mary realise the truth about the mechanics of the gaze and how it differs from their own notions of sexual desire. McIntyre's characters provide sites for the female self with all but one of the eight scenes taking place in a bathroom, the site of self-image.
Somewhat ironically, McIntyre instructs in the stage directions that the scene takes place "during the morning of a sunny summer's day". 18 What is demonstrated from the outset is the objectification of women in all levels of culture, and the feeling that women, to be visible, need to identify with the constructed image of woman. The character of Jo demonstrates this in her fascination with the magazine's text and images, asking Mary to read fragments out loud to her, as if for confirmation of her position. Mary reads, "Long, leggy Barbara reveals all and hopes all you guys out there like what you see. "(89) The magazine's address to men "out there" suggests a collective male desire that governs the production of images of women, to which most women do not fit. Mary holds up the double spread: MARY. She's not that pretty. JO. She's really thin though isn't she? MARY. Not really. JO. She's thinner than me. MARY. How d'you know. You haven't even looked. JO. I don't have to. (90) Jo does not have to look at the magazine's framing of female subjects because she is already aware of its laws and feels the pressure on her self-image. This pressure comes from without but she has internalised its demands. The spectacle of pornography may only be a product for consumption, but Lyotard finds that pornography works to cater to "the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it. " 19
18 McIntyre, Clare, Low Level Panic, in First Run: New Plays by New Writers (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989) p.87 19 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodem Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984), p.75 99
McIntyre sets up notions of the pornography 'invading' the womens' space and psyches. Mary objects, sensing a specific violation: Why did he have to choose our bin? ... Why do they have to include me in their horrible, messy lives? I don't want to look at that stuff I don't want to think about it. I don't want to get involved. It's got nothing to do with me has it? What's it got to do with me? (101) Scene Two goes on to demonstrate the fact that pornography has everything to do with women, cannot be ignored and may affect women like Mary who do not seek objectification or desire to be desired. Mary's panic at the realisation that pornography instructs men that women are "all just things to fuck"(102) stems from the connection she makes between the pornographic text as proof of male desire, and an incident she experienced some weeks prior to the discovery of the magazine. It is this incident that is dramatised in Scene Two. Mary both narrates and re-enacts an assault on her by two men. Prefacing the actual assault is a monologue which attempts to come to terms with the attack, provide a rationale for it, and lay the blame on herself: Maybe if I'd been wearing trousers it wouldn't have happened. I was only wearing a skirt because I'd just come from work and it's the kind of place where they like you to wear a skirt ... I'm not really comfortable on a bike in a skirt: it just makes people look at your legs. But who's around at that time of night to look? ... It's not as ifl was cycling along with my skirt up round my ears. ( 103) Mary then weighs up the possibility of averting the attack by presenting a different image of herself but concludes that I'd still have been there, on the edge of the road at midnight, about to get on my bicycle or into a car or just been stuck there waiting for a taxi whether I'd been in a skirt or not, whether I had good legs or not, whether I was fifteen or menopausal or lame, I'd still have been there. (103-104) Then suddenly Mary is "there" and the voice of a man is making apparently harmless remarks about the bike, asking to "have a go on it"; another male voice joins in the banter and the voices accelerate their enquiries in a threatening way. Mary is sexually assaulted by the man behind her, but this, McIntyre instructs, must be enacted by the actress herself "using her own arms and hands"(107) until it is clear to the audience what is going on. Mary then "holds her arms away from herself, disassociating herself 100 from what is happening to her and screams."(107) This action may be read gestically, but it is an instance of subjective, rather than social gest.
Instead of focusing on the male aggressor, as is often the case in factual and fictive cultural narratives of sexual assault such as news reports or exploitation texts, McIntyre locates the incident solely on the body of the female subject in a way that avoids enabling the spectator to 'read' it. McIntyre also seems to play on the idea of the pornographer's "distance" from the female subject, this ghostly and violating "touch" experienced by Mary being an extension of the "gaze". This seems to be McIntyre's area of enquiry: how does the gaze become the touch, and might not men entitled to gazing, want to touch? The fetishised distance provided by pornography between the male viewer and the female object is a false one. Dolan describes this "aesthetic distance" as "a screen for the projection of a fantasy over which the male viewer has total control. "20 The control of the male over the pornographic image (males can write their sexual experiences or fantasies, send them in to many magazines for publishing, thereby contributing to the manufacturing of images) provides the illusion of control over 'reality', already a cultural construction, especially where gender is concerned This poses the question: does aesthetic distanciation inspire political/critical correctness? Even when the female subject/object enduring and returning the male gaze is aware of her performative strategies, she has no autonomy or control of the text (think of peep shows or strip clubs). What aesthetic distanciation may in fact provoke is the illusion that the spectator has total control and if this is beneficial in the Brechtian/political text, it may be undesirable in the Feminist/sexual text. Distanciation is a problematic notion that is already always implicit in the subject/object construction of gender roles. McIntyre's handling of the assault scene avoids this construction and bypasses Brechtian distanciation for a literal inscription of the attack onto the female body, thereby excising the role of male agent.
McIntyre's text would seem to endorse Freedman's theory that the gaze is part of the pedagogical structure of known subject positions,a false construction which operates via
20 Dolan, fill, "Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat", p. l 06 101 tricks of perspective and learned ignorance.21 The way in which McIntyre's narrative avoids portraying events and is relatively low in action content may express the author's desire to avoid the pedagogical structure dramatic action often depends on. As Brecht cautioned in The Messingkauf Dialogues, "The spectator isn't going to learn anything from having an incident just happen. It won't be understood simply by being seen."22 But Low Level Panic evades the need for the female spectator to cast her vote. Jo concludes that women have to learn to live with pornography and to "stop thinking" about it. Mary is too drunk and angry to convince her to confront the issue of pornography as one that affects her mental and physical health. She is also badly traumatised by the assault and does not seem in control of her emotions. However, the play ends dialectically, with Jo and Mary coming to represent opposing attitudes. Mary dyes black a party dress which had made her feel "flimsy and open." Jo narrates another fantasy in which she goes to the beach with a man and two bottles of pink champagne. When Mary asks Jo if she has ever had pink champagne the answer, of course, is no. Pornography and the fantasies it permits men may spill over into reality. It may certainly affect the day to day reality of women. But there is no cultural apparatus to empower them with the gaze. This is demonstrated in a gestic monologue (gestic because its referent is social but it is transmitted through speech rather than action) when Mary tells of an incident where she examined a giant billboard advertisement, fascinated by the female subject it used and its trick of perspective. The billboard image consisted of a gorilla holding onto a woman in a bikini, but the woman's face had absolutely no expression at all. Mary tells how she climbed into the picture, into the subject position and discovered the shocking truth of female representation within the pornographic frame: (H)er eyes ... they weren't focused ... I don't think they were looking at anything at all. ... (H)er head gently fell back and her mouth opened.... I pulled myself up on both of her shoulders and looked into her mouth. And I just screamed and screamed ... because inside there wasn't anything at all./ She was completely empty.
21 Freedman, Barbara, Staging the Gaze: Psychoanalysis and Shakespearian Comedy, (New York: Cornell University Press 1991) p.23 *It is interesting to compare Freedman's analysis of The Taming of the Shrew in which Kate is found to be driven to hysteria by being forced to adopt the gaze of her husband in the mock learning scene, with Mary's 'panic' when she too is prompted to adopt the male gaze. 22 Brecht, p.32 102
(121-122) The female subject is present within the frame but she is also absent, erased by the male gaze. She is an illusion to reflect this gaze. Lacan's mirror stage does not exist for Mary. She does not see herself reflected by the construction of woman; she sees "someone else's idea of what they think (she's) feeling like."(125) The pedagogical structure of seeing and knowing and its artificial distance of perspective is exposed. Seeing and not knowing is the first step towards the dialectical.
Sarah Daniels' Masterpieces also stages the effects of the pornographic scene on the everyday life of the female subject, and the pornography Daniels deals with ranges from the blue joke to the snuff movie. Her approach to narrative form differs to that of McIntyre: male characters are present in the play as a very strong cultural force, and the shape of the narrative involves a steady build-up of gestic and dramatic scenes. However, there are similiarities between the two texts. Both have a bewildered and angry female protagonist at their centre who becomes drawn into the mechanics of the gaze, and both urge their audiences to cast their votes at the closure of the narrative. Both texts resist framing the female subject in ways which promote objectification (by the characters or the audience) and when pornographic items are present on stage the audience is unable to see them. We are not given any images of pornography other than those described by 'ordinary' women. Daniels' text exceeds McIntyre's because it takes as its subject a woman who, having experienced the gaze being transmuted into the touch, touches back. This narrative choice complicates the play's dialectic, giving both sides of the argument considerable weight and making the casting of the vote an inavoidable part of the spectator's theatrical experience. The title Masterpieces, ironic when the audience becomes aware that the play deals with the manufacture, circulation and effects of pornographic texts, signals the critical attitude of the author towards text-making within the patriarchal framework. There are several connotations: of narratives made by males, narratives that are mastered ( conform to certain expectations and conventions); there may even be implicit the suggestion of the 'pieces' made of women's bodies by the objectificatory gaze of the male pornographer/voyeur -- the master, as opposed to the 103
'mistress'. To this extent, the handling of the text by its female author as an antidote to conventional narrative strategies is a crucial one. The process asks the question of how Daniels utilises the master's tools, especially the tool of didactic form, to deconstruct the master's house of objectificatory narrativity. It will be seen that the play states its case strongly often employing didacticism to do so, declining the ambiguity often inherent in the dialectical form which Daniels finds inappropriate to her deconstructive purpose. Daniels exerts such control over the play' s form that at times it seems Masterpieces is an attempt to posit a female 'learning play', if not a cautionary tale concerning certain heterosexual imperatives.
The structure of Masterpieces is episodic; it consists of seventeen scenes which form a cyclical shape overall. The dialectic is generated by scene Two which informs us of the fact that Rowena is on trial for some crime, not taken up again by the narrative until scene Sixteen, only one scene prior to the play's 'closure'. This strategy promotes internal debate in the spectator during the play's action, each scene being read in the light of the need to reach a verdict, even before the crime is portrayed by the text. Framing itself becomes a difficult act for the audience, but by the second half of the play there is the growing sense that cultural forces are against Rowena, and that she is being 'framed' for a crime which was in some way justifiable. This process of contradiction is furthered by the fact that the scenes tend not to conform to temporal unity, and the persistent use of other interventionist devices such as taped voices, gestic monologues that work as case studies to comment on the stage action and give it cultural contextualisation, and in places, broad comedy, enhances this effect. There is also a non-mimetic use of sound (pop music, radio jingles, television themes) in between scenes that does not act as a bridging device but rather distances each scene from the next and gives cultural contextualisation for the action. That Daniels' plays have been described as "grittily naturalistic studies of contemporary life"23 does not really do justice to their attempt to 'master' counter-narrative strategies, to disrupt the mimetic model of subject/object
23 See Katherine Worth's discussion of Daniels "Images of Women in Modern English Theater" Feminine Focus, Ed. Enoch Brater, p.13 104 narrative framing. Daniels' play had its beginnings in didacticism24 but it approximates a matter-of-factness or objectivism that is reminiscent of Brecht while dialectically colouring the scenes from the very outset, alerting the audience to recognise and reconsider the cultural composition of contemporary life, especially where gender relations are concerned.
The play begins with a prologue of three monologues delivered by males who work in the pornography trade and justify their work claiming that "looking at pictures never hurt anyone". In a chilling device of doubling, these three men become the husbands in the first scene of the play, not-so-subtly abusing their wives through the pornographic structures of jokes and the attitudes they inspire towards women. In scene One, Yvonne and Ron, Rowena and Trevor, and Jennifer and Clive, Rowena's mother and step-father, engage in after dinner conversation, and the dialogue in this scene is largely generated by the telling ofjokes, mostly by the men. The jokes are all misogynist and their punchlines depend for success upon the assumption that women enjoy and invite rape. When the women attempt to tell their own jokes, some of them anti-male, they are deemed unfunny and indecorous by the men, even though the women have been expected by them to laugh good-humouredly about raped nuns and nymphomaniacs. It could seem that Daniels was loading the dialectical dice against the men at this early stage in the play if this scene wasn't so familiar to the audience, or so well-observed. However, it does seem that when Daniels even resorts to mimetic models for her action, the male characters 'come off' badly. Yvonne, who has remained silent for most of the conversation, addresses the three men who have dominated the evening with their utterances of socially acceptable sexism: "How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? (Pause.) Three but you have to slice them thinly."(7) Daniels' inclusion of this joke is ironic and any laughter it provokes from the audience is (deliberately) Pyrrhic -- as the following narrative demonstrates, it is women who are sliced ( especially in snuff films). The motif of the joke anticipates the desire to strike back which Rowena unexpectedly does. In this play, the joke is exposed
24 It was originally intended to support the feminist protest of the release of a film titled Snuff in Britain in 1982. 105
as a vehicle unsupportive of female observations, just as the fantasy in Low Level Panic was unsupportive of female desire, due to a lack of cultural correlation. However, Daniels seems to give the female characters the province of stage-humour and Tracy C. Davis finds that the humour generated by the women serves to "shift the mood and relax the tension"25 of the play's dialectical build-up. Jennifer, for example, describes how she used her discarded diaphragm as a base for ornamental flower arrangements and engages in 'batty' behaviour as a way of concealing her marital disappointments and getting back at her husband. In addition to Davis' observation, Daniels seems to use humour to centralise the female characters and marginalise the male. There is present in the play an obvious didactic split between the female characters as 'good' and the male characters as 'bad.' In her approach to the aesthetics of the play, Daniels juggles the didactic and the dialectical: the play, one the whole, is neither; the form displays a tension between the two. Daniels makes the audience aware of all sides in the debate, but then makes it clear which side she favours.
Like McIntyre, Daniels also uses monologues to shift the pornography debate back to the territory it essentially affects -- the body of the female subject. Taped monologues of women's voices recounting their experiences with pornography counterbalance the monologues of the male pornographers at the play' s opening and argue strongly that making pictures and looking at them hurt people. These women speak of their exploitation within the pornography industry and and are heard while Rowena leafs through a bag of pornography confiscated at Yvonne's school, owned by one of the students convicted of rape. The most extreme speech connects pornography with social, economic and political attitudes towards gender: When I was seven I was sexually interfered with by a male relative ... I'd learnt by then that I was dirty ... Your value is your body, when it starts to go, you get into the rough stuff and can be threatened within inches of your life ... I also 'starred' in a film especially made by a television company for the Falklands lads who watched the stuff to get their bloodlust up. (23)
25 Davis, Tracy C., "Extremities and Masterpieces: A Feminist Paradigm of Art and Politics" Modern Drama, 32:1 March 1989, p.92 106
It is important for Daniels to establish pornography as a socially tolerated force but she is also concerned that it has been appropriated as an issue by debates between the right and the left on censorship issues. When Yvonne resolves to bum the magazines, Trevor objects: "That's what the Nazis did with propaganda they didn't like." (24) For Daniels, the debate should concern first and foremost the female body which seems to have been subjected to moralised erasure. As part of her strategy, Daniels introduces Hilary, a working class girl who has struggled with birth control, become pregnant, and worked as a prostitute to support her child. Hilary' s monologue demonstrates the ignorance a lot of women display towards their own bodies, whereas the female body is a commodity portrayed as available to men by pornography. Hilary visits a birth control clinic: The funniest thing was this pink plaster model of your insides ... Only having never seen a cross-section of me insides it was difficult to make out what was what - the fact that it was chipped to buggery didn't help matters none. (20-21) The direct address of this speech and its comic tone work to engage the thought processes and the empathy of the audience, but the rest of the monologue which recounts the internal damage caused by an IUD anticipates the way in which female mutilation is widely tolerated by society. The narrative of Masterpieces works in this way; scenes are juxtaposed or inter-linked without an apparently direct connection; but we are made to weigh up the cumulative effects of what is demonstrated onstage with what Rowena does. It is interesting to note in terms of narrative structure that Rowena does not view the pornography until at least halfway through the play. Daniels instructs that when Rowena looks at the magazines it is in such a way that "the audience is not exposed to their contents." (22-23) Instead, they are made to listen to the monologues, voices of the female objectified self, rather than participating in the visual apparatus.
The scene in which Rowena (willingly) exposes herself to the porn (as a social worker she is curious) also depends for its shock value on Rowena invoking the pornographic images of women through her own speech, which re-frames and reconstitutes these male made images of women. It is at this point that didacticism appears to enter and define the 108 chainsaw, leaves the audience no room to debate. A policewoman confirms that what Rowena saw is more widely practised than many people think, and if this does not convince the audience in what direction to cast their vote, we also receive the information that Rowena will be convicted of manslaughter. One final speech ties up the dialectic neatly and reveals the extent to which the form of the play has worked towards a powerful and persuasive argument for the banning of pornography:
I don't want anything to do with men who have knives or whips or men who look at photos of women tied and bound, or men who say relax and enjoy it. Or men who tell misogynist jokes. (35) Rowena is articulating, hopefully, the thoughts of the female spectator. This is the conclusion at which she must arrive for Daniels' manipulation of dramatic form to have been worthwhile. Sue-Ellen Case finds that Rowena's killing of the man at the station is an attempt to use narrativity to reverse the scopophilic process invited by the structure of the pornographic text and implicit in cultural gender relations: the scene demonstrates that "the object status of women in the system incites a woman to violence against her victimizer".26 Daniels resists the mechanics of the gaze in a medium which has long depended on voyeuristic machinations, but exceeds Brecht in her investigation of the fact that such viewing practices are culturally constructed and provide one group's visual pleasure at the expense of another's physical displeasure. To ignore the didacticism of Daniels' piece would be to deny her appropriation and 'mastery' of narrative strategies, and conversion of narrativity into a political vehicle. It is as if Daniels has employed diacticism to open up the dialectic surrounding the issue of pornography. The play's contentiousness was noted by reviewers, and welcomed for its propensity in 'stirring up' the argument. The form of the play demonstrates the tension between the desire to rationally weigh up the factors surrounding the issue, the intensely emotional responses and reactions from people with opinions about the debate, and the need for commitment to didacticism from the female subject if she is not to be dissuaded from protesting at all. For her, in Daniels' opinion, it is a battle of life and death proportions: the rationale of this view is didacticism.
26 Case, Sue-Ellen, "The Power of Sex: English Plays by Women, 1958-1988", New Theatre Quarterly, 7:27 August 1991, p.241 107 play's structure. Rowena's husband requests that she not "lecture" him, but the audience is lectured anyway by the following events. The next scene leaps forward in time: Rowena is undergoing psychiatric analysis after having attempted to kill a man. She battles with psychoanalytic discourse in order to preserve her subject position. Daniels' attitude towards this institution is clear. Rowena uses mocking humour to undercut the framework of analysis the psychiatrist attempts to establish: the dynamic of the scene mimics interrogation rather than analysis, but Rowena corrects the psychiatrist's view of her situation, claiming that through discovering the "way women are viewed by men" she "gained all sense of reality." But which reality - the reality of the female subject position? The portrayal of the pyschiatrist (doubled by the actor who plays Rowena's husband) is parodic and (possibly) not credible: he accuses Rowena of being "prudish", seems to be totally humourless, moralistic, non-professional and judgemental of his patient. Daniels' narrative seems drawn, necessarily, towards mocking the profession of psychiatry, as it does the portrayal of the law, social work, the institution of marriage and heterosexual relations. Didacticism is again apparent.
In scene Fourteen, Rowena is waiting at the tube station and a man approaches her. We do not hear what he says but he ends up under the train, pushed by Rowena. Although a man is present in this scene, the handling of it is reminiscent of the assault scene in Low Level Panic, where events may seem ambiguous and need a different kind of spectatorial approach. The man who harrasses Rowena is played by the same actor who plays Ron, and later the prosecutor in Rowena's trial. This doubling has some impact as it suggests a complicity between the men in the play. The doubling of the female characters is more sympathetic: Rowena's mother also plays the Judge, the sympathetic policewoman and the troubled mother of the boy convicted of rape. In spite of the narrative disruption of the plot/action throughout the main part of the play, a rationale is provided for Rowena's behaviour in this scene and it takes the form of a monologue which is privileged by Daniels in its positioning at the 'closure' of the play. The shock of this monologue through which Rowena graphically describes the contents of a snuff film owned by her stepfather and which she viewed, in which a woman is mutilated and killed with a 109
In her theoretical writings Cixous criticised the framing systems that were already always inherent in theatre narrative conventions and asked if there might be a way of writing outside these structures. 27 In Portrait of Dora she tests the possibilities of such a theoretical question by coming to grips with the heart of the problem, the Oedipal/Freudian narrative itself, and its framing of the female subject. This play takes as its attitude a refusal of the patriarchal narrative, and to do so, Cixous, like McIntyre and Daniels, to an extent works within the frames of the Oedipal structures and sign systems of the theatre, which reproduces in its representations culturally encoded roles, in order to deconstruct them. The original director/theatrical collaborator of Portrait of Dora, Simone Benmussa, also considered working within certain patriarchal framing elements, assuming a parallel between the stage and the dream, between the spectator and the dreamer. It is a collusion which Brecht, as a materialist/rationalist, may not have viewed as useful, but in dealing with Cixous' play, Benmussa finds in the parallels the fractures in the frames tolerant of deconstruction from within. Theatre is, like the dream, "familiar and obvious" yet also "new and bewildering"; theatre, like the dream, confronts us with "the presence of something strange".28 Benmussa assumes a Freudian affinity between the stage and the dream, mediums that have at their base a likeness of narrative structures, and gets to the heart of this territory to collaborate in an attempt to answer Cixous' questions regarding the Oedipal narrative: Dream work consists, as we know, in combining several images with skill, intelligence, ruse and precision, so as to hide the dreamer's desires behind an apparently incomprehensible mask. In 'stage work', just as in 'dream work', a situation, or a desire, is projected into space by a word or a gesture: stage work produces images. The stage is the reflecting surface of a dream, of a deferred dream. It is the meeting place of the desires which can only make signals to us and which, although deformed and interwoven, both accumulate and cancel each other out as they succeed one another, change their medium, pass from word to gesture, and from image 29 to body.
Benmussa identifies the narrativity of the stage and of the dream as a topos for the enactment of desire, the production of images and the inscription of text onto body. The
27 Cixous, Helene, "Aller a la Mer", Modern Drama, 21:4 December 1984, p.546 28 Benmussa, Simone, "Portrait of Dora: 'Stage work and dream work'", Benmussa Directs, p.9 29 Ibid. 110 dream narrative, like the theatrical narrative, has the potential to distance the subject from her context, to make the everyday estranged. Inherent in the dream is a process of questioning, a process of dialecticism that springs from the truth embedded in irrationality.
Benmussa's directorial approach, however, was non-Brechtian in that she pursued process, not meaning, proceeded by image and association, informed by the actors' instincts. And yet Benmussa avoided slipping into Stanislavskian rehearsal and dramaturgical processes; the actors could not identify, then become, the characters - they had to "imagine themselves of the obscure, reverse side." Benmussa sought a way to "disorientate the spectator's gaze from what seemed real, (to) light the dream to make it appear real, and not a romantic or poetic illusion. "30 A form of alienation technique. The need for Dora's case study to seem very much a part of the twentieth century rather than a legacy of the past approaches historicisation and Cixous' text seems receptive to an interpretation of such Brechtian devices, even montage (Benmussa observed it was constructed like a jigsaw puzzle). But the nexus between the Brechtian and the feminist is located in Benmussa's belief that the "text came from 'elsewhere"', 31 suggesting a refusal of many conventions of the theatre, including Brecht' s canon. This "elsewhere refers to the site of (non)narrative production 'outside' the master's house, and where an altering of aeshtetics is practised. Thus, there is not a direct appropriation of Brechtianisms, but a transmutation: distanciation becomes displacement, gest becomes dream gest, montage becomes jigsaw; the text is para-Brechtian in its claim that it comes from 'elsewhere'. The spectatorial position is altered beyond the pedagogical, the Brechtian: seeing and knowing becomes seeing and not knowing. Benmussa intended the framing of the narrative of Portrait of Dora to prompt the spectator to ask the question: "Are we in the interior of Dora's eye, or are we seeing through Freud's eye? Is Freud dreaming, or is he being dreamt about?"32 The potential empowerment of the female
Jolb-dI ., p.10 31 lb·dI ., p.11 32 Ibid., p.15 111 subject through dreaming (narrative-making in which the dreamer is also the subject, in which cultural relations may often be reversed) is the power which Cixous' text explores.
Sharon Willis has argued that Portrait of Dora is a staging of the encounter between feminism and psychoanalysis.33 Willis discusses the notion of Freud's case study of Dora as a portrait which attempts to 'frame' the female subject, and the need for Cixous to break this frame and insert the feminist portrait of Dora. To this extent, Cixous employs various narrative strategies, some of which are Brechtian/para-Brechtian, in the initial need for deconstruction and reconstruction of the female subject. In Cixous' play, the only framed subject that emerges is that of Freud himself, framed and fixed by his own narrative strategies. In spite of Freud's obsession with narrativity, he is unable to control the dream; his analysis depends upon tropes of classic realism - the verification of time, place, situation, incident, motive, desire, his objective as narrator/analyst being closure/diagnosis after a twelve month period of disclosure. This narrative form defeats the female subject in its objective that "female sexual development run(s) its proper Oedipal course. "34 In response to these strategies, Cixous releases the voice of the (always female) hysteric, Dora, who fragments the narrative with inconsistencies, obstacles and gaps which confound the narrative progress of Freud's analysis.
Portrait of Dora also stages the female subject's encounter with the patriarch (Freud, Herr K, Herr B) and the perceived 'problem' of femininity identified by Freud. The character of Dora is the site of disclosure and the trauma she creates is presented as hysteria which she transfers to her father (her medical condition is said to "bring him to tears"). The play's pre-text is Freud's own case study of Dora and Cixous defeats its demands in several ways, especially through approach to narrative form and structure. The play begins with images projected on a screen and this device recurrs, invoking the principles of montage, collage and decoupage. These images are meant to relay the incident at the lake, but whose version of the events it is, is not known. The same
33 Willis, Sharon, "Helene Cixous's Portrait de Dora: The Unseen and the Un-scene", Theatre Journal 37:3 October 1985, p.287 34 Ibid., p.288 112 blurring between objectivity and subjectivity occurs in the filmed sequence of one of Dora's dreams, which in its dramatic portrayal seems to approach verisimilitude, and yet is manufactured illusion. Dora as a female subject is not a fixed entity, cannot be read as a stereotype, and is not imprisoned within the symbolic order that Cixous reconstructs on stage.
There is a complicity between Dora as female subject and the play' s form and structure which stages Dora's journey from "dependence, through suffering, until she exits onto an entirely different stage/scene." This was Cixous' intention35 and it is achieved through an appropriation and expropriation of Brechtian dramaturgical elements. This is enhanced by Benmussa's direction by which the dialectical is transformed into the ambiguous, the interventionist becomes the disembodied. Dora's voice is a separate entity to her 'character\ it is inconsistent and used as an aural device which "rips through silence"36 and then is silent itself in the face of the narrative traps of Freud's questioning. Dora's disembodied voice (pre-taped) varies widely in tone and the effect is to dominate the narrative with the voice of the hysteric. Dora's phrases are uttered "as if tom from the rest like her short, choppy sentences." (5) Dora's voice is not consistent with that of a fully-rounded stage character, but the divided self of pychoanalysis; all utterances must be questioned, all verbal constructions decoded. Sound itself is a visceral element in the play, and the wide range of sound effects, diegetic and non-diegetic, suggest a hidden realm of offstage space where the real events happened (or did not). It is the play's privileging of the aural over the visual that helps challenge the hegemony of the scopophilic dynamic of theatre where what is seen is believed; in this play the real has the weight of a dream, and the dream the concreteness of the real. Cixous' treatment of the theatrical mise-en-scene as less than solid challenges audience perceptions of seeing and knowing. Benmussa has described the relationship of the characters to the space: They move around freely ... hence the passages where they are walking in a garden, hence the characters photographed on transparent slides, as if they were losing their material substance. And they are surrounded by nothing but light, and some spindly
35 Ibid., p.547 36 Cixous, Portrait of Dora, (trans. Sarah Burd) Diacritics, Spring 1983 114
scene/stages where she moves, several woman (sic), unchecked in this place expanded by her look, her listening. 40
In this, Cixous' description of the plurality of the female self, the metaphor of the self as staged is already drawn upon. It is this plurality, as well as the fact the the 'private' scene between patient and analyst is staged, that defeats the role of Freud as narrative-maker. Dora resists analysis by using the process to stage rather than disclose herself She associates narrative making with the death of the subject, her death: FREUD Do you like to write? Yes. DORA No.... I'll write a letter. It will be ambiguous. It will begin: ''you've killed me." ... I'll leave it unclear so he can finish it "himself'. Because I don't know what he wanted. Nonetheless, "I'm the one" who died. My body's buried. In the woods. It's dark in there. I am voiceless. (8-9) Dora's body is also buried in the words, the words used by Freud, her father and Herr K, which demand explanation of her 'hysteria', her 'condition'. Throughout the broken course of the analysis, Dora reveals her awareness of the narrative rules and openly challenges Freud's discourse. When Freud notices Dora is preoccupied with a purse she is unable to open, his attempt to 'read' the incident symbolically is confounded: FREUD Don't you think this can apply to something other than the purse? DORA Yes, if you insist. That's what men seem to think. FREUD He whose lips are silent chatters with his fingertips. Unclear words, by means of free association, become sharp as needles. DORA Pricked, pierced, stitched, unstitched. It's all women's work. DORA I've got a dream. FREUD Yes ... DORA I know how to ... make dreams rise, to expand them, to cook them, to roll them and put them in my mouth. (16) Freud tries to entrap Dora and classify her hysteria using dream symbols that conform to images of the psychoanalytic symbolic order signifying feminine sexuality -- jewellery boxes, locked writing desks, purses -- but Dora constructs her own symbolic order based on the images of women's work such as bakery and embroidery which have their own narrative principles and ways of inscribing. Using them, Dora can make dreams for her own consumption, not for somebody else's. Dora finds Freud's interpretations of her
40 "Aller a la Mer'', pp.547-548 113
c hair s: no props .... 37
The stage itself as a frame is questioned; as a bordered territory of visually fixed space. Cixous was interested in attuning the ears of the audience to ''the pulse of the unconscious, to hear the silences and what lies beyond them. "38 The disembodied voice challenges the mastery of the gaze and divests any one voice of narrative domination: FREUD Come on, don't be a baby. Believe me. And tell me your dream. DORA Don't be a baby. (Frau K is there, sitting not too far from Dora, who doesn't see her but who hears her. Frau K's voice reaches her from the back, goes right through her.) FRAU K Come here. Tell me what's new with you. DORA I have nothing to tell. There's never any news. FRAU K Tell me a bit about yourself. (23) Frau K supplants the position of the analyst, neutralising the enquiry so that it becomes something friendly, informal, ordinary. Such is Frau K's manner that she has greater narrative power than Freud within the text, and is the true object of Dora's desire, not Herr K. But Dora does not fix Frau K with her gaze, and Marc Silverstein finds that this moment in the play demonstrates Cixous' refusal to oppose the patriarchal gaze with a "feminist" gaze that replicates its metaphysical structural categories. Indeed, Cixous's use of sound to problematize sight suggests that "truth" is precisely that which remains unavailable for specular capture. 39
Especially the truth of the female subject's desire, the object of which divides her subjectivity ("goes right through her") in a way which offers the reverse of the gaze dynamic.
Although the narrative of Portrait of Dora may seem to take for its basis the sessions of analysis between Freud and Dora, the structure of scenic development is never 'stable', and Cixous fractures Freud's portrait of Dora, replacing it with another picture of woman, who experiences herself as many, the totality of those she has been, could have been or wants to be, moving ever more slowly, more quickly than hersel( anticipating herself ... with a hundred simultaneous
37 Benmussa, p .14 38 Cixous, "Aller a lamer", p.547 39 Silverstein, Marc, "Body-Presence: Cixous's Phenomenology of Theatre" Theatre Journal 43:4 December 1991 115 subconscious involve an appropriation of her subjectivity, and in retaliation, she cuts off his dream analysis (the text shows a feminist turning of the Freudian table with this semantic castration). She also mimics him, criticising his subjectivity and personal mannerisms such as smoking, and claims that the 'cure' is taking too long. It is taking too long but she also wishes to forestall analytic closure which will forever alter her subjectivity and reconstitute herself as the analyst's portrait. The play ends with Dora's refusal of Freud's narrative strategies; she breaks off the treatment claiming that nobody can do anything for her, and when Freud asks her to write to him she answers "Write? ... That's not my business." (32)
Portrait of Dora succeeds in breaking two framing systems which structure the female subject: the medical frame and the theatrical frame. These frames are supported by the gaze and the play enacts a de-framing of the female subject, a refracting of the theatrical and medical gaze. The way in which this re-framing is achieved is through Cixous' treatment of hysteria and the body. Freud made observations on the structure of the hysteric's utterance: "(W)e find at first a series of perfectly correct and fitting thoughts, equivalent to our conscious ones, of whose existence in this form we can, however, learn nothing, i.e. which we can only subsequently reconstruct.',41 Freud's Dora case is such an example of reconstructing the discourse of the hysteric, of normalising it, and Cixous' play , according to Silverstein, "transforms hysteria into a subversive performance, an active soliciting of the clinical gaze in order to reveal its truth - its complicity with a system of power threatened by a desire that must remain invisible and unnameable. "42 That Dora's desire can be misinterpreted as hysteria is evidence of medicine's mis framing of the female subject. The episodes that are broached by the analysis are 'acted out' on a side stage and are therefore subjected to marginalisation by being positioned 'elsewhere'. But the scenes acted out in this 'elsewhere' are also scenes 'made' by Dora: they are outside the main stage, outside the frame, and outside the master's house. She constructs them, and Freud is unsure of their validity in terms of his own frames of
41 Freud, Sigmund, Basic Writings (New York: Random House, 1938), p.532 42 Silverstein, p. 510 116 reference. It is this space that provides the seeds of subversion which enable Dora to walk away from her analysis at the play' s closure. In effect, she has become empowered to force closure of the patriarch's narrative. The tension between the real and the imaginary cannot be closed over by the analysis and Sharon Willis suggests that the effect of this is to 'literalize' the figure of the hysteric, the effect of which is also to inscribe it above the everyday in a Brechtian way. Willis' observation of the nexus between actress/subject/hysteric describes a para-Brechtian function because "(t)he hysteric becomes an actress to make visible the scene she describes, thus sundering the analytic space',43 .
Cixous' play marks a shift from the use of the female body as object/spectacle to body/text, and the play contains various gestic nodal points where the body of the hysteric reclaims the text from the male medical appropriator. If the female hysteric produced a site to be read by the male analyst, it also produces, in Willis' words, "a site of condensation of major issues for feminist theory: woman as body-image-spectacle for a gaze historically construed as masculine". 44 But the role of the female body also needs investigation. For Dora, the unspoken is her weapon against the analyst, and during analysis, what Dora does not say with words Freud says "with smoke"(28), which is the recurring image associated with the phallic presence in the play. It is as if Dora's body/text counters Freud's smoke/narrative. Dora is aware that her monologues, her dreams may give her away and prompt analysis but they function also as obstacles to the process of analysis: Freud cannot be sure whether they are dreams, visions, or fantasised tales, and he describes Dora's account of a dream as "an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks."(4) But it is especially through the body of Frau K that Cixous constructs an alternative site for narrativity. Dora's desire becomes written on Frau K's body which Dora describes:
43 Willis, p.292 44 Ibid., p.288 117
Always in white. Milley white veils. Crepe de Chine. I saw HER. The whiteness of her body, especially her back. A very soft luster. (10) In spite of the scopophilic nature of Dora's portrayals of Frau K, Cixous positions the two characters as sundered from each other in the stage space; Dora is always standing behind Frau K, sometimes seated in front; no looks are exchanged.
Dora's attempts to construct Frau K as the 'other' are confounded by Freud's attempts to construct his analysis of Dora around male principles in Dora's existence such as her father, her 'uncle' and Freud himself, who is a friend of her father's. Dora's mother is almost totally excluded from the narrative. The stage image of the Madonna links the mother with Frau K and the notion of image construction of the female subject. Frau K, "seated in front of her mirror ... with a terribly calm and unfathomable smile" (10) anticipates the filmed sequence of three stills of the Sistine Madonna, a substitute of the Madonna, and then Frau K. A voice intones gently "You must live". (11) Perhaps it is the Madonna's, or Frau K's voice. If the spectator examines the stills it should be evident that "the infant Jesus held by the Madonna is none other than a baby Dora." (11) Onstage, Frau K's figure diminishes, resisting Dora's reach: she is as inaccessible as the Madonna; only the baby Jesus has access to the Madonna's desire through the Oedipal symbolic order and Dora's attempts to insert herself into this position are "impossible," says Frau K, covering Dora's mouth with her hand. Dora's desire is the "desire to be dreaded the most" since language, sign systems, gender roles, and relationships are structured Oedipally. Dora's 'hysteria' is defined by language: she screams at the images, "Do something for me. Tell me the words that give birth. Nourish me. I am dead, dead!" ( 13) In gesture, her hysteria becomes dance; in a filmed sequence Dora dances, and we see her body "expressing sadness, desire, a strength divided, restrained." (28) Not hysteria. This is the single gesture Cixous referred to in her manifesto for the theatre, "Aller a lamer", a single gesture that was not part of plot or action, but was part of the female subject's life story, "inside her body, beginning with her blood", a single gesture that could transform the world. 45 For Cixous, the dream gest, voice, sound and image
45 "Aller a lamer'', p.547 118 are tools with which to deconstruct the Oedipal narrative and free the female subject from the twin frames of psychoanalysis and theatre, to re-appropriate feminine pathology and feminine dramaturgy, to look behind the Oedipal and see hysteria as an inscriptive force rather than as a symptom of inverted Oedipal desires.
An intertextual reading of pornography and psychoanalysis depends upon both as narratives which frame the female subject in order to exorcise notions of male desire. In dramatising this subject area, feminist playwrights are faced with the task of de/reconstructing theatrical form which is already always infused with the male economy of desire. In Low Level Panic, the narrative is essentially composed of females talking around and about pornographic images. The play seems to reflect its author's uncertainty of how to begin to write about territory that has a male option on it, and without reverting to the didacticism associated with feminists who have lobbied against the production of pornography. Consequently, the play most frequently employs the narrative feature of the monologue, having value when delivered by a female actor as an instance of female subjectivity and woman's theatrical body-presence. The monologues in Low Level Panic constitute attempts by the female characters to understand the way in which society frames them. They are also attempts at reframing~ moments of self description and narration of the self which reject the cultural framing they have endured. This approach to narrative may be seen as less than radical as it does not break the theatrical frame which has as part of its tradition the monologue for the actress which assists in framing her identity. The most challenging moment in the play is the assault scene in which Mary enacts her own, and the male role. This amounts to a gestus which challenges frames of cultural and theatrical representation and erases the male body-presence for that of the female. In Masterpieces, Sarah Daniels also makes use of the female monologue, but here it is didactically contrasted with the male monologue which is impersonal, ruthless, cold. Daniels resists framing Rowena as heroine, tragedienne, or victim. Pornography as a narrative process of framing the female subject through images and words is 'framed' by Daniels as the perpetrator of all sorts of brutalities against women. But in Masterpieces Daniels finds it essential to use didacticism, as if to 119 safeguard the position of the female subject within the dialectic of the pornography debate. Portrait of Dora's approach to breaking frames may be summed up by a comment made by Frau K: "A body has all kinds of ways."(11) It may refer to the patriarchy's (and Freud's) rejection of variant sexual practices, but it is also suggestive of Cixous' attraction to variant textual practices - the body of the text has "all kinds of ways." This is evident especially in the play' s use of side stages, projections, screens, voices - its variant body, which reflects the body of Dora, young, exhuberant, female, and its resistance of the gender, cultural and medical apparati which seek to frame it. The luxuriousness, the complexity, the elusiveness, of the feminine body is reflected by the body of the text. The desire embedded in and expressed by these forms is "(t )he desire to be dreaded the most"(24), according to Frau K. But dreaded by the patriarchy.
It is debatable as to whether or not the narrative-making of a performer such as Annie Sprinkle, who practices on the nexus of pornography/psychoanalysis posing as porn star/therapist, is any more radical than that of these feminist dramatists, still working within many existing framing systems of the theatre. However, what Sprinkle achieves in her work is to at once position herself as author and subject of the pornographic text, which also acts as analysis for her (male) spectators. This is perhaps a strategy which eludes a playwright such as McIntyre, or even Daniels, whose work has the quality of preaching to the converted, or of attempting to persuade others. Sprinkle inhabits the economy of desire, ambushing its consumers with the contents of their 'buy.' But even though Sprinkle uses her body as a canvas it must be asked whether she ever really escape the pornographic/psychoanalytic frame? As a feminist performance artist, she may have succeeded in re-appropriating the female body, whereas McIntyre and Daniels still seem to struggle with the framing of their subjects, the choice being between ambiguity or didacticism. Cixous seems more aware of the collocation between the female body and the textual body as the site of subversion within the theatrical, written text. Her work anticipates the need to harness the non-textual power of the female body which says more than words, in order to counter the fact that play-writing is always within the 120 master's house. It is this fusion of body, text and theatrical sign that is explored in the next and final chapter. 121
CHAPTER SIX
PERFORMING BODIES, MULTIPLE SIGNS: THE PLEASURE OF THE (FEMINIST) TEXT.
"Much of(Brecht's) writing is devoted to the production ofa critical spectator, but there is an evasively scant attention to the pleasure produced by the entertainment Brecht considered such an important part of any drama."
Susan Bennett 1
"Brechtism . . . the Name does not cross its lips, it is fragmented into practices, into words which are not Names. Bringing itself to the limits of speech, in a mathesis of language which does not seek to be identified with science, the text undoes nomination, and it is this defection which approaches bliss.
Roland Barthes 2
This, the final chapter of analysis, will examine two plays which seek to challenge the nature of the dramatic through the use of the performative strategies of the female body, multiple signification and the notion of the pleasurable text, especially through the positing of the feminist and the lesbian subject/spectator. The objective of these plays seems to be the re-engendering of the theatrical space and the further inscription of possibilities of female identity, cultural or sexual. A Barthesian critique of Brechtian theory is useful in the exploration and consolidation of feminist theories of the production and reception of theatrical narratives. Susan Bennett finds that in his writings, Barthes parallels his own theories with those of Brecht focusing on the issue of critical distance in which he, like Brecht, has an interest because it points to the gap between
1 Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: A Theory ofProduction and Reception (London/New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 77 2 Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), Trans. Richard Miller, p.45 122 signifier and signified and "draws attention to the complexities and codes activated in theatrical performance." 3 The pinpointing of this locus is important to feminist theorists because it is the site where representation may be made visible as culturally constructed, but Bennett also sees Barthes' writings as exposing the pleasure produced by the gaps in the text, an issue seemingly neglected by Brecht' s theories.
Barthes has posited a reader (spectator) of the text who may situate her/himself in direct opposition to the Brechtian spectator: Imagine someone ... who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony .... Now this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure. 4
Barthes seems to advocate that this reader discard rationalism, asceticism, dialecticism ("Brechtism") in order to read the pleasurable text. This text must necessarily refuse rationalism and science which are nominative and seek to paste over the gaps in language through the reconciliation of opposites. "Brechtism," dialecticalism, and materialism all "name" their subjects and tend to preserve the binary oppositions of the dominant culture; instead, Barthes sets forth and vaildates the text of pleasure, and its more subversive extension -- the text of bliss. The text of pleasure must desire its reader/spectator, may achieve a redistribution of language through cutting and placing the two edges of language together, "the obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge" and "another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. "5 It is this seam between the two edges which Barthes terms "erotic" and it is this site, the gap between sign and signification, which is subversive and erotic, that the playwrights discussed below claim as territory in which to construct their narratives and notions of the self in relation to culture. Politics and erotics converge here and language is caught in the act of imitating itself. Mimesis is exposed. The text of pleasure may still construct
3 Op.Cit., p.65 4 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p.3 5 Ibid., p.6 123 itself in terms of Oedipal form where the pleasure is present in the desire to "denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end',6 , or it may be exceeded by the text of bliss, the form of which "imposes a state of loss, ... discomforts ... , unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language."7 The former is a product of culture while the latter breaks with culture. Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends is an example of the former while Holly Hughes' Dress Suits To Hire is an example of the latter.
It is important at this stage to note that Barthes' definition of pleasure may differ from what one would imagine Brecht to identify as pleasure. To Barthes, his notion of pleasure is the critical attitude produced by the excesses of the text and its process of exceeding social and structural functions. 8 It is likely that Brecht' s conception of pleasure produced by narrative may have involved notions of bourgeois commodification and may have invoked in him an attitude not dissimilar to his towards emotion as a suspect element of narrativity. But Barthes finds that the Left has relegated the principle of pleasure to hedonism, to the Right, the sober morality of the Left being highly suspicious of the doctrine that pleasure is the chief good. 9 Brecht's "cigars", metaphorical of the critical attitude in the spectator the alienation effect was to produce, may be seen to provide the foundations for the reconstruction of textual pleasure (pleasure as something that is 'taken' assumes an active detachment) but for the feminist critic, whose pleasure, and the means of its construction and attainment, are crucial issues: the very notion of pleasure constructed by narrative and taken by the spectator incurs the old trap of subject/object relations and begs the necessary reappropriation of desire as a strategy for readership. In Brechtian theory pleasure may be antithetical to intellectuality, but this mythic binary is conflated by Barthes and this conflation is useful to the feminist theorist: Pleasure ... is not an element of the text, it is not a naive residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect. Something neuter? It is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not
6 Ibid., p. 10 7 Ibid., pp.13-14 8 Ibid., p.19 9 Ibid., p.22 125 pleasure of the spectator in parsing the difference(s)." 14 Reinelt refers to the "Not/But," which is the aspect of sexual difference foregrounded by the feminist text. This is, to her, the locus of pleasure and it is certainly a site of pleasure in Fornes' text. Fornes displays a scepticism towards all social signification, giving the play a distinctly non-materialist (yet not cultural-) feminist base. The main concern of the narrative seems to. be a questioning of cultural and social signification and the move towards what Helene Keyssar describes as the dialogic or polyphonous text. 15 Keyssar takes Mikhail Bakhtin's deconstructions of literary narrative and applies some of his key concepts to dramatic analysis, useful when identifying and discussing dramatic form. She finds that many dramatic texts, including most ofBrecht's plays, resemble what Bakhtin identified in the novel form as "polyphonous". Bakhtin, like Brecht, demands "that we rethink what it means to accept a still-prevalent Aristotelian understanding of drama, and, then, that we query both the accuracy and the virtues - politically, socially, aesthetically - of the Aristotelian model." 16 The polyphonous text may suggest a form useful to feminist dramatic practitioners because it rejects the dominant ideology, refusing to reflect its structures in its narrative, therefore challenging the notion of a consensual field of vision. Keyssar identifies these narrative strategies especially in feminist drama in which "the spectacle and dialogue of theatre mediate but do not resolve differences; the essential strategy of these plays is to bring together diverse discourses in such a way that they interanimate each other and avoid an overarching authorial point ofview."17 It is through its questioning of sign systems and deconstruction of cultural signifiers through dramatic form that Fefu and Her Friends approaches 'polyphony'.
Fefu and Her Friends deliberately muddles its stage signs from the very beginning with the set seemingly demanding the action of a naturalist drama or a drawing-room comedy.
14 Reinelt, Janelle, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p.85 15 Keyssar, Helen, "Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends', Modem Drama, 34: 1 March 1991 16 Ibid., p.90 17 lbid., p.95 126
Fornes informs us that the play takes place in the 1930s in the living room of a New England country house, complete with French doors, terrace, sofas and occasional furniture. This in no way alerts us to the 'absurdity' of the action or the apparent lack of correlation between stage sign and signification. However, Fornes' treatment of stage speech and action are the real loci for the polyphony of the narrative. The first dialogue in the play announces the topic of the cultural representation of women. Fefu states, "My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are"18 , and the play seems to take as its subject the attitudes and behaviour of women towards each other and themselves, men being physically absent from the stage space. Fefu is convinced that women in general are "loathsome." Already the signifier has become divorced from the signified: 'woman' may or may not relate to the women present on stage; the text takes a non-mimetic stance, refusing to promise a correlation between the general and the specific, the constructed and the real. What is examined, however, is the cultural referent itself - that women are 'loathsome'. Fefu explains her fascination with the revolting: "(i)t is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest. It's there. The way worms are underneath the stone. If you don't recognize it . .. it eats you. "(7) The notion of an "elsewhere" site of feminine production is identified by the text, but considered loathsome by the dominant culture. Fefu's gest of picking up a shotgun and shooting at her husband who is outside plays on the dual meaning of the word 'revolting,' with fantasies of loathsomeness being followed by an action which disrupts conventional notions of female behaviour. The play weaves its narrative in such a manner and there seems to be some empowerment of the female gender in this shifting sign field that is only cogent for the duration of each scene. This may be explained through the motif of the shotgun game.
When Christina asks Fefu which man is her husband, Fefu aims and shoots, proclaiming "That one!", smiling and blowing the smoke from the gun. Fefu explains the rules of the game: "I shoot and he falls." Fornes' manipulation of cultural signifiers becomes evident when the origin of this motif is disclosed: (T)here is a Mexican joke where there are two Mexicans speaking at a bullfight. One says to
18 Fornes, Maria Irene, Fefu and Her Friends (New York: PAJ Publications, 1990) p.7 127
the other, "She is pretty, that one over there." The other one says, "Which one?" So the first one takes his rifle and shoots her. He says, "That one, the one that falls." 19 In her play, Fornes has reversed the gender roles and the mortality factor of the Mexican joke; the action becomes gestic of Fefu's feelings of oppression knowing her husband finds her loathsome, while his agreement seems to suggest temporary release from this oppression. It also represents the compulsion to 'play' at being what the dominant culture inscribes as 'woman.' Men are absent from the stage. Their presence is inferred through the women's narration of offstage space. Like many other plays with all-female casts, F efu plays out the notion that Women are restless with each other. They are like live wires ... either chattering to keep themselves from making contact, or else, ifthey don't chatter, they avert their eyes ... like Orpheus ... as if a god once said "and if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart." They are always eager for the men to arrive. When they do, they can put them selves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. ( 15)
But the men don't arrive and the women are left to their own devices, discussing some plans for an educational forum or convention, the shared discourse of which fails to shed the light of truth on their personal situations.
A third of the way through the play Emma cheerfully asserts that "Theatre is life. If we're showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre."(22) It is this notion which is taken up by the play and is proven to be double-sided. If theatre is life, then rightfully it should reflect in its representations all cultural oppressions as fact, the result of which Brecht has argued posits these oppressions as wtchangeable. Fornes' text persists in a Barthesian way of highlighting the gap between signifier and signified. This notion is demonstrated in the play's 'word gest.' The women philosophise: "(P)eople act as if they don't have genitals. . .. I mean, how can business men and women stand in a room and discuss business without even one reference to their genitals .... everybody has them. They just pretend they don't." (27-28) Within the group, Fefu is honoured as the mainspring of knowledge, and yet her credibility is sometimes questioned by her friends: Emma improvises an effigy ofFefu, others debate her 'honesty', her 'truthfulness'. The women read and question epistemologies of truth: sonnets, proverbs, dreams; they practise
19 Fornes, Maria Irene, "I write these messages that come" 1DR, 21 :4 December 1977 124
because it is immoral but because it is atopic. 10
Feminist playwrights have taken the notion of pleasure (and the attendant representation of desire) and made of it something revolutionary, applying it to a variety of issues and representations, in a way that is Barthesian more than Brechtian. Barthes' notion of pleasuring the reader/spectator furthers feminist theory's interest in narrativity which, as De Lauretis suggested, requires a "rereading of the sacred texts" and the positing of "a different practice, and a different desire." 11 This discussion will, however, return to forms of gestus, which Dolan has described as potentially re-framing the female body and making cultural assumptions about women visible, as well as making their differences constructable.12 Following Dolan, Iris Smith has suggested that Brecht's notion of gestus is a strategy that "allow(s) disenfranchised spectators and actors to develop new forms of spectatorial pleasure."13 The plays discussed below may be said to all come from marginalised, if not disenfranchised positions, in terms of their authors' cultural contexts, the subjects they represent and the approaches to narrative form that place each play outside of the mainstream of conventional theatricality. The multiplicity of the subject and the pleasure of the spectator is accented by each.
Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends focuses on cultural constructions of the female subject and represents its illuminations through the form, style, and positioning of the spectator rather than through characterisation and action. The characters are more like aspects of 'woman' as cultural signifier. The action and language are replaced by a form of feminist gest. The structure of the play defies spectatorial conventions, generating a pleasure which inscribes it as above the everyday, reflective of the dominant culture but severed from and no longer a product of it. It is appropriate here to refer to Reinelt's location of pleasure in the Brechtian/Feminist text: "The objective of the performance becomes the heightening of the experience of the Not and also of the
10 Ibid., p.23 11 Alice Doesn't, p. l 07 12 Dolan, ft.I.I, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), pp.8-9 13 Smith, Iris, "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theater'', Theatre Journal, 43:4 December 1991, p.494 128 speeches, play croquet, heat soup, mix drinks, engage in water fights. What is the purpose of their gathering? What is the sum of these various activities? The men are not present in the master's house. In fact, it seems to be more Fefu's house than her husband's. We are witnessing the first activities of a group of women left to their own "loathsome" devices within the unattended house of the master. Fefu is simply mistress of ceremonies.
The character of Julia is the play's locus of the cultural 'problem' of woman. She is wheelchair-bound after a mysterious shooting accident in which Fefu may or may not have been involved, and suffers from hallucinations ( although Fornes stresses she must not display the behaviour of a mad person). Through these hallucinations which take the form of monologues, Julia invokes the nature of her oppressors; "'they" are male, patriarchal image-makers and they readily resort to inflicting bodily injury on those who don't obey them. "They" control definitions and images of woman and enforce these 'truths' through 'prayer': The human being is of the masculine gender.... Woman is not a human being. She is: 1--A mystery. 2 -Another species. 3 -As yet undefined. 4 - Unpredictable. (35) Deborah Geis finds that Fornes uses monologues to "locate the female speaking subject - itself a site for complex oscillations of signifier and signifieds - as a medium for pursuing this question at the level of theatrical language".20 Julia's monologic discourse of the self is interrupted by a kind of gestic 'action' especially when she deviates from or criticises the ideology of the prayer: she endures an invisible slap which demonstrates the insidious and all-pervasive nature of this ideology. Fornes' text aims at a counter aesthetic, one which refutes the notion that narrative aims at mass identification, and instead, as Cecilia explains, teaches "how to be sensitive to the differences in ourselves as well as outside ourselves"( 44 ). But none of the speeches the women formulate on the role of the educator and tools for learning help them to understand the differences between themselves and Julia whose body has physicalised the restraints of the
20 Geis, Deborah R., "Wordscapes of the Body: Performative Language as Gestus in Maria Irene Fomes's Plays" Theatre Journal, 42:3 October 1990, p.296 129 patriarchy. Infuriated by her incapacitation, Fefu believes Julia can walk but is being 'weak', and attempts to pull and shake her to her feet. She goes outside to shoot a rabbit but it is Julia who appears wounded. There appears is a gestic conflation between Fefu's action and Julia's status as victim/rabbit, to highlight the difference in status of Julia and Fefu, and yet their interconnectedness. Geis has noted how Julia's imprisonment in language is visually 'stated' by the confinement of her body to the wheelchair: "To some extent, Julia's condition is a representation of the oppression suffered by all of the women in the play; in this sense her paralysis has a "gestic" quality. "21 The cultural meaning is clear in the Mexican joke, but the gest which operates at the moment when Fefu shoots the rabbit and the wound appears on Julia is ambiguous. What does it signify, or is the gest open to interpretation? Sontag has noted that rather than enforcing pedagogical structures based on patriarchal sign systems, Fornes criticises the reader's conventional, conditioned longing for initiation and instruction through the learned, literary text.22 Fornes' use of gest must be read intra-textually as well as intertextually; it refers to the gaps in its own text-making processes, as well as referring to the broader cultural image-making processes. Geis finds that the death of Julia is necessary and symbolises the end of these women's paralysis within a male world. 23 However, this gestic termination of the narrative may just as equally demonstrate the polarisation of women by the discourse of feminism, with some aspects of the feminine being branded as undesirable. The 'pleasure' of learning, of controlling discourse, of 'reading' which the women attempt to master during their stay at Fefu's house is counterbalanced by their displeasure at occupying the site of femaleness, and throws into question both notions of discourse and gender construction.
It is the spatial and spectatorial aspects of Fefu and Her Friends which have garnered much of the critical discussion surrounding the play. The first part of the play is to be viewed by the audience in a conventional theatre space, from the auditorium area. In the second part of the play the audience is to be divided into four groups, each group being
21 Ibid., p.297 22 Sontag, Susan, Preface to Maria Irene Fornes: Plays (New York: P AJ Plays, 1985) 23 Op.Cit., p.298 130 led to separate spaces where the scenes are performed simultaneously, the audience rotating until all scenes have been performed and viewed in their spaces by all of the groups. For the third part of the play the audience is returned to the auditorum where they view the last section of the play as one group. 24 While this effect was apparently not intended in the first draft of the play (Fornes thought of the idea when viewing spaces the play might be performed in) the result is a challenging of spatial, temporal and spectatorial unity which is implicit in the narrative proper of the play and accentuated by this staging, transforming the roles of both narrative and spectator. Scenes staged simultaneously tend to challenge the notion of a fixed subject and spectator position and further amplify the notion of the text as polyphonous, of the stage signs as multiple. Keyssar has noted that the re-positioning of the audience in the second part of the play functions in a different way to interactive theatre of the 1960s, the object of which was to confound the roles of performer and spectator. Keyssar would seem to suggest that this play's viewing context forges a multiple identification between female spectator and performers, raising questions of subjectivity and identity: with each viewing of each scene "our position as audience members is re-accentuated and our relationship to the characters is re-mediated ... ; each character's telling of the tale re-mediates my relationship to all of the characters and their various meanings. "25 That this play fosters a pleasurable catharsis between performer and female spectator without depending upon and reinscribing culturally fixed positions seems to be the main achievement of the play that is isolated by Keyssar. But the play's strategy for reception also acknowledges its own construction of the site at which the nexus between the pleasure and displeasure experienced by the female spectator is located. The effect of the play is therefore not Aristotelian, nor is it Brechtian: Barthesian and Balchtinian perspectives of pleasure and polyphony are more relevant to the structure and strategy of Fornes' text.
Even though the play is •set' within the master's house, there is a degree of re construction achieved within these bounds. With the master and his ~ absent from the
24 Fomes., notes to Fefa and Her Friends, p.4 25Keyssar, 131 text, the female subject(s) preside over the spatio-temporal form of the play and ascribe to it a polyphony only achievable in his absence. At the play's conclusion, Fefu seems to acknowledge her complicity in the shooting of Julia. Fefu drops the shot rabbit to walk to Julia while all the women enter from the other spaces and surround Julia. This final gest, however, seems to demonstrate what the play set up at its outset that within the master's house, and left to their own devices, women will be "loathsome," their 'revolt' inverted and directed towards each other or themselves. This is a preoccupation found in many plays by women where the 'protective' cladding of a house (present as space, image or metaphor) defines the form of the play and the actions of its female inhabitants. It may be a manor house as in Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House, a prisonhouse, as in Marsha Norman's Getting Out26 or Megan Terry's Babes in the Bighouse, or a 'funnyhouse' or asylum, as in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. In this last play, as in the others, the house is representative of the wider cultural constraints suffered by the woman inhabitant, and duplicated in the playwright's formal experiments to convey this confinement. But all of these plays suggests that de/re-construction of the house is impossible and habitation of it, unbearable. The "elsewhere" is yet to be attained. In the following play, Holly Hughes' Dress Suits To Hire, it seems as though the "elsewhere" site has been found, the new house constructed, and the inhabitants settled in. Just how 'settled' their position is will be examined.
Holly Hughes is a playwright who writes from the margins of culture and addresses the issue of lesbian identity through varying approaches to theatrical form. Based with the WOW cafe in Manhattan, Hughes credits the group with giving her "a whole different kind of approach to feminist performance"27 . This approach was fostered by the atmosphere of the cafe which through 'drag party' nights allowed virtually anybody to become a performer. Cross-dressing, masquerade and cabaret as performative strategies
26 Patricia R. Schroeder finds in Norman's and Kesselman's plays metaphoric references to the theatre as prison, challenging the practice of the female playwright, who must balance realism with experimentalism see "Locked Behind the Proscenium: Feminist Strategies in Getting Out and My Sister in This Huuse" Modem Drama 32: I March 1989 27 Schneider, Rebecca, "Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist" 1DR 33:l Spring 1989 132 contributed to the anti-narrative approach to theatrical form favoured by Hughes in her plays. The presence of women performers only, many of them lesbian, led gender and its depiction to become a theatrical device, and in most of Hughes' plays the butch/femme aesthetic of lesbian role-playing is used to pluralise characterisation, narrative form and 'pleasure', for the lesbian spectator, the debate surrounding gender construction. The pleasure of the female performers/writers dominates the text and determines the form it takes, which is rare in feminist, or any other kind of professional theatre. Pleasure and desire become actual structural devices in the production as well as the reception of the text, and the main guide for the construction of female subjectivity.
Mary Russo finds subversive power in the image of a woman making a spectacle of herself, especially through the asymmetries offered by the act of transvestism. 28 Such a spectacle is theatricalised by Hughes in Dress Suits To Hire, based on an idea suggested to Hughes by WOW founders Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, concerning two women who operated a tuxedo rental shop. The idea was charged with potential to explore the asymmetries afforded through transvestism, the swapping of gender roles, and the cultural and spatial elements that govern a relationship between two women. What Hughes eventually made of the idea in Dress Suits To Hire was neither as simple as transvestism, cross-dressing, nor the cultural limitations of gender roles. For the . relationship between the two female characters, Michigan and Deeluxe, Hughes drew upon the lesbian butch/femme aesthetic and all of the cultural signifiers that it invokes: the erotic gender symbols associated with male and female identities but inscribed upon and performed pluralistically by one or more individuals of the female gender. To this extent, 'character', or theatricalised identities and the self-spectacles they perform, provide the substance of the play: narrative notions of plot and action are secondary concerns to the free inscriptions of pluralistic subjectivity found in Dress Suits.
For a culturally marginal playwright who has emerged only within. the last few years, Holly Hughes' work has garnered much attention from critics, theorists and funding
28 Russo, Mary, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory", in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies 133 bodies for the Arts. The reason for this focus has much to do with the cultural position from which she writes and the effect this position has on her approach to questions of form, aesthetics and representations. Hughes seems to practise the theories discussed for some time by feminists such as Irigaray and Monique Wittig concerning the subversiveness of the lesbian paradigm: Irigaray's view of lesbians in society is that of the goods that get together and "refuse to go to markef'29 , or establish their own market. This is seen in Hughes' plays, performed by and for women, often or mostly lesbian. Wittig sees the lesbian as the paradigm which challenges the signifiers of 'man' and 'woman', dialectically united by the 'copula' and suggestive of the entire socio-symbolic order. 30 Both theories are essential to this discussion because they address issues of appropriating the materialist conditions of production, essential if women are to gain control of the image-making apparati and challenge the symbolic order which only allows a certain type of image-manufacture to reflect its ideologies as true/real. Wittig is especially relevant to Hughes because she has discussed the structure of the dominant culture as it is determined by the "straight mind" around binary oppositions, and it is these oppositions that Hughes has attempted to appropriate and nullify in the structure, imagery and representations of her plays, through the iconography of the lesbian butch/femme aesthetic.
This is also pertinent to the need to expropriate the Brechtian aesthetic, since it also operates in terms of the dialectical oppositions between binaries, confident in the belief that rational oscillation between two poles of signifiers, epistemologies, etc., would seem to posit an utopian or at least rationalist, change-seeking, problem-solving, perspective. The lesbian position as articulated by Wittig would suggest that this is impossible, because as a mode of thought, Brechtian "ideology" revalidates the very structures it criticises, reflecting in its own discourse the symbolic order of the dominant culture. Brechtian theory is, of course, a discourse of heterosexuality, and fits quite neatly into the other disciplines, theories, and ideas that cohere to form the "straight mind". Wittig gives
29 Irigaray, Luce, see "When the Goods Get Together" in New French Feminisms 30 Wittig, Monique, "The Straight Mind" Feminist Issues I: I Summer 1980, p. l 08 134 a portrait of the straight mind and the problematic centrality of ideology and dialecticism to its functioning: In spite of the historic advent of the lesbian, feminist, and gay liberation movements, whose proceedings have already upset the philosophical and political categories of the discourses of the social sciences, their categories ... concern "woman," "man," "sex," "difference," and all the series of concepts which bear this mark, including such concepts as "history," "culture," and the "real." And although it has been accepted in recent years that ... everything is culture, there remains within that culture a core which resists examination, a relationship excluded from the social in the analysis ... the hetero sexual relationship. I will call it the obligatory social relationship between "man" and "woman." ... With its ineluctability as knowledge, as an obvious principle, as a given prior to any science, the straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time. I can only under-line the oppressive character that the straight mind is clothed in in its tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individuals ... giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality or thought which produces the difference between the sexes as a political and philosophical dogma. 31
This passage has been quoted at length because it begins to convey the magnitude of the problem for the theorist or the practitioner whose cultural position is not already defined by the patriarchal binary code and the dialectical ideology that has always governed discourse within the patriarchy. Such a view as Wittig's makes the Brechtian dialectic seem less than subversive indeed, and highly inadequate when attempting to portray, let alone change, "oppression" unless it is already recognised by the patriarchal symbolic order. 32 The one keynote of Wittig's discussion of the straight mind which parallels Brechtian theory is her critique of the tendency to universalise, to generalise, without historicising. This criticism feeds the notion of the multiple sign, the revitalisation of the spectatorial role, and the reconstruction of the subject position, all of which are taken up by Hughes as a lesbian playwright. The idea of the subject position as lesbian, as refusing to go to market, and as producing its own dialectic and gestic operations without referring to an immediate social or materialist basis, perhaps only to a hidden subculture, would have been unthinkable (perhaps) to Brecht. The closest Brecht's sensibility may have come to such a manipulation of the theatrical signifier in defiance of the dominant
31 Wittig, pp.106-107 32 Class and race oppression are visible in this way, but 'woman' without the dialectical complement, 'man,' is not visible, nor therefore is the lesbian position, hence lesbians are not 'seen' as oppressed. 135 culture's paradigm may have been in some of the more homo-erotic spectacles produced by Weimar cabaret, where free-play with gender signification was fairly commonplace.
Jill Dolan has identified the WOW Cafe as a place where theatre is not a cultural forum
"used to promote the dominant culture's economic and political ends"33 , but where the lesbian performers "bend both gender and genre ... free from the dominant culture's judgements".34 Dolan has basically summed up what it is about the performances at the WOW Cafe that has appeared to defy existing cultural and ideological constructions of gender identity: "Performers dress in male and female drag while maintaining lesbian identities, so that the performances become not about men, and not about women, but about lesbians"; in this way, lesbian performance "replaces the historically heterosexual male axis of categorization", and during this process, "the way theatre communicates its ideological meanings between performers and spectators is thrown into high relief. "35 Dolan claims that this is something most feminist theorists believed the theatrical apparatus could not withstand; it is certainly only produced by the fact that the representation of lesbian sexuality, by lesbian performers to lesbian spectators, sufficiently removes the theatrical frame from the symbolic order of the dominant culture. The work of Holly Hughes is characteristic of and synonymous with that of the WOW Cafe -- Hughes is still their most prolific and oft discussed practitioner. By returning to a discussion of Dress Suits To Hire and the theatricalisation of the butch/femme aesthetic, we may see how the lesbian paradigm exposes and challenges the heterosexual ontology of the 'other' which constitutes the dominant culture, replacing it with the multiple sign and the performing body. But as well as the political imperative behind such an endeavour, the pursuit of spectatorial pleasure by the WOW Cafe should not be underestimated. It is this pursuit that allows Hughes to manipulate the theatrical sign and foreground the virtuoisty of the female body in performance in a way that is
33 Dolan, Jill, "Feminists, lesbians, and other women in theatre: thoughts on the politics of performance", Women in Theatre (Cambridge University Press) p.204 34 Ibid. *Note that this observation seems to have been made before the Holly Hughes/NEA Funding debacle where Hughes was de-funded due to the sexual orientation of her performance texts: funding would provide economic visibility, therefore it was withdrawn, prompting Hughes' return to the lesbian 'marketplace'. 35 Ibid., p.205 136 immediately recognised and consumed by the lesbian spectator, broadening notions of the ( feminist) pleasurable text, which displays the Bathesian elements of subversiveness, scandal and gender evasiveness.
The play begins with Deeluxe singing a blues-type song that tells of obsessive love; Michigan sits facing her and mouths the words to the song. The play establishes the notion of 'same but different', two sides of one identity, from the very beginning with Michigan mentioning that Deeluxe is her sister, a body she discovered many years ago, a man, part palomino, all cat ... the lesbian spectator recognises these signifiers as denoting a female lover, while avoiding the heterosexual paradigm of 'woman.' The overall linguistic structure of the play depends upon alternating monologues delivered by Michigan, then Deeluxe, which act as narrations and inscriptions of their subject positions, detailing their origins, histories, as defined by identity and desire, each monologue punctuated with signifiers referring to lesbian subculture: Michigan tells us she was "(b )orn in that cold snap spring won't come time of year. Under the sign of Go Fish. "36 The dialogue is circuitous, returning to notions of lesbian existence, desire and relationship dynamics. The enacting of butch and femme roles forms the 'action' of the play with various stages of dress and undress, the striking of poses that play with ideas of seduction, femme fatale performance, and the 'camping' or fetishisation of cultural signifiers of 'woman' and 'man' as they are tranformed into lesbian 'ritual:' (T)he two begin to dress for the ritual. MICHIGAN holds up a pair of pink high-heeled cow-boy boots as DEELUXE removes a pair of rhinestone earrings with fetishistic attentiveness. DEELUXE picks up a toothpick while MICHIGAN sticks a wad of bubblegum in her mouth. They reach behind the hanging suits to pull out a pair of day-glo hula hoops. As MICHIGAN begins to cross downstage center, DEELUXE puts on a cowboy hat .... MICHIGAN drops her hoop. Music up, it's the instrumental theme from "A Man and a Woman." DEELUXE crosses to center stage moving as much like a cowboy as you can in a strapless gown and heels. DEELUXE snaps her hula hoop over to MICHIGAN so that it rolls past her, then boomerangs back. MICHIGAN catches it. (139)
36 Hughes, Holly, Dress Suits To Hire in TDR 33: 1 Spring 1989, p.134. *Note that "Go Fish" is a subculture term for lesbian sexual orientation. 137
This sequence is fairly paradigmatic of the theatricalisation of the butch/femme dynamic and the parodic attitude of the text to society's privileging of the heterosexual 'copula', satirised in the use of the musical theme to a film which iconises heterosexual romance, and the 'business' or gest with the hula hoops. The very theatrical sight of a woman's body assuming a man's walk, but while dressed in strapless gown and heels demonstrates a camp sensibility which allows a break with the mimetic tradition, but also acts as a gestic moment in which we identify the exact method of gender attitude.
This would suggest camp be read as a form of gest, and there are similarities between the two. Sue-Ellen Case has noted that camp's "send-up of genres also sends up all the other stable mechanisms for identity"37 and its effect is not unlike the way gest throws a new light on significatory processes. Whereas Sontag has identified camp as disengaged from political theory, a lesbian use of camp by playwrights such as Hughes (and Sarah Daniels) would suggest otherwise. Yet even Sontag suggests that camp in performance has traces of subversiveness as it involves "going against the grain of one's sex"38 , and this idea of going against the grain has been discussed earlier on as a Brechtian strategy. Sontag has suggested that camp sees everything in quotation marks, and in this way it is also Brechtian, incurring both a distanciation and literarisation, while the phrase 'camping it up' equally suggests the 'big' acting, the generalisation gestus and Brechtian acting require. This is evident in Dress Suits To Hire where Hughes instructs that Deeluxe sing "a la Bela Lugosi, i.e., lots of rolling eyebrows", striking a different pose at the end of each phrase, or that Michigan "strikes poses of terror in unison" with Deeluxe's singing (135). The way the characters 'put on' gender as they would costumes, and just as easily remove them to enact a different role has a Brechtian effect of exposing gender as a cultural construction. The ease with which this is done by the characters suggests the fundamental alterability of gender roles outside of cultural restrictions and within a subcultural environment. Camp fulfils the Brechtian requirements of making the everyday strange since, as Michael Bronski has observed, it involves "a re-imagining of
37 Case, Su~Ellen, "The Power of Sex", p.243 38 Sontag, Susan, "Notes on Camp" in Against Interpretation (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967) 138 the material world into ways and forms which transform and comment upon the original. " 39 If camp has a gestic function it is to suggest the possibilities of the self that may exist outside of the dominant culture's expectations.
Dress Suits to Hire was intended by Hughes to portray a world which was "a microcosm of the whole lesbian situation',40, and in this sense its concerns and its manipulation of the theatrical signifier place it outside patriarchal or Brechtian notions. But what exactly, in Hughes' view, is the lesbian situation? The play's use of form and imagery returns again and again to the lesbian body as the focus of this 'situation.' The figuring of the lesbian body has no cultural referents: a multitude of animal signifiers, mostly wild41 , are employed to denote the lesbian body, as well as substances or elements such as mud, ice, and fire. Hughes gives each character alternating monologues through which they relate their subjectivity, their identification of their bodies as lesbian. Michigan, growing up, was her family's (and the town's) "first robin of disaster" (135) and at thirteen she "got bit" with lesbian desire (139). Deeluxe's monologue about her home town describes herself as a "young girl with mud on the brain" and the town talk of her lesbianism which was only "the half of it" (137). But it is Deeluxe who expresses dissatisfaction with the "lesbian situation." She talks of wanting something else that's "not in this shop ( and) may not even be on this block" ( 136). Her interaction with Michigan consists mostly of games of leaving and staying, and displays of desire. Even the mechanical dog Linda barks to be let "outside" and at one point Deeluxe screams "It's not forever I want!" ( 138). But California, the place Deeluxe wants to go is, says Michigan, tatooed on her body. Deeluxe can see it, and stay. Michigan sings that love is a woman's "whole happiness." (143) For her, lesbian desire is like "clothes you put on and can't take off ... (l)ike a silk straight jacket." (150) Is their romantic love simply a conventional cladding after all, a straight jacket?
39 Bronski, Michael, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), p.42 40 Schneider interview, p.175 41 *Animals such as dogs, snakes and foxes, usually connotative of the male, are employed by the text. 139
Hughes reinvokes Wittig's 'straight mind' but replaces it with the lesbian signifier, the binary of 'sisters', 'twins', butch/femme, suggesting the 'perilous' excitement of desire not defined by difference, but also the ability to share the gaze through mutual subjectivity, mutual pleasure at the alternating of roles: MICIDGAN: I been more than looking. I been watching. That's looking with a reason. DEELUXE: What's the reason? MICIDGAN: 'Cause you're my kind of star. DEELUXE: What's that? MICIDGAN: A falling star. Wanna see one? It's a nice night for viewing. Rare to see so many binaries. DEELUXE: What's binaries? MICIDGAN: Doubles. A pair of stars so close they cannot escape each other. DEELUXE: Close as sisters? MICIDGAN: Closer. Like twins. DEELUXE: How come they stay together? MICIDGAN: Gravity .... And the closer they get the worse it gets .... The pull, and then it's ... kaboom. But there's that moment right before the end when they're the brightest thing on Second Avenue. Just a big red nova. (144-145) It is interesting to note that in this speech Hughes conflates binaries: she converts them from opposites to 'twins'. The world of the play refuses the 'straight mind' which operates on notions of gender difference. To return to the notion of Dress Suits as an essentially Barthesian rather than Brechtian text: Hughes' play splits the "moral unity that society demands of every human product',42 , its semantic signifying a "class eroticism"43 that is not materialist but lesbian, its relish for language drawing upon signifiers produced substantially by the 'private' tropes of the lesbian subculture, with few referents to the dominant culture. Is the Brechtian dialectic part of the straight mind itself because it can only think in terms of opposites?
The production and reception of this play place it successfully outside of the 'master's house', with other tools having been instrumental in its construction. The sense of
42 The Pleasure of the Tert., p.31 43 Ibid., p.38 140 detachment is sufficient enough to allow a surreal vision of the future narrated by Deeluxe from a letter delivered by the "dead" Little Peter in which women "replace the world", their tears forming diamonds which will be worn as pinky rings by "all the men who kill (women) for a Iiving."(152) At the moment of this speech, a hand appears at the window with a pinky ring announcing that the future Michigan claimed they'd never see is already a reality. This final gest supplies an instance of historicisation achieved through both a projection into the future and a conflation into the present. We become aware that a house separate to the 'master's' exists, but that the new and real danger is that it may be appropriated or annexed by the dominant culture, or the danger that an "in" group has sole rights to habitation. May lesbian pleasure, desire and the body, be forced to go to market?
The Brechtian signifier does not point to the universal, the unchangeable: it points to the fact that there are alternatives possible. Michigan states "The moon could be anything she wants" (135), and at the roots of this text is the desire to access the ability to choose cultural cladding, to self-evolve. Hughes' play seems to hark back to that early feminist interpretation of gest seen in Megan Terry's Calm Down Mother: the fluidity of feminine ( selt)representation. Iris Smith has noted that a feminist version of the Brechtian signifier would point to "an absent sign, that of the (feminist) spectator's lived response.',44 Crucial to this activity is the acknowledgement of pleasure in engaging with the very roles she is trying to abandon. Sue-Ellen Case, in her description of the largely non lesbian reception of Dress Suits To Hire at Ann Arbor, objected to the fact that she could not anticipate or categorise what the heterosexual spectators saw when the performers wore 'drag' and therefore claimed the play lacked the ability to resist cooptation. 45 In this way she herself is rejecting the free play of meaning allowed by the Brechtian/Feminist theatrical sign. In her letter to Hughes, Case also finds fault with the text itself, which she claims to be riddled with heterosexual/sexist tropes. 46 Case misreads Hughes' text. She sees Hughes' use of imagery - Cheverolets, snakes coiling
44 Smith, Iris, "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theater" Theater Journal 43:4 December 1991, p.495 41 "A Case Concerning Hughes" IDR 33 :4 Wmter 1989, p.12 46 lbid. 141 and uncoiling, cowboy boots, tatoos, exploding trick cigars - as mere concessions to the phallic iconography of a Sam Shepard. Rather, they are there to 'balance' the images of sherry, satin, pinkness, collapsing centres. In effect, Hughes is performing the aesthetic of gender binaries; parading the fact that the lesbian has, but may not want, access to both. Lesbian desire conflates the binary structure of the 'straight mind'. Hughes is suspicious of a fresh, unspoiled utopia, having referred to this possibility as a "Lesbian Disneyland". To evade this ideological position, Hughes' text switches from butch to femme as fast as the characters switch clothes. And this determines the form of the play which Case finds (annoyingly) hard to pin down.
In Fefu and Her Friends, we see the master's house in the process of spatial deconstruction. This is achieved through the house/stage being divided and the transforming of the (female) audience's spectatorial experience into a polyphonous one. Fornes' staging of Fefu and Her Friends extends Cixous' use of adjunctive stages in Portrait of Dora as a means of representing the desire for an "elsewhere" of female performance, a separateness of female subjectivity and a pleasurable female spectatorship. The simultaneous and repetitive staging of scenes in F efu affords the female spectator spectatorial pleasure in the breaking of frames: especially the breaking of the proscenium frame, and of the spatio-temporal frame. Cultural frames, however, are demonstrated by the text to be a little more difficult to break, and this play only achieves a bending of them through the use of gest. The shooting game, and the killing of Julia forces the audience to question the cultural codification of women, even while suggesting that women are loathsome when without men. But the context and environment of the master's house must, and is, taken into account by the play and a reading of it. Consequently, the play generates pleasure and displeasure simultaneously. The relationship of deconstruction, inhabitation and subversion are brought into play. In Holly Hughes' Dress Suits To Hire, much seems to have been accomplished in terms of de/re-construction of a feminist practice, and perhaps it has only been accomplished by Hughes' textual orientation which may be defined as 'queer.' Queer presupposes an "elsewhere" and helps to explain the leap in aesthetic distance between Foriies' play and 142 that of Hughes. Other factors that contribute to this leap are the reliance on performative strategies rather than on textual elements. and the deliberate 'perversion' of the binary norms of the dominant culture that evokes more than the highly consumable aesthetics of camp. Pleasure in this play is located at the nexus of the reversal of the 'straight mind' (the knowledge that lesbians could duplicate these structures. as has been demonstrated with the butch/femme aesthetic) and the knowledge that they can refuse and transform them. Hughes theatricalises both the element of freedom and entrapment in the performance of lesbian as role. On the juncture of Feminist and Brechtian, Hughes shows how the object of pleasure is made.
Finally what is being exposed on stage is a spectacle of women as no-one within the dominant culture would want to see them. That is, the separatist staging of unnamable desire. Dress Suits offers the painful sight/site mythologised in The Bacchae (and suggested by the separatism in The Lysistrata). which here differs markedly to its representation in Rites. A Mouthful of Birds and The Love of the Nightingale. Its main difference stems from the fact that it caters to the lesbian spectator; the mythological frame of the male gaze has been removed. Sue-Ellen Case's argument implies that it can be re-applied, as witnessed by the heterosexual viewing context of the Ann Arbor production of Dress Suits. 41 However. Hughes has already accounted for this possibility in the text itself The play's final gest with the appearance of the hand at the window (not to mention the presence of the errant Little Peter) states that in spite of the re-building of the house. the frame may always be reapplied. The master may decide to move in next door. or even break in. And perhaps it is just as well. Hughes explains her perspective in a vitriolic response to Case's criticism of the play's cynicical attitude towards separatism:
Thank you for showing us that lesbianism is a tree house looking down on the dominant culture's backyard, that patriarchal desert .... Ms. Case is right to say that Dress Suits To Hire doesn't dovetail with the notion oflesbianism as a clubhouse. She may have inadvertently stumbled upon the heart of the play: I wrote about the impossibility of withdrawing from the world. The world has a way of creeping in through the cracks of any separate reality. I maybe have even been a wee bit critical of this isolationist desire. So Dress Suits is not clubhouse material.48
47 Letter from Case to Hughes "A Case Concerning Hughes" TDR 33:4 Winter 1989, pp.10-13 48 Ibid., Letter from Hughes to Case, pp.15-16 143
It seems that Hughes identifies the desire to own the theatrical frame, to apply exclusionist policies to questions of aesthetics, as faulty and liable to breed oppression. She rejects the notion of clubhouse on the basis of the 'us and them' mentality it fosters and her wariness of such traps is present in the textuality of the play itself. Deeluxe and Michigan are only renting their premises, and their dress suits, the signification of gender roles, are 'to hire,' not to buy. No-one owns anything. Nor should they want to. Deeluxe and Michigan's oppression stems from the belief that they 'own' each other. The play theatricalises a warning against conflating the feminist need for a desire of one's own into a desire to own. Hughes demonstrates in this play the house as frame: that the feminist "elsewhere" is just another frame. It too should be questioned, manipulated, and at times resisted. There is always the need to explore, then explode, to appropriate, then expropriate, form. 144
CONCLUSION
"Brecht' s theory is not an endorsement of a separation of elements or of the gestic technique or of epic construction as such; he continually emphasizes the particular ends to which theater must direct its craft and the need to remain open toward the value ( or dis-value) of any particular means to those ends." DanaPolan1
Dana Polan's comment suggests, as this argument has proved, that the appropriation of aesthetics is part of a process that includes evolution and expropriation, and that this notion is already implicit in Brecht's theorising, even if it is not demonstrated in his practice. Janelle Reinelt, when assessing the value of an intertextual reading ofBrechtian and feminist dramaturgy, felt that
(w)hile Brecht's own representations of gender and sexual difference are subject to severe critique from a feminist perspective, ... two aspects ofBrecht's theory transcend the historical and patriarchal limitations of his discourse. I refer to his persistent antagonism to closed systems of representation and his emphasis on constructing a specifically socialist paradigm. 2
Brecht' s resisting of narrative confinements which mimetically reflect the structure of the 'master's house' of patriarchal culture has constituted the main attraction for the (socialist) feminist playwright The separation of the elements, the isolation for discussion of aspects of epic theatre such as gest, alienation effects, and the role of the spectator, has supported the notion of the need to deconstruct not only the expectations which surround the theatrical text in print and performance, but Brecht' s own strategies and how they may have been appropriated and altered by the feminist dramatist. In the final analysis, to return to Polan' s comment, it is the flexibility of the Brechtian paradigm which is crucial to the feminist endeavour; the belief that the theatrical signifier does not always display complicity with cultural signifiers, but may work "against the grain" of
1 Polan, Dana, "The Politics of a Brechtian Aesthetics," in The Political Language of Film and the Avant farde (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), pp.79-99 Reinelt, Janelle, After Brecht: British Epic lheater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p.82 145 established sign systems, the means constantly being reviewed in terms of how useful they are for attaining the ends.
This thesis has examined the re-validation and politicisation of elements excluded from, overlooked, or merely foreshadowed by, Brechtian dramaturgy. Chapter One has looked at three plays in which the appropriation of gest is evident. Trafford Tanzi is a neat Brechtian exercise that demonstrates the ease with which Brechtian theory can be given a feminist twist in practice, with gest providing a foundation for the platforming of feminist issues. Cloud Nine shows an acknowledgement of epic techniques such as alienation and historicisation, but concentrates on the Brechtian signifier in order to 'alienate' gender positions and cultural constructions of sexual preference, using gest in a way that presents not only the material conditions which produce gender, but the inner life as well. Calm Down Mother reveals an 'organic,' fluid interpretation of gest - through Terry's invention of 'transformations' in which the female performer totally eludes the cultural signifier, demonstrating the capacity to 'self-evolve' in front of the audience's gaze.
Chapter Two examined the need for departures from realism by the feminist text, and through the appropriation of mythic narratives, how this departure may be realised through dramatic form. Whereas Brecht refused the Aristotelian narrative, his plays still demonstrated a mimetic approach to the female protagonist within the narrative. Rites, A Mouthful of Birds and The Love of the Nightingale all challenge this construction of woman through the idea of female violence, through the appropriation of the classical pre-text, The Bacchae. C~apter Three considered Brecht's notion of historicisation and how it may assist narrative charting of 'herstory' by the feminist playwright. Queen Christina and The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs showed a historicisation of the female subject, foregrounding the issue of 'difference,' past and present.
Chapter Four argued for the dialectical value of rejected theatrical devices such as . catharsis and identification, finding parallel between them and the need for the feminist
ERRATUM The summaries of Chapters Two and Three should occur in the reverse order. 146 playwright to work through cultural constructions of the feminine. My Mother Said I Never Should and Tissue not only tackle issues that immediately engage the emotions of the spectator and appeal to subjectivity, but demonstrate the subversive potential of an 'emotive' structuring of form. Chapter Five looked at the way in which the theatrical frame can reproduce cultural frames, and the way in which an interpretation of Brecht' s distanciation and the removal of the 'fourth wall' could dismantle the male gaze as it operates in theatre. Masterpieces and Portrait of Dora take up the framing of the female subject by pornography and psychoanalysis and demonstrate the ways in which a re radicalising of theatrical form may challenge these frames.
Finally, Chapter Six examines what is achieved when de/re-construction is completed, and whether formal experimentation can ever really cease. Fefu and Her Friends and Dress Suits To Hire both focus on the site of the feminist/lesbian body, challenging notions of theatrical space and performance. By the last play in the discussion it seems that an "elsewhere" of feminist textual production has been arrived at. The elements discussed in these chapters are perceived to work in harmony with, or develop upon, the elemental objectives and means of the Brechtian/Epic repertoire of theatrical effects and approaches to form, revitalising Brechtian theory and renewing its potential in the postmodem age. The appropriation and expropriation of Brechtian dramaturgy may have saved the work of this author from becoming fully ensconsed in the academic canon of dramatic literature (the 'master's house') and may have helped ensure the subversive longevity Brecht craved at the end of his theorising when settling upon the need for a dialectical theatre.
It may also be important to consider that what Reinelt suggests in the dialectical relationship between Brechtism and Feminism as case of "Strange Bedfellows"3 may actually make more sense if Fuegi's allegations of Brecht's appropriation of women's writing and thought are given even minor consideration. If it can be allowed that several of Brecht's works and theoretical writings received substantial input from his female
3 Ibid 147 cohabiters/collaborators throughout his life, it is not unreasonable to suggests that there may be seen in his work a faint 'pentimento' effect -- the ghosting of a feminist aesthetic beneath the 'masculinist' asceticism associated with Brecht. This consideration casts an interesting light on the way in which feminist playwrights who may not even class themselves as socialist have gravitated towards Brecht's approaches to dramatic form. What has appeared to be appropriation on the part of feminist playwrights could be seen, therefore, as re-appropriation, and what has been seen as expropriation is, perhaps, more likely a matter of 'coming into their own.' What we are left with is an approach to form which acknowledges that the theatrical signifier is intensely political, but not necessarily a socialist paradigm. Brechtian textual elements may be adapted to the needs of political groups that do not see their struggle as a matter of class, of economics, and that appeal to and reflect forces beyond the materialist, consequently revitalising the very materiality of theatrical form itself. The treatment of the theatrical signifier in texts such as Calm Down Mother and A Mouthful of Birds could never have been conceived by playwrights with solely materialist world views. The approach to the theatrical signifier in Fefu and Her Friends and Dress Suits To Hire could never have been produced by a playwright with an exclusively heterosexual experience or cultural position. In these plays, a 'magic gest' and a 'sexual gest' acknowledges the fact that the body is a force to be dealt which is perhaps not emphasised enough by the materialist perspective. This, of course, lends power to the inquiry into the subjectivity of women's positions evaded by Brecht's theoretical prescriptions. There is one very valuable legacy of the 'appropriation' of Brechtianisms by feminist playwrights. The control of the theatrical signifier demonstrated by their practice may have heralded an end to the need for the appropriation Brecht found essential at the time in which he wrote, and which was necessary until there was a thorough experimentation with the ways in which systems of representation could be opened up, deconstructed, re-coded, to fit the endeavours of the most marginalised social groups, as this thesis has demonstrated in part.
Feminist playwrights have demonstrated that they can not only use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, but that they can use variations on these tools to build a 148 house of their own. It is a fact that this theatrical 'house' demonstrates marked differences to the main stages of the dominant culture. It is also conspicuous in its differences and is itself, of course, an object of inquiry. There are also, however, dangers incurred in this practice, and these dangers are tellingly referred to at the end of Hughes' Dress Suits To Hire in which the patriarchal hand, wearing the ring of the 'woman killer' is seen at the window of the 'sisters' house.' There is, revealed in this gestic moment, a subconscious fear of invasion, of appropriation by the dominant culture; and perhaps even of a punishment for the demand for separateness. What remains to be done is the rebuilding of the master's house; the rebuilding of the theatre of the dominant culture, a theatre open to all ideological positions, to all aesthetic expressions. Or perhaps the notion of a house of any sort should be abandoned entirely. This point is dealt with in an insightful way by Australian playwright Alma De Groen in her play Vocations, which ends with the character Joy contemplating such a possibility: I think women should give up trying to find a home. . .. I think they should wander the earth until they do find one; and if they don't at least they'll know it isn't there.... That it's some where inside them. Because we have no place. We're here on sufferance. 4
4 De Groen, Alma, Vocations and Going Home (Sydney: Currency Press, 1983), p.184 149
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