Female Pirates, Sexual Diversity and the Reconstruction of Women's History

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2016 Weather the Storm: Female Pirates, Sexual Diversity and the Reconstruction of Women's History MacAlpine, Anna MacAlpine, A. (2016). Weather the Storm: Female Pirates, Sexual Diversity and the Reconstruction of Women's History (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28680 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3087 master thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Weather the Storm: Female Pirates, Sexual Diversity and the Reconstruction of Women’s History by Anna MacAlpine A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN DRAMA CALGARY, ALBERTA JUNE, 2016 © Anna MacAlpine 2016 ii ABSTRACT The following artist’s statement and accompanying manuscript discusses the historical research and creative process of writing the play Weather the Storm. The artist statement examines the historical context of play’s inspiration, setting and characters, and discusses the process of adapting history within a feminist/queer framework. The play explores the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, the only documented female pirates to operate in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following people for their wisdom, guidance and support: my supervisor Clem Martini; my committee members April Viczko and Laura Hynes, and neutral chair Joelle Welling; my fellow MFA Playwriting candidate, James Wade; the University of Calgary students who participated in the workshop process, Myah Van Horn, Kelcey Leavitt and Ben Jones; my director, Courtney Charnock, and cast, Natasha Strickey, Vanessa Jetté, Connor Williams, Ryan Gray, Ethan Ross, Andy Weir, Christopher Hunt and Nicole Logan; my family, Gerry MacAlpine, Shirley Osterman, Stephanie MacAlpine and Rebecca Piccoli; and, finally, my partner, Josiah George. From the bottom of my heart – thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………… ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………..… iii TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………… iv INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...… 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Not-So-Very-Golden Golden Age………………………………………... 4 1.1. A Pirate’s Origins……………………………………………………………………………….. 4 1.2. Life Beneath the Black Flag………………………………………………………………….… 8 1.3. Violence, Torture and Plundering……………………………………………………………… 13 1.4. Capture, Trial and Execution…………………………………………………………………... 15 CHAPTER TWO: Women of the High Seas…………………………………………………….. 19 2.1. From Shore to Sea to Prison…………………………………………………………………… 19 2.2. Crossdressing Ladies…………………………………………………………………………... 23 2.3. The Enigma of Anne Bonny and Mary Read…………………………………………………... 26 CHAPTER THREE: An Old-Fashioned (Queer) Love Story………………………………….. 29 3.1. 18th Century Sapphism, the Female Pirate and Historical Fiction……………………………... 30 3.2. Bisexual and Lesbian Representation………………………………………………………….. 34 CHAPTER FOUR: Navigating Adaptation…………………………………...………………… 40 4.1. Guiding Principles……………………………………………………………………………... 40 4.2. The History in the Fiction……………………………………………………………………… 41 4.3. Play Development……………………………………………………………………………… 47 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………. 51 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………………… 55 APPENDIX A: Weather the Storm……………………………………………………………... 59 1 INTRODUCTION Anne Bonny and Mary Read occupy a unique place in history: they are the only documented female pirates to have operated in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Following their well- publicized trial, Charles Johnson capitalized on the public’s interest by including their biographies in his 1724 book, A General History of the Pyrates. To further showcase their unusual situation, the publisher included both a subtitle – “With the remarkable Actions and Adventures of the two Female Pyrates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny” (1) – and an illustrated fold-out of the women. The only other pirates to be given illustrations were Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts (Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women, 87). The book became an immediate bestseller and by 1726 four more editions were published. It comes as no surprise that Anne Bonny and Mary Read’s biographies in A General History have attracted many authors over the years. Their adventures have resurfaced in numerous plays, novels, films, TV shows and even video games. Their depictions have changed over time, reflecting shifting attitudes about women, gender roles and sexuality. As women and pirates, Bonny and Read presented several opportunities to delve into topics and themes that I found interesting, poignant and urgent. For clarification’s sake, in this document I will refer to the historical women by their surnames and their fictional counterparts by “Anne” and “Mary”. The first is the history of piracy. Our cultural image of pirates and piracy is heavily shaped by fictional works like Treasure Island and Peter Pan, from which some of the greatest pirate tropes evolved. In writing Weather the Storm, my goal was to do away with pirate tropes and contextualize the play through history. To date, A General History remains the primary source for information about 18th century piracy. However, the book has a negotiable relationship with history, particularly with personal histories that cannot be verified by transcripts of trial records or reports in newspapers (Wheelwright, “Tarts”, 181). I thus could not rely solely on the information in A General History and looked to other resources to aid in building the historical background. By writing historical drama, I hoped to introduce audience members to an area of history with which they were unfamiliar. The second is women’s history. As Deirdre Beddoe puts it, the history of our textbooks is “a male view of history – all about men and men’s activities in the public world of war, diplomacy and statecraft” that has been “palmed off on us as universal history, the history of all humanity” (1). Even though women sailors were rare, they were present. By focusing on women in the context of a 2 historical period where women’s roles were overlooked or deemed unimportant, I aimed to question the belief by positioning women as active players in their environment. The third was the chance to re-construct Bonny and Read’s relationship as a romance rather than a friendship. Most fictional versions (including A General History, depending on how you wish to view the historicity of Bonny and Read’s biographies) focus on their romantic entanglements with men: in both James Birdie’s Mary Read (1933) and Steve Gooch’s The Women Pirates Ann Bonney and Mary Read (1978), the women’s friendship comes at a distant second to their relationships with their male love interests. In addition, there is a desperate need for more stories, regardless of medium, to feature LGBTQ characters of all kinds in leading roles. Many existing queer works feature gay and lesbian characters, but there is a significant lack of bisexuals and other sexual minorities. There are also long-standing beliefs about sexual orientations like bisexuality, which is sometimes thought to be a “phase” or “not a real orientation”. The sexual orientations of the real Bonny and Read can never be known, but the context of their friendship was an opportunity to write a genuine portrayal of bisexual and lesbian identities. Representation was not the only goal; I hoped that audience members unfamiliar with sexual diversity could learn that bisexuality is a real orientation and the experiences of bisexual and lesbian women are not invalid. Lastly, the context of this play’s source was an opportunity to “write back” at the way women have been portrayed in fiction. Many of my choices came from an attempt to push back against tropes that sweep female characters into roles focusing on motherhood or marriage, or place them in situations where they are abused, raped, punished and killed simply because that is the “realistic” experience of women. While things like motherhood and violence play a role in Anne and Mary’s lives, my goal was to execute them in a manner so that they did not become the central focus or the defining aspect of their characters. Weather the Storm does not merely intend to construct history on stage, but to RE-construct it in a way that speaks to a modern audience. I preface the text with a quotation from A General History: “As to the Lives of our two Female Pyrates, we must confess they may appear a little Extravagant, yet they are never the less true for seeming so” (6). I take a similar approach: however extraordinary the events and characters may appear, they are true to the world created in the text. Through the use of history, gender studies and queer theory, I hoped to create a plausible setting with plausible characters who either speak to the social concerns of a modern audience or introduces them to new ideas and experiences. The characters’ challenging environment and the trials they face are 3 encapsulated in the title: in addition to sounding nautical, “weather

Load more