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Madness and Performance: Representing Female Madness in Theatre

By Marguerite Love

James L. Pethica, advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, MA

April 16, 2012

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their extensive help in this process:

Professor James Pethica, for his unwavering support, guidance, and tough love, and for always making me laugh

My readers, Professor Ilona Bell and Professor Lynda Bundtzen

The ladies in Wood, Bryant, Fitch, and the Accidentals for providing me with endless love, fun, and support

Megan Behrend, for leading me by example, and knowing how to be both pragmatic and optimistic

Noah Schechter, for his patience, support, and love

Professor John Kleiner, Professor Robert Baker-White, Professor Amy Holzapfel, and Professor Robert Bell, who all spoke with me at various points in my process.

Thad Persons, with whom I took junior year English, a class in which I wrote a paper on Ophelia’s freedom in madness

Finally, my parents, my brothers, and my dog Ninja: for always being understanding – even when you didn’t understand what I was talking about

Contents

* * *

Preface: Representing Madness i

Chapter One: The Structure of Female Madness in Shakespeare 1

Chapter Two: Representing Madness in the 20th Century: 29 How Ibsen and Chekhov Adapt and Expand Shakespearian Representations of Mad Women

Epilogue: The “Madness” of Representation 57

Preface

Representing Madness

* * *

“Madness deals not so much with truth and the world as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” - Michael Foucault, Madness & Civilization

As Michael Foucault notes in Madness & Civilization, the possibility for one to lose rationality has been a source of both crisis and intrigue: “from the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western man” (15).

Theatre has been a central site for exploring both the idea of and the actualities of madness – the stage lends itself to the task of realist representations while also foregrounding the challenges of performance and representation. These paradoxical dual roles of the Theatre were less problematic when the characters represented on the stages were Gods and super-humans of Greek and Roman plays, or when the characters represented “good” and “evil” in the Church’s morality plays. In the

Elizabethan period, the theatres got smaller, and playwrights began to write more realistic works with ‘real’ people. Many of these dramas from the late 16th century onwards feature mad characters or figures of madness. The challenge – if not near impossibility – of trying to represent such a state surely attracted playwrights to writing mad figures in their works. From Shakespeare and Webster to Artaud, Ibsen,

Chekhov, Strindberg, Beckett, and Williams, playwrights have used madness to test limitations of realist representation, often inviting the audience to notice the operating theatrical structures.

In playing madness, the actor is required to use the body, voice, and mind to the maximum. Hence, actors, too, are invariably drawn to such challenging roles.

Representing madness poses a unique problem for the actor, particularly the modern actor who values naturalistic, psychologically ‘real’ acting. Can a psychologically-real actor ‘act’ mad without being able to imaginatively occupy that mental state? Such a question might suggest why actors playing Hamlet today are more inclined to play him as definitively ‘performing’ madness the entire time – in spite of the fact that, as the next chapter will explore, the text frequently suggests that Hamlet is mad at times. The question of whether Hamlet is feigning madness or not pulls the audience in two different directions; in the context of the plot, the audience wants to decipher if he is feigning madness, but that very task calls attention to the operating theatrical structures of the play: The actor, in Hamlet’s role, is – out of necessity – always performing.

The theatre inherently demands different forms of engagement from its audience than other art forms. With a novel, the reader chooses when to start and stop reading and draw on their own creativity to visualize the scene and the characters. In a film, the camera’s movement simulates shifting points of view, allowing for the viewer to take numerous, divergent perspectives during the course of film. The theatre offers only one ocular point of view, it operates in real time, and the audience is physically distanced from the play. By contrast, as a reader of a play, we are given the freedom to have multiple perspectives. We become more powerful, in a sense, as critics. We are able to hold interpretative possibilities in tension, deferring the choice-making that the director and actress must inevitably do in rehearsal and performance. Reading plays and analyzing their text absent from physical performance, we must “remind ourselves

afresh of the chasm that may exist – that so often does exist – between the literature of the drama and the literature of the stage” (Robbins, 6). Productions use physical bodies, where, as readers, we work with imagined bodies. As a reader, then, we can explore the texts as though the characters are psychologically real without having to see them in performance – where we are always reminded that there is an actor playing the part, performing the role.

But historical context, tradition, and histories of performance are important as well. At the outset of any modern interpretation of Shakespeare is the historical consideration that the female roles were originally played by boy actors. As with the

Japanese Kabuki theatre tradition, in which female characters, called onnagata, were always – and are still – played by men with a stylistically and physically exaggerated femininity, the female roles of Shakespeare considered in the first chapter were written with these conventions firmly in mind. Shakespeare knew his audiences would suspend their disbelief and ‘accept’ the boy actors as women, but he also called attention to that convention, and thereby, called attention to the fundamental ludicrousness – madness – of the very idea of accepting stage representations as ‘real.’

At the same time, Shakespeare’s female representations, as with the Japanese onnagatas, solidified contemporary cultural conceptions of women. Recognizing the historical legacy of these stage representations and conventions – how they were shaped by culture, and how, in turn, they shaped culture – seems crucial to a fundamental reading of these texts.

The plays chosen for this analysis – Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Hedda

Gabler, and The Seagull – are all self-conscious about their theatricality and theatrical

iii

conventions – whether explicitly so, as with Hamlet and The Seagull, or more elliptically so, as with Hedda Gabler. They also all have in them – with the exception of King Lear – female characters who suffer varying degrees of ‘madness.’ Ophelia,

Lady Macbeth, Hedda, Nina, Arkadina all sit in the short list of roles actresses agree on as ‘the best’ female stage roles, and the young actress, a hopeful ingénue like Nina, dreams of being talented and famous enough to one day play the parts Arkadina might play, like Hedda or Lady Macbeth.

In a recent celebrated production of Hamlet that I saw at the National Theatre in London, the young actress playing Ophelia was boring and flat in her mad scene.

Performing madness requires intimacy and vulnerability as well as massive emotions and physicality, and this daunting challenge makes madness inherently difficult to portray. Ibsen’s admirer, the actress Elizabeth Robbins, expressed as much on seeing the Tarantella dance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: “my one moment of anxiety was a doubt whether [Nora’s wild dance] would come off. Somehow for me it never did quite – in spite of all the actress could do. The tarantella seemed a piece of theatricalism, Ibsen’s one concession to the effect-hunting that he had come to deliver us from” (Robbins, 13). Like Robbins, I felt that the problem with Ophelia’s scene was not solely the performance of the actress playing her, but the inherent challenge of representing madness. Though Robbins was a staunch supporter of Ibsen – indeed, this comment was delivered in an address at his memorial service – she found Ibsen’s original text to be the cause of her “anxiety” with this ‘mad’ scene. The following chapters will explore the difficulty of producing and performing ‘madness’ in the roles of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Hedda, and Nina as well as a problem of the translation

from page to stage. Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov’s texts all implicitly ask the reader/audience to recognize the problem of representing madness.

Shoshana Felman finds that, “In the play of forces underlying the relationship between […] literature and madness, the crucial problem is that of the subject’s place, of his position with respect to the delusion” (222). In attending to the interpretative possibilities we enjoy as readers, we may better understand these texts and exploit multiple perspectives. With historical considerations in mind, we may better understand how representations of these mad characters have influenced cultural assumptions about gender and madness today. The close readings might better inform the actress or director embarking on their own interpretation, and help also to recognize what has been mistaken or overlooked in the original texts in traditional approaches to production. In taking on the challenges that madness poses to realist performance, these playwrights engage with the theatre’s core concerns with illusion, representation, performance, and ‘truth.’

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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Chapter One

The Structure of Female Madness in Shakespeare

* * *

“Faint and delicate, however, as these shadowings are, they are yet so true to nature, and at the same time so full of suggestion, that I look on Ophelia as one of the strongest proofs our great master has left us of his belief in the actor's art (his own) and of trust in the power possessed, at least, by sympathetic natures, of filling up his outlines, and giving full and vivid life to the creatures of his brain.” - 19th century actress Helena Faucit Martin (4)

“Lady Macbeth is basically a man’s role […] it is probably a mistake to cast a woman at all” - Kenneth Tynan

Though a relatively minor character in Hamlet, Ophelia is one of the best- known female characters in the western dramatic canon. She has been loved, admired, ignored, censored, painted, eroticized, analyzed, and performed both weakly and well.

From one captivating mad scene first performed by a boy in a flower-bedecked wig and a white dress, an astounding legacy has followed. Many male writers wrote of her dismissively, as did Jacques Lacan who called her, “that piece of bait named

Ophelia.”* Others, particularly the Romantics, wrote of her with adoration. William

Hazlitt, for instance, effused, “Ophelia is a character almost too exquisitely touching to

* Lacan begins this essay saying, “As a sort of come-on, I announced that I would speak today about that piece of bait named Ophelia, and I’ll be as good as my word.” Here, treating Ophelia as a whore with whom he can lure an audience, he is more playfully condescending than dismissive. However, as he goes through his lecture, when he does speak of Ophelia, it is only an object by which to better understand Hamlet. Showalter’s charge to feminists is, “Unlike Lacan, when we promise to speak of her, we make good on our word” (Showalter, 92). be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded! Her love, her madness, her death, are described with the truest touches of tenderness and pathos.” He speaks of her as a precious object, as does Samuel Johnson who refers to her with fond sympathy as “the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious.” The Romantics were a huge source of renewed interest in the character, but in celebrating Ophelia as an image of female purity and a source of sublimity, they reduced her to an object with no agency.

After centuries of delicate treatment or marked dismissal of Ophelia by male writers,

Ophelia has more recently been championed in feminist criticism, a focus for the exploration of historical representations of women.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose work The Madwoman in the Attic documented the angry “madwomen” figures in literature as articulations of women’s repressed rage against social constraints on them, were uninterested in the rather passive Ophelia. Ground-breaking though their work was for feminist studies, they use her only as a passing example of how most stories written by male poets and novelists,

“tend to perpetuate extreme and debilitating images of women as angels or monsters” claiming that, “Lear’s madness is gloriously universal while Ophelia’s is just pathetic”

(68). In contrast, in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture,

1830-1980, Elaine Showalter argues that “virtually all the conventions” of representing female madness in visual culture “can be traced to the figure of Shakespeare’s

Ophelia,” and furthermore that “the changing representations of Ophelia over the centuries do chronicle the shifting definitions of female insanity” (10). In

“Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist

Criticism,” Showalter identifies three primary approaches scholars have taken with

2 Ophelia, noting the critical problems each approach presents. “To liberate Ophelia from the text,” she explains, “or to make her its tragic center is to re-appropriate her for our own ends; to dissolve her into a female symbolism of absence is to endorse our own marginality; to make her Hamlet’s anima is to reduce her to a metaphor of male experience” (79). Though she makes a strong impact in documentation of Ophelia’s legacy, Showalter too ‘liberates’ Ophelia from the text, as she makes little substantial use of the text of Ophelia’s mad scene in her analysis.

In contrast, in “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in

Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Carol Thomas Neely examines

“why, how, and with what consequences madness was read and represented in England in the early modern period” (315). She contends that previous scholars and theorists failed to appropriately “gender the subject of madness” by carelessly applying their contemporary ideas of gender and madness onto the Renaissance framework (318).

“As the play presents it,” she claims, “Ophelia’s madness begins to be gender-specific in ways that later stage representations of Ophelia and of female hysterics will exaggerate” (Neely, 325). She narrows the scope of her argument to how the cultural context influenced Shakespeare’s representations of madness. Her arguments are compelling, but she treats Ophelia – as well as Lady Macbeth – too narrowly. Indeed, many accounts from other feminist critics treat Ophelia as a vehicle for their own theories or approaches. I aim to re-locate her by reading the text neither solely as a construct of the prevailing ideologies and conventions of gender in Shakespeare’s

England, nor simply as an opportunity for applying interpretive methodologies from our own era.

3 Though critical responses to Ophelia all tend to focus predominantly on

Ophelia’s madness, few begin their analyses by treating the scene isolated from the rest of the play. Forming an account of Ophelia’s madness from just this one scene, then, might lead to a different perspective of her than those accounts which aim to understand Ophelia in broader terms of the text – or use Ophelia as a means to explain

Hamlet’s complexities. The scene begins with Gertrude, Horatio, and a Gentleman discussing Ophelia’s madness. They constitute an on-stage body of spectators that watches Ophelia’s madness, as well as mediators who significantly shape or inflect the likely response of the theatre audience or reader. Before Ophelia even enters, the manifestation and meanings of her madness are to a large extent conditioned by their on-stage accounts.

Queen: I will not speak with her Gentleman: She is importunate, indeed distract: Her moods will needs be pitied […] She speaks much of her father; says she hears There’s tricks i’ the world; and hems, and beats her heart; Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they yawn at it, And botch the words up to fit their own thoughts; Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures yield them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. (IV.v.1-13).

This opening description of her mad scene paints an unmistakable image such that no matter what the actress does when she enters, some memory of this description will linger. Though much of the speech suggests a physical manifestation of her madness – her distracted aspect, her actions of “beat[ing] her heart,” “spurn[ing] at

4 straws” – the description as a whole is static, since it constitutes her as an object of spectatorship. Furthermore, several of the “wild” descriptions, most notably the beating of her heart, stem directly from styles of the Classical theatre, a tradition that is rooted in such picturesque gestures. The description of people’s attempts to understand her is comparable to an observer – and ignorant observers, at that – trying to interpret a work of art. These watching-people described by the Gentleman “yawn” at her and judge her speech as “nothing,” but then “botch” it to “fit their own thoughts.” She is here portrayed as a canvas onto which these people may project their own interests or desires. The use of the words “botch” and “fit” are suggestive of a violation – and at that, one executed in a rather cavalier fashion. It is as though Shakespeare critiques this violence, warning against using Ophelia’s “nothing”-ness for one’s own means, and against interpreting her “unshaped” language by projecting our own perspective or desires on to her. But historically, this warning has not been well heeded. Indeed, this body of spectators appears quite similar to the larger body of critics that have used

Ophelia as a canvas for their own theories, and Shakespeare is here warning against such future re-appropriation.

As spectators to Ophelia’s madness, Gertrude, Claudius, and Horatio are representative of the collective response of the court. In this, as on-stage spectators, they function as a point of identification for the audience. The audience is invited to read Ophelia through their point of view, but is also subtly encouraged to judge their perspectives, as Gertrude and Claudius are suspicious characters. This is clear from the beginning: we do not “see” her go mad; her state is presented by the Gentleman’s precise imagery. Once Ophelia enters, these information-deliverers turn to observers,

5 and continue to inform the audience’s way of looking at the mad body of Ophelia. The on-stage spectators are intensely invested in understanding her, Gertrude asks her,

“alas sweet lady, what imports this song?” and Claudius asks, “How do you, pretty lady?” (IV.v.27, 41). Claudius thinks of Ophelia in terms of a picture, bemoaning her madness, “Poor Ophelia, divided from herself and her judgement / without the which we are pictures or mere beasts” (IV.v.84-86). The choice of how to see her madness is either a painting or as a wild beast – neither of which allow her to be seen her in human or rational terms.

The on-stage body of spectators grows to include the distraught Laertes, who enters the scene after Ophelia leaves for the first time. His spectatorship of her complicates the audience’s impression of her. He is seemingly less biased in his account of her, having not heard the Gentleman’s account, and after a wrought description of his first impression of Ophelia, concedes that, “this nothing’s more than matter” (IV.v.174). While Laertes offers a new way of engaging with Ophelia, his acute poetry and pain takes the focus away from her and brings it to him. His emotional excess at the sight of her reifies and intensifies her objectified state; his poignant question: “Is’t possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”† outweighs the new potential of meaning in her “nothing” (IV.v.159-161).

His new perspective on Ophelia’s madness reveals little new information, yet the additional presence of Laertes brings a fresh attempt to understand her. He calls her, “a document in madness,” re-asserting her as an object to be investigated (IV.v.146). In this reprise of Ophelia’s madness, the attempt to understand Ophelia intensifies, but

† With this, Shakespeare links young woman’s madness and an aging man, a discovery he explores fully with King Lear.

6 the space between her entrance and exit and the addition of Laertes provide a gap that invites the audience to recognize that the on-stage spectators’ understanding is limited.

The interpretive urge/responsibility of spectatorship to female madness is instilled in the audience during the opening speech, “the unshaped use of it doth move / The hearers to collection; they yawn at it, / And botch the words up to fit their own thoughts,” yet this same speech asks the audience to look more critically at those who

“botch” Ophelia. She is to a significant extent a construction of the on-stage spectators’ attempt to read/understand her madness, but the text makes it clear how limited that attempt and understanding are.

Neely suggests that, “the representation of Ophelia implicitly introduces conventions for reading madness as gender-inflected” (325). Ophelia is the image of pure femininity with her white dress, flowing hair, and nursery rhymes. Her femininity often slides into child-like qualities as well – her father explicitly calls her a “baby” – which also limits viewing her as capable of full rationality. With this insistence on

Ophelia’s feminine attributes, Shakespeare gives his contemporary audience a mad woman they will recognize‡ - her loss of rationality, her child-like behavior, and her wild manner all conform to stereotypes of women from the period. However, there is dissonance in the scene that inhibits a reading of her as simply lacking in rationality and therefore, “mad.” Indeed, she is summoned to Gertrude because she is a threat.

Horatio articulates this – “twere good she were spoken with; for she may strew / dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds” – as if her madness could expose an

‡ For a full-analysis of how Shakespeare crafts Ophelia out of cultural assumptions of his own time, see Neely’s article, or Hanna and Maurice Charney’s "The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists” from Signs: 3.2 (Winter, 1977). Pages 451-460.

7 inconvenient or even politically dangerous truth about what really happened (IV.v.14-

15). In this, she is rather like Hamlet himself.

This immediate threat to Claudius and Gertrude is highlighted by their emphatic insistence on the “nothing”-ness of her speech. However, her speech is a great deal more than “nothing” – it is pregnant with bawdy, sexual imagery. Claudius markedly ignores the pronounced sexual story in her song, “Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes / and dupp’d the chamber door; / Let in the maid, that out a maid / never departed more” by immediately responding, “Pretty Ophelia!” (IV.v.52-56). Claudius, a male authority, easily overlooks elements in her madness that might hold truth. To recognize her words as having some meaning, even amidst other nonsense, would be to give her agency. To preserve his own notion of her as simply a mad girl, he treats her as a pretty, sad object. In this, he is representative of a body of male authority that might replicate this same process of dismissal and reduction of Ophelia. As Showalter notes, “this gentle female irrationality, so easily subjected to male reason, might also represent an unknowable and untamable sexual force” (10). This repressed sexual urge has been heavily documented as the cause of female hysteria, which suggests the potency of Ophelia’s representation.

Here Shakespeare lays the potential foundation for a representation of Ophelia that might directly challenge that male authority. However, the text serves in many ways to reify what he has created as representative of feminine madness with the use of the word “nothing” – suggestive of the vagina, the opposite of the “something” of

8 the penis.§ While the double-meaning of this word could just be Shakespeare flexing his skills at punning, the pointed ignorance of the on-stage spectators suggest that via the pun, he in some sense laughs at both the unwitting spectators and perhaps at the poor Ophelia. While she looks like a traditional portrayal of a mad woman in the terms of Shakespeare’s time, the text’s implicit suggestion that the on-stage audience is deficient, and untrustworthy, together with Ophelia’s speech which shows substance, make the audience wonder whether or not she is ‘simply’ mad. Additionally, the pun on nothing underscores a critical judgment of the scene, for Shakespeare seems to laugh at her, too. It is unclear what Shakespeare wants from her, and this confusion ultimately contributes to the mystery of her madness that has been a source of fascination for centuries.

Though the pun of “nothing” has resonance today only for scholars, the potential for Ophelia to have her own agency is still exists in the text in the moments that follow her death that do not need a cultural/historical analysis. At the end of Act

IV, Gertrude comes in to announce Ophelia’s death. In a beautiful speech, she describes the tree from which “an envious sliver broke,” and Ophelia and her “weddy trophies” fell into “the weeping brook” (IV.vii.173-175). She articulates Ophelia’s death in such exquisite detail that it begs the question: if she witnessed the death, why didn’t she stop Ophelia? And if she did not witness it, why is she fabricating this description? This rather obvious problem with Gertrude’s speech has been largely

§ As Phyllis Gorfain discusses in “When Nothing Really Matters: Body Puns in Hamlet,” "'Nothing' and 'note' linked images of woman's sexuality with puns on 'naught' and 'naughty.' Because 'nothing' simultaneously refers to the 'noting' (making of sound) about 'nothing' (sexual intercourse), it is also about punning about such naughtiness" (71).

9 ignored by scholars and in productions of Hamlet. Her evocative images of Ophelia as

“mermaid-like” till “her garments, heavy with their drink / pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay / to muddy death” are enthralling (IV.vii.176-183). To this point, the audience has been repeatedly invited to conceive of Ophelia in poetic terms and via ornate images, and this description is thus consistent with what comes before it. As in the very first descriptions of Ophelia’s mad scene, the dissonant in-congruities here seem to ask for closer examination, but the heightened imagery and the intensity of

Gertrude’s description inhibits such examination – at least initially. We do not ask:

Why did Gertrude not rescue the mad Ophelia from her death? Did Ophelia knowingly-drown herself, and Gertrude’s speech is a cover story which softens that harsh truth? Before the audience can even think about such questions, the scene shifts to the grave-diggers. This scene is a source of comic relief. The contrast of the lowly,

“funny guy” gravediggers with their articulate, heated debate is humorous. The audience welcomes such comic relief and their substantial discussion of if Ophelia deserves a Christian burial – as one of the two gravediggers suspects she killed herself knowingly – is easily taken as secondary to the comedy of the moment (V.i.15).

Taking these two accounts into consideration, one might argue against the critical tradition, as Gabrielle Dane does, and suggest that Ophelia does wittingly commit suicide. Dane claims, “Ophelia decides that in order authentically “to be” she must choose “not to be.” While the notion that suicide becomes the only possible route to autonomy for this woman is undeniably tragic, Ophelia’s choice might be seen as the only courageous – indeed rational – death in Shakespeare’s bloody drama” (460).

Such a reading of Ophelia’s agency points to what Elizabeth Robbins found to be the

10 case in Hedda Gabler, “it is perhaps curious Ibsen should have known that a good many women have found it possible to get through life by help of the knowledge that they have the power to end it rather than accept certain slaveries…The power of escape” (Robbins, 28). This reading is extreme, but it is a conjecture based upon at least some degree of textual possibility. At the very least, the gap between the way

Ophelia’s madness is represented by her and by the on-stage spectators presenting it to the audience invites the audience to look skeptically at how Ophelia is presented.

If reading these portions of the text isolated from the rest of Hamlet highlight some dissonance in how the audience is invited to view Ophelia, reading her in relation to Hamlet offers additional possibilities. “What is the point of the character Ophelia?”

Lacan asks, “Ophelia is obviously essential. She is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure of Hamlet” (10). Ophelia is more than just the feminine counterpart to Hamlet and the “real” to his performed madness. Showalter explains that, “the stage conventions associated with the role have always emphasized the feminine nature of

Ophelia’s insanity as contrasted with Hamlet’s universalized metaphysical distress”

(10). Showalter’s account is exemplary of a common formulation of Ophelia’s madness vs. Hamlet’s madness. Ophelia is marked as “feminine” where as Hamlet is

“universalized metaphysical distress.” Though much has been made of Ophelia’s madness as demonstrative of “female” madness, very little has suggested Hamlet as a kind of parallel “masculine” madness, even though they are so frequently seen as a complementary pair. In Shakespeare’s time, there was a gendered difference in representations of male and female madness, and a gendered reading helps further

11 explore these questions of Hamlet’s – and ultimately, of Ophelia’s – feigned or real madness.

This gendered difference is repeatedly apparent in the text, and the characters make ample use of exploiting these differences. Ophelia’s “speech is nothing / yet the unshaped use of it doth move the hearers to collection” while according to Polonius,

“there’s method in” Hamlet’s madness (IV.v.8-10; II.ii.205-206). Where Ophelia’s language is meaningless but evokes pity from spectators, Hamlet’s is nominally babbling, yet there is both meaning and strategy in it. The manifestation of their madness suggests the cause: for Ophelia, overwhelming, excessive emotion; for

Hamlet, his rationality is at odds with the circumstances. Furthermore, while Ophelia’s madness is beautiful for its poignant simplicity, Hamlet’s madness is both “crafty” and something to be “feared.” Gertrude gives a powerful description of Hamlet as “mad as the sea and wind when both contend / which is the mightier” – as if she is reacting to an encounter with the sublime (IV.i.8-10). Indeed, the descriptions of their madness are so heavily gender-coded, it almost “doth protest too much,” suggesting knowledge that both Hamlet and Ophelia know this gendered language and know how to perform to it. Obviously this is the great debate with Hamlet, yet the case has rarely been made for Ophelia’s consciously performing her role. If, however, Hamlet codes his performance in “masculine” attributes to be convincing, can Ophelia not also be performing?

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, people debated the question of whether

Hamlet is mad at all, or is in fact thoroughly ‘mad.’ T.S. Eliot, for example, claimed that “For Shakespeare, it is less than madness and more than feigned,” while Lacan

12 suggested that “feigning madness is thus one of the dimensions of what we might call the strategy of the modern hero” (Eliot, 4 and Lacan, 20). Neely implies Hamlet’s madness to be fake, saying, “Hamlet’s madness is in every way contrasted with

[Ophelia’s], in part, no doubt, to emphasize the difference between feigned and actual madness” (323). What is unmistakable in the text, however, are two distinct manifestations of his madness. There are moments when he plays the babbling fool for strategic reasons, and there are moments when something authentically violent and passionate occurs and his actions do not appear to be calculated at all: when he kills

Polonius through the curtain, for instance, or when he jumps into Ophelia’s grave. In these latter, compelling moments, physical power and emotion apparently overpower rational thought. In his essay, “Hamlet and His Problems,” T.S. Eliot notes that, “In the character Hamlet, it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action”

(4). Eliot clearly marks a line between action and emotion in Hamlet, seeing them as disconnected, irresolvable aspects of his being. Hamlet’s actions – stabbing and jumping – are immensely active and masculine, while the rawness of his emotions is inherently feminine. In this, Eliot misses that Hamlet’s emotions prompt his actions, and he does not see the distinction between Hamlet the feigner and Hamlet the actually over-powered.

Further contributing to the challenge in determining Hamlet’s state for the audience is his figuration as a kind of Fool. Though Hamlet expresses his frustration with the improvising clown-actors in his address to the players, “And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too,”

13 Hamlet is quite frequently linked to Shakespeare’s Fools (III.ii.38-42). In his book,

Shakespeare’s Great Stage of Fools, Robert Bell groups Hamlet with other central protagonists, such as Lear and Othello, “who play the fool both deliberately and willy- nilly” (5). Hamlet, like Shakespeare’s actual Fools, exists in a liminal, neither fully performed nor fully realistic space. He calculates his performance and dominates over the rest of the court in performing ‘beneath’ them.

But Ophelia too, perhaps even more so than Hamlet, also certainly speaks in the language of Fools. Her primary mode of address in her mad scene is through bawdy song – a Fool’s traditional communicative weapon. At one point, Ophelia even instructs the court to sing with her, “you must sing ‘A-down a-down” (IV.v.194-195).

She provides a source of entertainment for the court: she is an object to watch, as well as an intellectual pleasure, with people quoting her phrases, and “botching” them to fit their own ideas and thoughts. Like a Fool, she speaks awkward truths about sex and death in child-like riddles and songs, and like a Fool, her song and dance allow for these truths to be easily ignored by the court. Her actions, particularly when Laertes arrives, are suggestive of witting choices. She hands out either imaginary or real flowers, each with a very specific symbolic meaning. Here she is performing a pretty, feminine scene, but it serves a pragmatic purpose to communicate with Laertes. The initial flower she gives to him, fennel, symbolizes flattery and deceit. The rue she gives him and herself symbolizes sorrow and repentence, and she tells Laertes he must wear his rue “with a difference” (IV.v.205.) She then hands him simply a daisy, which symbolizes dissembling, and would give him a violet, the flower of faithfulness, “but they withered all when my father died” (207-208). She tells him a story with these

14 flowers – perhaps Hamlet’s flattery and deceit, the rue for her father, the daisy for her own dissembling, and refusing to give him a flower of faithfulness as he left her.

Additionally, telling him to wear his rue “with a difference,” could be indicating to him he will be sorrowful for her death as well. All this shows that Ophelia does partake in the role of a Fool, though in a more ‘holy,’ less strategic way than Hamlet. In the end, Ophelia is more mad than self-performed and feigning, but she is certainly a far more witting than the cultural and traditional representations of her have made it out to be.

With Hamlet, Shakespeare explored the parameters of male rationality and male emotion. King Lear, written after Hamlet, continues this exploration more fully and successfully. In this play, Lear’s madness is directly related to the failure of his rationality, and thus to his manhood. His male-selfhood and his kingship are often contained and discussed as one inseparable, overlapping entity: he is king because he is male; he is male because he is king. These two defining roles function more separately as his madness takes course. His flailing status as a monarch first sets him on the course of madness, but ultimately his maleness is undercut and that pushes him over the edge. The action that promotes the start of the play is the division of his kingdom, but the dramatic action is his suffering maleness. The threat to his manhood is pervasive. It manifests physically with his masculine, castrating daughters, and lyrically through the mocking of his fool.

A telling moment of this occurs early on when Lear approaches Goneril’s palace. When Oswald, servant to Goneril, enters, Lear asks him “Who am I, sir?” and

Oswald responds, “My lady’s father” (I.iv.76-78). Lear reacts violently to this slight –

15 not because of what is first implied as a threat to his status as king, but because this greeting defines him in reference to his daughter. The Fool calls Lear crazy for his unnatural fathering, never even addressing his kingship. When Lear asks the Fool why he has started singing songs, the Fool says,

“I have used it, nuncle, e’er since thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod, and put’st down thine down breeches, [sings]then they for sudden did weep and I for sorrow sung that such a king should play bo-peep and go the fools among.” (I.iv.163-171).

This blithe song suggests that Lear’s failure was making “thy daughters thy mothers” – perverting the familial binaries. The Fool implies that this led to a king becoming a child, an emasculating suggestion. Following this, Goneril effectively strips any lingering bits of his dignity away from him. This prompts Lear’s first address to direct expression of anxiety about incipient madness, saying to himself, “O

Lear, Lear, Lear! / Beat at the gate that let thy folly in / and thy dear judgment out”

(I.iv.266-267). He himself recognizes her threat to his masculinity, saying, “Life and death, I am ashamed, that thou hast power to shake my manhood thus!” (I.iv.288). He curses her along strictly gendered lines, attacking what is distinctly feminine about

Goneril – her capacity to have children – by cursing her to be sterile, “Hear nature, hear […] into her womb convey sterility” (I.iv.271).

Lear and the Fool engage in an intimate back-and-forth, during which Lear, quite unprovoked, says, “I did her wrong” (I.v.14). This moment is significant for his dramatic, emotional introversion – he is unquestionably referencing Cordelia, but with no prior impetus to be thinking of her. He is swept up into regret and sorrow, saying, “I will forget my nature. So kind a father!” (I.v.28). Here he has deep emotion over doing

16 wrong to Cordelia, and it nearly becomes overwhelming. Lear perceives such

“feminine” weakness to be a threat. He addresses this threat, “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” (I.v.40). When he is refused access to Cornwall and Regan,

Lear bellows, “The King would speak with Cornwall. The dear father,” then makes a dramatic break in the iambic pentameter, “would with his daughter speak, commands – tends – service” (II.iv.95-97). This break is wrought, triggered by referring to himself not as “King” but as “the dear father.” This emasculation prompts his feelings of hysteria, “O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!” (II.iv.116). Ultimately, he comes to a speech “O reason not the need!” in which he asks the heavens for anger, but forbidding “women’s weapons, water drops” to “stain my man’s cheeks” (II.iv.271).

Here again, a threat to his control provokes a highly emotive response that he recognizes as emasculating. This passionate speech culminates in both his declaration that “but this heart / shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad,” and a violent storm breaks (II.iv.279-281). This second failure of the father-daughter relationship pushes him to the brink, and the play starts to respond with a literal tempest and the scenes become shorter and more fragmentary.

At this point, when Lear finally declares, “my wits begin to turn,” he does not admonish violently against the oncoming madness (III.ii.68). Rather, when the fool jests “He that has and a little tiny wit / with, heigh-ho, the wind and the rain / must make content with his fortunes fit / though the rain it rainest every day,”** he replies simply and submissively, “true boy” (III.ii.74-78, 79). They go to the house, but Lear

** This refrain, “the rain it raineth every day,” is also used by the Fool of the comedy Twelfth Night. In his book, Shakespeare’s Great Stage of Fools, Bell discusses that “folly in Twelfth Night takes the form of madness and maintains its troubling persistence amid the requisite happy ending.” The Fool’s familiar, a-tonal refrain of Twelth Night then finds its more natural place in King Lear’s tragic catharsis.

17 will not enter, asking, “wilt break my heart?” to which Kent, almost mad with nobility, replies, “I had rather break my own” (III.iv.3-5). Lear then goes into a monologue in which he rapidly runs through emotions, coming to the point of “O Reagan, Goneril, /

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all -- / O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. / No more of that” (III.iv.20-21). Though he has largely given in to this madness, he still has moments where he fights against it, holds on to his senses. He holds his ground in the middle territory, something that neither Ophelia nor Hamlet do quite effectively. Furthermore, when he is a raging in a violent storm of madness, it is quite the opposite of “female” madness, but something far greater than Hamlet’s madness.

Audience and on-stage spectatorship to Lear’s madness is radically different from that in the cases of Ophelia and Hamlet’s. In the “structure” surrounding his madness, there are multiple characters functioning as mediators and spectators, including his Fool. These spectators become deeply affected by his madness, acknowledging and augmenting its emotional impact, rather than serving to inflect our interpretation of it. The imminent, looming onset of Lear’s madness is the propelling psychological action for much of the play, and they watch and respond in awe and fear.

In the first scene of the play, Kent, who immediately senses a change in Lear’s behavior, cautions Lear to “reserve thy state” against “this hideous rashness,” and coaxes him to calm with reason, maintaining his duty as “the true blank of thine eye”

(I.i.144-151). Kent functions here as a kind of external reasoning operator, which in this context would resonate as strongly ‘male.’ Kent places his life, his self-hood, on his loyalty to Lear, who rashly avoids Kent’s reason and banishes him. When Kent

18 returns in disguise, he finds his way back into Lear’s service by convincing Lear there is something “in your countenance which I would fain call master,” which, he explains, means ‘authority’ (I.iv.26). Much later in the play, as Lear begins to wander down the path of madness, there is a companion scene to this one with Kent and

Oswald again but with Lear notably absent. Kent lambasts Oswald once more, but he is unprovoked this time. The audience might almost question, as Cornwall does, “what, art thou mad, old fellow?” (II.ii.22) Is Kent a bit mad to defend Lear’s honor so violently? When Kent meets up with Lear again to convey news of his letter delivery, he describes this moment as “having more man than wit about me” This is not fully appreciated by Lear, who hears the description and begins to sense the madness brewing inside of him, identifying it once more with strictly female terms, “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysteria passio, down, thou climbing sorrow.” Here Lear makes a clear effort to repress the “improperly” female form of emotion he feels. Speaking directly to the female form of madness – Hysteria passio –

Lear demarcates gendered boundaries. While this seems to be the same crisis Hamlet feels, the gender boundaries are not so clear for him. Compared with Lear, Hamlet begins to look more like a reckless, arrogant youth. Lear does not condemn the immense power of female madness, but rather sees it as something he does not want to have. In contrast, Hamlet sees madness as something he can manipulate.

Similarly to the delivering of news of Ophelia’s madness by a “messenger” figure, Lear’s “true” madness is delivered to Kent by a seemingly impartial Gentleman in the rain. However, unlike the Gentleman of Ophelia’s scene who does not seem affected by witnessing Ophelia’s madness, this Gentleman seems overcome by having

19 witnessed Lear’s. He describes the king’s actions as, “contending with the fretful elements / bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,” a which recalls Gertrude’s description of Hamlet’s madness as “mad as the sea and wind when both contend / which is the mightier” (Lea III.i.4-5, Ham IV.i.8-10). He also describes Lear as being alone, but for the fool “who labors to outjest / his heart-struck injuries” – what is an internal struggle in Hamlet of sea and wind fighting for “power” is two physical bodies fighting to “outjest” emotion (III.i.17-18). The storm continues to rage, with the fool mocking, “here’s a night pities neither wise men nor fools” (III.ii.10). The structure of the play contributes to expanding his madness: The storm signifies that something is

‘wrong,’ the fragmentary structure affects the audience’s perception of the events taking place. When Kent says that “since I was man / such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder…I never / remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry / the affliction nor the fear,” he anticipates the spreading maddening effect the storm will have on the troupe amassing around Lear (III.ii.45-59).

When Edgar as Poor Tom of Bedlam yells from within the shelter, his presence somehow changes Lear. Lear immediately shifts from verse to prose – a shift

Shakespeare often uses to highlight a loss of sense and wit. This moment is important for this, but also for the marked shift from performed speech to something simple, natural, and perhaps, more authentic. As he moves from a speech less conscious of his high status, he moves to something more authentic and pressing – his painful emasculation by his daughters. This authenticity is supported by the reactions of his troupe. Gloucester is affected, “thou sayest the king grows mad – I’ll tell thee, friend, /

I am almost mad myself…the grief hath crazed my wits” (III.iv.156-157). The troupe

20 acts out a court scene with Goneril-the-stool on trial, and Lear’s involvement is so painfully vulnerable, Edgar breaks his character in an aside to the audience “my tears begin to take his part so much / they mar my counterfeiting” (III.vi.59-60). Lear’s madness affects all of these men in the company, and they then mediate his madness for the audience. Indeed, Edgar’s throwing off of his disguise of Poor Tom is a way of recognizing the authenticity of Lear’s madness for the audience, “how light and portable my pain seems now / when that which makes me bend makes the king bow”

(III.vi.106-107). This moment is made all the more forceful by a rhyming couplet – a rarity in this play. In Lear’s full immersion into the madness, he enters “bedecked in weeds” – as if he were wearing an Ophelia costume. Such feminine signifiers could be threatening and over-power the picture of the madness, but Edgar alleviates him from this ‘iconographic’ fate by proclaiming, “O matter and impertinency mixed; reason in madness” (IV.vi.171). This directly recalls Polonius’s famous “method in madness”

(Ham II.ii.205). This moment of Lear’s mad break is an aesthetic picture of poor

Ophelia with the power of reason and knowing in madness. In this moment, female and male madness co-exist in one theatrical being.

With King Lear, Shakespeare seems to have combined fragments of Ophelia and Hamlet in such a way as to make Lear more readable, accessible, and emotional – but also powerful and sublime. After his mighty madness, Lear seeps into a more pleading emotional state, “Pray, do not mock me / I am a very foolish fond old man

[…] I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” and regains his wits, if only momentarily

(IV.vii.60-63). The beautiful moment of, “we two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.

/ When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / and ask of thee forgiveness. So

21 we’ll live / and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / at gilded butterflies” is truly heart-breaking (V.ii.8-13). For Shakespeare’s male characters, the end-point of

“madness” is a place of healing and catharsis, and the process is a discovery of knowledge. For the audience, this moment is ultimate catharsis, but not with Hamlet or

Ophelia. Hamlet has his own catharsis, but the audience does not. Eliot notes that, “the

‘madness’ of Hamlet was “a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience” (4). Hamlet engages the audience’s intelligence, and is tragic for the rational mind’s painful paradox, but it does not tug with painful recognition, as King Lear does. Ophelia is not afforded a catharsis through madness.

The audience, however, gets a great deal of pleasure in the aesthetic beauty of

Gertrude’s description of her watery death. Moreover, if Ophelia is well-acted, there is great potential for audience catharsis through watching her.

Amidst these explorations of male rationality and emotion, Shakespeare also explores possibilities of a woman desiring male rationality and emotion. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around the same as King Lear, in which Lady Macbeth is not quite so monstrous as Goneril and Reagan, but she is terrible and nonetheless offers a challenge to conventional notions of ‘proper’ womanly behavior. While pages are filled in musings on Ophelia’s beauty and innocence, Lady Macbeth has relatively little singularly-focused scholarly attention. She seems to be the type of character that

Gilbert and Gubar are interested in studying – the woman who escapes “from the bondage of femininity into an empowering and violent madness” – yet they almost entirely overlook her (Showalter, 14). Showalter, too, who uses Ophelia significantly in her works, never addresses Lady Macbeth. Even Neely spends minimal time with

22 Macbeth, and when she does, she speaks mostly about the witches and mad-magic.

Further, what has been said has not been complimentary. The over-arching opinion through the centuries on Lady Macbeth has been variations of evil, monster, Terrible

Mother, and Shakespeare’s most “unsavory heroine” – the only description Gilbert and

Gubar give her (66). She is often described as masculine or wanting to be a man, but

Lady Macbeth asks to be “un-sexed” – not to be re-sexed. She wishes for the agency a man has, but not the body.

Lady Macbeth is less a she-man than a woman trying to assert herself over her husband, and she uses feminine means – mothering and seduction – to get what she wants. She takes up space in the play that is traditionally male, but she is inherently feminine in nature. In asking the “Gods” to “unsex me here” and “make thick my blood / stop up th’access and passage to remorse / that no compunctious visitings of nature / shake my fell purpose,” she asks for the Gods to prevent her feminine nature from interfering with her agency (I.v.42-46). And yet, this emotional rejection of femininity is feminine in nature. The unresolved clue into her past, “I have given suck, and know / know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me,” momentarily paints her as a mother. However, this is an underdeveloped moment – no other mention is given to this child – and thereby seems to serve only to vilify her, for she continues that she would “have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / and dashed his brains out” (I.vii.54-55, 57-58). Shakespeare revels in the shock caused by challenging seemingly inflexible gender norms. He treads along delicate ground, testing how a

“male” woman might be compelling, and what happens when men are weaker than their partners. It seems only a test, though, for he limits her, in stage-time, character

23 development, and with a very structurally inhibiting mad scene – a mad scene that structurally echoes Ophelia’s mad scene. Though Ophelia is allowed some agency in her madness – though it may not be readily perceived by the audience/reader, in Lady

Macbeth’s madness, she is ultimately stripped her of her agency.

For four hundred years, Lady Macbeth has been a source of great difficulty for the audience, and even for the actress playing her. Ophelia has been a challenge to actresses, too, but she is not a problem in the way the gender-transgressive Lady

Macbeth is. The very suggestion that there could be a woman like Lady Macbeth seems troubling to audiences – but indeed, this is not the case for all monstrous female characters. In spite of all this, Lady Macbeth reigns as one of the most coveted female roles in the dramatic canon, and yet, even some actresses playing her are repulsed by the character, as was legendary British tragedienne Sybil Thorndike, who said, “this is so awful, I can’t, I haven’t got anything in me like that woman” (Burton, 57).

Thorndike’s sentiments are made more pointed by her subsequent account of playing the matricidal Medea, of which she said, “It was so great, after every performance I felt like I’d just taken a bath” (57). The sharp distinction of reactions between these two theoretically similar characters is crucial and helps to suggest to what is uniquely troubling about Lady Macbeth verses other “monsters” in the canon.

Betrayed, jealous, and protective, Medea has reason for murder which is based in feminine instincts – to protect her children from being raised by another woman.

Lady Macbeth’s reason for murder is to assure her husband’s – and therefore, her own

– ascension to the crown. This reason is grounded in masculine desires for power.

Furthermore, her plea to the Gods to “unsex” her to allow her to do the deed seem to

24 suggest that in committing the murder, she seeks to overcome her feminine instincts.

Lady Macbeth receives no sympathy from other women, marked by the

Gentlewoman’s reaction to her madness, “I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body,” whereas the Greek chorus understands why Medea carry out her horrible act (V.i.58). Medea’s motivation comes from a, though skewed, protective mothering-instinct. Though horrible, it is appropriate, and to some degree sanctioned, within gendered codes, and therefore, garners sympathy – both in the greek chorus, as well as the audience. Lady Macbeth’s motivation is power, a male desire, and therefore, inappropriate.

Lady Macbeth’s mad scene, though quite different in content from Ophelia’s, is structured with striking similarity. Her madness “happens” off-stage, and the theatre- audience are introduced to it through the Doctor and Gentlewoman who function as on-stage spectators. The Gentlewoman describes the Lady’s actions, much like the

Gentleman’s description of Ophelia. The Doctor remarks “a great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching!” (V.i.9-

11). The sleepwalking is the striking characteristic of Lady Macbeth’s mad scene, similar to Ophelia’s flowery daydream. Her sleepwalking is directly linked to

Macbeth’s punishment “Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house / 'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more” (II.ii.5). It is also reminiscent of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in which he muses,

“to die – to sleep - / no more; and by a sleep to say we end / the heartache…to die – to sleep. To sleep – perchance to dream” (III.i.68-73). These two male protagonists have the agency to muse – to decide what is real, what is imagined. Even King Lear remarks

25 on sleep as the “remedy.” Lady Macbeth is denied this gift of sleep – trapped in a kind of sleep, but opposite from the kind that will end the heartache. She is also candid, verbally outing herself within the mad framework, “yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (V.i.42-43). The lines between real and imagined blur here: Her guilt of committing the murder is so palpable that in her madness, she imagines herself to have actually committed it. Her insistence of having killed Duncan indicates a perhaps deeply ingrained wish to have actually done it. After she fails to kill him, she reports to Macbeth, “had he not resembled / my father as he slept, I had done’t” (II.ii.12-13). The metaphorical, the imaginary – blood on her hands

– is her reality. The reality of her confession is denied by the Gentlewoman, who tells the Doctor that it cannot be repeated, “neither to you nor anyone, having no witness to confirm my speech” (V.i.20). The audience is that witness, which at once implicating the audience in the drama, as well as making the audience aware of its role as by- stander.

The challenging roles of Lady Macbeth and Ophelia have generated a legacy of type-casting. Actress choices for Lady Macbeth are usually tall, powerful women, capable of being a physical direct opponent to Macbeth. We read Lady Macbeth as masculine and therefore need to find a body that conveys as much. This is the same oversimplification that occurs in casting Ophelia: Ophelia is a naïve ingénue, therefore she “needs” to be cast as a whimsical, beautiful, soft-spoken girl. These types have been so strictly followed through centuries of unwavering representations that they are now iconic. Female actresses are classified as either Ophelias or Lady Macbeths.

However, what may look like a lack of imagination on the part of the theatre-makers is

26 here fundamentally connected to the problem of female representation. The ‘truer’ the actress is to looking like the expected representation of the character, and the closer she gets to embodying that representation, the more readable and accessible her mad moment will be. Ophelia’s madness is not ‘readable’ because the whimsical, ingénue, pathetic aspects of her have been exaggerated over time in this very attempt to make her more readable. With a powerful actress looking out through open, yet asleep, eyes, the mad moment truly has potential to be threatening. However, Lady Macbeth is reduced in her mad scene and given only a moment’s closure – an off-stage scream followed by news that, “the queen, my lord, is dead.” (V.v.16).

Representing female madness seems to have been ultimately more of a problem for Shakespeare than representing male madness. Unlike Lear and Hamlet,

Shakespeare represents the female mad scenes largely off-stage; what he does represent on-stage draws on familiar conventions. With the suggestion of the madness that is off-stage and the built-in spectatorship, Shakespeare seems to foreground the problem of representing mad women. With Ophelia as both mad and a fool, he seems dually interested in exploring the theatrical problem of presenting mad women, as well as navigating the problems that come with it. He ultimately does not seem sure how to go beyond gendered boundaries – Lady Macbeth is even more contained than Ophelia for perhaps this very reason.

Intrigued by these figures and the problems of representation that Shakespeare was unable solve with them, many modern playwrights have re-imagined these characters in their plays to try to represent female madness and push the boundaries further than Shakespeare. Of particular note is Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler – a subject of the

27 following chapter. The actress Elizabeth Robbins, who first portrayed Hedda Gabler in its English translation, wrote a mock interview in 1891 to promote the show in which she clearly notes the connection between Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, saying of

Hedda Gabler, “very true, she never tells you she was badly brought up, and wasn’t really to blame…Depravity and vice? Yes I’ve often wondered how any actress could descend to Lady Macbeth” (Cima, 51).

28 Chapter Two

Representing Madness in the 20th Century How Ibsen and Chekhov Adapt and Expand Shakespearian Representations of Mad Women

* * *

“This one of Ibsen’s actresses did not see Hedda as she was described by any critic, and Ibsen still seems to me to side with the actress.” - 20th century actress Elizabeth Robbins (18)

The last two decades of the 19th century and the beginning years of the 20th century saw the rise of the New Woman, far-reaching advances in psychology with the work of Freud and others, and an arguably correlative crisis of the rise in cases of diagnosed hysteria and neuroses in women. This historical moment also saw a radical transformation of the Theatre from Melodrama to Realism – as well as the Modernist forms pushing firmly against it.

These changes and tensions leave their mark in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, the father of Realism, and most dynamically in his work Hedda Gabler. Viewed by them as a Champion of Women’s Rights, Ibsen was a source of inspiration for the New

Women who rallied around his psychologically complex female characters. As

Elizabeth Robbins, the first actress to portray Hedda in the English translation of

Hedda Gabler said in her address “Ibsen and the Actress,” “no dramatist ever meant so much to the women of the stage as Henrik Ibsen” (6). Ibsen portrayed strong female characters on the stage and opened up new possibilities for female actresses. But while some female spectators of the time felt galvanized by Ibsen’s ambitious women, many male spectators were unreceptive. This was particularly the case with Hedda Gabler, whose mean, unlikeable protagonist has been difficult both to portray and respond to

29 since its first production. Critics, scholars, directors, actresses, and audiences frequently have fallen into the trap of trying to define Hedda within their own gendered conceptions and expectations. They are quick to try “solve” the problem of

Hedda by finding motivations which might explain her actions in categorical, and simple terms. The appealing enigma of the play is that Hedda cannot be so easily or readily defined: She is pregnant but not motherly, caustic yet sympathetic, sexy but cold, bored yet artistic – among a slew of other contradictions. Joan Templeton argues that for Ibsen “an essential, preoccupying subject” was “man’s refusal of woman’s full humanity, his objectification of her into an idea” (108). In Hedda Gabler, Ibsen seeks to explore questions of what happens when a woman wants to have the power a man has – a woman with similar desires to Lady Macbeth. He revisits considerations tested by Shakespeare in Macbeth and further vexes them by elevating Hedda – unlike Lady

Macbeth – to the level of protagonist. Ibsen, like Shakespeare, ultimately seems uncertain about Hedda.

As though they saw aspects of Lady Macbeth and her madness in Hedda, many early male critics eagerly diagnosed Hedda as ‘mad’ with the popular clinical term of a neurotic hysteric. A reviewer from The Times, for instance, stated that Hedda Gabler was “a demonstration of the pathology of mind such as may be found in the pages of

The Journal of Mental Science or in the reports of the medical superintendents of lunatic asylums” (Showalter, 146). Other critics took more care to avoid recognizing

Hedda as ‘real’ at all, such as Hjalmar Boyesen, a contemporary Norweigan critic of

Ibsen’s, who described Hedda as “that complete perversion of womanhood” (292). In almost humorous contrast to the responses of the men, the New Women spectators

30 were overly emphatic and optimistic about Hedda, crying, “Hedda is every woman!”

Such approving hyperbole likewise too easily disregards the pronounced problems of

Hedda’s character. These positive reactions similarly reduce Hedda to a narrow, singular set of definitions.

Such uncertainty and divided reactions are a major factor in the play’s longevity in production. However, with gender theories of the Academy and a century’s worth of changing acting styles, the play is often just as problematic for critics, spectators, and performers today. Certainly, the urge to define Hedda has not dwindled. Feminist scholar Gail Finney fell into such a trap when describing Hedda’s

“hysteria,”

“Ibsen depicts Hedda’s mild hysteria as the reaction to her entrapment in female roles to which she is unsuited, epitomized by her unwanted pregnancy; careful analysis of the text reveals that the stage directions describing her gestures of nervousness or suffocation nearly always follow indirect references to her incipient maternity. In other words… Hedda’s hysteria is the response to her hysterization, or to the reduction of her to her femaleness.” (161)

That the text does not bend neatly to such “careful analysis of the text” is precisely why Finney’s argument comes up flat. In her attempt to fit Hedda into a feminist schematic, she, too, reduces Hedda and reads “the gestures of nervousness” as narrowly related to her pregnancy or her husband, thereby simplifying her in essentialist terms that manage to reify rather than complicate the traditional cultural associations between female madness and reproduction, in which hysteria – rooted in

“hystera,” Greek for “uterus” – was believed to be a woman’s ailment caused by a wandering womb. In her book, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature,

Elizabeth Hardwicke produces a more evenly balanced account of Hedda, refuting any

“diagnoses” of her. “There is something too hopeful in the use of any sort of medical or physiological determination of Hedda's character,” she suggests, “It would seem to

31 make us mourn that she had missed the felicities of ‘treatment’ or simple sexual knowledge of the kind supposedly easy to come upon in our own day” (54). She is not the only scholar/critic to recognize that Hedda cannot be neatly or schematically defined. Recently, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times tried his hand at explaining this problem,

“Every actress with the right aptitude and intelligence wants to play Hedda, but relatively few stars manage to triumph in the role […] The urge to clarify — and to forge a connection with the audience by evoking sympathy or amusement — can trip up an actress in this role perhaps as in no other […] Attempt to reveal too much about Hedda that Ibsen did not specifically plant in the text, or settle too firmly on a neat psychological formula, and you risk reducing her to a bored housewife, a frustrated neurotic, a thwarted artist. She is all these, in part and in theory, but she must be more, too, larger somehow than both her personality and her predicament.”

This evaluation of Hedda’s complexity is, like Hardwicke’s, a well-balanced reading, coming from years of empirical data of watching actresses trying on the role. Here he gives an enlightened reading of Hedda, but only three years prior to this more generalized critique, this same reviewer discussed a specific production of the play in a far less even-keeled manner saying, “The role of the original desperate housewife has always been catnip to actresses, and Ms. Blanchett is by no means the first to treat it as a vehicle affording copious opportunities for hand-wringing, moody stage-stalking and anguished stares into the distance.” This more disdainful attitude towards Hedda reveals a lingering patriarchal attitude to the play and exposes his discomfort with the character. By using the descriptions of “hand-wringing,” “moody stage-stalking,” and

“anguished stares” – words recalling the theatricalities of Melodrama – he criticizes what he perceives as over-the-top, ‘melodramatic’ acting.

For contemporary audiences, the term ‘melodramatic’ is often used to describe over-the-top or ‘bad’ acting; and off-stage, it suggests an over-wrought theatricality in real life, and most often describing a female sentimentality – she is, in contemporary

32 terms, a drama queen. In both cases, it implies a negative view towards what is described. But the heightened, stylistic, and overtly theatrical methods of Melodrama were once popular art forms that dominated the stage in the 19th century. Melodrama purported moralities that were ‘black-or-white,’ and used sentimentality to evoke tears and laughter from the audience. Many new dramatists like Ibsen were eager to create new modes that broke away from this prevailing form. However, Ibsen’s

“psychologically real” style did not completely erase Melodrama. He neither mocks nor dismisses the popular Melodrama of the time – he uses it. By intentionally incorporating moments of Melodrama in the play, Ibsen reminds the audience that this

“Real” world is still a Theatrical space. Melodrama has been so frequently parodied throughout the 20th century that it is today unrecognizable as its own distinct art form to a contemporary audience who qualifies ‘good’ acting along terms of ‘real,’ and

‘honest.’ Melodramatic modes are still in high demand in some contemporary types of performance – Hollywood blockbusters and commercial Broadway theatre, and, even more prominently, TV comedy and soap operas, seek to please their audience with stylized, easily-understood, melodramatic character types or situations. What was once a celebrated dramatic art has become equated to soap opera acting and is not accorded a respected place in highbrow theatre. Ibsen’s intentional quotations of 19th century

Melodrama in Hedda Gabler are therefore easily lost on contemporary audiences who readily perceive Hedda’s theatricality as either the hysterical un-pleasantries of a harpy character or the incompetence of the flailing actress playing her.

The contemporary audience then misreads the play if it tries to understand

Hedda solely within the context of realism. Ibsen’s ‘Realism’ intended to represent

33 “real life” – not actually be “real life.” Ibsen is always aware of the absent fourth wall, and his inclusion of heighted theatrical moments are frequently designed as a reminder of the play as a representation, not ‘real’ life. This is clearly apparent in the finale of the play with Hedda’s perfectly staged death behind a meta-theatrical curtain, but it subtly included throughout the play. One such example occurs when Hedda burns the manuscript at the end of Act III, “whispering,” “Now I’m burning your child, Thea!

With your curly hair! Your child and Ejlert Lovborg’s. I’m burning…burning your child” (246). Her acting here is melodramatic, and concludes with as a climactic, theatrically perfect act break. Additionally, Act II literally begins with a bang when

Hedda fires General Gabler’s pistols at Brack – a Melodramatic moment which in

Ibsen’s time would have been recognized and appreciated for its theatricality. Under the assumption that the play is ‘realistic,’ however, contemporary audiences are likely to be jarred by this moment and respond over-emphatically to its theatricality. Some feminists might celebrate Hedda’s performance here as proto-feminist: she uses Brack

– “The Symbol of the Patriarchal System” – as target practice. Others might view her as a neurotic naïf whose little experience with or understanding of objects full of phallic and violent potential is dangerous. Such audiences might feel a sense of relief when Brack puts these “toys” away. To an audience accustomed to Melodrama, these moments would have still been recognizably theatrical, but less startling and difficult to process than for the audience far more accustomed to naturalism. Unsurprisingly, such moments often garner harsh critiques from audiences and critics as ‘badly- performed.’

34 Some critics, however, have begun to offer far more nuanced approaches both to Hedda’s self-performance, and to the theatrical conventions and expectations that shape the audiences’ understanding of that performance. Both theorist Elin Diamond and performance-studies scholar Gay Gibson Cima use actress Elizabeth Robbins’ her work on Hedda as their source material. Diamond argues that Robbins as a Realist actress “translated” Hedda and her hysteria, “enabling the critic/spectator to take on the role of spectator/analyst, gathering clues (the pistols, the portrait, the thinning hair), and to trace the outline of a ‘mental pathology’” (29). She goes on to explain that in

Ibsen’s Realism, “twentieth-century performance dreams of the body that will gesture and present, not imitate and represent, a body of “subjugated knowledge” that resists social discipline” (38). In contrast, Cima sees Robbins as a proto-materialist feminist who deftly manipulated Melodrama and Realism and created “a critical style that simultaneously placed on view the melodramatic and realistic bases of her character, complicating her position onstage and enabling audiences to become conscious of and critique the performance of woman” (17). While both of these readings argue persuasively for the liberation at work with Hedda, they take to an extreme something recruited far more subtly within the actual text.

Hardwicke notes that, “It is natural that actresses would wish to find an objective expression for the mystery of Hedda's nature. […] The hysterical gestures so often seen in the acting out of Ibsen's heroines are a way...of trying for a clear and neat motivation the author does not wish to provide” (56). There is implicit pressure on the actress to play up her neurotic aspects: should she lean into the Melodramatic stylization, she might just look like a bad actress, but should these actress resist

35 ‘playing up’ madness, audiences will likely mark what does not make sense under their assumed context of Realism as symptomatic of a madness or neurosis. In the first beat after Hedda’s entrance in the play, while Tesman says good-bye to Aunt Julie at the door, Ibsen’s stage directions describe that “while this is going on, Hedda walks about the room, raises her arms and clenches her fists as though in a frenzy” (179).

Contemporary audiences would likely read this moment as either badly-acted or demonstrative of neuroses, depending on whether the actress plays her ‘straight’ or neurotic. Hedda is conflicted ultimately between the social pressure to conform in the public sphere and the inexpressible private emotion glimpsed in these “clenched fist” moments. There is no private space in Hedda’s world – even her dressing closet is soon to have a “chink” in it for Brack’s looking pleasure. She imagines what a private space to express her feelings might be, but she can only do so in the terms of a man’s world – Brack’s drinking parlor, for instance. Hedda is almost neurotic in her effort to manage this conflict between her feelings and her socio-cultural obligations, but she is not hysterical or neurotic. She is impulsive and destructive as a means to combat both her boredom and her frustration with social, gendered constraints – both of which do threaten to force her into the realm of hysteria. She resists boredom and containment by way of theatricality, but this theatricality is then misread as symptomatic of her neuroses or indeed as evidential proof that she is ‘going mad.’

Hedda’s impulsivity is not a haphazard creation or a convenient device for the development of the play’s action. Ibsen offers an almost schematic range of postures towards impulse control in its central characters – Brack and Lovborg function as extremes and Tesman as a median. Brack is a calculating social operator, always alert

36 to pragmatic considerations, attentive to the expectations and rules of his culture even if he disdains them privately. This is a man who seeks, above all else, to control and regulate his public persona, and who deftly manages to keep his own transgressions private and exploit the weaknesses of those around him. Lovborg, by contrast, is a reckless genius of romantic excess, and he cares little about if he transgresses against societal expectations. He is, as a result, highly vulnerable to the power of his own feelings and imagination. The dull, plodding Tesman, who is neither calculating nor imaginative, embodies an ordinary domesticity between these extremes. Hedda’s possibility for emotional control in the play is largely defined by her relationships with these men. In those scenes in which Hedda is ‘alone’ with Brack and Lovborg, respectively, her relationship to impulse control drastically changes depending on whom she is with. The scene with Brack “sneaking round the back,” begins, as previously noted, with a Melodramatic trope, which Brack immediately regulates, calling it “that game,” and putting the gun – her “toy” – away (199). With his money and connections, Brack created the oppressive structure of the Tesmans’ house, and he knows how to use it as “master of the house” (203). Hedda is cavalier in telling Brack her cynical views of Tesman, including him in on her practical joke on poor Aunt

Julie, and indiscreetly revealing how Tesman spent the honeymoon in the library. Her relationship with Brack is a game of resistance to the rules. She engages in a kind of affair with Brack by letting him in on her secrets, and the two “exchange a knowing smile” about Tesman’s academic publications that he “simply had to have” (205, 204).

However, Hedda resists an actual affair with Brack, something he explicitly expects of her. When she is with him, as in this scene, Hedda is acutely aware of her own

37 inabilities to control, telling him “my impulsiveness had its consequences, my dear

Brack” (207).

In contrast, with Lovborg, Hedda is quite reserved and exhibits emotional control. The setting is the same as their alluded-to secret intimacy, when they “sat in the corner sofa…always with the same magazine in front of us…,” with General

Gabler presiding over them. A photo album of Hedda’s honeymoon replaces the magazine, and General Gabler has become a looming portrait; The framing devices of their secret intimacy are now images. Their conversation is elliptical and nostalgic, as if they are creating a tiny play. This scene stands as a crumbling relic of the past.

While she is interested in Lovborg initially, he becomes more interesting and desirable to her as a symbol of equal parts excess and control, rather than for what he actually is

– a creative intellectual who cannot handle his liquor. To her, he represents a world she has always longed to visit. In a moment of sensitive self-awareness, Hedda asks him,

“Do you find it so hard to understand that a young girl…when it can happen like that…in secret…that she should want to find out about a world that…that she isn’t supposed to know anything about?” (219). Though Lovborg digs into their past emotional drama, Hedda maintains control of the situation. Even when she starts to slip and “confess something” to him, and he cuts her off too soon, “Oh Hedda! Now I think

I see what it was that lay behind our companionship! You and I…! So it was your lust for life…” she strives to regain control, “Have a care! Don’t assume any such thing!”

(220). However, this reunion with the past – when she was reckless, flamboyant, and young – ignites Hedda’s most destructive impulses. Lovborg reminds Hedda of her lack of courage in breaking off their relationship, and he makes no attempt to hide his

38 disgust towards her marriage with Tesman, “Oh Hedda…darling Hedda, how could you throw yourself away like that?” (216). He reminds her of when she was Hedda

Gabler and had control over him, and he asks her, “what power was it in you that forced me to reveal all those things?” (218). Lovborg models a courage and decisiveness she either envies or simply cannot resist. Stirred and animated by the memories he recalls, Hedda’s impulsivity takes a drastic turn. Despite her wish to control herself – and despite the control she exhibits with him in this scene – Hedda moves from mean-spirited pranks that “just come” to her, to destructive measures with fire, alcohol, and death.

Nietzsche’s early work of dramatic theory, The Birth of Tragedy, published in

1872, explores the categories of what he termed Dionysian and Apollonian theatre. As defined by Patrice Pavis, the Apollonian “represents moderation and harmony, knowledge of self and one's limits. The image of the sculptor giving form to matter, representing the real and absorbed in the contemplation of image and dream is the archetype of Apollonian art.” The Dionysian is contrasted as “dedicated to inebriation, to the uncontrolled forces unleashed in men in spring, to nature and the individual reconciled. It is the art of a kind of music lacking articulate form that strikes terror in the hearer and the performer” (27, 28). The Dionysian is associated with Romantic ideas of Madness, as it involves a release of emotion carrying one away from rationality and towards an overwhelming excess. Nietzsche contended that true tragedy only existed in the tension between Dionyisan and the Apollonian. He argued that the

Apollonian form and structure gave meaning to Dionysian excess and madness, and that “the continuing development of art is tied to the duality” of the two (19). Whether

39 or not Ibsen read Nietzsche’s work remains uncertain. However, Nietzsche’s ideas were so frequently discussed by theatre critics and playwrights in the era that, at the very least, Ibsen surely internalized and was familiar with the core arguments of The

Birth of Tragedy.

Hedda Gabler is a tight, well-structured, schematic play of four distinct acts.

The structure even manifests physically in the form of the immaculate, suffocating, minutely-described realist living room to which Hedda is effectively confined throughout the action of the play. The essence of the societal world of the play, as well as the play’s formal qualities of structure and set, evoke core elements of Apollonian drama. Hedda is impulsive and destructive as a means of escape from this structure.

However, she has little experience with any Dionysian forms – drinking, sexuality besides her dull honeymoon, motherhood, or emotionally heightened forms of music or culture. That lack of experience is highlighted both in her speech and by the set: the only artwork is the looming portrait of her father, and the piano – a prop central in size, placement, and purpose – is left un-played until the very end. The play is also full of references to books and, at that, un-finished books which she shows a marked lack of interest in reading, and her most direct encounter with a book is using it as kindling.

The only evidence that Hedda has any familiarity with Dionysian art is her reoccurring reference to “vine leaves,” the iconic image of Dionysian drunkenness. One might imagine that it is the one vocabulary word she remembers from a school girl lesson on mythology – perhaps one she listened to when not preoccupied with yanking Thea’s hair. Her fixation on this image of Lovborg returning from Brack’s “with vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and confident,” gives shape and purpose to impulses which quickly

40 turn destructive (226). Without any real artistic vocabulary to do so, Hedda acts as an agent for the Dionysian values in the otherwise tightly-constricting Apollonian drama of her domestic life.

By recognizing Hedda as capable of her own agency, she begins to look more like Hamlet, who is his own agent with impulsive tendencies. Within their own dramas, they are both elusive artists: the audience of the court struggles to interpret

Hamlet’s performance, while the audience in the villa misinterprets or merely ignores

Hedda’s. The extent of Hamlet’s self-performance, as discussed in Chapter One, is a source of endless discussion by those on-stage who view and try to interpret him, while

Hedda’s self-performance is misread and misdiagnosed both by the other characters in the play and by the theatre audience.

As an artist-figure, Hamlet seemingly understands both the potential and the limitations of the theatre. He is empowered by its capacity, and as an actor and a director, he prompts the action of the play by using self-consciously theatrical means to plot and exact his father’s revenge. He does this both as an actor through his performance of madness, and as a director instructing actors how to perform his play.

Hamlet is quite a capable performer: both the audience of the court and the audience in the theatre struggle to discern whether he is just performing or actually mad, and his famous address to the players is still used for actor training today. But he is also ultimately trapped by the limitations of acting. He is self-aware of his performance as an “actor on the stage,” and positions himself in direct contrast to the “actual” player who “in a fiction, in a dream of passion / could force his soul so to his own conceit / that, from her working, all his visage wann’d / Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect

41 / a broken voice, and his whole function suiting / with forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! / For Hecuba!” (II.ii.383). He is frustrated over the “tears,” “distraction,” and

“broken voice” that are for art not utility. Self-performance is a necessity for Hamlet, but he is both in conflict with and jealous of the ease with which these actors perform with ‘purpose.’

Hedda, caught in her roles as wife and expectant mother, and as a proper woman within her social realm, resists these roles by theatricality. However she is not a conscious performer in the way Hamlet is, except perhaps in her last moments in the play. Though her theatricality rises and expands through the play, it does not come to a kind of unequivocal self-conscious performance until immediately before her dramatic end. Indeed, much like her impulsive, cruel actions, her theatrical self-performance stems from a defense against boredom rather than a conscious decision, like Hamlet’s.

Hedda’s foremost role is a Housewife in a Realist social drama. She is as an actress who has wound up in a limited role with limited prospects for promotion or creative license, telling Brack, “It’s these paltry circumstances I’ve landed up in…!

That’s what makes this so pitiful. So positively ludicrous!...Because that’s what it is”

(208). Her frustration with this role – even if she does not understand it as a role in fully theatrical terms – leads her to impulsive action. She gets pleasure from resisting her prescribed role and by not playing her part ‘correctly.’ After Hedda has played a prank on poor Aunt Julie, Tesman asks her “couldn’t you bring yourself to give her a kiss when you meet? For my sake Hedda, Eh?” (179). Hedda refuses, “Oh don’t ask me, Tesman, for God’s sake. I’ve told you before, I just couldn’t” (180). Further, calling him “Tesman” is yet another way she fights passive aggressively from within

42 her role. While impulsivity, a Dionysian quality, is scorned under the Apollonian umbrella, and as Hedda says, “my impulsiveness had its consequences, my dear Mr.

Brack,” her impulsivity initially gets her results (207). Each time she gets a reaction, however, it is either not exactly what she wanted or it does not satisfy her for long.

When she “happened to say, just on the impulse, that I’d like to live here in this villa,”

Tesman makes her impulse a reality, but at the cost of becoming his wife (207).

In Toril Moi’s work, Henrik Ibsen: and the Birth of Modernism, Moi seeks to put Ibsen in the ranks of the founders of Modernism. She highlights the importance of theatre and theatricality to Ibsen throughout his works. However, Moi only briefly touches on Hedda Gabler as a short epilogue to the otherwise lengthy work. She makes the observation that “throughout the last two acts of the play, Hedda has behaved like a producer and director trying desperately to stage a sublime idealist tragedy entitled “Lovborg’s Death,” but does not linger over this idea nor elaborate on the degree of consciousness with which Hedda ‘stages’ this tragedy (316). Further, she overlooks the ways that Hedda’s work as a director begins unconsciously the moment she steps on stage. Hedda establishes her authority by ordering Tesman around to adjust the lights, “Dear Tesman, go and draw the curtains, that gives a softer light,” to clear the set of unwanted props (the slippers and Aunt Julie’s hat), and to move the set around, “We’d better put [the piano] in the back room, there” (176, 177). She also makes subtle directorial choices in managing the ways her immediate audience – the other characters in the parlor – perceive her, insisting, like a prima donna, on her own centrality, and her own power to define herself. This is particularly the gesture behind responses to remarks on her pregnancy, either refusing, “I’m exactly the same as I was

43 when we left,” or dodging completely (178). Hedda also tries to perform outside of her

Housewife role, trying to represent herself as a woman who can shoot a gun and be like a man. Ultimately, however, she lacks courage to perform this role with full conviction. She is paralyzed, resigned to her state of boredom and domesticity – “I’d really danced myself tired…I had had my day” – and out of fear or paralysis she will not engage in an affair with Brack; she admits this immobility and cowardice to him saying, “I’d sooner stay where I am…in the compartment,”(202, 204). She is stuck in a house, playing two roles, the domestic role of wife which she is forced to grin and bear, and the other, a woman with her own agency, is ignored by her audience;

Lovborg does not hear half of what she says, Tesman does not see her for even a glimmer of what she is, and Brack is only interested in her as a sexual object which he can look at through the “minutest chink in the door” (200). As a performer of a female self who desires masculine agency, she has no fully attentive or sympathetic audience in the play. Even the women in the play are a poor audience to/for Hedda. Aunt Julie is miffed by her aloofness, and Thea is completely incapable of reading her. Thea is first

“terrified” of her, but then confides everything in her. To alleviate her boredom, Hedda uses Thea as a weapon, and makes Aunt Julie a victim.

Just as Hedda’s audience within the play does not fully recognize her transgressive desires – Lovborg being a brief exception – the audience and readers of the play, like Moi, have not fully recognized the extent of Hedda’s directorial talents.

Hedda herself also does not fully recognize her own capabilities: as a performer she is not aware, in most of the play, of her own capacity for self-performance. She is reactive but without a strategic sense of how to create or operate a larger plot. She is an

44 adept manipulator, and can read people instinctively. She sets the stage the moment she enters, asserting directorial control over the situation with confident ease. She, however, lacks erudite discipline and has no craft. Where the allure of Hedda is her unconscious capacity for self-performance, her lack of smarts and self-awareness is her tragedy; the allure of Hamlet is his self-performance and his smarts and his self- awareness. Her project is doomed to be a failure, because she has no vision or a vocabulary to do what she wants to do. Furthermore, while her impulsiveness as a performer might get results, as a director, her impulsiveness is the driving force of her failure. This is a stark contrast to Hamlet, who is methodical about the play he directs, and his play gets him results. There are no moments in the play in which Hedda engages in any extensive pre-meditation. She improvises to disastrous consequences.

Hedda directs Lovborg as her puppet who can go into the places she has never been. In doing so, she attempts to direct a play on a set she has never even seen. Her duality as

Romantic performer and performer as a woman of polite society complicate and undermine her directorial authority – indeed, the repercussion of her performance as

“wife” has resulted in a future role for her as ‘mother’ – one she staunchly resists, though she clearly should have expected such an outcome. Her prescribed role as

‘woman’ in this society not only limits her abilities to act out her impulses, it limits her access to artistic or other opportunities to explore those impulses, such that her perceptions of the Dionysian tragedy are narrow and simplistic. As an impulsive performer, this reduced knowledge of an “Art” is not dangerous, but as a director with only a sliver of knowledge, she is as a child playing with matches.

45 Hedda’s rhetorical question to Brack, when he takes away her guns – the only tools she has to entertain herself – epitomizes her trouble: “well, what in God’s name do you want me to do with myself?” (201). Her boredom combined with her lack of tools paves the way for her spontaneous, improvised “drama.” After her attempt at staging Lovborg-as-Dionysus at Brack’s drinking party fails, she becomes angry, telling Lovborg “Oh no. I don’t believe in those vine leaves any more” (246). She impulsively decides to stage a “beautiful” tragedy, giving Lovborg the pistol and begging him, “Couldn’t you let it happen…beautifully?” (245). When Hamlet begins to drown in excess of emotion, and when his directorial plotting is not enough to control what he does, he jumps in the grave, purges his excess feelings, and re-surfaces in calm control of himself. Hedda has no such outlet available, so her impulses continue to drive her actions as they become progressively more destructive.

Having sent Lovborg away with the gun, and then having been told by Brack of his death by gunshot, Hedda firmly believes that she has finally succeed in staging something – here, a cathartic tragedy. After this moment, she is at her most joyful, celebrating that, “Ejlert Lovborg had the courage to live his life in his own fashion.

And then now…this! This beautiful act. That he had the courage to take his leave of life…so early” (258). However, the rational Brack, “compelled to disabuse” her of this

“beautiful illusion,” destroys this “beautiful act” her (258). Hearing the full truth of

Lovborg’s unseemly death in the whore-house, she moans that “Oh…everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical” (259). Where as

Hamlet’s jump in the grave is an abandonment of his self-performance and resignation of control, Hedda struggles to hold on to self-performance and control throughout the

46 play. Nonetheless, Hedda’s recognition of how everything she touches turns “vile” is a turning point for her, as Hamlet’s grave-jump is for him, since it forces her to a fuller self-awareness, a painful realization of just how much she lacks control. It also marks an awareness of the limited extent of her power to actually affect something by her touch.

It is at this moment that Hedda becomes more conscious of herself as a director and as an actor – through recognition that what she has attempted has been both ill- disciplined and “mean” in conception and execution. However, her initial reaction to this self-consciousness is to resort to a defiant new level of impulsiveness. It is as though in her moment of self-recognition, she becomes, almost instinctively, and truly, a Dionysian artist – echoing Romantic idealism and the more tangible emotional extravagance of Lovborg, the man she has just propelled to his death. She boldly tells

Brack, “Subject to your will and your demands. No longer free! No! That’s a thought that I’ll never endure! Never” (262). She, now markedly, shows a new mastery as a performer who has a capacity to imagine herself in other roles, an ability to simultaneously act out and mock those roles, and a sharply crafted self-performance.

She uses the memorable defining aspects of the characters around her as her ‘script.’

She first mocks Tesman, imitating his distinctive verbal tics, “Well? Is it going to work out, Jorgen? Eh?” then she passes “her fingers lightly through Thea’s hair” and coos at her about how she is going to inspire her husband as she did Lovborg, “in time” (263).

She artistically reduces her respective relationships to these characters to two, simple – but brilliantly insightful – gestures, almost as a theatre critic offering a summation of their characteristics.

47 For the first time in the play, Hedda here conceives of her actions with forethought – like a director – and with self-conscious theatricality. She chooses her props when she “[pulls] an object, covered with sheets of music, out of the bookcase”

– the pistol – and takes it into the inner room upstage that is separated by a curtain

(260). She sets her ‘drama’ in this upstage area, framing her set with a deliberately meta-theatrical ‘curtain.’ She then pokes her head through this curtain after Tesman interrupts her ‘pre-show’ “wild dance” music to tell him – with self-performed, biting irony – “I shall be silent in the future” (263). In this moment, she also wryly recognizes and exploits the inattentiveness of her ‘audience’: she is ‘backstage,’ but speaks through the curtain to the ‘audience,’ a taboo disruption of the ‘performance.’

Within the metatheatrical construction, the gunshot and Hedda’s death are both behind the curtain, and therefore ‘off-stage’ – reminiscent of the off-stage deaths of Lady

Macbeth and Ophelia. However, though out of sight, Hedda remains, in another sense, almost emphatically on-stage, and both her ‘audience’ and the audience in the theatre must confront her death directly. She shocks her audience, and quite literally makes her ‘audience’ sit up and look at it: Tesman jumps up and “pulls the curtains aside and runs in,” then shouts at Brack, “shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Think of that!”

(264). Indeed, this line echoes Hedda’s ‘script,’ in which Hedda mocked Tesman’s repetitive exclamatory style. And the audience in the theatre is left processing Brack’s final line, “people don’t do such things!” as the curtain comes down on the tableau

(264).

In re-staging the previously failed ‘drama’ of Lovborg’s death, Hedda is finally a fully realized director, actress, and artist, for one brief moment. This clarity of

48 direction, doing what she believes is the “courageous” thing, does not come at her most sane, but, her emotional and intellectual turmoil draws on what Nietzsche describes as “that madness from which tragic and comic art grew, the Dionysian madness” (7). With her simultaneous self-destruction and artistic creation, Hedda ends the play a consummate Dionysian, in which, as Nietzsche says, “Man is no longer an artist but a work of art” (Pavis, 29). Whereas Ophelia dies a ‘work-of-art’ created by other people’s descriptions of her, Hedda dies as the work-of-art that she created.

* * *

“People love actresses […] They’re always looking for an ideal image.” - The Seagull (117).

In The Seagull, Anton Chekhov wryly – and often mockingly – reworks the core themes and archetypal figures of Hamlet into a meta-theatrical, tragicomic masterpiece. Hamlet becomes an aspiring playwright, Konstantin, who shows some promise, but has no willing audience to his work – least of all his self-involved mother

Arkadina, who interrupts his play several times, asking, “is this supposed to be symbolic?” and “Something smells. Is that part of the effect?” (119). With Arkadina,

Gertrude is re-imagined as a formidable actress. She actually quotes Gertrude before her son’s play starts, “Oh, Hamlet, speak no more!” suggesting her awareness of her own Gertrude-like maternal relationship to her troubled Hamlet-like son who has

‘veiled’ desires for her (118). Arkadina, like Hedda, is bored, relatively unlikeable, and narcissistic. Trigorin is Arkadina’s lover and an object of jealousy for Konstantin, and thus to some extent occupies the role of Claudius; Nina fills the space of Ophelia as the

49 love-object of the brooding Konstantin. Chekhov seems to have a lot of fun with rewriting these characters, and with the nearly constant metatheatricality of his plot, centering as it does on two men who write and two women who are actresses.

Nina is an updating of Ophelia put into a world in which women have options – albeit limited ones. Nina chooses to be an actress, but is fundamentally insecure and hence struggles with this choice and all the other freedoms this world provides. “I was trying to guess if I’d be an actress or not,” she bemoans to Trigorin, “I wish someone would advise me,” to which he definitively responds, “nobody can advise you about that” (137). Nina is also readily viewed in symbolic terms by the men, which she quite willingly allows. Trigorin explicitly declares this symbolic use of her in his “idea for a short story,” in which “a girl like you…loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she’s happy and free as a seagull” (133). Having this nominal freedom, and, like Hedda, being the title character, come at a price, as Trigorin predicts: “Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here” (133). Nina is at times unaware of her symbolic status, as when she tells Konstantin, “You sulk, you talk and talk, and I can’t understand what you mean.

You talk in symbols. Like this seagull – is this supposed to be a symbol too? Well, excuse me, but I don’t quite get it. I must be too ordinary a person to understand what you mean” (131). But by the end of the play, in her ‘madness,’ she is self-aware about her role, but also resistant to it, telling Konstantin, “I’m the seagull…No that’s not right” (157). Like Konstantin, Nina wants to be less bound by ordinary time and society – to be like a seagull. That desire naturally leads her to a profession in acting, but it is a profession in which consciousness of audience and self-awareness about

50 one’s own performance – matters indeed contingent in ordinary time and society – are essential for success.

Perhaps the most celebrated and confounding aspect of Chekhov’s work is its distinctive combination of elements of both comedy and tragedy. As Ben Brantley, the

Theatre critic for the New York Times, explains, “Chekhov’s work sees the human condition as an exercise in frustration that is both comic (“Ha! They can’t get what they want”) and tragic (“Sob! They can never get what they want”) . And he works both sides of that equation more successfully than any playwright” (Brantley, second paragraph). The characters of the tragedy of Hamlet transition are re-imagined brilliantly in this “comedic” arena of The Seagull. Konstantin is a sympathetic character, but his attempt at the play, his pitiful love for Nina, and even his failed suicide are humorous; Arkadina is hilarious in her complete neglect of her son and fascination with herself – and both tragic and comedic in her assurance that she could

“play a girl of fifteen with no trouble at all” (126). As an exaggeration and a parody of

Ophelia, Nina is funny, and intentionally so. Sorin’s treatment of her as a child, “Yes?

Are we happy? Are we really, really happy? Did our father and stepmother go ‘way and leave us by ourselves for three whole days? Are we happy?” is humorous, as is her emphatic response to him, “Yes, we’re happy!” (126). Her short soliloquy, “it’s so strange, watching a great actress cry! And all over nothing! […] I thought famous people would be serious and unapproachable […] but they cry and go fishing and play cars and laugh and get mad, just like the rest of us…” is in the same sort of enthusiastic, energetic tone as her response to Sorin – and though the content of this speech holds a grain of self-understanding, the tone makes the realization lighter and

51 slightly comedic (131). However, with Nina, the comedy is always ultimately de- stabilizing. The audience often does not know when to laugh at her, and when to sympathize with her, as with her own self-contradictory desire in the last scene, when she calls herself “I’m the seagull” then correcting, “…no that’s not right” (157). Here, the clash between comic and tragic elements complicate the reception of Nina in her

‘madness,’ which thereby complicates the way Chekhov is able to re-imagine the role of Ophelia.

With the Nina’s ‘mad’ scene, Chekhov revisits and disrupts the ‘Ophelia-mad- scene.’ When Konstantin informs what has happened to Nina in the two years that pass between acts III and IV – “the baby died. Trigorin grew tired of her […] As far as I know, Nina’s personal life is a complete disaster” – he functions as the Gentleman who prepares the audience for Ophelia’s madness (150). Once Nina enters the scene, however, Konstantin does not serve as an on-stage spectator or mediating presence in the scene. He is her appreciative audience, in a sense, but he also is completely engaged by her. Like Ophelia, Nina is at once both ‘mad’ and meaningful. She is

‘lucid’ in much of her interaction – speaking substantially and only momentarily drifting away mentally. Rather than the “symbolist raving” she spouted in Konstantin’s play, her speech here is more that of a fatigued actress fumbling over her lines. Her quotations of Turgenev and Konstantin’s play, like Ophelia’s quoted songs and passages, have literary meaning as well. Unlike Lady Macbeth and Ophelia, however, after Nina wanders away, her death/suicide is not subsequently reported. Shortly after her exit, it is Konstantin who kills himself off-stage and whose death is reported on- stage. Nina’s departure is not followed-up, thereby leaving the audience to decide

52 whether, perhaps, her suicide is symbolized in Konstantin’s, or if she is to “become a great actress” (159). Nina is not a closed book in the play as Ophelia is with her watery death. Chekhov invites the audience to draw multiple interpretations of her ‘ending,’ and in this, he gives the audience a freedom that allows for the audience to have greater personal investment in Nina.

Nina also ultimately has more of a role in her own demise than Ophelia does.

Ophelia is tragic because of circumstances that happen to her – forces entirely outside her own control. Nina, however, has the power to choose. She chooses to be an actress, and she creates an idealized image of Trigorin. In this, she is like Arkadina who thinks

Trigorin is brilliant, telling him, “One line, that’s all it takes, and you have it all – you create living human beings! To read you is a triumphant experience!” And Nina tells him, “You’re one in a million! Your life turned out bright, interesting, full of meaning

[…] you’ve lost any sense of your own significance. You may not like yourself, but the rest of us love you! (143, 134). Even when Nina is in her ‘mad’ state at the end and acknowledges that, “[Trigorin] never believed in the theater, he laughed at all of my dreams, and little by little I stopped believing in it too,” once she starts talking about being an actress, she returns to an obsessive love for him, saying, “When you see

Trigorin, don’t say anything about this…I love him. I love him even more than before”

(158, 159). Though Nina appears in a pathetic state in Act IV and has been undoubtedly wronged by him, Nina is not purely a victim of Trigorin’s passing interest. In fact, the pregnancy and his abandonment of her are only briefly alluded to – what seems to be most pertinent to her ‘mad’ state is her failure as an actress – something she chose to do. While she attributes some of her failure to Trigorin’s lack

53 of belief in the theatre, it has far more to do with her own insufficiency as an actress.

She wants to be a fabulous actress, but she doesn’t have the raw skill or craft. She describes how her “acting was emptier and emptier…I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I didn’t know how to hold myself onstage, I couldn’t control my voice. You don’t know what that’s like, to realize you’re a terrible actor” (159) The audience, however, never sees this ‘bad’ acting. To understand, then, how or why she is a bad actress, she must be compared with Arkadina, the play’s representation of ‘good’ acting’ – a pragmatic performance which is aware of the audience.

Though the audience never sees Arkadina act in a theatre, they do see her ‘act.’

In Arkadina’s most ‘emotional’ scene, when Konstantin wants to duel and Trigorin wants to leave, Arkadina puts on a highly emotional show. She screams and cries and begs Konstantin, “no, no…I’m just an ordinary woman, Boris – you musn’t talk to me like this. Don’t torment me…I’m afraid,” and plays into the role of desperate, needy feminine lover convincingly, such that Trigorin agrees to stay (143). She breaks off the charade when she says “to herself,” “He’s mine again” (143). Arkadina clearly draws the line between performance and the real with this aside. Nina, however, is never able to make this distinction: never hides how she feels or performs a part to get what she wants, as Arkadina does. She also feels far more acutely than Arkadina, which would suggest Nina is also quite oblivious to how people view her – she does not see when

Sorin is chiding her, how Trigorin plays her with his smooth lines, or how Arkadina detests her. In this, Nina is like Konstantin, who is unable to do what Trigorin does – write what people want. Nina is not capable of acting for what the audience wants.

While she is not completely incapable of a ‘bigger picture,’ unlike Ophelia who is told

54 “think yourself a baby,” Nina is not capable of theatrical performance or awareness, as

Arkadina is (II.ii.205). Nina is, as Sorin says, “an amazing girl,” but a bad actress

(151). The conniving Arkadina, by contrast, most certainly is an effective actress;

Konstantin calls her a “psychological textbook,” and she is also, as he says, “talented, no question about that. And smart” (113). Nina ultimately fails as an actress because she is not able to act pragmatically. Chekhov marks a clear distinction that the

‘monster’-type woman fails at being an ‘amazing girl,’ but excels at performance, and the sweet ‘angel’-type fails at performance. Nina’s mental state at the end of the play is ultimately a result of her very lack of audience-awareness and of pragmatic performance.

In Hedda Gabler and The Seagull, self-awareness of performance comes at a price for the female characters. For Hedda, it gives her the courage, but only the courage to stage her own “beautiful” death. For Nina, it gives her a kind of hope to go on, but it is a hope founded in an inability to recognize the reality around her. Even though she recognizes that she is a bad actress, she still has hope, saying, “All it is is the strength to keep going, no matter what happens. You have to keep on believing. I believe, and it helps. And now when I think about my vocation, I’m not afraid of life”

(159). Chekhov foregrounds a separation between life and performance, but Nina cannot recognize that distinction. Hedda ultimately does recognize the difference, but she cannot use performance in a way that is useful to her own happiness or creativity.

Ibsen and Chekhov both re-imagine classical representations of female madness within meta-theatrical constructs of performance. Hedda becomes self-aware of her power for theatrical self-performance by her final scene that precedes her

55 ‘tragic’ ending. Nina becomes aware of her own inabilities to act, which surely precipitates her ‘madness.’ Hedda’s brilliant “acting” contributes to the perception of her as mad or neurotic, and Nina goes “mad” because she fails as an actress. Ibsen and

Chekhov acknowledge the inherent impossibility of ‘truthful’ representation of madness. Working within meta-theatrical structures, however, they are free to re- envision alternative representations for Shakespeare’s canonical women.

Epilogue

The “Madness” of Representation

* * *

Player: We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off.” - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

Sue: I had no idea we were going to do theatre Emma: Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre. Sue: Will I have to act? Emma: It’s not acting. It’s being. It’s springing forth with the powers of the spirit. It’s breathing. - Fefu and Her Friends, Maria Irene Fornes

“I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be the truth.” - Blanche Dubois, A Streetcar Named Desire

Judging from her claim that, “when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement,” Elaine Showalter would likely be wary of celebrating the nuanced representations that Ibsen and Chekhov offer of the ‘mad’ woman (250). This should be suggestive for the next generation of female contemporary playwrights who might try to solve what is problematic or incomplete in the representations of Chekhov and Ibsen by re-appropriating the “mad woman” in their own works. Contemporary female playwrights, however, have not readily done this. Gilbert and Gubar argue for the benefits of female writers representing mad woman in their work: by “creating dark

57 doubles for themselves, and their heroines,” they claim that the female writer is “both identifying with and revising self-definitions patriarchal culture has imposed on them”

(79). Gilbert and Gubar show this to be the case for the 19th century female novelist, but their study – as is generally the case for later critics – offers no examples of female playwrights utilizing such representations of madness in their works. Gayle Austin, in her essay, “The Madwoman in the Spotlight,” suggests that this is, in part, a reflection on the relatively small numbers of female playwrights whose work is produced, and she stresses that, “women playwrights are still in need of more such models than they presently have” (76). There are recent female playwrights who use representations of madness in their works. Austin discusses works by Maria Irene Fornes which feature mad women. The most successful of these, Fefu and Her Friends, has a symbolic character, Julie, who has a ‘mad’ scene that defies association with Ophelia or Lady

Macbeth.

Fefu and her Friends is performed in three acts. The first and the last act take place in the proscenium stage, but the second act takes place in four different locations, including a garden outside the theatre. The audience divides up into groups of four and moves through these locations as the scenes that comprise the second act are performed repeatedly for each group passing through. At some point, the audience comes to a bedroom in which Julie is alone, and she delivers an emotionally draining monologue about her torture and her ‘madness.’ She talks to no one directly and does not interact with the audience. By forcing the audience to come physically to her space, Fornes essentially creates a ‘mad’ space for Julie – a space that is at once distinctly theatrical, with the actress, the ‘set,’ and the heightened speech, but also

58 ‘real,’ since occupied by real people from the audience who do not have a ‘character’ or a ‘script.’ The audience is given agency – a choice of where they want to be – and hence, a different perspective, as well as more physical stake in the play. Fornes has said that, “Julie is really not mad at all, She’s telling the truth. The only madness is, instead of saying her experience was ‘as if’ there was a court that condemned her, she says that they did,” which suggests that Fornes is pushing against the traditional representations of the ‘mad women” (Austin, 80). However, like Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, Fornes uses the presence of a ‘mad’ character to both tax the theatrical structure and to more intensely implicate the audience in Julie’s emotional state. If

Julie is, as Fornes says, not mad, then she is performing her madness. For her to be merely performing is to be aware of the audience and call attention to the structures of theatricality itself. Fornes here calls attention forcibly to the structures of theatricality and performnce.

In association with the avant-garde theatre group Les Freres Corbusiers,

Elizabeth Meriwether recently wrote a cyborg version of Hedda Gabler called

Heddatron, in which robots capture a suicidal woman and make her perform Hedda

Gabler. At the end of the play, Nugget, the brilliant 10-year old daughter of the captured woman, gives a book report on Hedda Gabler:

“You can’t just say that the play is cold and impersonal, because how do you know? […] I don’t know why Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler. Maybe that’s the point. Hedda doesn’t want to be understood; she doesn’t want us to say, “oh that play was so well-made.” It’s like it got out of control. It’s like Ibsen just let it break itself. Why did he build something just so it could destroy itself from the inside?” (56)

59 In Heddatron, Meriwether does not mock or diminish the value of Hedda

Gabler: she makes use of it within her own cyborg vision. Meriwether acknowledges the legacies of these representations and theatrical exigencies, while also creating something new that suggests therapeutic aspects of madness. Indeed, Nugget’s mother finds solace in performing the texts of Hedda Gabler, “every day I think maybe one day she’s going to kill herself again but sometimes we perform scenes from this play, and it’s okay” (57). Nugget critiques, as does this thesis, the audiences who said, “‘we neither understand nor believe in Hedda Gabler. She is not related to anyone we know,’” and the critics who claimed, ‘Hedda is a study in a vacuum’” (56). Meriwether works with Hedda Gabler as Chekhov works with Hamlet by using the plot, characters, and themes, but also being irreverent with these ‘canonical’ works to ultimately find what translates and still resonates with a later generation.

Both Fornes and Meriwether show ways of using forms of ‘madness’ to critique the way those forms have been used by male writers. Sarah Kane offers an even greater challenge. Her works do not use individual figures of madness. They are, though structurally and schematically sound, thematically ‘mad.’ The last play she wrote, 4:48 Psychosis, deals explicitly with depression, and was completed right before she killed herself. This work, like Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts or Sylvia

Plath’s final poems, is invariably approached and read to some degree by scholars as in part a suicide note, and not solely as a literary text. If we take that approach, the text is downgraded from performance and literature to material for clinical studies, like

Kaufman and Baer’s Psychological study, “I Bask in Dreams of Suicide: Mental

Illness, Poetry, and Women.” Kane’s works, like Meriwether’s and Fornes’, have been

60 largely ignored by scholars. This is perhaps because, as Austin suggests, there are few comparable works by which to judge them. This thesis has centered on plays that have had enduring impact within and beyond the theatrical canon so as to establish a vocabulary for what has remained popular over time and still resonates today, a vocabulary which might be used in another context to look at these more recent works, as well as other texts by other female playwrights, such as Naomi Iizuka and Beth

Henley.

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