Feminist Drama in Two Plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker

The Beginnings of Feminist Drama

Theatrical performance, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth and into our current era, has been at the forefront of social and political change. This has been arguably true of the art form during other epochs of human history, but has been most noticeable in the modern age. Issues of class, race, sexuality, and gender were first truly and explicitly addressed in plays such as Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Ghosts, George Aiken's stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and other examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century realism such as Strindberg's Miss Julie and even, to a degree, the more serious works of Anton Chekhov. The change in style and theme of these theatrical scripts both reflected and helped to perpetuate ongoing social changes throughout this period, including the reshaping of identity that occurred in modern society at large — but especially among subjugated and/or minority subclasses.

For the entirety of Western civilization, the female members of the species have comprised one such subclass. This issue has been recognized to greater or lesser degrees since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. One of the clearest and earliest examples of a quasi-feminist text is Aristophanes' Lysistrata, in which women use their sexuality to end a pointless war. Though the themes and plot of the play are not exactly progressive by today's standards, even this Old Comedy makes clear the injustice and illogic inherent in a highly patriarchal system. Various other figures in history and drama have also contributed to the challenging of male-dominated power structures, but it was not until modern drama that the issue of feminine identity was truly addressed.

Aphra Behn is the first known female playwright in the English language, but despite the social and economic boundaries this proved her capable of crossing, her Restoration-era scripts such as The Rover and The City Heiress did little to truly redefine the role or identity of women in her society. The Mexican author Sor Juana showed an early grasp not only of the colonial and ethnic experience and its influence on identity, but also of the parallels that these situations had to the issue of gender. In one of her short loas, preceding a larger work entitled The Divine Narcissus, America is embodied as a female caught between the warring (and masculine) figures of Occident, an Indian male, and Zeal, a Spanish male, and eventually won over by the calm and compassionate reasoning of Christianity, represented as a Spanish female (Case 42). The female as an object of control is made explicit in America's plight, though the questions of agency and identity are complicated somewhat by Christianity's entrance.

This confusion of identity has been a hallmark of feminist drama even in its most concrete forms. It is, in fact, central to feminist theory, as well as to many other branches of criticism dealing with marginalization and postcolonialism. Ibsen's A Doll's House does not offer a clear judgment of its protagonist, Nora, and her decision to leave her family and make her own life. What the play does is highlight the difficulty and uncertainty of such a possibility for women, and this uncertainty persists in feminist drama and literature.

The issue of identity and the uncertainty of attaining it are also essential to modern drama as a whole, not just to works with overtly feminist themes. This is not to suggest that modern theatre has developed in tandem with feminist ideologies. As Fortier points out, "like much materialist theory and unlike, for instance, much phenomenology and post-structuralism, feminist theory is directly and predominantly political. Its purpose is to struggle against the oppression of women as women" (Fortier 108). This is in many ways a gross oversimplification of the aim and process of feminist drama, but Fortier's definition does have its merits. It provides the very basic framework within which feminist drama operates — that is, feminist drama operates under the assumption that women are being oppressed as women, consciously or otherwise, and that they ought not to be. Most feminist drama, however, attempts to move beyond the mere assertion of these truisms and delves into the possibility of a female existence and identity that is not only un-oppressed, but also independently and freely expressed.

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Accessed 7 May 2009. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/index.htm

Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Claycomb, Ryan. "Towards a Parodic Spectator: Metatheatre and Staged Feminist Retellings." New England Theatre Journal, 19(2), pp. 1–18.

Cook, Rena. "Review: The Love of the Nightingale." Theatre Journal, 45(3), pp. 381–2.

Dahl, Mary Karen. "Constructing the Subject: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 1993, pp. 149–59.

Fortier, Mark. Theory/Theatre: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Strindberg, August. "Author's Preface to Miss Julie." Modern Theories of Drama, George Brandt, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Sullivan, Esther Beth. "Hailing Ideology, Acting in the Horizon, and Reading between Plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker." Theatre Journal 45(2), pp. 139–54.

Wertenbaker, Timberlake. The Grace of Mary Traverse. In The Love of the Nightingale and The Grace of Mary Traverse. London: Faber, 1989.