Feminist Drama in Two Plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker

The Beginnings of Feminist Drama

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.

Finding the Second Sex

In her seminal 1949 work The Second Sex, philosopher and critic Simone de Beauvoir examines the question of female identity and the phenomenology of gender at great length. She critiques many constructions of gender identity, including contemporary theories that, while showing definite progression from unadulterated patriarchy, fail to grasp the issue clearly enough to be truly progressive. The title of the book itself explicitly references the secondary status accorded to female identity and gender studies as a whole, which colors most if not all scholarship occurring along such lines. Beauvoir notes that this approach still defines the female from a masculine perspective.

Beauvoir makes this especially explicit in her treatment of psychoanalytical theory. After describing the liberation that this new perspective offered through its reduction — though not elimination — of biological constraints on gender, Beauvoir engages in a lengthy discussion with Freud's theory of feminine development and self-awareness, concluding that "the two essential objections that may be raised against this view derive from the fact that Freud based it upon a masculine model... All psychoanalysts systematically reject the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value, and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system" (Beauvoir). That is, Beauvoir sees the psychoanalytical approach as reducing not simply the biology of gender, but even the very humanity of choice — especially for female-identified individuals.

Reclaiming such choice in the process of making identity, then, becomes the goal of feminist theory and feminist texts. Beauvoir asserts her attempt to "place woman in a world of values and give her behavior a dimension of liberty. I believe that she has the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object" (Beauvoir). This sentiment can be echoed even in the early stirrings of feminist drama, before the genre or the phrase had been fully conceived. August Strindberg's Miss Julie is not strictly a work of feminist drama; he refers to the heroine as a "half-woman" and "man-hater" (Strindberg 93). But in his preface to the play, Strindberg notes the multiplicity of perspective and motive that he attempted to employ in defining the rather unsympathetic title character — from "the passionate character of her mother" to "her menstruation" and "her association with animals" and ultimately ("of course") "the passion of the sexually inflamed man" (Strindberg 92).

This quite explicitly demonstrates the conflict found in feminist texts, and perhaps particularly in feminist drama, which carries the added layer of conscious scripted performance overlaid on the subconscious, automatic, and always-already present performance of gender. Even while attempting to create a more well-rounded and complexly motivated female character, Strindberg finds himself — without apparently realizing it — working within a construct that defines femininity in terms of its relationship to and/or resemblance to masculinity. This construct reflects the fundamental oppression of women in a patriarchal society; as Fortier puts it, "if most cultural work has been given over to men, it follows that most prominent cultural work is invested in a masculine perspective... patriarchal culture is seen as the exchange of cultural material — often involving representations of women — within an exclusively male social economy" (Fortier 109–10). Without female practitioners and predominantly female audiences, the female perspective simply is not.

Modern Feminist Drama

Strindberg's own masculinity, then, may be one of the major reasons he was unable to create a female character with true agency and complexity while retaining her full status as a woman. In addition, such a concept was not culturally viable at the time. Though there were exceptions, it was not until the twentieth century that women were truly able to seek out careers and livelihoods in fields of their choosing. Even — perhaps especially — writing was largely closed to them, and economic constraints necessarily limited the perspectives presented in the culture. Feminist theory and texts have not dealt with a purely ideological issue, but also with the very real attendant practicalities.

Themes of economics and political and social agency are common and even essential to feminist drama. This is clearly visible in A Doll's House; even though it was the creation of a male author in a highly patriarchal society, the practicalities of life as a woman in such a system form the fundamental basis for the plot. More recent feminist dramatic texts, however, more closely link such practicalities with the inner struggle to form an independent feminine identity. As Beauvoir argues, these plays tend to deal with restoring a sense of value and choice to a world that has been largely stripped of these features by modern critical, literary, and dramatic trends. Character is created with a greater sense of agency, and identity — especially feminine identity — ironically emerges as a more actively created and self-determined construct through its interactions within and against societal demands. Due to the economic constraints on women until the last century (and arguably even today, though to a lesser degree), the feminine identity and perspective is still being created and is not yet ready to give way to postmodern meaninglessness. It emerges as an economic and political force that embodies agency in its determinative powers.

The Works of Wertenbaker

Many of modern playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays deal explicitly with the issues of feminist drama. In constructing feminist dramatic texts, Wertenbaker has the obvious advantage over Ibsen and Strindberg of actually being female, as well as the fact that she was born just a few short years after World War II and thus grew up in a world where identity — especially along gender lines and other demarcations of marginalization — was in a state of explicit and near-constant redefinition. But although it would be disingenuous and naive to completely ignore such personal and historical information, her texts also stand on their own.

Feminist texts, dramatic or otherwise, are often read and/or judged with the assumed perspective of the (feminine) author, which in and of itself relegates such texts to a secondary and subjugated status — a minority perspective not considered as equally indicative of or relevant to its cultural underpinnings as non-feminist or male-authored works. Wertenbaker's plays are as susceptible to such misreadings as any other text, but an examination of the texts themselves reveals a much more profound reshaping of feminine identity (Sullivan). Not all of her works are primarily or even tangentially concerned with this issue, insofar as it can be escaped, but they "are particularly pertinent to materialist critiques of culture," which has implications both specific to feminist theory and for broader issues (Sullivan 141). Through all of Wertenbaker's works, an essentially inclusive and humanistic perspective is apparent, which matches the attempt to define femininity and feminine identity not as a separate construct in opposition to masculinity, but as an equally viable and necessary perspective.

Conclusion

Timberlake Wertenbaker is not the most overtly feminist playwright working today. These two works, however, examine the nature of the feminine as it plays out in society, and suggest paths to all individuals within a society to establish their own identity. There will be no sudden insight and reclamation of identity, she suggests, but rather an ongoing struggle to define ourselves on our own terms.

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.