Section A. Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine Review of the Play One Of

126 4 Section A. Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine Review of the Play One of Churchill’s most prominent plays is Cloud Nine which was first performed in 1979. It was performed several times in many different countries. In 1982 it won the Obi award after its New York production. Gender and class oppression and sexual politics have been touched upon in the play. The problems of race oppression and colonialism are another concern in the play. In this play Churchill is believed to have “‘traced the legacy of colonial regimes’ sexual and racial oppression in contemporary life” (Reinelt, On Feminist 27). To draw attention to her ideas, Caryl Churchill has employed techniques such as cross-gender and cross-race casting. The play is written in two acts, and offers an exploration of sexual politics. The first act has five scenes and the second act has four scenes. Act One is set in Africa where a man and his family are living in colonial times. This setting can be viewed as a critique of the Victorian era. In Act Two, the same family is cast, however, the place is London, the year is 1979 and the characters have aged only by twenty five years. According to Aston, “Cloud Nine has mainly attached critical interest on account of its gender role reversal and cross-race casting” (Feminist Views 29). Cloud Nine represents character attitudes and the changes that occurred towards sexual behavior in the hundred years from 1879 to 1979. Janelle Reinelt believes that theatrically “Churchill could represent the presence of the past in the lives, minds, and bodies of living human beings” (Politics of Style 183). 127 The play is different, both, in time and setting and is performed in two separate acts. Each actor plays one role in Act One and a different role in Act Two. The only exception is Victoria’s daughter, Cathy; her role is played by a male actor in Act Two. They have aged only by twenty five years while about one hundred years of time have passed. Clive and his family are living in Africa to take care of the Queen’s Properties. The main members of his family are Betty, his wife, and their two children Edward and Victoria. Edward is nine years old and Victoria, whose name reflects Clive’s faithfulness to the Empire, is two years old. The other persons who live with them are the governess, Ellen and Betty’s mother, Maud and their black servant, Joshua. This company is later joined by Mrs. Saunders who is a wealthy widow from their neighborhood, and Harry, an adventurer. In the play we see that Clive is sexually attracted to Mrs. Saunders and makes advances to her, while his wife Betty has a fancy for Harry. Harry, on the other hand, is gay, and has secret sexual relations with the servant Joshua as well as Edward, Clive’s son. We also find that Ellen, the governess is in love with Betty who is unable to comprehend her sincere passion. The act ends with a gathering of all the men on the verandah where they discuss the growing tension with the native insurgents. There have been no white casualties so far but the British Army is on the way to help quash the rebellion. Clive, however, has burned a village and Harry protests against this. Then Clive talks to them about the nature of fellowship amongst men. Harry misunderstands what Clive intends to say and makes a pass at him. This horrifies Clive who is offended by Harry’s homosexuality. He wants to cure Harry of his ‘disease’. In trying to do so, he attempts to marry Harry to Mrs. Saunders but she refuses the offer. As the decision maker and master of the household, he then forces Harry and the governess, Ellen to marry each other. The marriage is an act to save the Empire from a sin which could destroy everything and he has no consideration for 128 their feelings and desires. The final scene in Act One is the wedding celebrations. While Clive is giving a speech, Joshua is seen raising a gun. He aims at Clive and though Edward (Clive’s son) sees this, he does not warn his father about the impending danger. In Act Two the setting is that of a park in present day London. The year is 1979 (a century has passed). Some of the characters of Act One reappear in Act Two but they have aged only by 25 years. Betty has separated from Clive. Their son Edward is now openly gay. His partner is Gerry. Their daughter Victoria is married to Martin who is overbearing. Unable to put up with him, Victoria is upset with and distant from her husband. She starts a lesbian relationship with Lin. Later in the Act, Gerry leaves Edward who discovers that he is bisexual. By late summer, we see that Victoria, Lin and Edward are living together. One summer night, Victoria, Lin and Edward assemble in the park to hold a ceremony for a goddess of sex. Within moments, Lin’s dead brother appears to them and tells them about his experiences while serving in the army. As soon as her brother disappears, Lin collapses. Later in the play, Gerry and Edward sort out their differences and make a plan of a date with each other. Betty, after she has a discussion with Gerry finally accepts the fact that her son is gay. In the final scene, Betty returns from Africa and embraces the new Betty. Churchill’s Subversion of Gender Identities and Gender Roles Judith Butler is a renowned gender theorist and feminist theorist in the critical and theoretical fields. I would like to employ her ideas about gender theory to analyse Cloud Nine. Here I wish to argue about gender performativity and performance, drag or cross- dressing and sexual politics by using Judith Butler’s ideas on gender. 129 When Simon de Beauvoir stated, “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” it seems it was an early attempt to address the cultural construction of gender (qtd. in Butler, 111). Butler asks questions that perhaps Simon de Beauvoir herself might not have considered or intended: “who is this “one” who does the becoming? Is there some human who becomes its gender at some point in time? How does one “become” a gender? What is the moment or mechanism of gender construction?”(Gender Trouble 111). Butler says that the body is not a “mute facticity” (Gender Trouble 129).That means there is no body prior to cultural inscription and “sex as well as gender can be performatively reinscribed in ways that accentuate its factitiousness (i.e. its constructedness) rather than its facticity (i.e. the fact of its existence)”(Salih 55). Thus, When de Beauvoir states that “woman” is not a natural fact but actually a historical idea, she emphasizes on the difference between sex as a biological facticity, and gender as a cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity. Butler argues by that distinction, to be female is a meaningless facticity, but to be a woman would mean the process of becoming a woman, to force the body to adapt to a historical idea of ‘woman’ so that it becomes a cultural sign. In fact, Simon de Beauvoir has not denied the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body, but reconceived them as distinct from the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings. Elaborating on de Beauvoir statement, Butler writes: to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.(Performative Acts 522) 130 So, Butler challenges the sex/gender distinction and develops her theory of gender performativity. She argues that gender is performative rather than natural. She believes that gender identity is socially constituted. She highlights gender performativity and says that “gendered and sexed identities are performative” (Salih 10). In the article “critically queer”, Butler defines gender performativity as follows: gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a regulatory regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social constraints, taboos, prohibitions, threats of punishment operate in the ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and destabilization. There is no subject who precedes or enacts this repetition of norms. (21) Indeed, Butler refers to de Beauvoir’s prominent statement to explain that “woman is something we do rather than something we are” (Salih, 10). Butler proposes the idea of performativity by declaring, “Gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed” (Gender Trouble 25). Butler argues, “The gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts that constitute its reality, and if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is a function of a decidedly public and social discourse” (Gender Trouble 136). Gender identities are constructed and constituted by language, which means that there is no gender identity that precedes language. As Butler argues it is not that an identity “does” discourse or language, but on the contrary language and discourse “do” an identity or gender.

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