Journal of International Women's Studies Volume 17 Issue 2 New Writings in Feminist Studies: Winning Article 7 and Shortlisted Entries from the 2015 FWSA Student Essay Competition Feb-2016 Happy Days Sinking Into Immanence: Samuel Beckett nda The Second Sex Susan Hennessy Follow this and additional works at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws Part of the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hennessy, Susan (2016). Happy Days Sinking Into Immanence: Samuel Beckett nda The Second Sex. Journal of International Women's Studies, 17(2), 65-76. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol17/iss2/7 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. ©2016 Journal of International Women’s Studies. Happy Days Sinking Into Immanence: Samuel Beckett and The Second Sex By Susan Hennessy1 Abstract Dysfunctional, fragmented, and restricted bodies are a cornerstone of Samuel Beckett’s stage, a place where characters and actors alike find themselves forced to express the inexpressible, with notoriously diminished resources. Historically, existentialist readings of the Beckett canon have offered an insight into works which seem to raise essential questions regarding what it means to be when normative metanarratives have ceased to govern and “realist” escapism is denied. When it comes to discussions of phenomenological existentialism and its proponents, however, the works of Simone de Beauvoir often seem to be eschewed, or assimilated into those of the more famous Jean-Paul Sartre. This essay argues that if we revisit Beauvoir’s The Second Sex we can gain fresh insight into Beckett’s construction of his female characters (who, like Beauvoir, tend be overlooked), and a new existentialist reading of parts of his oeuvre can begin to emerge. Beauvoir, as well as being a figurehead of feminist theory, was a phenomenologist in her own right, and by using Happy Days as a case study her theories can be applied to Beckett just as readily as those of her male existentialist counterparts. This essay argues that in Happy Days, we are presented with a protagonist, Winnie, who does much to illustrate the limitations placed on the female body, which in this case is enclosed literally within the earth, and figuratively in its own immanence. I propose that Winnie presides “happily” over reduced but familiar circumstances which see her rendered captive not only by the demands of a relentless and punishing text, but also by a “cultural script” that would fix her to the spot. In her attempts to transcend herself as object, Winnie actually makes of herself her own "other", and demonstrates what it means, for her, to “become” a woman. Key Words: Beauvoir; Beckett; Phenomenology It is no secret that the writings of the male French existentialists have long been used in an attempt to decode the enigmatic works of Samuel Beckett, a writer whose name, and face, have become synonymous with Martin Esslin’s trademark reduction of existential philosophy to a “Theatre of the Absurd”. Albert Camus’ specter can be sensed throughout Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin, 2001 [1961]), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology is reduced, in early Beckett scholarship, to existentialism, the tangible, once-popular face of French, post-war philosophy, in order to pair it off neatly with Beckett’s works, which also seem to speak of a despairing humanity, searching for answers in the face of the void. More recently, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology has been used to add “Beckett and the Body” to writings on “Beckett and [add almost any word here]”. One French philosopher, however, would 1 Susan Hennessy is an academic, writer, and performer, whose work explores the application of philosophical theory to twentieth century text and performance. Susie’s doctoral research re-examines the philosophies of some key French thinkers, as it places these alongside both historical and contemporary theory and criticism, in order to launch a new phenomenological investigation of the theatrical and literary works of Samuel Beckett. Susie is an Associate Lecturer in Drama and English at the University of Lincoln. 65 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 17, No. 2 February 2016 appear to be conspicuous in her absence from Beckett studies and, moreover, her absence from wider discussions of the existential phenomenology which she played a key role in developing, and that is Simone de Beauvoir, whose contribution to gender studies is most succinctly summarised by the newspaper headline that announced her death in April 1986: “Women, you owe her everything!” (Appignanesi, 2005). “Beckett and Beauvoir” is unchartered territory then; in fact, the only thing that currently links the two is their sharing of a biographer in Deirdre Bair, their contemporaneous residency in Paris, and Beauvoir’s refusal to publish the second half of Beckett’s short story “Suite” (which later became The End) in Les Temps modernes (see Knowlson, 1997, p. 406, for details). As well as being a figurehead of feminist theory, Beauvoir was a phenomenologist in her own right, and her theories can be applied to Beckett just as readily as those of her male existentialist counterparts. Margaret A. Simons explains, however, that Beauvoir’s work has long been “overshadowed” by that of her lifelong partner, Sartre, and that “by the mid-1950s, when Beauvoir was beginning her memoirs, the sexist assumption that she was merely Sartre’s philosophical disciple was deeply embedded in the scholarly literature” (2004, p. 2). Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949, not long before Beckett had his first successes as a writer, and this work secured her place in the history of twentieth-century feminism (if not European phenomenology more broadly) as what Elizabeth Grosz would define an “egalitarian” feminist; one who assesses “the reproductive imperative as a major defining feature of femininity” (1994, p. 15).2 For the egalitarian feminist, the female body is that which limits a woman’s freedom and capacity for equality, whilst providing her with a unique viewpoint on the world and a means of accessing knowledge about the processes of life.3 Beckett’s bodies are the focus of much recent scholarly research,4 and yet the female body is still most widely read in contemporary critiques through male theorists such as Merleau-Ponty,5 whilst Beauvoir, who offers phenomenological insights born of an intimate knowledge of the female experience, is ignored. Two works of the 1990s placed the spotlight on Beckett’s female characters, Linda Ben-Zvi’s Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (1992), and Mary Bryden’s Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama (1993), although Bryden’s is not so much a sustained study of gender as it is a commentary (shaped by Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus) on what she sees as the gradual dissolution of binarized gender identities in Beckett’s work, and neither work makes so much as a fleeting reference to Beauvoir. Over the course of this essay, I will focus quite specifically on phenomenological modes of being unique to Beckett’s women; particularly as the aforementioned male existentialists have a tendency to write about the human experience from their own (male) perspectives and, broadly speaking, the history of Beckett criticism is divided into waves that are directed by philosophical movements dominated by men.6 I will demonstrate 2 Beauvoir is considered a second wave (post-suffrage) feminist. 3 Grosz provides a succinct summary of “categories” of feminism (“Egalitarian Feminism”, “Social Constructionism” and “Sexual Difference”) in Volatile Bodies, pp. 15-19. 4 Ulrika Maude’s Beckett, Technology and the Body, and Anna McMullan’s Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama for instance. 5 Merleau-Ponty’s theories are the focus of both of the above works. 6 From the “first wave” existentialist/humanist studies of Theodor W. Adorno, David Hesla, Lance St. John Butler et. al., through the “second wave” deconstructions of the prose carried out by, amongst others, Leslie Hill, Thomas Trezise and Steven Connor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to the “empirical” work of the “third wave” of Beckett scholars (the current interest in the Beckett archives or the “grey canon”, the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project) male literary theorists, and philosophies written by men (Camus, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida included), have dominated the field. 66 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 17, No. 2 February 2016 here that if we revisit Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we can gain fresh insight into Beckett’s female characters, and a new “gendered” phenomenological reading of his oeuvre can begin to emerge as something more than a mere footnote to “Beckett Studies.” In February 2014, Susannah Clapp began a review of Natalie Abrahami’s Young Vic production of a much-celebrated work of the Beckett canon as follows: You would have to go a long way to find a more intensely feminist play than Happy Days, which was first staged in 1961. It makes a woman the centre of a play that talks of the human condition. You can, it suggests, have a handbag and still speak for everyone (2014, p. 41). Whilst Clapp’s rather bold proclamation is one that is shared by those Beckett scholars who would agree that the great man himself condescended to allow a woman a potentially-philosophical voice once or twice, it seems, to me, rather more than an overexertion to begin speaking in terms that would hail Happy Days as a feminist play and thereby Beckett as a feminist writer.