Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama
Christina Wald
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Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama Christina Wald
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia
© Christina Wald 2007
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230547124 hardback ISBN-10: 0230547125 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction: Theatrical Performance, Gender Performativity, and the Drama of Performative Malady Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as cultural tropes Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies Performance and performativity: From termini technici to umbrella terms The theatre metaphor in Butler’s performativity theory Can performativity materialise as performance? 1 The Drama of Hysteria Hysteria: Theory and theatre Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria (1993) Terry Johnson: Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis (1993) Hysteria as performative malady
1 1 4 10 13 17 27 27 42 60 75 89
2 Trauma Drama Trauma concepts, trauma culture Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie (1989) Sarah Daniels: Beside Herself (1990) Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss (1994) Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998) Trauma as performative malady
93 93 102 114 128 139 156
3 The Drama of Melancholia Concepts of melancholia: From black bile to melancholic incarnation David Auburn: Proof (2000) Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan (1996)
161
v
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161 171 184
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Contents
Contents
Sarah Kane: Cleansed (1998) Melancholia as performative malady
198 212
Conclusion: The Drama of Performative Malady
215
Notes
225
Works Cited
259
Index
283
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vi
Over the years that I have worked on this study, I have received generous help and expert advice from teachers, colleagues, and friends, without whose support and criticism I never could have realised this project. This book is a slightly revised version of a PhD thesis which I completed at the University of Cologne in 2006. My first thanks, therefore, go to my teachers and colleagues at the Englisches Seminar, especially to Beate Neumeier who supervised my thesis and critically shaped my thinking about contemporary drama and gender theory. In the research groups of Hanjo Berressem and Claudia Liebrand, I presented drafts of chapters, and I owe a great deal to the responses of the participants. I am very grateful to Richard Aczel, Stefan Börnchen, Tobias Döring, Bernhard Klein, Martin Middeke and Gottfried Krieger for their thought-provoking comments on earlier versions of my manuscript and for their encouragement. Without the grants of the Cusanuswerk, the German National Academic Foundation, the FAZIT foundation and the Johanna und Fritz Buch Gedächtnis-Stiftung, researching, writing and publishing this book would not have been possible. Most of the ideas of this book have been presented at conferences and seminars, and for their invitations, support and criticism my thanks are particularly due to the participants of the many inspiring workshops of the German National Academic Foundation and the German Association for the Study of Theatre and Drama in English, especially to Werner Huber and Martin Middeke, as well as to the research group of the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College. I am grateful to Irmela Schneider and Michael Gassenmeier for their encouragement of the project. Thanks also go to my colleagues at the University of Augsburg for their support during the final stages of preparing this book. I am very grateful to Susanne Röltgen and Tim Jones for the painstaking care they have given to my manuscript, to Paula Kennedy for her interest in this project, and to the anonymous scholar who read my book for Palgrave and provided most helpful comments. I have benefited greatly from many conversations with playwrights and directors, whom I thank for their time, patience, and interest in my work: Claire Dowie, Anna Furse, Terry Johnson, James Macdonald, Kim Morrissey, Phyllis Nagy, Colin Watkeys, and Jules Wright. For the generous permission to use his photograph of Cleansed, I would like to thank Arno Declair. I also owe thanks for their permission to reproduce material from the plays to A&C Black, Faber and Faber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nick Hern Books, and Routledge: vii
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Acknowledgements
viii Acknowledgements
DORA by Kim Morrissey copyright © 1993 Kim Morrissey. Reprinted by permission of the publisher: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk. Amateur performing rights:
[email protected]. Excerpts from PROOF by David Auburn. Copyright © 2001 by David Auburn. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from PORTIA COUGHLAN by Marina Carr. Copyright © 1996 by Marina Carr. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts from AUGUSTINE (BIG HYSTERIA) by Anna Furse. Copyright © 1997 by Anna Furse. Reprinted by permission of Routledge. Excerpts from BESIDE HERSELF by Sarah Daniels. Copyright © 1990, 1991 by Sarah Daniels. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers. Excerpts from EASY ACCESS (FOR THE BOYS) by Claire Dowie. Copyright © 1998 by Claire Dowie. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers. Excerpts from HYSTERIA by Terry Johnson. Copyright © 1993, 1994 by Terry Johnson. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers. Excerpts from BUTTERFLY KISS by Phyllis Nagy. Copyright © 1994 by Phyllis Nagy. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers. Excerpts from CLEANSED by Sarah Kane. Copyright © 1998 by Sarah Kane. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers.
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SLEEPING NIGHTIE by Victoria Hardie copyright © 1990 Victoria Hardie. Reprinted by permission of the publisher: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk. Amateur performing rights:
[email protected].
Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as cultural tropes Hysteria not only survives in the 1990s, it is more contagious than in the past. (Showalter 1998: 5) In contemporary culture [ ] trauma is both a clinical syndrome and a trope [ ]: a strategic fiction that a complex, stressful society is using to account for a world that seems threateningly out of control. (Farrell 1998: 2) The particular melancholic mood of the present, which is apparent in contemporary art, culture, and society as well as in the political sphere, essentially is a sense of a fundamental ‘disenchantment’ of modern reality. (Heidbrink 1997: 7, my translation) Increasingly, contemporary culture defines its own moment through hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. As tropes, hysteria, trauma, and melancholia negotiate cultural meanings that are interconnected with but exceed the nosology of the psychic ‘disorders’ established by psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Contemporary drama plays a particularly important role in this negotiation. It is not only in the theatre, however, that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are invoked, but also in visual art, cinema, and literature as well as in life-writings, self-help books, and TV talk shows. Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia serve as explanatory patterns to account for the experiences, biographies, and behaviours of individuals, but they are also, on a more abstract level, employed to explain collective and sociocultural phenomena. The present cultural significance of these concepts is nourished by their far-reaching histories. Hysteria and melancholia in particular, which have circulated as categories in medical and non-medical discourses ever since antiquity, are still informed by their discursive histories prior to their redefinitions by psychiatric, psychological, and psychoanalytic discourses in the 1
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Introduction: Theatrical Performance, Gender Performativity, and the Drama of Performative Malady
twentieth century. The term ‘hysteria’ encapsulates the first medical hypothesis about the aetiology of the disease, which was thought to be caused by a wandering womb (Íst°rç). The current cultural and cultural theoretical appropriations of the concept critically engage with hysteria’s discursive history, paying particular attention to the transition from Jean-Martin Charcot’s neurologically founded concept of Grande Hystérie to Sigmund Freud’s psychically grounded model of little hysteria. Because of the persistent discursive association of hysteria and femininity in psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytically informed discourses, hysteria plays an especially important role in feminist cultural theory. Since the 1970s, feminist scholars such as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Luce Irigaray, Christina von Braun, and Elaine Showalter have figured ‘hysteria’ as a powerful trope to discuss the exclusion of feminine subjectivity that is intrinsic in patriarchal Western cultures. They interpret the female hysteric as an ambivalent figure who oscillates between victimhood and rebellion against “the phalse woman-being which the logos has assigned to her” (von Braun 1985: 193, my translation). Simultaneously with the feminist re-evaluation of hysteria, scholars from the humanities and social sciences began to recover the history of male hysteria (Micale 1991, 1995), to explore the visual and medial fabrication of the disease (Gilman 1993, Baer 2002, Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]), to trace postmodern forms of hysteria (Showalter 1998), and to explore hysteria as a reaction to the (repressed) knowledge of vulnerability (Bronfen 1998a). Observing the immense interest in hysteria as a historically variable cultural concept, Showalter calls the international scholars working on hysteria the “New Hysterians” (1998: 7). Taking into account that psychiatric and psychoanalytical research on hysteria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have gone to constitute current trauma theory, the revived interest in the history of hysteria also attests to contemporary Western culture’s intense preoccupation with issues of physical, psychic, and sociopolitical wounding. Since its application to psychology in the late nineteenth century, trauma, originating from traËma (‘wound’), has described the long-lasting psychic effects of an event that is so overpowering that the subject is unable to respond to it adequately at the moment of occurrence.1 Trauma is considered such a dominant cultural formation for Western societies that critics have employed the labels “wound culture” (Seltzer 1997, 1998) and “traumaculture” (Luckhurst 2003). In contrast to melancholia and hysteria, which today no longer serve as psychiatric categories, the increasing employment of trauma as a cultural trope is concomitant with its rising importance in psychiatry and psychology. As a result, a fastgrowing, interdisciplinary field of trauma studies has emerged, whose development proceeds apace.2 Since the late 1980s, trauma-related diagnoses, such as ‘multiple personality disorder’ (now renamed ‘dissociative identity disorder’) and ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, have abounded in the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is used both in
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2 Introduction
the USA and in Europe.3 Scholars from various disciplines employ (and modify) these classifications as accounts for the long-term innerpsychic responses to trauma, but also for interpsychic, collective reactions to traumatising events, such as experiences of (sexualised) violence, war atrocities, and genocide. Observing the social and theoretical fascination with trauma, studies in the field, such as Kirby Farrell’s Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (1998) and the aptly named essay collection Trauma: Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Bedeutungsmuster (Trauma: Between Psychoanalysis and Cultural Paradigm, 1999) edited by Elisabeth Bronfen, Birgit R. Erdle, and Sigrid Weigel, suggest, respectively, that trauma is a way of interpreting the cultural centennial crises of the 1890s and the 1990s, and that trauma is a new means of interpretation for modernism and modernity in general, designating that part of personal or collective history which cannot be made up for, which remains inconceivable and inadequate. The employment of trauma as a cultural trope has on the one hand risked its generalisation to the point of meaninglessness, as Ian Hacking laments. To him, trauma has become “a metaphor for almost anything unpleasant” (1995: 183). On the other hand, trauma remains “an immensely loaded and highly debated term, around which some of the most pressing cultural questions are negotiated” (Berressem 2003a: 1) – among them the issues of experience, memory, the body, and representation. The cultural fascination with trauma is interlocked with the contemporary interest in melancholia. In its psychoanalytical meaning, melancholia can be understood as a specific traumatic formation, since it describes the psychic reaction to an experience of loss which the subject, as in the case of traumatisation, does not fully register. Rather than accepting the loss, the subject remains in a state of disavowed or suspended grief that keeps the lost object present by psychic means. The contemporary cultural preoccupation with melancholia on the one hand draws on this psychoanalytic notion of melancholia. On the other, it displays a persistent fascination with melancholia as a state of sadness that involves heightened sensitivity, which was once defined as the excess of black bile (m°lçn xolÆ). Cultural critics characterise “the contemporary aesthetic realm [ ] [as] a melancholy space” (Gibson 2003: 136), perceive a “rhetoric of loss” in contemporary theoretical discourse (Schiesari 1992: 1) and even “a melancholy of the disciplines” (Schor 1996: 1). A considerable number of studies have taken the recent cultural interest in melancholia as a starting point for the exploration of the medical, literary, and iconographic tradition of melancholia. While scholars like Lynn Enterline (1995) and Martina WagnerEgelhaaf (1997) have contributed to the research on the medical and cultural function of melancholia in particular epochs, survey studies by Stanley W. Jackson (1986) and Juliana Schiesari (1992) as well as readers (Lutz Walther 1999, Jennifer Radden 2000) have undertaken a diachronic assessment of the concept of melancholia and have explored its intersections with related categories such as acedia, depression, and schizophrenia.
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Cultural Tropes 3
Employing the psychoanalytic definition of melancholia as a theoretical concept for sociocultural analysis, Julia Kristeva (1989 [1987]), Kaja Silverman (1988) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997) have theorised gender formations with regard to melancholia, while Anne Anlin Cheng (2000) explores racialisation and racism as melancholic phenomena and Paul Gilroy characterises the neo-imperialist politics of contemporary Western society as a form of sociopolitical melancholia (2004). Starting from different theoretical premises, other studies have drawn on definitions of melancholia as a political category as proposed by Wolf Lepenies’s Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Melancholy and Society 1969) (cf. for example Gibson 2003) and have characterised the contemporary disorientation and indifference caused by the dissolution of grand narratives as a melancholic phenomenon (Heidbrink 1994, 1997, Derveaux 2002). Given the versatile cultural adaptations of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, which I will trace in the main part of my study, their attraction seems to stem from their very capaciousness, which allows them to act as projection surfaces for psychic pain, social rupture and loss as well as epistemological crises. My study, however, will focus on one specific realm of cultural reception and production, on contemporary theatre. How do anglophone plays employ these concepts? Which significance and which impact do the phenomena have on the stage? How are the plot patterns and modes of representation affected by these disorders, which mean a departure from, if not a break with a collective/conventionalised sense of reality? Which exchange relations between theory and theatre can be traced? This book pursues such questions. It seeks, on the one hand, to explore the formal characteristics of the theatrical representation of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. On the other hand, it launches an argument as to the cultural significance of these phenomena in the theatre. Arguing that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are staged as ‘performative maladies’, my exploration of the plays selected proceeds from the thesis that the disorders can be read as tropes for the performative quality of gender identity.
Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies [T]he rise of an interest in performance reflects a major shift in many cultural fields from the what of culture to the how [ ]. Its real meaning is now sought in its praxis, its performance. (Carlson 2004: ix) There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; [ ] identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result. (Butler 1990: 33)
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4 Introduction
In contemporary drama, hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are, as I will argue, staged as ‘performative maladies’. They are tropes, most prominently metaphors and metonymies, which represent the performative quality of gender identity. My conceptualisation of the performative maladies conjoins the culturally prominent discourses on hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, performance theory, and the notion of performative identity formation as theorised by Judith Butler. Butler’s model of gender as an ongoing, performative activity, which she has developed in her writings since the late 1980s, participates in and has considerably contributed to the cultural and academic fascination with issues of performance and performativity. Simultaneously with the cultural re-evaluation of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, performance and performativity have gained such immense cultural significance and critical attention in recent decades that scholars have identified a ‘performative turn’ in contemporary culture (cf. Conquergood 1991: 190, Connor 2004: 14, Fischer-Lichte 2004: 24–6). As I will trace in the following section, however, the relationship between performativity and theatrical performance has been a subject of controversy. Many scholars, Butler herself among them, perceive the relation as troubled if not altogether severed. My study revisits this question and aims to show that the performative maladies of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia bring performance and performativity into a mutually illuminating interplay. The wealth of contemporary anglophone plays on hysteria, trauma, and melancholia and the cultural eminence of the phenomena suggests that the time has come to group these plays and to consider them as dramatic genres in their own right. My study explores ‘The Drama of Hysteria’, ‘Trauma Drama’, and ‘The Drama of Melancholia’ as genres which have evolved since the late 1980s and have not lost their significance to the present day.4 In the three main chapters of this book, I set out to define each genre with regard to its thematic interests as well as its aesthetics. Each of the chapters discusses the cultural significance of the respective phenomenon, introduces the relevant theoretical concepts, and unfolds my notion of the performative malady through in-depth readings of representative plays. Proceeding from the thesis that my notion of performative malady allows the interlinking of these genres, I will propose to regard the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melancholia as variants of the Drama of Performative Malady. While some of the plays, such as Victoria Hardie’s lesser known Sleeping Nightie (1989), but also David Auburn’s commercially successful Proof (2000), which was released as a Hollywood movie in 2005, have not yet been explored by literary or theatre studies at all, the majority of plays have already been analysed from different theoretical premises and have been grouped according to other salient genres and stylistic trends in contemporary drama, such as the (postmodern) history play, feminist drama, and in-yer-face theatre. My study suggests the consideration of the plays selected from an alternative and, as I aim to show, particularly productive perspective.
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Performative Maladies 5
My readings set out to examine, first, the ways in which the performative maladies allow inquiry into gender performativity, secondly, with which aspects of gender performativity the individual plays engage in particular, and thirdly, which role the medium of theatrical performance plays in this complex field of negotiation. Considering the plays both as dramatic scripts and as plurimedial performance texts, my study interlaces literary and performance analysis.5 Focusing on the plays in a British context, I will look primarily at their first British productions, but whenever fruitful, I will also refer to different theatrical realisations or evoke as yet unrealised staging options.6 The theoretical project of my study, that is, the conceptualisation of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies, draws on feminist and gender-theoretical employments of the concepts. In the field of hysteria, Bronfen’s The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (1998) instigates a reflection on the relationship between the disorder and Butler’s gender theory. In contrast, earlier influential feminist assessments of hysteria by scholars such as Cixous, Irigaray and von Braun, who wrote prior to the ‘performative turn’ in gender studies, offer accounts of the ‘female malady’ hysteria as a mode of genuinely female expression. Although my gender-theoretical approach differs from theirs, my notion of hysteria as performative malady makes use of their exploration of the subversive potential of hysteria and of their foregrounding of issues such as imitation and the embodiment of images, which I will discuss as the process of ‘image-ination’.7 As rewritings of hysteric case studies, the Drama of Hysteria features historical figures on stage and thus participates in the trend of postmodern history plays discernible on the British stage since the 1980s, when plays that combine historical facts and fictitious elements began to proliferate. Terry Johnson belongs to the most prominent authors of this trend;8 he employs the ‘what-if’ structure typical of many postmodern history plays not only in Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis (1993), but also in Insignificance (1982) and Hitchcock Blonde (2003). Anna Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) has also been situated in the context of the contemporary historical drama (cf. Kramer 2000). As a self-conscious and academically informed genre, the Drama of Hysteria draws not only on psychoanalytic and psychiatric case studies, but also on cultural theoretical studies on hysteria and on earlier plays of the genre. The intense exchange relation between academic research and theatrical negotiations of hysteria is illustrated by the academic forewords to the published play texts of Augustine and Kim Morrissey’s Dora: A Case of Hysteria (1993) by Showalter and Lizbeth Goodman respectively (cf. Showalter 1997 and Goodman 1993a). Furse herself, who works as a lecturer in theatre studies, has written an extensive introduction to her play and published several articles which explicate the writing and rehearsal process and reflect
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6 Introduction
on the feminist background that informed Furse’s rewriting of the hysteric case study (cf. Furse 1994, 1997, 2000). My consideration of the plays draws on these introductions and essays as well as a number of readings by Tobias Döring, from which I adopt the label ‘Drama of Hysteria’ (cf. Döring 1996, 2000, 2002). Döring assesses the plays in the context of the feminist critique of psychoanalysis and elucidates how they demystify and rewrite notions of hysterical femininity. He points out the intersection of theatricality and hysteria in Freud’s writing and shows how the plays, in a self-referential manner, make the female hysterics utilise the subversive potential of theatrical mimesis for “crucial interventions in the classic Freudian performance” (2000: 168). Linking this theatrical strategy to Butler’s gender theory, I will explore the thesis that the subversive project of the plays can be regarded, beyond the demystification of psychoanalytically established notions of hysterical femininity as explored by Döring, as the critique of essentialist gender notions in general. Interpreting the plays according to my concept of the performative malady, my readings often depart from the interpretation made explicit by the playwrights in the introductions to the plays, in articles on the plays, or in interviews. Thus, I establish my notion of hysteria as performative malady in contrast to Furse’s concept of hysteria as a genuinely female mode of expression. I will argue that the notion of hysteria as performative malady allows a productive way of dealing with the aporia staged by Furse and identified in Margarete Rubik’s criticism of the play, that is, the silencing of woman’s voice in her attempt to abandon phallogocentrism (Rubik 1996; cf. also Kramer 2000: 233). Chapter 2 on Trauma Drama focuses on theatrical negotiations of sexual child abuse, the most dominant form of traumatisation discussed in the 1990s. My notion of trauma as performative malady brings together Butler’s gender theory, trauma theory, and performance theory to investigate how the protagonists’ traumatisation, their gender performances, and the theatrical medium interact.9 Concerning the interface of trauma and gender, studies on sexual child abuse have identified the preponderance of male perpetrators and female victims and explored the gendered power structures underlying abuse (cf. for example Herman 1992). Moreover, at several points in her writings, Butler briefly evokes trauma as an experience which fuels gender performance in non-visible ways (cf. for example 1993a: 123–4 and 2004: 153–60), but she refrains from extensively theorising trauma in relation to gender. Because a great number of feminist dramatists have tackled this issue of abuse, the plays that I categorise as Trauma Drama have mostly been explored in the context of women’s and feminist drama. Alternatively, some of the plays have been examined as instances of in-yer-face theatre. Thus, Elaine Aston’s Feminist Views on the English Stage highlights the sociopolitical relevance of the plays that “use theatre as a forum for a feminist ‘speak out’ ”
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Performative Maladies 7
(2003: 43) by tackling the issue of incestuous sexual child abuse, which has been, according to Aston, “a specific victim of the general backlash against feminism” (ibid.: 38) in the 1990s. Kathleen Starck’s recent I Believe in the Power of Theatre likewise identifies the preoccupation with sexual child abuse as an important trend in women’s drama and dedicates a chapter to Sarah Daniels’s Beside Herself (1990) and Claire Dowie’s Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998) (2005: 178–89; cf. also Godiwala 2003: 136–40, Goodman 1993b: 192–9 and 1994, Aston 1995a, Griffin 2000). Although these readings for the most part acknowledge traumatisation as an important topic, no study as yet exists that systematises and specifies the function of trauma in the plays. The most prominent author whose play I investigate in Chapter 3 on melancholia, Sarah Kane, is considered the figurehead of a prominent stylistic and thematic trend in the work of young playwrights emerging in the 1990s, one which critics have given competing labels, such as ‘theatre of shock’, ‘sensationalist drama of cruelty’, or ‘new brutalism’.10 The seminal monograph on this confrontational theatrical style, Aleks Sierz’s programmatically entitled In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, discusses both Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998) and Phyllis Nagy’s Butterfly Kiss (1994) (2001: 47–53 and 112–17). Kane’s work has not only been controversially discussed in newspaper articles and radio and TV programmes, but also elicited an academic response far exceeding that of the other writers I cover in my study. Apart from a wealth of articles on Kane’s œuvre, Graham Saunders’s monograph Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002) explores the sociopolitical and dramatic challenges of Kane’s theatrical style in a similar vein to Sierz, drawing on the play texts, the performances, and interviews with the practitioners involved in the production of her plays. Both Aston’s and Sierz’s survey studies include a chapter on the work of Kane, in which they assess respectively her controversial position in feminist drama and the increasingly less confrontational style of her writing throughout the 1990s. Anna Opel (2002: 132–79) argues that Kane’s plays feature abstract, linguistically constructed ‘language bodies’ rather than psychologically grounded characters. Among the assessments of Cleansed, Aston’s analysis is most relevant for my focus. Aston argues that Kane’s play can be compared to Butler’s theoretical project, since it exercises “a figurative dismantling of the psychoanalytical framework that endorses and produces a ‘diseased male identity’, one that punishes homosexual [ ] couples and [ ] is even damaging to heterosexual relations” (2003: 90). I share Aston’s view that Cleansed proffers a theatrical version of the decade’s preoccupations with issues of gender, but suggest a different focus in my investigation of the play from the perspective of melancholia. Just as Cleansed, Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) has not been read with regard to melancholia either. Because of Carr’s exceptional status as a successful Irish woman writer, her work has mostly been analysed as a
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8 Introduction
female contribution to and transformation of the (male) Irish dramatic tradition (cf. Murray 1997: 237–8, Kurdi 2000: 59–71, McMullan 2000, O’Dwyer 2000, Llewellyn-Jones 2002: 78–80 and Leeney 2004). Carr’s œuvre has also had an essay collection dedicated to it, The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made” (Leeney and McMullan 2003b). Although my analysis of Portia Coughlan does not focus on Carr as a woman writer and her role in the dramatic tradition, I share with these readings the interest in issues of gender identity. I revisit their exploration of Portia’s failure and/or refusal to fulfil the gender expectations of her environment in the context of her melancholic incorporation of the lost brother, which results, as I will argue, in Portia’s transgression of gender norms. Melissa Sihra’s article on voices, topographies, and corporealities of alterity in the play is especially productive for my analysis of the play through the lens of (gender) melancholia. Sihra’s argument that Carr’s œuvre “asks the audience to question which bodies may be regarded as ‘real’ and which may be considered ‘ether-eal’ ”(2003: 24) has immediate bearing on my assessment of melancholia as a state which blurs the boundaries between (allegedly) ‘factual’, discretely gendered, and ‘fantastic’, gender-ambivalent, and gender-transgressive bodies. My concept of melancholia as performative malady draws, on the one hand, on the research on melancholia as a gendered phenomenon and, on the other, on Butler’s notion of gender melancholia. As Schiesari elaborates in her study The Gendering of Melancholia, melancholia, as a nosological category and as a cultural trope, was considered a typically male affliction as far as it was understood as the concomitant of exceptional intellectual and artistic talent. Separately from this investigation of the discursive history of melancholia, Butler has explored the intersection of melancholia and gender from a psychoanalytic point of view. Throughout Butler’s writings since Gender Trouble, she has used the psychoanalytical concept of melancholia to theorise the disavowed aspects that fuel gender performativity. I will investigate the plays from these complementary perspectives and explore how contemporary drama negotiates the gendering of melancholia as investigated by Schiesari as well as the gendering through melancholia as theorised by Butler. Before I start examining the plays, I will in the following sections establish the theoretical co-ordinates of my study. Discussing the relationship of the loaded concepts of performance and performativity, I will begin to explore the reasons why the theatrical stage might be a particularly suitable arena to negotiate the nexus of gender performativity and hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. At the same time, I will indicate how through the lens of the plays selected, the relationship of Butler’s concept of gender performativity to theatrical performance can be reconsidered from an innovative and, as I will argue, particularly illuminating perspective.
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Performative Maladies 9
10
Introduction
Performance and performativity: From termini technici to umbrella terms
[P]erformativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-representation; nor can it be simply equated with performance. (Butler 1993a: 95) [A]s soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects, all become discussable. (Diamond 1996: 5) As the above-quoted statements indicate, the relationship between performance and performativity is a contested issue. Proposing that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are staged as performative maladies in contemporary anglophone drama, my study aims to reconsider the troubled relationship between performance and performativity. After outlining the development that led to the dissociation of performativity theory and theatre studies, I will, taking my cues from assertions such as Elin Diamond’s, explore how relevant concepts of Butler’s performativity theory, such as reiteration, imitation, belatedness, original/copy, and parody, can be reconnected to their source in theatrical performance. I intend to show that reading Butler, and occasionally reading Butler against Butler, allows for a complex concept of theatricality that encompasses intentionality and scriptedness, ‘presence’ and representation, embodiment and discursivity, and the affirmation and the subversion of dominant structures. Both performance and performativity have become key terms in recent cultural theory and practice. In 1991, Dwight Conquergood suggested that after the ‘linguistic turn’, which made us understand the world as text, a ‘performative turn’ was about to take place in cultural theory, which casts the world as performance (1991: 190).11 Culture’s and cultural theory’s relentless fascination with performance has made performance studies a heterogeneous field, which encompasses not only the studies of theatre and performance art, but also ethnography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, business organisation, technology, linguistics, and literary and cultural theory, among others. While most of these fields initially utilised insights about theatrical performance for their theories, especially about religious ritual or social drama, their thought has fed back into and advanced the study of aesthetic performance.12 Because of the proliferation of performance’s applications and its resulting resistance to definition, performance studies have recently been called an “antidiscipline” (Schechner 2001: 10, Carlson 2004: 206).13
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[W]hile philosophy and theatre now share ‘performative’ as a common lexical item, the term has hardly come to mean ‘the same thing’ for each. (Sedgwick and Parker 1995: 2)
11
Comparable heterogeneity and elusiveness apply to the concept ‘performativity’, which has become so closely intertwined with ‘performance’ that critics have resorted to metaphors of troublesome companionship to describe their relationship: performativity is performance’s “uneasy bedfellow” (Campbell 2001: 6) and its “new theoretical partner” (Diamond 1996: 2). Their conceptual ‘romance’ has indeed made the terms indistinguishable in some contexts, in which performativity tends to serve either as “a fancy synonym for performance” (Solomon 1997: 3) or as the more abstract term that describes the conditions, functions, modes, and effects of individual performances (Fischer-Lichte 2005: 234). One possibility to differentiate performance and performativity is their reference to speech act theory. In many – but by no means all – cases, the use of ‘performativity’ relates to John L. Austin’s speech act theory as developed in his Harvard lectures in 1955 and first published in How To Do Things With Words in 1962,14 or to adaptations of Austin’s theory. According to Austin, the performative speech act does not relate to an extra-linguistic referent but enacts or produces that to which it refers. Therefore, the performative speech act does not describe social facts, as the constative speech act does, but creates them. In Speech Acts (1969), Austin’s student John R. Searle expanded Austin’s speech act theory to an understanding of all language as action. Searle thereby shifted Austin’s focus on rather specialised speech situations, such as the christening of a ship or marriage vows, to the recognition of the performative character of speech in general. However, because theatre and performance theorists, most prominently Ross Chambers (1980), Umberto Eco (1977), and Timothy Gould (1995), have likewise employed Austin’s terminus technicus in order to theorise the generative power of performances, the reference to speech act theory ultimately does not allow a clear differentiation between performance and performativity either. Significantly, the appropriation of Austin’s speech act theory for the conceptualisation of theatrical performance runs counter to one of Austin’s basic axioms. In How To Do Things With Words, Austin decidedly excludes from his theory the ‘non-serious’ speech acts which are carried out during theatrical performance because he understands those ‘infelicitous’ speech acts as an exception to (and a parasitical version of) the ‘normal’ use of language (1975: 22). In “Signature Event Context”, Jacques Derrida challenges this omission and argues that rather than being an exception to the conventional use of language, the speech acts carried out on stage are exemplary of the general use of language, which is likewise based on non-originality, that is, on iteration, infinite citationality, and the possibility of recontextualisation: “ultimately, isn’t it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, ‘non-serious’, citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without which there would not even be a successful performative?” (1988 [1972]: 17). It is partly due to Derrida’s broadening
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Performance and Performativity
Introduction
of the term that ‘performativity’ has been adopted by a variety of disciplines and theories. As many scholars (Dolan 1993: 419, Sedgwick and Parker 1995: 2, Wirth 2002: 10, Davis and Postlewait 2003: 31, Carlson 2004), among them Butler (1999: xiv), have remarked, its extensive use has made performativity, like performance, an umbrella term for varying concepts in a heterogeneous field of interests and disciplines. The broad application of performance and performativity theory – including its (at least partial) incorporation of Austin’s speech act theory – to almost every aspect of human activity had, as Diamond observes in her introduction to Performance and Cultural Politics, already by the mid1990s led to a dominance of “performance discourse, and its new theoretical partner, ‘performativity’, [ ] [in] critical discourse almost to the point of stupefaction” (1996: 2). At the beginning of the new century, Jon McKenzie in his study Perform or Else has even further extended the use of the critical tool ‘performance’ beyond aesthetic, cultural, and social performance to investigate business organisation and technology. Rather than critically assessing the ‘stupefying’ proliferation of the concepts of performance and performativity, McKenzie acknowledges and emphasises the persistent use of ‘performance/performativity’ as the dominant intellectual trope of the past and the forthcoming century. He daringly makes “the speculative forecast” that “performance will be to the twentieth and twentiethfirst centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, an onto-historical [sic] formation of power and knowledge” (2001: 18). Despite the proliferative employment of performance and performativity, two general characteristics are shared by their various definitions and applications. They are involved, first, with both the reinforcement and the dismantling of stable systems of meaning and representation and, secondly, with a sense of doubleness or repetition (Carlson 2004: 80). This latter sense of doubleness or repetition implies two basic assumptions about performance. On the one hand, it designates the iterative quality of all performances, which imitate or actualise a rehearsed ‘model’. As Richard Schechner has pointed out, every performance consists of ‘restored behaviour’: “Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second or the nth time. Performance is ‘twice-behaved behaviour’ ” (1985: 36). On the other hand, the logic of doubleness refers to the split awareness of both the audience and the performers, who simultaneously perceive the performed events and the event of performing. Critics have termed this awareness “double consciousness” (Carlson 2004: 5) or “hyperconsciousness” (Kubiak 2002: 158). I will show in the following that while Butler’s concept of gender performativity works with both performativity’s ambivalent relationship to normative structures and its iterative quality, Butler challenges the assumption of the audience’s and performers’ double consciousness.
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Butler’s Performativity Theory 13
As briefly mentioned above, contemporary theory’s fascination with performance and performativity has in most cases begun with an engagement with theatrical performance, which has become a highly popular metaphor in poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Theoretical projects as diverse as those of Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard have offered different rephrasings of the notion of a theatrum mundi. Barbara Freedman concludes at the beginning of the 1990s, A theatrical model is [ ] ideally suited to the project of decentring and subverting fields of representation that face postmodern theory. This explains why theatre is the source not only of much of the vocabulary of postmodern theory, [ ] but also of many of its key strategies. A refusal of the observer’s stable position, a fascination with re-presenting presence, an ability to stage its own staging, to rethink, reframe, switch identifications, undo frames, see freshly, and yet at the same time see how one’s look is always already purloined – these are the benefits of theatre for theory. (1990: 73) However, as theatre scholars observe with regret (cf. for example Diamond 1996, Case 1997, Kubiak 2002), theatrical performance appears to withdraw more and more into the background of the evolving ‘New World Order’ proclaimed by McKenzie and others, which is shaped by performances at work in psychic, cultural, social, organisational, and technological processes. In the following sections, I will outline the process of theatre’s increasing marginalisation in the performativity theory of Butler, who is acknowledged as one of the most influential of the performance theorists of the 1990s, if not the most influential, mainly because her theory of performativity synthesises psychoanalytic and poststructuralist notions of performativity, speech-act theory, and cultural and social theory. This innovative combination and its employment for gender studies have fuelled a discussion of performance and performativity of remarkable variety and complexity. Butler describes the social as the theatrical in the early stages of her conceptualisation of gender performativity, but problematises the theatre metaphor in her writing after Gender Trouble. Whereas she states at the outset of her 1988 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” that “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts” (272), in Bodies that Matter, she emphasises that “performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-representation; nor can it be simply equated with performance” (95) and adds towards the end of the book, “the reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (ibid.: 234). In the following, I will examine the conditions and reasons for the weakening of the theatre metaphor in Butler’s writing. In so doing, I will analyse the shifts
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The theatre metaphor in Butler’s performativity theory
Introduction
in her understanding of theatrical performance that are part and parcel of this development. In a second step, I will explore arguments and strategies that might re-establish theatre’s validity as the performative medium par excellence. Butler conceptualises gender as an ongoing performative activity which produces the appearance of substance or originality through the acts of reiterative citation alone. Inverting the claim that gender derives from sex, Butler maintains that the notion of a biological, ‘natural’ sex is determined by culturally constructed models of gender; gender hence produces the misnomer of pre-discursive, ‘purely physical’ sex. Butler argues that gender (and, therefore, sex)15 comes into existence through imitations and actualisations of gender norms, which in contemporary Western societies include ideal dimorphism, heterosexual complementarity of bodies, ideals and rules of proper and improper masculinity and femininity (1999: xxiii), and the ideal of reproductive heterosexuality which links sex, gender, and desire. Butler develops her notion of gender performativity by means of the metaphor of theatrical performance and emphasises the importance of reiteration and citation. Although she does not specifically engage with speech act theory in her writing before Bodies that Matter, she employs a concept of performativity that likewise emphasises the generative power of enactment and of discourse as enactment.16 When Butler writes, “Consider gender [ ] as a corporeal style, an ‘act’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ itself carries the double meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential’ ” (1988: 272–3), she connects the theatrical and the speech-act notion of the performative.17 Her employment of theatricality refuses to acknowledge a world beyond theatrical performance; in terms of gender performativity, the “actors are always already on the stage” (ibid.: 277). Hence, Butler’s notion of theatrum mundi rules out the sense of double consciousness, of the “very condition of consciousness split against itself” (Kubiak 2002: 167) that theatre scholars identify as one of the crucial characteristics of theatrical performances. Rather than allowing for critical distance through the recognition of a gap between the representations on stage and the world beyond the stage, according to Butler both the actors who ‘perform’ gender and the environment watching their performances are fully absorbed in what Samuel Taylor Coleridge has called the “willing suspension of disbelief”:18 “the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Butler 1988: 271, 1990: 179). Just as the characters of a particular performance come alive through the embodiment by the actors alone, the (gendered) subject is constituted through the citational acts s/he performs. In the process of “doing gender” (1993a: 41), the doer is the product of the deed (1990: 33). Hence, Butler’s early concept of gender performances as theatrical performances does not imply that they are voluntary, deliberate, and controlled
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acts exerted by actors with full agency.19 Butler emphasises the compulsory character of most gender performances, as “there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations” (1988: 282). In Butlerian terms, the actor is performed by the particular production just as much as s/he performs it; the actor creates, or at least revives, the performance, but s/he is also determined by it (1993a: 282). Describing the complex relationships between agency and subjugation and between ostensible spontaneity and predetermination that are at work in the ‘production’ of gender, Butler resorts to the image of the theatrical stage and argues that the act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed [ ]. [T]he gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives. (1988: 277) Butler also uses the theatre metaphor to criticise cultural assumptions about psychic interiority. She strips her gender concept of the notion of an inner, or even innate, core of gender identity. Just as the actors create the impression of the character’s interiority, their inner conflicts, their repressed emotions, et cetera, through their performances, gender is fabricated by acts of citation alone: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; [ ] identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result” (1990: 33); “gender attributes [ ] are not expressive but performative” (1988: 279); “Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed” (1993b: 4). In order to establish ontological effects, performativity depends on citationality and repetition: Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. [ ] This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. (Butler 1993a: 95) As the maintenance of gender norms depends on their ritualised imitation, the norms can be irritated by failed and deviant actualisations of the ‘command performance’. A perfect citation of the norm even remains impossible, as the performer “never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate” (ibid.: 231). Butler repeatedly conceptualises the demand to imitate gender norms as a law which is only powerful to the extent that
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Butler’s Performativity Theory 15
Introduction
it is quoted by judges and obeyed (ibid.: 14).20 The necessity of reiteration implies the instability of the law, which can be rephrased or possibly even abdicated by ‘wrong’ citations. Butler’s most prominent example of such a ‘wrong’ and distorting citation is the practice of drag, which can mock the notion of ‘true’ gender identity by illustrating the performative character of gender.21 The reception of her example of drag, which was often understood as the quintessence of Butler’s theory rather than as one of many possible strategies of denaturalisation, has contributed to Butler’s abandonment of the theatre metaphor. Those readings tended to reduce Butler’s notion of gender performance to deliberate, voluntary acts which can be altered at will and modified through theatrical means such as clothes or make-up. However, although Butler at some points acknowledges theatre’s capacity to explore alternative imagined spaces which potentially subvert the normative heterosexual hegemony, she puts particular emphasis not on theatre’s ‘as-if’, but on the scriptedness and compulsory character of every performance. In Butler’s theory, the subjunctive mode of performance’s ‘as-if’ is “intimately related to an imperative mood which commands ‘it must be’. Perform – or else: [ ] [it] is a command performance” (McKenzie 2001: 168). Butler has distanced herself from the comparison of gender performativity and theatrical performance, partly in order to forestall further misunderstandings.22 In order to distinguish between gender performativity and theatrical performance, Butler turns to a more traditional and simplistic notion of theatrical performance and of the stage actor in her writings after Gender Trouble. Thus, she argues in Bodies that Matter that performance as bounded “act” is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists of a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s “will” or “choice”; further, what is performed works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, un-performable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake. (234) Butler’s demarcation of theatrical performance from gender performativity is phrased ambiguously. On the one hand, her differentiation can be – and indeed has been – understood as presupposing that the stage actor’s performance is fully determined by his or her will and control (cf. for instance Aston 1999: 16, Diamond 1997: 46 and Kubiak 2002: 33–4). On the other hand, however, the relationship between performativity and performance which Butler envisions can also be grasped as a type-token-relationship rather than as an opposition – an interpretation that seems more fruitful to me.23 Following this trajectory, the mechanisms of performativity would likewise
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Can Performativity Materialise as Performance?
17
apply to the ‘bounded acts’ of theatrical performance, and performativity principally could only materialise as performance.
The subsequent sections will argue not only for the theoretical compatibility of performance and performativity, but also for theatrical performance’s particular capacity to stage and negotiate questions of (gender) performativity. My argument shares the assertion of theatre scholars such as Diamond, Marvin Carlson, Aston, Alisa Solomon, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Anthony Kubiak that theatrical performance offers a particularly apt arena to reflect on and possibly provoke an alteration of the workings of (gender) performativity because of its double consciousness. Given that every theatrical performance depends on the double consciousness of its audience, which always only partly suspends its disbelief in the onstage action, theatrical performance “is the site in which performativity materializes in concentrated form, where the ‘concealed or dissimulated conventions’ of which acts are mere repetitions might be investigated and reimagined” (Diamond 1997: 47). In order to sustain my claim for the capacity of theatrical performance in general (and the plays I consider in particular) to reflect on performativity, I will address two of the main complexes that appear to separate theatrical performance from performativity and hence seem to prevent Butler’s notion of performativity from materialising as performance: first, questions of intentionality and control, which are of importance for the process of producing theatre, and secondly, the opposition of presence versus representation that concerns theatrical reception. Producing theatre: Intentionality and control As we have seen above, Butler distinguishes between theatrical performance and performativity on the ground of the latter’s characterisation by conventions that are beyond the actor’s intention and control. However, every performance can itself be understood as “performative, i.e. shaped by conventions that likewise exceed, constrain and precede the performer” (Lloyd 1999: 202; cf. also Aston 1999: 16, Diamond 1997: 46, FischerLichte 2004: 39). Rather than separating gender performativity and theatrical performance, Butler’s emphasis on the non-voluntary and compulsory aspects of performativity can be used to conceptualise theatrical performance in a way that highlights the non-deliberate, scripted, and ‘matrixed’ aspects of theatrical performance. As the gendered subject, any actor in a theatrical performance performs as much as s/he is performed by a particular production. For instance, the actor has to reproduce the performance text or at least the rehearsed processes, follow cues, and perform within and according to specific theatrical conventions, such as acting styles, scenography, or theatrical architecture.
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Can performativity materialise as performance?
Introduction
Like the gendered subject’s agency, the actor’s agency resides in the possibility and, indeed, the inevitability of slightly varying the command performance of the rehearsed production, but this agency does not necessarily stem from deliberate and conscious acts (Butler 1990: 189). Although variation can be due to a deliberate attempt at innovation, it also can be an effect of technical malfunctions, a different attitude of the audience, or the actor’s failure to reproduce the ‘original’ moment, for example.24 The resignification that can take place within theatrical performance equals that of gender performativity, as both depend on “an agency that is (a) not the same as voluntarism, and that (b) though implicated in the very relations of power it seeks to rival, is not, as a consequence, reducible to those dominant forms” (Butler 1993a: 241). Yet, the notion of an original that every theatrical performance attempts to restage is precarious. In order to conceptualise the relationship of individual performances of a rehearsed production to their ‘original’, Butler’s paradoxical argument about performativity can be applied, which inverts the causal relationship between original and copy through the logic of belatedness. Butler contests the originality of gender norms and argues that gender performances are copies of non-existing originals which create an idea of originality or naturalness merely through their ostensible reproduction. Analogously, a production’s particular performance on one night can be conceptualised as the ostensible reproduction of a non-existent original. Although neither the play text, nor any script with production notes, nor the opening night’s performance can be considered the ‘proper’ or ‘original’ performance which all subsequent shows are meant to imitate as perfectly as possible, all artists involved in a particular performance will orientate themselves according to such an illusionary original. Describing the reiterative quality of every performance, Carlson cites ethnolinguist Richard Bauman in order to emphasise that for the performers, “all performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action” (2004: 5). Applied to theatrical performance, the performance’s norm is either a potential, that is, the ‘perfect’ performance which one day might take place, or an ideal, that is, the ‘perfect’ performance which remains inapproximable, or a “remembered original model” – would that be the, possibly blurred, recollection of the opening night? Or of one particular rehearsal? Do the individual actors remember the same “original model”? Furthermore, performances and rehearsals require both repetition and innovation; in terms of theatrical performance, satisfactory repetition can only be achieved via variation. Herbert Blau emphasises that as soon as actors attempt to repeat a past achievement, they are confronted with the necessity to vary the ‘original’ moment in order to actualise it properly: “it wouldn’t be the same if it were only the same, it would be nothing but
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19
a repetition, not as right as it was, spontaneous, as when it happened for the first time” (2001: 28). Blau hence concludes that there is something in both theatre and performance that “implies no first time, no origin, but only recurrence and reproduction, whether improvised or ritualized, rehearsed or aleatoric, whether the performance is meant to give the impression of an unviolated naturalness or the dutiful and hieratic obedience to a code” (1987: 171). In a similar vein, theatre practitioners Lisa Baraitser and Simon Bayly, co-directors of the company PUR, conceptualise rehearsal as performance’s “pre-play” and the actual performances as the rehearsal’s “replay”; strikingly, the moment of ‘play’ itself, the culminating moment of the rehearsals and the starting point for later performances, is missing. Acknowledging the fictionality of performance’s ‘original’, Baraitser and Bayly argue that the performance tries “to invoke the secret ‘real’ of rehearsal” (2001: 70) but remains multiply deferred from actuality: the performance “can only point to a moment of epiphany that we dream happened in rehearsal” (ibid.: 71). They hence suggest that performances aspire to a remembered vision of an ideal, a collective dream about a moment of epiphany, which is the product of the collaborative rehearsal process. Because the collective aspiration towards a particular, if volatile, ideal that the performance is intended to actualise is negotiated in rehearsal, the processes of this ‘pre-play’ of performance are of importance to the relationship between performance and performativity. In rehearsal, the issues of intentionality and control are even more central, as the collaboration between the director and the actors negotiates and transmits intentions. Rather than simply installing a ‘command performance’, the director has to transmit his or her idea of a character or a situation to the actors and make them intend to act in a specific way. As a result, the actor will enact the director’s intent as his or her own intent under the control of the director. However, because the director’s intent materialises only via the acting skills, body, and voice of the actor, it will never be exerted without variation. Therefore, in the dialogue and interaction between director and actor that takes place during rehearsals, intentions and control are negotiated, and performances will take off from the point that this exchange has reached, from the shared “image of perfection in the head” (Blau 1987: 179). Insofar as the performance actualises characters and situations that were once instigated by the stipulations of the director, an expanded version of the Althusserian concept of interpellation, which allows for bilateral dependence rather than the unilateral exertion of power, seems to be fruitful not only for the description of the workings of gender performativity,25 but also of the theatrical rehearsal process. Just as the director initially observes, reprimands, and calls the actors to action, his or her presence is increasingly interiorised by the actors, who will then perform as if the director were still present or who will depart from certain agreements once the director is no longer there – thus rearticulating the ‘law’ installed and defended by the director.
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Can Performativity Materialise as Performance?
Introduction
As a result, every performance will also involve the loss of control, both by the director, who can no longer interrupt and correct the actors, and by the actors. Not only are actors susceptible to technical malfunctions and the failures of their own “unaccommodated body that at any performative moment may really lose control, as in something so elemental as a case of stage fright” (Blau 2001: 289), they will also need to let go of control to a certain extent in order to fully embody their character and to be able to deal with changes that occur spontaneously during the performance. Thus, the balance of keeping and losing control, of exerting intentions and being ready to depart from them is at the heart of both the rehearsal process and the theatrical performance. In the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melancholia, this volatile relationship between deliberate performing and being performed, of control and loss of control, does not only apply to the performance process inherent in the theatrical medium in general, but to the play’s staging of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia in particular. The plays present protagonists whose conduct displays hysteric, traumatic, and melancholic symptoms and thus invites audiences to speculate about the repressed, unconscious psychic processes which surface in their conduct. Thus, the plays encourage audiences to perceive the protagonists’ acts as forms of acting out, of “action[s] in which the subject, in the grip of his unconscious wishes and phantasies, relives these in the present with a sense of immediacy which is heightened by his refusal to recognise their source and their repetitive character” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 4). Because of this invitation to audiences, the plays contradict Butler’s aforequoted notion that “what is performed works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, un-performable” (1993a: 234). By highlighting the degree to which the protagonists are installed in psychic repetition compulsions of which they are often not even aware, the plays demonstrate that the conduct of the protagonists cannot be reduced to intentional and controlled acts, but, inadvertently, displays that which is ‘opaque’ and ‘unconscious’ and cannot be performed deliberately by the protagonists. Since the plays employ acting out as a trope for gender performance, I will argue, they call attention to certain exclusions and repressions at work in the (gendered) performances of the characters rather than solely concealing the unperformed. Hence, through their subject matter, the plays focus on the non-conscious and disavowed aspects of performance which Butler, as elaborated above, misses in theatrical performance. Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies thus proffer one way of illustrating and explaining the unconscious repetition compulsions which are characteristic of gender performativity. Particularly in her writings since the latter half of the 1990s, Butler has acknowledged that not “all of the internal world of the psyche is but an effect of a stylized set of acts” (1999: xv) and “to reduce the psychic workings of gender to
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the literal performance of gender would be a mistake” (1997: 144), because “what is most apparently performed as gender is the sign and symptom of a pervasive disavowal” (ibid.: 147). Butler utilises melancholia to theorise psychic interiority as the merely provisional product of internalisation and argues that gender is the – likewise provisional – result of such an internalisation, namely of melancholic incorporation. As I will explore in detail in Chapter 3, the concept of melancholic incorporation offers Butler one way of theorising that which remains hidden and possibly unconscious but nonetheless directs gender performances. Conceptualising not only melancholia, but also trauma and hysteria as performative maladies, I will argue that also the latter disorders as staged by the plays are interlinked with the workings of gender performativity. Watching theatre: Presence versus representation Because theatre, unlike cinema, video, and other art forms that involve technical means of reproducing the body, depends on the material and live presence of the actors’ bodies, the double consciousness of theatre audiences who are constantly aware of theatre’s representational status can be eclipsed when it comes to matters of the body, and thus, issues of sex/gender. Fischer-Lichte in this respect differentiates between the ‘semiotic body’ of the character and the ‘phenomenal, sensuous body’ of the performer (2004: 130–60, esp. 132) and highlights that the perception of audiences oscillates between focusing on the former and the latter. In a similar vein to those theorists who speak of theatre’s intrinsic ‘double consciousness’, FischerLichte therefore characterises the perception of theatre audiences as a state of being “betwixt and between” (ibid.: 151). As feminist scholars have pointed out, the perception of sex/gender in theatre is prone to conflating these ‘bodies’; it is “exceptionally susceptible to naturalization. Indeed, the female body on stage appears to be ‘the thing itself’, incapable of mimesis, afforded not only no distance between sign and referent, but, indeed, taken for the referent” (Hart 1993: 5). As a consequence, the staging of gender might not be understood as a semiotic production or representation by theatrical means, but as immediate presentation, or ‘presence’, so that an actress onstage automatically is a female figure rather than acts like a female figure. Similarly, Butler suggests, “the theatrical models” understand “the gendered self to be prior to its acts” (1988: 271). She hence equates the theatrical reception with the, likewise naturalised, everyday perception of gender.26 Following the same line, Butler in Bodies that Matter no longer allows for theatre’s critical distance from itself, for a self-referential sense of its own historicity. According to Butler, gender performativity “is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity)” (1993a: 12). Rather than casting the theatrical as that
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Can Performativity Materialise as Performance?
Introduction
which is contrived and representational, Butler in this passage categorises the theatrical as the fully illusionistic, the authentic, and the seemingly non-historical. She thereby excludes from her concept of theatricality the double consciousness of audiences and performers that distorts complete theatrical illusion and allows for “the startling/contradiction of the stated by the shown” (Solomon 1997: 4). Already in her early essay, however, Butler at the same time acknowledges the double consciousness of theatre audiences when she discusses the difference between the everyday performance of non-normative gender and the theatrical performance: although theatrical performance can meet with political censorship and scathing criticism, gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions. Indeed, the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence [ ]. In the street or on the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act. (1988: 278) In contrast to Butler’s phrasing that tends to characterise theatre as the more limited, more conventional, and less dangerous site of cultural negotiation and provocation, I think that at the same time, it is precisely theatre’s status as heterotopia (cf. Foucault 1967), as protected space, which offers a chance for critical reflection on society, for the trial of different perspectives on ‘reality’, and for the unlimited imagination of, possibly utopian, alternatives. Protected by theatrical conventions, the theatre opens up a space for cultural observation and contemplation that everyday performances can hardly achieve. Rather than failing to expose the constructedness of gender, theatre can then become an appropriate arena to stage and upstage notions of gender, to see traditional gender concepts from a critical distance and to reflect on their inherent theatricality, not despite of but because of the fact that “theatrical performance depends on the legible presence of the quotation marks, which, as described by Butler, the process of performativity as citation operates to conceal in ‘everyday life’ ” (Harris 1999: 76). Butler’s contradictory treatment of theatrical performance is part of a larger poststructuralist trend. As Shannon Jackson shows in her genealogy of performance and gender theory, the ‘emancipation’ of poststructuralist performative theory from the theatre metaphor depends not only on a reduction of theatricality to a state of simplistic intentionality, but also highlights its alleged ‘presence’ at the cost of its representational status (2003: 206). Jackson demonstrates that gender theory (as promoted by Butler, Diamond, and Sue-Ellen Case) participates in a general theoretical confusion of the two
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Can Performativity Materialise as Performance?
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theatricality functions ubiquitously and contradictorily because of the term’s “flexible essentialism”. Depending upon context, convenience, and polemics, theatricality can as easily find itself on the essentialist as anti-essentialist side of a conceptual binary. Theatricality is used as a metaphor for representation and, in other contexts, as anti-representational ground for the authentic. (2003: 189)27 However, although Butler in the initially quoted statements employs the flexible essentialism of theatrical performance to illustrate the full belief in the illusion of gender essence, that performance “which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (1988: 271), her take on theatre cannot be reduced to such essentialist readings of theatrical performance. Butler’s use of theatricality does not undergo a consistent shift from the employment to the denial of a complex theatre metaphor, which McKenzie has summarised as the shift from “performativity via performance” to “performativity contra performance” (1998: 225). Instead, Butler’s application of the theatre metaphor, even in her work after Gender Trouble, keeps oscillating between the poles of the authentic and the contrived as well as the intentional and the scripted. Shortly before the remarks in the closing chapter of Bodies that Matter that admonish that “the reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (1993a: 234), Butler speaks of the “theatricality of gender” (ibid.: 232) and praises the theatrical as a critical tool, which can expose the constructedness of heterosexual gender norms. Butler argues that any resignifying citation of the norm “will emerge theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive conventions that it also reverses” (ibid.). She here emphasises the potential of theatrical performance to foreground the workings of performativity through marking them as theatrical, that is, as representational rather than authentic. As Blau states, the efforts of performance groups like the Living Theatre “to eliminate the as if, to return performance to unmediated experience”, that is, to rule out the ‘quotation marks’ of theatrical performance, were doomed to fail, as there “is nothing more illusory in performance than the illusion of the unmediated” (1987: 164). Particular theatrical strategies can foreground theatre’s representational status, its as if, which for performers and audiences opens a doubly conscious space for cultural observation and negotiation. Among them is the metatheatrical device of “performed performance”,28 which calls attention to the fabricated status of the theatrical performance taking place and can thereby comment on the more general performativity
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opposed concepts at work in theatricality, ‘presence’ and ‘representation’. Starting from the assumptions that the paradoxical character of theatricality is one of the reasons for its widespread use in critical theory, Jackson argues that
Introduction
in everyday life off-stage. If, for example, a theatrical performance manages to distort the equation of the gender of the performer and the gender of the performed, as the cross-gender casting of drag does and as the melancholic gender and sex changes in the Drama of Melancholia do, it can highlight the performative construction of gender in general. The plays selected do, of course, not only offer forms of acting out on the fictional level of the plays’ action, but they are also enactments. The actors represent and enact scenes of hysteric, traumatic, and melancholic repetition compulsion rather then act them out, which would require hysteric, traumatised, and melancholic actors who follow their psychic impulses rather than a script and a rehearsed performance. Possible forms of ‘the theatre of performative malady’ range from a mimetic method that tries to achieve the genuine acting out on stage (a project which will always, as argued above, be compromised by the inherently representational status of every stage performance)29 to a diegetic approach that offers written and/or rehearsed performances about hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. On this spectrum of the theatre of performative malady, the plays considered in this study are to be associated with the more diegetic pole. The productions of the plays discussed attempt neither autobiographic faithfulness comparable to the endeavours of American monologue performance artists such as Whoopi Goldberg and Anna Deavere Smith, nor the authenticity of pain on stage as tested by body artists such as Bob Flanagan, Orlan, and Stelarc. On the contrary, in the plays selected, metatheatrical elements constantly foreground the theatricality of the performances and hence call attention to the fact that actors enact acting out and that they deliberately fabricate allegedly unconscious symptoms. Given that the psychic ‘disorders’ of the protagonists, understood as performative maladies, metaphorically and metonymically represent their gender performances, these metatheatrical devices also comment on the performativity of the figures’ gender. Therefore, when Butler declares that she aims at bringing the existing but denied complexity of gender identity “into a dramatic cultural interplay without punitive consequences” (1988: 271), I would argue that “dramatic cultural interplay” can be understood literally rather than metaphorically, since theatre can indeed instigate and promote such an interaction. Such interplay can potentially make theatrical audiences expand their double consciousness to their own mundane performances, an “exercise of consciousness” which would dramatically change their perception:30 there is also the exercise of consciousness in watching a performance in which those who seem to be performing are under the illusion that they are merely living. I say under the illusion because, were they to think about it at all, that first reflection, they would be susceptible to the vice of performative consciousness which theatricalizes everything it looks upon, seeing the living as nothing but performance. (Blau 1987: 179)
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Once an audience, themselves mundane performers of gender, watch other performers of gender, that is, fictional characters on stage who “are under the illusion that they are merely living”, and once theatrical strategies reveal the degree to which they are caught in the compulsions of (gender) performativity, the audience can feel instigated to reflect on their own mundane performativity. If audiences, if we, do transfer the double consciousness characteristic of watching a theatrical performance to the perception of everyday performativity, the question remains whether we are able to live constantly with this double consciousness or whether we do not need to abandon it at times in order to return to a willing suspension of disbelief. This, at least temporary and partial, suspension of disbelief, which Blau has termed in a different context “the agency of repression” (1987: 185), might not only be indispensable for both theatrical reception and production, but also for the perception and production of mundane gender performativity.
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Can Performativity Materialise as Performance?
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Hysteria: Theory and theatre The Drama of Hysteria stages a phenomenon for which both medical research and cultural criticism have offered contradictory definitions and assessments: hysteria is multiple, it is uniform; hysteria does not exist; it is a disease, a disposition, or a simulation; it is true and false, organic and mental (Wajeman 2003: n. pag.). Observing that both the medical concepts and the symptoms of hysteria have always adapted to the prevailing ideas and mores in a given historical, social, and cultural context, critics note “the extreme, almost obscene interpretability” (Micale 1995: 103) of the “chameleon” hysteria (Mentzos 2000 [1991]: 13). Not only is hysteria modelled ‘stylistically’ on its surrounding culture, but it might also be a consequence of the tensions, conflicts and crises of a specific culture, as Stavros Mentzos and others have argued (Bronfen 1998b, Mentzos 2000 [1991], Roudinesco 2001). Because the medical and the popular histories of hysteria are inextricably intertwined, the distinction between scientific and fictional texts dissolves and the traditional division within the history of science between professional theory, enlightened lay opinion, and popular belief is unsustainable, as Mark S. Micale notes (1995: 180).1 The heterogeneous theories and histories of hysteria tend to share, however, the gendering of the disease as a specifically female malady. Ever since hysteria was classified as the disease of the wandering womb, it has not only influenced social constructions of femininity but also dramatic representations of women. Therefore, the contemporary Drama of Hysteria, which has resurfaced since the late 1970s in European theatre and has been prominent on the British stage since the late 1980s, refers back to a far-reaching tradition, in which medical studies on hysteria and theatrical representations of the phenomenon inspired each other. Concepts of hysteria were negotiated and elaborated both in theatre and in psychiatry and travelled between them. 27
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The Drama of Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
Despite the wealth of concepts of hysteria in both medical discourse and its popularised versions, which have not only changed through the centuries but also often contradicted each other even within one particular period, a rough historical development of this chameleonic disease can be traced. In the following brief outline, I will focus on those phases which are the central reference points for the contemporary Drama of Hysteria. My outline will also foreground the close interaction between theoretical and dramatic explorations of hysteria. After presenting nineteenth-century melodrama as the ‘Drama of Grande Hystérie’ and Ibsenite realism as the ‘Drama of Petite Hystérie’, I will discuss the plays selected by Furse, Morrissey, and Johnson as exemplary representatives of the contemporary anglophone Drama of Hysteria. With Hippocrates’s initial classification of hysteria as the disease of the wandering womb, it is characterised as a typically female disease and associated with sexuality – or, to be more precise, with the lack of sexual encounters.2 Plato’s Timaeus reflects this idea: The animal within them [women] is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of a disease. (1961 [360 B.C.a]: 1210, 91c) The notion of hysteria as “female malady” (Showalter 1985) has shaped the history of the concept to this day. However, medical discourses on male hysteria have almost constantly, yet at most times less prominently, coexisted. In antiquity, the first known hypothesis of male hysteria derives from the second century A.D., when Galen of Pergamon (or Claudius Galenus), the second prominent physician of Graeco-Roman antiquity next to Hippocrates, locates hysteria not only in the womb but also in the male semen. The rise of Christianity brings about a turning point in the understanding of hysteria. The ideal of chastity makes it impossible to regard sexual abstinence as damaging and sexual acts as a possible cure (Veith 1965: 42–6). Instead, due to Christianity’s emphasis on sinfulness and woman’s particular guilt, hysteria is comprehended as an indicator of evil possession. The central text of the inquisition, Malleus Maleficarum (1449), claims that hysterics are witches, whose symptoms are stigmata diaboli that betray the possession by Satan. By persecuting and torturing the alleged witches, medieval culture transforms a medical issue into a moral one and punishes rather than treats medically the alleged hysterics, most severely by burning them at the stake. Hysteria is remedicalised in the seventeenth century, when the brain and the nervous system rather than the womb come to be regarded as the locus of
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hysteria. For Thomas Sydenham, who is the most outstanding theoretician of hysteria in the anglophone medical world of the seventeenth century beside Robert Burton, hysteria is the most common disease of his time next to fever (Bronfen 1998a: 109).3 Within the period of the modern scientific worldview, the realisation that men and women alike could suffer from nervous disorders such as hysteria appears first in England and Scotland (Micale 1991: 226–7). This view runs through Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Thomas Williams’s and Sydenham’s studies in the 1680s, as well as through the eighteenth-century work of Bernard de Mandeville, Richard Blackmore, Nicholas Robinson, and Robert Whytt, who all had accepted George Cheyne’s account of the nervous disorders (including hysteria) as ‘the national malady’ of the English (ibid.: 222). After this de-gendering of the disease, the medical discourses on hysteria shift yet again during the eighteenth century. The introduction of a morality of sensibility, which aligns the resistance of the organs to the penetration of the spirits with notions of a strength of the soul that keeps thoughts and desires in order (Bronfen 1998a: 112–13), once more moralises and feminises hysteria, which “now implied a form of physical and mental degeneracy and crude and uncontrolled emotionality” (Micale 1991: 222). The feminine norm prevalent in the eighteenth century is the sensitive, excessively refined woman, who is too frail and too easily impressionable to resist the hysterical symptoms of her own body and, by extension, morally dangerous influences from the outside. Because of their weaker physical constitution, women are considered more prone to hysterical symptoms and attacks than the physically and mentally more robust men.4 Although hysteria is no longer linked to the womb, the discursive association of femininity and hysteria is once again naturalised by such biological assumptions. Hysteria attains a paradoxical status in the eighteenth century, as the phenomenon is not only regarded as the epitome of ideal womanhood, but also becomes a container term for everything that is morally intolerable in women, such as deceitfulness, exaggerated display of emotions, or overt sexual behaviour (Panke-Kochinke 1991: 66). Jean-Martin Charcot, Augustine, and Grande Hystérie The nineteenth century is the peak time for the study of hysteria and the Parisian clinic La Salpêtrière becomes the centre of the European study of hysteria towards the end of the century.5 The clinic’s director, the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who comes to be nicknamed the ‘Napoleon of neurosis’ (Borossa 2001: 17),6 reforms theories of hysteria, as he understands hysteria as a neurological hereditary degeneration triggered by physical shock. Charcot distinguishes the hysterical attack from the epileptic fit as well as from other mental diseases, and thus establishes hysteria as a nosological entity with specific symptoms. He classifies four phases of symptoms that together constitute Grande Hystérie, the particular form of
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Hysteria: Theory and Theatre 29
The Drama of Hysteria
hysteria Charcot claims to have detected: the période épileptoide, the phase of epileptic fits and convulsions, the période des grands mouvements, also named clownisme, in which the patients display illogical movements and contortions, the attitudes passionelles, which have hallucinatory traits and during which the patients replay incidents and affects from their past, and the délire terminal, in which the patients slowly regain consciousness. Charcot insists that these phases and their subphases could be labelled and timed precisely (Bronfen 1998a: 182). In addition to the hysterical attack, Charcot identifies hysterical symptoms occurring between the attacks, such as paralysis, loss of speech, or loss of sight, which he calls ‘stigmata’, thus alluding to the notion of stigmata diaboli which proved the hysteric/the witch’s possession by the devil during the Inquisition. Establishing Grande Hystérie, also called ‘hystero-epilepsy’ or ‘hysteria major’, as a normative paradigm of hysteria, Charcot transforms “the old, amorphous ‘wastepaper basket’ of symptoms [ ] [into] a coherent and conceptually elegant array” (Goldstein 1987: 33).7 The Grande Hystérie that is treated in the Salpêtrière becomes the dominant model of hysteria in the late nineteenth century and attracts great attention all over Europe, not at least because of the popular Tuesday lectures by the charismatic Charcot, which are open to the public. In these leçons du mardi he instantly diagnoses patients he has never seen before and thereby arouses the public’s fascination “like a magician, or an acrobat working without a net” (Showalter 1998: 31). Charcot’s concentration on identifying hysteria as a nosological unit has been considered both his merit and his shortcoming. A number of his contemporaries as well as later critics have accused Charcot of having been less interested in curing than in classifying and reproducing Grande Hystérie.8 Indeed, Charcot’s school concentrates on not only the recording, but also the provocation of hysteria, since Charcot develops a complex system which enables him to instigate hysterical attacks during his lectures. As trigger mechanisms, he uses hypnosis, shock effects such as flashes or sudden sounds, and the exertion of pressure on the ‘hysterogenic zones’ he claims to have identified, most prominently the ovaries. Consequently, the physicians at the Salpêtrière use a contraption called the ‘ovarian compressor’ to induce and stop hysterical attacks by penetrating the patient’s womb. In addition to his public lectures, Charcot spreads his fame through the circulation and publication of photographs taken at the clinic. Charcot innovatively employs photographers to reinforce his classification of Grande Hystérie, among them the trained physician Paul Régnard, who in 1882 is succeeded by Albert Londe as the first professional photographer to have a full-time appointment in a European hospital (Gilman 1993: 352). The photographs and sketches made at the Salpêtrière are not only used during lectures for illustration and demonstration; the clinic’s physicians Désiré-Magloire, Bourneville and Régnard – following Charcot’s request –
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also publish them, accompanied by case studies and theoretical articles on Grande Hystérie, in three volumes of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière from 1876 until 1880.9 The Iconographie photographique contains many photographs of the same young hysterical patient, who is given different names and initials (such as X, L , and G ) but most often is called ‘Augustine’. Augustine, whose real name is Louise, is one of Charcot’s most popular patients, as her hysterical attacks perfectly fit Charcot’s ideal of Grande Hystérie. She becomes the “star model for a whole concept of hysteria” (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 117). As the photographs and sketches produced at the Salpêtrière indicate, the hysterical symptoms are classified foremost visually, while the meaning of the patients’ utterances is ignored or simply documented as yet another symptom, as ‘hysterical babbling’. This neglect is criticised by Charcot’s student Sigmund Freud, who reforms the treatment of hysteria from the 1890s onwards. In Augustine (Big Hysteria), Furse reconsiders Augustine’s case study from a feminist point of view. By fictionalising Augustine’s case and making her meet Freud, Furse advances Freud’s reformation to the time when he stayed at the Salpêtrière. Charcot innovatively institutes a wing for male hysterics at the Salpêtrière in 188210 and publishes case histories of male hysteria,11 thus inspiring literature about male hysteria in the 1880s and 1890s in all major European languages (Micale 1991: 202). Charcot argues against a sexual pathogenesis of hysteria12 and dismisses the nineteenth-century Victorian doctrine of a gendered, innate disposition for hysteria, which is considered “a kind of pathological intensification of feminine nature itself” (ibid.: 205). Trying to avoid the feminisation of his male hysterical patients, Charcot emphasises in his writings that male hysteria – or “virile hysteria” – is “authentically masculine in nature” (ibid.: 207).13 However, as Micale has shown, Charcot’s gender liberalisation of the disease leads to the mapping of the gynocentric model onto the male body; thus, he locates male hysterogenic zones in the area of the lower abdominal wall which match the position of the ovaries in the female body. Georges Gilles de la Tourette accordingly calls them “les zones pseudo-ovariennes” (ibid.: 213).14 Yet, although Charcot and his colleagues assume the pattern of Grande Hystérie for both men and women and juxtapose male and female patients in the lectures to demonstrate the similarity of their attacks and stigmata (ibid.: 204), they do not entirely escape the traditional association of hysteria and female sexuality. The majority of the patients treated at the Salpêtrière are female, and women appear much more frequently in Charcot’s lectures than male patients. Furthermore, Charcot’s identification of the ovaries as a hysterogenic zone is reminiscent of the ancient theories based on the idea of the wandering womb. All of the clinical pictures published in the Iconographie photographique depict female patients, and many of the images show them in sexually suggestive poses.15 In addition to the photographs,
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Hysteria: Theory and Theatre 31
The Drama of Hysteria
paintings and sketches made at the Salpêtrière reinforce the feminisation of hysteria, such as André Brouillet’s Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, a gendered and eroticised representation of Grande Hystérie. Because Charcot was not as free from the preconceptions of his time as he liked to think, Ulrich Baer states that “Charcot the man lagged behind the radical insights of Charcot the clinician” (2002: 29), an assessment which Showalter shares: Despite Charcot’s insistence that hysteria was neither a sexual disorder nor one limited to women, both he and his staff repeatedly fell back on stereotypes that equated it with the female personality. Hysterics were seen as vain and preoccupied with their appearance, deceitful and selfdramatizing. Charcot’s assistant Charles Richet saw these traits as “varieties of female character [ ]. One might even say that hysterics are more womanly than other women”. (1998: 34; cf. also Micale 1991: 214) Richet’s statement shows that even the innovative specialists at the Salpêtrière (not to mention public opinion) are unable to overcome entirely the traditional association of hysteria and femininity and the gendered stereotypes of their day. As Showalter has shown, hysteria both in medical discourse and in popular opinion becomes the female malady par excellence in the nineteenth century, since it “was linked with the essence of the ‘feminine’ in a number of ways. Its vast unstable repertoire of emotional and physical symptoms – fits, fainting, vomiting, choking, sobbing, laughing, paralysis – and the rapid passage from one to another suggested the lability and capriciousness traditionally associated with the feminine nature” (1985: 129; cf. also von Braun 1985: 28, Israël 1976: 49). Because the discursive link of hysteria and femininity proves stronger than medical evidence that hysteria was not gender-specific, men suffering from hysteria are frequently considered not quite ‘real men’ (Borossa 2001: 56–62). Although Charcot attempts to counter this association in the case studies he publishes, the notes he leaves on cases of male hysteria display innuendos of homosexuality16 and effeminacy, which are standard in the medical discourse of the nineteenth century (Showalter 1998: 64–5). Moreover, not only did Charcot’s theory and treatment of hysteria contain traces of the far-reaching history of hysteria as female malady, but also did Charcot’s pupils largely ignore his reformation that allowed for male hysteria. For example, Charcot’s intern Émile Batault in 1885 writes, “One can imagine a perfumed and pomaded femmelette suffering from this bizarre malady, but that a robust working-man should have nerves and vapours like a society woman, that’s too much!” (qtd in Showalter 1998: 65). Jan Goldstein shows that not only sexuality, but also race, class, and religion come to be surrogate markers for gender, which again distance Charcot’s
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male hysterics from their therapists and thus foreclose broader transformation of late nineteenth-century notions of gender. As long as he treated Jews, Arabs, and working class men, “from the vantage point of the male, bourgeois, Christian doctor who made the diagnosis, the male hysteric remained the ‘other’, as radically foreign and as extruded from the self as the female hysteric” (Goldstein 1987: 154).17 Melodrama: The Drama of Grande Hystérie The zenith of hysteria’s popularity in European medical discourse is also the peak of the mutual influence of medical and theatrical concepts of hysteria. The concept of Grande Hystérie has been moulded by the theatrical ‘attitudes’ of Lady Emma Hamilton in the late eighteenth century, by their adaptations in the nineteenth century by women solo performers throughout Europe (such as Ida Brun in Denmark and Henriette Hendel-Schütz in Germany) as well as by the practice of creating tableaux vivants that was popular throughout Europe (Carlson 2004: 91–2, see also Holmström 1967). While these theatrical practices fed into Charcot’s concept, Grande Hystérie in turn inspired theatrical shows. In the late nineteenth century, a number of plays, performances, and fair shows announce their close association with Charcot’s hysteria in their titles or in the names of their companies. For example, performers called Harengs Saurs Épileptiques or Hydropathes imitate the theatrical attacks of Grande Hystérie in their shows at the Parisian theatres Chat Noir and Folies Bergère (Showalter 1998: 100). The magicians and magnetisers of the time advertise their shows with slogans such as “Based on Professor Charcot’s experiments at the Salpêtrière” (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 235), and the travelling museum of Dr Spitzner goes from fair to fair exhibiting a life-size group representing a “Lecture of Prof. Charcot” (ibid.: 30). Even psychiatrists themselves contribute to the Drama of Hysteria of the day. Charcot’s disciple André de Lorde writes a play called Une leçon à la Salpêtrière that is produced in 1908 at the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris (Micale 1995: 198, Showalter 1998: 101).18 Hysteria not only becomes part of the plot of various theatrical performances, but also moulds the acting style of the day. The flamboyant behaviour of the grandes hystériques treated at the Salpêtrière is very similar to the exaggerating style of melodramatic stage acting, and Sarah Bernhardt even takes inspiration for her performances of extreme mental states from her visits to Charcot’s lectures (Micale 1995: 198). Consequently, the terms ‘hysteric’ and ‘histrionic’ are nearly synonymous at the turn of the century and the sign systems of the theatrical stage and the arena of the Salpêtrière are almost identical: By the early to mid-nineteenth century, hysterical women (who were often considered degenerate, duplicitous actresses) became semiotically
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The Drama of Hysteria
The therapists at the asylum take part in this circle of mutual inspiration between theatre and psychiatry as well. As noted above, Charcot’s popular Tuesday lectures are spectacular ‘shows’ with a meticulous dramaturgy, featuring hysterical stars in front of amused and thrilled audiences. The Tuesday lectures are written like plays, including the protagonists’ lines, their soliloquies and asides, and meticulous stage directions (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 243). The hysteric performers are sometimes costumed to enhance their impact on the audience, such as when they wear feathered hats to magnify their hysteric tremor (Ellenberger 1970: 96). Charcot functions as this theatre’s dramaturge and director and, moreover, performs himself, thus becoming a role model for his patients. He often introduces hysteric case studies by imitating the facial expression, the voice, and the movement of a particular patient before s/he enters the lecture hall. The notion of the ‘Drama of Grande Hystérie’ hence not only applies to melodrama but also to Charcot’s lectures themselves. Sigmund Freud, Dora, and Petite Hystérie Freud studies at the Salpêtrière from October 1885 until March 1886 and is greatly impressed by Charcot,19 whom he describes in his letters as “one of the greatest of physicians and a man whose common sense borders on genius” (1960 [1885]: 86). Nonetheless, Freud comes to develop, together with his colleague Josef Breuer, an alternative theory of hysteria and a new method of treating hysterics once he is back in Vienna. Because Freud and Breuer’s patients did not display the classic ‘great hysteric’ attacks that Charcot identified in his patients, they at times describe their patients’ symptoms – including neuralgia, anaesthesia, paralyses, vomiting, anorexia, hallucinations – as Petite Hystérie (cf. for example 1905a: 181, 1905aE: 23), but most often simply use the term ‘hysteria’. The publication of their coauthored book Studies in Hysteria in 1895 produces another turning point in the history of hysteria. For the first time assuming a psychic trauma to be the cause for hysterical symptoms, Freud and Breuer claim that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (1895E: 7; cf. 1895: 86). They argue that the hysteric converts psychic pain into somatic ailments and phrase the term Konversionshysterie (conversion hysteria) to describe this phenomenon. In consequence, deciphering the physical symptoms of conversion hysteria becomes a way of detecting and alleviating the mental suffering. Freud and Breuer understand verbal utterances as keys to unlock the patient’s repressed psychic processes. They hence develop a new treatment which centres on the
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indistinguishable from actresses playing hysterical fallen women in melodrama. In both we find eye rolling, facial grimaces, gnashing teeth, heavy sighs, fainting, shrieking, choking; “hysterical laughter” was a frequent stage direction as well as a common occurrence in medical asylums. (Diamond 1990–91: 63)
words rather than merely on the spectacular body language of the patients: Their innovative ‘talking cure’,20 thus Freud’s and Breuer’s claim, weakens the damaging impact of unconscious memories by affectively remembering and verbalising the trauma in the context of a therapeutic relationship.21 As they assume that the patient abreacts repressed feelings by remembering and re-enacting them, Freud initially labels the effect of the talking cure ‘catharsis’, the liberation from a trapped affect. Freud and Breuer describe the success of their cathartic method in the Studies: each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. (1895E: 6; cf. 1895: 85) With hindsight, Freud states that “ ‘catharsis’ (purging, setting free of a strangulated affect) [ ] was the immediate precursor of psychoanalysis; and, in spite of every extension of experience and of every modification of theory, it is still contained within it as its nucleus” (1928E: 194; cf. 1928: 409). Freud’s therapy uncovers that in many cases, the psychic trauma instigating hysteric conversion was caused by sexual child abuse, often by a close relative or a friend of the family; he therefore comes to develop a theory that acknowledges the importance of sexual traumata for the aetiology of hysteria. As Freud’s research goes on, he is shocked by the rapidly rising number of cases of incestuous sexual abuse that are reported to him. In a letter to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess in 1897, he articulates his growing unease, frowning “at the fact that in all cases the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse” and that “surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable” (1887– 1904E: 264). Moreover, Freud states, “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect” (ibid., cf. 1887–1904: 283–4). As a consequence, Freud starts to abandon the thesis that Ernest Jones later euphemistically calls ‘seduction theory’.22 According to his emerging theory of the Oedipus complex, he shifts the causation of trauma from the external to the internal and argues that the reminiscences of incestuous abuse might stem from the patient’s own denied incestuous desire. He generalises these findings as a universal principle of psychic development, as he reports to Fliess: “A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event of early childhood” (1887–1904E: 272; cf. 1887–1904: 293). Freud’s abandonment of his seduction theory has been profoundly criticised by the so-called ‘seduction theory revivalists’, including the French
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Hysteria: Theory and Theatre 35
The Drama of Hysteria
feminist group Psychoanalyse et politique, Judith Lewis Herman, and Jeremy Moussaieff Masson. Masson’s study The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984) caused intense controversies within and beyond the psychoanalytic community, just as a series of essays by Frederick Crews published in the New York Times, which were later released together with letters of protest and the author’s answers in The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (1995). The seduction theory revivalists consider the seduction theory to be the appropriate explanation of hysterical symptoms and suspect Freud of “complicity with patriarchal silencing of women and children” (Hunter 1992: 398; cf. also Webster 1995: 195–213). However, as Phillip Mollon, Dianne Hunter, and others have pointed out, Freud continues to acknowledge the existence and the damaging impact of sexual child abuse. Instead of totally denying the reality and prevalence of actual abuse, Freud extends his theory by pointing out that it is psychoanalytically undecidable whether a traumatic memory stems from a real event. As he indicates in his above-mentioned letter, Freud comes to assume that there are no markers for reality (Realitätszeichen) in the unconscious and consequently states that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction. Hence, “hysteria [ ] acts primarily on the stage of psychic reality. What the analyst must redress is not the actual events but the way they have been reformulated in phantasy” (Bronfen 1998a: 255). Freud continues to indicate an awareness of the pathogenic role of actual sexual child abuse in his writings after 1896 but – problematically – blames other family members and caretakers than the father: Actual seduction, too, is common enough; it is initiated either by other children or by someone in charge of the child who wants to soothe it, or send it to sleep or make it dependent on them. Where seduction intervenes it invariably disturbs the natural course of the developmental processes, and it often leaves behind extensive and lasting consequences. (1931E: 232; cf. 1931: 525) The anglophone Drama of Hysteria of the 1990s restages Freud’s abandonment of his seduction theory, questioning, criticising, as well as ridiculing his step. The plays both explore reasons that might have led to this development in Freud’s theory and stage the consequences this shift had on his actual and fictitious hysterical patients. Both Furse and Johnson present ‘what-if’ encounters between the analyst and an ostensible hysteric, whereas Morrissey focuses on Freud’s case study of Dora. Freud’s “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse” (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”), first published in 1905, analyses a young, ostensibly hysterical woman, whom Freud names Dora, according to Freud’s new assumption “that the causes of hysterical disorders are to be found in the intimacies of the patients’ psychosexual life, and that hysterical symptoms are the expression of their most secret and repressed wishes” (1905aE: 7–8; cf. 1905a: 164).
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Hysteria: Theory and Theatre 37
In the late nineteenth century, the new theatrical trend of realism starts to replace melodrama. Henrik Ibsen as well as his British contemporaries Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones establish a tradition of stage realism. In their plays, there is often a female figure at the centre who displays hysterical symptoms and whose ‘riddle’ has to be solved. Ibsen’s best-known ‘hysteric’ protagonists are the eponymous Hedda Gabler and Nora, who became models for later realistic plays focusing on a ‘woman with a past’. While melodrama related to the exaggerated poses of Grande Hystérie, stage realism is much closer to the symptoms of Petite Hystérie as described by Freud. Diamond connects the aesthetic shift in theatre – from melodrama to realism and its popular ‘sex problem play’ – to the epistemological shift in medical discourse, the emergence of the new science of psychoanalysis. She points out that in the realistic plays as well as in Freud’s theory, female hysteria turns from the epitome of falsehood and playacting into “a powerful and contradictory measure of the real” (1990–91: 64). Ibsenite realism safeguards its authenticity by investing the fallen woman of melodrama with the symptoms and traumata of the hysteric, which according to Freud and Breuer stem from a repressed ‘truth’: “In deciphering the hysteric’s enigma, realism celebrates positivist inquiry, thus buttressing its claims for ‘truth to life’ ” (ibid.: 60). Consequently, Ibsen’s plays and the psychoanalytic talking cure share an emphasis on the theatrical production of truth; they are both “theatres of knowledge – sites charged with the pleasure of positivist inquiry” (Diamond 1997: xiii). The new psychologically realistic depiction of dramatic characters is supported by the emergence of a novel acting convention. The innovative psychotechnique of acting established and taught by Konstantin Stanislavski (and later developed into ‘method acting’ by Lee Strasberg) demands that the actor create an unconscious for the characters s/he plays and pay particular attention to the character’s traumata of the past (Diamond 1990–91: 79). Thus, a careful psychoanalysis of dramatic figures becomes the prerequisite for their successful embodiment on stage. While theatrical realism comes to validate itself through allusions to psychoanalysis, Freud in turn illustrates, or even proves, some of his psychoanalytic findings through close readings of dramatic texts, and in particular of Ibsen’s work.23 In his article “Einige Charaktertypen aus der psychoanalytischen Arbeit” (“Some Character-Types Met in Psychoanalytic Work”, 1916) Freud psychoanalyses Rebekka West, the female protagonist of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. He interprets Rebekka’s renunciation of marriage to Rosmer as a result of her feeling of guilt after she has realised that her erstwhile lover Dr West is her father. In accordance with his theory of the Oedipus complex, Freud goes a step further and suggests that Rebekka was not fully
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Ibsenite realism: The Drama of Petite Hystérie
The Drama of Hysteria
ignorant of Dr West and her mother’s relationship but rejoiced in becoming “her mother’s successor with this man” (1916E: 330; cf. 1916: 388). Diamond suggests that Freud’s effort to translate Rebekka’s hysterical symptoms and her confession into a truthful narrative of repressed incestuous desire (“Let us listen to [Rebekka] and then consider whether we can believe her entirely” 1916E: 325; cf. 1916: 382) equals the task of the theatre audience, who attempt to reveal the deeper motivations and secrets of the characters: “the spectator takes on, is assured of, the position of completing the narrative, of discovering the secret, of judging its truth” (1990–91: 69). This analytic task and its intrinsic “hermeneutic pleasure” (ibid.) differs decisively from the audience’s position in the melodramatic Drama of Grande Hystérie, which used a highly standardised and therefore effortlessly graspable repertoire of sings. The shift from melodrama to realism entails a shift from visual signs to the emphasis on verbal expression, just as Freud’s new method centres on listening to the patients rather than visually classifying their symptoms and attacks. Not only does Freud occasionally illustrate his findings by means of drama analysis; some of his fundamental concepts and elements of the therapy borrow from theatre as well. Freud describes hysterical symptoms as hallucinatory re-enactment of a past scene, which is “portrayed in pantomime” (1909bE: 229; cf. 1909b: 235). Although Freud rejects the public treatment of the hysterics as practised at the Salpêtrière and instead specialises in intimate dialogue (Showalter 1998: 102), his idea of a successful therapy corresponds to the convention of Greek tragedy: “it must be a truthful performance otherwise there can be no catharsis” (Diamond 1990–91: 67). While he shares the idea of the theatrical production of truth with the contemporary realistic plays by Ibsen and others, Freud adopts the notion of catharsis from the Aristotelian model of tragedy, with which his therapeutic practice has in common the family setting and the importance of anagnorisis and peripeteia (Döring 2000: 170–3). As both Freud’s concept and his treatment of hysteria are based on theatrical dramaturgy,24 there is a similarly close interaction between the theatre of stage realism that centres on the figures’ past – and especially ‘the woman with a past’ – and the psychoanalytic concept of Petite Hystérie as there has previously been between melodrama and Grande Hystérie. The contemporary anglophone Drama of Hysteria alludes to this dramatic tradition. While Furse’s Augustine includes references to Sarah Bernhardt, both Morrissey’s Dora and Johnson’s Hysteria associate their female protagonist with an Ibsenite heroine. Augustine also takes up the Ibsenite fascination with female characters with double natures that was shared by British dramatists of that time, such as Pinero and Jones. While they staged the double natures most often through hypnoid second conditions, Furse’s Augustine chooses a less realistic mode of representing the protagonist’s dissociation: A look-alike double of Augustine expresses Augustine’s concealed emotions through her violin playing.
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Hysteria: Theory and Theatre 39
In recent medical and psychological literature on hysteria there is hardly a consensus as to whether the illness still exists or whether it has ever existed as such, let alone what precisely hysteria is. Books and articles such as Roberta Satow’s programmatically titled “Where Has All the Hysteria Gone?” (1979) proclaim the end of hysteria, which today is no longer a category of psychiatric diagnosis, although the symptoms formerly regarded as hysteric persist (cf. Hyler and Spitzner 1978). In the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, hysteria’s manifold symptoms such as choking, paralysis, fainting, coughing, vomiting, amnesia, loss of eyesight or of the ability to speak, and the dissociation into multiple personalities are attributed to more recent classifications, such as bulimia, multiple personality disorder, depression, conversion disorder, dissociative disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or brief reactive psychosis (American Psychiatric Association 2003, cf. also Gilman 1993: 353 and Roudinesco 2001). In contrast to the abandonment of hysteria in psychiatry, in the humanities and the social sciences, a critical reappraisal of hysteria has taken place since the late 1970s. This re-evaluation received its major impulses from the “interarticulated discourses” (Pellegrini 1997: 3) of feminism and psychoanalysis.25 Feminist critics returned to the question of hysteria in their discussion of the exclusion of female subjectivity in patriarchal culture. Among the most influential feminist psychoanalytic theoreticians is Irigaray, whose poststructuralist studies argue that the bodily, pre-discursive hysterical symptoms rebel against the phallogocentrism of patriarchy and point towards a pre-oedipal female rapport to the mother that the hysterics have not given up.26 Under the auspices of her project to establish sexual difference within the (according to Jacques Lacan always already phallic) symbolic order, Irigaray champions hysteric body language as a genuine female alternative to phallogocentrism: But hysteria, or at least the hysteria that is the privileged lot of the “female” now has nothing to say. What she “suffers”, what she “lusts for”, even what she “takes pleasure in”, all take place upon another stage, in relation to already codified representations. (1985 [1974]: 140) the “reasonable words” [ ] are powerless to translate all that pulses, clamors and hangs hazily in the cryptic passages of hysterical sufferinglatency. [ ] Turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front. Rack it with radical convulsions, carry back, reimport, those crises that her ‘body’ suffers in her impotence to say what disturbs her. (ibid.: 142)27
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Hysteria today
The Drama of Hysteria
Von Braun in Nicht Ich: Logik. Lüge. Libido (1985) likewise sees hysteria as a form of protest against patriarchal logocentrism. She argues that the logos produced its own form of materiality, which it associates with masculinity, while woman comes to represent the original, denied materiality. The hysteric, thus von Braun’s thesis, rebels against the role which the logos has ascribed to women by simulating and exaggerating this role: Hysteria is “die große Lügnerin”, the big liar, who opposes the logos (ibid.: 128). In a way comparable to Irigaray’s idea that the hysteric excavates a genuinely female mode of expression, von Braun understands the hysteric as a rebel who dismantles the logos in a guerrilla tactic, by employing its own weapons. The hysteric draws attention to the existence of the ‘non-written’ materiality, that is, the materiality unaffected by the project of the logos: “the hysteric is a parody of the logos, because she stages the same performance as it does, but instead of having the mind shape matter, she proves the existence of ‘unwritten’ matter, the existence of the woman, the sexual being” (ibid.: 129–30, my translation). As a counter-reaction to these positive, almost celebratory assessments of hysteria, which interpret the disease as a form of protest, as a “rudimentary feminism” (Price Herndl 1988: 54), other feminist critics have highlighted the danger of idealising the hysteric as a feminist icon. In La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman), Cixous and Clément discuss Dora’s case. Their antagonistic positions are exemplary of the general divide within feminist studies on hysteria. Whereas Cixous identifies with Dora as her sister and praises her as “the nuclear example of woman’s power to protest” (Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975]: 285), Clément rejects the notion of non-verbal protest through hysteria and insists on the necessity of the feminist “inscription in the Symbolic” (ibid.: 288). In a similar vein, Kristeva criticises the French feminist movement as hysteric and raises the question, “Will the eternal frustration of the hysteric in relation to discourse oblige the latter to reconstruct itself? [ ] Or will it remain a cry outside time [ ]?” (1977: 511, trans. in Moi 1986: 10). Moreover, feminist critics keep highlighting that the – potentially rebellious – ‘hysteric’ symptoms were employed by male therapists to once again appropriate the language of the hysteric. Thus, Janet Beizer characterises Charcot’s patients as “ventriloquised bodies”. She points out that the hysterical patients were silenced, as their mode of expression was an “inarticulate body language, which must then be dubbed by a male narrator” (1994: 9). Critics such as Sarah Kofman raise an analogous critique of Freud’s therapeutic method, since the psychoanalytical treatment understands the female hysteric as a riddle whose solution depends on the deciphering and interpretative abilities of the male analyst (1980). Thus, in feminist eyes, hysteria oscillates between subversion and affirmation, between rebellion against norms of femininity and a reinforcement of the image of the debilitated, insane, mute woman.
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The New Hysterians,28 the group of contemporary international literary critics, cultural and social historians, anthropologists, and philosophers interested in the exploration of hysteria, are indebted to the “gender revolution” inaugurated by feminism, “the great metacritique of gender that in retrospect is certain to be regarded as one of the defining features of the thought, culture, and society of the late twentieth century” (Micale 1995: 288–91). However, their conceptualisation of the interrelation of hysteria and gender varies and remains an object of debate. While the work of many New Hysterians, inspired by the feminist re-evaluation of hysteria, enquires into the gendering of hysteria, recently a number of studies have explored hysteria as a gender-neutral concept. For example, Bronfen uses the hysteric as emblem of the knotted subject, which is structured by memory traces that ultimately point to a traumatic rather than a sexual origin as Freud came to assume. Diverging from Freud and Lacan, Bronfen interprets the moment of cutting the umbilical cord as decisive for the subject’s psychic development and rewrites symbolic castration under the aegis of the navel, thus offering “a way out of the impasse in psychoanalytic theory, all division and separation inevitably turning into a discussion of sexual differences, so that feminine castration is necessarily viewed as different from masculine castration” (1998a: 11–12). In Showalter’s latest study on hysteria, Hystories, gender does not play the central role either. Instead, she argues that inexplicable mass phenomena, such as alien abduction, the Gulf War syndrome, or chronic fatigue syndrome, are contemporary versions of hysteria, which spread from North America, “the hot zone of psychogenic diseases”, to Europe and elsewhere. Concomitant with hysteria’s revival as a cultural category in the 1970s, the interest of playwrights in hysteria is revived as well. Cixous’s own groundbreaking play Portrait de Dora in 1976, whose original French production directed by Simone Benmussa first came to London in 1979, has set the model for the contemporary anglophone Drama of Hysteria by playwrights such as Furse, Morrissey, and Johnson, but also Christopher Hampton, Snoo Wilson, and performers such as Anna O.29 The contemporary Drama of Hysteria reconsiders Charcotian, Freudian, and Lacanian case studies and reassesses their hysterical (anti-)heroines. The fact that the plays selected for closer analysis, namely Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria), Morrissey’s Dora: A Case of Hysteria, and Johnson’s Hysteria, announce the topic ‘hysteria’ in their very titles indicates that hysteria again is an intriguing and marketable topic in theatre. The preoccupation in the arts with hysteria has been so intense and creative since the late 1980s that Showalter in 1998 concludes that “[t]oday the theatre, movies, and television play an even more important role than literature in publicizing and circulating views of hysteria” (100). In my following readings, I will explore which views on hysteria the plays put forth. Which aspects of the case studies do the plays rework? Which features of hysteria are made particularly prominent in the contemporary Drama of
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Hysteria: Theory and Theatre 41
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The Drama of Hysteria
Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) Augustine (Big Hysteria) rewrites the story of Charcot’s ‘star patient’ Augustine,30 who was committed to the Salpêtrière in 1875 as a fifteenyear-old because she suffered from hysterical paralyses, nightmares, and attacks. Her physician Bourneville, the author of the Iconographie photographique, recounts Augustine’s traumatic life story in a section casually entitled “Further Information” in the second volume of the Iconographie photographique (Bourneville and Régnard 1878: 126–7, trans. in Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 157). It informs the reader that Augustine, then thirteen and a half years old, was raped by a Monsieur C, who was her employer and, as Augustine realised later, her mother’s lover. Augustine stayed for six years at the Salpêtrière, during which she suffered several thousand hysterical attacks and underwent the common therapeutic measures such as daily inhalations of amyl nitrate, ether, or chloroform, and penetration by the ovarian compressor. Although her condition temporarily improved and she was made a nurse’s assistant, she relapsed into hysteria before secretly escaping from the Salpêtrière in 1880 in men’s clothes (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 276). It remains unknown what happened to Augustine after she fled Charcot’s treatment, but she missed Freud, who studied at the clinic from October 1885 until March 1886. As outlined above, Freud subsequently with his colleague Breuer developed Charcot’s theories further and revolutionised the study and treatment of hysteria by assuming that a psychic trauma was the cause of hysterical symptoms. Furse’s ‘what-if’ play invents an encounter of Augustine, Charcot, and Freud in the early 1880s. Through the dynamics of this triangle, the play condenses significant steps of Freud’s actual development from the 1880s to 1900 and advances them to the short period when he stayed at the Salpêtrière. Augustine thus assigns the birth of the psychoanalytic talking cure, Freud’s foundation of his seduction theory as well as his later theory of infantile sexuality to the time when Freud worked in the Parisian clinic and makes Freud’s fictional conversations with Augustine the catalyst of this development. Furse spent several months in the archives of the Salpêtrière before writing and eventually directing the first production of Augustine in 1991. On the basis of her research, she created a feminist rewriting of Augustine’s story, which, similar to Cixous’s approach in Portrait de Dora, aims at telling the hysteric’s story from the hysteric’s own point of view, thus establishing a female counter-narrative against (male) medical literature – but
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Hysteria? How does the depicted disorder affect the structures and the style of the plays? In which ways does the Drama of Hysteria capitalise on the theatrical potential of both the disease and its various cures? And which role does gender play in the staging of hysteria as performative malady?
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also against “British theatre’s dramatic virility” (Furse 2000: 73). The focus on Augustine’s voice is even more pressing in (Furse’s) feminist eyes, as Augustine was silenced in the Salpêtrière, where Charcot analysed hysteria foremost as a visual phenomenon.31 Although the utterances of the hysterics were archived as symptoms of the illness, which involved babbling and crying, no further attention was paid to their potential meaning. Reading Augustine’s words today, when Freud’s theory of symbolic expressions of the unconscious has become ‘proverbial knowledge’ (Gay 1998: 98; Döring 2002: 124; cf. also Rubik 1996: 186), it is difficult to understand Charcot’s ignorance, as Georges Didi-Huberman emphasises: “How did he [Charcot] manage to evade the meaning that Augustine incessantly shouted through the halls of the asylum: ‘Get rid of the snake you have in your pants It’s a sin ’?” (2003 [1982]: 161). In contrast to the Iconographie photographique, which Furse characterises as “a form of medical pornography” (2000: 76), Furse takes Augustine’s recorded words seriously: “My play, like its protagonist, urges the spectator to watch and listen, to read the hysterical body and to listen imaginatively” (ibid.: 77).32 As a collage of historical facts and emphatic fictionalisation, Augustine constantly weaves recorded utterances of Augustine and Charcot into the figures’ speeches and employs samples from the wealth of photographs collected in the Iconographie photographique, which are to be projected repeatedly onto the stage and are reproduced in the play text. Through Augustine’s utterances, Furse traces the girl’s symptoms to the traumatic experience of having been repeatedly raped by Monsieur C (whom Furse names Carnot). Putting sexual child abuse centre-stage, Furse’s portrayal of nineteenth-century hysteria is, as the reviews remarked, “unnervingly in tune with modern feeling” (Kingston 1991: 702). In her own extensive introduction as well as in her articles on the play and its performances, Furse places Augustine into the context of French feminism. In unison with Cixous and Irigaray, Furse understands hysteria as an opportunity to establish a genuinely female (body) language that opposes the logocentric language of the father: “such unboundaried utterance is also a rebellion against (patriarchal) Civilisation and a return to a savage (feminine) Nature” (Furse 1997: 10). Attempting to transform the body into a site and practice of écriture féminine (Aston 1999: 10), Furse puts a violinist by Augustine’s side as a double who expresses the protagonist’s “pure prelingual emotion” (Augustine 10) and Augustine’s unconscious ‘true’ self.33 Furse understands the violinist’s dance and music as alternatives to the logocentrism of patriarchy. However, even in the play itself, dance is rendered as being already infiltrated by male dominance, when Charcot in a pas de deux becomes the leader of Augustine’s hypnotic dance (A 27) or when Augustine’s dance displays “the coquettish charm of a striptease artist converging with the studied control of a ballet dancer: histrionic, erotic, ecstatic” (A 20–1). Equally, the
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
The Drama of Hysteria
play visualises the misogynist appropriation of cello music by surrealism when Augustine and the violinist enact Man Ray’s photograph that depicts a naked woman’s back tattooed with F holes (A 21). This iconographic citation of Ray displays the hysterical female body as an instrument (on which the male doctors play). The play thus foreshadows the misogynist appropriation and celebration of the hysterical images by the surrealists, who regarded Augustine as “the most important poetic invention of the late nineteenth century” (Gorsen 2000: 63) and as “the precocious diva of the [surrealists’] convulsive ideal of beauty” (ibid.: 65). In contrast to Furse’s claim that hysteria offers an insight into woman’s true, pre-lingual nature, I will offer an alternative reading of Augustine under the auspices of Butler’s notion of performativity and the play’s foregrounding of its theatricality. Furse’s play tests out theatrically the thesis proposed by the New Hysterians, most prominently by Didi-Huberman, that the classical hysterical attacks were collaborative, performative inventions, directed by the doctors and embodied by the hysterics, whose “spectacular bodies did fantastical things [ ] in front of amused audiences” (Katz 1999: 118). Tracing hysteria’s show-character, Augustine links theatre and psychiatry, thereby emphasising their factual connections in the late nineteenth century that I outlined above. Although Furse’s Charcot figure rebukes Freud’s conception of hysteria as ‘theatre for forgotten scenes’, the play characterises Charcot’s own treatment as highly theatrical. Presenting the lectures and therapeutic sessions as plays-within-the-play, Augustine suggests that Augustine is cast in the role of the star patient by Charcot and Freud, the directors of their respective theatres of hysteria. As I set out to show in the following sections, the relationship between the performer Augustine and the directors Charcot and Freud displays the complex interaction between control and loss of control, between deliberate performing and unconscious reproduction that I explored in my introductory reflections on performance and performativity. Augustine as much performs the ‘command performances’ of her therapists as she is performed by them. As in the theatrical rehearsal process, the directors manage to transmit their mental ‘image of perfection’ to the performer, that is, their diverging models of hysteria, which Augustine learns to embody. The play demonstrates the degree to which the scientists depend on Augustine’s embodiment of their models, since they are in need of literal ‘bodies of evidence’ for their theories. “The most picturesque of illnesses” – Image-ining Grande Hystérie At the beginning of the play, a photographic portrait of Augustine is projected onto the white curtains which conceal Augustine’s bed. The portrait, published in the Iconographie photographique, was taken when Augustine arrived at the clinic and is entitled “etat normal”. Furse describes
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the photograph as follows: “She is the picture of demure, compliant femininity. Only her eyes [ ] do not smile with her mouth” (A 16). The description indicates that Augustine attempts to perform according to a norm of femininity which prescribes compliancy, that is, the willingness to behave according to the wishes of others. Thus, the regulatory norm of femininity she has learned to cite outside of the Salpêtrière makes her more susceptible to her psychiatric environment’s model of pathological feminine conduct. As soon as Augustine meets Charcot during one of his lectures, he posits the target for her future performance: “I set before you a case of Grande Hystérie! Time will tell if she will be a Classic example!” (A 18). In order to be such a “classic example” of Grande Hystérie, Augustine has to conform to Charcot’s four-phase model. Charcot dissembles the suggestive character of his treatment and claims that his scientific methods merely detect hysteria in his ‘star’ patients: like ancient astronomers, we gaze, and chart all the secrets of the universe. Stars exist. Fact. It is only for us to prove it, discover and name them (A 20) there is no greater satisfaction than TO SEE SOMETHING NEW. That is to say, to recognise novelty or to suddenly see things afresh. There is both great value and great difficulty attached to such vision. Why do you think that, in medicine, people only see what they have learnt to see? [ ] No imagination!! To my mind, it is quite marvellous to state how one is suddenly capable of seeing things – new states of an illness, which are probably as old as the human race. (A 21, my italics) Charcot does not understand “vision” in the sense of creation or invention but rather as the discovery of something that already existed, of a prediscursive illness “as old as the human race”.34 However, the play gradually unravels the performative character of Charcot’s observation, which actually produces what it then pretends to detect. In so doing, Augustine stages suspicions of simulation and fakery that already surfaced during Charcot’s lifetime. Charcot’s contemporaries accused him of forgery and maintained that the hypnotised patients had become “addicted to simulation [ ] encouraging each other in simulation, rehearsing amongst themselves, or even before the medical students of the establishment” (de Courmelles 1891: 159).35 Attempting to invalidate such claims of the rehearsed character of his lectures and Grande Hystérie in general, Charcot during his Tuesday lectures asked spectators to command the hypnotised hysterical patients in order to prove that there was no trick involved (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 235). Charcot also publicly and spontaneously diagnosed patients shortly after their committal to the Salpêtrière
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
The Drama of Hysteria
or by provoking hysterical shock reactions, which, thus his argument, could have been rehearsed only with great difficulty (Baer 2002: 27). Augustine’s staging of such an ostensibly spontaneous first encounter between Charcot and the young patient emphasises the importance of Charcot’s suggestive announcements and the audience’s expectant gazes. As soon as Augustine grasps what it means to behave like a classic case of Grande Hystérie, she behaves as Charcot wishes and thus becomes the star of his lectures, always checking on the impact of her hysterical performances (“How was I?” A 42). Augustine quickly gets used to the narcissistic satisfaction the lectures offer: “Professor Charcot says I’m special. He did! He says I’m a chef d’œuvre, a perfect sample, an archetype. He says I am a star. I think some of the other girls are jealous” (A 23). She initially is enchanted by her stardom, which involves the audience of the play’s performance: After Charcot has presented Augustine in his lecture to demonstrate the power of hypnosis, he asks her to shake hands with the audience, which she does, “delighted by her success. Beaming like an actress at curtain call, she shakes hands with members of the audience, thanking them as she does so” (A 26). Charcot not only makes Augustine perform for audiences in the lecture hall, but also for his painters and photographers. As the real Charcot did, Furse’s character reinforces his classification by a vast visual apparatus of documentation that includes sketches, tables, and photographs. Charcot adhered to the materialist myth prevalent in the late nineteenth century, according to which photography promised an ‘indiscreet resemblance’ that, unlike paintings, left no gap between the portrait and the portrayed (DidiHuberman 2003 [1982]: 63).36 Thus, Charcot introduced photography at the Salpêtrière to provide ‘truthful’ representations of the hysterical attacks which could be used in his lectures and distributed outside the Parisian medical world. Furse’s Charcot figure accordingly postulates that the (male) scientific gazes of his “illustrators, [ ] sculptors, [ ] and photographers” (A 20) are objective, and calls his activity “recording” and “witnessing” of the “classic cycle” of Grande Hystérie (A 20). Yet, he involuntarily reveals the creative character of his gaze when he calls his model “perfect as a symphony” and praises hysteria as “the most picturesque of illnesses” (A 20). Augustine puts on view how the mental ‘image of perfection’ that Charcot, the director, makes Augustine, the star performer, aspire to materialises in photographs and paintings, which in turn set the model for ever new performances of big hysteria. This process is illustrated by Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, which was displayed in one of the main lecture halls of the Salpêtrière and a copy of which later hung above the couch in Freud’s consultation room. The picture shows Charcot talking to his male students during a lecture, while the female hysterical patient – the “Queen of Hysterics” (Showalter 1998: 34) Blanche Wittman – is about to faint, accidentally baring her breast in the fall. The scene not only
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displays the voyeurism that was at the heart of Charcot’s lectures, but also the complex interdependence of images of hysteria and the classification of the disease. In Brouillet’s painting, all men have their backs turned to the rear wall, so that only the hysteric and the nurse who is about to catch her can see the enlarged drawing by Paul Richer on the back wall of the lecture hall, which depicts the big hysteric arc-en-cercle stage. At Charcot’s right hand sits Paul Richer, who documents the hysteric’s attack in a drawing. Therefore, Brouillet’s painting maps a complex pattern of imitation in which Richer is “sketching the patient who is replicating his own drawing” (Gilman 1993: 345). It records how the Salpêtrière became “a phantasmatic site of infinite reiterability” (Bronfen 1998a: 182), where hysterical attacks were not only catalogued, but also provoked or at least shaped through photographs and drawings. Augustine stages Brouillet’s painting as a tableau, which then comes alive as a scene of a Tuesday lesson (A 37). However, Furse slightly modifies the image, as Freud replaces the nurse who catches the falling hysterical patient. Eliminating the only other female figure of Brouillet’s painting, Augustine (Big Hysteria) radicalises even further the gendered division of sanity and insanity at work at the Salpêtrière. Moreover, the gendering of hysteria is buttressed by the fact that the existence of male hysterics at the Salpêtrière remains unmentioned throughout the play. By embodying the images displayed at the Salpêtrière, the alleged hysterics also cited the iconographic tradition in which these images stood.37 For example, Tony Robert-Fleury’s painting Pinel Freeing the Insane from 1887, which hung in the Salpêtrière’s main lecture hall, influenced Brouillet’s picture in its association of femininity with madness and of masculinity with reason (Gilman 1993: 345).38 Moreover, the hysterics actualised poses of religious obsession that have been displayed on paintings since the Middle Ages. When the doctors at the Salpêtrière reinforced the integration of the epileptic fit into the hysterical repertoire of symptoms by paying more attention (in terms of documentation and treatment) to those hystero-epileptic attacks than to other symptoms (Katz 1999: 118),39 they supported Charcot’s innovative hypothesis that people who had been regarded as possessed in earlier days had actually been non-recognised hysterics. In order to reinforce the interpretation of religious ecstasy as a clinical sign of psychopathology, Charcot together with Richer compiled sixty-seven illustrations of possession and demonology in a book called Les Démoniaques dans l’art (1887), which was published after the three volumes of the Iconographie photographique.40 As the grandes hystériques incarnate the paintings, drawings, and photographs displayed at the Salpêtrière as well as their iconographic predecessors, hysteria in the Salpêtrière is no longer chiefly the disease of the womb, but “the disease of images and imagining” (Gilman 1993: 353).41 Augustine stages the processes on which this incessant ‘image-ination’ of big hysteria relied, such as the ceremony of taking pictures (A 20). The play emphasises that due to the technical standards in the late nineteenth
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
The Drama of Hysteria
century, the hysterical model has to freeze in a particular pose for having her image taken. In fact, the stillness of the models was at times ensured by headrests or kneebraces.42 The Salpêtrière entertained well-equipped photographic studios with special lighting and used devices such as applying white make-up to attract enough light to the face. Hence, paradoxically, the relationship between the photographed object or event and its photographic representation was “authenticated [ ] through theatrical means” (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 62).43 The play demonstrates this ‘authentication by theatrical means’ when it discloses the playacting of the medical director which the photographs required but dissimulated. The third volume of the Iconographie photographique reveals how the hysterical poses displayed on the photographs were produced through an interaction between hypnotiser and patient, which would have allowed the photographer to take similarly bizarre and ‘hysterical’ pictures of the physician himself: The experimenter abruptly moves towards her with a threatening mien: X ’s eyes fill with fear; her eyelids open wide: she falls back like a block. [ ] The experimenter simulates the movements of an animal running. Laughing, X searches for him. [ ] The experimenter [ ] draws the simulacrum of a snake and takes on a frightened expression: immediately X ’s physiognomy expresses fear, she wants to crush the animal that is scaring her, and grabs a chair for this purpose. (Bourneville and Régnard 1879–80: 194, trans. in Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 222–3) Furse’s play stages this practice of hypnosis and thereby makes the experimenter’s role-play, which is omitted in the photographs, visible again: He [Charcot] draws a bird shape in the air with his finger. He flies the “bird” and Augustine’s gaze is transfixed to it. It becomes a kind of pas de deux, with him leading her dance. Her face is full of joy. She laughs with pleasure. Suddenly Charcot draws a snake on the ground. Her whole body contracts into a huge gesture of terror. He adds the bird back in with his other hand, so he is dancing out a ritual fight between the snake and bird. The bird makes short pecking movements to the snake which is circling and circling. She responds to every physical nuance. (A 27) The play thus shows how photography at the Salpêtrière was an interventionist, performative practice that created the very objects it claimed merely to represent (Baer 2002: 28).44 Augustine foregrounds the processes of ‘image-ination’ inherent in Grande Hystérie when Furse makes the actress freeze in a particular hysteric pose
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during the attacks and then projects the equivalent slide from the real Augustine in the same pose onto the body of the actress. Through this technique, a twofold process of construction is highlighted. On the level of the play’s action, Augustine demonstrates that photography required a few seconds of motionless maintenance of one pose, even during an ‘attack’ of hysteria. On the level of non-fictional communication with the audience, however, the device shows the reconstruction of motion from the photographed stills. In the process of rehearsing Augustine (Big Hysteria), the actress playing Augustine – Shona Morris in the original production – attempts to reconstruct Augustine’s hysterical attacks from photographs and drawings of the poses displayed in the Iconographie photographique: “We systematically took each frame and then ran them together, looking for repetition and pauses to blend with the verbal text of an attack which I was able to reconstruct from Augustine’s clinical notes” (Furse 2000: 76–7). Morris is thus in a situation comparable to Augustine’s a century earlier, who herself – equally in front of audiences – tried to achieve an accurate imitation of hysteric images that had become an ‘image of perfection in her head’. In this respect, the projection of the photographs becomes a control instance to check on the accuracy of Morris’s live performance and virtually creates a contest between her and the hysterical ‘star actress’ Augustine: the better Morris is able to actualise the hysteric poses, the more audiences are encouraged to consider Augustine’s poses back then as performative accomplishments. Exposing the hidden fabrication processes involved in these allegedly ‘documentary’ photographs, the play’s intermedial references to medical photography invalidate Charcot’s assurance that “the camera doesn’t lie” (A 37). By making the ostensibly ‘documentary’ photographs an integral part of a theatrical performance (on the inner-fictional level by Augustine, on the extra-fictional level by Shona Morris), Augustine highlights the performativity of these images: they require deliberate theatrical performances by both the hysteric and the (invisible) physician and they performatively produce that which they claim to merely document. Furse’s play demonstrates how radically Augustine pursues the required ‘image-ination’ when she begins to suffer from colour-blindness (as the real Augustine did): She internalises the black-and-white gaze of the camera – as it is displayed in the photographs – to the point of incarnation; she finally sees everything in black-and-white herself (cf. Furse 2000: 74). The original production reinforced Augustine’s loss of colour sight by colourless and harsh lighting, which emphasised the black-and-white quality of the stage scenery and the costumes. Through this device, Furse made audiences share Augustine’s allegedly hysteric perception and thus created an aesthetic of ‘hystericised realism’.45 This participation in the protagonist’s internal reality is furthered by the device of the double, which grants audiences insight into Augustine’s moods. Moreover, Augustine’s lack of control and orientation
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
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The Drama of Hysteria
in the Salpêtrière is reflected in the stage scenery and the blocking: the bare stage is dominated by Augustine’s bed which is moved all over the space by the doctors. To transmit both the real and imagined spaces that Augustine inhabits, the play makes extensive use of slide projections and soundscapes.
Although the play depicts the performance of the complete circle of Grande Hystérie as the product of imitation and ‘image-ination’, it nevertheless highlights that these performances are suffused with Augustine’s pain. Augustine herself emphasises “I have to suffer for my art” (A 29), and the play gradually unravels that Augustine expresses her traumatisation through the given models of hysteria: her trauma of sexual child abuse is “only finding articulation through this representational dislocation” to the symptoms of Grande Hystérie (Bronfen 1998a: 197). The play thus shows that Augustine’s deliberate enactment of hysteria is inextricably intertwined with the acting out of her repressed memories. Augustine’s exposition in the dramatis personae introduces her as a suffering and traumatised ‘child-woman’ (A 16) and the play’s exposition establishes her pain before the play’s action sets in. Audiences enter to an evocative soundtrack,46 which, as the houselights fade, singles out “a girl child’s voice singing, falteringly” the tune of the German children’s song “Ach, Du liebe Augustine”,47 which ends on “everything’s cracked” and thus evokes a feeling for the shattered childhood Augustine experienced. After the “haunting, desolate” tune of the children’s song has faded away, audiences hear Augustine “scream out, throttled gasps and yells” (A 17). When Augustine’s initial cry develops into speech, her words can either be interpreted as recounting the oral rapes by Carnot or as expressing the prototypical hysterical symptom, namely the suffocating womb: “There’s something [ ] pulling my tongue, there’s something in my throat MAMAN!!!! (She weeps) [ ] I can’t breathe Maman!!!!” (A 17). Instead of the mother’s appearance, however, the lights cut to the Salpêtrière’s amphitheatre, where Charcot with “paternal familiarity and great oratorical charm” (A 17) addresses the “Messieurs” (A 18) in the audience, thereby creating an exclusively male environment in which the female hysteric serves as illustrative material in the learned exchange between men: “Charcot: hysteria hystero the womb! He moves his hand generally over Augustine’s womb area, like a TV weather-reporter” (A 18). Although Charcot in his following speech denounces ancient theories of the wandering womb as “nonsense” (A 18), he does not consider the alternative meaning of Augustine’s initial cry and remains uninterested in Augustine’s traumata. Furse’s doctor figure recognises the potential meaning of Augustine’s words but does not take it seriously: “All female hysterics cry rape!” (A 44). Nonetheless, the play traces Augustine’s symptoms, such as her choking, her crying, and her nightmares, explicitly back to her traumatic experience
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“I have to suffer for my art!” – The pain of performing
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of rape. Portraying the pain and distress expressed in her attacks as genuine, Furse complements Stephen Katz’s description of the hysterics as “spectacular bodies” (1999: 118) and emphasises that their hysteric performances are not playful shows, but rather “desperate measures taken by people in extremis. They are spectacles of suffering, displays of unutterable inner turmoil” (Furse 2000: 77). Re-establishing the hysterics at the Salpêtrière as ‘subjects of distress’, Augustine restores a view that was at times neglected, since “[t]he hysterics of the Salpêtrière were so ‘successful’ in the roles suggested to them that their suffering had lost something like its basic credibility. They were so ‘successful’ as subjects of mimesis that, in the eyes of the physicians who had become the directors of their fantasies, they entirely lost their status as subjects of distress” (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 229). The play highlights that the mimetic process of incarnating images is fused with the distressing traumatic repetition compulsions and that the photographed poses contain traces of the patients’ trauma. While there are no historic documents telling us whether Augustine ever saw her photographs, Furse inserts the thrilling moment when the young star patient persuades Freud to show her the images (A 36–7). On these pictures, Augustine sees herself as she has never done before, namely reproducing her traumatic “ownerless experience” (Baer 2002: 13) of the rapes:48 “Is that me? I don’t look like that!! [ ] I look so MESSY! ” (A 37). Moreover, Augustine ultimately comes to ‘see’ Charcot’s gaze, which is exemplified by the interpretative legends under the images, such as “amorous supplication”, “eroticism”, and “ecstasy” (A 37). Seeing the images and reading their titles, Augustine realises that her pain has been appropriated, aestheticised, and eroticised by Charcot. The omnipresence of Charcot’s inexorable gaze, which determines and classifies Augustine’s behaviour, associates him with Monsieur Carnot, Augustine’s erstwhile violator. Carnot’s “cat’s eyes, green and bright and shiny as topaz” (A 28) used to urge Augustine to be silent about the abuses, yet, at the same time, their covetousness announced the next assault. When Carnot starts to join the public Tuesday lectures and watches Augustine’s desperate repetitions of the abuses, he becomes the gratified director who returns to watch the performance he once set up.49 The likeness of their names epitomises the association of the rapist Carnot and the therapist Charcot; calling the ‘Monsieur C’ mentioned in the Iconographie photographique ‘Carnot’, the play indicates that Augustine experiences Charcot’s therapy as a repetition of the abuses she had to endure beforehand; thus, the penetrations by the ovarian compressor trigger reminiscences of the rapes in Augustine. The play does not clearly demarcate Augustine’s deliberate playacting of hysteria from her enforced and unconscious imitations but emphasises that both kinds of performances are forcefully cleansed of any acts of opposition against the doctors. Every failure or refusal to conform to Charcot’s
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
The Drama of Hysteria
expectations (“I don’t want doctors’ fingers! [ ] I don’t want pictures! I don’t want performances!” A 36) is punished with measures such as locking her up in an isolated padded cell (which is, as Augustine complains, “no way to treat a star!” A 37). The demand of total submission is particularly striking in the scenes in which Charcot hypnotises Augustine, thus fully transforming her into a hysterical trigger-body deprived of resistance. Nevertheless, Furse’s play shows Augustine’s repressed anger by transferring it to the alter ego-figure, a violinist who wears the same nightshirt and has the same hairdo as Augustine.50 In a number of scenes, the violinist lies beneath Augustine’s bed, thus visualising her hidden, repressed status. When the violinist dances a wild tarantella on Charcot’s desk despite his order that Augustine should be “charm itself” (A 42), she displays Augustine’s discomfort and fury. In addition to the dances, the double expresses the denied parts of Augustine’s performance in her violin playing by creating “a passionate and rasping counterpoint to Augustine’s sweet, lethargic and compliant dance” (A 21). However, while the double demonstrates Augustine’s pain and anger for audiences, she remains invisible for Freud and Charcot. Thus, on the innerfictional level, she embodies an imagined rather than an actual form of rebellion. Moreover, the play exposes how the classification of hysteria as pursued at the Salpêtrière made individual expression of pain as impossible as acts of protest and rebellion, because Grande Hystérie included acts of resistance as very part of the model. Thus, the violinist’s tarantella that protests against Charcot does not transcend hysterical symptomatology, but cites the very theatrical sign of hysteria that Ibsen in A Doll’s House has adopted from the tradition of melodrama. This example illustrates that at the Salpêtrière, every attempt to break with the frame of Grande Hystérie was read as a hysterical symptom and consequently even reinforced Charcot’s classification. Didi-Huberman notes that when Augustine and her wardmates violently protested against their treatment through outbreaks of anger or panic, these expressions of desperation were classified as clownism, as the illogical movements typical of the third phase of the big hysteric attack. Thus, the hysteric actress was “exulted and distressed, gesticulating a hatred of the theater on the very stage where she [was] maintained as a prima donna” (2003 [1982]: 256); she was totally confined in the model of Grande Hystérie, which was rigid but still flexible enough to include acts of resistance as an integral part of it and thus constantly recoded rupture as affirmation. Although Furse’s Charcot complains about Augustine’s “extreme unmanageability” (A 38) and her persistent “fits of rage” (A 37), the play shows how even Augustine’s protest is used as evidence of her hysteria. When Augustine undergoes the full circle of a hysteric attack after discovering her abuser in the audience of the lecture hall (and thus in the midst of the spectators watching the performance of Augustine), Charcot interprets her fits of anger and despair as integral part of his model of Grande Hystérie:
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
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(Augustine suddenly fixes her gaze on someone in the audience, a horrified expression on her face. Screams.) Augustine: OH NO! Monsieur Carnot! Not you again! Charcot: Now I want you to appreciate especially the unfolding of the attack [ ]. So, we will just use a little hysterogenic point to provoke an attack as a form of therapy! (He presses lightly under her breast, Augustine arches her back. Her whole body goes rigid. She starts to utter strangled cries. [ ]) Augustine: Dirty beast Pig! Pig! I’ll tell Papa! You’re so heavy! You’re hurting me! Kill the rats! [ ] I don’t want a rat in my botto Mama! [ ] Put that snake back in your trousers! (She opens her mouth and puts her hand in as if to take something out. She holds the invisible thing on the palm of her hand and spits on it. [ ]) Charcot: First phase, what we call epileptoid – arched back then vocalizations, then contractures [ ] (He presses again on her ovary. Augustine goes into a freeze.) Augustine: Maman! I’m scared! Oh, no! Oh please no! Oh, please don’t! Charcot: Note the emotional outburst again. (Augustine starts to move into wild and impossible positions. [ ]) Charcot: And now we are in the second phase, that we call “exotic movements” or “clowning” [ ] [N]one of us knows where this demonic energy comes from. Makes the Folies Bergères look like a funeral march, eh? (He tuts and marvels at Augustine’s extraordinary, agonising, dance.) (A 38–40) Furse models this attack and Augustine’s utterances on the records of the Iconographie photographique. The most sexually explicit passages of Augustine’s cries are almost verbatim quotes: “Get rid of that snake you have in your pants! [ ] (She opens her mouth, and introduces her hand as if to pull something out)” (Bourneville and Régnard 1878: 146–64, trans. in Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 83); “Pig! Pig! I’ll tell Papa Pig! How heavy you are! You’re hurting me” (Bourneville and Régnard 1878: 139, trans. in Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 160). By quoting these entries but leaving out others, Furse reinforces her reading of Augustine’s hysteria as re-enactment of her past trauma of sexual abuse. The play creates dramatic irony and promotes the audience’s compassion with Augustine through the juxtaposition of the audience’s supposition that Augustine’s attack is a compulsive re-enactment of the traumatic rapes with Charcot’s ignorance and his fixation on his model of Grande Hystérie.
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(She is furious. Her bed is rolled on and she is laid down on it, protesting.)
The Drama of Hysteria
Since Freud is contrasted with Charcot and presented as young, shy, and sensitive doctor rather than as established authority, Furse’s Freud is more positive than other Freud figures in the Drama of Hysteria. When Freud first sees Augustine, he already notices her distress (A 19). Furse portrays Freud for the most part of the play as supportive and understanding, even as Augustine’s confidant. As the real Freud did, Furse’s Freud figure comes to believe that he can find the key to the riddles of hysteria in the utterances and dreams of the patients. He thus emancipates himself from the convictions of his teacher Charcot, who considers the meaning of his patients’ utterances completely irrelevant (“Much ado about nothing!” A 30; “The corridors are positively cacophonous” A 44). When Freud confronts him with his new ideas concerning the aetiology of hysteria, Charcot does not take him seriously: Freud: Couldn’t it be all an antic disposition a an outward performance if you like of some deeper story trying to be told? Of a sexual nature I have noticed, with Mlle Dubois, whose words during an attack I have been documenting as you asked [ ] Mlle Dubois’ body would seem to have become a theatre for forgotten scenes! Charcot: Too much Sarah Bernhardt, Herr Doctor, and not enough Salpêtrière, eh? [ ] We must think as scientists and not let ourselves be manipulated by the febrile imaginings of young girls! (A 30–1) The dialogue shows that Freud’s concept of hysteria is based on a “deeper story” that is to be “told”. Freud thus reverses the evaluation of images and words that is characteristic of Charcot’s treatment, which preferred the “immediate, real image of the sufferer” (Gilman 1993: 352) to the ambiguity of words. Rather than subsuming the hysteric’s words to her visual classification and eliminating narrative, Freud focuses on her verbal utterances and comes to read her bodily symptoms as language as well. Freud thus considers the hysteric’s narrative more ‘real’ than her image and consequently, in his psychoanalytic sessions as staged by Furse, Freud avoids the sight of the patient and fully concentrates on her words. As Freud takes the hitherto ignored verbal utterances of Augustine seriously, he appears as a saviour figure until the play’s turning point. Augustine and Freud’s relationship has romantic and erotic overtones; the young patient flirts with the timid and chaste intern (A 23) and idealises him as fairy-tale prince who will save her, the Sleeping Beauty, from the grim rule of Charcot (A 28). Yet, the time-lapse technique of Furse’s play makes Freud and Augustine’s relationship shift quickly. While Freud initially believes in the reality of Augustine’s rapes and in their traumatic impact, he soon comes to see Augustine’s narrations of the sexual abuses by Carnot as wishful sexual fantasies. Furse’s Freud, just like his teacher Charcot, begins to systematise
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his notion of hysteria and thereby again creates a hysteric ‘ideal’ that he expects Augustine to actualise. The “theatre of forgotten scenes” that Freud detects in the hysteric performance is based on scripts, which he not only reads from the hysteric’s body and her utterances, but which Augustine conversely learns to enact. While Charcot is depicted as a stern choreographer, who prefers the arena of the lecture hall, Freud becomes the director of language-based psychological theatre in a more intimate setting. In the same way that Augustine learned before which behaviour attracted the attention and approval of Charcot, she now quickly grasps that the young Freud is interested in particular phenomena, such as her gory dreams, and repeatedly bribes Freud with the promise to recount them. Thus, Freud does not terminate the performative aspects of the therapy, since he, too, attempts to model Augustine’s utterances and thus produces that which he claims merely to ‘find’. Wishing to prove his new theory of repressed Oedipal fantasies, Freud’s questions, which appear only to summarise what Augustine herself said before, are always already interpretations and set a clear target for Augustine’s linguistic performance: Freud: You were saying Augustine: I forget Freud: Your feelings for Monsieur Carnot these were these were uncomfortable, perhaps nice feelings, but uncomfortable perhaps? Augustine: I didn’t say that! [ ] he pulled my hair and made me look in his face. He said I was a filthy whore and he’d kill me if I told anyone [ ] I was frightened! [ ] Freud: So you think he was really saying he’d kill you, Monsieur Carnot? Augustine: (Angry) I don’t think, I know! He did! [ ] Freud: So why do you feel you want to tell me this story? (A 44–5) Freud’s expectation to find Augustine’s desire for Charcot subverts Augustine’s need for confession (“I want to remember everything. As it was” A 47) and transforms her memories into an Oedipal story. The effect of Freud’s disbelief is as devastating for Augustine as Charcot’s ignorance: “She is in considerable distress. Anguished at Freud’s pressure” (A 45). Like Charcot’s treatment, Freud’s therapy comes to constitute a repetition of the abuses by Carnot, which is reinforced by the fact that Freud and the violator share the habit of cigar smoking. When Freud in a psychoanalytic session avant le lettre sits next to Augustine, smoking and asking her about Carnot, the first thing that springs to Augustine’s mind is the cigar consuming of her torturer. Thus, Freud’s smoking is compared to Charcot’s ovarian
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
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The Drama of Hysteria
compressor, since both induce a painful flashback of the childhood trauma without offering release.
In the case of Grande Hystérie, the relationship between hysteria and femininity is metonymic, since the terms became almost synonymous in the late nineteenth century. As noted above, hysteria was understood as a pathological intensification of normative femininity; accordingly, Augustine’s hysterical attacks always already cited the contemporary norm of femininity, albeit in a hyperbolic manner. Thus, her fainting exaggerated the abdication of power expected of women, her catalepsies overdid the passivity ascribed to femininity, and her fits of laughter, crying, and anger overacted the lability and emotionality that was regarded as typically feminine. However, hysteria offers more than a radicalised form of normative femininity. Through its interweaving of deliberate performing and unconscious repetition compulsion, hysteria also structurally equals the general performativity of gender as theorised by Butler and hence serves as an illustrative metaphor for gender performativity. The play visualises the workings of gender performativity by exposing the culturally configured character of hysteria and demonstrating the incarnation of cultural images, but at the same time highlights that Augustine’s ‘hysteric’ performances cannot be reduced to deliberate playacting. Like gender, Grande Hystérie is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1990: 43–4), which allegedly is, as Charcot claims, ‘as old as the human race’. Thus, Grande Hystérie offers a concrete historical example of Butler’s abstract theses. Consequently, Furse’s production can be regarded as one of those performances feminist theatre scholars call for, which employ “a mode of performance that places the historical contextuality of gender production on display for analysis and critique” (Jackson 2003: 192–3, see also Dolan 1993: 434, Diamond 1997: 84). Thus, the hyperbolic character of hysteria not only applies to its exaggerations of normative femininity, but also makes hysteria one of the strategies of hyperbole that Butler calls for, which can highlight the imitative character of gender in general. While the acts of gender performance most often remain unnoticed, as they are taken for ‘natural’ behaviour, the spectacular character of hysterical imitations calls for attention. If one considers hysteria a performative malady, the earlier readings of hysteria by feminist critics such as Cixous and von Braun can be modified. While they call attention to the caricaturing status of hysteria, they do not foreground the hysteric’s ‘simulation’ of (patriarchal/symbolic/‘logical’) femininity as evidence of the general performativity of gender. While von Braun proceeds from the assumption
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Hysteria: Return of the genuine female or performative malady?
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that the hysteric points to ‘unwritten’, original womanhood, my modification of her argument under the auspices of performative gender theory focuses on the hysteric’s foregrounding of the ‘falsehood’ of femininity (‘the phalse woman-being which the logos has assigned to her’ 1985: 193) without presuming that ‘true’ femininity (or masculinity) exists. Reading hysteria as performative malady becomes even more pertinent with regard to the play’s ending, since this negotiates the question of whether and how Augustine can escape from or take apart the cultural arena that constantly observes, classifies, and determines her (gender) behaviour. Modelled on the historical record, the play makes Augustine eventually escape from the Salpêtrière in men’s clothes. Before Augustine leaves, she pronounces her rebellion against the hysterical paradigms she embodied so perfectly: “I’m an upside down festival! [ ] I’m so angry! I’m so angry! [ ] I don’t see myself in any of it!” (A 46). Subsequently, the poses of hysteric femininity that Augustine has performed throughout the play are repeated in a series of silent tableaux. The accelerated succession of female hysterical stereotypes is reinforced by stroboscopic projections of Augustine’s photographs and a “cacophonous crescendo of sound like a whirlpool into which all the sound of her [Augustine’s] story concentrate” (A 49). During this visual and acoustic climax which will attract the audience’s attention, Augustine surreptitiously leaves the stage, thus escaping the constant observation by the doctors as well as the audience, whom the play casts as medical students.51 Furse departs from the historical record by making Augustine return for a final monologue and reflect upon her escape from the clinic. However, the figure who reappears no longer wears the white nightgown and loose hair typical of the iconography of Grande Hystérie. Augustine has exchanged her nightgown for the clothes of Charcot and Freud, who sit “defrocked, [ ] vulnerable, like babies” (A 49). She imitates Charcot’s habit of lecturing when she solemnly addresses the audience as well as Charcot and Freud, “My doctors, sirs, messieurs!” (A 49) and informs them that she is abandoning their therapy: “No more emotion pictures! No more secretions for you! No more exhibition! No more stories! I’m leaving your stage! The masterpiece has been stolen!” (A 49). Thus, visually, the paradigmatic hysteric has already disappeared, as Augustine no longer conforms to the photographs which were repeatedly projected onto her body. Wearing men’s clothes, Augustine not only abandons the iconography of the grande hystérique, but also the vestimentary code of femininity. The play thus takes up the close interconnection between hysteria and femininity, which characterised the changeful history of hysteria and peaked in the late nineteenth century, when hysteria and femininity were almost synonymous. Augustine’s final monologue reinforces this conflation, since it announces the abandonment of culturally coded patterns that govern the perception not only of hysteria, but also of femininity. Furse models this monologue
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
The Drama of Hysteria
on the feminist thought that conceives of the hysteric as a rebel against phallogocentrism and sees hysteric body language as a possible access to an alternative, female mode of expression. Augustine’s final words indicate a yearning for a substantial self beyond the doctors’ male expectations, for an identity beyond performance. Furse sees Augustine’s new beginning as the achievement of a “new and hard-won integrity” with the prospect of an “authentic future” (1997: 12). The play reinforces the notion of a new integrity by having Augustine leave her double behind, as well as by the return of coloured lighting, which demonstrates that she has regained her ability to see colours and has recovered “the full spectrum of herself” (Furse 2000: 74). Thus, the play proposes a narrative that conforms to the model set by Cixous’s Portrait de Dora, namely the hysteric’s “journey [that] takes her from her dependence, through suffering, until she exits onto an entirely different stage/scene” (Cixous 1984 [1977]: 547). In her final monologue, Augustine conjures up such an exit ‘to an entirely different stage’, which is not only a different phase in cultural perception, but also requires a different theatre; a stage in and on which a female mode of expression becomes feasible. She announces the explosion of the hysterical body as perceived by the doctors/the audience and its rematerialisation in and on this new stage in a monologue whose pathos is reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s style: I’m leaving your stage! [ ] You will see my body fly away in a thousand sparks [ ] I will disappear. Dis-membered. I will return. Re-membered. I will come together again in a form you won’t recognise. Me and my magical body! [ ] Then I will tell everything, as I remembered myself. And you, you will put your tools down, you will listen, really listen, and you will believe every word I say (A 49)52 By contrasting the theatricality of Augustine’s performances of hysteria with her final wish for a ‘true’ identity beyond performance, Furse’s ending is in line with Cixous’s demand, “if the stage is woman, it will mean ridding this place of theatricality. She will want to be a body-presence; it will therefore be necessary to work at exploding everything that makes for ‘staginess’ ” (1984 [1977]: 547). However, the play does not practise Augustine’s preaching of an explosive disappearance,53 but makes Augustine leave the stage “by a window of light, as though performing a conjuring trick” (A 49, my italics). Thus, Augustine’s exit aesthetically does not warrant a foretaste of the envisioned new stage beyond phallogocentric representation, but features a highly theatrical and artificial disappearance. As far as the present stage is concerned, both Augustine’s explosive exit and her ‘authentic’ return as a ‘body-presence’ remain utopian, placeless.
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A passage from Butler’s Gender Trouble seems to proffer a direct reply to Augustine’s yearning for liberation from performativity and the ‘tools’ of culturally shaped perception (“You will put your tools down, you will listen, really listen”) and affirms that, from the point of view of performative gender theory, such a liberation remains impossible, as “there is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (1990: 185). I would like to propose an alternative reading of the play’s ending, one which takes its cue from Butler’s suggestion that the cultural tools of the present stage, that is, the present period and the present theatrical arena, allow a subversive, resignifying use. While the ending aesthetically contradicts the verbal claim of explosion and remembering in a more ‘genuine’ form, it employs, as elaborated above, techniques of visual, acoustic, and verbal montage and the technique of collage in Augustine’s cross-dressing. This points to the possibility of resignification through a productive use of the existing ‘tools’ and modules of culturally shaped perceptional patterns. Both verbally and visually, Augustine’s final appearances distort her normative performances of femininity. Augustine tests out an abundance of selfcharacterisations which oscillate between hysterical, femininely coded, and aggressive, masculinely coded, self-fashionings: “I’m a Tarantella! [ ] I’m a Walpurgis night! [ ] I’m sour milk!” (A 46) and “I’m a volcano! [ ] I will pour hot lava all over your cities and your hospitals! [ ] I’m a gun! I will shoot, bang, bang, bang! [ ] I’m a snake!” (A 46). In addition to these hyperbolic feminine and masculine self-fashionings, Augustine characterises herself as a “pot-pourri” (A 46). This pot-pourri status is also visualised in her final appearance as a cross-dressed figure, as a “battered, vaudeville drag artist” (A 49; cf. Aston 2003: 51). By ultimately presenting Augustine as a gender-ambivalent figure, the play evinces a concept of hysteria that allows for a subversion of cultural notions of gender norms on the present stage. This notion of hysteria as the troubling of the binarism of femininity and masculinity can be linked to Freud’s later writings, in which he came to recognise instabilities of gender identification in all his cases of hysteria. From “Hysterische Phantasien und ihre Beziehung zur Bisexualität” (“Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relations to Bisexuality”, 1908) onwards, Freud developed the thesis that the hysteric is unable to identify himself/herself as either male or female, as s/he remains in a pre-oedipal phase. Lacan developed the approach further, arguing that effects of language and identification artificially establish the border between the genders,54 an argument which feminist theory has taken up: while the hysteric’s dilemma lies in her not knowing whether to identify her body with that of a man or a woman, its cause is the inadequacy of gender identity to support the anatomical difference between the sexes
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Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria)
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The Drama of Hysteria
According to this notion of hysteria, the hysteric questions the gender division that organises experience in the totalised concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’, revealing the fundamental unfeasibility of confining identity to gender. The hysteric is “hors-sexe”, she performs an endless oscillation between masculinity and femininity (Ragland-Sullivan 1995: 124).55 Thus, Augustine’s emancipation from the doctors’ control does not appear to be a regained integrity beyond performativity but rather a new performance, which, however, subverts the binarism of the regulatory norms of masculinity and femininity as well as their association with sanity and insanity. In this respect, the guerrilla tactics of Augustine can be linked up with von Braun’s argument that hysteria adapts to the rules of the world which the logos has established: “But this is precisely what makes it [hysteria] an efficient fighter: it has the logos hoisted by its own petard – by the only way that the logos can be fought at all” (1985: 130, my translation). Read in the light of gender performativity, Furse’s play thus encourages a more positive assessment of the theatrical depiction of hysteria than Rubik’s analysis, which concludes that Augustine does not provide an answer to “the disturbing question if, under the Law of the father, an alternative discourse is possible at all. A viable and practical feminist alternative has yet to be found” (1996: 189). Although Augustine’s monologue preaches a different agenda, the play’s visual rhetoric and its stylistic devices substantiate such a viable and practical feminist alternative.
Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria (1993) Morrissey’s Dora: A Case of Hysteria, which premiered in London two years after Augustine, enacts this productive ‘taking up’ of the ‘tools lying there’ by rewriting one of Freud’s most famous case studies, the “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”,56 as a comedy. Morrissey’s contribution to the Drama of Hysteria makes the allegedly hysteric protagonist perform a subversive appropriation of the psychoanalytic tools of her therapist. Although the play highlights Dora’s pain and the compulsion inherent in Freud’s treatment, it demonstrates how Dora appropriates her ‘malady’ as a performative strategy which utilises her (allegedly typically hysterical) capacity of imitation as a means of empowerment. Using the pseudonym ‘Dora’, Freud’s case study recounts the treatment of the eighteen-year-old Jewish-Austrian Ida Bauer,57 who was sent to Freud in 1900 by her father after she threatened to commit suicide. She suffered from symptoms such as nervous coughs and migraines, and troubled her family
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[ ]. The hysteric is not disgusted by her body per se, but by the efforts of others to pin her down as a sexual body in terms of a gender identity for which she lacks a signifying basis. (Ragland-Sullivan 1992: 163–4)
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by maintaining that her father had an affair with Frau K. (alias Peppina Zellenka), who, like her husband Herr K. (alias Hans Zellenka), was a friend of the Bauer family. Ida accused her father of ignoring Herr K.’s sexual advances to her and suspected him of accepting the ‘traffic between men’, in which Ida was to be exchanged for Frau K.58 Freud’s case study shows that in contrast to the three adults whom Ida/Dora trusted most but who conspired to deny the reality of her experiences, Freud believed in her narration (Marcus 1990 [1974]: 61). However, in unison with his new theory of the Oedipus complex, he asked Ida/Dora to discover her own libidinal involvement in the net of desire and expected her desire to be directed at her father and at Herr K. as a paternal substitute. Feminist critics have hence read the Dora case as a powerful example of how patriarchy and psychoanalysis silence women and take certain assumptions about appropriate gender behaviour for granted. Dora’s case was interpreted as “a paradigmatic text about patriarchal assumptions about female desire” (Kahane 1990: 31) by critics such as Cixous, who argue that Freud marginalised Dora’s lesbian desire for “the adorable white body” of Frau K. (thus Dora’s words as recorded by Freud). Although Freud recognises Dora’s homosexual desire for Frau K. as the “strongest unconscious current in [Dora’s] mental life” (1905aE: 120, n1; cf. 1905a: 284, n1),59 and even states that homosexual desire (“gynäkophile Gefühlsströmungen” 1905a: 224) is typical of female hysteria, he does not integrate the insight fully into the study and instead tries to prove Dora’s desire for her father, for Herr K., and even for Freud himself.60 However, Dora has not only been understood as “a saint in the pantheon of feminist martyrs” (Showalter 1998: 57):61 feminist critics have also championed her as a rebel against Freud’s interpretations (and likened her to Ibsen’s Nora, as I will explore in the final section of this reading), since Dora broke off the treatment after only twelve weeks.62 Despite the treatment’s brevity and the fragmentary character of Freud’s analysis, it has become the locus classicus for a critical exploration of Freud’s theories of little hysteria and his therapeutic methods. So many critics have reconsidered and rewritten the case that Bronfen laconically concludes, “there appears to be nothing that has not been said about this case history” (1998a: 333). The multiple appropriations of Ida’s story by Freud and later writers, some of which are collected in a special volume of Diacritics on Dora (Herz 1983) and in the anthology In Dora’s Case (Bernheimer and Kahane 1990 [1985]), are exemplary in showing that “[h]ysteria is no longer a question of the wandering womb; it is a question of the wandering story, and of whether the story belongs to the hysteric, the doctor, the historian, or the critic” (Showalter 1993: 335).63 Morrissey’s dramatic version of Dora’s ‘wandering story’ as comedy not only ridicules Freud but also probes the theatrical potential of psychoanalytic treatment and highlights the degree to which both patient and therapist are part of the drama of Petite Hystérie. Through abundant references to Ibsen’s
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Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
drama of little hysteria, Dora self-referentially invokes its dramatic forerunners; rather than claiming to represent Dora’s, or even Ida’s, ‘true’ story, the play thus exposes its fictionality and acknowledges the impossibility of “retriev[ing] Dora’s voice from the palimpsest of patriarchal interpretations [ ] [and of] retrac[ing] the intertextual layers of case history, mimetic representation, dream narrative and drama back to the figure of Ida Bauer” (Döring 1996: 35). “Don’t try to do my job” – Analysing the analyser Rewriting Dora and Freud’s encounters as presented in Freud’s case story with a critical, feminist impetus, Dora incorporates academic, and particularly feminist, critical work and is itself a contribution to the ongoing critical project of “analys[ing] Freud’s methods of analysis, [ ] question[ing] his mode of questioning, [ ] study[ing] his language and the assumptions ingrained in his way of seeing women: a white middle-class Jewish man’s view of women” (Goodman 1993a: x) situated in 1900 in Vienna. However, Freud’s view of Dora as portrayed in his case study cannot be reduced to one singular, linear narrative which is (pre)determined by his race, class, religion, gender, and the epoch and city he lived in. The case study on the contrary appears as a “slippery affair” (Bronfen 1998a: 340), which offers several stories and contradictory assessments of its female protagonist. Freud attempts to establish a particular interpretation of Dora’s case in the writing, but his footnotes, some of which he added years later, often undermine and contradict the theses developed in the main text. Moreover, even Freud himself self-consciously admits his failure to apprehend fully Dora’s case. These devices open the space for alternative readings which depart from the ‘white middle-class Jewish man’s view of women’. Dora utilises these gaps and contradictions in the case study and excavates the comic potential of Freud’s writing. Presenting the play’s events as part of Freud’s memories, which he compiles for a lecture to the audience, the play connects these lecture parts with flashbacks to the psychoanalytic sessions with Dora. Through this juxtaposition, audiences can constantly compare Freud’s theses as put forward in his direct audience addresses with the ‘data’ of the psychoanalytical session. Contrary to Freud’s claims, these scenes rarely illustrate his theses, but contradict, undermine, and ridicule them instead. Dora parodies Freud’s case history by juxtaposing his overactive sexual imagination, his absorption in his theories, and his dogmatic insistence on authority with Dora’s witty strategies of resistance that keep undermining his interpretations. It supports the trustworthiness of Dora’s accounts, whereas it portrays Freud’s metaphorical understanding of Dora’s stories as often far-fetched and absurd. The play recontextualises quotes from the original Freudian text or reduces them to comic one-liners, which are followed by timed silences to pack the most punch. And in fact, it was these verbatim quotes that received the greatest laughs from the audience during Dora’s run in London (Goodman 1993a: xiv, Döring 2002: 132).
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Like Charcot in Augustine, Freud in his lectures establishes a male bonding with the audience and creates an all-male space of voyeurism that oscillates between scientific observation and erotic scopophilia. Chirstine Hoodith’s production emphasised Freud’s chauvinism and untrustworthiness by having him thoroughly scrutinise the audience – that always included women (Morrissey 2004) – before greeting them with “Good evening, Gentlemen” (Dora 1).64 From the play’s very beginning, Dora thus encourages audiences to distrust Freud. Through the interaction of Freud’s lecture with his encounters with Dora, the play highlights how Freud tries to reveal the erotic thrill of ‘talking dirty’ to young Dora in ostensibly scientific, objective explanations. In the play’s opening speech – which equals the introduction of the case study – Freud justifies the publication of the case as well as his sexual explicitness during the sessions with young Dora. Freud’s first words are addressed to “certain so-called critics of psychotherapy who regard a case study as a frivolous excuse for salacious pornographic gossip – a roman à clef – a romance – told entirely for their own entertainment” (D 1). However, the play links Freud’s insistent affirmations of his pure intentions to his own axioms such as “The more you deny, the more I know it’s true” (D 3) and “Widerstand! The more you protest the more I know it’s true” (D 25), and thereby makes the audience suspect the contrary; a suspicion which Morrissey fuels through Freud’s commentaries on Dora’s “charming good looks” (D 1) and his long and scrutinising gazes. When Freud boasts about his scientific ability to talk directly about sexual matters, he again inadvertently demonstrates the opposite: “I give bodily organs and processes their technical names [ ]. And Gentlemen, I assure you, j’appelle un [sic] chatte une chatte” (D 1–2). The would-be frank Freud timidly resorts to French to circumscribe the female genitalia and even in the foreign language uses a colloquial metaphor rather than the promised technical term. Morrissey did not need to invent this comic slip, as it is taken verbatim from Freud’s case study (cf. 1905aE: 48/1905a: 208). Despite his inhibitions when tackling issues related to the female body, Freud is almost obsessed with talking about the male body, especially about the penis. He insists that Dora must have felt Herr K.’s “member” (D 12) when Herr K. embraced her, and bullies the ignorant young girl with an almost manic listing of names for the male genitalia: Freud: Look at me, Dora. You did not notice his Member? Dora: His what? Freud: His Member his John Thomas his Man Below Stairs. (Dora looks blank.) his Flagpole, his Wiener, his Schlong his Penis (Impatient.) His Peter, his Prick, his Cock. You did not notice? Dora: Well no. (D 12)
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Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
In Hoodith’s production of Dora, Freud even briefly touched Dora’s lap during this interrogation, thereby reinforcing his sexually charged intimidation. In addition to his uncompromising inquiries about her encounters with Herr K., Freud repeatedly and lecherously interrogates Dora about her habits of masturbation (D 29). Despite Dora’s denial, her potential acts of masturbation become an idée fixe for Freud, who obsessively infers “circumstantial evidence” (1905aE: 78) (“Indizienbeweis”, Freud 1905a: 241) against Dora. Quoting Freud’s remarks on Dora’s alleged acts of masturbation but omitting other topics and passages of the 120-page case study, Morrissey’s comedy enhances the impression of Freud’s obsession with his young patient’s sexuality. When Dora in one of the sessions plays with a little purse she holds in her hands, Freud – as in the case study (cf. 1905a: 231 and 238–40/1905aE: 69 and 76–8) – regards this as a Symptomhandlung65 (symptomatic act) which serves as proof of Dora’s habit of masturbation: “reticule or purse [ ] it means the female genitals. [ ] You’ve been playing with your little reticule opening it shutting it touching it putting a finger into it haven’t you Oh yes, Dora, I’ve been watching I’ve seen what you do with your pretty little purse” (D 24). Trying to support his theory of the Oedipus complex, Freud is at great pains to ‘prove’ Dora’s desire for Herr K. Hence he claims to know Dora’s feelings and concealed desires better than she herself does. Like Charcot in Furse’s play, Freud is not willing to let the patient interrupt or object to his lecture. He repeatedly attempts to silence Dora, who contests Freud’s sexualised interpretations (“This is my lecture, young lady. Not yours” D 3). Accordingly, far from interpreting Dora’s aphonia as a sign for such an enforced loss of voice (her father and Herr K. also tried to make Dora keep silent about the abuses and the father’s extramarital affair), Freud reads it as a sign of her love for Herr K. (D 17; cf. also Freud 1905a: 199/1905aE: 40). In addition to silencing Dora, he attempts to make her perform according to his model of hysteria by pretending omniscience about her entire biography and her secret sexual wishes: “I know you have sucked your thumb as a child. I know you have wet your bed to the age of eight. I know everything – even your most secret, hidden, shameful thoughts and actions” (D 19). This is one of several exaggerated but always only temporarily successful attempts to reinforce his authority. The more Freud insists on his expertise, the more vulnerable and helpless he appears. He repeatedly rejects Dora’s insightful interpretations of her dreams (“Don’t try to do my job” D 24) and instead justifies his far-fetched interpretations as more sophisticated than Dora’s precise explanations: “the patient is using such arguments, which analysis can’t attack, as a smoke screen for hiding others” (D 16). Attempting to support his own preconceived theory of the Oedipus complex, Morrissey’s Freud ultimately does not take Dora’s words and opinions seriously. Despite his initial belief in her reports of Herr K.’s attempts to kiss her, he is unable to acknowledge the girl’s disgust and anxiety. Instead
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of seeing Herr K.’s approaches as acts of sexual (child) abuse, he pathologises Dora’s inability to respond to Herr K.: “the behaviour of Dora at fourteen was already totally and completely hysterical. [ ] [I]nstead of the genital sensation which would have been felt by a healthy girl, Dora felt only disgust” (D 11).66 Morrissey again quotes Freud almost verbatim; however, Freud’s original statement deserves attention as it betrays the gender bias of his treatment: “das Benehmen des 14jährigen Kindes [ist] bereits ganz und gar hysterisch. Jede Person, bei welcher ein Anlaß zur sexuellen Erregung überwiegend oder ausschließlich Unlustgefühle hervorruft, würde ich unbedenklich für eine Hysterica halten” (1905a: 187).67 Although Freud here pretends to talk about hysterics in general (“jede Person”), he then implicitly specifies the hysteric’s gender as female when he talks about the “Hysterica”. He resorts to the stereotypical topos of the frigid woman and applies it to a young girl who was sexually approached by a man thrice her age. Freud’s ignorance of the abusive quality of Herr K.’s conduct is reinforced when he sees Herr K. as being “in the prime of life” (D 7; cf. 1905a: 187, n2/1905aE: 29, n3) – here Morrissey uses Freud’s original words to demonstrate that Freud is unable to acknowledge that a man of his own age might arouse disgust rather than sexual interest in a fourteen-/sixteen-/eighteenyear-old girl:68 “Herr K is quite handsome. A young girl should feel excited being kissed by such a man” (D 10). Employing Freud’s own argument about transference, the play suggests that Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s case is shaped by his identification with Herr K. During the psychoanalytic talking cures he undertook, Freud realised that he repeatedly stood in for important figures from the patient’s past. He labelled this phenomenon Übertragung (transference). The play probes the theatrical potential of the role-play inherent in transference. For example, it stages in a simplified and straightforward manner the phase during which Freud becomes a substitute for Herr K., with Dora literally casting Freud in the role of Herr K.: Dora: [ ] You be Herr K. So you are here. Pulls Freud into position. Freud (to audience, a footnote): Transference! “I am Herr K. Herr K is here!” Most patients take months to make such a leap! Wonderful! [ ] Dora: And then you come down the stairs Freud: I come down like this? Dora: Slower very slowly, and you are smoking. Freud: Like this? Dora: Yes, but you come down more slowly, because the light is very dim, with the shutters drawn. Freud: Like this? Dora: Yes, exactly Freud: What do I do? Dora: You clasp me and you kiss me. (D 9)
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Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
In contrast to the ambiguous and subtle mechanisms of transference as described by Freud in “A Fragment” and other writings, where transferences are theorised as a means for allowing new encounters with persons from the past as well as the abreaction of earlier emotions, this explicit scene offers a parody of transference. The theatre for forgotten scenes here becomes an erotic role-play, in which Dora not only performs her younger self in the role of the helpless victim of sexual abuse but also directs Freud in the role of the lecherous villain. The play subsequently stages the counter-transference which this role-play triggers in Freud. In the case study, Freud himself failed to acknowledge his identification with Herr K., as critics of the Dora case, such as Lacan in his article “Intervention on Transference” (1951: esp. 101) have highlighted. In Morrissey’s play, Freud’s identification with Herr K. is one of the main sources of comedy. For example, Freud’s physical reactions betray his identification with the virile Herr K. and his sexual interest in the girl: Freud: So you do know the signs of a man who is Physically Excited? [ ] Dora: Well, for one thing, you can tell by his mouth. Freud (covers mouth): By the mouth – how? [ ] Dora: Well, of course, there are other things, too. Freud (crosses legs): What other things? (D 11–12) Moreover, after this session Freud writes a letter to a friend about a dream which reveals his desire for the young girl and alludes to the origin of Ida’s pseudonym, which Freud derived from a young servant in his parents’ home: “I seemed to be wearing no clothes. Suddenly I saw a woman someone very young but familiar an acquaintance or an old family friend perhaps or perhaps a young servant tripping gaily after me [ ]. I awoke in a state of almost overwhelming physical excitement” (D 20).69 As these are the final words of the first act, they are especially prominent and announce the importance of Freud’s sexual desire for the second part of the play as well. Before writing the letter, Morrissey’s Freud announces the interval to the audience and asks them to leave the auditorium; although during the performances of Hoodith’s production none of the spectators left the room at this point (Morrissey 2004), Freud considered the lecture finished and withdrew to upstage to write the letter to Fliess. In the production, Freud’s change from a lecturing to a confiding tone and the shift in lighting to an intimate spot on Freud reinforced the seeming authenticity of Freud’s confession, which reveals another instance of Freud’s counter-transference in which Dora stands in for the servant from Freud’s past. Morrissey further associates Herr K. and Freud by using the same device as Furse does in order to associate therapist and abuser. When Dora retells Herr K.’s first attempt to kiss her, she describes his distressing, desiring gazes:
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“he smoked, and just watched me” (D 8). Later she stresses that Herr K.’s “grey beard and the way his breath stinks of cigars” (D 10) disgust her. As Freud, himself sporting a beard, repeatedly smokes cigars and cigarettes (D 4, 25, 28), audiences early on establish a connection between Herr K. and the analyst and realise that they both distress and harass Dora. Freud himself is aware of the smoke as tertium comparationis and argues that it may have triggered a transference – however, of desire rather than disgust – in Dora: “Freud (takes out a cigar): Dora. [ ] you were longing for a kiss with a smoker. Herr K, perhaps. (to audience) Gentlemen, because I am a smoker, too, I came to the conclusion that she might want to have a kiss from me” (D 28). The play here once more utilises the study’s comic potential by placing a quote (1905a: 236/1905aE: 74) into a context that renders the idea an absurd figment of Freud’s own wishful thinking. The play highlights that Freud identifies with Herr K. as an object of Dora’s desire, whom he understands as a stand-in for Dora’s father, but that Dora, in turn, transfers her feelings of disgust and fear from Herr K. to Freud. In a modification of Dora’s dreams, which are at the heart of Freud’s case study, the play epitomises these contradictory modes of transference. Thus, in a travesty of one of the dreams Dora describes in the case study, Dora addresses Herr K., played by Freud, as “Papa” (D 21). In another dream sequence, Dora is presented as a bride who is to marry an ambivalent groom: Papa (to Freud): You are Herr K and Papa and Herr Freud. You may kiss the Bride. (‘Herr K’ kisses Dora, hands her back to her father.) Freud (to Papa): You may kiss the Bride. (Papa kisses her, pushes her to her knees, and into his groin, Freud pulls her up, Papa pushes her back to Freud.) Papa: Herr Freud and Papa and Herr K and Papa and Herr Freud and Herr K – (Freud kneels and presses his face into the folds of her dress.) Freud: We may all kiss the Bride. (D 31) The staging of a marriage takes its cue from the case study, in which Freud suggests the K.s’ divorce and Dora and Herr K.’s marriage as a solution to the sexual involvements of the ménage-a-quatre. The dream version of this marriage highlights how the scenario satisfies the desires of the men involved but ignores Dora’s fear and disgust. By staging dream scenarios, which Hoodith’s production underlaid with non-realistic lighting and a sound created by rubbing glass, the play grants audiences insight into Dora’s allegedly hysterical perspective and thus creates its own form of hystericised
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Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
realism. However, rather than providing evidence of Dora’s repressed sexual fantasies, which is how Freud interprets the dreams in the case study, the nightmares excavate the sexual motivation of the three men involved. By diagnosing Freud’s libidinous involvement in the Dora case and his resulting identification with a virile image of Herr K., Morrissey’s play emphasises Freud’s own hysterical potential. Freud’s inclination to hysteria is most obvious after Dora has finally left the therapy, when he nostalgically dwells in romanticised memories while tenderly stroking the couch Dora used to lie on. In a daydream, Freud fantasises how he could have alternatively dealt with Dora. Rather than sternly interrogating her, he now tenderly and cautiously addresses the absent girl. Freud’s revision of the treatment not only constructs alternative strategies but also embellishes actual events. Lying on the couch, Freud says, “I still remember her that [last] day, listening so quietly, hardly contradicting me at all. And then taking my hand in hers, smiling and wishing me well. She smiled, and wished me well, and came no more!” (D 36). These recollections are again an almost literal quote from “A Fragment” (cf. 1905a: 272/1905aE: 109), but whereas they remain undoubted in the case study as the only report of Dora’s departure, the play presents them as false memories. In Morrissey’s version, Dora often contradicts Freud during the last session and does not shake Freud’s hand when leaving. An explicit stage direction (“Note: Dora must not shake Freud’s hand” D 35) makes sure that productions demonstrate the discrepancy between the departure as it happens and Freud’s memory of it. Freud’s romanticised memories and his tender stroking of the couch show him as subject to the Symptomhandlungen and the Erinnerungstäuschungen (paramnesias) he had diagnosed in Dora as hysterical symptoms (D 11, 24; Freud 1905a: 174/1905aE: 17). However, Morrissey’s hystericisation of Freud is less a pathographic twist she adds to the case than the excavation of a layer of meaning which is intrinsic to the case study and has been described by Freud himself in his letters. As Freud, especially in his early work on hysteria, proceeded from an identification with the hysteric (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992: 138, Bronfen 1998a: 54), the border between the male master-position and the female hysteric was volatile and constantly had to be negotiated. Three years before treating Dora, Freud acknowledges how his own Petite Hystérie blocks his work; he writes to his friend Fliess: “The chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself. My little hysteria, though greatly accentuated by my work, has resolved itself a bit further” (1887–1904E: 261; cf. 1887–1904: 281). In another letter to Fliess, he acknowledges his own femininity, stating, “no on can replace for me the relationship with the friend [Fliess] which a special – possibly feminine – side demands” (ibid.: 412; cf. 1887–1904: 452). In Vienna, Freud initially encounters outright dismissal of his progressive theory of male hysteria, which he adopted from Charcot. His first talk on male hysteria before the Viennese Society of Physicians in October 1886 is
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“Your ill-health is just a trick you learned” – From hysterical imitation to parodic impersonation Morrissey’s play demonstrates the pain involved in Dora’s allegedly hysteric symptoms. Countering Freud’s interpretations, it explains them as traumatic symptoms and as effects of the syphilis that Dora inherited from her father. In the original British production, Dora’s psychic and physical pain was palpable, with Jo McInnis recounting the scene by the lake with great anguish and limping throughout the performance. Although Freud knows about the father’s syphilis and himself believes in a causal relationship between the father’s and Dora’s symptoms, he conceals and represses this knowledge and instead – in both Dora and “A Fragment” – argues that Dora suffers from hysterical symptoms and from the consequences of her own sexual desires. Arguing that Dora mimics Frau K.’s symptoms, Freud not only shifts Dora’s behaviour from the imitation of a male model to that of a woman, but also from an organic, inherited disease to malingering, thus again feeding misogynist stereotypes: “Admit your ill-health is just a trick you learned from Frau K. Pretty little Frau K. Adorable little Frau K. with her beautiful white skin and her delicate cough” (D 33). In Hoodith’s production, Dora’s heavy cough subverted Freud’s claim that Dora forges a “delicate cough” in order to resemble Frau K. While Morrissey’s Freud figure – as did the real Freud – dissimulates his knowledge about the organic causes of some of Dora’s hysterical symptoms in order to maintain his theory about hysteria, he pathologises Dora’s conduct that claims masculine privileges. The play hints at Dora’s identification with her elder brother Otto,71 which the case study discusses in more detail. Freud notes that while Dora was a “wild creature” as a young girl, her boyish behaviour declined when she began to suffer from asthma at the age of eight: It was as though she had been a boy up to that moment, and had then become girlish for the first time. She had in truth been a wild creature; but after the ‘asthma’ she became quiet and well-behaved. That illness formed the boundary between two phases of her sexual life, of which the first was masculine in character, and the second feminine. (1905aE: 82, n1; cf. 1905a: 244, n2) Connecting Dora’s shift from masculine to feminine conduct with her suffering from asthma, Freud associates and almost equates femininity and illness. In Dora (as in “A Fragment”, cf. 1905a: 181/1905aE: 23) Freud
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received badly.70 A number of critics have argued that whereas Freud initially identified with his female hysteric patients, he later was at pains to ascribe hysteria solely to the feminine Other (cf. for example Bernheimer 1990: 18, Sprengnether 1990, Kahane 1990: 27).
The Drama of Hysteria
subsumes Dora’s refusal to do her share of housework and her insistence on attending lectures for women under her hysterical symptoms. In this diagnosis, Freud’s gender bias again comes to the fore: Dora claims the same rights as her brother, who did not work in the household and was free to attend lectures. Whereas this behaviour in Otto’s case is considered normal and healthy, even commendable, it requires psychological treatment in Dora’s case. The aim of Freud’s therapy is therefore partly to train Dora in the appropriate gender role of the non-intellectual housewife. Dora’s mother, who has put up with this gender norm, remains a shadowy figure in both the case study and the play. Dora again quotes Freud verbatim: “Though I have never met Dora’s mother, the girl and her father led me to think of her as an ignorant and exceedingly silly woman [ ]. A typical example of ‘housewife’s psychosis’ ” (D 6; cf. Freud 1905a: 178/1905aE: 20). Dora exposes the lack of scientific objectivity of this unreflecting adoption of Dora’s and her father’s opinion by contrasting it with Freud’s initial claim that he concludes nothing from the stories of relatives (D 2). Freud notes in the case study that Dora’s mother was obsessed with cleaning the house and made any use of the furniture almost impossible for her husband and her children (cf. 1905a: 178/1905aE: 20). Her compulsive cleaning not only reveals the enforced requests of the gender norm, it can alternatively be seen as a silent protest that aimed at disrupting family life, as her husband and her children are deprived of the comfort of their home and literally shut off from the living room, which Dora’s mother used to lock up once it was clean. Dora’s mother protests not through refusal to be a model mother and housewife (as Portia in Portia Coughlan) but on the contrary, by over-fulfilling the norms,72 a (not necessarily conscious) strategy that Dora also comes to employ. Despite the staging of Dora’s pain, Dora, unlike Furse’s play, does not predominantly present its protagonist as a distressed victim. Just as Dora has managed to escape Herr K.’s advances, she is not completely victimised by Freud’s treatment either. Although the fourteen-year-old Dora is frightened by Freud’s sexual explicitness and his authoritative interpretations when she first meets him (D 3–4), through the play’s elliptic time structure she quickly becomes a “wise and ironic listener” (Goodman 1993a: xiii) to Freud’s analyses, who counters and dismisses Freud’s interpretations. Morrissey’s play shows how Dora progressively learns to utilise her ‘hysterical’ capacity for imitation. One of these strategies, which ‘take up the [psychoanalytic] tools where they lie’, is Dora’s imitation of Freud himself, which leads to a reversal of the roles of analyst and analysand, of interpreter and scientific object, of agent and patient. Dora literally appropriates Freud’s place in the course of the analysis, when she asks to sit in his chair and finally does so (D 23). In Hoodith’s production, McInnis increasingly imitated Freud’s mode of speaking and his habit of calling out “Aha!” whenever he believed to have found new evidence of his interpretations. When they
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Dora: [ ] I forgot to tell you about the smoke! Freud: [ ] Without smoke there’s no fire. Dora (together): ‘there’s no fire’. [ ] And every time I woke up after the dream, I smelled smoke (Pause.) Well? Freud: Well? Dora: Well what do you think? Freud: What do you think? Dora: I think Herr K had the key and was spying! What do you think? (D 28) This conversation portrays Dora as a more brilliant analyst than Freud himself – an impression which renders Freud’s subsequent patronising statement, “Dora. You know nothing” (D 28), a futile attempt to re-establish his exegetic authority. Apart from the straightforward appropriation of the analyst’s position by mimicking him and joining his psychoanalytic discourse, Dora uses the hyperbolic enactment of the hysteric ‘norm’ as a second strategy to undermine Freud’s mastery. Dora demonstrates that she knows Freud’s pattern of interpretation well enough to be able to forge symptoms and to perform as Freud wishes. For instance, she reveals her ability to manipulate Freud by a deliberate performance of hysteric, sexually charged Symptomhandlungen: I only want to show you my little birthday present from Papa my little bag my little reticule, as you say [ ] The bills are very large, aren’t they? They fill it right to the brim If we go on much longer, it will be stretched all out of shape [ ] But look Feel how soft! [ ] after all, what are purses for? [ ] Come, come, Herr Professor it won’t bite, will it? It’s only a purse [ ] I know very well that you’ve been watching me opening it shutting it playing with it putting a finger into it Oh yes, and I have been watching you watching me. [ ] And now it’s time for the piper to be paid – Drops reticule in Freud’s lap. (Huskily.) Sigi, don’t bother to count we both know it’s all there. Pause. (laughs) Herr Freud, you look so funny! Can’t you take a little joke! (D 27–8) Through her deliberate hysteric performance, Dora achieves a parodic recontextualisation by shifting its focus from gender and sexuality to economics. Dora modifies Freud’s interpretation of the purse-as-vagina, which in her show becomes a purse-as-vagina-as-purse. Dora on the one hand overdoes the sexual connotation of the purse and thus exaggerates the cliché of the
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talk about Dora’s dreams, it seems as if they had become colleagues who interpret Dora’s case together:
The Drama of Hysteria
nymphomaniac hysteric that Freud has set up throughout the treatment. In Hoodith’s production, Dora held out the opened purse closely in front of her lap when she asked Freud for penetration (“feel how soft”). Dora presents the therapy as a sexual affair which deforms her vagina (“it will be stretched all out of shape ”) and she evokes the topos of the vagina dentata (“it won’t bite, will it?”). On the other hand, she highlights the actual function of the purse as a place to store the money with which she pays Freud for his work. While Freud earlier on embarrassed Dora through the male privilege of making sexual innuendos, Dora underlines her financial superiority and thereby manages to embarrass him. In her repetition of Freud’s technique, a slight alteration allows Dora to invert the power structure inherent in the therapy. If, as Butler argues, “the task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (1990: 189), Dora’s strategy of resignification offers an example of how such repetition with a difference as envisioned by Butler can be achieved. Through this strategy, Freud’s earlier sexual interpretation of the purse appears as an absurd red herring which was meant to mask his economic dependency from his patients. Dora’s strategy, her “resistance through mimesis” which “achieves empowerment from within” (Döring 1996: 42) the psychoanalytical discourse, is an example of parodic recontextualisation as theorised by Butler (1990: 176). Dora continues her parodic recontextualisation that troubles gender norms when she announces she is abandoning Freud’s therapy. Against Freud’s will and without his knowledge, Dora casts Freud in the role of the K.s’ erstwhile governess, who has been abused for the sexual gratification of her employer. Dora, whom Freud named after a former servant, thus transfers the role of the female servant to the analyser himself.73 Dora’s association of Freud with a governess is again taken up when Dora at the end of the play explains to Freud that her father only brought her to Freud in order to spend the hour undisturbed with Frau K. This revelation mocks the fraternisation of Freud and Dora’s father at the beginning of Dora’s treatment, when Freud promised Papa to cure Dora of her ‘fantasy’ regarding his affair with Frau K. Dora’s final explanation ridicules this act of male bonding and reveals that her father has employed Freud less as an informed confidant whose unique psychological abilities are needed than as a governess who has to distract and educate Dora according to her father’s wishes. Thus, Dora not merely rejects, but gradually makes use of the ascriptions with which the analytical treatment invests her. While Freud claims that Dora expresses unconscious sexual wishes through her imitation of the behaviours and illnesses of others, Dora learns to utilise this allegedly hysterical capacity of imitation. Dora’s appropriation of her malady as performative strategy not only undermines the authority of the analyst, but also, through
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“Nora – excuse me, Dora”74 – The Drama of Petite Hystérie As noted above, feminist criticism of the case study has made Dora, who abandons Freud’s therapy, the figurehead of woman’s rebellion against patriarchal ascriptions (cf. Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975], Showalter 1985, Bernheimer and Kahane 1990). The historical connection of woman’s discontent and hysteria was complex. On the one hand, Freud and Breuer’s case studies show that their patients were often intelligent but intellectually frustrated women, who were dissatisfied with the gender-specific distribution of labour in the bourgeois family, which confined women to the domestic and private realm. The probably most famous patient of the Studies is Anna O., in whom Breuer diagnoses an excess rather than a lack of energy, drive, and talent, and who in later life becomes a feminist activist. While dissatisfaction thus might have contributed to women’s hysterical symptoms, political expressions of discontent were pathologised by the same token. Suffragettes who fought for the right to vote and for access to universities were frequently discredited as hysterics and in some cases even committed to mental institutions (Showalter 1985: 146). Feminist critics have taken not only Anna O., but also Dora as examples of how hysteria and feminist protest interlink. Therefore, they have likened Dora, who “[a]s the most famous of Freud’s women [ ] almost seems to take the place of his wife in the popular imagination” (Showalter 1998: 57) to Nora, Ibsen’s heroine, who rebels against her incapacitation and bourgeois gender roles, leaving her husband behind (cf. for example Marcus 1990 [1974], Møller 1990, Lindhoff 1995, Weissberg 2002).75 Morrissey takes up this association of Dora and Nora in her play, intertwining their stories of protest. From the very beginning, Freud confuses Dora with Ibsen’s heroine. Introducing her, he cannot help calling her “Nora” in a Freudian slip of the tongue (which he repeats later, cf. D 5, 26) but makes it clear that he dislikes Nora as well as her creator (D 1). Freud’s confusion of Nora and Dora on the one hand points out that “Dora was no more ‘real’ for [the actual] Freud than was Ibsen’s Nora” (Goodman 1993a: xi); on the other hand, it hints at Freud’s anticipation that Dora will abandon his therapy. Apart from Freud’s exposition of Nora as Dora’s negative antidote, Morrissey’s play again associates Dora with Nora when Dora’s father calls her “my little songbird” (D 25). He belittles his daughter with a similar pet name to Ibsen’s protagonist Helmer, who notoriously calls his wife Nora ‘meadow-lark’, ‘siskin’, and ‘squirrel’.
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parody, accepted notions about (hysterical) femininity. As a parodic impersonator of Freud’s notion of the sexually obsessed hysteric, she recontextualises the sexually charged performance in the field of economics and thereby achieves an inversion of the power structure between analyst and patient. Her subsequent comparisons of Freud with governesses reinforce this reversal, as they cast Freud in the femininely coded role of the servant.
The Drama of Hysteria
When Dora pathetically describes her former idealised image of Herr K. and the honest attitude she understood him to represent, Freud compares her passionate speech to Ibsen’s dramatic rhetoric he so dislikes: “Dora: [ ] The old Herr K would rather have died than tell a Lie, because Life must be lived Truly, in spite of the Small, Cowardly, Stupid, Nasty, Vindictive, Ungenerous, Mean-Minded of the world. Without truth, there is nothing. When Freud can’t stand the speech any longer, he whispers ‘Ibsen’ ” (D 17). The intertextual reference to Freud’s contemporary, Ibsen, not only highlights the theatricality of both Morrissey’s play and Freud’s therapy, but also highlights the stylistic innovation of Morrissey’s own contribution to the Drama of Petite Hystérie, which, unlike Ibsen’s serious, realistic form of social criticism, expresses its criticism through comedy. Thus, although Morrissey takes over elements of realism, such as a psychological conceptualisation of the characters that requires psychological acting, she distances her contribution to the Drama of Hysteria from the pathos of Ibsen’s hysteria plays. The most important point of reference to A Doll’s House is Dora’s first angry departure, which is modelled after Nora’s famous exit. After furiously telling Freud that she loathes his sexual innuendoes, Dora leaves Freud’s office, “like ‘Nora’, with dignity; Ibsenite sound of door closing” (D 30). However, Dora’s exit which imitates Nora’s leave-taking is not final. The patient returns for one last session and thus makes Freud’s self-assured expectation come true (D 31). Dora hence subverts the impact of D/Nora’s dignified exit and reduces it to a mere dramatic pose, thus again parodying Ibsen’s pathos of emancipation. The play shares this gesture of disillusionment with the idea of women’s emancipation with other feminist rewritings of A Doll’s House, such as Elfriede Jelinek’s play What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband, which shows how Nora, after leaving Helmer, is further sexually and financially exploited by men. Jelinek finally makes Nora surrender to capitalist patriarchal power and miserably return to her husband Helmer.76 Both Jelinek and Morrissey demystify the emblematic emancipated woman of dramatic literature. Like Nora in the final scene of Jelinek’s play, the eponymous protagonist in Dora returns weakened and humiliated after the (dream of) group abuse by Freud, Herr K., and Papa (D 32). However, Morrissey grants her protagonist a second exit, which she presents this time as emancipatory. Although Dora’s calm exit after the last session is less formidable, its impact on Freud’s self-confidence is more devastating. What makes Dora’s exit so disturbing for Freud that he needs to repress it afterwards is precisely its lack of pathos, its light-heartedness. Before she leaves, Dora laughs when she compares Freud to the K.s’ governess, thus defeating Freud through her laughter rather than her anger. Dora’s triumph is reinforced in the play when she, as described in the afterword of “A Fragment”, returns one more time to Freud two years later. Although Dora is still ill and slightly more desperate than in the earlier scenes, she at the
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same time is more confident. During her final visit, Dora again alludes to Ibsen, when she tells Freud that she saw Herr K. being knocked down on the street as she returned from a lecture on Ibsen. In Morrissey’s play, Dora has continued her ‘hysteric’ attitude of attending lectures and she has learned about Ibsen’s unruly heroine, whose name and behaviour are so similar to Dora’s own. Freud, who in Morrissey’s version is surprised by Dora’s return while he is still nostalgically stroking Dora’s imagined body lying on the couch, learns that Dora has confronted the K.s and that both Herr and Frau K. confessed their deeds. In view of this news, he declines the resumption of treatment for which Dora asks him. Rather than starting the analysis of Dora (and her persistent luetic/hysterical symptoms) anew on the basis of the actuality of the abuses, Freud closes the play/the lecture as he started it: with an affirmation of his theory of hysteria as stemming from repressed sexual desire. However, Freud’s initial statement is modified through its recontextualisation at the end: this time Dora is onstage and silently regards Freud, thus again making him the object of analysis and making his speech seem like hysterical wish-fulfilment. The play’s self-conscious references to Ibsen and his Drama of Petite Hystérie highlight the innovation of Morrissey’s play, which renders its feminist agenda by making the analyst comic. From the play’s outset, laughter is introduced as the most powerful weapon against the analyst. Freud admonishes Dora, “I know you have been accustomed to laugh at doctors, but you will not laugh at me” (D 7); as described above, Dora does not obey this command but repeatedly mocks Freud. On the extra-fictional level, Freud’s warning also serves as a metatheatrical comment that anticipates the laughter of audiences, which is provoked by the play’s techniques of comic exaggeration and parodic recontextualisation. Thus, Dora not only demonstrates how the hysteric protagonist appropriates her ‘malady’ as a performative strategy: it also uses similar guerrilla tactics to those of its protagonist, employing verbatim quotes and arguments from the case study but placing them in contexts which render them comic.
Terry Johnson: Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis (1993) Johnson’s award-winning farce Hysteria opened on the main stage of the Royal Court in August 1993, five months after Dora’s run in London.77 Hysteria participates in the Drama of Hysteria’s project of staging psychoanalysis to upstage its power (cf. Döring 2000: 168), as the play explores the analyst’s fallacies rather than defending his master narratives about his female hysterical patients. As Augustine and Dora, Johnson’s play stages hysteria as a performative malady. Whilst Furse focuses on the foregrounding of the hysteric’s unrecognised pain and Morrissey excavates the subversive
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Terry Johnson: Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
potential of the repetition compulsion inherent in psychoanalytical treatment, Johnson’s contribution radically connects these issues by resorting to farce. Hysteria, which the reviews dubbed a “factual fantasy” (Peter 1993: 966), oscillates between a realistic history play and surrealistic fiction. The play is set in November 1938 in Freud’s study at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, the house in which he spent the final two years of his life after he had emigrated from Vienna in January 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. The play fictionalises the final hours of Freud’s life, which are far from tranquil; not only does he suffer from cancer of the jaw and fear for the lives of his family members left in Austria, but he also has nagging doubts about his theoretical writings. Moreover, he is plagued by the intrusion of two visitors, Salvador Dalí and a young anonymous woman who seeks treatment for her hysterical symptoms. The stage scenery’s meticulous recreation of Freud’s study as well as the verbatim quotations from Freud and Dalí in both the play text and the programme’s extra material contribute to the realistic, even documentary air of the play. The dramatic representations of actual people from Freud’s social sphere in 1938, such as his daughter Anna and his physician,78 reinforce Hysteria’s affinity to historical facts. Even the seemingly far-fetched encounter of Dalí and Freud in Freud’s London home actually took place in July 1938, when Dalí visited Freud and sketched a portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis, whom he saw as a patron saint of the surrealistic movement.79 However, Johnson’s notes beneath the dramatis personae, “the style of the playing varies as Freud’s last thoughts, recent memories and suppressed anxieties dictate the action” (Hysteria 0),80 indicate that the play revisits historical facts as emanations of Freud’s internal reality. In performance, audiences initially are not informed about this intermingling of internal and external reality. It is only towards the end of the play that the realistic style is so severely interrupted by surrealist scenarios that audiences belatedly recognise the psychically rather than externally real character of the entire action, which is shaped by Freud’s thoughts that wander between past and present, between reality, imagination, dream, and morphine-induced hallucinations. In contrast to the historical characters, the young woman intruding into Freud’s study is entirely Johnson’s invention. Jessica claims to be the daughter of Miriam Stein, one of Freud’s hysterical patients, whose case study he published using the pseudonym Rebecca S. However, instead of adopting Rebecca’s case from Freud’s writings, Johnson creates his own fictional case history by combining parameters of Freud’s case studies, such as anorexia, agoraphobia, hysterical tics, and paralyses that relate to childhood memories and the emerging recollection of incestuous sexual abuses.81 Significantly, the only ‘patient’ called Rebecca whom Freud psychoanalyses in his writings is Rebekka West, the protagonist of Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm. While Freud
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“You were very accurate in your impersonation” – Jessica’s performative malady Hysteria employs the fictitious case to demonstrate the damaging impact of Freud’s abandonment of his seduction theory on the life of one particular patient. While Johnson’s Freud figure maintains that he simply abandoned the “theory” because it was “false and erroneous” (H 63), Rebecca’s daughter, Jessica, interprets Freud’s reform as a betrayal of his patients (“So you abandoned them” H 63, my italics) and informs Freud of the dire consequences that his recantation had for her mother and for herself. By bringing the sad events after Rebecca’s therapy to Freud’s attention, Jessica presents a split image of Freud’s ostensible patient: “Your patient Rebecca is a successful case history; my mother Miriam a suicidal hysteric” (H 60). Jessica quotes from Rebecca’s diary and thereby lets Freud know that Rebecca felt happy for the first time in her adult life after he had healed her from her hysterical symptoms by making her remember the oral rapes by her father (H 58). However, when she happily returned to thank Freud one year after her treatment, he informed her about his new theory of infantile sexuality and suggested that she had imagined and secretly even desired the abuses by her father. As Rebecca was devastated by these ideas, her mental health declined and she finally committed suicide “in the washroom of an insane asylum near Paris” (H 59). Although the passage does not explicitly refer to the Salpêtrière, it evokes associations with Charcot’s grandes hystériques. Thus, rather than retroactively ‘healing’ the hysteric patient as Morrissey and Furse do in their plays, Johnson has her suffer even more than presented in Freud’s alleged case study. He even renders her suicidal to demonstrate the damaging consequences of Freud’s recantation of his seduction theory. Although Hysteria promotes the theses of seduction theory revivalists such as Masson through Jessica’s statements, the play ultimately evades a clearcut and altogether serious position on the topic through its hallucinatory structure as well as its comic features. Ridiculing and criticising Freud at times, Johnson’s play by the same token emphasises the analyst’s merits and compassionately depicts his suffering from cancer as well as his anxiety about the Nazi persecution; as the reviews remarked, the play is both “blasphemous and reverential” in its treatment of the “wounded god” Freud (Peter 1993: 966–7). The act of fakery on the extra-fictional level is taken up on the level of the play’s action by the figure of Jessica. Like the play itself, its protagonist
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in “Some Character-Types Met in Psychoanalytic Work” turns the dramatic heroine into a case study, Johnson cunningly creates a dramatised case study of his own by imitating Freud’s techniques.82 Thus, he demonstrates how easily Freud’s discourse can be mimicked – and the fact that the reviews and the literary criticism on Hysteria failed to notice that Johnson invented the case of Rebecca S. amply demonstrates this.
The Drama of Hysteria
pretends to be a Freudian case study. When Jessica first appears in front of Freud’s French windows, she holds a razor blade to her wrists to make Freud admit her to his room. She thus already signals her ostensibly pathological condition. Once Jessica explains why she has to talk to Freud, she displays intimate knowledge of psychoanalytic terminology. She starts out with the mimetic competence that Dora in Morrissey’s play gains only at the end: “I have inverted morbid tendencies. [ ] And a great deal of free floating anxiety desperate for someone to land on. I am mildly dysfunctional” (H 8). When Freud asks her whether she had recently been in analysis, her prompt answer that she had recently visited a library which demonstrates that psychoanalysis since Dora’s treatment has developed from a code for the enlightened few to an accessible, academically established discourse. Jessica knows Freud’s theory very well, but far from being a devout follower she mocks his concepts, such as penis envy: How in a thousand years of civilised thought anyone could imagine a penis an object of envy is beyond me. Those I have seen erect and bobbing seem positively mortified at their own enthusiasm. The only one I ever saw flaccid looked like something that had fallen out of its shell. Euugh! Why would anyone envy a squidgy single-minded probiscus that thinks it’s God’s special gift to those without. (H 12) This outspoken criticism comically deconstructs Freud’s gender concepts that base on a model of female lack and male castration anxiety and it discredits his crucial axiom of the Oedipus complex. Jessica’s comments on Freud’s theory anachronistically use the jargon of the 1990s rather than that of the play’s setting in 1938. Thus, Hysteria not only highlights a shift in the discourse on sexuality that took place between the Vienna of the fin de siècle, when Freud wished that “a higher degree of honesty about sexual things should become a duty among men and women” (1898E: 266; cf. 1898: 495), and present-day London, but it also exploits the comic potential of the fact that sexual frankness subverts rather than reinforces Freud’s theories. Johnson’s play takes the notion of Freud’s ‘script’, which is already evinced in Augustine and Dora, literally. After her rather self-assured entrance, Jessica – to Freud and the audiences still a nameless young woman – starts to imitate hysterical talk and Symptomhandlungen. She cries and begins to narrate the story of Rebecca S. as if it were her own (H 13). Jessica constantly interrupts her speech by rubbing her breast, retching, and shaking her stiff fingers (H 14); as she assures Freud that no physiological impairment causes these symptoms, she invites their interpretation as hysterical manifestations (H 15). Although Freud initially listens to Jessica and even makes notes, he finally recognises her conduct as re-enactment of the details of a case he published thirty years ago and accuses her of “hysterical dishonesty” (H 16). Thus, rather than demonstrating how the therapist installs
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a hysteric ‘command performance’ as Furse’s play does and rather than demonstrating how the patient grasps Freud’s terminology, as Dora does, Hysteria stages theatrical, rehearsed performances of Freud’s script against the analyser’s will. Jessica takes his published case study, which contains both direct speech and detailed descriptions of hysterical symptoms, as a play text which provides lines and elaborate stage directions. Freud acknowledges Jessica’s perfect embodiment of his meticulous script, telling her as a director or playwright could tell an actress: “I was very explicit in my descriptions. You were very accurate in your impersonation” (H 16). However, Jessica is not content with her successful embodiment of Freud’s account. When she produces a journal Rebecca kept of her visits to Freud, she demands that Freud perform according to his patient’s “unauthorized script” (Döring 1996: 39), which contradicts Freud’s master narrative. Just as Augustine and Dora attempt to make their therapists and the audience listen to their version of what has happened to them, Jessica wants Freud (and the spectators) to study Rebecca’s notes and thus to reconsider the case history (H 47). Because Freud refuses to read out his own lines, Jessica makes Dalí read them, while she herself recites Rebecca’s part, which she knows by heart. Only as their enactment proceeds towards its revelatory climax, does Freud finally take over his own role, professionally leading ‘Rebecca’ to the recovery of her repressed childhood memories: Jessica: [ ] I hate the dark; my mother allows me a candle. My father thinks it a waste. He will open my door and bark ‘put it out’. The door opens (Pause. She’s still for a moment.) Jessica: Don’t put the knife in your mouth. He opens the door. Put out the candle. The taste of salt and my my fingers. (She sobs quietly.) Freud: Why are you crying? [ ] I think you know. [ ] (Sobbing openly, growing in violence.) Jessica: He says ‘put it out’. Put it ! Put it ! Freud: That’s enough. Jessica: The candle is not upside down! It’s me, I’m upside down! My head is hanging over the side of the bed! Put it ! Freud: That’s enough now. Rebecca. Jessica: Put it in your mouth! (H 57–8) During the dramatic climax of Jessica’s impersonation of Rebecca, the boundary between mere playacting and genuine suffering again dissolves. It is no longer decidable whether Jessica deliberately performs the hysterical symptoms or whether her body is involuntarily seized by them: “The hysterical symptoms take hold of her, more exaggerated and more frequent.
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Terry Johnson: Hysteria
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Other physical tics manifest themselves. She returns to the couch in an increasingly distressed state” (H 56). Thus, while Jessica’s first embodiment of Rebecca was identifiable as a calculated performance only belatedly, the second performance, which sets out as deliberate playacting, is transformed into ‘authentic’ pain. Foregrounding the performativity as well as the malady inherent in hysteria, these embodiments call attention to the untenable boundary between performing and being performed. The final scene reinforces the repetition compulsion inherent in Jessica’s performative malady. It reveals that Rebecca’s trauma not only affects her daughter as a second-hand experience she read about in her mother’s diary, as Freud suggests (H 68). Jessica confesses that she was abused by the same man as her mother, her grandfather, and that she recognised only after the molestations took place – when reading her mother’s journal – that the trauma of incestuous abuse was a shared experience of mother and daughter. Miriam/Rebecca herself sadly anticipated this repetition, a secret knowledge that contributed to her desperation (H 90). Rebecca’s suicide restaged the trauma of oral rape as well as the therapeutic force-feeding she might have encountered during her therapies, as she had been unable to eat properly. She drowned her organs by swallowing a rubber tube that was attached to a tap. Dying, she demonstrated that the therapy at the Parisian clinic had meant a repetition of the abuses for her, just as Freud’s earlier betrayal had equalled that of her abusive father. Presenting psychiatric and psychoanalytic treatment as a repetition and reinforcement of the traumatic abuses that made the treatment necessary in the first place, Hysteria displays a characteristic of the Drama of Hysteria that is also apparent in Furse’s and Morrissey’s plays. Freud’s words after Jessica alias Rebecca’s confession emphasise the analyst’s insensitivity to (inherited) trauma. When Jessica reveals that Rebecca was her mother, Freud fatally remarks, “you have her mouth” (H 59). Just as Rebecca’s faked case history draws on Freud’s actual writings, the deception on the play’s inner-fictional level, which makes Freud (and audiences alike) initially take Jessica for Rebecca, seems to take its cue from Freud’s own writings. In “Der Wahn und die Träume in Walter Jensens ‘Gradiva’ ” (“Delusions and Dreams in W. Jensen’s Gradiva”), Freud recounts the story of a physician, who had once lost one of his women patients suffering from Graves’ disease [ ]. One day, several years later, a girl entered his consulting room, who, in spite of all efforts, he could not help recognizing as the dead one. He could frame only a single thought: ‘So, after all it’s true that the dead can come back to life’ [ ]. The doctor to whom this occurred [ ] was none other than myself. (1907bE: 95; cf. 1907b: 99)
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As in Freud’s article, in Hysteria, Jessica’s performance of the ghostly return of one of Freud’s former patients is indicative of Freud’s feelings of guilt about ‘wrong medication’, that is, the revision of his seduction theory, which ultimately led to the patient’s death. It is only during the last minutes of the performance that the audience and Freud find out Jessica’s name. Beforehand, her deliberate performances as well as her acting out of Rebecca’s case story associate her with Rebecca S. Jessica’s embodiment of her dead mother, which keeps Rebecca and her fate alive, bears similarities to the melancholic identifications that I will discuss in Chapter 3. “Fragments of an analysis of obsessional neurosis” or Male hysteria? The play’s title Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis announces two distinct psychoanalytic diagnoses, which Freud in his lecture “Der Sinn der Symptome” (“The Sense of Symptoms”) characterises as the two forms of mental illness on which psychoanalysis was founded (cf. 1917b: 265/1917bE: 258). As Freud identified a preponderance of female hysterics and male obsessional neurotics (cf. 1896: 386/1896E: 168 and 1926: 114/1926E: 143), the gendering and the clinical pictures of the diseases seem to stipulate the characterisation of Rebecca/Jessica as hysteric and Freud as obsessional neurotic. However, the play soon dissolves such a division. In his writings, Freud characterises obsessional neurosis as a state of constant doubt that forecloses decision-making and argues that it involves a death complex (cf. 1909a/1909aE). In a self-analytic speech early in the play, Johnson’s Freud character reflects on his imminent death and explains, “this morbid preparation is difficult. I have never liked waiting for trains; standing on the platform looking back down the track: never a glance, of course, in the direction of one’s destination. Like all trains I have ever caught this one is late. And so I wait. I rearrange the luggage at my feet” (H 5). These initial remarks set the play’s agenda, as Hysteria’s action is part of Freud’s gaze back down the track of his life; the rearrangement of his luggage concerns not only the preparation of his latest manuscript, but also the subsequent encounter with Jessica, who forces Freud to reconsider his theories. Because the play’s ending makes Freud sink into the sleep “which will become his last” (H 92) and then makes Jessica appear once again, the circular structure of the play suggests belatedly that the play’s action might have taken place after Freud’s death. As is characteristic of obsessional neurosis, Johnson’s Freud character “is obliged against his will to brood and speculate” (1917bE: 258; “muß gegen seinen Willen grübeln und spekulieren” 1917b: 266). Thus, Freud is unable to decide whether he should publish his heretic essay “Moses and Monotheism”. Despite his anxiety about his sisters and his empathy with other Jews who are persecuted, deported, and killed by the Nazis, Johnson’s
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Terry Johnson: Hysteria
The Drama of Hysteria
Freud figure (as the actual Freud did) comes to deny the existence of Yahweh in his late work. Regardless of the warnings of his physician Yahuda (“Deny Moses and you deny us. At this time, of all times” H 19; “You lead us to an agnostic hell” H 20), Freud develops a radical understanding of religion as “the neurosis of humanity” (H 20) and argues that the belief in God stems from an obsessive idea. He intends to publish his work, thereby risking being regarded a “traitor Jew” (H 20).83 Despite such indicators of Freud’s obsessional neurosis, the advertising and reception of the play tended to dispense with the play’s subtitle and instead associated Freud’s state with hysteria. The cover of the play’s first publication by Methuen, which at the same time served as the programme for the original production, shows a photograph of Freud taken in the 1930s, which depicts Freud as an elderly scholar smoking a cigar. As the jacket presents Freud’s portrait under the heading Hysteria and does not display the subtitle at all, it suggests regarding Freud as a case of male hysteria. This suggestion is reinforced by the programme’s back cover, which teases spectators and readers by asking, “why is he [Freud] close to hysteria?”. The publication of the revised play text in 1995, concurrent with the play’s revival at the Duke of York’s Theatre, modifies Freud’s picture – Freud now sports a Daliesque moustache – but maintains the combination of Freud’s portrait and the title Hysteria. The posters of international productions of the play, such as the French production directed by John Malkovich and the production at Florida’s Hippodrome State Theatre directed by Mary Hausch employed a similar design that associates Freud with hysteria and surrealist iconography. Advertising Freud as a case of male hysteria, the play participates in the rising interest in male hysteria in the 1990s. Concomitant with the translation of Charcot’s case studies of male hysteria into English in the 1990s, allowing an assessment of male Grande Hystérie for a broader group of international critics, the New Hysterians have rediscovered the topic and its connection to issues of gender and sexuality. Micale, the leading scholar of male hysteria, argues that Charcot’s case studies of male hysterics display the (hyperbolic) imitation of gender norms just like those of his more famous female patients, thus revealing “normative gender representations, encoded ideals of normal and abnormal masculinity” (1991: 202).84 The broad cultural acknowledgement of male hysteria has been overdue, since during the two world wars of the twentieth century, men suddenly became the “most visible group of sufferers” from symptoms that resembled those of hysteria (Borossa 2001: 59) and could thus have replaced the female grandes and petites hystériques as main representatives of the disease.85 However, the traumatised soldiers’ syndrome was labelled ‘shell shock’ or ‘war neurosis’ rather than ‘hysteria’. According to Lucien Israël, the diagnosis of the femininely connoted disease ‘hysteria’ would have been an even more devastating shock to the returned soldier than war itself. For a man, the
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no accident: it’s the result of avoidance, suppression, and disguise. Although male hysteria has been clinically identified at least since the seventeenth century, physicians have hidden it under such euphemistic diagnoses such as neurasthenia, hypochondria, phthiatism, neurospasia, eleorexia, koutorexie, Briquet’s syndrome, shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder. (1998: 64) These alternative terms intend to save male patients from the feminine and sexual connotations of hysteria. While female hysteria is usually linked to sexual trauma, excessive sexuality, or sexual dissatisfaction, male forms of hysteria are mostly associated with railway accidents or war traumata (Bronfen 1996: 148). Recently, critics have interpreted shell shock not only as a reaction to physical injuries but also as a “male solution to the burden of masculinity” (Borossa 2001: 58), thus likening male to female hysteria as a way of dealing with the pressure exerted by gender norms. Corresponding to the scholarly (re)discovery of male hysteria, a number of novels and movies in the 1990s centre on the hysterical man, such as Martin Amis’s The Information and Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre (Showalter 1998: 98). The alleged hyper-virile heroes of the 1980s and 1990s action movie have been read as male hysterics (cf. Paul Smith 1989, Tasker 1993: 109–31, Blaseio 2003), like the protagonists of neo-noir depictions of masculinity in crisis such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001) and Ethan and Joel Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). As Bronfen states, “if one looks at Hollywood mainstream cinema of the 90s [ ] one does get the impression that it is particularly ‘straight white males’ who have a problem with the symbolic order” (2002: 66). Hence, roughly a century after the iconographic and discursive association of femininity and hysteria in the Iconographie photographique, towards the end of the twentieth century a popular iconography of (heterosexual, white) male hysteria appears to emerge. The presentation of Freud as a case of male hysteria in Johnson’s Hysteria is part of this larger cultural trend. The play highlights that Freud struggles with what Juliet Mitchell considers the ‘clear task for men’ (“accept the law of the father and you will not be hysteric” 2000: 52), as the play depicts Freud in a persistent conflict with male authority figures. When Freud at the very beginning of the play wakes up from a short night’s sleep, he sees a large,
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diagnosis of hysteria would have been “the real injury, a sign of weakness, a castration in a word. To say to a man, ‘You are hysteric’, became under these conditions a way of saying to him, ‘You are not a man’ ” (Israël 1976: 60, trans. in Showalter 1998: 77). The fact that male hysteria is largely denied within medical studies is part of a cultural process that according to Showalter is
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dark, primordial paternal figure (that turns out to be Yahuda), which he feels persecuted by and which causes “unbearable pain” (H 3) and “enormous, paralysing tension” (H 3) in him. The sense that Freud is haunted by a paternal presence recurs throughout the play. Not only does he argue with Yahuda, whom the dramatis personae describe as a “large man in his sixties. An even greater weight and status than Freud” (H 0), about the planned publication of “Moses and Monotheism” (which contests the existence of the fatherly God), but his clash with Jessica also focuses on the role that paternal figures, especially Freud’s own father, played in the revision of his seduction theory. Jessica’s criticism presents a complex explanation for Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory, but highlights that the theoretical revision included the rehabilitation and protection of fathers, particularly Freud’s own father. Jessica claims that Freud identified signs of psychoneurosis in his sister Marie and hence suspected his father of having abused her. She quotes Freud’s letter to Fliess, in which he hints at his suspicion: “In every case of hysteria, the father, not even excluding my own, had to be blamed as a pervert” (H 77). Notwithstanding Freud’s insistence that this thought was an “error”, “a bottomless pit which could have swallowed us [his family] all” (H 77), Jessica maintains that Freud pursued the topic of paternal incestuous sexual child abuse no further because of his father’s death in the same year, which made him feel guilty. Furthermore, Jessica knows about a dream Freud once had that betrayed his own incestuous desires for his daughter Matilde: “Not long I ago I dreamt that I was feeling over-affectionate to Matilde (my eldest daughter, aged nine)” (H 77).86 Although Freud defends himself against Jessica’s accusations that he has been complicit in child abuse, the play reinforces the validity of Jessica’s arguments when Freud makes Yahuda cross out “not excluding my own” from his letter to Fliess that accuses fathers of sexual abuse (H 92). Freud thus attempts to eradicate any evidence that personal motives made him emphasise the sexual fantasies of daughters as well as the roles of “nursemaids, governesses, servants, siblings” (H 77) as actual perpetrators of sexual child abuse. Nevertheless, Jessica keeps on deconstructing Freud’s life work. She returns to confront him with her own memories of being abused by her grandfather, which both support the veracity of her mother’s recollections and weaken Freud’s axiom of the Oedipus complex: “He was no beloved, half-desired father to me. He was a wiry old man who smelt of beer and cheese and would limp to my bed and masturbate on me” (H 90). When Freud finally breaks down and weeps, admitting that he is less tranquil and complacent than he pretended to be, he encourages Jessica to make her objections and insights public, as if entitling her to his succession: “the young may speak what the old cannot bear to utter” (H 91). Jessica’s answer – which is her final statement in the play – not only conveys her persistent psychic pain, it moreover objects to Freud’s fundamental notion of catharsis through verbalisation: “Because I can articulate these things does not mean I am able to
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“Nothing than a neurotic manifestation” – Freud’s theatre for forgotten scenes The play encourages audiences to consider Freud a case of male hysteria all the more when it, increasingly towards the end of the play, reveals the degree to which the play’s entire action is a ‘theatre for forgotten scenes’, in which Freud relives suppressed anxieties and doubts. Throughout the play’s realistic parts, remarks by the characters indicate the possibly imagined quality of the action, which exteriorises Freud’s fantasies and fears (cf. H 7 and H 72). In the latter part, the play employs Daliesque representations of the unconscious to emphasise the hallucinatory quality of the scenes. As in “the camembert of time and space” (H 84) painted by the Spanish artist, clocks start to melt, trap doors open, the walls of the rooms soften, bodies are pressed against the soft walls from the outside, a train hurtles through the garden, and corpses evolve from the closet. Transforming the initial stage realism into a surrealist Daliesque scenario, the play creates its individual version of hystericised realism, as the reviews acknowledged. Thus, Benedict Nightingale reads the play’s combination of serious and comic features as well as the intrusion of surrealism as hysteric self-fashionings: “the title could almost be referring to the shifting styles of the piece. It is earnest and sombre, then babbles, then plays the fool, then becomes solemn again, then very childish, and then, its hysteria rising to psychosis, it starts wildly hallucinating. Dramatically, it is a mess and sometimes such an irritating mess that I longed to clap a straitjacket on it” (1993: 968). Portraying the play’s action as Freud’s guiltridden fantasy, Hysteria’s version of hystericised realism makes audiences share the perception of the male hysteric Freud rather than the allegedly hysterical patient Rebecca/Jessica. When the play represents Freud’s unconscious by means of Daliesque scenarios, it resorts to a style which the painter himself understood as inspired by psychoanalysis. In the first Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton defined the method of ‘psychic automatism’, which like the psychoanalytical method of free association was meant to correspond to “the actual functioning of thought [ ] in the absence of any control exercised by reason” (1969 [1924]: 26). While Breton and Louis Aragon, as noted above, in an article entitled “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria” referred to the Charcotian Grande Hystérie and declared the convulsive hysteric to be their ideal of beauty, Dalí took inspiration from Freud’s psychoanalytic insights for his ‘critical-paranoid method’. In the play, Dalí praises the analyst as the sole person who understands “the genius of Dalí’s spontaneous method of
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bear them” (H 91). Although Jessica remembers the abuses by her grandfather and is able to speak about them, she has not yet overcome the trauma; the ‘talking cure’ has not healed Jessica as it had (temporarily) healed her mother Rebecca. Even Jessica’s final words are thus part of her contestation of Freud’s life work.
The Drama of Hysteria
irrational cognition and his critical interpretative association of delusional phenomena” (H 29), and emphasises the importance of Freud’s work for his art: “Dalí and I are engaged in a great struggle to drag up the monstrous from the safety of our dreams and commit to the canvas. It is you who have inspired this” (H 30). By dragging up the monstrous from Freud’s dreams, the play enacts the evidence that Jessica invoked earlier. The intercom no longer transports the adult voice of Freud’s daughter Anna but plays back a scene of child abuse: “From the intercom a child’s scream. Child: No, Papa! No! And a father’s solemn reprimand. Father: Sigmund” (H 83). This vision suggests that Freud has either witnessed his father’s abuses of his sister, as Jessica suggested, or else that he himself is a victim of child abuse. When Jessica urges Freud to admit the importance of his father for the enunciation of the seduction theory, he evades a clear answer by saying, “What is more relevant is what I could not remember” (H 90). Trying to get rid of the torturing apparitions, Freud implores Jessica: “You are nothing than a neurotic manifestation [ ]. Of a buried subconscious of a [ ]. You don’t exist. I can’t hear you” (H 85). Freud refrains from referring to himself in pathological terms, leaving the nature and cause of his anxious hallucinations opaque. Visualising Jessica’s second claim about Freud’s own incestuous desire as well, a naked woman alias Freud’s daughter Matilde appears and seduces Freud. The sequence of surrealistic dream fragments climaxes in an image which links Freud’s and Jessica’s childhood memories and which shows that just as Jessica’s conduct is directed by the ghostly presence of her mother, so Freud is acting according to the wishes of his dead father: (Freud tries to hide in the closet. Opens the door and through it topples a cadaverous, festering, half-man, half corpse. Screeching music. [ ] Grotesque Images appear, reminiscent of Dali’s work, but relevant to Freud’s doubts, fears and guilts. [ ] Freud is horrified as the contents of his unconscious are spilled across the stage. [ ] Suddenly there appears a huge, crippled, faceless Patriarch. He enters and towers over Freud. [ ] Jessica enters, searching blindly.) Freud: Papa? Jessica: Mama? Woman: Papa? Jessica: Mama? Corpse: Sigmund! [ ] (Jessica is grasped and awkwardly embraced by the figure. Her eyes are screwed shut so as not see his face.) Patriarch: Open your eyes. (Jessica shakes her head.)
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Patriarch: Open your eyes. Then I shall open them for you. (The razor appears in his hand and he cuts open one of her eyes.)
This climactic passage condenses psychoanalytic, surrealistic, and biblical imagery. While the figure of the omnipotent Patriarch refers to psychoanalysis and particularly to Freud’s writing “Totem und Tabu” (“Totem and Taboo”, 1912/13), the cutting open of the eye resembles Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Dalí from 1928. In the film’s first notorious sequence, the eye of a girl is cut by a razor blade. Dagmar von Hoff points out that the shocking potential and the starkness of the image of the eye being cut, which makes the spectators divert their gazes from the image, excels representations of incest, which lack such visual shock potential (2003: 371). Von Hoff further argues that blindness and blinding recur in the literature on incest because the topos stands for incest’s unrepresentability – as that which cannot be visualised, incest blinds its victims (ibid.: 298). By restaging the punishment Jessica was threatened with, the play metonymically replaces the incest by its punitive consequences. Through its hystericised realism, it hence offers an image that captures incest’s painfulness, unbearableness, and the foreclosure of ‘witnessing’ in a traumatic experience. Since it presents the surreal fantasy scenarios as evidence of the serious criticism pronounced by Jessica, the play accepts surrealism’s “invitation to explore the inner world of fantasy without abandoning an actively critical attitude toward reality” (Suleiman 1992: 419). Hysteria’s stylistic shift from realism to surrealist scenarios (which is, because of the circular ending, to be repeated ad infinitum) is characteristic of the farce, whose “starting point [ ] may be normality; but that normality is pushed further and further towards absurdity, anarchy, even nightmare” (Smith 1989: 11). Johnson’s farce takes the idea of an evolving nightmare literally, as the action is increasingly transformed into Freud’s consciencestricken hallucination. Hysteria employs the typical basic plot line of the farce, namely the story of a protagonist who has to deal with unexpected intruders and the discovery of secrets, which leads to people being hidden in closets, the comic effect that arises from confusing people with each other, and unlikely coincidences. This plot line is rendered through farcical stylistic devices, such as slapstick, sexual innuendos, stereotypes, frenetic activity, and the vast use of dramatic irony.87 Leslie Smith in his extensive study of the modern British farce has theorised a function of farce that is crucial for Johnson’s project. To illustrate farce’s capacity to stage taboo subjects (ibid.: 8), Smith draws on Freud’s argument that jokes are often the return of the repressed in a socially acceptable
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(Music crashes. Lights crash to a tight downlight on Freud. Stillness. Silence.) (H 87–8)
The Drama of Hysteria
guise (1905b: 11/1905bE: 13–14). Resorting to farce, Johnson’s contribution to the contemporary Drama of Hysteria utilises comic features for the exploration of the socially as well as individually repressed topic of incestuous sexual child abuse – supposedly “things one shouldn’t joke about” (Smith 1993: 967), as the reviews remarked. Whereas most reviewers criticised the play for its inadequate treatment of serious topics,88 I would argue that Johnson manages to tackle the delicate subjects of sexual child abuse, suicide, exile, and the holocaust with seriousness. The artists involved in the production of Hysteria acknowledged Johnson’s creation of a new genre of ‘tragic farce’ and the Royal Court’s artistic director Stephen Daldry decided to revive Hysteria for the Court’s classic season in 1995 because of Johnson’s innovation of genre (Daldry, Goodman, and Lloyd 1995). Hysteria’s farcical elements link up with the play’s portrayal of hysteria as performative malady. The abundant metatheatrical elements in Hysteria,89 another characteristic of the farce (Smith 1989: 10), are not only an important source of the comic in the play, but also highlight the theatricality involved in the performative malady of hysteria, such as in Jessica’s re-enactment of her mother’s script, which is presented as a play-within-theplay. As noted above, Jessica initially makes Dalí read out Freud’s lines of the drama of little hysteria provided by Rebecca’s diary. Dalí’s failure to recite Freud’s lines properly offers such a caricaturing imitation of the analyst that ultimately Freud, reluctantly, takes over his own part. Ridiculing the analyst’s role through (flawed) imitation, Hysteria adopts the very methods to make people comic posited by Freud himself in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious) (Döring 2002: 122) – in spite of letting Jessica criticise Freud’s work on the joke (“If you were going to analyse jokes you might have chosen a couple that were funny. I suspect you’ve no sense of humour” H 11–12). The mimicry of Freud by Dalí is doubled on the extra-fictional level by the actor playing the Freud figure. In contrast to Dalí’s flawed imitation, Henry Goodman impersonated the analyst in the original production almost perfectly. Nicholas de Jongh praised his “cunning theatrical impersonation” (1993: 966), Michael Coveney called him a “convincing Freud lookalike” (1993: 968), and Nightingale even contended, “I did not doubt for one moment that I was watching the aged shrink himself” (1993: 968). In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud himself identified faithful imitation as a source of pleasure through comic relief (1905b: 239/1905bE: 210) and noted that this pleasure might even be increased by the techniques of caricature, parody, travesty, and unmasking. He argues that mimicry gives quite extraordinary pleasure to the hearer and makes its object comic even if it is still far from the exaggeration of a caricature [ ]. Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim
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As Freud himself is such a figure invested with authority and respect, Johnson (like Furse and Morrissey) employs the very techniques of impersonation described by Freud in order to undermine and question Freud’s authority.90 While the farce thus, on the one hand, highlights the deliberate playacting involved in the performative malady of hysteria and allows for the subversion of Freud’s authority through processes of playacting, on the other, it highlights the large degree to which the figures are performed beyond their control. As is typical of farce, disguises and role-plays are forced upon the characters in Hysteria, whose “quick-witted improvisations of dialogue or action become essential, and the characters are propelled into frantic activity to keep one step ahead of disaster” (ibid.: 209). The play offers a farcical version of the performative malady of hysteria, as Freud not only acts out his repressed fantasies and fears in his encounters with Dalí and Jessica, but is also constantly forced to enact deceitful performances for Yahuda in order to hide the characters or to explain their presence. For example, Freud makes Jessica spontaneously perform as Dalí’s Russian wife to make her presence plausible to Yahuda. The characters directly comment on the growing absurdity of the action, on the farcical direction that Freud’s hysteric ‘theatre for forgotten scenes’ takes. Thus, Freud tries to call the other characters to order by saying, “Could we please remember this is my study, not some boulevard farce” (H 10), and Jessica likens their experiences to a “pathetic farce” (H 45). By presenting Freud’s theatre for forgotten scenes as a tragic farce, Hysteria emphasises the pain inherent in hysterical performance (as Furse’s play does) and at the same time resorts to comedy to question and undermine Freud’s authority (as Morrissey’s play does). By portraying the play’s farcical action as an emanation from Freud’s unconscious, the play presents the vengeful return of (the daughter of) one of Freud’s hysteric patients as a symptom of Freud’s own, male hysteria.
Hysteria as performative malady The Drama of Hysteria has developed its formal and narrative idiosyncrasies just as other genres of ‘hysterical fiction’ have done.91 As reconsiderations of psychiatric and psychoanalytical case studies which juxtapose female patients and male therapists, the plays set out to subvert the ostensibly clear-cut gendering of sanity and insanity. Despite the dichotomy of ‘sane’ male analyst and ‘insane’ female patient that the plays initially install, their dramatis personae never consist merely of patient and therapist. While Augustine features two male therapists, Charcot and Freud, Dora’s Freud is
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to authority and respect, which are in some sense ‘sublime’. They are procedures for Herabsetzung. (1905bE: 200; cf. 1905b: 228)
The Drama of Hysteria
aided by Dora’s father and Herr K., and Jessica in Hysteria is confronted with Freud, Dalí, and Freud’s physician Dr Yahuda. Significantly, female characters that might be supportive of the hysteric, such as Dora’s and Augustine’s mothers, remain offstage. The character constellation, with a majority of fraternising powerful male characters, hence reinforces the isolation and initial powerlessness of the female patients and at the same time enhances the impact of their defiance. By identifying with the hysteric’s female perspective, the Drama of Hysteria opposes and criticises the analyst’s male master narrative and the patriarchal assumptions inherent in the case stories. Given the theatricality involved in both the symptoms of hysteria – the ‘theatre for forgotten scenes’ – and the cures proposed, the theatre appears an apt arena to renegotiate the case studies and to undertake an “acting cure that displaces the therapist as director of women’s emotional theatre” (Showalter 1998: 107). The plays establish a counter discourse to their hypotexts, a “theorised stage practice” (Aston 1999: 11), which de-pathologises the allegedly hysterical heroine by presenting her conduct as a sane reaction to an insane environment shaped by abusive patriarchal structures.92 While the plays thus ‘cure’ the ostensible hysteric, they conversely, especially in Dora and Hysteria, foreground the therapist’s own hysterical potential. As a result, they stage a role reversal through which the female patient becomes the agent who examines the male analyser. In Dora, this role reversal is achieved by Dora’s imitation of Freud’s methods and interpretative patterns as well as her abandonment of the therapy, which renders Freud hysterically dwelling in false memories. In Hysteria, the entire action belatedly turns out to be a product of Freud’s own, male hysteria. The depicted performative malady affects the aesthetics of the plays, which display distinct forms of a hystericised realism that grant audiences insight into the protagonist’s internal reality. Furse’s Augustine sutures the perception of audiences and the perception of Augustine, most palpably through the device of the double, whose violin playing and dance express Augustine’s feelings of rage and desperation. Moreover, the play makes audiences literally share Augustine’s point of view by externalising her loss of colour sight in the colourless lighting of the black-and-white stage scenery and costumes. The realistic main plot of Dora is interrupted by Dora’s dreams, which allow audiences to sense Dora’s feelings of anxiety and powerlessness, while in Hysteria the increasing takeover of the play’s action by Freud’s repressed fears and fantasies is reinforced by a surrealistic transformation of the meticulously realistic set and the initially realistic action. My readings of the plays have argued that hysteria, which in its changeful history has often served as a metonymy and hyperbole for femininity, becomes a compelling metaphor for the performative quality of gender in the Drama of Hysteria. In the plays, hysteria is constituted by the intersection of deliberate performing – Augustine’s shows in the lecture hall,
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Dora’s theatre of transference, Jessica’s role-play as Rebecca – and moments of being performed, such as the enforced actualisation of Grande Hystérie, the acting out of traumatic memories, and Freud’s succumbing to scenarios of his unconscious. Through the interweaving of deliberate performing and unconscious repetition compulsion, hysteria structurally equals gender, which is, according to Butler’s theory, also performatively constituted by the incessant, ritualised actualisation of gender norms. The plays’ staging of hysteria throws different aspects of gender performativity into relief. Since Augustine’s hysteric fits are exposed as results of ‘image-ination’, as the embodiment of the omnipresent images at the Salpêtrière, Augustine offers a potent metaphor of how ‘docile bodies’, through ritualised, enforced repetitions, come to materialise according to prevailing gender norms – which, like Grande Hystérie, are naturalised and declared to be anthropological constants that are “as old as the human race” (A 21). Although Augustine’s closing monologue preaches the abandonment and explosion of the performative repetitions that are required to attain cultural intelligibility and although it envisions her return as ‘authentic’ female body beyond performativity, her final exit in drag does not practise such desertion. Instead, it highlights the potentially subversive productivity that is inherent in the performativity to be left behind. In Morrissey’s Dora, this productive use of the cultural tools and modules that shape the cultural configuration and perception of hysteria and femininity are of central concern. Rather than focusing on the pain inherent in the enforced, ritualised reproduction of hysterical femininity/feminine hysteria as Augustine does, Morrissey’s play makes Dora appropriate her malady through performative strategies, such as parodic recontextualisation and hyperbole. These strategies not only undermine the gendered power structure at the heart of her encounters with Freud, but also dismantle the stereotypical notion of the sexually obsessed female hysteric. While Furse’s Augustine focuses on uncovering the protagonist’s psychic pain and the manifold repetition compulsions inherent in hysteria, Morrissey’s Dora distils a comedy from the Freudian case study and foregrounds the subversive potential of the hysteric’s capacity for imitation. Resorting to farce, Johnson’s Hysteria connects these concerns. It features a female hysteric protagonist whose performances of hysteria highlight the interlocking and inseparability of modes of performing and of being performed in the performative malady: Jessica’s hysteric symptoms turn out to be deliberate simulations, while her theatrical enactment of hysteria transmutes into acting out her traumata. However, the play twists the status of the female hysteric when the action increasingly turns out to be shaped by, even entirely emanating from, Freud’s unconscious. Thus, the appearances of the female hysteric become a symptom of Freud’s own performative malady, his ‘theatre for forgotten scenes’ that forces him to enact and act out repressed conflicts with paternal figures. Some of the aspects of my alignment of hysteria and gender theory will return and become more central in the following chapter on trauma. Since
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Hysteria as Performative Malady 91
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Trauma Drama does not focus on protagonists in therapeutic settings, it is not concerned with the theatricality involved in psychiatric and psychoanalytical treatment, but explores trauma as performative malady in the everyday lives of the traumatised protagonists. In my following readings, I will investigate how the plays manage to render the traumatisations of their protagonists intelligible and palpable for audiences. Further, I will enquire how the protagonists’ traumatisation comes to represent the workings of gender performativity. Which role do aspects of trauma theory play in this context, such as acting out, working through, dissociation, and belatedness? And how do they affect the aesthetics of the plays?
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2
Trauma concepts, trauma culture Trauma Drama engages with a concept that has been so prominent in a number of contemporary Western discourses, among them psychiatric, psychoanalytical, artistic, journalistic, legal and cultural theoretical discourses, that scholars describe the contemporary North American society as “wound culture” (Seltzer 1997, 1998) and speak of a “traumaculture” (Luckhurst 2003) in the British context.1 The term ‘trauma’ was first used to indicate a general form of injury and came to be associated with a wounding of the mind by the end of the nineteenth century, when it designated the sudden prostration of the nervous system through surgical shock (Leys 2000: 255). As outlined in Chapter 1 on hysteria, Breuer and Freud – as well as other physicians such as Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, and Morton Price – developed the concept of psychical trauma. Present-day psychiatric explanations of traumatisation are based on these accounts, and especially Freud’s psychoanalytic theory has informed the current medical and, even more prominently so, cultural theoretical notions of trauma. In psychoanalytic theory, trauma designates “an event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organisation” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 465). Trauma plays a crucial role in a number of mental disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but is most prominent in the classification of “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, a category that has replaced earlier concepts such as shell shock or traumatic neurosis (Caruth 1995a: 3). It was first included in the manual in 1980, and trauma was acknowledged as the causing factor of “Multiple Personality Disorder”, now renamed “Dissociative Identity Disorder”2 in the same edition. The latest edition of the manual describes the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as follows: 93
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Trauma Drama
Trauma Drama
The person’s response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror [ ]. The characteristic symptoms [ ] include persisting re-experiencing of the traumatic event, persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness, and persistent symptoms of increased arousal. [ ] The traumatic event can be re-experienced in various ways. Commonly the person has recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event [ ] or recurrent distressing dreams during which the event is replayed [ ]. In rare instances, the person experiences dissociative states [ ] during which components of the event are relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at the same moment [ ]. Intense psychological distress [ ] or physiological reactivity often occurs when the person is exposed to triggering events that resemble or symbolize an aspect of the traumatic event. [ ] The person commonly makes deliberate efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations about the traumatic event [ ]. This avoidance of reminders may include amnesia for an important aspect of the traumatic event [ ]. (American Psychiatric Association 2003: 463–4) Concerning its actual symptoms, the category is thus similarly capacious as hysteria used to be a century ago. Psychic and somatic symptoms may range from paralysis to hyperactivity, from troubling nightmares and flashbacks to loss of memory, from hyperalertness to numbness and alienation, and might include dissociative states. The rise of trauma as a medical concept has been concomitant with its fast-growing importance in artistic and popular discourses of contemporary ‘trauma culture’. Thus, trauma, and in particular childhood trauma, plays a crucial role in the work of distinguished contemporary British and American artists, such as Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin, Nan Goldin, and Tracey Moffat (Luckhurst 2003: 39–47). In 2001 and 2002, a British national touring exhibition called Trauma, curated by the Hayward Gallery, gathered the work of twelve international artists to explore how contemporary art addresses the issue and reflects the “fascination with trauma in contemporary society” (Bradley, Brown, and Nairne 2001: 6). Von Hoff diagnoses a revival of incest narratives in contemporary European literature and film (2003: 2) and argues that because of the ‘incest-survivor-machine’, the topic has become ubiquitous in all literary and TV genres (ibid.: 273; cf. also Tavris 1993).3 In addition to a vast number of crime fiction, self-help books, and novels, comics such as Spiderman, Rex Morgan, and Gasoline Alley have dealt with the trauma of sexual child abuse (Hacking 1991: 255) and trauma has even been discovered by commercial advertisement: In an advertisement for hair products, one could read about “traumatised hair” (Berressem 2003a: 1). Observing the pervasive cultural engagement with notions of psychic wounding, Roger Luckhurst argues that a new notion of subjectivity, the
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“traumatised subject”, has emerged in the 1990s (2003: 28). Although it is questionable how new the notion of an injured and split subject is – one might think of the popularity of the doppelgänger motif in romantic, postromantic, and modernist culture – trauma certainly is of central importance to contemporary articulations of subjectivity. The traumatised protagonists of Trauma Drama hence appear as characters built according to current notions of subjectivity. The plays stage the figures’ symptoms with reference to, but by no means strictly according to, the established clinical syndromes involving traumatisation, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and multiple personality disorder. In cultural theory, trauma has become a category of analysis that exceeds the interpretation of individual instances of ‘trauma culture’. Cathy Caruth’s essay collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory, first published in 1995, is one of the key texts of the contemporary study of trauma, whose development proceeds apace. The collection not only covers many aspects of the current fascination with trauma, it also promoted broader academic interest in the topic. Caruth’s Trauma is typical of the interdisciplinary approach to trauma in recent theory. While Caruth herself is a literary critic, her collection assembles perspectives on trauma from fields such as history, sociology, neurology, and psychoanalysis. In her seminal introduction to the part of the collection that deals with the question of trauma and experience, Caruth argues that trauma has advanced to such a central cultural category “because it brings us to the limits of our understanding: if psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology, and even literature are beginning to hear each other anew in the study of trauma, it is because they are listening through the radical disruption and gaps of traumatic experience” (1995a: 4). Belatedness One of the crucial reasons why the notion of trauma tests the limits of understanding across the disciplines is its temporality of belatedness and the resulting logical paradoxes. Freud identified the principle of belatedness in his work with hysterical patients, when he realised that traumatisation sets in only after the event, “[d]uring the interval between the experiences of those impressions and their reproduction” (1898E: 281; cf. 1898: 511). According to Freud, the ‘traumatic kernel’ which instigates the hysteric symptoms stems from the interaction of two scenes. Because of its suddenness and overwhelming quality, the initial traumatic moment cannot be fully experienced and grasped but only ‘lived through’ at the time of its occurrence. It is only during a later, possibly trivial event that the memories of the initial event are triggered and that the affect associated with them is reactivated. Thus, Freud posits, the interaction between both scenes causes the subject’s traumatisation, which is belatedly shifted to the initial experience.
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Regarding the traumatic experience of sexual child abuse, Freud argues that the actual abuse in childhood has sexual content but no meaning for the child. It is only a second scene after puberty, which might or might not have sexual content but which has some relation to the erstwhile scene, which triggers the memory of the abuse and makes the adolescent/adult realise the sexual meaning of the experience. At this point, traumatisation retrospectively sets in: the subject cannot evade the distressing affect of the second scene because the distress only seems to emanate from the present experience – it actually stems from the memory trace of the childhood scene. Thus, the second scene endows the first scene with its pathogenic force (cf. Freud 1950E [1895]: 356; cf. 1950 [1895]: 447–8). Hence, Nachträglichkeit (belatedness, deferred action, or retrodetermination) for Freud not only means the latency period after which the traumatic symptoms occur but also the retrospective character of every traumatisation. Following this trajectory, the traumatic event as such has never taken place: the past is belatedly created through its ostensive repetition in the future. It is therefore, strictly speaking, catachrestic to talk about a ‘traumatic event’. Recent trauma theory does no longer assume that every case of traumatisation is the result of an interaction between two scenes; nor does Trauma Drama stage such a form of belatedness. Today, traumatologists from diverse disciplines, such as the neurologist Bessel van der Kolk, Caruth, and Herman, a feminist psychotherapist, assume that trauma has an immediate impact. Nonetheless, the logic of belatedness as established by Freud remains central to present-day trauma theory, since it assumes that the traumatic experience is so overwhelming that it cannot be grasped emotionally and intellectually at the time of occurrence and resists being accounted for in a coherent or meaningful way after the event. Trauma is that which cannot be narrated; as a sudden and chance event, it breaks with narrative patterns of making sense of one’s past and instead returns in forms that are distinct from narrative memory. Hence, the traumatic event is not possessed knowledge, which could be narrated, but on the contrary it itself possesses the subject, which can only belatedly, in its psychic returns, experience trauma. The nature of these intrusions is a contested issue in trauma theory. While some critics understand them as a literal return to the perceptual reality of the traumatising event, others consider them to be a reproduction of the trauma that is always already distorted. Traumatic flashbacks and the precision of recall The current debate about traumatic memory is linked to the immense academic and broader cultural interest in forms of individual and collective memory in recent decades. The notion of a traumatic memory that truthfully preserves the past in its perceptual reality proffers a form of recollection that stands in contrast to entrenched notions of narrative memory, through which “the past is continually being re-made in the interests of the present”
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(Bartlett 1967 [1932]: 309). Referring to the work of Janet and Freud, neurological research by van der Kolk and his colleagues supports the idea that traumatic memories differ from common memories in that they generally remain unaffected by other life experiences. While narrative memory therefore is flexible and, moreover, a social act because we compare our stories about the past with those of others or adapt our versions of the past to the particular addressee, traumatic memory has no social component; it is delayed, inflexible, and invariable (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 163). Unlike narrative memory – or ‘declarative’ and ‘explicit’ memory, as van der Kolk and van der Hart alternatively name it – traumatic memory remains unaffected by time and cannot be recounted verbally. The argument that the body becomes the arena for a ‘truthful’ recording of the past has likewise been employed by studies in the humanities. For example, Aleida Assmann’s study Erinnerungsräume describes traumatic memory as an experience that is encapsulated in the body but cut off from consciousness (1996: 21). Van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane assume that traumatic memory, as it comes to the fore in dreams and flashbacks, is a literal presentation rather than a distorted representation of the traumatic experience. Both during a traumatic dream, which according to van der Kolk and McFarlane differs profoundly from the symbolic dreams theorised by Freud, and during a traumatic flashback, the victims feel as if they have returned to the perceptual reality of the traumatic situation (1996b: 565). This view is shared by Herman and Caruth, who argue that trauma oscillates between the precision of recall and the elision of memory (Herman 1992: 37–42, Caruth 1995b: 153).4 Following this trajectory, the victim’s body becomes a body of evidence and the transformation of traumatic, bodily memory into narrative memory would endanger its literal accuracy and falsify the traumatic origin (Caruth 1995b: 153–4, Assmann 1996: 36, van der Kolk and McFarlane 1996a: 19). However, the hypothesis of the literalness of traumatic memory as expressed in flashbacks and traumatic dreams is contested in trauma theory. Ruth Leys is perhaps the most prominent critic to challenge the “powerfully entrenched” opinion that “traumatic dreams are ‘just what happened’ ” (2000: 239). Rather than assuming that traumatic memory as expressed in flashbacks and nightmares is literal, Leys argues that it might be veridical but subject to distortion and construction as other memories are. She hence comes closer to the Freudian notion of trauma, which privileged the emotional truth of memories, that is, their impact on the patients’ psyche, over their factual truth. Even if flashbacks and traumatic dreams offered immediate presentation of the traumatic moment, however, this moment could, as a renewed traumatic experience, once again be only lived through physically rather than understood psychically. Hanjo Berressem points out the aporetic character of the flashback, which promises access to experience and memory beyond representation but at the same time refuses integration in understanding and hence remains profoundly inaccessible (2005:
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5). Apart from trauma’s return in flashbacks, it intrudes into the subject’s present through other forms of repetition compulsion, which, according to psychoanalytic theory, encompass acting out the traumatisation and working it through.
Traumatic repetition compulsion, which makes the subject reproduce aspects of the trauma, generally entails two different but intersecting modes of repetition, acting out and working through. According to Freud, the acting out of the traumatisation enables the traumatised subject to develop belatedly the affect that was not aroused by the traumatic experience, because trauma is so overwhelming that it does not allow intellectual and emotional processing at the time. The repetition compulsion inherent in traumatisation hence means that the subject does not experience – in the sense of witnessing and grasping its happening and impact – the trauma as a repetition but for the first time. Thus, paradoxically, the event which is repeated has never actually taken place for the subject. The subject repeats without being aware of repetition. In his article “Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten” (“Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”), Freud concludes, “we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (1914E: 150; cf. 1914: 129). While the re-enactments of the traumatic experience can offer the ‘experiencing’ of the trauma in the sense of ‘going through it emotionally’, they can also be an unconscious attempt to master the traumatic experience, to work it through. Freud uses the example of his grandchild’s fort-da game to illustrate how the subject attempts to master the situation by staging the trauma. In the fort-da game, Freud’s one-year-old grandchild repeatedly threw away a little wooden spool that was attached to a rope and declared it to be “o-o-o-o”, “fort” (gone), only to fetch it back and pronounce it “da” (here) (cf. Freud 1920: 11–15/1920E: 14–17). Freud interpreted the child’s game as a way of coming to terms with the absences of his mother. Rather than being taken by surprise by the experience and enduring it passively, the child restages the experience in an altered context which allows control of the event. The game emanates, according to Freud, from the child’s Bemächtigungstrieb (instinct for mastery) (1920: 14/1920E: 16). While the traumatic repetition compulsion as characteristic of intrusive recollections and nightmares implies a mimetic reproduction of the trauma, the repetition compulsion as exerted in the fort-da game implies a modification of the reproduction. In a creative move, the game turns ‘pathology’ into a semi-conscious act which attempts the mastery of the traumatisation.5 The complementary aspects of trauma’s actualisation, acting out and working through, have alternatively been conceptualised in terms of
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‘unstory’ or plot versus story.6 The difference between the unfolding plot, or the ‘unstory’, which repeats the pain, and the unfolding story that provides relief can, as Leys suggests, alternatively be grasped through the terms mimesis and diegesis. The working through/diegesis of trauma belongs to the conscious, psychic, and intellectual processing of trauma. Deriving from Freud and Breuer’s talking cure, it is considered a step towards detraumatisation in trauma therapy to this day. Leys emphasises that the two models are not mutually exclusive, but both “internal to the traumatic experience” (2000: 40) and in fact interact with each other. As theatre encompasses mimetic and diegetic, that is, non-narrative and narrative modes of representation, it is an apt medium to stage these two principal traumatic modes.7 In its dramatisation of trauma, as I will argue, Trauma Drama employs these traumatic modes as – equally intersecting – dramatic modes, both on the level of aesthetics and on the level of the plays’ action. The trauma of sexual child abuse Engaging with the sexual abuse of children, the plays discussed in this chapter tackle a common, however easily hidden and denied traumatising experience, which has aroused immense media attention and caused heated public controversies in the UK (as in Western Europe and North America) since the late 1980s. Although Freud almost a century earlier had already realised the traumatic effects of sexual child abuse and “cemented the idea of the [ ] trauma of sexual assault” (Leys 2000: 18), the professional and public interest in the phenomenon declined in the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, this reduction was due to Freud’s abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’. On the other hand, the focus of trauma theory shifted from sexual child abuse to the experiences of war and genocide as a result of the world wars and the Holocaust. In the post-war period, an article in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association on “The Battered Child Syndrome” in 1962 propelled the issue of child abuse into the public arena (Kempe et al. 1962). In this article, child abuse was included in a medical model and labelled as pathology with the causes lying in the personality of particular parents. The public awareness about child abuse in the UK increased when Maria Colwell was killed by her stepfather in 1973, a murder that was broadly covered by the media (Hallett 1995: 25). It was only the second main phase of the rediscovery in the 1980s that centred on sexual child abuse, a rediscovery that resulted from the testimony of adult survivors of sexual child abuse in the UK and the USA as well as from feminist analysis. As a result, the concepts of ‘child abuse’ (through bodily maltreatment), of sexual offences against children, and of incest were merged in the concept of ‘sexual child abuse’ from the 1970s onwards (Sgroi 1975, Weber 1977, Hacking 1991: 274). Several events of (suspected) sexual child abuse elicited immense media coverage in Britain
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Trauma Concepts, Trauma Culture
during the 1980s.8 The most notorious case was the Cleveland affair in 1987, in which ninety-one children were taken away from their parents because of suspicions of sexual molestation (Campbell 1988, Search 1988). Although the social workers were subsequently criticised for working over-hastily (Ogg and Dickens 1995: 78), the incident shows how sensitive and suspicious of sexual child abuse British institutions and the public had grown by the end of the 1980s. Concomitant with the ‘mainstreaming’ of the issue of sexual child abuse in the public debate through media reports, the concept of traumatisation became more firmly planted into medical discourse. In 1980, post-traumatic stress disorder was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a reaction to the campaigns of women’s advocates and Vietnam War veterans, which had made the public aware of the pervasive symptoms that follow the traumatic experiences of sexual abuse and war. Calling sexual abuse the “combat neurosis of the sex war”, Herman explicitly links the two traumatic experiences (1992: 28). Cultural critics acknowledge the social and epistemological importance that the issue of sexual child abuse had gained by the beginning of the 1990s. Hacking states in his seminal study Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory that “the most sensational trauma of recent times is child abuse” (1995: 15), and Luckhurst notes that the experience of sexual child abuse had by the late 1980s become “the privileged origin of trauma” in the public awareness (2003: 31). Lynne Segal calls the fate of the helpless and vulnerable child in the abusive family “the most culturally ubiquitous narrative available for explaining all manner of social problems and individual failures and misfortunes today” and “one of the central moral tales of our time” (1999: 119). Jenny Kitzinger states that the discovery of child abuse brought forth “an extraordinary cultural transformation in public and private knowledge” (2001: 91) about trauma and argues that the intense media coverage of the issue not only effected a decisive shift of sexual child abuse “from cultural vacuum to multiple media mediation” but helped to challenge “abusers’ monopoly over definitions of reality und undermined some of their power to silence victims” (ibid.: 92).9 In the course of this heightened medical and sociocultural awareness of the issue, sexual child abuse has become the most common subject of Trauma Drama. Apart from the four plays by Hardie, Daniels, Nagy, and Dowie discussed in detail in this study, plays such as – to name but a few – Michael Wilcox’s Massage (1986), Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), Bryony Lavery’s Frozen (1998), Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill (2000), Arnold Wesker’s Denial (2000), Shelagh Stephenson’s Five Kinds of Silence (2000), Judith Jones and Beatrix Campbell’s And All the Children Cried (2002), Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004), and David Harrower’s Blackbird (2005) have explored the issue of sexual child abuse.10 Acknowledging the ‘popularity’ of the topic of sexual child abuse in the theatre and its easy exploitation for sensationalism, critic Paul Taylor has polemically
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argued that “[i]ndeed, in the past decade or so, it would be hard to find a dramatic subject that has been more abused than abuse” (1999: n. pag.). Similarly, reviewers of Kevin Elyot’s Forty Winks (2004), one of the more recent contributions to Trauma Drama, have remarked that “[c]hild abuse has become a sort of theatrical ‘chef’s salad’. No one wants it, but it’s always available” (Evans 2004: 1426). Whilst such reviewers have become weary of the theatrical negotiation of the topic, its persistence in contemporary anglophone drama to the present day points to the unrelenting cultural interest in the topic. Rather than ‘abusing’ the sensitive topic for sensationalist means, the plays contribute, as I will argue, to sustaining the disturbing impact of the issue on the public consciousness by means of constant thematic and stylistic innovations. In addition to the extensive body of play texts that deal with sexual child abuse, contemporary anglophone Trauma Drama also stages other forms of traumatisation, such as the experience of war (for example Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender), genocide (for example Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport, Julia Pascal’s Holocaust Trilogy), violence and (mass) murder (for example Anthony Neilson’s Normal, Phillip Ridley’s Ghost from a Perfect Place, Rona Munro’s Iron), and racial discrimination (for example Winsome Pinnock’s Mules, Roy Williams’s Fallout). Recently, traumatic experiences in the context of terrorism have gained particular prominence on the British stage (cf. for instance Victoria Brittain and Gilian Slovo’s Guantanamo, Mark Lee’s The Private Room, and Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists). Hardie’s Sleeping Nightie (1989) and Daniels’s Beside Herself (1990) belong to the earliest plays dealing with sexual child abuse after the Cleveland affair in 1987. Presenting adult female protagonists who have to come to terms with their denied memories of sexual child abuse, both Hardie and Daniels sought to enlighten audiences about a formerly silenced topic. By the mid-1990s, the issue of sexual child abuse was firmly implanted in the public awareness, and rather than calling attention to the pervasiveness of the phenomenon, the plays began to challenge entrenched notions about sexual child abuse and trauma. Thus, Nagy’s Butterfly Kiss (1994) calls the clear-cut division of abuse and seduction into question through its depiction of the relationship between the fourteen-year-old protagonist and a friend of her father’s. Dowie’s Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998) departs from the usual gendering of the role of the abuse victim and restores to Trauma Drama what Kalí Tal has termed ‘the missing voice’ of abused boys (1996: 186).11 Moreover, the play explores how the omnipresence of the public debate about the trauma of incestuous abuse makes the protagonist rebel against the ready-made role of the victim. Focusing in particular on issues of gender, my analysis of trauma as performative malady will explore the interface of trauma theory and theatre. What happens, for example, to a concept such as acting out when it is
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Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie (1989) Sleeping Nightie was commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre and was first performed in 1989 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs after a run at the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon. Hardie is among the first dramatists to deal with the topic of sexual child abuse after the Cleveland Affair in 1987, which had impelled the issue of sexual child abuse into the public awareness. The original production was directed by Terry Johnson, four years before Hysteria, his own play dealing with sexual child abuse, was staged at the Royal Court Theatre. When her son Boy is born, Hardie’s protagonist Molly, an artist in her midthirties, experiences a return of repressed memories and fears concerning the sexual abuses by her godfather, which she has not talked about since they took place twenty-five years ago. Throughout two-thirds of the play, before the turning point in the opening scene of the second act, Molly remains unable to verbalise her abuse memories. When she tries to utter her concern for her son, she does not dare to tackle the gist of her fear: “make Boy all right. Protect him from [ ] protect him somehow” (Sleeping Nightie 128).12 However, Molly is not only afraid that her son might become a victim of abuse, she also fears that he will turn into an abuser. The play opens with a soliloquy in which Molly reflects upon this twofold danger: “Since being a mother I have noticed more sharply it is nearly always them men who are doing something crazy on the tele. [ ] My son might become one of them” (SN 102). The play’s opening thus indicates that Molly has connected her fear stemming from a private abuse experience to media reports about male, possibly sexual, violence. Moreover, it establishes Molly’s generic view of men as (potential) perpetrators, in which she might also have to include her son. Closely associating the issue of trauma with issues of gender, the play not only highlights the degree to which Molly’s childhood traumatisation informs her stereotypical perception of men as (potential) perpetrators and of women as (potential) victims of sexualised violence, it also shows how she attempts to employ the traumatic repetition compulsions to resignify these gender norms. Molly’s concern that her son might grow up to be a violent abuser suggests that she tries to compensate her traumatic past by reforming the gender performances of the men in her environment. As Molly calls her son ‘Boy’, she makes him a representative of boys in general. Her pedagogical task in educating Boy according to her ideal of a different, non-violent version of masculinity reflects her project of the re-education of
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enacted? How does the theatre stage symptoms of traumatisation such as dissociation or flashbacks? How are traumatisation and gender linked in the plays? In how far do they infect each other and which mechanisms of traumatisation throw the workings of gender performativity into relief?
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men as a “species” (SN 102), which also informs, as I will argue, her creative work. The play traces how Molly devises and eventually exhibits a video installation, which like her private education of Boy has a didactic task and aims at a revision of the social norm of masculinity. Equipped with a Super-8 camera, Molly approaches men in the street, invites them to physically and sexually abuse her, and films their reactions, which range from amusement to shock and from escape to aggression. None of the men, however, reacts with sexual arousal or with the sexualised violence demanded. Molly edits these filmed encounters into a series of encounters, which she then replays in a video installation. During Molly’s filming, the editorial process of the filmed material, and the vernissage of the video installation, the filmed encounters are repeatedly shown on stage. In the play’s original production at the Royal Court, the film sequences were shown both on the monitor of Molly’s installation on stage and on extra monitors that were placed between the audience and the stage. Molly’s project can be aligned with women’s testimonies and feminist analyses that instigated the public awareness of sexual child abuse in the 1980s. These accounts emphasised the social power imbalance between (predominantly male) adult abusers and their (mostly female) young victims and criticised the process of male socialisation that engendered predatory and exploitative attitudes and sexual behaviours (Hallett 1995: 26). Statistics indicate that sexual abuse is closely connected to questions of gender until the present day. Whereas the vast majority of the perpetrators of reported cases of sexual child abuses in the UK as well the USA are men, between eighty and ninety per cent of sexually abused children are female.13 Hence, the disorders stemming from the traumatic experience of sexual child abuse in the 1980s and the 1990s appeared as clearly gendered as the ‘female malady’ hysteria had been a century earlier. Suggesting a causal relation between the gender norms (men as perpetrators, women as victims of sexualised violence), Sleeping Nightie sets up traumatisation as a metonymy, even as a pars pro toto synecdoche for the norms of femininity and masculinity. “Beat me. Rape me. Strangle me” – Acting out trauma Sleeping Nightie encourages audiences to speculate on whether the feminist political agenda of Molly’s video project is connected to a repressed but not fully forgotten event in Molly’s biography. It is only towards the end of the play, after the vernissage of the installation, that these speculations are confirmed, since Molly acknowledges the project’s relation to her childhood trauma of abuse. Prior to this scene, the video project is presented as a form of traumatic repetition compulsion, through which Molly re-enacts the experience of abuse. This attempt vacillates between a deliberate staging and moments in which Molly appears to be seized by the re-enactment, between the attempt at mastering the traumatisation and the reliving of pain. The
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Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie
project hence is an installation in a double sense: While Molly actively constructs the video installation, the project also makes it clear that she remains installed in her traumatic past, which she denies but compulsively re-enacts when she provokes men to abuse her once more. Insofar as the video is an acting out of Molly’s traumatisation, that is, insofar as it shows her to be in the grip of the memories and reliving them “in the present with a sense of immediacy which is heightened by [ ] [her] refusal to recognise their source and their repetitive character” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 4), it can be linked to her nightmares, in which Molly also re-experiences the abuses but which she cannot remember in the morning. Audiences witness Molly’s reliving of the abuses in her dreams, during which she involuntarily beats her partner Adrian. Adrian senses that Molly at night-time is performed by something which is out of her control: “It’s as if you’re possessed. I can’t believe you can’t remember” (SN 128). Adrian himself is caught in a traumatic repetition compulsion. When he is in distress, he punishes himself by repeating the traumatic castigation of the monks at his school, such as taking a bath with his clothes on. Whereas Molly knows about Adrian’s trauma and can thus understand and comfort him (“To hell with the monks” SN 137), she does not give Adrian the same opportunity. Molly equally rejects talking about the abuses to her younger sister Laura, who as a five-year-old witnessed one of the abuses and wants her elder sister to confront her memories: “I wish you would tell. I want the world to know” (SN 124). Although Molly and Laura display complementary ways of dealing with their childhood trauma,14 their shared secret closely connects them, as Laura emphasises: “Talking about you means talking about me and talking about me means talking about you” (SN 123). However, Molly denies that the memories which Laura wants her to acknowledge are related to her present life or her video project: “I’m a different person I shed layers off my life like throwing off heavy blankets when the Spring comes” (SN 124). In the play’s original production, the actress Louise Jameson emphasised Molly’s determination not to disclose her traumatic past by turning “her face [into] a mask of almost tetanus-like rigidity” (Brown 1989: 1555). While Molly neglects any autobiographical motivation of her artistic project apart from the raising of a son, Laura immediately suggests a causal relationship between Molly’s past trauma and her present project: “you know perfectly well why you are doing this and I know. [ ] Face up to where the inspiration came from. You wouldn’t have the guts” (SN 103); “If you told him [Adrian] what happened you wouldn’t have to do the videos” (SN 124). When Laura reveals that she not only witnessed the abuses but also observed Molly burying her sleeping nightie, which was soiled with sperm after the abuses – an act that Molly considered her secret – Molly again refuses to talk about the incident and insists that she needs to sleep (SN 124). Her plea to let her sleep not only stands for the trauma’s repression but is also part of its compulsive
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repetition, since Molly’s abuser used to prevent her from sleeping. The play thus employs the burial of the sleeping nightie as a symbol of the burial of Molly’s traumatic memories and the painful feelings that stem from them. Molly’s choice of material for her video project reflects the paradox of trauma, in which the greatest exposure to an event is also a numbing to it (Caruth 1995a: 8), because the event is so overpowering that it escapes the subject’s mental registration and thus his or her ability to remember the event in narrative memory. The event only belatedly makes itself felt to the traumatised subject, when it returns in the distorted, uncanny forms described above. When Molly explains her use of video film for her artistic project, she describes a similar paradox: “The image hardly exists at all. It has a ghostliness. Mine’s the sort of art that you can see through. No. Don’t quote me on that. Sorry. Crass. [ ] Video is immediate. Raw” (SN 101). Whereas the traumatic repetition compulsion inherent in Molly’s artistic project involves the ‘rawness’ of reliving the painful aspects of the original event, this reliving only ever takes place in an uncanny, ghostly form, as Molly’s accosting of the men on the street is a displaced and transformed version of the abuses by her godfather. Thus, Sleeping Nightie’s intermedial use of video resorts to a medium that is characterised by a similar paradox as the traumatic event on which the play’s action centres. In comparison to Molly’s engagement with painting and sculpture earlier in her career, video allows for greater immediacy and rawness insofar as Molly’s filming can document the reactions of the accosted men in real-time. However, the filmed records of these encounters do not have the same sense of material substantiality; in comparison to paintings, the video images “hardly exist[ ] at all”. In addition to the ambivalent quality of the video image between ghostliness and immediacy, the way in which the play includes the video film sequences in its structure reflects Molly’s traumatised perception. Molly replays her accosting of the men at several points throughout the play. The filmed passages break into and interact with the action onstage and hence create two concurrent levels of action which, for audiences, metaphorically stand for the intrusion of Molly’s traumatic past into her perception of the present. Consequently, no more extracts from her video project are shown after Molly has verbalised her abuse memories and thus has, as the play suggests, begun to integrate them in her understanding of the present. Sleeping Nightie’s use of intermediality therefore, both by its choice of video material and the way in which it integrates the filmed passages into the play’s structure, reflects the traumatic mode of Molly’s perception. However, the repetition compulsion involved in the video project has a second function. Not only does it induce a painful re-experiencing beyond Molly’s conscious control and demonstrate that she remains installed in past experiences she considers she has overcome, it also is an attempt to turn the frightening childhood experience into controlled action. The repetition compulsion as staged in Molly’s project thus also sets about the working through of traumatisation, both on a personal and a social level.
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The process of working through trauma as theorised by Freud, who set out to utilise the therapeutic power of the repetition compulsion in his talking cure, paradoxically allows for a gradual liberation from the repetition compulsion through the very mechanism of repeating, albeit repeating in a slightly different form. The repetition typical of working through differs from the unconscious repetition characteristic of acting out and of flashbacks insofar as it involves a certain emotional and intellectual distance and is an attempt at mastering the traumatisation. According to Freud, the trauma’s reproduction can serve to turn impotence into mastery, as “the ego, which experienced the trauma passively, now repeats it actively in a weaker version, in the hope of being able to direct its course” (1926E: 167; cf. 1926: 200). This form of repetition compulsion attempts at least partial control and domination of the trauma, a model which more recent psychoanalytic theory and practice as well as behaviour therapy still relies on. The different levels of Molly’s artistic project, namely all production stages as well as its eventual exhibition, are preoccupied with staging such a controlled repetition. Molly’s project contains three basic forms of artistic creation. Her accosting of the men in the street has the characteristics of a happening that blurs the boundaries between the work-of-art and everyday life, as it makes the latter an integral part of the former. These confrontations and Molly’s subsequent work with the records of these street performances are preoccupied with gaining and exerting control. Molly’s work with the video material, which can be played, replayed, rewound, fast-forwarded, and switched off at her will, offers an almost literal form of the fort-da mastery of trauma. Further, the transformation into a video installation is under the control of Molly as well, who functions as the writer, producer, director, camerawoman, cutter, actor, and curator of her video installation. Her idea that the filmed men will buy a video and subsequently incorporate Molly’s disempowered version of them betrays Molly’s utopian fantasy of artistic omnipotence, which even allows complete control over the audience’s reactions to her project. Yet, Molly repeatedly has to surrender to the other form of traumatic repetition that defies mastery and makes her, on the contrary, experience powerlessness. On all of these levels, gender is a prominent factor in Molly’s project. As indicated above, Molly perceives men in general as prone to (sexual) violence and makes the passers-by on the street substitutes for her dead abusive godfather solely on the basis of their gender. Through her artistic project, Molly acts out and works through the gender norms that she perceives as one of the causes for her trauma. Since Molly locates the cause for sexual child abuse in an overall male violent behaviour that is condoned and even encouraged in popular media, she does not treat sexual child abuse merely
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“A view of himself not needing to be violent” – Working through trauma, working through masculinity
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as her personal story but transforms it into a political issue. Because Molly sees (sexual) violence as part of being a “real man” (SN 116), she claims that her project goes to “the heart of masculinity” (SN 112). The TV screen’s position in her installation reinforces the pedagogic impetus of Molly’s project. The screen is integrated in an icon of the Virgin Mary, where it is, as the stage directions specify, “slotted into the crook of the Virgin Mary’s arm so she looks as if she is cradling it, like a baby. She gazes down on the screen tenderly” (SN 99). Mary, as a surrogate for Molly herself, nourishes an alternative male gender ideal which will counter the model of aggressive masculinity ubiquitous in a world shaped by the media’s omnipresent images of violence. Molly’s video project can be situated in a tradition of female artists and performers who since the 1960s have increasingly dealt with issues of gendered and sexualised violence. Famously, Yoko Ono explored bodily harm and female victimisation in her performance Cut Piece in 1964, in which she invited members of the audience to inflict harm upon her by cutting away her clothes. Molly’s project even more drastically invites strangers to hurt her. Its guerrilla strategy of leaving the art/performance space and approaching men in the street equals street actions such as Valie Export’s Tapp und Tastkino (Touch Cinema), which she conducted in 1968 on the streets of Vienna. Export wore a miniature stage set constructed around her naked but concealed breasts and used a megaphone to ask members of the public to reach through the curtain and touch her breasts. Molly’s use of film to compromise the accosted men additionally copies the techniques of artists such as Laurie Anderson, whose photo project Fully Automatic Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity), conducted in 1973, inverted the gendered positions of the subject and the object of the gaze by means of a camera. Anderson comments, I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready, I passed a man who muttered “Wanna fuck?” [ ] I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK. (Anderson in Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972–92. New York: Harper Collins 1994, qtd in Reckitt 2001: 96) Although Molly uses the camera as an instrument of power, control, and objectification in a similar way to Anderson, Hardie radicalises the idea by making Molly provoke physical violence rather than having her react to verbal abuses. In this respect, Molly’s project equals Export’s action Genital Panic in 1969, during which Export entered a sex cinema in Munich, dressed in a black shirt and jeans with the crotch removed. With a machine gun in
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Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie
hands, she announced that real female genitalia were available and that the audience could do whatever they wished. Like Ono, Export, and Anderson, Molly cites gender stereotypes in her artistic project in order to subvert them. She almost satirically presents herself as a hyperbolic version of woman-as-masochistic-victim and thereby mocks the men’s potential desire for sexualised violence. While Molly’s words preach her victimhood, the whole set-up practises her empowerment. The tactics of mockery and intimidation (via the camera as weapon, or, as in the case of Export, an actual weapon) bereave the public ‘seductions’ of any seductive power, as they force the men to be passive vis-à-vis the female performer’s control. In the original production of Sleeping Nightie, the accosted men were visible solely on the TV screens. The fact that the filmed men, with one exception, appear on film only, reinforces their objectification and their disempowerment – as the men and Molly remain in two separate spaces and have no physical contact, the character on stage is at no point in danger of being attacked. Molly’s actualisation of her past trauma in her video project hence attempts to restage the event in a variation which allows Molly’s control of the situation. Molly herself says, “If they did what I asked, that would give me control. That is the thing most men fear about a woman. So I confront them with what they think they want” (SN 116). Molly thereby replaces the violent “men [ ] on the tele” (SN 102) she is afraid of with her version of disempowered and non-violent men she puts onto a television screen. Molly’s artistic project thus connects the traumatic repetition compulsion and the repetition compulsion inherent in the performative construction of gender norms. Given that gender norms are, according to Butler, based on ritualised and compulsory repetitions, Molly’s attempt at resignification utilises the repetition compulsion of trauma to modify the repetitions by which gender norms are maintained. By acting out and working through her trauma of sexualised violence, Molly at the same time acts out the gender norms (men as perpetrators and women as victims) and attempts a working through, that is, a resignification of these stereotypes: Each man is supposed to come to the exhibition and buy himself. A view of himself not needing to be violent. So that each time he assumes he has the right to be out of control he has this to remind himself (SN 116) Utilising the repetition compulsion inherent in traumatisation to achieve a working through of gender, Molly’s artistic project undertakes a concoction that Butler has proposed in a different context. In Bodies that Matter, she suggests linking the traumatic repetition compulsion to the repetition compulsion of gender and emphasises the subversive potential of both:
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Where one might understand violation as a trauma which can only induce a destructive repetition compulsion [ ], it seems equally possible to acknowledge the force of repetition as the very condition of an affirmative response to violation. The compulsion to repeat an injury is not necessarily the compulsion to repeat the injury in the same way or to stay fully within the traumatic orbit of that injury. (1993a: 123–4) Although Butler does not explicate the reference, she here seems to allude to the kind of repetition which enables partial mastery of the trauma. Later in Bodies that Matter, Butler more explicitly proposes such a Freudian Bemächtigung of the trauma. Referring to queer street actions such as die-ins and kiss-ins, she argues that theatre can become a forum to enact collectively traumata in order to weaken their damaging impact: “theatrical rage reiterates those injuries precisely through an ‘acting out’, one that does not merely repeat or recite those injuries” (ibid.: 233). Calling for a form of acting out that exceeds the actualisation of pain, Butler appears to invoke the working through of trauma, which can offer ways of coming to terms with the trauma. Given the elusive transition from acting out to working through, such a project, promising as it is, is continuously at risk of repeating and renewing injuries rather than making up for them. Sleeping Nightie highlights how unpredictable and fragile a feminist project remains that is based on the utilisation of working through, which is always on the border of acting out. Molly assumes that she can control the reception of her artistic project, that the accosted men will come to the exhibition, buy a video of themselves, and replay the video sequence of themselves (literally or in their minds) until they have assimilated to Molly’s construction of themselves as non-violent men. This assumption indicates that her project is informed by an aspiration for control that borders on megalomania. However, Molly’s attempt at mastering male sexualised violence fails, both on an artistic level, because the vernissage of her installation neither attracts the filmed men nor raises the public attention she hoped for, and on a personal level. Although Adrian and Molly are portrayed as an affectionate couple, their relationship is contaminated by the very mechanisms of gendered behaviour that Molly attempts to fight in her artistic work. Distressed by Boy’s constant need for attention, by their poverty, and by his inability to find a new employment as an opera singer, Adrian increasingly turns into one of ‘the men on the tele’ Molly loathes. When he hits Molly after a domestic argument on the night before the vernissage, he comes close to Molly’s debased view of a ‘real man’. His conduct triggers memories of the abuses in Molly and brings her close to confessing them: “This has happened before. [ ] I’m trying to tell you something” (SN 135). Rather than listening to her, Adrian forcibly undresses Molly and forces her hand between his legs – he thereby, inadvertently, repeats the uncle’s abusive gestures. Thus, while
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Molly attempts to utilise her traumatisation for a public working through of gender norms in a consciousness-raising piece of art, in her private life she is unable to escape the very mechanisms that, in her eyes, produced her childhood traumatisation.
Having associated Molly’s artistic work and her traumatisation throughout the first act, Sleeping Nightie in the opening scene of the second act presents Molly’s verbal narration of her memories as the finale of her exhibition. During the vernissage, Molly has to realise that her didactic artistic aim has failed, as none of the filmed men buys a video of the installation – with the exception of David, an American, who has fallen in love with her. However, whereas the project does not achieve the intended cathartic impact on the gender performances of the filmed men, the failed exhibition has a catalytic impact on Molly herself. When she returns drunk to the unsuccessful vernissage, Molly starts to talk about her traumatic memories in front of Laura, Adrian, and David. Laura joins the narration, telling the events from her perspective as well. Their shared story reveals the helplessness of children who did not realise what was done to them: “But I’d never heard of masturbating then. So I didn’t know what he was doing [ ]. My hand was sticky and there was sticky stuff all over my nightie. There were patches of sperm on the sheet but I didn’t know what sperm was then” (SN 141). Molly oscillates between reliving the events with the child’s ignorance (“sticky stuff”) and the adult’s retroactive realisation of what had happened (“sperm”). She no longer maintains that the past does not have an influence on her present sense of self when she complains, “I’ll never know what I might have been like if it hadn’t happened I might be confident [ ]. I was born complete then broken up and put back together with jagged edges no frame ” (SN 142). This image of herself as broken and imperfectly repaired rules out the earlier simile of skinning and leaving behind undesired parts of herself, including the abused child. Presenting the confession on the eve of the vernissage, the play makes the articulation of the trauma the culmination of Molly’s artistic project and gives it the ambience of an autobiographically informed piece of performance art. The confession thus makes the process of working through inherent in Molly’s project more complete, as working through requires both repeating and remembering (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 488–9). As noted in Chapter 1, Freud and Breuer assumed that the affective recollection and acknowledgement through verbalisation could relieve the symptoms stemming from trauma by deactivating trauma’s harmful impact: “the psychotherapeutic procedure which we have described [ ] brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech” (1895E: 17; cf. 1895: 97). In contemporary trauma theory, the idea of the healing
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“This is mega trauma man” – The art of trauma
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power of the narrativisation and intellectual processing of trauma as it might happen in (the modern forms of) the talking cure is still of paramount importance. Theorists and practitioners from the fields of neurology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis alike strongly advocate the integration of the traumatic event in the victim’s consciousness via its narrativisation. The formula that the “unfolding story brings relief, whereas the unfolding plot induces pain” (Langer 1991: 175, van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 177) epitomises the assumption that the intellectual and emotional processing of trauma via its verbalisation is an effective technique of remembering and de-fragmenting the subject’s life story shattered by trauma: Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. (Herman 1992: 1) Out of the fragmented components of frozen imaginary and sensation, patient and therapist slowly reassemble an organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical context. [ ] At each point in the narrative [ ] the patient must reconstruct not only what happened but also how she felt. (ibid.: 177) By presenting both Molly’s video project and her narration as belonging to the installation, the play suggests that the artistic/filmic and the confessional/verbal form of representing trauma cannot easily be divided. Although Molly’s narration is confirmed by a witness, Laura, its claim to factual accuracy is questioned through its association with the installation and its ‘staging’ in the art space. Integrating the confession into Molly’s ‘art of trauma’, the play is less concerned with excavating the ‘truth’ of the earlier abuse than with searching for appropriate forms to represent the impact of the abuses, which can only ever be a rapprochement to the ‘traumatic scene’. The play’s suggestion that art offers a possibility to represent traumata through its indirect, associative form of communication is shared by clinical researchers. Dori Laub and Daniel Podell argue that the ‘art of trauma’, by which they mean both artistic projects and creative forms of the survivor’s everyday dealing with trauma, “has the ability to revive the enshrouded past of a trauma through a dialogue in the present. In creating a holding, witnessing ‘other’ that confirms the reality of the traumatic event, the artist can provide a structure or presence that counteracts the loss of the internal other” (1995: 993). The sisters’ revelation, which is presented as the culmination of Molly’s ‘art of trauma’, has two sets of audiences: the two spectators onstage, Adrian and David, and the theatre audiences of Johnson’s production at the Royal
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Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie
Court. While Laub and Podell, as quoted above, argue that all forms of art can create a “witnessing ‘other’ ” (1995: 993), theatre scholars have suggested that theatre and performance art through their experiential character allow for a more direct confrontation of audiences than other media. Adrian Kear proposes that the theatre spectator can become a “performatively produced witness” (2001: 199), and theatre practitioner Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, describes the responsibility of such a ‘performatively produced witness’ as follows: “to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them, even when that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker” (1999: 17). The Royal Court audiences, as ‘performatively produced witnesses’ of Molly and Laura’s narration, could thus see themselves reflected in the mise en abyme that presents Adrian and David as such witnesses. They display two diametrically opposed ways of dealing with the ethical responsibility transferred to them. Realising the importance of the events and suggesting that Molly needs professional help, David puts his concerns in drastic words that comically evoke the stereotype of the direct but slightly obtrusive American: “This is mega trauma man” (SN 142). In contrast, Adrian tries to play down the relevance of the childhood experiences and asks Molly to repress her feelings again: “Try not to cry” (SN 140); “We can’t rewind it. Make it different. And it’s strictly family” (SN 142). The play thereby presents two options with which audiences of Sleeping Nightie are confronted: to acknowledge the personal and political importance of the issue of sexual child abuse or conceive of it as a private experience that cannot be made up for, ‘made different’ on a social level. Being itself a consciousness-raising work of art, Sleeping Nightie in this way self-referentially reflects its own didactic aim in appealing to the audience’s ethical responsibility. The vernissage of the video installation that culminates in the confession of the abuses not only triggers contrasting reactions in David and Adrian, it also has decisively different results for the performers Molly and Laura. Laura benefits from their shared trauma’s revelation and feels more comfortable with being single (SN 158). For its protagonist Molly, however, Sleeping Nightie does not present the acknowledgement and verbalisation of trauma as a secure path to a better life. On the contrary, Molly is killed in a random accident one day after her confession. The play’s plot pattern hence does not reward Molly’s efforts to deal with her trauma but deprives her of the opportunity to live a happier future. Sleeping Nightie offers two alternative explanations for Molly’s death, one motivated by the realistic main plot, the other suggested by a non-realistic subplot. Adrian and Molly live in a council estate where many single mothers used to live before they were rehoused. One of the mothers refused to leave her flat and threw herself out of the window in protest. Adrian and Molly claim that she now haunts the place and pushes the glass out again every time the builders have replaced it; they
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both maintain that they have witnessed such apparitions. Whenever they see the ghost mother approach the window, Adrian sings an aria and succeeds in placating the ghost. While Laura initially mocks their explanation of the crashing windows, she later anticipates misfortune when she watches her sister and Boy pass the place where the mother once died. However, Adrian does not follow Laura’s request to distract the ghost once again: the window crashes and buries Molly, who dies, and Boy, who is going to survive. The non-realistic explanation for Molly’s death as being occasioned by the ghost mother’s revenge rather than deficient craftsmanship does not suspend the contingency of her death, because the play provides neither an explanation for why Adrian is unable to sing to calm the ghost mother, nor why the ghost, who appears to revenge women’s social discrimination, kills Molly, who had identified with the ghost mother, rather than a representative of the institution that had driven her out of her house. The non-realistic subplot does, however, once more highlight the destructive impact of the past on the present. Moreover, it foreshadows Molly’s return as a ghostly presence which keeps pursuing the project of distorting the gender norm of violent masculinity. An epilogue eighteen years after Molly’s death presents Laura and David at a Trooping the Colour parade. The grown-up Boy has become a soldier, and, according to Laura and David, a “proper man [ ] [a]mongst men” (SN 160). He has been living with his aunt Laura, who is aware that Boy’s development runs counter to his deceased mother’s wishes, who meant to educate Boy into a non-violent and thus ‘improper’ man. Laura is proud of Boy’s career and feels that “he’s fulfilled” (SN 160) her. However, during the parade Boy does not live up to Laura and David’s gender expectations, since he faints when the King rides past him. The play thus ends with a confirmation of Molly’s project of resignifying gender norms: Although Molly has been unable to raise her son, she seems to haunt the present, just as the ghost mother does, in order to determine her son’s gender conduct. Laura acknowledges Molly’s persistent impact on Boy’s failed actualisation of the soldierly masculine gender norm in the play’s final words: “he’ll always be Molly’s” (SN 161). The original production used stylistic means to reinforce Molly’s persistent presence as suggested by the play text in the dialogue (Laura’s remark) and the plot structure (the appearance of ghost mothers). In the epilogue, Laura and David watched the film of the parade on the monitor in the Mary figure, while the audience could also see it on the extra screens placed in front of the stage. In this film, the actor playing Adrian, Michael Garner, also played the adult Boy. Displaying the film on the very screens on which the audience used to see Molly’s video films, Johnson’s production transformed Boy’s failure to perform like a ‘proper’ man into a posthumously exhibited piece of performance art by Molly. This final screening also refers back to Molly’s initial statement “Mine’s the sort of art that you can see through”
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Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie
(SN 101), which now designates not only the aesthetic quality of the film that can be aligned with the mechanisms of trauma, but also Molly’s status as a ghost, whom neither the characters onstage nor audiences can see but whose ‘art’ directs the gender performance of Boy. By the apparitions of the ghost mothers and by its intermedial employment of film, Sleeping Nightie creates a form of ‘traumatised realism’ which departs from stage realism in order to highlight the past’s persistent intrusion into the present. Molly’s ultimate return as a power-wielding ghost on the non-realistic level of the plot thus alleviates and comically subverts the random extinction of its protagonist on the realistic level of the plot.15 Sleeping Nightie’s morbid and non-realistic form of eventual female empowerment differs decisively from Beside Herself, which was written at roughly the same time and offers a more straightforward and encouraging empowerment of the abused protagonist.
Sarah Daniels: Beside Herself (1990) Like Sleeping Nightie, Beside Herself, which was inspired by interviews with victims of sexual child abuse (Goodman 1993b: 193, 1994: 56), takes a feminist perspective on abuse.16 The play was commissioned by the Women’s Playhouse Trust, whose artistic manager Jules Wright directed the first production at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in 1990. Beside Herself is the first play of a trilogy in which Daniels investigates the genderbiased definition, causation, and treatment of psychic disorders.17 Presenting abuses as the cause for the traumata of several female characters, the trilogy promoted the mainstreaming of the debate about child abuse in Britain (cf. also Aston 2003: 43). Daniels’s play, like Hardie’s, belongs to the early phase of plays dealing with sexual child abuse, which confronted audiences with a topic that tended to be repressed on personal, social, and political levels, as the critics acknowledged: “Here is the dramatic analogue of a contemporary social tragedy which exists on a scale we are only just beginning to comprehend” (Coveney 1990: 469; cf. also Taylor 1999: n. pag.). Daniels situates Beside Herself in present-day London, in which suffering from trauma caused by sexual abuse in childhood appears to be a ‘female malady’ that is as common as hysteria had been a century earlier. Beside Herself focuses on a middle-aged protagonist named Evelyn, who, like Molly in Hardie’s play, has never talked about the incestuous abuses by her father and is able to articulate her memories only towards the end of the play. Evelyn does voluntary work on the committee of a community group home for former psychiatric patients. In the case studies that the committee discusses, as well as in the biographies of the other members of the committee, the play introduces subplots about and includes references to other cases of sexual child abuse. In its depiction of multiple abuse stories, Beside Herself criticises the tendency to pathologise the (female) victims, whereas the (male) perpetrators remain categorised as ‘normal’ as long as
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their crimes are undisclosed.18 Although the above-quoted statistics and academic studies support the play’s suggestion that most of the perpetrators of child abuse are male while most victims are female and its assertion that there is a tendency to protect the male abusers, many reviewers harshly criticised Daniels for her “feminist hatred of men” (cf. Griffin 2000: 194), the play’s “archetypal, gender-exclusive notions of victimisation”, and its “misguided notion that the female sex has the monopoly on victimhood” (Taylor 1999: n. pag.). The play’s serious topic and its outspoken social criticism notwithstanding, Daniels makes strategic use of humour not only to stage the play’s emotionally and morally charged topic without sentimentality, but also to make audiences engage with her social criticism, or, in the words of reviewer Jeremy Kingston, to make “the feminist medicine go down” (1990: 469).19 Daniels at the outset depicts Evelyn as a narrowminded housewife about whom the other characters joke. While Evelyn is the initial target of jokes, the play increasingly deconstructs male authority figures through ridicule. Daniels and Wright, a trained psychotherapist, staged Beside Herself as a consciousness-raising issue play which aimed at increasing the public awareness about sexual child abuse and at fighting common assumptions that mystify abuse. For example, the play tackles the view that the middle class is exempt from cases of sexual child abuse. As one of the few feminist playwrights to be produced in the mainstream theatre, Daniels is able to reach the middle-class audiences of the main stage of the Royal Court Theatre that might share this assumption (Remnant 1987: 7, Aston 1995a: 393, Godiwala 2003: 139). A scene in Beside Herself in which the professional and voluntary social workers meet to discuss their patients presents some of the stereotypes concerning sexual child abuse (Beside Herself 130–3).20 The conversation brings up the common arguments that attempt to play down the damaging effect and pervasiveness of sexual child abuse, such as the idea that the alleged victim is the actual seducer, that sexual child abuse is a question of class or geography, that the mother is to blame, that it is less common than the statistics claim and that sexual abuse is only a misdirected attempt at caring. Beside Herself shows the injurious impact of such opinions, which according to the play are even held in the very institutions that are meant to cure the traumatised victims. To foreground the pervasiveness of sexual child abuse, the dramatis personae of Beside Herself assemble representatives of various classes, genders, and sexualities and the play is located in fully realistic settings. Choosing the community group home St Dymphna’s as the central setting of her play, Daniels tackles the decline of the British welfare state, a sociopolitical development in Britain that began in the 1980s. Due to the state’s drastic saving measures, many long-term psychiatric patients were discharged from psychiatric hospitals and put into community group homes. In these “halfwayhostels” (BH 122), the patients were supposed to relearn daily living skills
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Sarah Daniels: Beside Herself
which would enable them to eventually live on their own again. In lieu of showing how the insane find their way back into ‘normality’, however, Daniels depicts the opposite: she explores the potential for madness of the seemingly sane people who work at St Dymphna’s or visit the home. The cleaning woman Lil, the Acting Team Leader Greg, the psychiatrist Dr Freeman as well as Reverend Teddy are shown to be on the verge of madness; and the behaviour of the visitors Richard and Gaynor Brittain, whose telling name makes them representatives of British society in general, reflects a fundamental fear that normality might collapse. In the opening scene of the play’s second part, the Brittains appear as elected representatives of the alarmed neighbourhood of St Dymphna’s. Their speeches epitomise the madness inherent in maintaining normality, as they are at pains to defend their normality by demarcating themselves from the former psychiatric patients. Beside Herself exaggerates and thereby ridicules the couple’s fears, which centre on their perception of mental instability as a contagious illness that endangers the volatile normality of the average people: “Living close to people who are really disturbed might tip the balance. She [Gaynor] might go mad. My daughter might take drugs. My son might get AIDS and I’ve worked all my life to be a normal family man” (BH 159, my italics). Richard Brittain here puts in a nutshell what he has alluded to in utterances like “I’ve worked all my life to maintain my mortgage”, “one long scramble to earn enough”, or “I’ve just managed to reach a little ledge which now threatens to crumble” (BH 159). The status of normality has to be founded and maintained by performative efforts; in Richard’s case it is upheld by citing the norm of the heterosexual family with two children and a house of one’s own that is paid for by the hard-working family father. Since the Brittains experience every deviation from this regulatory norm as a menace, the fact that Gaynor’s brother sexually abused their daughter has to be concealed. Instead of taking her brother to task, Gaynor thinks that her own behaviour was insane and keeps reproaching herself (BH 161). In contrast to the ‘sane’ figures, the erstwhile psychiatric patients living in St Dymphna’s, with one exception, remain backstage characters. However, their case stories show that, as in the Drama of Hysteria, the psychiatric treatment for most of them has meant a repetition of the abuses in the family or in society that initially produced, or at least promoted, their illness. The case history of Dave, the only resident of St Dymphna’s whom audiences see on stage, highlights the dominant role that socially constructed notions of ‘normal’, that is, heterosexual, sexuality have played in classifications of crime and mental illness in the UK. Daniels mixes the play’s realism with non-realistic elements, such as a prelude, titled “The Power and the Story”, which features an encounter of biblical women figures in a supermarket. Realised almost like a frontcurtain piece of stand-up comedy in the original production, the prelude
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stages a comic and abridged version of Foucauldian discourse analysis. It demonstrates that the contemporary gender-biased definition of sanity is part of a cultural tradition that can be traced back to the times of the Old Testament. It points out that the interests of heteropatriarchy, which sets itself as norm, shape the religious historiography of the Bible, which has in turn coined non-religious discourses. Presenting Eve, Mrs Lot, Delilah, and Jezebel, Daniels chooses female figures of the Old Testament who to this day serve as cultural icons that embody a sinful, irrational, and insane concept of femininity that is indispensable for male sanity as its constitutive other. Rewriting the stories of these biblical women from their own perspective, Daniels pursues a similar project to Furse, Johnson, and Morrissey. The prologue treats the fates of the women with irony, exaggerates or trivialises them, and invents unknown motivations for their ostensibly mad acts. It thus deconstructs the stereotype of sinful and insane femininity and questions the classifications of ‘insane’ and ‘sane’ and their association with gender even before the play’s main action starts. Moreover, Mrs Lot’s and Delilah’s stories introduce sexual child abuse, which collapses the ideas of sanity and insanity in the main part of Beside Herself. “I was never on my own”21 – The doubled protagonist Eve lyn Beside Herself explores the traumatisation of its protagonist through the device of a double figure. When Evelyn in the opening scene of Beside Herself enters her father’s house with the words “It’s only me”, Eve is already awaiting her on stage, thus disproving Evelyn’s statement. In the play’s original production, the staging of Eve’s first appearance suggested that Eve represents a part of Evelyn’s existence that she attempts to block out. Rather than making Eve visibly wait onstage as the script suggests, Eve was crouching in the refrigerator which Evelyn opens early in the scene to store the food she bought for her father. Unexpectedly confronted by Eve, “Evelyn is visibly shaken by Eve’s presence” (BH 105). Eve’s emergence from the refrigerator endows Evelyn’s following lines with ambivalent meaning: George (jovially): Evelyn, will you please stop fussing. Evelyn (putting things in the fridge): It’s no good leaving things uncovered in there, they just rot. Eve (laughs softly). (BH 107) The play suggests that Eve is a leftover of the past, which ‘rots’ Evelyn’s sense of self as long as it is not addressed. Although the opening scene does not explicitly reveal that Eve is connected to the issue of incestuous abuse, her presence gives the domestic scene in Evelyn’s former home a decisively un-heimliche atmosphere, which signals the darker side of the fatherdaughter-relationship. From the play’s beginning, the presence of Eve thus
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creates a form of traumatised realism that poses a riddle for audiences. Eve serves as a symptom, which invites audiences to speculate about its cause and hence offers them the ‘hermeneutic pleasure’ described by Diamond for the Ibsenite Drama of Hysteria. It is only in the ninth of twelve scenes that Evelyn and Eve confess their trauma and hence resolve the suspense-creating hermeneutic task of the audience – only to replace it with the renewed suspense stemming from Evelyn’s decision to confront her father George with her memories. From the opening scene onward, Evelyn is constantly accompanied by Eve, who remains unintelligible for the other onstage characters. In contrast to Augustine, who does not always perceive her double, Evelyn communicates and interacts with Eve and thus is never “on her own” (BH 106, 110); she always has Eve beside herself. The doubles in Augustine and Beside Herself differ, moreover, in terms of style: while the violinist expresses Augustine’s concealed sides by dance and music and never resorts to language, Eve acts realistically, if, at some points, with heightened emotionality. The original production visualised Eve’s relation to Evelyn’s childhood by means of costume and styling. An adult actress, Marion Bailey, played Eve in a girl’s dress of the period in which Evelyn grew up; Wright in this way presented Eve neither as the abused child nor as the fully-grown middleaged abuse survivor but made Eve represent Evelyn’s abused childhood self as an adult’s (re)projection. Although the play text does not specify Eve’s age and Eve occasionally behaves more maturely than Evelyn herself does, Wright’s decision to give Eve a childlike quality follows suggestions in the dialogue. Evelyn recollects that during the abuses in the back of her father’s car, “I wished myself away. It was as though I was standing outside the car looking in, looking down on another me that I despised” (BH 184). This statement suggests that the disapproving observer split off from the abused child has remained with Evelyn. Evelyn’s description evinces the clinical picture of psychic dissociation.22 Recent psychological and psychiatric research has shown that a number of disorders that are connected to childhood trauma share a high prevalence of dissociation (van der Kolk and McFarlane 1996b: 570). The most severe case of dissociation is multiple personality disorder, now renamed dissociative identity disorder, a syndrome that was intensely discussed in the 1990s in medical, popular, and cultural theorist discourses.23 The theatrical device of doubling in Beside Herself evokes these classifications, but does not strictly adhere to their clinical pictures. Rather than staging doubles as a form of splitting – as, for instance, the play version of Jekyll and Hyde by David Edgar did in the same decade – Beside Herself doubles its main character, a device that the play shares with Peter Nichols’s Passion Play. The doubles do not alternate as is characteristic of multiple personality disorder but are present simultaneously and even interact. Moreover, the play does not offer several ‘alters’ which fulfil specific roles and represent particular sides of the host’s
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personality but makes Eve represent both a detached, sneering supervisor and the abused child. Eve’s attitude towards the memories of the abuses is ambivalent, too. While Eve in many scenes naggingly reminds Evelyn of her repressed childhood memories, at other points she offers Evelyn retreat from situations which evoke the recollections. For instance, when the issue of child abuse is discussed during a committee meeting, Eve distracts Evelyn from the communication’s disturbing topic by manically counting colours throughout the scene: “Think about something else. [ ] Don’t think about it. [ ] Try to remember the names of the pencils in the box. Ivory, black, gunmetal, terracotta. [ ] Count on the other hand. Copper beech, golden brown, raw sienna” (BH 130–1 and so on to 135). This scene repeats the described mechanisms which Eve/Evelyn used as a child to distract herself from the abuses. Eve’s contradictory reactions to trauma – its repression as well as its compulsory remembrance – are reminiscent of Molly’s ambivalent behaviour and correspond to patterns that Freud describes as the positive and negative fixations on trauma. The former are, according to Freud, compulsions to repeat the trauma, “attempts to bring the trauma into operation once again – that is, to remember the forgotten experience or, better still, to make it real, to experience a repetition of it anew”. In contrast, the negative reactions are “fixations with a contrary purpose”: “that nothing of the forgotten traumas shall be remembered and nothing repeated” (1939E: 75–6; cf. 1939: 180–1). The double’s polyvalent name epitomises her versatile function. “Eve” recalls Evelyn’s pet name as a child (George repeatedly calls her “Evey”, cf. BH 184, 185), it is reminiscent of one of the earliest and best known cases of multiple personality disorder,24 and it evokes the biblical Eve as the epitome of female disobedience.25 The biblical reference was reinforced in the original production by the fact that Evelyn’s double was played by the same actress who embodied the biblical Eve in the prelude. Apart from its clinical relevance, the double figure serves as an elegant dramatic device of exposition, characterisation, and plot development. Not only does the appearance of the double immediately signal Evelyn’s peculiar position in the dramatis personae, it also grants audiences insight into Evelyn’s concealed side without having to resort to soliloquies or monologues. Eve’s gestures, verbal comments, and her interaction and communication with Evelyn display Evelyn’s inner conflicts, fears, and her repressed memories. The fact that Eve constantly accompanies and interacts with Evelyn but remains invisible for the other characters not only creates dramatic irony, but engenders two concurrent levels of action in many scenes: one level which presents external reality and Evelyn’s interaction with the realistic dramatis personae, and a second, interdependent level, which depicts Evelyn’s inner reality. The simultaneity of these two levels of reality reflects the concurrence of the traumatic past and the present in
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Sarah Daniels: Beside Herself
Evelyn’s post-traumatic perception and makes the audience share the protagonist’s dissociated perspective. The traumatised realism established by the double figure also applies to the play’s settings. Although the locations of the main part are realistic, the topic of trauma invests some of them with a metaphoric meaning which gives them an almost expressionist quality, as they can be seen as exteriorisations of the protagonist’s inner state. Thus, the vandalised state of St Dymphna’s at the play’s beginning, where intruders have sprayed “Loonies” onto the wall and destroyed the furniture, including a large mirror, offers a visualisation of Evelyn’s devastated psyche. A statement of Lil connects the broken mirror to Evelyn’s sense of fragmentation: “Lil (holding a piece of mirror): Unnerving, ain’t it – how you can only see a piece of yourself in a shard of mirror” (BH 113). The renovations Evelyn carries out in St Dymphna’s are a symbol for her attempts to restore both her past and her present sense of self by neglecting the abuse. Likewise, the renovation of her own house has become an idée fixe for Evelyn. As it was in the bathroom that her father molested her for the first time, Evelyn perceives the bathroom as a realm of filth. The fact that her obsessive efforts concentrate on the bathroom indicates that her present home stands for the house Evelyn grew up in as well as for the metaphoric ‘house’ of her psyche. Just as the renovation of her home will never be finished because the bathroom will always be dirty in Evelyn’s eyes, the abuse will always taint her performances of normality. “a hollow performance, almost convincing” – The malady of self-conscious performance In contrast to Hardie’s protagonist Molly, Evelyn is not concerned with changing the gender norm of masculinity that condones (sexualised) violence, but attempts to conform as perfectly as possible to what she perceives as the norm of femininity. Trying to compensate and conceal the sexual abuses she had to endure as a child, she is obsessed with the wish to be accepted as a ‘normal woman’ and takes pains to fulfil the norm of the white heterosexual middle-class housewife “who is unassuming, co-operative, caring and presents the philanthropic and nurturing side of a particular kind of conventionalised [ ] femininity” (Griffin 2000: 200). Evelyn complies with the expectations and wishes of others; and these others are mostly men. She adjusts her conduct to the demands of her father George, her husband Phillip, and other male authorities. The fact that she tries to please the men with whom she has a difficult relationship, above all her father, demonstrates how obsessive her conduct is; Evelyn is unable to depart from her “long-term investment in heteropatriarchy” (ibid.: 196). However, through the device of the double, Beside Herself displays those aspects which Evelyn systematically neglects and excludes from her complacent behaviour. As the double figure renders intelligible the concealed
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underside of Evelyn’s normative performances of femininity, it broadens the play’s possibilities to stage the workings of (gender) performativity. As expounded in the introduction, Butler argues in Bodies that Matter “what is performed works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, un-performable” (1993a: 234). Emphasising that “the reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (ibid.), she establishes a concept of performativity that encompasses more than those aspects of gender performativity that become intelligible. Butler reflects in her 1999 preface to the anniversary edition of Gender Trouble that the assumption of a psychic, unconscious base of gender performance seems to grind with her own claim that gender is performatively constituted, that “what we take to be an ‘internal’ feature of ourselves is one we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures” (1999: xv). Butler in her writings throughout the 1990s, most prominently in The Psychic Life of Power, increasingly comes to acknowledge and theorise the un-performed psychic aspects that fuel gender performativity. Her theory thus departs from a radical notion of performative identity that would assume that “all of the internal world of the psyche is but an effect of a stylized set of acts” (ibid.). Beside Herself offers its audiences the opportunity to consider the repressed aspects of its protagonist’s performance in terms of trauma. Evelyn’s traumatisation thus serves as a metaphor, as it allows an exploration of the workings of gender performativity, and in particular, of the exclusions that shape gender performances. At the same time, however, the relationship between traumatisation and gender performance also has metonymic qualities, since Evelyn attempts to deny and conceal her traumatisation by presenting herself as a ‘normal woman’, which requires the concealment of her ‘non-feminine’ feelings, such as rage, that stem from the trauma; for her, her traumatisation has causal effects on her gender conduct, as Eve constantly impedes Evelyn’s efforts to behave and feel ‘normal’. For example, Eve prevents Evelyn from establishing any self-confidence as being someone who feels ‘good’, ‘okay’ and ‘all right’ and instead characterises her as ‘stupid’, ‘dirty’ and ‘worthless’ (BH 115). While Eve often undermines Evelyn’s self-confidence, at other points she offers a more self-assured and emancipative version of Evelyn. For example, Eve criticises George’s hypocrisy and Phillip’s adultery and does not automatically pay respect to male dignitaries. She ridicules Reverend Teddy for his ignorance and homophobia, calling his brain “the dying throb of a tomcat with tertiary syphilis” (BH 137). In contrast, Evelyn’s linguistic behaviour is indicative of her overall conformist attitude; she keeps using proverbs and empty phrases: “The sooner it’s done, the better” (BH 106), “Nothing that a good night’s sleep won’t put right” (BH 106), “It’s important to practice what you preach” (BH 108), “soonest done least mended” (BH 175). Through the device of the double, the play counterpoints the conformist behaviour of Evelyn on the level of external reality with the transgressive
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(George stands suddenly, accidentally knocking his cup and saucer on the floor. They smash. The noise makes Evelyn and Eve jump in fright.) (Eve covers her face and drops to the floor.) George (pathetically): Damn! Damn! Evelyn (shakily): It’s all right. It was only an accident. No real damage done. George (sits down again, miserably): Oh God, I can’t bear getting old. Eve: Then drop dead. Evelyn (shocked, responds to Eve): I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. George: What? Evelyn: To make you angry. (BH 108–9) Eve: I am smashing my fist [ ]. I am smashing all the things in my father’s house. Everything is splintering around me [ ]. I am crashing my way through the brickwork and plaster, the rendering and the mortar until nothing, nothing is left of my father’s house but rubble and dust. And it goes on and on and it will never stop. (BH 172) Up to the play’s peripeteia, Evelyn tries to ignore her alter ego’s fear, anger, and aggression and constantly transforms it into polite and self-denying behaviour as in the above-quoted example. An intertextual allusion to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre reflects upon Eve’s function to act out the rage excluded from Evelyn’s conduct: “Was Jane related to Mrs Rochester or was Mrs Rochester a part of herself which had to die before she could live happily ever after” (BH 141). Daniels here refers to the paradigmatic example of doubling in women’s writing of the nineteenth century, which, as pointed out by Sandra Gilbert and Susanne Gubar (cf. 1999 [1979]: 359–62)26 , divides the protagonist into a well-behaved heroine and an angry madwoman who breaks out of middle-class order and gender restrictions. Making the double thus, on the continuum between metaphor and metonymy,27 represent the excluded parts of Evelyn’s gender performance, Beside Herself does not, however, suggest that the double reveals all aspects that are excluded from Evelyn’s conduct. On the contrary, in some scenes, Eve attempts to repress and cover up the trauma just as much as Evelyn does. Eve does not fully lay bare all concealed and foreclosed parts of Evelyn’s gender performances either. Although Eve conforms less to the norm of femininity than Evelyn does and might hence represent a more authentic
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conduct of Eve on the level of internal reality. While Evelyn performs according to the ideal of the caring and obedient daughter, Eve acts out both her fear and her hatred of her abusive father:
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version of the protagonist, she does not represent Evelyn’s ‘true’ self beyond the exclusions required by social gender norms. The device of the double installs a double consciousness, not only for Evelyn but also for the audience. Because the play continually contrasts Evelyn’s and Eve’s gender performances and makes Eve repeatedly comment on Evelyn’s behaviour, it persistently distorts the suspension of disbelief in the authenticity of Evelyn’s (gender) conduct. In Beside Herself, the dissociation stemming from traumatisation thus highlights the performative character of Evelyn’s gender performances. The play’s linkage of traumatisation and gender performativity has, in a similar form, been suggested in trauma theory. Evelyn’s behavioural pattern corresponds to the psychograph of abuse victims as outlined by Herman: adult survivors who have escaped from the abusive situation continue to view themselves with contempt and to take upon themselves the shame and guilt of their abusers [ ]. In the effort to placate her abusers, the child victim often becomes a superb performer [ ]. She may become an emphatic caretaker for her parents, an efficient housekeeper, an academic achiever, a model of social conformity [ ]. None of her achievements in the world redound to her credit, however, for she usually perceives her performing self as inauthentic and false. (1992: 105) Taking into account Butler’s notion of gender as “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (1988: 271, 1990: 179), the abuse victim differs from her environment, as she cannot participate in the willing suspension of disbelief and has a constant critical distance to her ‘superbly conformist performances’ of gender. Through the interaction between the protagonist and her double, Evelyn and Eve, Beside Herself stages trauma as a self-conscious performative malady, as the suffering that derives from the inability to ‘perform gender in the mode of belief’. Towards the end of the play, after Evelyn has begun to articulate the abuses, the protagonist herself in retrospect expresses her disbelief in her own earlier performance: “I [ ] was doing what was expected of me, a hollow performance, almost convincing” (BH 184). The double furthers Evelyn’s feeling of inauthenticity by constantly mimicking her attempts to fulfil the (gender) expectations of her environment. Wright’s production reinforced Eve’s continuous verbal undermining of Evelyn’s attempts at normality through body language. Whenever Evelyn interacted with other characters, Eve mirrored her gestures in a cynic, mocking way. Under Wright’s direction, Eve thus became “a cruel parody” of Evelyn (Wright 2005). By mimicking Evelyn, Eve distorts all attempts of Evelyn to perceive her own (gender) conduct as natural or authentic.
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The notion of gender parody [ ] does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; [ ] so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect – that is, in its effect – postures as an imitation. (1990: 175–6) As Eve mirrors Evelyn’s gestures in a sneering way, she parodies Evelyn’s normative conduct and reveals it to be a performatively constructed fabrication. Thus, Eve serves as an alienation effect for both Evelyn and audiences, as the double distorts the willing suspension of disbelief in the ‘naturalness’ of Evelyn’s gender performance. The presence and actions of Eve bar the audience’s as well as Evelyn’s ‘agency of repression’ that I discussed in the introduction, since they force Evelyn to be constantly aware of the performative quality of her identity. Apart from the device of the double, Beside Herself highlights the obsessive quality of Evelyn’s conduct through hyperbole. By the beginning of the play’s second part, Evelyn’s attempts to compensate the stigma of abuse by performing normality have become so excessive that they lead to the opposite effect and make her ultimately appear like a “good egg but absolutely barking mad” in the eyes of the other characters (BH 138). When Evelyn shows the visiting Brittains the group home, she finds Dave sitting motionless in a chair. While “Evelyn acts normally” and pretends that Dave is asleep, Eve realises that Dave is dead and “jumps back in fear” (BH 161). The stage direction indicates that Evelyn is confronted with a situation in which her resolution to act normally makes her behaviour unusual. Instead of taking measures to save Dave, she pretends that nothing has happened and ignores Eve’s reproaches: “Stop being so polite, the man in that chair there has just died. [ ] Don’t just pretend it’s all right [ ]. Are you mad? You are mad” (BH 162). When she has to explain her behaviour to the other members of the committee later on, Evelyn still clings to her desperate performance of normality, maintains that “[n]othing” (BH 169) has happened, and denies that her behaviour was inappropriate. The play thus stages two of the strategies of gender denaturalisation which Butler identified and theorised in Gender Trouble in the year of Beside Herself ’s first production. In addition to the device of gender parody as exerted by Eve, the protagonist enacts the hyper-affirmation of gender norms to the point of making them appear absurd. Thus, after escaping St Dymphna’s together
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This technique of copying (which paradoxically challenges the status of the ‘original’) creates an effect that Butler calls ‘gender parody’. Employing the example of female impersonators, Butler argues that gender parody reveals the imitative structure of gender in general:
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with Lil’s daughter Nicola, Evelyn compulsively goes shopping for her father George, an occupation that defends her ‘normality’ by defining her as both a good daughter and a good housewife (BH 175). However, the climax of Evelyn’s hyperbolic performances of normality is also its turning point. At the end of the scene, she decides to talk to Nicola. Nicola is a complementary figure to Evelyn, as she herself had been abused as a child, but dealt differently with the event. Instead of clinging to excessively normative performances, Nicola insists on revealing the gaps and fissures in the façade of normality: She left her parents’ home and informed her mother Lil that her stepfather, Tony, had abused her. Nicola is not afraid of being characterised as ‘mad’; she instead inverts the classification and considers Tony “sick” (BH 174). “There would be words to say ” – Staging detraumatisation While the subject matter trauma affects the play’s realism through the multiplication of the protagonist and the double level of action that Eve’s constant presence effects for both Eve and audiences, the final quarter of play not only stages Evelyn’s increasing healing from trauma after her confession, but also enacts a de-traumatisation on the level of style. Supported by Nicola, Evelyn manages to articulate her abuse memories. Beside Herself shows how Evelyn is only gradually able to verbalise her trauma and thus to transform it from an ‘unstory’ that induces pain into a narrative which offers relief: Nicola (pause): I’m listening. Evelyn: Now, I just want to go to sleep and not think about it. Eve: Just say it. Evelyn: It’s about my father. Eve: It’s about me. Evelyn (blurts out): You see the first time it happened I thought it was my mistake [ ]. Nicola: But it wasn’t. Evelyn: No, you don’t understand, he’s such a well thought of man. Important, respected. (BH 177) Nicola and Eve have a similar function to Laura in the respective revelation scene in Sleeping Nightie; they encourage and support Evelyn’s attempt at articulating her traumatic experiences that resist narration. Moreover, the scene shows that Evelyn’s idealisation of her father contributes to her inability to verbalise her traumatic past. She has difficulties narrating the events that cast her father in the role of the perpetrator, a pattern which will return, albeit in a varied form, in Easy Access (for the Boys). Even though at the end of the conversation Nicola and the audience know about the abuses, Evelyn
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has not used words as ‘rape’, ‘abuse’, ‘sex’, or ‘hurt’. She is still searching for adequate words to express the harassment: “there would be words to say, ‘Don’t be alone with your father – he’s he’s ’ She cannot finish the sentence” (BH 180). When Evelyn decides to confront George with her memories, she has overcome her verbal hesitation and can tell him precisely, “I remember being raped by you” (BH 183). While Evelyn’s capacity to articulate the abuses enables her to use the word ‘rape’ as a weapon against her father, he himself pleads for mercy on the ground of his, socially conditioned, linguistic ignorance in the 1950s: “It was the only way I knew to show love. It wasn’t talked about then. I didn’t even know myself what I was doing. You’re making it into something more than it was” (184–5, my italics). Since she no longer denies the abuse, Evelyn is able to transform Eve’s anger into action and transgresses her performance of the well-behaved, caring daughter. Eventually, she makes George’s offence public, thus terminating his professional career as a physician. After the confrontation with her father, Evelyn’s emancipation is symbolised in a cleansing of both her own and Eve’s body: “Eve holds out a large towel towards Evelyn. Evelyn takes it and slowly starts to wipe her hands and face and neck, carefully, taking pleasure in it. She repeats the action with Eve” (BH 186). As the following scenes indicate, Evelyn cleanses herself of the inscription of the pleasant daughter, the untiring honorary worker, and the discreet wife. She resigns her post on the management committee and no longer ignores that her husband is unfaithful to her. Representing Evelyn’s emancipation by an image of bodily cleansing, Daniels chooses a similar means to Furse, whose protagonist Augustine changes her nightdress for men’s clothes as she abandons the performance of hysterical femininity. The play’s plot structure reflects Evelyn’s psychic development. The titles of the most significant scenes are indicative of the play’s plot pattern of de-traumatisation, in which the action progresses from repression to acknowledgement and confrontation, which enables the convalescence of the abuse victim. This pattern corresponds to the stages in the recovery of trauma as identified by psychologists such as Herman (1992: 133–236). The play starts with a scene titled “In her father’s house”. While this initial scene demonstrates Evelyn’s compliance and her inability to confront her father, the subsequent scenes depict her gradual emancipation from George. Her acknowledgement of the abuse and her confession of her past experiences are presented in the scenes “Exodus” and “Genesis”, and the scene in which she confronts George, again in his house, is named “House built on sand”. Hence, the sequence of the scenes’ titles indicates Evelyn’s development from a dutiful daughter to a more self-assured adult woman, who exposes her father’s abuses. The biblical titles mark them as a counter-narrative to the heteropatriarchal plot pattern designated for unruly women, which was mocked in the prelude.
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The process of detraumatisation culminates in the elimination of the double and the completed renovation of St Dymphna’s. In the second to last scene, Evelyn for the first time appears without having Eve “beside herself” in the living room of St Dymphna’s, where the mirror is finally restored. When Evelyn stands in front of the mirror, the earlier image of the shattered mirror that represented Evelyn’s fragmentation is replaced by an image of Evelyn’s more unified sense of self after she has integrated the formerly excluded parts of herself in her personality. The positive and rewarding ending of Beside Herself suggests that recovery from male violence and abuse is attainable via acknowledgement, articulation, and confrontation (cf. also Aston 2003: 41–3, Godiwala 2003: 138–9, Starck 2005: 183). It stages a way of female self-empowerment which the other plays do not grant their protagonists. The fact that the play does not end with the reconciliation between Evelyn and Eve but with Eve’s elimination suggests that Evelyn has fully overcome her trauma. The culmination of the protagonist’s development in full detraumatisation gives the story line a utopian note; even therapists such as Herman, who advocate language’s capacity to heal traumatisation, profess that trauma therapy can at best achieve a softening of the traumatic impact but not ultimately suspend trauma: “Resolution of trauma is never final; recovery is never complete” (1992: 211). The play’s feminist politics hence offer audiences an encouraging, if perhaps utopian, “model of survival”, which, as Kitzinger argues, is of utmost importance for victims of abuse.28 Because Beside Herself has presented Evelyn’s traumatisation as the malady of self-conscious gender performance throughout the play, the elimination of Eve in the final scene raises the question of whether Evelyn’s eventual gender conduct can be considered the general abandonment of performance or whether it allows for the, at least temporary, suspension of disbelief in the gender performances. In this context, Evelyn’s earlier assessment of her normative gender performance is significant: “I [ ] was doing what was expected of me, a hollow performance, almost convincing” (BH 184, my italics). Characterising her complacency as a “hollow” performance, Evelyn does not contrast performance and ‘authentic’ behaviour (as Augustine does in her final monologue), but seems to imply degrees of performing that range from particularly hollow to entirely convincing performances. Rather than staging the general liberation from the workings of gender performativity, the play thus seems to grant Evelyn a new kind of gender performance which has emancipated itself from certain (but by no means all) gender norms. Moreover, its shows that Evelyn can, at least temporarily, suspend disbelief in her own mundane performances. The play’s ending thus offers a cure for traumatisation and stages an alleviation, or temporary suspension, of the malady of self-conscious performance.
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Sarah Daniels: Beside Herself
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Whereas Hardie’s and Daniels’s plays contributed to the public awareness about sexual child abuse, Nagy’s play, directed by Steven Pimlott at the Almeida Theatre in 1994, is representative of a different phase in Trauma Drama. By the mid-1990s, the issue of sexual child abuse was strongly entrenched in the public knowledge; plays consequently began to challenge well-established notions about sexual child abuse and trauma. Among these notions was the absolute moral condemnation of the child abuser29 and the unreserved sympathy for the innocent victim of abuse. Butterfly Kiss complicates these clear-cut moral judgements by presenting a potentially abused female protagonist, Lily, who is introduced as a perpetrator: Lily is on remand for matricide. Vice versa, the abuser figure in Nagy’s play cannot be so unequivocally categorised as a villain as he can be in Hardie’s and Daniels’s plays. As is typical of Trauma Drama, Nagy employs comic features to present the play’s bleak topics. Nagy herself calls Butterfly Kiss a “strict and rather brutal comedy” (2003) and thereby indicates that the comic features not only offer relief but also serve as an instrument of humiliation and offence. Since the comic features have a merciless and sarcastic quality, they even reinforce the dark atmosphere of the memory play. The play stages meetings which Lily has during her custody with her lawyer Jackson Trouver and her partner Martha McKenzie. However, a substantial part of the play’s action derives from Lily’s memories and fantasies, in which Lily, who is in her mid-twenties, revisits and transforms pivotal points of her childhood and adolescence. The memories of Lily’s sexual encounters as a fourteen-year-old with Teddy Roosevelt Hayes, a friend of her father’s in his forties, are presented as a borderline case between abuse and seduction. The play raises the question of whether Lily was a helpless child or a precocious seductress, or whether she could have been both. Moreover, it leaves open whether the sexual experience had a traumatising impact on Lily. The categorisation of Teddy as an abuser is further complicated by his portrayal as one of the kindest and most reliable figures in Lily’s life. The dramatis personae characterise him as “Lily’s first lover, [ ] big, handsome, and somewhat slow on the uptake. Sweeter and more polite than one would expect” (Butterfly Kiss 50),30 and Lily describes him in a conversation with her lawyer as “the dumbest man” she knows, but emphasises that she likes him because he is “sweet and uncomplicated” (BK 66). Lily-Lolita – An All-American Dora? Lily’s ambivalent status between seductress and victim of abuse, the constellation of characters, and the figures’ names are reminiscent of Freud’s case study of Dora as well as of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which are the paradigmatic, controversially discussed twentieth-century texts about the border between seduction and abuse. As in the case of the Drama of Hysteria, where
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Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss (1994)
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plays set in Paris and Vienna revisit the nineteenth-century foundation of current trauma concepts, Nagy’s play, which is set in the USA and evokes Austrian and American intertexts, is of so great cultural importance to British artistic directors and audiences that the play by the British-American playwright received its world premiere in London.31 The plot of Butterfly Kiss employs crucial elements of the Dora case: It suggests that the protagonist’s father tolerated or even instigated the affair/abuse of his daughter. With hindsight, Lily wonders whether the affair might have been due not to her own adolescent sexual curiosity but to her father’s voyeuristic adult desire: “Sometimes I think my father seduced Teddy for me. [ ] My father is a scientist. He likes to watch” (BK 67). Teddy, who has a daughter of the same age as Lily and senses that their sexual relation is inappropriate, shares Lily’s impression that his friend Sloan set up the relationship: “What was I supposed to do? I’m a pretty normal guy [ ]. And I’d certainly never been moved to excitement by fourteenyear-old buns. But Lily Ross well. She was exciting to me. Sloanie knew what was going on. He probably planned it” (BK 67–8). As in the Dora case, the protagonist’s father has turned his affections and his sexual interest away from his wife, who is in constant medical treatment, to a woman whom the daughter admires and desires. As a contemporary version of the Dora case, Butterfly Kiss stages the lesbian content of the Freudian case study in a more straightforward way. Nagy’s adult protagonist Lily lives with Martha, her “one true love” (BK 96), who reminds her of her father’s mistress Christine. Thus, at the heart of Butterfly Kiss there is a complicated net of desire and abuse similar to the Dora case as presented in the Freudian text and reworked in Morrissey’s play Dora. Like the Dora case, the play stages the protean identifications of Lily with members of her family. The enacted memories of Lily’s adolescence show that Lily, like Dora, chooses her father as a role model. Lily wants to become an ex-marine like her father, shares her father’s habit of observing others, and pretends to be a lepidopterist like her father when she first meets Martha. She adores her father’s mistress and falls in love with Martha because she reminds her of Christine. Her desire for Christine is intermingled with envy of her father’s affection. This ambivalence is emphasised when Lily steals Christine’s photo from Sloan’s wallet, thus making her father see again her own photograph underneath. The dramatis personae characterise Sloan as “an intriguing personality contradiction: sexy and handsome in a remote yet gentle way; academic yet un-professorial; cold yet sympathetic; imposing yet ineffectual” (BK 50). This ambivalence also applies to Lily’s feelings for her emotionally detached yet admired father. Nagy’s staging of the abuse/seduction refrains, however, from the contrasting categorisations by Freud and later critics’ interpretations of the Dora case that I have outlined in Chapter 1. While Freud’s analysis assumed Dora’s sexual maturity and does not consider Herr K.’s advances abusive but
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Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss
even desired by Dora, feminist rewritings, both theoretical and theatrical, highlight the traumatising impact of Dora’s abuse in the network of adult desires. Although Lily’s and Teddy’s remarks suggest that they are helpless objects of Sloan’s interest, like the butterflies he pins down to examine, Lily, played “disturbingly erotic[ally]” (Hagerty 1994: 445) by Elizabeth Berridge in the original production, deliberately provokes the sexual attention of Teddy. She does not, not even retrospectively, classify their affair as abusive. Nevertheless, Lily’s re-enactment of the ‘seduction’ demonstrates her sexual ignorance and shows that ultimately she does not take the initiative in their sexual encounters. The play’s preoccupation with butterflies is also relevant for the second intertext proposed, Nabokov’s Lolita.32 Sloan’s and Nabokov’s shared passion for butterfly hunting supports this intertextual connection (cf. Coveney 1998: xiv, Nabokov 1956: 321), which suggests interpreting Lily, who oscillates between victim and seductress, as a contemporary Lolita figure. The performance by Berridge in the original production emphasised this ambivalence by splitting Lily’s seductive body language from her distressed mind: “Elizabeth Berridge does manage to provide a portrait of appalled adolescence, her face closed and worried like a wounded kitten but her body telling another story entirely” (Tinker 1994: 445). Lily displays the same mixture of theoretical sexual knowledge and practical innocence as Nabokov’s figure. Not only when seducing Teddy, but also when picking up her lover Martha, Lily pretends to be sexually much more experienced than she actually is (BK 90). The play’s intermingling of past and present further complicates the interpretation of the sexual encounter as either seduction or child abuse. Because Lily as a twenty-five-year-old re-enacts the seduction of Teddy, the childish Lolita-appeal is presented by an adult character, who should not, as Nagy notes, “attempt [ ] to ‘play’ the younger ages” (BK 50). While the scene hence might mean a traumatic repetition compulsion for Lily, it differs from a ‘literal flashback’, as it is significantly altered by its belated re-enactment. The ambivalence of the roles of perpetrator and victim is buttressed by the characters’ names. While Lily’s name can be seen as an allusion to ‘Lolita’, the name of her abuser/lover likewise refers to the character, because Teddy’s surname Hayes resembles Lolita’s surname ‘Haze’ and thus associates Teddy with the girlish seducer/victim rather than the male adult seduced/perpetrator.33 On the level of plot and structure, however, Lily is allied with Nabokov’s figure Humbert Humbert, as both are imprisoned for murder and as both Lolita and Butterfly Kiss retrospectively reconstruct the events that led to their crimes. Lily’s ambivalent position between victim and perpetrator and her potential traumatisation associate her with Humbert, a perpetrator who may have inflicted trauma on Lolita, but who is himself traumatised by the early death of his mother and of his teenage love Annabel Lee; his very name Humbert Humbert indicates the repetition compulsion
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he is involved in (Berressem 2003c: 2). However, Nabokov’s novel also suggests that Humbert merely poses as traumatised victim and thereby intentionally manipulates the clinical and legal systems through his knowledge of their mechanisms. If Humbert successfully pretends to be a disturbed victim-turned-perpetrator and cunningly feigns his infantile trauma to exonerate himself, Lily in contrast skilfully conceals her childhood injuries from the psychiatrists who examine her. She refuses to deliver the standardised explanation that the public and the media expect for her outrageous crime. Lily’s girlfriend Martha comments on the public’s quest for Lily’s mental disturbance: “I read newspaper articles about you [ ]. Strangers speculating about your past. [ ] No one has an answer, Lily. They say you are not insane. But no one wants to believe that” (BK 60). “Look at this. [ ] Imagine that”34 – Traumatic snapshots Although the play’s action does not explicitly categorise the former relationship between Teddy and Lily as sexual child abuse, its aesthetics stage a traumatised sense of place and time in an even more pronounced manner than the plays by Daniels and Hardie. As a memory play, the plot of Butterfly Kiss mainly consists of the recollections and fantasies of Lily, who is “talking to the voices in [ ] [her] head” (BK 65) while being imprisoned for matricide. Apart from the appearances of Jackson and Martha in prison, the action of Butterfly Kiss consists of re-enactments of past scenes, and, possibly, the acting out of traumatic experiences.35 Nagy’s notes concerning the play’s local and temporal setting indicate the intermingling of time levels and spaces inherent in Lily’s memory work: “Lily’s memories of events transform the cell into many places [ ]. The Time is the present, the past, the imagined past and the imagined future” (BK 50). Mark Thompson’s set design for the original production reflected the shape-shifting quality of the prison cell. White, gleaming tiled walls and floor, neon bars, and steel chairs and tables evoked the prison cell, but could also serve as furniture and deco of settings such as the bar where Lily meets Martha and the Ross’s home, which is described as overwhelmingly white and “almost antiseptic” (BK 56) by Jackson Trouver. The multiplicity and simultaneity of places corresponds to the play’s fragmented temporal structure; the mosaic plot of Butterfly Kiss presents events from a period of more than twenty-five years in an associative rather than chronologically linear or causal order.36 The characters’ comments reflect the play’s confusion of time levels. When Lily first meets Martha, clocks display different times, Lily pretends not to know how old she is (BK 74), and Martha flirtatiously calls Lily a “young woman with a past” (BK 75). Jenny increasingly loses any sense of time and asks her daughter: “How old did you say you were, Lily? Forty-six? Twelve? Seventy-seven?” (BK 89). Lily wishes to invert the chronological order: “I’d like to take everything backwards. Run it in reverse. Just for a second” (BK 80).
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Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss
As typical of Trauma Drama, Butterfly Kiss depicts trauma from a posttraumatic perspective and does not stage ‘literal’ flashbacks of the original traumatic scene, which would need to feature a child actor. However, Lily re-enacts the potentially traumatising events in a more mimetic way than the characters in the plays by Hardie and Daniels. She relives the first sexual encounter with Ted, her forced observation of an aggressive sexual act a tergo between her parents, described by Freud as the quintessential traumatic scene, the Urszene or primal scene (cf. Freud 1918: 89/1918E: 59), and the murder of her mother. Because the play re-enacts these scenes mimetically as dramatic/traumatic flashbacks rather than assimilating them in a coherent and meaningful narrative that offers explanations, Butterfly Kiss stages a case of unresolved traumatisation. Since the memories remain unstructured and non-interpreted, audiences can neither be sure whether the scenes are real or imagined nor decide which of the recollected and re-enacted events is supposed to be the actual (or the most) traumatising scene. The play does not solve the questions of whether Lily and Teddy’s relationship had a traumatising impact on Lily, nor whether this impact was more severe than the effect of the emotional abuse and neglect that Lily experienced in her family. Like the pristine cabinet of pinned butterflies which hung above the prison cell in Thompson’s stage design for the original production, the play thus catches and pins down snapshots from her protagonist’s (imagined) past. However, it does not dissect, order, and classify them. The structure of isolated flashbacks that are not connected to a coherent and meaningful narrative is reflected aesthetically in the employment of slides, which are projected onto the stage. Like the memory play’s overall structure, the series of images of Lily and Sloan holding hands on the beach, of Jenny posing with a knife as a microphone, of the scene of the crime, and of young Christine in fishnet stockings are isolated and non-integrated moments and thus correspond to the characteristics of trauma photography as examined by Baer (2002: 27). Additionally, they distort the differentiation between internal and external reality; while the images often depict scenes from Lily’s past as they might have happened and even include a documentary, black-and-white picture of the bloodstained scene of the crime made by the police, they also become a means to visualise Lily’s fantasies and desires. For instance, she tries to touch the image of Christine (BK 94), her father’s lover, whom she adores. Hence, the play employs photography to reinforce its traumatised realism in two ways: Not only does Butterfly Kiss through its projection of slides integrate the medium of photography in the theatrical performance, but it also structurally imitates a slide show that presents isolated images in lieu of establishing a coherent narrative. Whilst the play’s structure equals the series of unconnected snapshots, it introduces one figure who repeatedly attempts to order the depicted
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events and who offers diegesis rather than mimesis. Jackson Trouver, Lily’s lawyer, directly addresses the audience and offers a chronological order of events which transforms the mosaic plot presented by the play’s action into a story: “Shortly thereafter, ladies and gentlemen, Sloan Ross left his wife and set up house with the Countess” (BK 93). He also asks Lily to structure her memories and to convert them into a chronological story: Jackson: Watcha doing there, Lily? Lily: I’m talking to the voices in my head. Jackson: All right. Perhaps you can convince those voices to have a chat with me. [ ] Let’s take it from the beginning. [ ] Start with Teddy Hayes. (BK 65) Jackson’s suggestion that Lily should start her story about the causes for her matricide with an account of her sexual relationship with Teddy Hayes indicates that Jackson sees the relationship as a potential source of traumatisation. The recovery of a case of sexual child abuse in his defendant’s biography could count as an explanation for Lily’s murder during a trial and would therefore improve Jackson’s chances of winning the prestigious case or of reducing Lily’s sentence. The question of whether or not Lily is traumatised and whether Jackson can construct and certify a feasible narration about Lily’s traumatisation hence becomes a legal question which is of vital importance for Lily’s future. Although Nagy’s play ultimately defies causality, it suggests that Lily is trained to perform gender through a series of traumatisations in her family life. Similar to Hardie’s Sleeping Nightie, the play thus suggests a causal relationship between traumatisations and gender norms, which makes the traumatic repetition compulsions not only a metaphor for the performatively and repetitively constituted gender norms, but also suggests a metonymic relationship between Lily’s traumatisation and her notions of femininity and masculinity. In Lily’s education, patterns of sexual and emotional abuse are deeply entrenched. Not only does Lily’s father use her for his voyeuristic pleasure when he watches Teddy kiss and undress his teenage daughter, but Jenny also tries to make Lily a substitute for her absent husband. For example, she forces Lily to take over Sloane’s position in an eroticised dance ritual, despite Lily’s protest, “I can’t do this, Mama. It’s not right. [ ] I can’t touch you that way. [ ] I’m not him, Mama” (BK 63). Lily is not only trained for her adult sexual behaviour when her parents directly teach her (Lily will later make Martha dance with her), but also when she secretly
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Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss
watches them. Her grandmother Sally forces Lily to observe her parents having sex, making Lily witness a rather brutal and irreverent sexual act a tergo. When Lily falls in love with Martha, it turns out that she has followed Sally’s command, “Watch your mama, Lily. Watch and learn” (BK 72) and has accepted Jenny as a (sexual) role model. Martha wonders why Lily always makes love turning her back to her partner. Thus, in the Ross family, the parent-child-bond is sexualised and lacks the tenderness and innocence that is indicated by the title Butterfly Kiss, “a caress given by one winking eye so that the lashes brush against the face of the receiver” (BK 48).37 They clearly depart from the ideal of the happy family with “two and a half kids, a mortgaged home approximately twenty miles from a major city” (BK 83) whom Lily’s lawyer Jackson invokes. Rather than offering emotional support and caring affection, the family is presented as the fundamental unit of abuse and, as I will show in the following, social pressure. While the traumatising lessons form one part of Lily’s education, she is also challenged by the non-attainable gendered expectations her mother and grandmother constantly confront her with. When Sally suggests that Lily should marry one of the Kennedys (BK 56), which would make her part of one of the most famous and glamorous American families, she connects the ideals of (seeming) familial happiness and “the specific American trait of idolising fame and success” (Billington 1994: 448). Although Jenny and Sally constantly request Lily to become a (famous) mother, they themselves fail to actualise the maternal ideal. The figurative line in the opening scene, “bite the bullet of motherhood” (BK 51), which is literally enacted in the ending through the matricide (Aston 2003: 114), epitomises the play’s portrayal of motherhood as a site of destruction rather than of creation and nurture. While Sally outdoes herself with the role of the nurturing mother, Jenny is unable to take care of her daughter Lily in the socially expected way. The symbiotic relationship between Lily’s mother Jenny and her grandmother Sally cites the gender stereotype of ‘the sacred bond’ between mother and daughter. Depicting this ‘sacred bond’ in a hyperbolic form, Butterfly Kiss exhibits its harmful and stifling quality. Sally not only emotionally takes care of Jenny; she is even responsible for Jenny’s physical wellbeing, as if Jenny still was an infant. Thus, Sally constantly checks her blood pressure and feeds her hypochondriac and anorexic daughter by force after having bound a gigantic bib around her neck. Lily is not allowed to interfere in the relationship between the two elder women. Whenever Lily is close to either her grandmother or her mother, the other is envious of their rapport. Furthermore, excluding and debasing Lily reinforces the bond between Jenny and Sally, who call Lily “a major disappointment”, a “leech”, and “a big nothing” (BK 89). The exclusiveness of the bond between Sally and Jenny is again emphasised when Sally makes Jenny promise that she will leave her husband and daughter behind to move to Florida with her. The play exposes the brutality as well as the ridiculousness of their
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symbiotic relationship when mother and daughter, already of the same blood, carry out the ritual of becoming blood sisters. Whereas Sally performs excessive maternity, Jenny is too much the helpless daughter to be an affectionate mother. She treats Lily moodily, oscillating between possessive affection and cold refusal. Jenny’s irresponsibility and incompetence as a mother comes to the fore when she offers her small daughter gin, referring to the history of alcoholic, unhappy women in their family as an excuse: Lily: I’m not old enough to drink, mama. Jenny: Nonsense, Lily-pie. The females in our line got the booze gene. Your own grandma started hitting the bottle at age two. [ ] Why, from the moment I escaped her womb, she breast-fed me gin. Sally: So what if I did? Maybe I gave you the only thrill of your life. (BK 54) In addition to the ideals of motherhood and fame, Lily has to fulfil more individualised versions of the American Dream that are passed on in the “grandmother-mother-daughter-tyranny” (Freeman 1997: 149). As both Sally and Jenny have not managed to become famous singers, they attempt to make Lily a renowned composer who ought to compensate not only for their lack of success but also promote their late careers. Lily’s constant recapitulation of famous cases of murders in a family multiplies her own story of the American dream turned into a violent nightmare and exposes the pervasiveness of the failure of family ideals. Whereas the intertextual references to Freud and Nabokov demonstrate that sexual child abuse is a phenomenon shared by European and North American societies, the play’s explicit negotiation of American values allow British audiences a critical distance to some of the depicted mechanisms. The setting of the original production visualised Nagy’s concern with American ideals in a pristine cabinet with rows of pinned butterflies in the shape of stars and stripes on the back wall of the stage. Jackson describes the home of the Ross family as “Red, white, and blue this place is. Like a flag. [ ] It’s all very American” (BK 58). Despite the unhappiness of the female characters and despite their disillusioning experiences of both motherhood and daughterhood, they cling to fantasies of happy and glamorous family life. For Jenny, increasingly “the American dream [ ] has such a hold on the imagination that it takes over from the bleakness of life” (Freeman 1997: 150). Whereas she first denies her miserable past and present, arguing that it is “better to sit in the dark and remember nothing” (BK 62), she more and more retreats into a dream world. As Jenny’s delusion progresses, she takes Lily for a happy wife and mother as well as for a famous composer who writes songs especially for
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Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss
her. In the final scene between Jenny and her daughter, Lily adopts and even embroiders Jenny’s wishful thinking and confronts her neither with her composing block nor with her lesbian relationship. Complying with Jenny’s American dream, she pretends to have achieved both the norm of femininity and the ideal of fame. She imagines she is married, that she has written fifty songs for Jenny who will soon give a concert and that she is the mother of two sons, now hoping for a girl whom she will name after Jenny. “What if. This never happened” – The ‘unstory’ of Butterfly Kiss Staging the memories of a young woman imprisoned for matricide, Butterfly Kiss employs the dramatic structure of an analytical play both in the sense of a detective story, albeit as a “whydunit” (Sierz 2001: 50) rather than a whodunit, and in the sense of a psychological analysis of the causes for Lily’s traumatisation. However, the play’s ending does not transpose the ‘traumatised’ structure of the play, its series of snapshots that resist a coherent narrative, into a narrative that offers the denouement required by the analytical play. As outlined above, the mosaic plot created by Lily’s recollections is replete with (potentially) traumatic experiences that may have caused Lily’s murder. Towards the end of the play, Lily phrases her vision of a happy and successful life. Her rewriting of her life starts from the speculation “What if. This never happened” (BK 95). Significantly, Lily does not single out one specific traumatic experience which ought not to have happened, as Molly does in Hardie’s play (“I was born complete then broken up” SN 142) but needs to undo a number of disturbing experiences which have shaped her life: my father is a renowned lepidopterist. My mother attends each of his lectures and she understands everything he says. Of course, she’s very busy herself, being as she’s rather a good mezzo-soprano.[ ] My grandmother, once a famous mezzo herself, has retired to Fort Lauderdale. And because she’s very wealthy, men pursue her. She’s dazzling. [ ] My dearest friend is the world-famous flamenco dancer, Christine. She and her husband, the Danish Count Victor Van Dyne, frequently host dinner parties for my parents [ ]. I, of course marry John-John Kennedy and I bear him five sons. He is busy with law school and fund-raisers, which leaves me time to be with Martha McKenzie, my one true love. Martha and I often travel [ ]. And in between my various engagements, I find the time to complete my sixth opera. It’s the one I’m writing for my mother. She’s really looking forward to it. Lastly, I have set up a trust fund for Eleanor [ ], daughter of my father’s friend and my godfather, Teddy [ ]. Eleanor wants to be a composer, too. Teddy’s proud of the example I’ve set for her. He’s such a nice man. (BK 95–6)
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Lily envisions her family to be happy, successful, and prosperous. Her own life combines the normative gender expectations as mediated by her mother and grandmother – the marriage to a famous, wealthy man, motherhood – her unruly love for Martha, and her professional and artistic aspirations. Teddy is represented as Lily’s godfather and a friend of the family only; Lily does not even mention the sexual affair/abuse in her teenage years. This verbal vision of a trauma-free life is reinforced by snapshots which visualise Lily’s wishful thinking. In contrast to the earlier projection of slides, these images are enacted as tableaux vivants. In these enacted snapshots, the audience sees Christine in her flamenco costume, Martha surrounded by luggage, Teddy, who thanks Lily for her generosity, and Sally sunbathing in a beach chair. These hallucinatory images are in stark contrast with the stage images that immediately precede and follow Lily’s fantasy. Before Lily presents her daydream, Sally scrubs the floor of the Ross apartment with her hands, trying to remove the invisible bloodstains of Lily’s matricide (BK 94). After having suffered a stroke, the desperate Sally is far from being “dazzling”. Jenny likewise drastically differs from the ideal image of the famous singer and the intelligent, beloved, and attractive wife. Directly after Lily’s embellished version of her life, the audience sees Jenny in hospital. She is demented and “looks older, greyer. Her hair’s a mess. She wears an old hospital robe and fluffy slippers. She tries to brush her hair, but can’t quite do it” (BK 96). An earlier scene equally demonstrates the impossibility of detraumatisation through revisiting the past and exorcising its traumatic impact. Rather than contrasting fantasies of a trauma-free life with the harsh reality, this scene implies the impossibility of detraumatisation by employing the paradox occasioned by traumatic belatedness. Detraumatisation would require the return to “the initial traumasite and traumatime, and from there, to come to terms with the disruptions that have been caused by them” (Berressem 2003b: 6). However, because of the belated construction of the initial moment as ‘traumatic event’, the initial trauma site and trauma time are non-existent. The play enacts the paradox logic of belatedness, when Lily, attempting to trace the initial trauma of her life, develops a fantasy scenario that cancels out her very existence. She envisions herself to be a guest at the marriage of her parents, where she warns her mother to run away before the groom’s arrival and tries to object to Jenny and Sloan’s wedding in church. Trying to separate her parents to protect herself (and her mother) from future misery, Lily in effect makes her own procreation impossible. The act of matricide, with which the play ends, once more entails a traumatic distortion of chronology and causality. Before her death, Jenny remarks that she was always interested in a family with a past. She thereby inadvertently indicates the reason for her death. Lily’s last sentence before pulling the trigger is “There’s nothing ahead of you but the future, Mama. The future” (BK 102). Lacan’s notion of the rétrovisée, the rear-view, captures trauma’s characteristics of belated construction and its distorted returns. Just
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Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss
as the rear-view mirror projects an inverted image of the past into the front of the subject and thus, metaphorically, into the future,38 the ostensible future that Lily promises her mother turns out to be the lethal consequence of the past. In the final encounter between Lily and Jenny, causality and chronology are further unsettled by the play’s fusion of internal and external reality. In the original production, this fusion apparently subverted the reliability of the events so profoundly that Peter in his review for the Sunday Times suggested that the matricide might be merely a fantasy, too (1994: 446). The ending of Butterfly Kiss does not solve the question of why Lily kills her mother; rather than being presented as the (psycho)logical result of the former events, the murder remains enigmatic and invites various interpretations. First, it might be a reaction to Lily’s realisation that the gendered ideals of the American dream are no more attainable for her than they were for her mother and grandmother. Following this trajectory, the matricide would be an ambivalent act: on the one hand, it is an emancipation from and fatal revenge for the pressure exerted by the normative expectations of her mother. On the other, it could be an act of “euthanasian love” (Kingston 1994: 448), which releases Jenny from her miserable state of having failed the American dream of fame and success and the gender norms of the caring mother, the able housekeeper, and the beloved wife (cf. also Freeman 1997: 149). However, although Lily claims that her mother asked to be killed (BK 82), the re-enactment of the final encounter of mother and daughter at the play’s ending suggests that Jenny is unaware of her daughter’s intention to kill her. A second explanation that the play evokes for the matricide is that the murder becomes Lily’s sad access to fame: Throughout the play, she recites the cases of famous murderers to whom she now belongs as well. Thirdly, Lily might have killed Jenny on behalf of her father. Sloane gives Lily the gun as a present and thereby offers Lily the means to make their childhood game come true, in which he charged his small daughter with matricide: “we begin to run. [ ] Daddy [ ] begins to sing: If you step the crack, you will break your mother’s back [ ]. And when, at the end of our sadistic run, I do step on that crack, I know my breath will come no more. I have killed my mother” (BK 79). Following this trajectory, the murder appears as part of a repetition compulsion, as the acting out of a traumatising childhood experience. The abundance of explanations for Lily’s matricide fits the overall structure of the play, which enacts an ‘unstory’ that defies causality and chronology rather than providing a story that allows for the assessment and, as in Daniels’s play, even the (at least partial) exorcisation of the trauma. In Butterfly Kiss, narration does not become a means of making sense of the past either on the inner-fictional level or on the aesthetic level. Lily does not abreact the traumatic impact of particular, formerly repressed experiences of abuse by narrating them, as Molly and Evelyn do in Hardie’s and Daniels’s plays. Instead, Lily recounts and re-enacts a surplus of potentially traumatising memories, which frequently contradict each other and sometimes even
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cancel each other out. Nagy’s play can hence be linked to the more sceptical assessment of the healing power of narration in Lacanian trauma theory. From a Lacanian point of view, the notion of the restorative and unifying power of verbalisation is problematic. As Lacan assumed that the entry into the symbolic (into language, the law, culture) is itself traumatic, there can be “no escape from trauma in narrative. Narrative is always already traumatic [ ]. The utopia of detraumatization through narrativisation must [ ] always stumble against the traumatics inherent in the structure of language” (Berressem 2003a: 4–6). Despite its ostensibly investigative structure, the play thus demonstrates the impossibility to locate (mono)causal connections between the protagonist’s past, her traumatisation, and her matricide. Rather than solving the mystery of Lily’s murder, the play ends with the very act of Lily’s murder that instigated the action, once more offering ‘mimesis’ rather than ‘diegesis’ in the sense established by Leys. Frustrating expectations of denouement, Butterfly Kiss makes felt the “epistemic violence” inherent in trauma, because of which “whatever story and representation emerge to account for this event, which is no event, will be subject to this same catachresis that I perform when I speak about it improperly as an event; [ ] For part of the effect of that violation, when it is one, is precisely to make the knowing of truth into an infinitely remote prospect” (Butler 2004: 156).
Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998) Easy Access (for the Boys), first staged at London’s Drill Hall in 1998, continues Nagy’s aesthetic experimentation, and Dowie, as Nagy, raises questions about sexual child abuse that tended to be neglected in the public debates about the issue.39 The reviews of Easy Access point to the shift in the public discourse on the trauma of sexual child abuse, that is, the “decisive swing from cultural vacuum to multiple media mediation” (Kitzinger 2001: 92). Rather than disputing the prevalence of abuse as some critics of Beside Herself at the beginning of the decade had done, reviewers such as Jane Edwards criticised the play for its all-too common topic, arguing that the play “is just another skeleton from a now too familiar closet that would benefit from being pushed back inside” (1998: 121). However, Dowie’s approach to the issue of sexual child abuse differs in several respects from earlier plays of Trauma Drama and thus manages to bring to the fore new aspects of the ostensibly ‘too familiar’ topic. The play demonstrates that being intimate with the termini of trauma theory and being able to address sexual child abuse as a phenomenon does not necessarily grant the victim easy access to his own feelings about the event. On the contrary, in Dowie’s play the ubiquity of the discourse on child abuse makes the protagonist, Michael, revolt against the ready-made role of the victim. Michael, who works as a prostitute for male clients, devises a documentary video diary for a TV channel about his job and the impact that
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Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys)
his job has on his private life. In the process of creating this documentary, Michael also talks about the former sexual encounters with his father. Just as he refuses to see himself as a victim of abuse, Michael does not cast his father, Ed, in the role of the perpetrator. The play’s characterisation of Ed supports Michael’s view to a certain extent: Rather than making the abusive relative an absent but demonised figure as Hardie does and unlike Evelyn’s chauvinistic and despotic father George in Beside Herself, Ed is depicted as “a liberal, non-authoritarian, 1960s, drug and Bob Dylan loving dad” (Aston 2003: 54). Initially, he hence does not fit the figure of the villain. Challenging the standardised depiction of sexual child abuse in the media, the play raises taboo questions: Can sexual relations between father and child be experienced as an expression of affection rather than as traumatic and abusive? Can the encounters be sexually arousing for the child as well? Can the son still love his father if he remembers the abuses? Does the environment’s moral condemnation of adult-child-sex rather than the acts themselves victimise the child? The polyvalent title Easy Access (for the Boys) not only highlights that in the case of incestuous abuse, the father’s access to the son, his “habit or opportunity of getting near or in contact with” (Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. I: 72) Michael, was particularly easy. It also suggests that in the world of Easy Access, child abuse is no longer a taboo topic as in Sleeping Nightie and Beside Herself, but has become a widely discussed matter. It is even the abusing father himself who first uses the word “traumatising” (Easy Access 5), which appears to be part of his everyday vocabulary.40 Unlike Molly and Evelyn, Michael is able to remember and verbalise the sexual encounters with his father; his confession at the very beginning of the play offers audiences easier and earlier access to the protagonist’s past than most other plays of the genre do. However, Michael rejects the label ‘abuse’: “Apparently, if you’ve put up with so-called sexual abuse, then you have to automatically hate the abuser. ‘Put up with’, ‘abuse’. I never put up with anything, I never felt abused [ ]. I love my dad actually” (EA 8). In his accounts of the incestuous relationship, Michael dismisses using the ready-made narrative patterns of abuse which his environment offers. Instead, Michael has created a counter-narrative of the former incestuous relationship as an expression of mutual affection, which entails an idealised image of Ed as loving and caring father. Michael’s idealisation of Ed is contrasted with his radically different relationship to his mother. The incestuous relationship started after Michael’s mother had left the family. Whereas Michael easily and often has accesses of anger about his mother’s leaving (EA 15), he denies that he has been injured by the incestuous encounters with Ed. On the contrary, he claims that the sudden end of the sexual acts disturbed him: I love my dad. I love my dad so much. For years, since I was six it was me and him, him and me. We were like that, we were so close. [ ] Times I
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Another aspect of Michael’s argumentation to exculpate his father is that sex is “meaningless”, a view that links up with his job as a prostitute: “I’d hate us to fall over something as meaningless as sex. Although I know that some would regard child sex as anything but meaningless but that’s their problem, I don’t suffer from it” (EA 8). However, in the very monologue in which Michael first talks about the sexual encounters, the play introduces a number of elements which will make audiences soon question Michael’s version of his unconventionally sexualised but happy relationship with his father. It turns out that although Michael clearly remembers the incidents, claims not to have suffered from them, and talks about his experiences to the audience, he and Ed have never talked about them (EA 8). Throughout the play, Michael needs to address the audience as if they were his father to discuss the silenced part of their relationship: “Nothing ever being said, everything covered up, normal. [ ] Did you ever think about it the next day? You never said anything! It was always so silent, wasn’t it? So unacknowledged” (EA 23). Moreover, when Michael claims that he has succeeded in “forgiving and forgetting” (EA 7), he indicates that his father behaved in a way that needed to be forgiven. Statements like these undermine Michael’s idealisation and romanticisation of the father-son-relationship. This subversion is reinforced by Michael’s best friend Gary, who keeps mocking Michael’s tender rapport to his father and warns Michael that he is “just burying” (EA 7) his memories at the expense of his self-esteem. Presenting an alleged victim of abuse who struggles to maintain his view of father-son-incest as an expression of emotional closeness, the play tackles an issue which Butler has recently demanded be addressed in the context of trauma and incest: “it is often precisely the child’s love that is exploited in the scene of incest. By refusing to consider what happens to the child’s love and desire in the traumatic incestuous relation with an adult, we fail to describe the depth and psychic consequence of trauma” (2004: 155). In addition to its novel focus on the child’s emotional and sexual involvement in an incestuous relationship with an adult, the play innovatively departs from the predominant gendering of the abuse victim in Trauma Drama. In Easy Access, the traumatic consequences of sexual child abuse appear as a male rather than female malady. Not only Michael, but also a number of his male friends, among them Gary, have been abused in their childhood. The fact that the presentation of sexually abused boys was largely omitted from contemporary Trauma Drama corresponds to the denial of the
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hated him, hated what he did, but he never hurt me, never did anything really bad. Except of course when he stopped. [ ] months and months of waiting [ ]. I felt worse then, that was the worst time, I thought [ ] he [ ] didn’t love me any more [ ]. (EA 23)
experience of abused boys on a larger sociocultural scale. Mike Lew’s Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse is one of the earliest studies that attempted “to provide as much information as possible [ ] about a subject that seems to be ignored as much as possible” (1988: 3). However, according to the recent publication Sexual Abuse of Males by Josef Spiegel, the issue remained neglected on both societal and professional levels throughout the 1990s. The study’s foreword opens with the remark that “in contemporary society, the sexual abuse of males is massively denied, misunderstood, and trivialized” (Courtois 2003: vii). In this regard, the title’s supplement (for the Boys) can be understood as a dedication to a marginalised group of abuse victims. Not only does Dowie’s play differ from the earlier pieces in its gendering of the traumatised protagonist, it also depicts a world in which gender norms are far less clearly discernable. Easy Access presents a male protagonist who deviates from the norm of heterosexual masculinity: Working as a prostitute who dresses up for his exclusively male, often abusive, clients, Michael occupies a position which heteronormative patriarchy has associated with femininity. When Michael’s partner Matt asks him to give up prostitution and become “a regular bloke with a regular job” (EA 35), the play highlights that it is not Michael’s homosexuality but his profession which demarcates him from ‘regularity’. In the revised version of the play that was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,41 Michael explicitly comments on the obsoleteness of the heterosexual gender norms (as well as the racial norm of whiteness), at least in the chic, metropolitan upper middle class circles Matt associates with: “I mean whoever wants to be a straight, white, heterosexual, married couple nowadays?” (Dowie 1999: 40). This assertion of a world freed from heteronormative gender expectations notwithstanding, Easy Access gradually unravels the large degree to which Michael’s gender performances are affected by his traumatic repetition compulsions. Although Easy Access does not, as the plays by Hardie, Daniels and Nagy do, present gender norms as a causing factor of Michael’s traumatisation, it nonetheless highlights in how far Michael’s masculinity is a product of his traumatisation. On the sliding scale between metonymy and metaphor, Michael’s traumatisation comes to stand for his masculinity, which is established and maintained through performing and being performed, through the incessant and partly unconscious reproductions of (no longer obligatorily and exclusively heterosexual) gender norms. “Everything becomes blurred and sliding” – Stand-up trauma drama Like Butterfly Kiss, Easy Access presents a protagonist who is aware of his experiences of teenage/childhood sex and even can articulate (parts of) his memories. Nonetheless, the play depicts its protagonist as traumatised. Whereas Butterfly Kiss stages traumatisation chiefly on the level of style
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and does not specify one particular traumatising incident on the plot level, Dowie’s play excavates the traumatising impact of Ed’s erstwhile sexual abuses on both levels. On the inner-fictional level, the play makes Michael gradually establish a new narrative about the incestuous encounters which recovers his feelings of exploitation. Stylistically, Dowie creates a form of ‘stand-up trauma drama’ which highlights that Michael, despite his ability to talk about aspects of the abuses, is deeply traumatised. Dowie’s contribution to Trauma Drama shares and further develops characteristics of earlier plays of the genre, such as the employment of comic elements and the non-realistic treatment of time and space. These features link up with Dowie’s individual way of dramatic writing and performing, which she labels “stand-up theatre” (Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 156, Dowie 2006), as it blends stand-up comedy strategies and more traditional dramatic techniques.42 Profiting from her experience as a stand-upcomedian, Dowie skilfully weaves comic one-liners and dialogues into her depiction of the traumatic legacy of incestuous sexual child abuse. Furthermore, the play equals stand-up-comedy in its direct address of the audience and its evocation of spaces, times, and situations mainly by means of performance and speech rather than props and stage scenery. The employment of video proffers an inner-fictional motivation for Michael’s direct, ‘stand-up’ address of the audience as a narrator figure. For his video documentary, Michael not only films and interviews his family and his colleagues and performs scenes of everyday life for the camera, he also directly talks to the camera about his experiences, and he records voice-overs that explain the material recorded. In the original production directed by Dowie, the camera was placed in the auditorium in those moments when Michael talked to the camera about his life; thus, the monologues addressed to the theatre audiences were, on the inner-fictional level, recordings of Michael’s explanations for the future TV audiences. As typical of Dowie’s stand-up theatre, the play’s original production used only indispensable props such as the video player and a microphone to record Michael’s voice-over. The stage design presented Ed’s bar with chairs at the back of the stage, but created all other rooms merely by speech and the use of video sequences. For example, when Michael wakes up in Matt’s bed, the actor playing Michael, Jud Charlton, remained standing at the front of the stage rather than lying down in an (imagined) bed. The play is not divided into scenes but constantly blends or even folds temporal and local settings and character configurations into each other.43 Moreover, it interconnects external reality and internal reality. While this technique requires heightened attention from audiences used to linear time structures, clearly demarcated settings, and a stylistic differentiation between realistic and fantasy scenarios, it achieves to stage the action according to Michael’s view. Easy Access’s aesthetics stage the protagonist’s traumatised perception, in which all memories and feelings concerning the abuses are “blurred and sliding”
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Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys)
(EA 24) and not ordered into a chronological and causal narrative. The play’s traumatised realism, which interlocks past, present, reality, and fantasy is even further complicated by the use of video screens. In the original production, the audience could see the video sequences on a screen placed above the characters, while the characters occasionally watched recorded scenes on a monitor placed on the stage. These screens offer yet another level of action that runs parallel to and sometimes interacts with the scenes on stage. Blending past and present, the play demonstrates the degree to which Michael is performed by his past. It reinforces the idea that Michael repeats his childhood experience of abuse in his professional life, in which he is continually (ab)used by older male clients. Despite their different uses of video as a means of documentation and as an artistic project, Michael’s provocation of exploitative sexual encounters with men resembles Molly’s video project and, as in Sleeping Nightie, the repetition compulsion involved in Michael’s job has a twofold function. On the one hand, it induces a painful reliving of the past and demonstrates that Michael is performed by the repetition compulsion beyond his control. The fact that his job involves a renewed experience of helplessness and abuse is highlighted when Michael is beaten up by clients. On the other hand, working as a prostitute offers Michael a repetition of the past abuses in a way that allows him more control of the situation of sexual exploitation than he had as a child. The play epitomises Michael’s attempt at mastery by a spatial metaphor. While the small boy passively waited upstairs for his father to come to his room after he closed down his bar, Michael the adult actively seeks clients downstairs in the bar. Michael experiences this change of roles as a way of empowerment and gaining control. He maintains that this waiting person upstairs is “never again going to be me”: “The bar’s just a bar, no surroundings, no upstairs, I’m in control [ ]. [ ] [N]ever drunk, I want to be in control of this guy” (EA 9). The stage design of the original production visualised this spatial metaphor, which split off the passive, waiting child upstairs from the adult in charge downstairs. Large, slightly tilted wooden beams above the stage represented the room upstairs in which Michael used to wait for his father’s sexual caresses/molestations. By presenting Michael’s room as a space that cannot be entered by the characters but that roofs the action, the original production visualised the impenetrability as well as the importance of Michael’s memories associated with the room upstairs. Moreover, the fact that in the production the video screen was placed on the eaves of these wooden beams reinforced the close association of the video diary with Michael’s traumatic past. The stage scenery ‘downstairs’ was dominated by the counter of Ed’s bar. Since all characters who were not part of a particular scene retreated to the bar to wait for their next appearance, the image of Ed behind the counter served as background image for all scenes in which Ed was not directly involved and thereby visualised the importance of Ed ‘downstairs’.
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The play’s fusion of past and present suggests that Michael repeats the pattern of abuse not only in his job but also in his personal relationships. When he falls in love with Matt, their sexual encounters are closely associated with the earlier abuses. As long as Michael conceptualises the incestuous sexual encounters with his father as expressions of love, he feels stimulated by these memories. For example, the play interlinks a childhood recollection of Michael excitedly waiting upstairs for his father to close the bar with a situation in the present, when Matt rather than Ed eventually enters the room (EA 10). While this blending of past and present ascribes a sexually arousing quality to the past, the following instance makes Ed’s participation more ambiguous. Although Michael initially responds Ed’s caresses, he turns to Matt as soon as Ed becomes his sole sexual partner: Matt undoing Michael’s shirt etc. Michael very still, passive. Michael getting more aroused (though still passive) as Ed joins Matt in rubbing, massaging, kissing etc. Michael’s body. But as Matt backs off and Ed takes over completely, Michael becomes active and reciprocates to Matt, Ed then backs off, ‘fades away’. (EA 13) These scenes employ filmic techniques such as montage and fading, but adapt them as dramatic modes. Rather than switching between scenarios of the past and the present as in filmic montage, Dowie’s dramatic montage unites the past and the present sexual encounter and thereby indicates that Michael experiences sex as a repetition of his childhood experiences with Ed. When Michael slowly starts to admit his shame and anger about the abuses, his conflation of Matt and Ed becomes problematic and he acts out his repulsion: Michael finding it difficult as Matt gets sexual. Michael succumbing (reluctantly) till Ed takes over from Matt, then Michael freaks. Michael: Stop it! Stop it! I can’t stand it! (Ed backs off, Matt takes over.) Matt: What’s the problem? What’s wrong? (EA 25) Michael’s best friend Gary sarcastically articulates that the traumatic repetition compulsion correlates lover and abuser, when he suggests that Matt as Michael’s “new dad” exploits Michael’s sexual submissiveness (EA 30). Dowie uses the same device as Furse in creating the pair Charcot/Carnot when she highlights the characters’ connection through their names; the similar sound of ‘Ed’, ‘Matt’ as well as ‘dad’ supports their association. The paronymy of the names is emphasised in sentences such as “Matt, this is
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Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys)
Ed, my Dad” (EA 18). The play visualises Michael’s fear that Matt has an equally exploitative sexual interest in him as his father had, when Matt and Ed simultaneously wave and smile at Michael after Gary suggested that Matt shares Ed’s abusive interest in Michael (EA 30). While these correspondences between Matt and Ed emphasise Michael’s fears and Gary’s suspicions, Matt’s characterisation does not support his similarity with Ed. Matt replaces Ed as a lover, but he does not abuse Michael and is not portrayed as paedophile. On the contrary, his relationship to his daughter Becky triggers a change in Michael’s conceptualisation of the incestuous sexual acts he has experienced and he begins to comprehend that they were not marked by equality and mutual love and caring. The play’s stand-up traumatised realism calls the actuality of Michael’s friend Gary into question. It is only in the last scene that Michael and Gary meet other people together. Until then, Gary could be an imagined friend of Michael’s, who helps him to come to terms with the abuses and who makes him confront his father. This idea is supported by the fact that Michael avoids introducing Gary to Matt, because he is afraid that Gary might tell Matt about the abuses (EA 28–9). Gary hence has similar functions to Eve. He reminds Michael of the abuses, he mocks Michael’s emollience and his idealisation of his father, and he expresses Michael’s anger, such as when he proposes to “beat the crap out of” the “absolute bastard” (EA 30). The interlocking of different times and spaces reinforces the impression that the Gary figure is the externalisation of a voice in Michael’s head which monitors and directs Michael’s behaviour: Michael: I suppose you want an apology? Matt: An explanation would be better. Gary: Tell him, Michael, why not? Michael: My dad bothered me. Matt: What do you mean? Gary: If he really cared about you, what difference would it make? (EA 31) The play’s intermeshing of time levels at other points creates the impression that Gary is not only a voice in Michael’s head, but also actually speaks on Michael’s behalf to the other characters: Gary: Has he introduced you to the folk yet? Have you taken tea with mumsy? Matt: Oh come on, Michael, you know full well my parents live in Edinburgh [ ]. Plus the fact that I invited you to come with us that time but I seem to recall you were otherwise engaged with a very rich American [ ]. Gary: Which came first, the idea of the visit or the rich American jam pot?
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In the solo remix of Easy Access, Michael’s monologues included a number of Gary’s lines of the first version; this revision supports the idea that Gary serves as an alter ego figure for Michael in the original production.44 Although Gary and Michael share the experiences of childhood incestuous abuse, they deal with them in very different ways. Whereas Michael has conceptualised the abuses as acts of love and is unable to see the negative sides of his father, Gary has demonised both his parents and claims to feel no affection for them. His world-view has become ‘disabused’; he denies the existence of love and sees power as the only basis for human relationships: “Nobody does something for nothing [ ]. It’s all power in one form or another” (EA 31). Gary’s misanthropy is constantly reinforced by his experiences with his customers. His friends, who are all victims of child abuse (EA 31), appear to be the only exception to this rule. Gary divides the people he knows strictly into despicable abusers and victims who can be trusted as friends. Because of his uncompromising allure of emotional autarchy, Gary temporarily becomes an idol for Michael (EA 32). “It’s private till it’s edited” – Michael’s video diary As Michael’s video project is designed to be a diary, Dowie’s intermedial play employs a classical modus of recollection and reflection in a technically updated form. The video diary’s combination of live recordings, belated interpretations of recorded events, and the possibility to rearrange the filmed episodes and statements by editing resemble the workings of memory, which not merely stores episodes from the past but continually revises the past in the interests of the present. The recording, viewing and editing work involved in the creation of the video diary also represents the memory work that is necessary in the process of detraumatisation: “Merely uncovering memories is not enough; they need to be modified and transformed (i.e., placed in their proper contexts and reconstructed in a personally meaningful way) [ ]. Thus, in therapy, memory paradoxically needs to become an act of creation rather than the static recording of events” (van der Kolk and McFarlane 1996a: 19). Michael not only uses the video diary to film scenes from his everyday life, but also to report verbally his own feelings and thoughts. In these passages, he either films himself talking directly to the audience with simultaneous live projections (EA 8, 24, 42), films significant places or events and at once reflects on their meanings in a voice-over (EA 38–9, 45), or belatedly adds a voice-over to already filmed sequences (EA 27). Although his trauma, as I will argue, invades all modes of filming, it is particularly in those contemplative sections that Michael tackles the abuses. As a narrative mode, film offers Michael the possibility to transform his present and past experiences into a
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Matt: God, how long does this suspicion and mistrust have to go on? If I didn’t want you I wouldn’t be here. (EA 13–14)
story. Since Michael admits and re-evaluates feelings and memories he does not disclose when he talks to others, the diary offers a means to develop a new, hitherto untold story. Michael does not even grant his best friend Gary access to the particular recordings with which he creates an intimate, fragile new story, arguing that the diary is “private till it’s edited” (EA 28). Allowing audiences insight into Michael’s memory work, the video projections enhance the synchronisation of Michael’s and the audience’s perception. They make audiences witness Michael’s gradual establishment of a new narrative about his past, which no longer considers the sexual encounters with his father as expressions of mutual affection between equal partners. Dowie’s second version of the play, Easy Access (Solo Remix), made even more extensive use of video. In this production, Dowie played Michael while all the other characters, played by the Drill Hall cast, were present on video projections only. This technique reinforced the impression that the play takes place in Michael’s imagination and even strengthened the play’s “characteristically canny [ ] use of [m]onologues, with their built-in knack of presenting the world from the speaker’s distorted, partial perspective, with slippery overlappings of reliable and unreliable witness[ing]” (Taylor 1999: n. pag.). In both versions of the play, the emerging new narrative about the abuses is so central to the diary that it becomes questionable whether Michael indeed has been asked to document his life as a male prostitute for TV broadcasting or whether he invented this as an excuse to pursue his private task of coming to terms with the abuses. As a result of the video diary’s function both as a means of contemplation and of documentation, the video offers the possibility of working through, but it also displays forms of traumatic acting out. In the opening scene of the play’s original production, for instance, Michael re-enacts the past for the sake of documentation. He demonstrates his professional progress from soliciting clients on the street, to postcard advertisement in a shop window, to appointments arranged by mobile phone. Michael actualises these professional steps not merely by recalling them verbally but re-enacts them on the original sites in original clothing. Gary films his friend “dressed very young and sexily” on the “meat rack” (EA 3) where Gary and Michael first used to work. However, already the opening passage blurs the line between re-enactment and re-experience. Whilst Gary films Michael posing as his younger self and Michael begins to explain to the future TV and the actual theatre audience that he started working as a street prostitute, Michael suddenly disappears to meet a costumer. Since the video does not show the costumer, Michael’s exit remains ambivalent. Does he perform as perfectly as possible as if he were still working on the ‘meat rack’, to the point of feigning a costumer contact? Or is he performed by the video’s set up and actually once more works as a street prostitute? A later video fragment shows the repetition compulsion involved in Michael’s return to his rough beginnings in a more explicit way:
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(External. Michael, dressed sexily, young, sitting on the safety railing on the ‘meat rack’.)
(A car horn sounds. Michael jumps off the rail and, after a cursory chat gets into the car.) Gary (VO.): Arsehole. (EA 33) The fact that even his colleague Gary perceives Michael’s conduct as insensible emphasises the impression that Michael is performed by the traumatic repetition compulsion of his past rather than deliberately poses for the video. Furthermore, the later video fragment shows that Michael re-enacts his former job on the ‘meat rack’ more than once and hence indicates that he does not merely do it for the sake of documentation. In addition to the re-enactment of scenes from Michael’s professional life, the video diary shows interviews with people from Michael’s environment, such as Gary, Ed, and his mother. Ed is introduced through his statements on the video diary. Significantly, Michael interviews Ed as if he were not his father, and makes Ed talk about his son in the third person; the audience hence only gradually realises that the son Ed refers to is actually Michael, the interviewer and cameraman himself. The passage indicates that the video diary offers Michael not only radical subjectivity – and sutures the audience’s perspective into Michael’s – but also the relief of documenting and questioning his biography as if it were someone else’s. The camera’s objective becomes a means of objectifying his beloved father and Michael’s past experiences that are associated with him. Although Michael’s interview with Ed does not mention the abuses, the video passage introduces a visual element that associates the father with Michael’s clients, as the camera at one point moves from Ed’s face to his crotch while he and Michael are discussing the advantages and drawbacks of Michael’s job. This device emphasises that the video project becomes a means to approach the childhood trauma in ways which are non-verbal; it allows Michael to accuse his father with images rather than words. As in Hardie’s and Daniels’s play, the presence of a child that is in potential danger of repeating the protagonist’s own experiences of abuse serves as a catalyst for Michael’s acknowledgement of his abusive past. When Michael experiences Matt’s tender rapport to Becky, he starts to realise how warped his view of parental love is. He takes incestuous desire for granted, seeing it as the only interest a father might have in his child. He is surprised that Matt doesn’t touch her [Becky] at all, [ ] doesn’t even cross his mind. I thought that was weird at first, I kept looking for signs, kept thinking oh
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Gary (V.O. – concerned): What are you doing this for Michael? This is ridiculous.
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This confession demonstrates that sex is not meaningless for Michael, as he has claimed before. On the contrary, he sees sex as the (only) basis for human relationships and is appalled by it. Thus, despite the play’s sympathy for Michael’s need for paternal affection, it demonstrates that the abuse has affected and debased Michael’s very concept of paternal love. Although Easy Access does not typecast the abuse survivor as an innocent victim,45 it introduces the notion of spoiled innocence through Becky. Michael films Betty and later comments in a voice-over: “How can anyone want to ruin a little kid like Becky? [ ] What did my dad think? What did he see? Innocence” (EA 27). Employing concepts like ‘innonce’ and ‘ruin’, the speech invokes a model of traumatised identity in which trauma shatters the subject’s pre-existing wholeness. Such a model has been described by theoreticians such as Herman and has gained prominence in the context of legal debates about abuse cases.46 In Sleeping Nightie, the protagonist explicitly refers to the model of originary wholeness: “I was born complete then broken up” (SN 142). Beside Herself visualises the notion of a shattered subject and its recuperation through the doubling of the protagonist that is rescinded in the end, as well as through the crashed mirror onstage, which is ultimately replaced by a new mirror. It is only Nagy’s Butterfly Kiss which does not offer a vision of Lily’s ‘wholeness’ or innocence prior to the abuses. Lily appears always already traumatised and the sexual encounter with the adult is only one of a series of potentially traumatic experiences. Michael starts to reconstruct the subtle mechanisms involved in child abuse when he recognises in Becky his own purity and helplessness as a little boy: And she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t understand if a finger strayed where it shouldn’t. And that would be the start. [ ] And then having touched once, the next one will be easier and more sexual. [ ] And on and on till she’s overpowered by her confusion and guilt. Oh God Oh God, Dad, I loved you so much. (EA 27) The past tense of the final statement already indicates a change in Michael’s feelings towards his father. He starts to realise that Ed exploited his helplessness, deliberately overpowered Michael, and then hid his deeds (EA 23–4). Michael begins to question the reliability of his conceptualisation of the sexual encounters with Ed: “I have an image a memory of me and my
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he must be, why else would he want access? But he doesn’t, he just loves her – normally. Had so much respect for him then [ ]. I want to be part of something where sex isn’t always at the heart of everything. Because to be honest I am sick of sex. (EA 12)
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dad in the flat, it’s like a bubble, a dream. And it was all so innocent and loving and I don’t think that’s true any more. I’m beginning to think I invented that image ” (EA 24). The appearance of a second child leads to the play’s climax, as it provokes Michael’s acknowledgement of the abuses and the confrontation with Ed. However, rather than presenting the confrontation as a (psycho)logical result of the acknowledgement, as Daniels’s play does, Easy Access interlocks confrontation and acknowledgement. Unexpectedly for Michael, a young woman, Ruth, and her seven-year-old son Jake, who is about the same age as Michael was when his father started abusing him, move in with Ed. Michael feels pressurised to take measures against a possible repetition of the abuses and confronts his father with both his fear for Jake and his memories, for the first time saying, “you abused me” (EA 38). Ed does not neglect the abuses and even shows an awareness of his guilt. However, he plays down the significance of the sexual acts: I felt terrible. [ ] It didn’t last long, it hardly happened really [ ]. I was going through a bit of a crisis [ ] things got out of hand, but it wasn’t much [ ], you’ll never know how much I regretted it [ ]. [ ] I tried so hard to give you the love that you needed [ ]. If I perhaps loved you too much, if I perhaps compensated too much when your mum went [ ]. I didn’t do much, did I? Nothing bad really. Hardly anything if you remember correctly. [ ] [S]uch a little thing, a slight mistake. (EA 37) Like George in Beside Herself, Ed attempts to defend himself by suggesting that the abuses were an expression of his love and concern for Michael. However, Michael’s subsequent comment, “Lies all lies” (EA 38), proves that Michael no longer shares Ed’s narrative about the abuses as an expression of love. Michael moves in with Ed as well, attempting to constantly observe and control his father. While this is a measure to protect Jake, the play also suggests that it is an act of jealousy because Michael fears being replaced by Jake. Michael realises that a repetition of the abuses would bereave the sexualised father-son-bond of its uniqueness. Accordingly, the presence of Jake promotes Michael’s insight that Ed’s abuses were as exploitative as his sexual encounters with his clients: “If he is doing stuff with Jake then I’m just a body. Nothing special. Easy access, cheap, rent boy [ ]. Didn’t want me. Wanted what he could get from me” (EA 42). Seeing Jake as his replacement also allows for Michael’s identification with him, in an even more straightforward way than with Becky. When Michael films Jake sleeping in his own former bed, he begins to work through the trauma and recovers the affect caused by the abuses: “It was always late. I pretended to be asleep [ ]. I feel a bit like I used to, doing this, sort of panicky, I suppose” (EA 45).
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Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys)
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In Easy Access, acknowledgement and confrontation of the abuser are not (simultaneous) steps of the protagonist’s journey towards empowerment and healing, but these processes prompt a power struggle between Ed and Michael. The play presents this fight on the inner-fictional level through Michael’s and Ed’s constant arguments and mutual provocations, but it also reflects it on the level of aesthetics. Throughout the play, Michael, as the protagonist and narrator of Dowie’s video-memory play, is constantly onstage, and all live action as well as all video projections are featured as part of his recollection or as his experience in the present. However, after the confrontation, the play stages a scenic fragment in which Michael is not involved. In this short dialogue, Ed warns Ruth not to trust Michael (EA 44). This introduction of a sub-plot to which Michael has no access and in which his reliability is discredited leads to the play’s turning point, after which Michael’s antagonist Ed controls the action for the remaining sixth of the play. Ed’s usurpation of the narrative power, as a result of which Easy Access in the final part abandons the form of a memory play, is motivated on the level of the play’s action by Ed’s theft of the video diary. When Ed realises that Michael will not let go of his accusations, he steals Michael’s video diary and, in the second scenic fragment in which Michael is not present, watches it in secret (EA 48). He thereby not only robs Michael of his chief means of gaining mastery over his trauma, but also eliminates a body of (emotional) evidence that accuses Ed. On the aesthetic level, the theft divests Michael of narrative power, as he is no longer able to transform, comment, and rearrange the onstage actions by means of video projections. This loss is visualised by the projection of a blank, static video screen (EA 51). Michael’s disempowerment is further emphasised by the fact that the audience learns sooner of Ed’s theft than Michael himself. Michael experiences Ed’s unscrupulous invasion of his privacy as a repetition of the childhood abuses: “Bloody done it to me again. That’s private, like a diary and he’s done it again, bloody fucked me again, I feel like he’s fucked me again” (EA 51). Michael’s anger about the theft eventually activates his formerly repressed rage about Ed’s perpetration in the past. Michael attempts to regain mastery over the plot remain futile and his pronounced need for a happy ending (“I believe in happy endings, believe everything will sort itself out, eventually” EA 17) is not fulfilled. On the contrary, the ending stages Ed’s usurpation of plot control on all three levels of presentation – onstage action, video diary, and the interaction between them. In the final scene, Ed prevents Michael’s attempts to publicly accuse him of sexual child abuse by making all characters, including Matt, watch Michael’s video diary. However, as the video starts, it turns out that Ed has rearranged the video in a way that makes Michael appear as a potential or actual abuser. In order to exculpate himself, Ed’s edition of the diary
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“Bloody done it to me again” – Losing control of the plot
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merely has to repeat Michael’s early recordings that asseverate his love for Ed. By means of a sophisticated montage of the other scenes, Ed reinterprets Michael’s attempts to reconstruct Ed’s behaviour as Michael’s own sexual fantasies: “Get the kid young and he won’t understand. [ ] I could probably touch Jake, he’s definitely asleep. I know how to, just slip my hand under the duvet [ ]. Innocence. And she [Becky] smells nice, clean [ ]. And she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t understand if a finger strayed where it shouldn’t. And that would be the start” (EA 58). Casting Michael rather than Ed as the abuser, Ed’s version of the video undermines the credibility of Michael’s accusations even before Michael is able to utter them. Rather than staging the protagonist’s triumph over the abuser in a public confession and accusation, the play’s ending denies Michael the opportunity to take revenge and instead once more victimises him. On the one hand, the ending reinforces the positions of victim and perpetrator. Whereas Ed’s behaviour up to the theft of the video was benevolent and caring, the ending belatedly proves his selfishness and his destructive power over Michael. Michael, who has initially rejected the position of the abuse victim, is once more victimised by his abuser – ironically, he is victimised by being denied the potentially empowering status of victimhood. While Dowie’s play critically examines the polarised positions of victim and abuser and offers a differentiated account of the mechanisms involved in incestuous sexual child abuse, the ending reinforces the victimhood of the abuse survivor and the villainy of the abuser. Despite its cliffhanger ending in terms of plot development, Easy Access hence offers adjustment on the level of characterisation and moral judgement. The play shares this device with other recent plays of Trauma Drama which offer complex abuser characters rather than flat and static villains. Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, first staged at the Birmingham Rep in 1998 and transferred to the National Theatre as well as to Broadway, presents the abuser as a former victim of abuse and takes into account neurobiological research which suggests that he might not be morally responsible for his deeds (cf. Wald 2006). In the same year, the monologue of a convicted paedophile in Alan Bennett’s TV drama Playing Sandwiches offered insight into the abuser’s thoughts. Lucy Prebble’s play The Sugar Syndrome, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 2003, portrays the paedophile protagonist as a likeable, intelligent, and somewhat pitiable person, a victim of society rather than a perpetrator.47 David Hines’s Nymphs and Shepherds (Etcetera Theatre 2004), Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s Fresh Kills (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs 2004), Kevin Elyot’s Forty Winks (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs 2004) and Bennett’s The History Boys (National Theatre 2005) have likewise explored the abuser character beyond the stereotypical demonisation of sensationalist press reports.48 Although the plays thereby might move “the viewing audience [ ] a few, perhaps grudging, steps closer to recognizing a flawed human – not a monster – behind the tabloid headlines” (O’Mealy 2001:
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Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys)
119), as Joseph H. O’Mealy argues for Playing Sandwiches, the endings of the plays nonetheless reintroduce moral judgement and highlight the abuser’s responsibility for his deeds.49 On the other hand, however, the confirmation of Michael’s victimhood does not go unchallenged. The unexpected ending juxtaposes Michael’s hard-earned, new abuse narrative with yet another narrative, which suggests that Michael does not exclusively identify with the filmed children, but also with the role of the perpetrator. Ed’s video evokes a pattern of traumatic repetition compulsion which unsettles the clear-cut differentiation between perpetrators and victims, a pattern which Michael had been afraid of throughout the play:50 A lot of people, straight people, they go on about cycles of abuse and how abusers were once abused and abuse breeding abuse breeding abuse and I wasn’t abused, I know I wasn’t abused but try telling that to people? [ ] Try telling them I don’t feel abused, I don’t feel abusive, but then see how suspicious they become. (EA 12)51 As the play has demonstrated earlier that Michael’s affirmations that he was not abused cannot be trusted, the ending likewise calls his claims that he does not feel abusive into question. An earlier remark by Michael supports the suspicion that his narrative about the consequences of the abuses might not have been fully accurate because it excludes his own paedophile desire. Blurring the border between recall, wishful thinking, and suggestion, Michael himself has questioned the veracity and reliability of his memories, that is, his video narrative: “Maybe I’ve told myself a lie for so long that I’ve forgotten it wasn’t true. I’m not even sure it actually happened. Or what actually happened” (EA 38). Ed had earlier tried to subvert Michael’s trustworthiness, when he remarks that Michael is “a great embellisher and an inveterate story-teller” (EA 19) who rehearses everything. The play hence does not solve the question of whether the video diary offers a more genuine expression of Michael’s feelings than his onstage dialogues or whether the video on the contrary is part of an unreliable narration by “the great embellisher” Michael. The open ending challenges not only the reliability of Michael’s onstage narrations, but also his characterisation and thereby the narration about an abuse victim (rather than perpetrator) put forward by the play itself. The use of intermediality in Easy Access thus not only supports the play’s traumatised realism and represents the workings of memory, but it also includes a metatheatrical display of uneasiness about its own devices (Taylor 1999: n. pag.). The ending emphasises that in the case of sexual child abuse, the desire to recover the truth about the past stumbles against the inherent unreliability of all recollections, due to which “[r]eal memories can fail to correspond to reality. Memory is not a camera;
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mechanically reproduced images of the past cannot be paged from an archive and publicly examined for evidence of wrongdoing” (Walker 2005: 59). The suggestion of both Butterfly Kiss and Easy Access that recollection is a perpetual activity which does not provide total reliability but can only ever produce provisional accounts of the past has been continued and made even more central by those contributions of Trauma Drama that engage with the issue of false memories. In the context of the ‘memory wars’ in the recent decades (Showalter 1998: 155–7 and Crews 1995), reports launched by lobby groups of accused abusers doubted the truthfulness of recovered abuse memories (in the court, the media, and elsewhere) and claimed that memories of child abuse possibly only come into existence through therapy. In 1992, a political action group that represented the interests of parents accused by their children of sexual abuse and of sceptical professionals established the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the USA. A similar group called False Memory Syndrome Society was founded in the UK. Although the syndrome does not appear in any textbook of psychiatry and no clinical case studies have been published in any medical or scientific journal (Mollon 2000: 5), its impact on public opinion was considerable. The false memory syndrome is a specific reaction to the paradox of traumatic memory. Because trauma can lead to amnesia, the (temporary) inability of the abused victim to remember the abuses can paradoxically reinforce the credibility: Forgetting and mistakes in memory may actually stand, therefore, as testament to the genuine nature of the event a person is trying to recall. This is the inherent contradiction of traumatic memory – [ ] the ‘traumatic paradox’: traumatic events can and do produce the very amnesias and mistakes in memory that are generally considered to undermine the legitimacy of a retrospective report about a remembered incident. (Walker 2005: 4)52 Whereas Hardie’s and Daniels’s plays do not cast doubt on the reports of the abuse victims, Nagy’s and Dowie’s contributions to Trauma Drama highlight the precarious, possibly fictive nature of abuse memories. Other plays of the genre, such as Mike Cullen’s Anna Weiss, Dennis Lumborg’s One Fine Day, Clare McIntyre’s The Maths Tutor, and Arnold Wesker’s Denial, stage cases of questionable or false allegations of sexual child abuse, thus reflecting the difficulty of ‘proving’ memories of sexual child abuse and portraying the risks of society’s scorn for those wrongly accused of sexual child abuse. These plays highlight the eminent role that internal rather than external reality plays in traumatisation and elucidate how the biographic ‘trauma scripts’ provided by the public as well as therapeutic discourse offer an explanation for unsatisfying life patterns and supply a “means to renarrativise the self at a stroke with a new transparency and plenitude, generated
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Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys)
within a wholly affirmative community” (Luckhurst 2003: 32–3). Moreover, the plays underscore the theatrical aspects of the performative malady, because the scenes in which the protagonists ostensibly act out their traumata are assessed as mere enactments by their environment. However, some of the plays also foreground that the line between deliberate enactment and unconscious acting out cannot easily be drawn. Thus, in Denial, the protagonist remains convinced that she has been abused by her father in spite of counterevidence; Wesker’s play suggests that stories about abuse can have the same impact on the psyche as actual events of abuse, a view that has been extensively theorised in the work of Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham.53
Trauma as performative malady As Trauma Drama approaches trauma from an almost invariably posttraumatic perspective, it shares the suggestion of trauma theory that trauma is constituted belatedly. Given that the ‘traumatic event’ is so overwhelming for the subject that it cannot be grasped at the moment of occurrence, it would be an inappropriate representation and most probably a belittling of trauma to stage the moment of traumatisation, that is, in the plays discussed here, the moment of sexual child abuse. Rather than depicting abuse, Trauma Drama puts on view the post-traumatic, psychic repetition compulsions and traces the protagonists’ attempt to come to terms with their traumatisation.54 None of the plays attempts to present a literal reproduction of the trauma as envisioned by trauma theory either. Although Easy Access and Butterfly Kiss present flashbacks to scenes from the figures’ abusive past, the flashbacks become part of the scene taking place in the present, as they are enacted by adult characters rather than the children or adolescents who originally experienced them. On the level of non-fictional communication between actors and the audience, both the idea of a literal return of the trauma and the attempt to account for the physical workings of trauma that are independent of representation are of course inherently problematic. In Trauma Drama, the staged returns of the trauma are always already representative and the actors’ bodies on stage are part of a distinctively representative and mediated realm.55 Theatre appears particularly suitable for the artistic representation of traumatisation since on the stage, trauma’s bodily symptoms can be visualised and since the concurrent levels of action as typical of dissociation can be enacted simultaneously. Trauma Drama adapts dissociation as a dramatic mode which not only affects characterisation but also the spatiotemporal structure of the plays. Daniels’s Beside Herself stages the protagonist’s dissociation by doubling her on stage. As Evelyn constantly has to interact with both her double, Eve, who remains invisible for the other characters, and her ‘real’ environment, the play makes audiences partake in the dissociative state of the traumatised protagonist. Beside Herself shares this stylistic
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decision with later plays of Trauma Drama, such as Jessica Townsend’s Terms of Abuse and Helen Cooper’s Three Women and a Piano Tuner. Easy Access (for the Boys) and Butterfly Kiss stage dissociation through the simultaneity of several spatiotemporal settings, which makes the traumatised perception of the protagonist, into which scenes from the past repeatedly intrude, palpable for audiences. When the protagonists of Nagy’s and Dowie’s plays experience such flashbacks, not only past and present but also external and internal realities intermingle.56 As a consequence, Nagy’s and Dowie’s versions of the memory play do not allow a clear-cut differentiation between ‘true’, traumatic memories and narrative memories that have been subject to distortion. Instead, the plays seem to propose a complex account of traumatic memory beyond the opposition of true/false, which “validate[s] the events that occasioned suffering while acknowledging the rhetorical function of memories as signs that are shaped by the contingencies of interpretation” (Ball 2002: 7–8). Whereas Trauma Drama does not support the notion of a literal traumatic memory, the issue of the veracity of traumatic memories is of paramount importance in those scenes in Beside Herself and Easy Access in which the abused protagonist confronts his or her erstwhile abuser. The plays discussed as well as those plays of the genre that engage with the notion of ‘false memories’ thus participate in the sociopolitical debate about the status of traumatic memories which was at the heart of the ‘memory wars’ of the 1990s (Crews 1995). Trauma Drama connects the elements of ‘unstory’ and story on an aesthetic level by staging symptoms such as dissociation and acting out while embedding them in narrative patterns. The coherence and completeness of these narrations differs decisively, and, principally, the coherence of the narrative pattern established by the plays’ action corresponds to the role which the plays ascribe to narration on the inner-fictional level. Beside Herself and Butterfly Kiss can be regarded as opposite poles on the sliding scale between story and ‘unstory’ in Trauma Drama. Beside Herself accredits narration with a therapeutic impact on its protagonist and stages a similar detraumatisation on the levels of plot and aesthetics, whereas in Butterfly Kiss, such detraumatisation happens neither on the inner-fictional level of the play’s action nor on the levels of the plays’ aesthetics and its structure. Trauma Drama undercuts the ‘mythologisation’ of trauma which Tal’s study Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma identifies as a basic strategy of cultural coping with trauma (1996: 6). Tal employs ‘mythologisation’ to describe the reduction of a traumatic event to a set of standardised narratives, which turn it from a frightening and uncontrollable event into a contained and predictable narrative. Trauma Drama subverts such a standardisation by constantly exploring, both thematically and stylistically, unprecedented perspectives on the trauma of sexual child abuse. The plays continuously break with narrative patterns as established by earlier plays of the genre, by other trauma fiction, and by media reports. They do
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Trauma as Performative Malady
not make the traumatic aftermath of sexual child abuse a predictable tale which undergoes an “automatism of perception” (Buse 2001: 183),57 but manage to preserve the disturbing character of their topic. Recent developments in Trauma Drama show that playwrights keep altering the perspectives on sexual child abuse. Apart from the above-mentioned foci on the abuser character and the notion of false memories, plays have recently presented non-white traumatised protagonists. These plays oppose the tendency in contemporary Trauma Drama to concentrate on white victims of sexual child abuse; referring to the trauma literature of the USA, Tal identifies the same tendency, which she calls the “whitinizing” of the sexual abuse narrative (1996: 156). After forerunners such as Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975), in recent Trauma Drama, Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (1997) contains the monologue of one woman of colour who has been victim to sexual child abuse and Debbie Tucker Green’s Born Bad (2003) presents cases of incestuous sexual child abuse in a black British family. Through its combination of realist dramatic conventions with traumatic modes, Trauma Drama creates an aesthetic of traumatised realism. The plays principally agree with realist conventions, as they are grounded in recognisable, contemporary settings and invite audience’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in the story and characters presented. However, in their staging of trauma’s psychic returns, the plays privilege the internal reality of the protagonist over external reality and thus depart from the conventions of stage realism. By adapting the structure and aesthetics of the play to the protagonist’s traumatisation, Trauma Drama makes radical use of psychological realism, or maybe even more appropriately, of psychopathological realism. Since Trauma Drama presents traditional characters on stage rather than the speaking machines or projection screens typical of post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann 1999), for which Elinor Fuchs has diagnosed the death of character (1996, especially Chapter I),58 the traumatised realism of Trauma Drama is a revision rather than an abandonment of stage realism as in postdramatic plays. Although Trauma Drama principally stages traumatic modes as dramatic modes, the play’s post-traumatic perspective hence cannot be equated with post-dramatic techniques. The traumatisation as staged by the plays proves a particularly productive site to explore the characteristics of performatively gendered subjectivity. While the Drama of Hysteria foregrounds the deliberate stagings involved in gender performativity by devices such as the play-within-the-play and the hysteric’s guerrilla tactics, Trauma Drama chiefly elucidates the unconscious and compulsory repetition processes and forms of acting out which are characteristic of gender performativity. It thus emphasises the anxiety and pain involved in the repetition compulsions required by the ‘system’ of performativity. Like the Drama of Hysteria and the Drama of Melancholia, Trauma Drama stages trauma as a performative malady, even though it does not assume that the characters could be cured from performativity.
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However, the plays show that traumatic repetition compulsions not only mean a renewed traumatisation and thus a reinforcement of the malady, but that they can also lead to the gradual mastery of the trauma. This potential working through of trauma by means of the very mechanism of its reproduction can be linked, I have argued, with Butler’s argument that the perpetual reproductions which continually re-establish gender norms allow the resignification of these norms. The plays demonstrate this ambivalence of repetition between the acting out, the reinforcement of trauma/gender norms, and the working through, the creative modification of trauma/gender norms. The connections between traumatisation and gender performativity in the plays oscillate between metaphor and metonymy. On the one hand, traumatisation is a metaphor for gender performativity, since it can be compared with the workings of gender performativity via a number of shared characteristics, such as the ambivalence of performing and being performed, the belated construction of an ‘original’, and the ritualised iteration of this ostensible original. On the other hand, the plays also highlight that gender and traumatisation are causally related and thus suggest a metonymic link. Molly’s ‘art of trauma’ in Sleeping Nightie highlights the degree to which Molly’s childhood traumatisation informs her stereotypical perception of men as (potential) perpetrators and of women as (potential) victims of sexualised violence, and thus brings out the causal connection between Molly’s perception of gender norms and her childhood traumatisation. However, the play also shows how by means of the working through of the traumatisation, by repeating it with a difference, a resignification of gender norms might be achieved. Beside Herself explores the excluded parts of Evelyn’s gender performances by the device of doubling the traumatised protagonist. Through the interaction between the two protagonists, the play foregrounds Evelyn’s inability to ‘perform gender in the mode of belief’ and thus stages trauma as a selfconscious performative malady. While the relationship of Evelyn’s traumatisation to her gender performativity on the one hand is metaphoric, since it allows understanding the structures of one semantic field, gender performativity, through those of a different semantic field, traumatisation, the fields are also causally linked in the play, because Evelyn clings to her normative gender performances – and exaggerates them – as she feels the need to make up for her ‘non-normality’, her traumatisation. Nagy’s Butterfly Kiss offers the most pessimistic view on the performative malady. The play explores how the protagonist has been trained into her gender performance by a series of traumatisations and how she eventually kills her mother, who suffers from having failed all social gender expectations. Staging a case of unresolved traumatisation, the play shows that Lily remains unable to commence a working through of her traumatisation or of the gender norms that are presented as both cause and effect of traumatisations in Butterfly Kiss.
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Trauma as Performative Malady
Unlike Hardie’s, Daniels’s, and Nagy’s plays, Easy Access is set in a world liberated from repressive heteronormative gender expectations. Therefore, in Dowie’s play, gender norms are not presented as causative factors of the protagonist’s traumatisation. Nonetheless, the play practises a metonymic replacement of cause by effect when it highlights that Michael’s masculinity, most of all his passive sexual conduct, is the product of his traumatic repetition compulsions. While the plays thus on the one hand present the traumatisations as metaphors for the workings of gender performativity, they also single out specific gender norms that are causally related (be it as cause or result) to the protagonist’s trauma, such as male sexualised violence and female victimhood in Sleeping Nightie, the norm of the obedient daughter and unselfish wife and housewife in Beside Herself, the norm of the glamorous, famous, sexually submissive mother and wife in Butterfly Kiss, and the (subcultural) norm of the passive homosexual ‘boy’ in Easy Access. Staging trauma as a performative malady that oscillates between performing and being performed and between working through and acting out, Trauma Drama integrates postmodern concerns with the loss of autonomy, with ‘machineness’ and ‘being performed’, but does so through the depiction of characters who are at the same time endowed with the agency to perform. Thus, the plays, be it metaphorically or metonymically, show that “[i]f gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Butler 2004: 1). Suggesting ways in which trauma theory and gender theory can illuminate each other, my investigation of Trauma Drama has highlighted how traumatic acting out and working through intersect with the actualisation and resignification of gender norms. In the following chapter, I will explore the intersection of melancholia and gender in the Drama of Melancholia from a perspective expounded by Butler herself, which not only suggests that gender structurally equals acting out in certain respects, but which theorises gender as the very acting out of disavowed grief. Therefore, in the context of melancholia, the trauma of loss rather than of violation is at stake. Assuming that a first traumatic loss initiates the subject’s assumption of gender, Butler’s twist of Freud’s concept of melancholia operates with a concept of intrinsically traumatised gender. Thus, according to Butler, the relationship between melancholia and gender performativity is always already metonymic, since they are causally related.
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Concepts of melancholia: From black bile to melancholic incarnation In the Drama of Melancholia, gender is a matter of life and death. The plays stage the impact that the reaction to death has on the gender performances of the protagonists. Struggling with the experience of bereavement, the protagonists are unable to accept the loss of their loved ones, but resurrect the dead in their imagination and thus psychically preserve their presence. Freud describes this state of unresolved or disavowed mourning as melancholia. Since the dead return as ghost companions who intrude into the melancholic’s perception, the plays enact yet another form of the Freudian notion of Wiederholungszwang, which draws on the alternative meaning of the German wieder holen as fetching something or someone back. From the Drama of Melancholia, to which authors such as Alan Ayckbourn, Shelagh Stephenson, Sebastian Barry, and Dermot Bolger have contributed, I have chosen Proof, Portia Coughlan, and Cleansed for closer analysis,1 since they allow a particularly productive discussion of crucial aspects that concern the interface of melancholia and gender identity in the Drama of Melancholia. Like hysteria, ‘melancholia’ is a historically variable model that has been used by medical, artistic, and popular discourses for more than two millennia. In its varied discursive history, it has described both a disease and a non-pathological inclination to sadness, sorrow, or desperation.2 The earliest medical account for this state, humour theory, stems from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., when Hippocrates explained melancholia biologically, namely as an excess of black bile. According to humour theory,3 which served as the explanation for diseases for two thousand years ( Jackson 1986: 7) and gained particular prominence in the Renaissance, the four elements earth, air, fire, and water are reflected by four humours circulating in the human body, namely blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. In the healthy person, these four humours are balanced. Therefore, the natural black bile has its place in health, but causes melancholia when in 161
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The Drama of Melancholia
excess. Hippocrates names lethargy, coldness, slowness, sleeplessness, irritability, aversion to food, fear, and dejection as symptoms of melancholia (Pensky 1993: 23). The ambivalence of melancholia between pathology and a healthy state characterised by increased sorrow and thoughtfulness pervades the history of the concept.4 An ‘ennobled’ notion of melancholia as the concomitant of exceptional intellectual or artistic talent circulated in many phases of melancholia’s history. In current medical theory, the concept has been replaced by other diagnostic categories, most prominently by the notion of ‘depression’, which, however, I will argue, is not invested with the same cultural meanings as melancholia. In the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “depressive disorders” are differentiated into “major depressive disorder”, which consists of one or several “major depressive episodes”, “dysthymic disorder”, and “depressive disorders not otherwise specified” (American Psychiatric Association 2003: 369–81). The classification still contains traces of the category of melancholia, as it mentions melancholic features as specifier for a major depressive disorder. These specifiers apply to patients displaying “a near-complete absence of the capacity for pleasure, not merely a diminution” (ibid.: 419). Thus, like the Drama of Hysteria, the contemporary Drama of Melancholia takes up and modifies a medical category which has largely been abandoned in psychiatric discourse. However, melancholia, and in particular its relation to exceptional talent, remains a fascinating issue for contemporary Western cultures, as, for example, the recent exhibition “Melancholia: Genius and Madness in the Western World”, shown in both Paris and Berlin, indicates.5 Critics consider not only contemporary art, but also current theoretical discourse as being preoccupied with melancholia (cf. for example Schiesari 1992: 1, Gibson 2003: 136). A salient trend in the current use of melancholia in cultural theory follows Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of this state of sadness. As indicated above, Freud theorises melancholia as a specific reaction to loss,6 namely as disavowed or sustained mourning. In its psychoanalytic meaning, melancholia can be considered a specific traumatic formation that is triggered by loss. Accordingly, Freud describes the process of melancholic incorporation in an image typical of trauma, namely as a “schmerzhafte Wunde”, a “painful wound” (1917a: 446/1917aE: 258). A number of cultural theoretical studies employ the psychoanalytical notion of melancholia to account for individual as well as social reactions to loss. Scholars such as Kristeva, Silverman, and Butler have employed melancholia to account for gender formations.7 In her study The Melancholy of Race, Cheng argues that “melancholia also presents a particularly apt paradigm for elucidating the activity and components of racialization” (2000: 10), and Gilroy in Postcolonial Melancholia uses Freud’s notion to account for the social pathology of Britain that suffers from “postimperial
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melancholia” (2004: 90), since the “[r]repressed and buried knowledge of the cruelty and injustice that recur in diverse accounts of imperial administration can only be denied at a considerable moral and psychological cost” (ibid.: 94). Observing the significance of the psychoanalytical notion of melancholia in fields such as deconstruction, holocaust studies, feminism, and queer studies as well as the persistent scholarly interest in the iconographical and historical issues concerning the excess of black bile as once stated by humoural medicine, Naomi Schor states in One Hundred Years of Melancholy that “the current return of melancholy exceeds any particular approach or single period; I would speak rather of the melancholy of the disciplines” (1996: 1). Critics assess the relationship of postmodernism to the current artistic and cultural theoretical re-evaluation of melancholia in contrasting ways. For example, Schor wonders “[i]s the revival of melancholy a sign of the waning of affectlessness, which is another way of describing the fading of postmodernism?” (ibid.). Rather than identifying melancholia as indicative of postmodernism’s end, Schiesari on the contrary perceives melancholia as the postmodern response to modernism, since “the melancholic sense of ineffable loss is only the flip side of the modernist espousal of progress, its objective or even chronological correlative: the self-critical tedium that comes after the euphoria of modernism, namely postmodernism” (1992: 3).8 I would argue that the revaluation of melancholia is not indicative of the fading of postmodernism, but that it is compatible with those writings that produced the impression of an ethical turn in postmodernism by redirecting attention from the playfulness of ‘anything goes’ to the investigation of political and ethical issues. In the introduction to their essay collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning, David L. Eng and David Kazanjian highlight the political importance of issues such as melancholia and mourning, positing that “melancholia at the turn of this century has emerged as a crucial touchstone for social and subjective formations” (2003: 23). Like hysteria and trauma, melancholia in contemporary drama indeed becomes such a touchstone for subject formations, and in particular for formations of gender identity. Among the utilisations of the psychoanalytic notion of melancholia for gender theory, Butler’s notion of gender as an inherently melancholic activity lends itself to examining the gendered reactions to loss depicted in the plays. As I will elaborate in the following, the combination of Freud’s and Butler’s theories of melancholia opens up a spectrum of melancholia from identification to ‘incarnation’, which equals the range of transformations staged in the Drama of Melancholia. While Butler’s notion supports my analysis of the processes of gendering through melancholia in the plays, I am also interested in a second interface of gender and melancholia, namely the discursive gendering of melancholia, particularly for my reading of Auburn’s Proof. Although it is difficult to find characteristics shared by the melancholia of antiquity, the melancholia of
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Concepts of Melancholia
the Renaissance, and Freud’s concept of melancholia, one recurrent characteristic of melancholia in both medical and non-medical discourses is its gendering. For centuries, melancholia has served as the male counterpart to the ‘female malady’ hysteria. As Schiesari outlines in her study The Gendering of Melancholia, this attribution involved a hierarchisation of the diseases, as melancholia was considered a typically male disease as far as it was understood as a state of heightened sensitivity and genius (cf. also Radden 2000: 44). My analysis of Proof will hence briefly discuss the discursive history of the concept of melancholia that preceded its reformulations by psychoanalytic and gender theory. Freud: Melancholic incorporation Freud establishes his concept of melancholia in “Trauer und Melancholie” (“Mourning and Melancholia”, 1917a). According to Freud, melancholia shares symptoms of mourning such as painful sadness, loss of the ability to love, and passivity.9 In both mourning and melancholia, the subject refuses to acknowledge the loss to the point of having hallucinations about the persistent presence of the lost one: “This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally, respect for reality gains the day” (1917aE: 244; cf. 1917a: 430). Freud argues that mourning ultimately results in the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the loved object, which enables the subject to transfer the attachment of the libido to a new object. In melancholia, however, the subject does not eventually regain “respect for reality” but, to avoid suffering from loss, he or she introjects the beloved object and thereby preserves it fantasmatically within the ego. In this process, the libido is withdrawn into the ego, where it establishes a narcissistic identification with the abandoned object (1917a: 435–7/1917aE: 249–51).10 Freud conceptualises the process of introjection as a regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, in which the subject desires to devour the object in order to incorporate it (1917a: 436/1917aE: 249–50). He thus understands melancholic incorporation, a process of psychic introjection, as the metaphoric equivalent of material, physical incorporation. This correlation is of particular importance for Butler’s critical modification of Freud’s concept of melancholic incorporation.11 In Freud’s article “Das Ich und das Es” (“The Ego and the Id”, 1923), he expands his theory of melancholia. He comes to regard melancholic identification no longer as an exceptional and pathological process, but argues that it might be “the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (1923E: 29; cf. 1923: 257). As the quote indicates, Freud in this later article assumes the id to be that part of the psychic apparatus that triggers object-cathexes. He suggests that the ego attempts to compensate for the loss by introjecting the object and thus posing as the object for the id. Consequently, Freud considers melancholic incorporation as crucial for
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the formation of the ego, which he conceptualises as the sedimentation of erstwhile, lost, and introjected object relations, arguing that “the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and [ ] contains the history of those object-choices” (1923E: 29; cf. 1923: 257). Therefore, the incorporation of the object does not only mean that the subject contains the object within the ego, but also as the ego. According to Freud, the effects of the identifications established in earliest childhood are lasting and practically constitute the ego, while the impact of later identifications depends on the ego’s “capacity for resistance, which decides the extent to which a person’s character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of its object choices” (1923E: 29; cf. 1923: 257). In “The Ego and the Id”, Freud distinguishes melancholic identification from a more “direct and immediate” form of identification (1923E: 31; cf. 1923: 259). He argues that before the child enters the first sexual period (that is, before the onset of the Oedipus complex), it identifies with the parents in a straightforward way, which does not yet transform an objectcathexis into an identification, because the child does not yet desire objects (1923: 259–60/1923E: 31). Once the child begins to desire, however, it builds up object-cathexes, which it replaces by further identifications when it has to abandon the objects. It is this differentiation between straightforward, primary identifications and identifications that result from abandoned erotic desire that allows Freud to theorise the processes of sexuation during the Oedipus complex, which have become central to the feminist and queer theoretical critique of Freud, including Butler’s theory of gender melancholia. Freud argues that in the pre-oedipal phase, the boy straightforwardly identifies with the father.12 The stronger his libidinal cathexis of his mother becomes, however, the more complicated grows his identification with the father, because it makes the boy begin to feel rivalry with his father. At the end of the Oedipus complex, the boy has to give up his object cathexis of his mother, which can either result in his identification with his mother or effect the intensification of his identification with his father. Freud at this stage of his theory assumes the analogous process for girls13 and argues that “in both sexes the relative strength of the masculine and feminine sexual dispositions is what determines whether the outcome of the Oedipus situation shall be an identification with the father or with the mother” (1923E: 33; cf. 1923: 261). The ‘normal’ result of the Oedipus complex – the boy identifies more strongly with the father and the girl with the mother – thus depends on the strength of “sexual dispositions”, “Geschlechtsanlagen” (1923: 261). In “The Ego and the Id”, Freud does not specify whether he understands these sexual dispositions as inborn and biological or as psychological (but perhaps nonetheless inborn), but leaves their character open (1923E: 32; cf. 1923: 261). In “Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie” (“Three Essays on Sexuality”, 1905), Freud acknowledges a universal, inborn bisexuality in
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a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally. In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. [ ] These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an originally bisexual physical disposition has, in the course of the evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving behind only a few traces of the sex that has become atrophied. (1905cE: 141; cf. 1905c: 40) However, Freud in this article dismisses the equation of anatomic and psychic bisexuality, because there is no evidence of a connection between the phenomena (1905c: 42/1905cE: 142).14 Freud in the “The Ego and the Id” elaborates that his theorem of the child’s bisexuality means that the complete Oedipus complex contains two versions, namely the positive version, in which the child desires the parent of the opposite sex and competes with the parent of the same sex, and a negative version, in which it desires the parent of the same sex and competes with the parent of the opposite sex (1923: 261/1923E: 32). According to Freud, the introjection of lost objects constitutes the moral consciousness that he conceptualises as the Über-Ich, the super-ego. In his theory of the super-ego as the third agency of the psychic apparatus, Freud adopts and modifies Karl Abraham’s argument that the melancholic desire to devour the object has destructive elements (cf. Abraham 1912). Freud redefines the contradictory attitude towards the incorporated object as melancholic ambivalence, positing that the ego not only integrates the feelings of love and, possibly, desire for the object but also all negative feelings. Hatred of the object thereby is transformed into hatred of the self, and the critical instance of the super-ego is formed and nourished. This explains the “Kleinheitswahn” (1917a: 431) – the delusion of inferiority (1917aE: 244) – and the heightened self-criticism that distinguishes melancholia from mourning and explains why “[i]n mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (1917aE: 246; cf. 1917a: 431). Freud’s concept of melancholia offers an explanatory pattern for the conduct of the protagonists of the Drama of Melancholia. Their reaction to the loss has melancholic qualities as described by Freud, because the protagonists hallucinatorily resurrect the dead and are unable to transfer their desire to a new object. The missing ‘respect for reality’ of the melancholic protagonists has stylistic consequences for the plays, which create an onstage reality that agrees with the melancholic perception of the protagonist. For discussing the effects that the resurrection of the dead has on the protagonists’ gender, however, Butler’s concept of melancholia is particularly useful. Butler revisits both Freud’s theory of melancholia and his central axiom
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human beings on the ground of anatomical and embryological stages of hermaphroditism:
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Butler: The melancholia of gender Butler conceptualises the assumption and maintenance of sex and gender in a heteronormative social framework as a melancholic activity and argues that “[g]ender itself might be understood in part as the ‘acting out’ of unresolved grief” (1997: 146).15 She develops her argument through a critique of Freud’s notion of the incest taboo at work in the Oedipus complex, which, as Butler argues, implicitly presupposes the prohibition of homosexual desire. Butler highlights that when Freud acknowledges the child’s general bisexuality, he then argues that the girl who desires the mother has a masculine disposition that is stronger than usual and that the boy who desires the father “behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother” (Freud 1923E: 33; cf. 1923: 261). Therefore, Butler argues, Freud understands the child’s bisexuality not as the co-existence of heterosexual and homosexual desire, but as the co-existence of heterosexual masculine and feminine dispositions in the child: “for Freud bisexuality is the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche” (1990: 77). Consequently, Butler in her later writings often terms Freud’s concept ‘bisexedness’ rather than ‘bisexuality’ (for example 1997: 164). The particularly interesting point that Butler raises is the question of how one can pin down the feminine and masculine dispositions that Freud assumes in both boys and girls, given that he at the same time argues that the identifications at work in the Oedipus complex make the child achieve, or at least consolidate, its gender: “But what is the proof that Freud gives us for the existence of such dispositions? If there is no way to distinguish between the femininity acquired through internalizations and that which is strictly dispositional, then what is to preclude the conclusion that all gender-specific affinities are the consequence of internalizations?” (1990: 78).16 Through this suggestion, Butler makes use of the lack of clarity in Freud’s theory of bisexuality concerning its biological or psychic grounding. She replaces the notion of a, possibly inborn and biological, disposition, by the effect of a psychic process that results in what poses as a disposition. According to Butler, “dispositions are not primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture” (ibid.: 81). Butler identifies the prohibition of homosexuality as this social ‘law’ that sets in earlier than the incest taboo. She thus fills in a gap in Freud’s model when she attempts to explain why homosexual desire is already foreclosed when the growing libidinal
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about the achievement of gendered and sexualised positions, the Oedipus complex, in order to develop her concept of melancholia as the very precondition of a gendered self and the mode in which gender is performatively maintained.
attachment to the same-sex parent causes the Oedipus complex.17 Criticising Freud’s tacit heteronormativity, Butler argues that prior to the (exclusively heterosexual) incest taboo, the prohibition of homosexuality must exist, and that this prohibition causes the heterosexual gender ‘dispositions’ through which the Oedipus complex then becomes possible (ibid.: 81–2). To theorise the establishment of these alleged ‘dispositions’, Butler resorts to Freud’s theory of melancholic incorporation. Using Freud’s argument that the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object relations and that the object losses in early childhood are the most formative ones, Butler argues for a loss prior to that of the parent of the opposite sex, namely the loss of the same-sex parent as an object of desire. Not only the loss of the samesex parent is repressed, Butler posits, but also the loss of same-sex desire in general: What ensues [from this twofold repression] is a culture of gender melancholy in which masculinity and femininity emerge as the traces of ungrieved and ungrievable love; indeed, where masculinity and femininity are strengthened through the repudiations that they perform. In opposition to a conception of sexuality which is said to ‘express’ gender, gender itself is here understood to be composed of precisely what remains inarticulate in sexuality. (1997: 140) Butler proposes that this loss causes a melancholic incorporation, through which the child incorporates the lost parent including his or her gender.18 Butler hence reverses Freud’s causal narrative and argues that Freud’s sexual dispositions are “[f]ar from foundational” (1990: 82), but effects of the taboo of homosexuality. It is important to note, however, that although Butler’s argument aims to criticise Freud’s heteronormative notions of sexual dispositions, she does not fully do away with the notion of foundational ‘sexed dispositions’ in a biological sense. On the contrary, the logic of her theory of the melancholic incorporation of the same-sex parent relies on the environment’s capacity to determine the ‘sex’ of a child after its birth. Butler’s concern is not to contest anatomic and hormonal differences, but to question their cultural classifications, evaluations, interpretations, and explanations, especially those that validate ideological positions (such as heteronormativity) by referring to ‘biological facts’ as if these were independent of cultural notions. Butler argues that in the process of melancholic incorporation, the notion of ‘incorporation’ can be taken literally in the sense of an ‘incarnation’. In the course of her argument, she employs a figure of thought that resembles Freud’s concept of hysteric conversion, which assumes that psychic processes lead to physical symptoms. Sometimes, this conversion can involve the literalisation of a metaphorical expression. For example, Freud explained Dora’s
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limping with her feeling of having committed a faux pas. In a similar manner, Butler posits that the melancholic incorporation of the same-sex parent is not only a psychic introjection but also a form of physical embodiment. Drawing on Abraham and Torok’s theory of melancholic incorporation19 and radicalising Freud’s model of the bodily ego as the projection of a surface,20 Butler suggests that this incorporation exceeds a metaphoric, psychic act and becomes a literal form of physical integration: “If the identifications sustained through melancholy are ‘incorporated’, then the question remains: Where is this incorporated space? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space” (ibid.: 86). Butler here argues that not only the assumption of gender but also the assumption of ‘sex’ – that is, of a culturally constructed notion of what biological sex is – are the result of an identificatory fantasy, which materialises on the body’s surface. Because incorporation is to be understood as a fantasy, yet as “a fantasy of literalization or a literalizing fantasy” (ibid.: 89), that is, a fantasy that poses as reality, “this literalization of the body conceals its genealogy and offers itself under the category of ‘natural fact’ ” (ibid.: 89). Butler proposes that if melancholic incorporation can be understood in a non-metaphorical way, that is, as the actual incorporation of a lost object, incorporation – a psychic activity – affects the body and becomes a form of ‘incarnation’. This process configures the body according to the culturally established, seemingly ‘true’, perception of bodies, which categorises bodies into discrete and exclusive sexes. Butler thus employs the concept of melancholia to elucidate how the assumption of sex/gender works psychically. For Butler, melancholic incorporation becomes an explanatory pattern for how bodies are constituted by the interaction between social (the prohibition of homosexuality) and psychic (the experience of loss) processes. Rather than assuming that the initial melancholic incorporation fully determines sex/gender, however, Butler understands gender melancholia as an ongoing, largely unconscious process of acting out. This links up with her model of performativity, which supposes that “materialization is never quite complete” (1993a: 2) and comprehends both sex and gender, which for Butler cannot be separated epistemically, as ongoing, repetitive, ritualised activities: “ ‘sex’ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or a statistic condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms” (ibid.: 1–2). Butler consequently understands matter not as “a site or surface, but [ ] a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (ibid.: 9). In resorting to and practically rewriting Freud’s theory of melancholic incorporation, Butler elaborates her concept of performativity, which now not only takes into account the ways in which the subject is performed by regulatory norms and discourses,
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Concepts of Melancholia
but also begins to illuminate how such norms form the psyche. Her theory of gender melancholia thus conceptualises gender itself as what I call ‘a performative malady’, namely as an ongoing, largely unconscious form of acting out (of unresolved grief) which performatively fabricates gendered and sexed bodies. It is Butler’s notion of melancholic incorporation as the maintenance of gender that is of particular interest for the plays, because they do not stage the very first melancholic incorporation that Butler theorises as the starting point for the assumption of gender, but feature later cases of melancholia, which complicate and (to varying degrees) undo the initially assumed gender identity. Featuring female melancholic protagonists who increasingly incorporate a lost male object, the plays test out, I will argue, what effects this cross-gender identification has on the gender performances of the female protagonists. The plays explore how far the incorporation of this object can go on the spectrum as expounded between Freud’s and Butler’s theories of melancholia. Does the performative malady of the protagonists effect identification in the sense of psychic introjection or does it produce a physical transformation in the sense of a literal incarnation? And how are these transformations put on stage? My readings of the plays by Carr, Kane, and Auburn will show how the Drama of Melancholia stages a spectrum of melancholic incorporation that ranges from psychic and intellectual identification in Proof, to fantasies of psychic and physical fusion of twin sister and brother in Portia Coughlan, to (almost) complete psychic and physical transformation of the female protagonist in Cleansed. Thus, the plays do not focus on the normative effect of melancholia (the affirmation of discrete, heterosexual gender norms through melancholic incorporation and ‘incarnation’), but highlight how unconscious melancholic processes can also resist and infringe upon gender norms. Like the Drama of Hysteria and Trauma Drama, the Drama of Melancholia stages a psychic ‘disorder’ as an ambiguous phenomenon that oscillates between the affirmation and subversion of gender norms. Following the line of thought of Butler’s theory, which proposes a causal link between melancholia and gender, melancholia in the plays can be regarded as a metonymy for gender identity. The metonymic relationship between issues of gender and melancholia, which I consider crucial for the Drama of Melancholia, also applies to the second theoretical reference point of the following sections, namely the discursive association of masculinity, melancholia, and genius that I will unfold in my reading of Auburn’s Proof. The play presents a female protagonist who through her melancholic identification with her dead father, an acclaimed mathematician, maintains that she possesses equal if not superior mathematical genius. I will argue that Catherine, by laying claim to this ennobled form of melancholia, metonymically usurps a male privilege.
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In Proof, the protagonist Catherine has to deal with the death of her father, Robert, a famous mathematician, who had accomplished extraordinary mathematical discoveries before he was affected by a non-specified but severe mental illness. Catherine is initially unable to acknowledge fully the loss of her father. Instead of ‘respecting reality’, she has hallucinations about the persistent presence of Robert.21 In the latter part of the play, Catherine increasingly identifies with her father and claims to have written an accomplished mathematical proof that is found among Robert’s unpublished works. The play derives its suspense from negotiating the question of whether and to which degree Catherine has inherited Robert’s mathematical genius, whether she has inherited his illness, and whether inheriting the former entails inheriting the latter. Thus, the suggestion that the daughter might become what her father was is supported by two complementary explanatory patterns, namely by melancholic identification and by genetic inheritance. The play knots together two different strands of the discourses on melancholia. On the one hand, it investigates Catherine’s reaction to Robert’s loss, which, at least initially, displays melancholic features in a psychoanalytic sense. On the other hand, Proof evokes the cultural and medical connotations of melancholia as a, possibly inborn, state of heightened intellectual and artistic creativity which, however, is always on the border to or accompanied by phases of mental illness. Because this ‘ennobled’ form of melancholia has been understood as a typically male malady, Proof probes the gender prejudices inherent in the association of melancholia with genius by raising the question of whether the daughter will become what her father was, that is, a ‘mad genius’. My reading of Auburn’s play therefore not only considers the processes of gendering through melancholia, which are the focus of my analyses of Carr’s and Kane’s plays, but also the discursive gendering of melancholia. “I am not alone” – Catherine’s hallucination As is typical of the Drama of Melancholia, Proof visualises Catherine’s melancholic clinging to the lost object through the device of a ghost figure. In contrast to Carr’s and Kane’s plays, however, Robert’s ghost appears in the first scene only, in which he is not marked as a ghost figure. Proof opens during the night to Catherine’s twenty-fifth birthday, which she celebrates with her father Robert. Only towards the end of their conversation, after Robert has watched Catherine drink the bottle of champagne he brought her, and after they have discussed Catherine’s future, do audiences – and readers alike – learn that Robert died a week ago and that Catherine consequently is talking to a figment of her imagination. The postponed information in the dialogue disguises the hallucinatory quality of the scene and thus makes audiences and readers initially not only witness the protagonist’s hallucinatory perspective, but also share her hallucination (and take Robert for a
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David Auburn: Proof (2000)
real figure). For readers, the effect of the initial participation in Catherine’s delusion is achieved by the lack of information in the stage directions, which do not introduce Robert as a ghost figure but as “Catherine’s father. Rumpled academic look” (Proof 5).22 As in the play’s original production at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the aesthetics of its first British production, directed by John Madden at the Donmar Warehouse, involved audiences in Catherine’s hallucination: the productions did not indicate Robert’s ghostly status through devices such as lighting, sound effects, costume, or the acting style of the actor playing Robert. On the contrary, they made Robert’s appearance as a ghost agree with the overall realism of the production. Therefore, audiences and readers can only in retrospect identify the ambivalent clues that indicate but do not prove Robert’s imagined status in the opening scene. When he first appears, Catherine has her eyes closed and is surprised and startled by Robert’s appearance (P 5), which suggests that he might be an unexpected vision. After Robert has admonished Catherine not to spend her birthday on her own, he invalidates her answer, “I am not alone” (P 7), by insisting, “I don’t count” (P 7). The dialogue resolves the uncertainty that this statement causes by Robert’s explanation, “I’m your old man” (P 7). The following dialogue introduces inconsistencies which are always provisionally resolved but ultimately result in Robert’s confession that he is dead: Robert: The simple fact that we can talk about this together is a good sign [for Catherine’s mental health]. [ ] Catherine: How could it be a good sign? Robert: Because! Crazy people don’t sit around wondering if they’re nuts. [] Catherine: Yes. [ ] Wait. No. [ ] It doesn’t work. [ ] Robert: Where’s the problem? Catherine: The problem is you are crazy! [ ] You just told me you are. [ ] You said crazy people would never admit that. [ ] So? Robert: It’s a point. Catherine: So how can you admit it? Robert: Well. Because I am also dead. (Beat.) Aren’t I? (P 11–12) By inserting unsettling remarks but initially making the spectator fully share Catherine’s deluded perception, the play’s first scene employs a similar device to the ones films such as A Beautiful Mind, The Sixth Sense, and The Others have used in the 2000s, which likewise belatedly reveal ostensibly real and living characters as ghosts of deceased people or as purely imaginary figures and thus make audiences in retrospect recognise the ambivalence inherent in the dialogues, the plot structure, and the configurations of figures.
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Catherine’s hallucination of Robert’s presence can be understood as an attempt to keep the father, with whom she has spent the final years of his life, psychically alive. Their conversation in the opening scene characterises Robert as a caring, if somewhat detached, father who advises Catherine to overcome her lethargy (which, as audiences realise at the end of the scene, is connected to her bereavement) and resume her studies of mathematics; in his ghostly return, Robert thus has features of a guardian angel who supports Catherine in difficult times. However, after audiences have seen the celebration of Catherine’s twenty-fifth birthday, they learn that Robert suffered from a mental illness which made him perceive imagined figures and that his disease began in his mid-twenties. This information affords a complementary explanation of Catherine’s hallucination, which might thus be not only a melancholic reaction to Robert’s death, but also the onset of the same disease that Robert suffered from. Robert’s ailment remains unspecified, but has, as I will argue, overtones of paranoid schizophrenia. When Robert’s ghost tries to comfort his anxious daughter in the opening scene, he characterises it as an illness that is triggered by the interaction between genetic and non-genetic factors (P 11). The play hence adds a novel dimension to the notion of repetition compulsion in the Drama of Performative Malady, which is not only a psychic process of unconscious iteration as in trauma or an attempt to fetch back the dead, but also a question of genetic inheritance. For this reason, Catherine comes to fear Robert’s appearance, which she apparently cannot control: “I want to be alone. I don’t want him around” (P 19). The play’s initial scenes thus offer two explanatory patterns for Robert’s apparitions, which could be the products of Catherine’s melancholia but might also be symptoms of the unexplained but severe disease with which her father was afflicted. One important criterion for elucidating the aetiology of Robert’s appearances is the extent of Catherine’s hallucinations. If they are restricted to appearances of the lost object, Robert, they might be melancholic, but if Catherine also suffers from other hallucinations and idées fixes, this could be an indication that she has the same illness that Robert had. Catherine’s encounter in the opening scene with Harold Dobson, alias Hal, one of Robert’s PhD students, negotiates this border. Hal is interested in Robert’s legacy and has inspected his notebooks for hours; when he wants to leave the house, Catherine accuses him of having stolen one of the books and even calls the police to report his theft. When Hal calls Catherine paranoid and recommends the university health service (P 20), at first he seems vindicated because Catherine does not find anything when she searches his bag. Yet, towards the end of their conversation, one of the notebooks falls out of Hal’s jacket, giving evidence of Hal’s rather than Catherine’s unreliability. However, the reality status of the entire opening scene is belatedly called into question. Because from the play’s beginning audiences are made aware that they are participating in Catherine’s possibly hallucinatory perspective,
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David Auburn: Proof
they can never be sure of the reality of the events on the stage. After audiences are made to realise Robert’s hallucinatory status in the opening scene, Hal’s appearance is in retrospect also placed in doubt by comments made by Catherine’s elder sister Claire, who arrives in the second scene for the father’s funeral. Claire is concerned about Catherine’s mental health and suggests that Catherine called the police on the night of her birthday because she had hallucinations about an intruder: “Dad hasn’t had any students for years. [ ] Why was he in the house in the first place? [ ] In the middle of the night? [ ] The police said you were the only one here” (P 28). It is only when Claire herself meets Hal that audiences are given verification of Hal’s actuality. The play further blurs the boundary between real and hallucinatory figures through its non-chronological time structure. The opening scene of the second act is set four years earlier than the events of the first act and stages an encounter between Catherine and her father. While readers are informed about this flashback in the secondary text, audiences watching the play are not enlightened in advance about the flashback and will possibly again take Robert for a ghost, at least at the beginning of the scene. The dialogue of Catherine and Robert fuels such speculations by making Catherine ask her father, “How did you know I was here?” and making her assert, “I thought you were asleep” (P 49). It is only when Hal, now ‘proven’ a real character himself, joins father and daughter and talks to Robert that audiences are assured of Robert’s status. There is another clue to this being a temporal flashback which audiences can grasp during the course of the scene: the scene enacts a diary entry by Robert that Hal reads out in the first scene and that is dated to Catherine’s twenty-first birthday, when Robert experienced a phase of recovery from his illness. A second flashback in the fourth scene of the act, set half a year after the first flashback and thus three and a half years earlier than the play’s present, depicts Robert’s relapse into illness. The dialogue and the stage directions of the scene again play with ambivalent meanings when Catherine “stares at him [Robert], baffled” (P 69) and constantly wonders why her father is sitting on the porch, which could relate either to his status as a ghost or to the fact that it is too cold to sit outside in December. However, because audiences have been prepared for the nonchronological order of the play by the first flashback, they will more quickly apprehend Robert’s status as a real figure in this scene. Proof thus creates a complex pattern of elements that need to be logically combined in order to determine the real or hallucinatory status of the figures on the inner-fictional level. The play’s title therefore not only refers to the mathematical proof upon which the action will focus in the second act, but also describes the play’s structure of constantly withheld proofs concerning Catherine’s state of mind. The repeated stylistic device of temporal flashbacks highlights the persistence of the past in the present, which is characteristic of melancholia. For
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the melancholic, the past is glued to the present; the past has not fully passed. Therefore, as Toshiaki Kobayashi shows, the melancholic past corresponds to the grammatical tense of the present perfect, which indicates the remaining relevance and persistence of the past in the present (1998: 168). Kobayashi goes on to argue that the grammatical construction of the present perfect, ‘I have gone’, not only uses a verb in the present tense (‘have’), highlighting the (typically melancholic) continuation of the past in the presence, but also a verb with the alternative meaning of ownership, thus indicating the ‘thingification’ of the past that can be ‘possessed’. Kobayashi interprets hallucinations as the result of an overflow of this perfect, which can no longer be ‘owned’ and thus actualised as a memory at will, but which enforces itself upon the melancholic (ibid.: 169). Thus, the differentiation between memory and hallucination can be understood as a gradual transition which is a continuum of possessing and being possessed. Proof ’s use of both hallucinations and memories can be placed in this context. As elaborated above, the play complicates the categorisations of memories as either temporal flashbacks – which the play uses for dramaturgical and narrative reasons – or the melancholic return of the past in a hallucinatory form. The structural device of the flashback in Proof thus addresses the border between memory, that is, a framed actualisation of the past as something that has passed (the experience of the reader made aware of the temporal structure), and hallucination, that is, a frameless actualisation of the past that is indistinguishable from the present (the potential experience of the spectator). It is the latter, frameless actualisation of the past that resembles the return of the past as the present in Trauma Drama. In contrast to trauma, however, which causes the traumatised protagonist to suffer from the re-enactment of the trauma and his/her inability to experience it as something that has passed, in the case of melancholia it is the returning consciousness, the abandonment of the hallucination, which makes the protagonists suffer, because they realise that the object of love is irreparably lost. From this perspective, Grace in Cleansed is the happiest of the melancholic protagonists discussed in this study, because she never abandons the hallucination that her dead brother is alive, whereas both Catherine and Portia are unable to surrender fully to their hallucinations. Proof unsettles the boundary between real and ethereal figures, that is, between external reality and internal reality, not only through the device of the ghost figure and a non-chronological time structure, but also through comments made by the characters. For instance, in Catherine’s description of Robert’s hallucinations, “I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there ” (P 18), her phrasing does not unequivocally decide to whom the final sentence, “talked to people who weren’t there” refers. As the participle could denote either Catherine herself or Robert as the one talking to imagined figures, the phrase emphasises the lack of discrimination between father and
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David Auburn: Proof
daughter and suggests that Catherine might have had visions before Robert’s death. In addition, Catherine asserts that her father “shuffl[ed] around like a ghost” (P 18) even when he was alive and Robert complains in the flashback scene, “It’s awful the way children sentimentalize their parents” (P 56), thus referring back to Catherine’s earlier imagined conversation with her dead father as a guardian angel. Moreover, the insider joke for mathematicians performed by Hal’s band, whose song “Imaginary Number” involves their stopping playing for three minutes, ironically comments on the volatile border between imagination and reality in mathematics. “You can never duplicate” – Gender, genius, and melancholia As Claire’s comment, “I think you have some of his [Robert’s] talent and some of his tendency toward instability” (P 45), makes explicit, Proof intertwines Catherine’s potential inheritances of Robert’s mental instability and of his mathematical genius. The question of whether the daughter can possibly match the father’s genius – a repetition which Hal considers impossible: “You can never duplicate” (P 37) – evokes the gender-biased Western discourse of the male genius on the brink of madness, which has in particular associated the male melancholic with heightened creativity and extraordinary talent.23 Although Roy Porter recently diagnosed the postmodern “waning of [the] myth of the mad genius” (2002: n. pag.), not only do a few medical studies keep assuming a causal relationship between genius and mental illness (cf. Lange-Eichbaum and Kurth 1985: 22 and 212), but also does the topos of the ‘mad genius’ remain of cultural interest, as the commercial success of Proof – both as a play and as a film – and of movies such as Shine (1995) and A Beautiful Mind (2001) demonstrate.24 Auburn’s play actualises the notion of the mad genius both in a serious manner through Robert’s figure and comically through the self-ironical comments of Hal, which play with the stereotypical notions of mathematicians as “insane” (P 34) “nerds” and “raging geeks” (P 16). The association of masculinity, mental instability, especially melancholia, and intellectual and artistic excellence has been common since antiquity, when (Pseudo-)Aristotle characterised melancholia and the concomitant extraordinary achievements as a male phenomenon, asking “Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and some of them to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile?” (Aristotle 1965 [ca. 350 B.C.]: 155, 953a: ll. 10–12).25 As Schiesari has shown, this gendering of the ennobled form of melancholia pervades the history of the concept. After melancholia’s disparagement in the Middle Ages,26 Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres (1482/1489) again ennobled the disease, since it emphasised the intellectual and artistic capacities of those suffering from an excess of black bile and described himself as a melancholic. His recovery of the Aristotelian ideal of genius was expanded by an astrological reformulation
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of humour theory which assumed a melancholic impact of Saturn. In his exhaustive seventeenth-century study, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton likewise declared himself a potential melancholic, thus associating himself with the exceptional men described by Aristotle: “I write of Melancholy, by being busie to avoid Melancholy” (1621a: 6); “their [the melancholics’] memories are most part good, they have happy wits, and excellent apprehension” (1621b: 383).27 Consequently, Burton considers melancholia not only as a disease, but also as a (healthy) disposition, and “the basis for intellectual and imaginative accomplishments, [ ] the wellspring from which came great wit, poetic creations, deep religious insights, meaningful prophecies, and profound philosophic considerations” (Jackson 1986: 99). After the Enlightenment transformed the category of melancholia into a negative, psychopathological image and described it as a state of self-delusion, in Romanticism “a newly eligible mode of melancholy” (Porter 1995: 418) evolved, for both the exceptional artistic talent and the social elite (cf. also Loquai 1984). The sufferings caused by melancholia now became the “hallmarks of a beautiful soul, proofs of superior sensibility” (Porter 1995: 418). The fates of poets and composers such as William Blake, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Robert Schumann buttressed the association of melancholia and genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before degenerationist psychiatry in the late nineteenth century again stigmatised the conjunction of ‘madness’ and genius. During melancholia’s history and through its contested and shifting association with genius, melancholia thus at many times was “an elite ‘illness’ that afflicted men precisely as the sign of their exceptionality, as the inscription of genius within them” (Schiesari 1992: 7).28 Proof associates Robert’s mental disease with genius but does not explicitly categorise it in clinical terms. Robert is described as “sick” (P 10, P 60), “crazy” (P 12, P47), “ill” (P 44) and having gone “bughouse” (P 11). Robert’s symptoms are, however, reminiscent of the Nobel Prize winner John Nash, praised as the most extraordinary mathematician of the second half of the twentieth century, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia (Nasar 1998: 12).29 Nash’s biography was turned into the movie A Beautiful Mind, which was released a year after the American premiere of Proof and strongly influenced the reception of the British production.30 During Nash’s illness, which took more than two decades, he had short phases of recovery, as Auburn’s character does. Like Robert, who thinks that aliens send him “secret, complex and tantalizing messages” (P 10) through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books that he obsessively gathers in his study, Nash tried to decipher codes everywhere in his environment. Nash’s portrayal by his biographer Sylvia Nasar, who also wrote the script for Howard’s movie, suggests that his mathematical achievements and his mental instability were interdependent, because schizophrenia in its early phases might promote logical thought and the delusions that accompany paranoid schizophrenia can involve “subtle, sophisticated, complex flights
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David Auburn: Proof
of thought” (Nasar 1998: 18). According to Nasar, Nash’s mind worked faster and his memory and capacity to concentrate were better than usual, but his ideas cannot be grasped through purely rational thought. Nash first had seemingly irrational visions and then worked out the logical mathematical proofs (ibid.: 12). Auburn portrays Robert correspondingly: “He’d attack a question from the side, from some weird angle, sneak up on it, grind away at it. He was slogging. He was just so much faster than anyone else that from the outside it looked magical” (P 37). The play demonstrates how Robert attempts to maintain his technique of ‘proving’ ideas after his mental breakdown. In one of the play’s flashbacks, he proudly presents a proof he considers a “Major result. Important” (P 72), but which turns out to be nonsensical: “Let X equal the quantity of all quantities of X. Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold and four of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature” (P 73–4). Through this transformation of a diary entry – Robert wrote the passage when sitting outside in the December cold – into an ostensible mathematical proof, the play shows to which degree the search for “most elegant proofs, perfect proofs, proofs like music” (P 19) determines Robert’s thought. The suggestion that schizophrenia involves states of heightened rationality but also intuitive creativity associates schizophrenia with the discourse on the ‘mad genius’ that was in earlier centuries strongly connected to melancholia. Proof’s suggestion that the mathematician looks for “proofs like music”, moreover, compares Robert’s activity to that of a composer and thus presents his intellectual achievement as artistic creativity, which evokes the Romantic myth of the melancholic artistic genius.31 This link of melancholia and schizophrenia corresponds to the overlap of the categories in medical theory. Because melancholia for centuries served as a passe-partout term that assembled a variety of mental disorders that have subsequently been differentiated into distinct clinical categories, the symptoms that are regarded as schizophrenic today would have been categorised as melancholic until the establishment of the category of ‘dementia praecox’ in the late nineteenth century, which developed into the current notion of ‘schizophrenia’.32 Whereas Robert’s illness remains vague but ennobled, associating him as it does with a genius like Nash, Catherine’s signs of mental instability, particularly after Robert’s death, are, at least initially, termed ‘depression’. When Robert’s ghost describes Catherine’s state, he identifies it as “depression” (P 10), a diagnosis shared by some reviewers of the Donmar production who characterise Catherine as ‘clinically depressed’ (cf. for example Shenton 2002: 620, Billington 2002: 623, Brown 2002: 620, Gross 2002: 620, Clapp 2002: 621, Spencer 2002: 622). Robert describes Catherine’s depressive state as a debilitating, passive condition that forecloses rather than promotes intellectual thought: “You sleep till noon, you eat junk, you don’t work, the
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dishes pile up in the sink. If you go out it’s to buy magazines. [ ] And those are the good days. Some days you don’t get up, you don’t get out of bed” (P 8). Catherine herself maintains that she felt “depressed, really depressed” (P 60) even while Robert was still alive. The gendered division of the diseases in Proof – that is, depression as the female version of melancholia, and a state reminiscent of schizophrenia but in any case associated with genius as the male version of melancholia33 – is confused, however, when Robert’s ghost suggests, “even your depression is mathematical” (P 10), and thus points towards Catherine’s unusual talent, which will become the focus of the second act. In a cliffhanger ending before the play’s interval, Catherine claims to have written the proof that Hal has taken for her father’s legacy and identified as “some of the most important mathematics of the world” (P 47). “She must have the noblest courage ” – Catherine’s gendercrossing Once Catherine declares herself to be the author of the groundbreaking proof, she attempts a gender transgression that her environment can hardly accept. In the second act, the play renegotiates the sexed and gendered positions that it sets up in the first act, such as male, mad genius versus female (comparably) healthy caretaker, and male creative melancholia (with overtones of schizophrenia) versus female debilitating melancholia (depression). When Claire and Hal express doubts about Catherine’s authorship, they constantly refer to questions of gender. Already in the first act, Hal reprimands Catherine, “You don’t have the maths. [ ] You wouldn’t know the good stuff from the junk” (P 20). His claims to intellectual superiority become stronger, but also more desperate, after Catherine has claimed the authorship of the revolutionary mathematical proof: Hal: I’m a mathematician [ ]. I know how hard it would be to come up with something like this. I mean it’s impossible. You’d have to be you’d have to be your dad, basically [ ]. Catherine: I’m a mathematician, too. Hal: Not like your dad. [ ] It’s too advanced. I don’t even understand most of it. [ ] You could not have done this work. [ ] Catherine: It would be a real disaster for you, wouldn’t it? And for the other geeks who barely finished their Ph.D.’s, who are marking time doing lame research, bragging about the conferences they go to – wow – playing in an awful band, and whining that they are intellectually past it at twenty-eight, because they are. (P 64–5) Catherine suspects Hal of employing “not like your dad” as a euphemism for ‘not a male mathematician’ and mocks Hal and his male colleagues, who
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David Auburn: Proof
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Hal: Really original work – it’s all young guys. Catherine: Young guys. Hal: Young people. Catherine: But it is men, mostly. Hal: There are some women. [ ] There’s a woman at Stanford, I can’t remember her name. Catherine: Sophie Germain. Hal: Yes? I’ve probably seen her at meetings, I just don’t think I’ve met her. Catherine: She was born in Paris in 1776. [ ] [S]he wrote to Gauss. She used a man’s name. [ ] She sent him some proofs involving a certain kind of prime number, important work. He was delighted to correspond with such a brilliant young man. [ ] Later a mutual friend told him the brilliant young man was a woman. He wrote to her: “A taste for the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare, but when a person of the sex which, according to our costumes and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents, and superior genius.” (P 35–6) Catherine cynically refers to the mathematician Sophie Germain to demonstrate how little has changed in the gender-biased view of mathematicians since the eighteenth century. The biography of Germain parallels Catherine’s, as she likewise has found a proof concerning prime numbers; the play explains that Catherine’s achievement is a “hip” (P 79) mathematical theorem about prime numbers that uses “newer mathematical techniques [ ]. Elliptic curves. Modular forms” (P 79) but does not further detail her accomplishment.34 Sophie Germain has to invent a male alter ego to communicate her extraordinary mathematical achievement. Catherine likewise perceives her gender as an obstacle to her mathematical career and first gives a male alter ego, namely her dead father Robert, the credits for her proof. Catherine’s effort to solve mathematical problems, that is, her deliberate attempt to uncover and make the most of her (possibly inherited) talent for mathematics, can be understood as a process of melancholic identification with her father, which already begins before his death. Melancholia,
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have not yet contributed important research to the field, for their boyish behaviour at conferences – Hal had earlier boasted about parties and drugs – and in their band. Another dialogue between Catherine and Hal more clearly reveals the gender bias inherent in mathematics:
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according to the psychoanalytic notion established by Freud, is not only a reaction to death but to loss in general. For Catherine, the onset of Robert’s mental disease is almost as profound a loss as his death: Catherine lost her able, caring, famous father and instead had to take care of a confused, helpless, ill version of her father. Therefore, her frantic, clandestine work on the proof after Robert’s relapse into illness can be understood as an attempt to keep the father-as-mathematical-genius psychically alive – if not as an object in the external world, then as an introjected object, as a part of Catherine’s self. This interpretation is supported by the fact that after Robert’s death, Catherine initially presents her own proof as Robert’s legacy. She has written it in one of Robert’s notebooks, in a handwriting which closely resembles that of Robert, and stores the notebook in Robert’s desk, where she makes Hal find the proof. Catherine’s assumption of qualities of the lost object has a profound impact on her gender and hence ties in with Butler’s notion of gender as the acting out of unresolved grief. Catherine’s unresolved grief for Robert affects and changes her gender performance and unsettles the gender expectations of her environment. In the process of Catherine’s transformation from an altruistic caretaker to a self-confident mathematical genius,35 the play increasingly associates Catherine with the masculine and mathematical world of Robert and Hal, and simultaneously establishes Claire as a counterpart. Claire embodies the stereotypically feminine, vain, “stylish” (P 23), shallow, “tidy-minded” (Taylor 2002: 619) woman to the point of caricature, whilst Catherine refuses to indulge in cosmetics and fashion. The differences of the sisters result in several clashes such as the following: Claire: Did you use that conditioner I bought you? Catherine: No, shit, I forgot. Claire: You’ll like it. It has jojoba [ ]. It’s something they put in for healthy hair. Catherine: Hair is dead. Claire: What? Catherine: It’s dead tissue. You can’t make it “healthy”. Claire: Whatever, it’s something that’s good for your hair. Catherine: What, a chemical? Claire: No, it’s organic. Catherine: Well it can be organic and still be chemical. [ ] Haven’t you ever heard of organic chemistry? Claire: It makes my hair feel, look, and smell good. That’s the extent of my information about it. (P 24–5) Whereas Claire is characterised as a person who assesses the cosmetic product intuitively and sensuously (that is, through qualities that are culturally
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David Auburn: Proof
associated with femininity), Catherine attempts to penetrate the consistence of the product through logical and rational thought – an approach that is connoted as masculine. A similar gender contrast between the sisters is evoked when Claire attempts to test Catherine’s authorship of the proof and asks Catherine to explain it without the help of the notebook. Catherine’s answer expresses her contempt for her sister, whom she associates with the stereotype of the practical housewife who could not grasp the complexity of the theorem: “It’s forty pages long. I didn’t memorize it. It’s not a muffin recipe” (P 62). The casting of the Donmar production doubled the troubling of gender norms inherent in Catherine’s refusal to behave and dress femininely on an extra-fictional level by casting Gwyneth Paltrow, whose star persona is an epitome of Hollywood femininity, in the role of Catherine. The importance of Paltrow’s star persona resulted not only in many comments on Paltrow’s unexpectedly non-feminine appearance on the Donmar stage, which contradicted her usual “doll-like perfection” (Thorpe 2002: n. pag.), but art critics and tabloid journalists alike also observed Paltrow’s casual and non-feminine outfit during her private appearances in the streets of London.36 Despite her star persona, Paltrow succeeded in convincing most London reviewers as non-feminine mathematical genius, and she was nominated for an Evening Standard Best Actress Award and for an Olivier Award. In view of the fact that Paltrow, according to the reviews, displayed an “almost child-like frailty” (de Jongh 2002: 621), looked “incredibly young and at once defended and defenceless, [and brought] a hauntingly lost, twenty-five-going-on-fourteen quality to the role of Catherine” (Taylor 2002: 619; cf. also Brown 2002: 620, Gore-Langton 2002: 619, de Jongh 2002: 621), her successful embodiment of a ‘non-feminine’ character seems to have been grounded in an androgynous, almost asexual childishness. Despite the play’s (from a feminist perspective) politically correct ending, which confirms Catherine as the author of the proof and hence ‘preaches’ the possibility of female mathematical genius, it does not, ‘practise’ this gender transgression with the same decidedness. By opposing Claire’s ‘feminine’ attributes with Catherine’s rationality, wit, and lack of interest in ‘feminine’ concerns, the play places cultural notions of femininity as the other of genius and thereby makes Catherine’s extraordinary mathematical talent plausible on the grounds of her distinctly non-feminine performances. Nonetheless, reviewers such as Nightingale found Proof’s cautious troubling of gender norms hard to accept and characterised it “as a piece of vicarious feminism designed to pander to male guilt and female wishfulness” (2002: 624). Whilst the play’s last scene solves the question of whether Catherine is to be regarded a mathematical genius, it does not settle the uncertainties about Catherine’s mental health. The dialogue of the final scene tells us that Catherine withdrew into sleep and isolation for an entire week after her
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David Auburn: Proof
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Hal: There is nothing wrong with you. Catherine: I think I’m like my dad. Hal: I think you are too. Catherine: I’m afraid I’m like my dad. Hal: You’re not him. Catherine: Maybe I will be. Hal: Maybe. Maybe you’ll be better. (P 82) The compressed phrasing of this dialogue creates ambivalent meanings. Not only does it raise two different, but connected meanings of ‘being Robert’, namely being a mathematical genius and being mentally ill, but it also negotiates the degree of the daughter’s identification with the father. Hal takes Catherine’s metaphorical suggestion that she is like her father literally by denying that she is her father and Catherine subsequently redefines ‘being like Robert’ as (potentially) ‘becoming Robert’. Catherine’s phrasing “Maybe I will be” acknowledges the unpredictability of the future; this acknowledgement is untypical of melancholia, as Kobayashi shows in his study on melancholia and temporality. Since for the melancholic the future is not unknown but already determined through the past, the future as future is eliminated in melancholia, that is, the sense for the future as something incalculable and unforeseeable is lost (Kobayashi 1998: 174). Because everything is finished and perfect for the melancholic, s/he will only ever experience and imagine the future as a repetition of the past (ibid.: 175). Catherine’s recognition of the future’s uncertainty indicates the waning of melancholia through its gradual transformation into mourning. The play reinforces this transition from acting out the traumatic loss of the father to working it through at a stylistic level. After the play’s opening scene, there are no more apparitions of Robert’s ghost figure and, as elaborated above, audiences are prepared for the play’s disruption of the chronological order after the first flashback in the opening scene of the second act. Hence, towards the end of the play, the realistic mode is no longer distorted by the intrusions of ‘melancholic devices’. On the level of plot, this suggested ‘sanitisation’ of melancholia allows speculations about a happy ending for the protagonist with regard to mathematical achievements to come, her mental stability, and her romance with Hal. Proof’s open ending thus indicates that a transition from melancholia to mourning is possible for its protagonist: that Catherine can, and indeed might have begun to, overcome her
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revelation that she had written the proof and her disappointment at Claire’s and Hal’s disbelief. This withdrawal postponed Catherine’s departure from her father’s house in Chicago and her move to Claire’s apartment in New York. In the final dialogue, Catherine and Hal again tackle the impending interdependence of the legacies of mathematical genius and mental disturbance:
melancholic acting out of the loss of her father. The play thereby opens up possibilities for the protagonist’s future – in contrast to Carr’s and Kane’s contributions to the Drama of Melancholia, whose endings, as I will argue in the following, foreclose further transformations of their protagonist. In these plays, the perfected identification with the lost brother is presented as the irreversible culmination of the development of the female protagonists. Moreover, they depart from Proof’s portrayal of melancholic incorporation insofar as they do not primarily present the effects of the female protagonist’s performative malady as an intellectual transformation. Instead, they explore how the melancholic incorporation of the lost brother affects the gender performance of the protagonist in terms of psychic incorporation and physical transformation.
Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan (1996) Carr’s award-winning Portia Coughlan premiered at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre in 1996, directed by Garry Hynes, and subsequently was transferred to the main stage of London’s Royal Court Theatre.37 The play’s initial scene is set on the thirtieth birthday of its eponymous heroine, but it soon turns out that for Portia the day is an anniversary of death rather than birth.38 Fifteen years ago, her twin brother Gabriel committed suicide, and Portia is still caught in memories of him: “though everyone an’ everythin’ tells me I have to forget him, I cannot, [ ] I cannot” (Portia Coughlan 255).39 Unable to accept Gabriel’s loss, Portia keeps him psychically alive. The play stages Portia’s melancholic state not only through her excessive talking about Gabriel and her constant dwelling in (false) memories about her brother, but also by making Gabriel’s ghost appear recurrently throughout the play. As Carr emphasises in her comments on Portia Coughlan, the name of her protagonist as well as of the setting is taken from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Carr 1996: 310–11, 1997: 147), in which Bassanio describes the lady he is going to woo: In Belmont is a lady richly left, And she is fair, and, fairer than that word, Of wondrous virtues. Sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair speechless messages. Her name is Portia [ ]. (1.1, 160–5) Carr’s Portia is also wealthy and lives at the Belmont River, but she is far from “fair”. As her mother complains, she is “so dark” (PC 209). The opening scene drastically stages Portia’s desperate state on her birthday, as she has already
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started drinking in the morning. The other characters constantly comment on Portia’s demeanour in a terminology that associates her conduct with issues of gender: For example, her aunt Maggie thinks that Portia is in a “[q]ueer mood”, while her uncle Senchil believes Portia to be “[l]onely in herself” (PC 200). Her husband Raphael complains, “It’s not normal the way you are talkin’ and thinkin’, not normal at all” (PC 234), and her lover, Damus, mercilessly states, “One of your bitchy moods again” (PC 202), “You’re cracked as your twin” (PC 203), and “Strange bird always – Portia Coughlan [ ]. The twin, too” (PC 224). Marianne, Portia’s mother, likewise accuses Portia of having a history of “bad-tempered moods” (PC 209). The stage directions, which for example require Portia to “erupt[ ] like a madwoman” (PC 221), reinforce these characterisations. Portia Coughlan shares, however, more than just the name of Shakespeare’s heroine. She likewise has three suitors – her husband, Raphael, her lover, Damus, and her dead twin, Gabriel – and like the story of Shakespeare’s Portia, hers is concerned with choosing and being chosen (Wallace 2000: 87). Although she self-confidently selected her husband and keeps choosing lovers, she has to surrender to Gabriel’s ghostly power. The spell of her dead twin, from whom Carr’s Portia “receive[s] speechless messages”, demonstrates that she is directed by the past. The ambivalence of choosing and being chosen is central to the performative malady of melancholia, which like hysteria and trauma unites modes of performing and of being performed. The degree to which the dead brother controls Portia’s life is demonstrated when Portia asserts that she has married Raphael because he has an angel’s name like Gabriel and because she hoped that by “osmosis or just pure wishin’ [ ] one’d take the qualities of the other” (PC 210). Vainly searching for a substitute for the lost brother, Portia insults Raphael for not fulfilling her expectations: “I completely and utterly despise you, for what you are in yourself, but more for who you will never be” (PC 222). As Raphael is unable to cure Portia’s melancholia, he does not live up to the expectations raised by his biblical name. While the archangel Raphael personifies the power of healing, Raphael Coughlan’s physical deficiency, his limp, foregrounds his own vulnerability and his need for rather than power of healing. The play’s first Canadian production, directed by Natalie Harrower, reflected Gabriel’s importance for Portia’s marriage by making him sing a song about matrimony. Portia’s gloominess, her fixation on Gabriel, and her lack of love for her husband, that is, her inability to transfer her love and desire to a new object, are symptomatic of her melancholic state. The figure thus displays the characteristics of melancholia as defined by Freud, such as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (1917aE: 244; cf. 1917a: 429).
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Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan
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Gabriel’s high-pitched arias, which Portia, unlike the other characters,40 can hear and which function as “speechless messages” for her, show the degree to which the lost brother is still psychically present for her. The play’s opening image visualises Portia’s melancholic state, in which the past remains a vivid part of the present: Two isolating lights up. One on Portia Coughlan in her living room. [ ] Dishevelled and barefoot, she stands, staring forward, a drink in her hand [ ]. The other light comes up simultaneously on Gabriel Scully, her dead twin. He stands at the bank of the Belmont River, singing. They mirror one another’s posture and movements in an odd way; unconsciously. Portia stands there, drinking, lost-looking, listening to Gabriel’s voice. Enter Raphael Coughlan, Portia’s husband. [ ] As soon as he speaks Gabriel’s voice fades. Lights on Raphael. (PC 193) The play’s original production highlighted the permeability or even futility of the border between the two halves of the play’s split setting, Portia’s living room and Gabriel’s realm of the Belmont River, by having a shimmering backcloth, which represented the river, cover the entire back of the stage. This interlocking of the settings accentuated Portia’s parallel but interactive existences in the present and in the past that she shared with her brother. Although in a number of scenes the intruding ‘real world’, personified by Portia’s husband Raphael in the opening scene, makes Gabriel’s voice fade, by the second scene, in which “Gabriel’s voice has come over and taken her [Portia] away” (PC 200) during her conversation with Maggie and Senchil, Portia (and audiences) already inhabit the real world and the ghost world simultaneously. However, the fact that Portia has exclusively acoustic hallucinations of her twin and that she can, moreover, hear his singing only from afar indicates that she cannot, as Catherine does in Proof’s opening scene, fully recuperate his lost presence. Portia is not even for brief moments able to suspend entirely her ‘respect for reality’, which would allow her to lapse into the hallucinations of Gabriel’s company that she longs for. Just as Portia is constantly aware of the ethereal quality of Gabriel, audiences and readers alike are from the very beginning informed about Gabriel’s ghostly status. The dramatis personae introduce him as “a ghost” (PC 191), and the stage directions of the first scene characterise him as Portia’s “dead twin” (PC 193) and specify in the fifth scene that the “effect [of his appearance] must be ghostly” (PC 209). Whereas Hynes’s original production represented Gabriel’s body through the living, material body of an actor and highlighted its ghostly status through means such as lighting and music, later realisations, such as Klaus Weise’s film version of the first German production of
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“couldn’t tell yees apart” – Melancholic incorporation
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Portia Coughlan did not employ an actor in the role of Gabriel but indicated Gabriel’s presence by means of sound and blurred projections of a face. Not only is Portia constantly aware of Gabriel’s ghostly status, she even has to struggle to recover and preserve Gabriel’s appearances, which repeatedly threaten to withdraw. Portia often has to “strain to hear” (PC 232, 247) Gabriel’s voice, which is always “faint” but grows even “fainter” (PC 208, 209, 232, 247) and “fades” (PC 193, 235) once the ‘real world’ intrudes into Portia’s psychic reality. Thus, despite Portia’s desire to dwell in her (aural) hallucinations, she is never fully able to do so. Neither is she able to attain a visual hallucination of Gabriel’s existence by catching a glimpse of him on the bank of the river. The opening of the second scene of the third act illustrates the elusiveness of the ghost’s appearances: (Sound of Gabriel singing. Portia registers this, runs from the living room. Gabriel appears by the bank of the Belmont River. Disappears as Portia arrives, out of breath. Sound of singing fades. She looks around. Silence, except for the flowing river and birdsong. [ ]) Portia: Can’t ya leave me alone or present yourself before me? (PC 235) It is only in dreams that Portia fully is able to recover Gabriel’s presence: “I dreamt about him last night, was one of the dreams as is so real you think it’s actually happenin’. [ ] [H]e turns and smiles and I know he’s going to stay and me heart blows open and stars fall out of me chest as happens in dreams” (PC 210–11). Gabriel’s appearances thus illustrate the paradoxical status of the past for Portia, which intrudes, as typical of melancholia (Kobayashi 1998: 168), into the present but yet remains irrecoverable. As the opening image and the above-quoted stage directions illustrate, in Portia Coughlan the theatrical hallucination for the audience even exceeds the melancholic protagonist’s perspective. Not only can audiences, like Portia, hear Gabriel’s singing, but they can also see Gabriel’s ghost, which remains invisible to Portia. The original production accentuated this contrast between the audience’s and Portia’s perspectives: Portia once extended her arms to the ceiling, yearning for Gabriel, and Gabriel’s ghost came down to take her hands in his. The production reinforced the imagined (rather than hallucinatory) character of this physical encounter, however, by making Portia neither look at nor talk to Gabriel. Portia suffers from her double consciousness, which makes her live in both the internally real and the externally real world, that is, in the world where Gabriel is still present and the world in which he is irreparably lost. Portia’s melancholic state thus also functions as a metatheatrical comment: like Portia, audiences have a double consciousness, as they participate in the willing suspension of disbelief but know that the on-stage action is unreal. Carr’s play reinforces this general awareness about the fictionality of the
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Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan
onstage action through the intertextual reference to The Merchant of Venice, which from the very beginning, through Portia’s name and the river setting, establishes a metatheatrical comment that foregrounds the fictionality of Portia Coughlan. The stage directions in the initial scene emphasise that despite the spatial separation of the twins – Portia sits in her living-room, Gabriel is on the banks of the river – they are closely connected: “They mirror one another’s posture and movements in an odd way; unconsciously” (PC 93). The device of congruent body language and mirroring returns in Cleansed, in which it signifies the onset of melancholic incorporation soon after the brother’s death. In Portia Coughlan, however, fifteen years have passed since Gabriel’s death. This time span reinforces the severity of Portia’s melancholia and makes it impossible for audiences to judge whether the congruent body language of the twins is the result of Portia’s identification with Gabriel after his death or whether the twins’ movements were already in unison when Gabriel was alive. It is the latter view which Portia promotes vehemently when she conjures up not only the twins’ gestural unison, but also their psychic symbiosis, which is reflected in their physical similarity: Portia: [S]ometimes I think only half of me is left, the worst half. [ ] We were so alike, weren’t we, Mother? Marianne: The spit; couldn’t tell yees apart in the cradle. Portia: Came out of the womb holding hands – When God was handin’ out souls he must’ve got mine and Gabriel’s mixed up, aither that or he gave us just the one between us and it went into the Belmont River with him [ ]. (Begins to weep uncontrollably). (PC 210–11) Other characters confirm Portia’s claim that she and Gabriel were “so alike”. For example, Damus remembers, that the twins gave simultaneous, exactly identical answers to questions (PC 224). However, Portia’s memories of symbiosis come to exceed the border of that which can possibly be remembered and instead establish a myth-like fantasy about original oneness which concerns not only the psyche, but also the twins’ bodies and their sexuality.41 When Portia in the final scene reveals that the physical and emotional closeness of the twins also entailed sexual union,42 she mythicises their relationship by claiming that their incestuous sexual union began in their mother’s womb: me and Gabriel made love all the time down be the Belmont River among the swale, from the age of five – That’s as far back as I can remember anyways – But I think we were doin’ it before we were born. Times I close me eyes and I feel a rush of water around me and above we hear the thumpin’ of me mother’s heart, and we’re a-twined, his foot on my head,
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Portia’s rhythm of speech imitates the swelling of water and represents the liquid world in which no boundaries between the siblings existed. In the original version of the monologue, which is written in stronger accent and thus resembles the pronunciation of the original production, the language draws words together even more and thus transports the speech’s concern with flowing and melting (Sihra 2003: 27–8; cf. Carr 1996: 63). The memories and visions of erstwhile psychic, physical, and sexual oneness with Gabriel are symptomatic of Portia’s melancholic incorporation of Gabriel, which likewise dissolves the boundary between the ego and the object. Expressing her present sense of oneness with Gabriel as memories, Portia projects her melancholic state back into the past and belatedly installs it as an irrecoverable origin which is to explain both her sense of bereavement (“only half of me is left”) and her persistent feeling of oneness with Gabriel (“we’re a-twined”). Through Portia’s yearning to return to the supposedly blissful incestuous past, her melancholia explicitly displays a desire that Schor considers typical of all forms of melancholia: “Ultimately the sadness of the melancholic involves an impossible desire: the desire to make love with the dead” (1996: 14). “If ya passed your day like any normal woman ” – Melancholia and femininity Portia’s visions of symbiosis, according to which Portia and Gabriel “don’t know which of [them] is the other and don’t want to”, confuse the boundary between masculinity and femininity and establish an androgynous ‘anatomy of melancholia’. By ascribing this androgynous anatomy to the embryonic state before separation and sexual difference, the play evokes an image reminiscent of the embryonic hermaphroditism that Freud considers in the context of psychic bisexuality in “Three Essays on Sexuality”, where he discusses the parallels between the anatomic and the psychic development from bisexuality to monosexuality. An earlier description by Portia likewise thwarts the demarcation of separate bodies and troubles the binarism of discrete sexes and genders; again, Portia initially tells this (fictionalised) recollection in the present tense and thereby highlights the past’s importance for the present: “Everythin’s swapped and mixed up and you’re aither two persons or you’re no one. He used call me Gabriel and I used call him Portia. Times we got so confused we couldn’t tell who was who and we’d wait for someone else to identify us und put us back into ourselves” (PC
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mine on his foetal arm, and we don’t know which of us is the other and don’t want to, and the water swells around our ears, and all the world is Portia and Gabriel packed forever in a tight hot womb, where there’s no breathin’, no thinkin’, no seein’, only darkness and heart drums and touch [ ]. (PC 253–4)
241). According to Portia, the twins dissolved and exchanged their sexed and gendered positions until the environment, at least temporarily, reinstalled order. The troubling of the binarism of masculinity and femininity is another shared concern of Shakespeare’s and Carr’s Portia character. Portia in The Merchant of Venice dresses as a “young and learnéd doctor” (4.1.143) of law to settle the lawsuit between Antonio and Shylock; this cross-dressing on the inner-fictional level was even doubled on the non-fictional level by the Elizabethan theatre convention of boy actors. In order to highlight Gabriel’s lack of ‘masculinity’, the original production of Carr’s play also used a boy actor who sang Gabriel’s aria in a “spectral treble voice” (Spencer 1996: 610). This casting befits the characterisation of Gabriel by Damus and the barman Fintan, who describe Gabriel’s lack of masculinity as feminine: Gabriel “looked like a girl” and “[s]ang like one, too” (PC 224). Whereas Gabriel is thus described and staged as non-masculine, Portia’s melancholic conduct is perceived as non-feminine by her environment. Portia’s melancholic state involves a profound failure, or refusal, to fulfil the gender expectations of her environment. Her lack of interest in the ‘real world’ and her inability to love make her neglect her duties as mother, wife, and housekeeper. Although Portia wishes that she “could be a natural mother” (PC 233) to her three sons, she is unable to care for them properly, “doing all the things a mother is supposed to do” (PC 233). The “markedly unhousewifely” (Leeney 2004: 159) mother does not even feel affectionate for her children: “I never wanted sons nor daughters and I never pretended otherwise to ya [ ]. But you thought you could woo me into motherhood. Well, it hasn’t worked out, has it? [ ] I can’t love them, Raphael. I’m just not able” (PC 221). Not only does Portia neglect her children, she even perceives herself as a danger to their well-being: I’m afraid of them, Raphael! What I may do to them! [ ] When I look at my sons [ ] I see knives and accidents and terrible mutilations. Their toys is weapons for me to hurt them with, givin’ them a bath is a place where I could drown them. And I have to run from them and lock myself away for fear I cause these terrible things to happen. Quintin is safest when I’m nowhere near him, so teach him stop whingin’ for me for fear I dash his head against a wall or fling him through a window. (PC 233) These fantasies of violence and infanticide evoke the prototypical dramatic heroine Medea, who kills her children in an act of revenge. Portia’s “devilish glee” (PC 243) and her resemblance to “a demon” (PC 244), as well as the name of Portia’s son Jason, reinforce this intertextual reference that heightens her menacing impression. Portia’s troubled bond to her children is mirrored in her own relationship with her mother, which is also characterised by the lack of love. Whereas
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Marianne admits, “Gabriel was the one I loved, never you!” (PC 249), Portia concludes, “I’ve always wanted to like ya, mother, but I never could” (PC 247). Whereas she calls her father Sly “Daddy” (PC 213), she always addresses Marianne more formally as “Mother” (PC 209, 210). When Marianne interrupts Portia’s efforts to listen to Gabriel’s voice, Portia even physically abuses her. Reviewers found the play’s portrayal of the mother-child-relationship as a site of hatred and violence even more surprising because the text was commissioned by Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, where Carr stayed during the writing process (cf. for example Billington 1996: 609). Portia’s lack of maternal affection questions naturalised assumptions about femininity. How firmly motherhood is built into notions of femininity in Ireland is underpinned by the fact that even to this day the word ‘mother’ is used interchangeably with the word ‘woman’ in the Irish constitution (Sihra 2003: 19). Although the deconstruction of the notion of the ‘natural mother’ is of particular importance in the Irish social context and dramatic tradition,43 it was also startling for British audiences, as the reviews indicate. In addition to Portia’s lack of maternal affection and her neglect of all domestic duties, Portia’s “relentless refusal of every ‘womanly’ virtue” (Leeney 2004: 159) comes to the fore in her lack of sexual faithfulness to Raphael. Publicly castigating Portia for her unfaithfulness, Portia’s father asks her to recover her “ethics” and “morality” (PC 214). Moreover, in her extra-marital affairs, Portia lacks ‘feminine’ modesty and is straightforward to the point of rudeness. She tells the barman Fintan who wants to take her for dinner, “Can have dinner at home, only want to fuck ya, find out if you’re any good, see if there’s anything behind that cowboy swagger and too honeyed tongue” (PC 208) and “if ya want to screw me, Fintan Goolan, have the decency to ask me like a man instead of fussin’ round me like an aould cluckin’ hen!” (PC 208). Portia’s sexual frankness, her lack of emotional involvement, and her lack of interest in romanticised courtship contradict traditional notions of femininity. Portia’s mother explicitly links Portia’s melancholic fixation on Gabriel to her violations of the gender norm, when she reprimands her daughter, “If ya passed your day like any normal woman, there’d be none of this!” (PC 211), that is, none of her desperate yearning for Gabriel.44 The play thus demonstrates the degree to which Portia’s unresolved mourning for her twin brother troubles normative femininity. Portraying melancholia as a malady which oscillates between performing and being performed, the play highlights the way Portia on the one hand deliberately rebels against the restrictive rural gender models, but on the other cannot help failing gender ideals. For example, she is unable to love and take care of her children despite her attempts to do so. Likewise, Portia’s self-confident sexual behaviour has traces of an obsession. Despite Portia’s deliberate seductions of Damus and Fintan, their eventual sexual encounters are always triggered by Portia’s search for Gabriel. Each time she meets her lovers at the
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Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan
river, she comes there to listen to Gabriel’s singing or to think about him (PC 200, 203, 218, 235, and 236). This non-deliberate aspect of her affairs is reinforced when Portia claims that she does not experience sexual pleasure: “I’m past all pleasures of the body, Damus, long past [ ]. I’ve always found sex to be a great let-down, all that suckin’ and sweatin’ and stickin’ things into one another makes sense to me no more. [ ] I’d liefer sit by the Belmont River for five seconds than have you or any other man beside me in bed” (PC 236). Portia’s claim of asexuality fits the melancholic symptoms as elaborated by Freud, who argues that the “transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido, which [ ] takes place [in melancholic incorporation] obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization – a kind of sublimation, therefore” (1923E: 30; cf. 1923: 258). Thus, Portia’s suspended mourning for Gabriel idealises the lost brother to such a degree that neither Portia’s husband nor her lovers can compete with him.45 Gabriel and the lost union with him becomes an imagined place of fulfilment, a utopia that differs from the rigid (gender) boundaries of her environment. However, towards the end of the play, the image of Gabriel shifts from an angel-like, androgynous, yearned-for figure to an avenging and destructive demon. “You were only his shadow” – (Ethe)real corporealities Portia’s visions of the blissful union with Gabriel are increasingly challenged and Gabriel’s ghostly omnipresence (“He’s everywhere, Daddy. Everywhere ” PC 213) becomes more and more harmful throughout the play. In contrast to Portia’s idealisation of Gabriel and her retrospective construction of their emotional closeness, she acknowledges, “We didn’t really like one another” (PC 241). Additionally, Marianne reminds Portia of Gabriel’s destructive power both when he was alive and after his death. According to her, Gabriel was “fierce difficult” and “obsessed” with his relationship to his sister; she claims that Gabriel clutched Portia’s leg in childbirth and has not let go of his sister ever since (PC 247), being able to exert an almost magical power over Portia: “he used to start ya chokin’ by just looking at ya! How he used to draw blood from ya whenever ya tried to defy him!” (PC 249). Portia’s conviction that Gabriel “was doin’ them things to himself for he thought I was him” (PC 249) once more refers to the siblings’ imagined unity and subverts the boundary between self-punishment and aggression towards the other. Sly’s contradictory comments about his son also illustrate the ambivalent status of Gabriel between vindictive demon and redemptive angel: Gabriel was “no human child but some little outcast from hell” (PC 230), but at the same time he was “something beautiful and rare” (PC 230) with “a voice like God himself” (PC 216). In Portia’s case, her contradictory opinions of Gabriel are an example of the condition which Freud calls melancholic ambivalence. As a result of her melancholic incorporation of Gabriel, Portia has internalised her conflicting
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feelings for her twin and now turns them against herself. According to Freud, it is this internalisation of ambivalent feelings for the lost object that founds the agency of conscience, the super-ego, which “manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt” (1923E: 53; cf. 1923: 282). Like Freud’s theory, which argues for an “excessively strong super-ego” (1923E: 53; cf. 1923: 283) in melancholia, Portia Coughlan characterises Portia’s melancholic yearning for her brother as moulded by her repressed guilt about his suicide. Towards the end of the play, Portia confesses that she destroyed the twins’ emotional and sexual exclusiveness for each other when she slept with Damus at the age of fifteen, as a result of which Gabriel stopped singing and never spoke to her again. However, Marianne again offers an alternative account of Portia’s memories when she claims that it was in fact Portia who rejected and punished Gabriel (PC 250). Portia eventually reveals that the twins had planned to drown themselves together as a final attempt to restore their unity. Yet, Portia neither accompanied Gabriel into the Belmont River, nor did she prevent him from wading further into the water. Portia attempts to exculpate herself by arguing that she had to defend herself in a merciless fight for dominance and even survival: “One of us was goin’, were killin’ each other, and ye [her mother] just left us to fight it to the death. [ ] I won” (PC 251). However, Portia’s victory has been only provisional; as a result of her melancholic incorporation of Gabriel, the struggle between the twins continues within Portia’s psyche. She feels that Gabriel will take revenge: “ ‘Portia,’ he says, ‘I’m going now but I’ll come back and I’ll keep coming back until I have you.’ [ ] I can hear him comin’ towards me, can hear him callin’ me” (PC 251). Portia’s fear of Gabriel’s revenge and her guilt feeling also offer an explanation for why she, who very often strains to hear Gabriel’s voice, sometimes tries to drown out his voice by listening to loud music on CDs (PC 195). These revelations stand in stark contrast with Portia’s earlier, possibly false, memories of the siblings’ unconditioned, loving closeness, which now appear even more as a compensatory fantasy that is meant to alleviate Portia’s guilt feeling for Gabriel’s death – a death which she possibly could have prevented and might even have caused. Ultimately, Portia cannot withstand Gabriel’s both luring and menacing appeal and commits suicide in an imitation of his death. Her suicide is as ambivalent as her feelings for Gabriel and her memories of their relationship, since it oscillates between an act of love and an act of hatred. On the one hand, the suicide is an attempt to restore Portia’s blissful prenatal, embryonic fusion with Gabriel in that she attempts to recreate their former union in the watery womb when she follows Gabriel into the Belmont River. At the same time, her drowning is a regression to the adolescent plan of joined suicide. As far as this belated execution of the suicide plan is concerned, however, the death by drowning in a river also shows the impossibility of such a repetition. The river’s transitional quality metaphorically represents the passing of time. Strictly speaking, the passing of time
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Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan
forecloses exact repetition, as Heraclitus’s famous dictum posits: “[i]t is not possible to step twice into the same river [ ] [, since waters] scatter and again combine [ ] and approach and separate” (trans. in Freeman 1971: 31). Portia’s suicide, which attempts an impractible repetition, epitomises her general melancholic suffering, which derives from the impossibility of repeating the past and from the unattainable Wiederholung, the fetching back, of the dead. On the other hand, her suicide is the finale of the siblings’ fight for dominance. Following this trajectory, Portia’s suicide is an attempt to destroy her brother. Freud argues that melancholics are prone to suicide because their incorporation of the beloved object integrates their feelings of hate. Therefore, the melancholic self might commit suicide “if, owing to the return of the object cathexis, it can treat itself as an object – if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world” (1917aE: 252; cf. 1917a: 439). In accordance with their ambivalent relationship when Gabriel was alive and his equally soothing and troubling presence as a ghost, Portia’s suicide is both an act of love and of hatred for her brother, both an attempt at reunion and an attempt at destruction, as in melancholia “countless separate struggles” take place “in which love and hate contend with each other” (1917aE: 256; cf. 1917a: 444). The Belmont River thus is a polyvalent metaphor in Portia Coughlan. As watery womb, it is the place of original oneness, secret sexual union, and the dissolution of sex and gender boundaries. As River Styx, it represents the permeable border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Accordingly, Gabriel stands on the other bank of the river when Portia’s corpse is retrieved. As in some of Carr’s other plays, water in Portia Coughlan is a central conceptual motif which visualises “the resistance to fixity and the solid, where the force of the water offers the possibility of exceeding boundaries, of flooding and diluting dominant structures” (Sihra 2003: 25). The river thus represents Portia’s melancholic incorporation, her “awful psychic entanglement”, which likewise dissolves “the borders between the living and the dead, between the born and the unborn, between the past and the present, [and, I would add, femininity and masculinity] [ ] in the river’s interminable flow” (O’Toole 1996: n. pag.). The confusion of boundaries between internal and external settings as well as between real and imagined places, such as the watery womb, corresponds to the play’s time structure, which resists linearity and causality. At the beginning of the second act, Portia’s corpse, to the sound of Gabriel’s singing, is pulled out from “the exact same spot” (PC 224) where Gabriel was recovered fifteen years earlier. In the act’s second scene, the family returns from Portia’s funeral. However, at the beginning of the third act, audiences see Portia in her living room on the morning after her thirtieth birthday. This non-chronological time structure allows several explanations. First, Portia’s
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death in the second act, which reunites her with Gabriel, might be a fantasy of Portia rather than an actual event; after introducing this fantasy scenario, the play returns to Portia’s bleak domestic life and her unhappy relationship with Raphael. A second way of reading the play’s structure is to understand the second act and third act as alternative endings, because Portia attempts to reconcile with Raphael in the third act’s final scene. Thirdly, the advancement of Portia’s death achieves the analytical structure of a ‘whydunit’, a “psychic autopsy” (O’Toole 1996: n. pag.), which invites audiences to search for reasons for Portia’s suicide throughout the third act. Following this third interpretation of the suicide and funeral as a flash forward, the play’s distorted chronology enhances the sense of inescapability, of being performed, that pervades the play. Having seen Portia’s death, audiences know throughout the third act that despite Portia’s attempts, she will not be able to overcome her melancholic repetition compulsion. Carr uses repetition not only as central characteristic of Portia’s imitation of Gabriel’s death, of family “history repeatin’ itself” (PC 210) through her suicide, but also makes it an aesthetic device. For example, Gabriel’s singing repeatedly interrupts the action of the main plot and makes Portia leave for the Belmont River (PC 200, 208, 235) or freeze in intense listening (PC 193, 209, 232, 245, 247). Moreover, Carr employs repetitive speech patterns. When the characters face Portia’s corpse, the pain caused by the repeated experience of loss condenses in their repetitive speech. Befitting the fate of the twins that it tries to capture, it is shaped by the rhetorical figures of geminatio: Marianne: It’s happened again. It’s happened again. [ ] Raphael (a whisper): Portia. Portia. Maggie: I don’t know, pet, I don’t know. (PC 223) Thus, Portia Coughlan on the levels of plot, structure, and language is shaped by patterns of Wiederholung, which characterise the melancholic’s desire to repeat the unrepeatable by fetching back the dead. Through the inverted time structure, “the space given to ‘new’ actions or patterns seems minimal and the role of the unexpected would appear to be deliberately undercut” (Wallace 2001: 440). This eradication of future’s incalculability is an apt device to make audiences share Portia’s melancholic perception, which is so profoundly preoccupied with the past that it cannot envision a non-determined, open future. As Kobayashi argues, the future perfect is the grammatical tense that best captures the melancholic’s attitude towards the future, since for the melancholic, the future is already ‘perfected’, that is, completed. The melancholic can only ever repeat the past because for him or her, everything is done and terminated. As a consequence, the future is divested of its crucial quality of being unknown
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Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan
(1998: 175). Portia displays this inability to conceive of a future that is radically different from the past and the present. Obsessed by the wish to return to her (allegedly) blissful past with Gabriel, she considers herself unable to change her unfulfilling life as bored housewife and non-loving wife and mother other than through suicide. Incapable of imagining a different life elsewhere, she perceives herself as tied to the Belmont River: “don’t think that I’d survive a night away from the Belmont Valley” (PC 207). Throughout the third act, that is, when watching the encounters that took place before Portia’s suicide, audiences share this melancholic sense of the future’s definiteness and inescapability. As a result of the flash forward, they ‘know’ that Portia’s attempts to reconcile with Raphael are futile, since her future is determined by the already enacted drowning. Thus, the ‘past’ of the (nonchronological) plot time line predetermines the future of the (chronological) story time. The advancement of Portia’s death not only highlights Portia’s feeling of being determined by the past and forecloses the future’s unthinkability, but it also unsettles the categorisation of its characters in terms of real and ghost figures. Whereas Portia initially appears as a ‘real’ character and Gabriel as an imagined ghostly presence, Portia in the final act can likewise be understood as a ghost. This confusion of real and ghost figures is enhanced by remarks made by the figures. Portia envisions herself as a living dead in the first act: She “might as well be dead”; “[T]he house creakin’ like a coffin” (PC 207); “I’ll be coming here [to the river] long after I’m gone. I’ll lie here when I’m a ghost” (PC 203). Marianne even advances Portia’s death-like, less-than-real quality to the time when Gabriel was still alive. She claims that before Gabriel’s death, Portia was merely his shadow: “He had all the gifts and you had none! [ ] You were only his shadow, trailin’ after him like a slavish pup” (PC 249). These statements suggest degrees of realness, or of shadowiness, even among the living. The image of the shadow that the play employs verbally and that lends itself to powerful stage imagery – which was realised in the first German production of Portia Coughlan46 – links up with Freud’s theory of melancholia and guilt. Freud argues that the melancholic identification of the self with the lost object, which results in the establishment and nourishment of the super-ego, means that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency as though it were an object, the forsaken object” (1917aE: 249; cf. 1917a: 435). Again, Freud’s theory of melancholic ambivalence offers an explanation for Portia’s and Gabriel’s perpetual mutual infection with shadowiness. Marianne’s suggestion that Portia was Gabriel’s shadow as long as he was alive indicates that Portia must have both admired and envied her twin brother. After Gabriel’s death, Portia introjected these ambivalent feelings towards Gabriel, which she now turns against herself.
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The melancholic ego, which has introjected the object, is unable to differentiate between the ego and the object. Therefore, not only is Gabriel Portia’s non-real shadow self, but Portia also perceives herself as a mere shadow. The temporal structure of the play, which advances Portia’s death and thus gives her a ghostly character in the final act, makes audiences share Portia’s perspective: they also perceive her as a not fully real figure, as a figure that has already died on stage and is bound to die according to the play’s plot (Pankratz 2005: 87). Stylistically, however, Portia’s staging in the final act differs from Gabriel’s appearances, because she is not confined to the river setting where she has died, she can still interact and verbally communicate with other characters, and the stage directions do not require the same ‘ghostly effect’ for Portia’s appearances in the third act that they require for Gabriel’s appearances throughout the play. Thus, Portia is placed between the untroubled ‘realness’ of the other characters and the ‘etherealness’ of Gabriel. Portia’s final words affirm her status as a figure that oscillates between the solidness and realness represented by her husband Raphael and the elusiveness and ethereality represented by Gabriel: I seen you [Raphael] long before you ever seen me, seen ya fishin’ one Sunday afternoon and the stillness and sureness that came off of you was a balm to me, and when I asked who ya were and they said that’s Raphael Coughlan, I thought, how can anyone with a name like that be so real, and I says to meself, if Raphael Coughlan notices me I will have a chance to enter the world and stay in it, which has always been a battle for me. (PC 255, my italics) Portia describes herself as a less-than-real figure who is attracted by Raphael’s stillness, sureness, and realness, and who depends on being noticed by Raphael in order to “enter the world”. Portia thus likens herself to Gabriel, who likewise is less than real than Portia and depends on her hallucination to remain in existence. These ‘melancholic’ devices unsettle Portia’s status as either a material or immaterial figure and call into question “which bodies may be regarded as ‘real’ and which may be considered ‘ether-eal’ ” (Sihra 2003: 24). As I have argued above, this interrogation of the (ir)reality and (im)materiality of bodies in Portia Coughlan not only applies to the boundary between living and dead bodies, but also to the border between those bodies that matter and those that do not matter in terms of sex/gender. Butler’s theory offers an explanatory pattern for the twins’ ambivalent bodies, which oscillate between materiality and immateriality as well as between normative bodies and an unruly anatomy of melancholia. As elaborated above, Butler argues that the social regulatory norm of two, discretely sexed bodies governs a continuous process of bodily materialisation. According to Butler, those bodies that do not materialise in line with the norms are excluded from
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Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan
intelligibility and hence remain bodies that neither materialise nor count to the same degree as normatively materialised bodies. Thus, melancholic incorporation is presented as a psychic process which involves vivid fantasies of bodily merging with the lost twin in the melancholic protagonist. The performative malady of melancholia results in an unhinging of the border between material and immaterial presences and between femininity und masculinity. Portia Coughlan offers counter-fantasies to culturally accepted notions about which bodies matter and which do not in terms of life and death but also in terms of appropriately sexed and ‘unruly’ bodies. The jacket picture of this study which shows such a merging of bodies in the watery womb looks like a visualisation of Portia’s obsessive fantasies. It is, however, taken from a production of Cleansed, which shares the thematics and imagery of Portia Coughlan. In Kane’s play, the fantasy of sex/gender transgression through melancholic incorporation is taken literally; the psychic process of melancholic incorporation transforms the protagonist’s body and effects a melancholic ‘incarnation’.
Sarah Kane: Cleansed (1998) Cleansed, which was first performed in 1998 by the Royal Court Theatre at the Duke of York’s under the direction of James Macdonald, presents a similar story to Carr’s play. Again, a sister loses her brother and reacts with the melancholic disavowal of his loss and the psychic resurrection of the dead brother. Although Grace and Graham are not explicitly described as twins, their likeness and identity (con)fusion is reinforced by the similarity of their names as well as the identical clothes which they wear from the third scene onwards. As in Auburn’s and Carr’s contributions to the Drama of Melancholia, in Kane’s play melancholia can be read as a performative malady which makes the melancholic protagonist lose ‘respect’ for the border between materiality and immateriality as well as between femininity and masculinity.47 Kane’s play departs from Auburn’s and Carr’s plays, however, as it takes literally the concept of ‘melancholic incorporation’, which Freud defined as a metaphoric, psychic equivalent to a bodily process. In Cleansed, as in Butler’s theory of gender melancholia, the psychic process of incorporation involves a bodily transformation, which not only affects the interior of the body (as in Freud’s notion of devouring), but triggers a metamorphosis of the body’s surface. Cleansed shares with the Drama of Hysteria an ostensibly ‘therapeutic’ setting – the institution depicted by Kane, however, is even bleaker than the Salpêtrière. Its inmates are, as the play’s ambivalent title indicates, either re-educated by drastic measures and thus ‘purified’, or, if the re-education fails, killed and thus ‘purged’. A doctor-figure called Tinker observes and disciplines the inmates Graham, his sister Grace, a young patient called Robin, and a homosexual couple, Rod and Carl, and occasionally visits a
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peep-show dancer called ‘Woman’ who works in the institution as well.48 Although Tinker treats his “patients” (Cleansed 8)49 with medication and electric shocks and is repeatedly called “doctor” (C 2, 10, 30, 32), Kane specifies the setting as a university in the stage directions (C 1), thereby linking the portrayed cruel re-education to university life. Moreover, the play evokes associations with a death camp, a prison, a brothel, and a religious sect; Cleansed thus portrays general social and institutional processes of exclusion and punishment. Structurally, the depicted institution resembles Jeremy Bentham’s sketch of the panopticon, whose circular architecture enables the attendant to survey all cells from a central watchtower. Michel Foucault presents the panopticon’s total surveillance as the perfect materialisation of the prisonmodel that he describes in Discipline and Punish as a conglomerate of body politics and the assessment and execution of sentences (1995 [1975], esp. 195–228). In Cleansed, this execution of ‘sentences’ applies in both meanings of the word, since the punishments exerted by Tinker as well as by the depersonalised, automatic environment often literalise proverbs. For example, Rod falls from a great height and lands next to Carl after Carl figuratively ‘dropped’ him by betraying him (Opel 2002: 147). By means of his totalitarian surveillance and severe measures of punishment, Tinker tries to reinforce normative body politics. The stage directions establish him as an omnipresent observer: “Tinker is watching” (C 6, 20, 23, 30, 35, 38) “Tinker watches for a while” (C 15, 24), “Tinker [ ] staring” (C 32). According to the principle of the panopticon, Tinker often remains invisible to the other characters, who nevertheless are aware of his controlling gaze (“Grace: Tinker knows me” C 22). However, the panopticon’s desired effect is not achieved; the inmates do not internalise Tinker’s gaze and thus control themselves.50 On the contrary, despite Tinker’s brutal punishment, they keep contravening his body politics. The stage design of the play’s original production by Jeremy Herbert reinforced the play’s sense of surveillance. In some scenes, for example in the tenth scene, the actors played on the back wall and the audience thus watched them as if from above, which emphasised Macdonald’s interpretation that the characters are “trapped on a microscope slide” (1998: n. pag.). “I look like him. Say you thought I was a man” – The anatomy of melancholia In contrast to Proof and Portia Coughlan, the action of Cleansed sets in when the ghost figure, Graham, is still alive. In the play’s opening scene, audiences witness how Graham dies from an overdose of heroine that Tinker injects into his eyeball. In the play’s third scene, Grace arrives at the clinic in search of her brother. When she learns that Graham died half a year ago, she has herself admitted to the all-male ‘clinic’, initially against Tinker’s will. Cleansed depicts the immediate reaction of Grace to the message of her
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
brother’s death. Because Graham’s corpse was burnt and his clothes are his only material remains, Grace forces the young patient Robin, who was given Graham’s garments, to swap clothes. Once she wears Graham’s clothes – a white shirt and black leather trousers in the original production – she breaks down and cries until she is tied to a bed and injected by Tinker. After this initial shock of bereavement, however, Grave disavows the loss of Graham. Disguised as Graham, Grace begins to ‘resurrect’ the brother.51 The cross-dressing is only the first step in Grace’s psychic resurrection of Graham through melancholic incorporation. When Grace awakes after her breakdown in the third scene, Graham, played by the same actor as in the opening scene, sits on her bed and promises that he will never again leave his sister (C 13). From that moment on, Graham remains at Grace’s side as her secret companion, whom only Grace can perceive. Like Proof and Portia Coughlan, the play stylistically resorts to a form of melancholic realism through which audiences can partake in the hallucinatory perception of the melancholic protagonist. In comparison with Auburn’s and Carr’s plays, Cleansed presents the most extensive form of the melancholic loss of ‘respect for reality’, since Grace’s hallucination of Graham involves all of her senses and is more persistent than Portia’s and Catherine’s delusions. A conversation with the young inmate Robin shows how radically Grace disavows the loss of Graham. She regards Robin’s question whether she would make her brother return if she could as “insane” (C 19) and answers laughing, winking at Graham: “I don’t think of Graham as dead. That’s not how I think of him. [ ] It’s not necessary, Robin. It’s not like he is dead” (C 19–20). Not only does Graham’s hallucinatory return compensate the loss caused by death, but it also invalidates the incest taboo, which used to restrain the siblings from fulfilling their desire during Graham’s lifetime: Grace: Love me or kill me, Graham. (He hesitates. Then kisses her. [ ]) Graham: I used to think about you and I used to wish it was you when I Used to Grace: Doesn’t matter. You went away but now you’re back and nothing else matters. (Graham takes off her shirt and stares at her breasts.) Graham: Makes no difference now. [ ] (They begin to make love, slowly at first, then hard, fast, urgent, finding each other’s rhythm is the same as their own. They come together. They hold each other, him inside her, not moving.) (C 14)
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The ambivalent phrase “him inside her”, which not only describes their sexual union but also Grace’s state of melancholic incorporation, highlights how closely Grace’s incestuous desire for Graham and her identification with him interlock. In contrast to the father-daughter incest tackled in Trauma Drama, the incest of siblings here, as in Portia Coughlan, is portrayed as an idealised symbiotic relationship that opposes the environment’s lack of love and tenderness (von Hoff 2003: 356). In contrast to Portia Coughlan, however, in which the attempt at re-establishing the incestuous symbiosis results in Portia’s death, the relationship in Cleansed, despite its regressive traces, offers a viable, if only imagined, chance of retreat from the depicted dystopic ‘reality’. The presentation of the ghost figure thus differs in important respects from Portia Coughlan and agrees with Proof. Graham is not confined to a secluded space and his appearances are not reduced to singing but are an integral part of the action and the communication with the protagonist. The fact that Cleansed initially presents Graham as a character who is alive offers a foil for Gabriel’s return as ghost figure. Productions can use this foil either to highlight the difference between Graham’s initial appearance and his ghost through stylistic means, and thus make audiences aware of his hallucinatory status, or to stage Graham’s return according to his presentation in the opening scene. It is the latter option that Macdonald preferred in the play’s first production, which did not differentiate in terms of clothing, make-up, acting style, or lighting between Graham’s initial appearance and his return as a ghost. The production thereby made audiences share the perception of Grace, for whom the ghost is as vital a part of her reality as the appearances of the other characters. Because the device of the ghost figure in the Drama of Melancholia offers a mise en abyme that self-referentially comments on the double consciousness involved in theatrical reception, it installs an additional double consciousness in audiences for the performance’s inner-fictional level. Cleansed makes extensive use of the additional double consciousness introduced by the ghost figure when it explores the theatrical potential of Schor’s claim that “what is at stake [in melancholia] is the always uncanny communication between the living and the dead” (1996: 6). In some scenes, Grace talks simultaneously to Graham and to other characters and thus pursues two overlapping conversations which create double meanings for audiences. For example, when Grace teaches Robin how to write, Graham intrudes into their conversation about Grace’s ex-boyfriends: Robin: Grace, you ever had a boyfriend? Grace: Yes. [ ] Graham: That black kid? Robin: Got a pink? Grace: It’s not about colour, colour doesn’t come into it. (C 18)
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
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(Grace lies sunbathing in a tiny shaft of light coming through a crack in the ceiling.) (Graham is on one side of her, Tinker the other.) Tinker: Whatever you want. Grace: Sun. Graham: Won’t get an even tan. Tinker: Can take you there. Grace: I know. Voices: Burn you clean Grace: Hold my hand. Graham: Sunshine. (Graham takes one hand, Tinker the other. [ ]) Graham: Love me or kill me. Tinker: Can make you better. Grace: Love you. [ ] Graham. Voices: Frazzle it out Tinker: Tinker. (C 28–9) These scenes, which play with the dramatic irony created by Tinker’s and Robin’s unawareness of Graham and the voices in Grace’s head, offer a theatrical version of the cross-purpose communications which clinical researchers describe as typical of the melancholic (Glatzel 1990: 80–6). In a similar manner to the staging of dissociation in Trauma Drama, these scenes show the usually imperceptible parts of melancholic communication, thus granting audiences access to Grace’s melancholic reality. Not only these cross-purpose-dialogues but also the play’s language in general can be characterised as melancholic, as Kane’s play employs the minimalist and repetitive speech that is typical of melancholia (Kristeva 1989 [1987]: 33, Schmitt 1990: 15). As many critics have noted, the lines of the characters are immensely compressed, and the figures always appear on the verge of becoming mute; some of them are indeed entirely robbed of verbal language, either by being killed (Rod) or by being mutilated (Tinker amputates Carl’s tongue) (Urban 2001: 42, Opel 2002: 42 and 150). Despite the highly reduced speech, however, the dialogue repeats entire passages and thus creates “recurring obsessive litanies”, which are typical of melancholic speech (Kristeva 1989 [1987]: 33).52 Because of the reduced verbal language, the stage images attain a particular importance in Cleansed. There are almost as many stage directions as spoken lines in the play script, and the play in production communicates chiefly through its stage imagery, as Macdonald
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When Tinker and Graham compete for Grace’s trust and love, the audience shares Grace’s even triply split attention, as they can also hear the voices in her head:
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acknowledges: “the images are there to tell the story more powerfully and immediately than the text” (in Saunders 2002: 122). Thus, as in Portia Coughlan and Proof, the device of the ghost figure makes audiences partake in Grace’s melancholic perception, which is divided between the hallucinated maintenance of the lost brother and the external reality in which Graham is no longer present for the other characters. This simultaneity of internal and external reality also affects Grace’s communication patterns, and Cleansed even has melancholic, reduced, repetitive speech affect its entire use of verbal language. Grace’s identification with Graham soon exceeds wearing his clothes and perceiving his presence and begins to transform the sense of her body, which she increasingly experiences as male. Grace requests affirmation of her new body sense from Tinker: “I look like him. Say you thought I was a man” (C 8). Whereas Tinker at first does not acknowledge Grace’s transformed body, Graham supports Grace. Fulfilling her plea “Teach me” (C 13), he shows his sister how to look, move, and talk like a man. The siblings’ exercise is presented in an image that resembles the opening of Portia Coughlan, because Graham and Grace mirror each other’s movements as Portia and Gabriel do. While their mirroring was described as an unconscious performance of synchronisation, in Cleansed it is a deliberate attempt at imitation: (Graham dances – a dance of love for Grace. Grace dances opposite him, copying his movements. Gradually, she takes on the masculinity of his movement, his facial expression. Finally, she no longer has to watch him – she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time. When she speaks, her voice is more like his.) Graham: You’re good at this. Grace: Good at this. Graham: Very good. Grace: Very good. Graham: So / very very good. Grace: Very very good. (C 13) As part of Grace’s melancholic incorporation, in the process of “absorbing the other as oneself” (Butler 1997: 195–6), Grace learns to assume Graham’s gestural, facial, and vocal attributes of masculinity. The exercise, which self-referentially comments on theatrical embodiment, effects a change in Grace’s gender performances that leads to a transformation of Grace’s body. The extent to which her fantasy of incorporation materialises for Grace becomes apparent when she complains, “My balls hurt” (C 28). This remark shows that the projection of a surface onto her body has exceeded theatrical embodiment and is beginning to have traces of Butler’s notion of melancholic incorporation as ‘incarnation’. If, according to Butler, the body is to be
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
understood as the projection of a fantasmatic, culturally configured, sexed morphe onto the body, then Grace’s melancholia offers a counter-fantasy of the body that contests its culturally accepted configuration. Tinker, however, defends the ‘factuality’ of the normative body and does not acknowledge Grace’s melancholic anatomy that transcends the model of two mutually exclusive sexes: “You’re a woman” (C 28). The voices in Grace’s head support Tinker; they stigmatise “Lunatic Grace” (C 28) and her body concept as aberrant. The play thereby contrasts Grace’s body which crosses sexes and genders with the anatomy of two discrete sexes, which Tinker not only affirms in his speech, but which the stage imagery of Cleansed also repeatedly displays. When Grace and Robin exchange clothes, when Tinker and Woman have sexual intercourse, and before the siblings’ incest, two characters of opposite sexes “stand naked and look at each other’s bodies” (C 14 and 41). While the ‘naked truth’ of these ‘bodies of evidence’ seems to prove the binarism of sexed anatomy and support Tinker’s opinions, they are challenged by Grace’s male body perception, Graham’s comment on their naked bodies, “Makes no difference now” (C 14), and his praise of Grace’s success in appropriating masculinity, “More like me than I ever was” (C 13). As Grace’s identification with Graham can refigure her bodily perception to such a degree that she feels pain in her testicles, and as she can, moreover, survive physical torture and even machine gun fire by means of mental concentration on Graham (C 25–6), Cleansed suggests that psychic processes transform and preserve her body. In a powerful stage image (reproduced on the jacket of this study), Benedict Andrews’s production at Berlin’s Schaubühne visualised the siblings’ sense that their naked bodies ‘make no difference’ by staging their incest as the dissolution of body and gender boundaries and the creation of an intersexual anatomy of melancholia. Given the play’s preoccupation with the materialisation of melancholic incorporation, it is noteworthy that the play text, despite its highly reduced language, repeats statements about what matters. When Grace encounters Graham after his cremation, she is astonished by the apparent substantiality of his body (C 13). Graham’s answer stresses the actuality of his presence and insists that “nothing else matters” (ibid.), a phrase that links up with the play’s unusual depiction of what matters in terms of living and dead creatures, but also in terms of gendered bodies, especially as it is repeated almost verbatim: Graham: I’m here. I went away but now I’m back and nothing else matters. [] Grace: Doesn’t matter. You went away but now you’re back and nothing else matters. (C 14; cf. also C 7)
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Extending the effects of melancholic incorporation to the body and thus to the category ‘sex’, Cleansed suggests a different impact of the performative malady of melancholia than Proof and Portia Coughlan. In Kane’s play, melancholic incorporation not only results in the unsettling of gender expectations as in both Proof and Portia Coughlan, and provokes fantasies of physical fusion as in Portia Coughlan, but it makes these fantasies materialise for its melancholic protagonist, who begins to perceive her body as male. Towards the end of the play, Tinker furthers the materialisation of Grace’s fantasy of her male body through sex-change surgery. Before I examine Tinker’s operation on Grace, I will explore his general attitude, for which Butler’s notion of heterosexual gender melancholia offers an apt framework. “You are what you are. No regrets” – Tinker’s heterosexual gender melancholia Attempting to reinforce normative forms of sex, gender, and desire, Tinker pathologises Grace’s conduct and brutally attempts to eliminate the homosexual love of Carl and Rod. When he witnesses the engagement of the gay couple, he tortures Carl in a way that oscillates between utmost cruelty, sexualised violence, and tenderness (C 10–11). Tinker’s punishment displays an obsession with homosexual acts which involves both disgust and desire. Butler’s theory of heterosexual gender melancholia offers an explanatory pattern for Tinker’s inability to admit homosexual desire. As I have explained above, Butler assumes that the heterosexual subject is founded through a twofold psychic disavowal, which concerns both the initial loss of the samesex parent and, more generally, same-sex desire as such. According to Butler, the excluded and denied homosexual desire nonetheless is of prominent importance for the heterosexualised subject, as it serves as constitutive, abject outside: “heterosexuality naturalises itself by insisting on the radical otherness of homosexuality, [ ] [it] is purchased through a melancholic incorporation of the love it disavows: the man who insists upon the coherence of his heterosexuality will claim that he never loved another man, and hence never lost another man” (1997: 139). Because the achievement of gender is closely connected with the assumption of heterosexuality, threats to heterosexuality can simultaneously be threats to gender identity and “homosexual desire [ ] panics gender” (ibid.: 136).53 In order to avoid such gender panic, Tinker projects his homosexual desire onto others, pathologising and cruelly punishing them. He not only offends and humiliates Rod and Carl verbally, but also injures and mutilates their bodies, threatens to kill them, and eventually does kill Rod. He thus attempts to mark these bodies as other, as less than human, as bodies that do not matter. When Tinker cuts off Carl’s tongue, his hands, his legs, and his penis, thereby robbing Carl of all means of communicating his love for Rod, and when he leaves the lovers in a field of mud inhabited by rats that carry away Carl’s cut-off hands, Tinker attempts to de-humanise the homosexual couple. Rod’s remarks that
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
Tinker “can take away your life but not give you death instead” (C 30) aptly describes the status of these bodies that exist but do not matter. Like Evelyn in Beside Herself, Tinker associates non-normative gender performances with madness; to him, “homosexuality represents the prospect of the psychotic dissolution of the subject” (Butler 1993b: 7). However, instead of characterising the homosexual couple and the other gender trespassers in the institution as ‘mad’, Cleansed utilises the pattern of reversing ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ positions. Just like Evelyn in Daniels’s play, Tinker exaggerates his maintenance of normality to such a degree that he appears to be a homophobic madman; the attempt at dehumanising Rod and Carl characterises Tinker as inhumane. Cleansed thus highlights the ‘madness’ inherent in Tinker’s individual, but also the abstract institution’s general, mechanisms of punishment. Although Cleansed therefore can be read as the visualisation of Butler’s gender theory of the 1990s,54 it is more optimistic than Butler’s theory insofar as it presents Rod and Carl as bodies that are legible and that matter, rather than as ‘abject’ bodies that cannot materialise according to the social norms. Butler has adopted a similar perspective in her latest book Undoing Gender, in which she emphasises the existing legibility of non-normative bodies. Although Butler keeps highlighting the discursive and legislative violence of social norms (cf. for example 2004: 29–30), she also acknowledges the successes in “the struggle to rework the norms by which bodies are experienced” (ibid.: 28). Thus, individual homophobic perpetrators who believe they are acting according to social norms possibly no longer do so. Butler’s psychogram of such a homophobic killer – which, for Butler, is a hyperbole of the psychogram of all heteronormative (groups within) societies – reads like a description of Tinker: This violence emerges from a profound desire to keep the order of binary gender natural or necessary, to make of it a structure, either natural or cultural, or both, that no human can oppose, and still remain human. If a person opposes norms of binary gender not just by having a critical point of view about them, but by incorporating norms critically, and that stylized opposition is legible, then it seems that violence emerges precisely as the demand to undo that legibility, to question its possibility, to render it unreal and impossible in the face of its appearance to the contrary [ ]. To counter that embodied opposition by violence is to say, effectively, that this body, this challenge to an accepted version of the world is and shall be unthinkable. (ibid.: 35) Tinker tries to ‘undo the legibility’ of the inmates’ non-normative sex/gender/desire, ‘to render unreal and impossible’ their ‘embodied opposition’ by depriving them of cultural intelligibility. Rather than making their
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conduct ‘unthinkable’, however, Tinker’s brutal punishment makes palpable the violence that is inherent in the cultural logic he attempts to defend. Tinker’s excessive physical violence makes productions of Cleansed difficult and requires non-realistic solutions. By means of metaphoric stage imagery, Macdonald managed to stage the brutality and pain of Cleansed in a stylised way that nonetheless sensually affected audiences and thus transported the disturbing quality of Kane’s writing.55 A number of critics have characterised Kane’s writing as ‘traumatic’,56 but I would rather agree with Aston’s more moderate description of Kane’s plays as a “perceptual critique” which offers a “dramaturgical, political, and aesthetic invitation for us to feel differently” through the plays’ ability not only to touch “hearts” and “minds”, but also, by means of its shock effects, “nervous systems” (2003: 82).57 Cleansed emphasises that Tinker’s cruel torture is part of a larger system, which appears like a dystopian version of what Butler describes as ‘heterosexual hegemony’. Although Tinker frequently carries out the punishments himself, in many scenes the characters are tortured by unseen, abstract forces. For the original production of Cleansed, Herbert designed a highly mechanised stage scenery, which came to stand for the anonymous and unseen rulers and executives of the institution. For example, Grace hung in harnesses like a tormented puppet in the tenth scene, in which she is hit by unseen men. The actress, Suzan Sylvester – and in a few performances, Kane herself, who stood in for Sylvester – reacted to the unseen blows as if she really received them. In other scenes, the figures had to deal with beds tilting on their axes and flowers falling like darts from the ceiling. Between the scenes, the scenery changed with the characters sometimes remaining in position. For instance, in the transition from the second to the third scene, the white room was constructed around Grace having a nervous breakdown. Walls flew in from above; the bed arrived vertically, rolled into position, and landed in front of Tinker, who then tied Grace to it. Sudden changes like these reinforced the impression that the characters were at the mercy of their automated environment. Notably, the first German production also made the characters appear trapped in an incalculable environment, although Peter Zadek’s staging differed decisively from Macdonald’s in its realistic staging of violence.58 While Tinker (ineffectively) attempts to dehumanise Rod and Carl, he tries to rectify Grace’s unruly gender performances. As neither blows, nor electric shocks, nor psychochemical treatment can undo Grace’s gendertransgressive performative malady, Tinker decides on sex-change surgery. By transplanting a penis and amputating Grace’s breasts, Tinker is able to reconcile the contradiction between Grace’s female body and her performances of masculinity. Furthermore, he can reinforce his belief that the penis is the ultimate signifier of sex/gender. Tinker’s preoccupation with primary sex characteristics is also apparent in his relationship to Woman, a stripper whom he regularly visits. The fact that the figure (as the only character in
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
208 The Drama of Melancholia
(The flap opens. The Woman is dancing. Tinker masturbates furiously until she speaks.) Woman: Doctor. Tinker: Don’t waste my fucking time. Sit. [ ] Open your legs. Woman: I’m confused. Tinker: OPEN YOUR FUCKING LEGS. Woman: (does) [ ] Tinker: Touch. Woman: (sobs) Tinker: TOUCH FUCKING TOUCH. Woman: Don’t do this. [ ] Don’t want to be this. Tinker: You’re a woman. [ ] You are what you are. No regrets. [ ] Woman: I can change. Tinker: You’re a woman. (C 31–2) Tinker repeatedly calls Woman ‘Grace’, which demonstrates his needs for an alternative Grace who does not unsettle but affirms his views on the causally connected triad of gender, sex, and desire. The fact that Tinker attempts to affirm Woman’s vagina as the source of sexual pleasure (“Touch”), can be understood in the Butlerian framework as an indication not only of his voyeurism but also of his heterosexual melancholia: The fantasized body [which, in the context of Cleansed would be Grace’s melancholic, hallucinatory transsexual body] can never be understood in relation to the body as real; it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy, one which claims the place of the “literal” and the “real.” The limits to the “real” are produced within naturalized heterosexualization of bodies in which physical facts serve as causes and desires reflect the inexorable effects of that physicality. The conflation of desire with the real – that is, the belief that it is parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire – is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy characteristic of the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality. (Butler 1990: 90–1) Taking into account Butler’s concept of the body as the (ritually actualised and maintained) product of melancholic incorporation, the two Graces
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the play) is not given a name but is generically called ‘Woman’ indicates that she represents femaleness for Tinker. Tinker’s encounters with her show that he not only understands femaleness in terms of sexual availability, but also strictly in terms of anatomy, since he needs to see the Woman’s vagina as a proof for her femaleness:
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represent rivalling fantasies of the body rather than one fantasised and one real body. Whereas the body of the protagonist is transformed by the melancholic incorporation of her brother into a sex/gender-ambivalent body, the unequivocally female body of the second Grace, Woman, can be understood as the materialised fantasy of heteronormative, discretely sexed bodies – a fantasy that is, according to Butler, likewise the product of a melancholic incorporation that needs to be sustained through repeated, ritualised performative efforts. “Body perfect” – Melancholia that matters The sex-change surgery that Tinker makes Grace undergo is an ambivalent act. As Tinker operates without anaesthetic, the surgery on the one hand is a torture that punishes the sex/gender trespasser. On the other hand, the surgery is the fulfilment of Grace’s wish to assimilate her outward appearance to her new body perception: “So it [my body] looked like it feels. Graham outside like Graham inside” (C 20). Despite her pain, Grace therefore thanks Tinker for having made her melancholic anatomy materialise on the surface of her body. Tinker acknowledges Grace’s completed incarnation of her brother: “Nice looking lad. Like your brother” (C 39) and henceforth calls her ‘Graham’. The device of the ghost figure helps to illustrate that Grace and Graham have fused in Tinker’s eyes, that he does not only perceive Grace as Graham, but also Graham as Grace. For the first time, Tinker reacts to an utterance of Graham as if Grace had talked to him. Because Grace has fully incorporated Graham, Graham’s ghost figure disappears and Grace is henceforward called “Grace/Graham” in the play text. The stage directions require that “Grace now looks and sounds exactly like Graham” (C 43), and Grace/Graham considers her/his body faultless: Grace/Graham: Body perfect [ ] Have they done it yet? Died. Burnt. Lump of charred meat stripped of its clothes. Back to life. [ ] Think about dying only it’s totally fucking pointless. Here now. Safe on the other side and here. Graham. (A long silence.) Always be here. Thank you, Doctor. (C 43–4) Like the ending of Portia Coughlan, the ending of Cleansed stages a version of the present that is ‘perfected’ in both senses of the word. Grace’s body
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
is made “perfect”, because it has accomplished the successful restoration of Graham in, on, and as Grace’s body. As in the case of Carr’s play, the melancholic temporality evoked in the final monologue forecloses the incalculability of the future. The ‘perfectness’ of the past not only affects the present but also the future, which Grace/Graham considers “safe” and determined (“always be here”). Similarly to Carr’s play, the ending of Cleansed thus complicates Grace/Graham’s categorisation as a living or dead creature. Grace/Graham constructs a Phoenix-like genesis for her/his body, which was a “lump of charred meat stripped of its clothes”, but has been resurrected from the ashes. While Grace/Graham thus maintains the reanimation of Graham’s body, the monologue also contains cues for the contrary interpretation: Grace might have died during the operation. Her claim that she has been completely transformed into Graham invites speculation about whether her body possibly has not only been altered from female to male anatomy but also from a material to an immaterial, ghostly presence. Her remark that she is “on the other side” is reminiscent of the image of the River Styx that is also employed in Carr’s play, and her statement that thinking about dying is pointless supports the indication that the perfect embodiment of Graham might entail his post-mortem ghostliness. The ambivalence of Grace/Graham not only concerns the figure’s status as a living or dead figure, but also applies to issues of sex/gender. Although Grace/Graham considers her/his body perfect and the stage directions require Grace to look exactly like Graham, the achievement of Grace’s transformation into Graham is distorted on an inner-fictional level and additionally causes problems in its theatrical realisation. On the inner-fictional level, the figure’s name “Grace/Graham” already subverts her/his unequivocal status as a male figure. Although Grace/Graham in the closing scene again wears Graham’s clothes and audiences thus no longer see the transplanted penis and the bloodstained bandages covering the wounds of her breast amputation, in the final image, a rat chews at Grace’s wounds and thus calls attention to her mutilation. Moreover, the emphasis on Grace/Graham’s operated body is reinforced by the fact that Grace sits next to Carl, who wears Grace’s women’s clothes. The play’s final image thus suggests the juxtaposition of a man-turned-woman and a woman-turned-man. However, audiences know that Carl’s femininity is far from “perfect” and only consists in his lack of ‘literalised’ masculinity, that is, the lack of a penis. As a second rat chews at Carl’s wounds, the final image highlights the mutilations of both figures. Rather than establishing two unequivocally sexed bodies, the ending thus foregrounds their status in-between the sexes. Aston offers an interpretation of Carl’s and Grace/Graham’s non-normative bodies as “the two inarticulate figures of abject homosexuality” identified by Butler (1993a: 96), namely the “feminized fag” and the “phallicized dyke” (ibid.: 110) that stand for the state of gender punishment within the psychoanalytic
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logic (Aston 2003: 92).59 However, while Cleansed presents castration as the punishment for homosexuality and Carl can thus be understood as a figure of ‘abject homosexuality’, the play does not link Grace’s gendercrossing with homosexuality. Her transformation therefore can be read as an instance of the “complex crossings of identification and desire which might exceed and contest the binary frame” of masculinity and femininity and of hetero- and homosexuality envisioned by Butler (1993a: 103). Moreover, the theatrical realisation unsettles the complete transformation of the sister into the brother. Kane’s request, “Grace now looks and sounds exactly like Graham” (C 43) is an example of her notorious ‘impossible stage directions’, because it tests the limits of theatrical embodiment. In Macdonald’s production, the actors of Graham and Grace – Martin Marquez and Sylvester – wore the same clothes, black leather trousers and a white shirt, throughout the play and had a similar haircut. The production thus reinforced their similarity to the point of their being each other’s mirror image, something that the play requires from the siblings’ mirror exercise onwards. The final image, however, demands more than similarity; it demands sameness. Remarkably, neither Macdonald’s production nor later realisations of Cleansed have replaced the actor playing Grace by the actor playing Graham in the final scene to achieve the required effect of complete transformation. This is another indicator that the failure of complete transformation and, therefore, Grace/Graham’s sexually ambivalent body are of interest in the play’s final scene. Furthermore, the original production visualised Grace’s naked body after the sex-change surgery in a realistic, illusionistic way that departed from the overall stylisation of the production. Rather than again finding a displaced representation of her operated body, a fake penis was attached to Grace’s body. Audiences could inspect her “stitched on genitals” (C 39), because the mirror in which Grace checks on her new body was replaced by a window of light that was projected between the audience and Grace; therefore, Grace’s naked body for the most part of Scene Eighteen faced audiences through this insubstantial, transparent ‘mirror’. Because the use of the fake penis departed from the performance’s overall non-realistic staging of physical violence and thus self-referentially highlighted the false, mock quality of the organ, it emphasised that the body differs from ‘naturalised’ bodies. Rather than ‘normalising’ Grace’s transgressive, melancholic body by fully transforming it into a male body, the scene accented the fact that her body fails/transgresses the regulatory norms that govern the materialisation and naturalisation of bodies.60 The ending of Cleansed resembles Portia Coughlan insofar as it presents an ambivalent melancholic body that troubles the separation of femininity from masculinity, life from death, materiality from immateriality, and external reality from internal reality. The play presents melancholia as a performative malady that not only results in the hallucinatory resurrection of the lost brother, but also affects Grace’s perception of her body.
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Sarah Kane: Cleansed
By introjecting Graham into but also on her body as a surface signification, Grace begins to perceive her body as male, and Tinker’s sex-change surgery attempts to adapt the appearance of Grace’s body to this fantasmatic morphe. With regard to Butler’s theory of gendering through melancholia, Kane’s play thus goes a step further than Carr’s in making the fantasy of melancholic incorporation materialise on the protagonist’s body. The performative malady here effects a process of melancholic incarnation that challenges normative body conceptions.
Melancholia as performative malady In the Drama of Melancholia, melancholia functions as a metonymy for the performative quality of gender. Focusing on different aspects of the protagonists’ gender-transgressions, the plays show how the gender identity of the female protagonists is affected through their melancholic incorporation of a lost, male object. Proof concentrates on the intellectual transformation of its protagonist, a development that evokes the gender-biased discourse on the melancholic genius. While Portia Coughlan centres on a psychic transformation that includes fantasies of physical fusion with the lost brother, in Cleansed, melancholic incorporation is presented as a bodily metamorphosis. Portraying the protagonist’s transformation, each play stylistically creates a particular form of melancholic realism which makes the action conform to the protagonist’s inner reality rather than to external reality. In both Proof and Portia Coughlan, a non-chronological time structure enables audiences to participate in the protagonist’s melancholic perception, in which the present is determined by the past and in which a future that is radically different from the past appears impossible. The most crucial melancholically realistic device, however, is the use of a ghost figure, which these plays share with all other plays of the genre. Making the dead return as ghost figures, Proof, Portia Coughlan, and Cleansed stage the wishful hallucinations of their protagonists and thus suture the perception of audiences – to varying degrees – with the perception of the melancholic protagonist. In Proof, Robert is not introduced as a ghost figure and the play thus initially makes audiences share Catherine’s hallucination and take the ghost for a real figure. Although Proof soon has the protagonist, and with her the play’s style, recover the sense for reality, in performance, the play can unsettle the clear-cut differentiation between temporal flashbacks and further episodes of hallucination. Unlike Proof, Carr’s play from the very beginning differentiates between hallucination and reality by means of a split stage and a staging of Gabriel that stylistically foregrounds his ghostly status. In Portia Coughlan, audiences not only witness the persistent auditive hallucinations of the protagonist, who hears her brother’s songs, but the stage directions also demand that they can see the figure. Therefore, Portia Coughlan offers audiences a perspective that is even more ‘hallucinatory’ than that of Portia. Like Portia Coughlan,
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212 The Drama of Melancholia
Cleansed from the very beginning highlights the ghostly status of Graham for audiences. It does not do so, however, by stylistic means, but through its plot pattern, as audiences initially witness Graham’s death and are thus aware of his ghostly status once he returns. The device of the ghost figure resembles the hysteric/traumatic doubles of the Drama of Hysteria and Trauma Drama, as both kinds of imagined figures exteriorise psychic processes of the protagonist. However, the logics of their genesis contrast: while the violinist, Eve, and Gary are to be understood as parts of the protagonist that are split off, that is, a part of the subject that becomes an object, the ghost figures in the Drama of Melancholia are interiorised by the protagonist; they used to be objects that have become part of the subject. Similar to the metatheatrical device of the play-within-the-play employed in the Drama of Hysteria, the appearance of ghost figures offers a mise en abyme that self-referentially comments on the double consciousness involved in theatrical reception. As soon as audiences have to consider the ‘realness’ of a potential ghost character on stage, the play exposes the fact that the other figures on stage are not ‘real’ either, but likewise figments of the imagination. Moreover, in Portia Coughlan and Cleansed, the protagonist’s incorporation of the lost brother offers a self-referential comment on theatrical embodiment, because the protagonist’s assumption of features of the dead person reflects on the actor’s activity of impersonation. While the synchronic body language of Gabriel and Portia in Carr’s play comments on the actor’s skill of imitation and timing, the mirror exercise in Kane’s play demonstrates how a female actor comes to convincingly embody a male figure. Kane’s play takes the notion of theatrical embodiment to an extreme. The requirement that Grace ultimately look and sound exactly like Graham tests the limits of impersonation, since it not only requires extraordinary imitative qualities from the actress playing Grace but also calls for the faultless transformation of her outer appearance through means such as costume and make-up. The issue of ‘embodiment’ and the sliding scale of deliberate performing and unconscious being performed that can be involved in the process of embodiment are central to melancholia as performative malady. I have argued that the melancholic incorporations staged in the plays are a metonymy for the generally ‘embodied’ quality of gender (including sex), which is a result of such identifications. Because the female protagonists of all three plays incorporate a male figure, their identifications transgress the binary genders and thus put on view the processes of identification and embodiment through which, according to Butler’s theory, the effect of a stable sex/gender identity is created. As their cross-gender melancholic incorporations disturb conventional notions of gender, the grief of the protagonists becomes a grievance for their environment (cf. Cheng 2000: 3). In both Portia Coughlan and Cleansed, the identification transgresses the border of psychic incorporation and begins to materialise in the form of
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Melancholia as Performative Malady 213
incarnation as theorised by Butler. Thus, the performative malady also concerns the anatomical aspect of gender, ‘sex’. Carr’s protagonist Portia verbally evokes a world beyond or before she was separated from her twin brother, which is also a world beyond or before sexual differentiation; although Portia’s body does not rematerialise into a male or cross-gendered body before the eyes of the audience, the play’s aesthetics and structure make her metaphorically de-materialise into a ghost presence like her brother and thus call into question the border between those bodies that materialise and those that do not. While in Carr’s play Portia envisions the exchange of body parts with her twin brother and repeatedly evokes a state of gender blending in her speech, Cleansed makes Grace’s anatomy of melancholia materialise in an altered body perception and makes it visible through cross-dressing, the assumption of ‘male’ body language, and sex-change surgery. Cleansed and Portia Coughlan thus stage counter-fantasies to the body as we know it. Taking into account Butler’s theory, however, these theatrical fantasies do not counter the reality of the body but another fantasy that is culturally endorsed as reality. Yet, the environments depicted in the plays insist on the difference between real, supposedly non-melancholic bodies and unruly, fantastic, melancholic bodies. Portia’s suicide shows how unliveable her fantasy of androgynous oneness is in the present-day rural Irish community, and Grace’s melancholic incorporation of her brother is severely punished in the abstract British institution where she is interned. Paradoxically, the ultimate punishment for her gender-transgressive body, namely a sex-change operation without anaesthetics, is also the fulfilment of her fantasy, as it completes the process of both psychically identifying with and physically incarnating her brother. As envisioned by Butler, in the plays “incorporations are sites of rearticulation, conditions for a ‘working through’, and, potentially, a ‘throwing off’ ” (1997: 191) of heteronormative, discretely gendered performances, which are, according to Butler, installed and maintained through an earlier, melancholically disavowed loss. Yet, this ‘throwing off’ of gender and sex expectations offers, however volatile, empowerment for the female protagonist only in the case of Proof. In contrast, Carr’s and Kane’s plays highlight the pain, anxiety, and violence inherent in gender formations and thus characterise melancholia, despite its subversive potential, as a performative malady.
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214 The Drama of Melancholia
This study has pursued a twofold objective. Taking into account the abundance of contemporary anglophone plays that deal with hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as well as the broader cultural eminence of the phenomena, it has proposed to consider the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melancholia as dramatic genres in their own right. I have further argued that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia in the plays selected can be regarded as ‘performative maladies’, as tropes for the performative constitution and maintenance of gender. In order to substantiate this thesis in the play readings, I have brought together hysteria/trauma/melancholia theory, performance theory, and Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Establishing the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the genres proposed, I have argued that the plays’ aesthetics are affected by their subject matter. The Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melancholia principally agree with realist conventions, as they are grounded in recognisable, contemporary settings and invite audiences’ ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in the story and characters presented. However, they include stylistic and structural devices which privilege the internal reality of the protagonist over external reality and thus depart from the conventions of stage realism. Through their combination of realist dramatic conventions with hysteric, traumatic, and melancholic modes, the genres create distinct forms of a ‘realism of performative malady’, which I have described in the respective parts as ‘hystericised realism’, ‘traumatised realism’, and ‘melancholic realism’. In the Drama of Hysteria, Furse’s Augustine grants audiences insight into the protagonist’s internal reality through the device of a double whose violin playing and dance express Augustine’s concealed feelings of rage and desperation. The play further sutures audiences’ and Augustine’s perspectives, when it ‘converts’ Augustine’s loss of colour sight into the colourless lighting of the black-and-white stage scenery and costumes. In Morrissey’s play, Dora’s dreams interrupt and comment on the realistic main plot and thus show audiences Dora’s feelings of anxiety and powerlessness. Resorting 215
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Conclusion: The Drama of Performative Malady
to surrealistic imagery and scenarios, Johnson’s Hysteria abandons its carefully established stage realism to visualise the repressed fears and fantasies of Freud, who turns out to be the actual hysteric protagonist of the play. The traumatised realism of Trauma Drama adapts the traumatic mode of dissociation as a dramatic mode that affects both characterisation and the spatiotemporal structures of the plays. By splitting its traumatised protagonist in two figures, Beside Herself makes her dissociated state palpable for audiences. Through the double figure, the play constantly creates two simultaneous levels of action and thus structurally captures the dissociative state typical of traumatisation. The other plays, especially Butterfly Kiss and Easy Access (for the Boys), represent dissociation through their spatiotemporal structures. By repeatedly imposing scenes from the past on the action set in the present, the plays enact the traumatised perception of the protagonist, which is prone to compulsive, intrusive returns of the past and which is therefore divided between two distinct but simultaneous spatial and temporal settings. In the Drama of Melancholia, non-chronological time structures make audiences participate in the protagonist’s melancholic perception, in which the present is infused with the past and in which a future that is radically different from the past appears impossible. In addition to this disruption of the chronological time line, the melancholic realism of the plays grants audiences insight into the protagonists’ hallucinations and wishful fantasies by making the dead return as ghost figures. By adapting the structure and aesthetics of the plays to the protagonists’ inner reality, the Drama of Performative Malady makes radical use of psychological realism and thus departs from stage realism. If we understand ‘realism’, however, not as a particular aesthetic theatrical convention – characterised by the use of the picture-frame stage, the maintenance of an ‘invisible fourth wall’ between the audience and the onstage action, the absence of epic elements in action and figure characterisation, et cetera – but as a historically and socially variable effect of creating reality, a somewhat different assessment of the plays’ realism becomes viable. Following this trajectory, theatre (like every art form) achieves a “reality effect” (Barthes 1989 [1968]) whenever it shares and shapes the notion of reality of its audiences. In view of the large degree to which both subjective and social formations in contemporary Western cultures are currently organised around the concepts of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, the plays offer a revision of stage realism that might be closer to audiences’ notions of reality than more traditional dramatic forms. Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, I have proposed, can be regarded as performative maladies in the plays, as tropes for the performative constitution and maintenance of gender. Considering the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melancholia as variants of the Drama of Performative Malady, I have argued that each genre focuses on particular aspects
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216 Conclusion
of gender performativity. Thus, the Drama of Hysteria explores the intersection of deliberate playacting and inadvertent acting out which is central to performances of hysteria as well as of gender. The transition from acting out to working through in the repetition compulsions of both traumatisation and gender performativity is crucial in Trauma Drama. The Drama of Melancholia concentrates on processes of hallucination and embodiment that are characteristic not only of melancholic incorporation, but also of the performative assumption, maintenance, and cultural perception of gender (including sex). I have traced how, through these thematic concerns, the dramatic negotiations of performative malady are also concerned with the drama inherent in the performative malady. The plays therefore, I have suggested, entail metatheatrical reflections on the intersections of theatrical performance and gender performativity. The Drama of Hysteria tackles a malady that traditionally has been charged with issues of sex and gender; originally conceptualised as the disease of the wandering womb, hysteria has maintained a close association with femininity throughout its changeful history. Given the strong link between hysteria and femininity, the concepts have traditionally replaced one another as metonyms, and have, as critics argue, in the late nineteenth century even become synonyms. Feminist scholars such as Irigaray, Cixous, and von Braun have utilised this association of hysteria and femininity. Their appropriations of the concept highlight the rebellious, subversive potential of hysteria as a genuinely female mode of expression that can, potentially, undermine and possibly even unhinge patriarchal (in feminist deconstructivist terms, phallogocentric or, in psychoanalytical terms, symbolic) structures and language. Thus, the Drama of Hysteria employs a phenomenon that has in different disciplines and different historical epochs been understood as a metonymy, a hyperbole, and at times even as a synonymy, for (different notions of) femininity. Drawing on but departing from these earlier assessments, I have proposed to consider hysteria as a metaphor for the performative constitution of sex/gender on the ground of their structural equivalence. In the plays, Grande Hystérie and Petite Hystérie are presented as performatively accomplished cultural configurations, as the ‘incarnation’, or, in terms of hysteria theory, the ‘conversion’ of cultural images into bodily symptoms; a process which I have described as ‘image-ination’. The protagonists sustain the particular model of hysteria both through deliberate playacting and through unconscious or unwilling compulsive performances. This knotting together of instances of performing and of being performed and the plays’ demonstration of how a seemingly ‘natural’ or ‘factual’ disease is performatively constructed makes hysteria a vivid metaphor for the performative quality of gender. Like gender, Grande Hystérie and Petite Hystérie are the result of “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1990: 43–44).
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The plays emphasise the performative quality of hysteria (and, metaphorically, gender) by self-referentially using the device of the play-within-the-play, or more specifically, the drama-of-hysteria-within-the-drama-of-hysteria. Augustine (Big Hysteria) depicts Charcot’s lectures as meticulously choreographed ‘dramas of Grande Hystérie’, in which the hysteric patients are meant to enact the gestural repertoire of Grande Hystérie that is so like the poses of nineteenth-century stage melodrama. Freud’s psychoanalytical treatment is characterised as ‘the drama of Petite Hystérie’, as the theatrical enactment of his scripts – be it orally communicated mental scripts as in Morrissey’s Dora or published case stories as in Johnson’s Hysteria. Depicting the hysteric’s conduct as theatrical, the plays present, however, a complex notion of theatricality that comes close to Butler’s notion of performativity. Rather than suggesting that hysterical performances are fully deliberate, controlled, or merely playful enactments, the plays emphasise that the performances also entail non-deliberate, unconscious, and enforced aspects. The patients are forced by their therapists to fulfil their command performances and, moreover, they are performed by their psychic repetition compulsion, by their acting out of memories. Highlighting the interaction between performing and being performed at work in theatrical performance, the plays propose a more complex notion of theatricality than performativity theory, including Butler’s writings, has recently allowed for. They do not present theatrical performance as fully voluntary playacting, nor do they lapse into the opposite view that promotes the theatrical stage as the realm of the ‘authentic’ and of ‘presence’. Instead, they put emphasis on the conditions that exceed, constrain, and precede the performer but that nonetheless do not fully determine his or her performance. Since the plays portray performance as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Butler 2004: 1), they suggest a multifaceted understanding of theatrical performance that can be regarded as performative in Butler’s sense. Emphasising the pain and compulsion inherent in this performative maintenance of hysteria, the plays characterise hysteria (and, in extension, gender) as a malady. They do, however, also explore possibilities through which the malady can be appropriated as a potentially subversive strategy, through which the patient can become active. In Furse’s play, Augustine’s closing monologue announces the abandonment of patriarchally shaped patterns of cultural perception and envisions the (as yet utopian) return of the hysteric in and on a stage that allows for the rematerialisation/perception of her genuinely female body. While the play thus preaches the abandonment of the system of performativity as the only way out of the aporia of how a woman can articulate herself truly within a patriarchally founded system, its ending practises an alternative strategy. By repeating images of Augustine’s hysteric poses in her white night gown at a dazzling speed and finally making Augustine return to the stage in men’s clothes, the
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218 Conclusion
ending indicates that repetition with a difference might be a means of performatively unsettling congealed cultural images such as the ‘female hysteric’/‘hysteric female’. While the ending of Augustine only hints at such a performative appropriation of the malady as strategy, Morrissey’s comedy Dora demonstrates how Dora, using the strategies of parodic recontextualisation and hyperbole, manages to dismantle Freud’s authoritarian notion of hysteric femininity/feminine hysteria. In Johnson’s play, the protagonist Jessica employs, or possibly feigns, ‘hysterical dishonesty’ and ‘hysteric’ imitation skills to confront Freud with his devastating failures in a former hysteric case study. As a performative malady, hysteria thus serves as a metaphor which captures both the deliberate playacting (the performing) and the repetition compulsion (the being performed) inherent in performativity and which indicates, moreover, the subversive potential of repetitions with a difference. Feminist scholars such as Cixous and von Braun have argued that hysteria involves the exaggeration of patriarchally constructed norms of femininity. Departing from these assessments, I have proposed to understand the hysteric’s ‘performed performance’ of such norms, her revelation that these notions of femininity are a construct, not as evidence of the ‘false’, patriarchal version of femininity as opposed to a ‘true’ femininity that needs uncovering. Instead, I suggest that it can be read as an indicator for the general performativity of gender, which goes against the idea that ‘true’ femininity or masculinity exist. Through its spectacular character, I have argued, the metaphor of hysteria draws attention to the processes of imitation, ‘image-ination’, and repetition compulsion that often remain unnoticed in (mundane and theatrical) gender performances which are taken for ‘original’ or ‘natural’ behaviour. In Trauma Drama, the correlation of traumatisation and gender oscillates on the continuum between metonymy and metaphor. On the one hand, the plays suggest a metonymic link between particular gender norms and traumatisation, since they highlight the degree to which they are causally related. Thus, Sleeping Nightie presents the norm of the powerful violent man as the cause for women’s traumatisation and the norm of the victimised, powerless woman as the result of traumatisation through male sexualised violence. In a similar vein, Beside Herself suggests that the norm of the obedient daughter and unselfish wife and housewife is both a cause and an effect of women’s traumatisation through incestuous abuse. Butterfly Kiss stages the traumatising impact of the norm of the glamorous, famous, sexually submissive mother and wife, whereas Easy Access (for the Boys) highlights that Michael’s actualisation of the (subcultural) norm of the passive homosexual ‘boy’ is an effect of his traumatisation. On the other hand, traumatisation can be read as a metaphor for gender performativity, since the phenomena can be compared on the basis of their shared characteristics: the ambivalence of performing and being performed, the belated construction of an
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‘original’ (‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’/the ‘traumatic event’), the iterative, performative production (which poses as an imitation) of this ostensible original, and the possibility of working through/resignifying the ‘original’ that depends on its reiterative, performative production. Moreover, the notion of traumatic acting out, which assumes that that which is performed can only be understood in relation to that which remains unperformed and might be unperformable (the trauma), metaphorically highlights that the system of gender performativity encompasses more than actual performances: it not only governs what is to be performed but also what ought to remain barred from performance. Particularly in Daniels’s Beside Herself, the protagonist’s traumatisation serves as a metaphor which the play can use to explore the exclusions that shape gender performances. By doubling the traumatised protagonist, Beside Herself renders intelligible the concealed aspects of Evelyn’s normative performances of femininity. The device establishes a double consciousness for Evelyn but also for audiences, which disrupts the suspension of disbelief in the authenticity of Evelyn’s gender performance. Beside Herself thus stages traumatisation as a self-conscious performative malady, as the suffering stemming from the inability to ‘perform gender in the mode of belief’. Both as a metonymy for particular gender norms and as a metaphor for the workings of gender performativity, traumatisation in the plays emphasises the anxiety and pain involved in the repetition compulsions that the ‘system’ of traumatisation/performativity demands. Like the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama thus stages traumatisation as a malady. Nevertheless, the plays show that traumatic repetition compulsions not only actualise the traumatisation and thus reinforce the malady, but that they can also bring about the gradual mastery of the traumatisation. For the metaphorically/metonymically invoked field of gender performativity, this potential working through by means of the very mechanism of reproduction can be linked up with Butler’s concept of resignification. Butler argues that the perpetual reproductions which continually re-establish gender norms allow for the resignification of these norms through repetitions which slightly diverge from the ideal and can thus effectively, over time, change these performatively maintained norms. The plays demonstrate this ambivalence of repetition, which can reinforce the trauma/gender norms through their incessant acting out, but which can also achieve the creative (not necessarily conscious and deliberate) modification of the trauma/of gender norms. Thus, Sleeping Nightie presents the protagonist’s video project, her ‘art of trauma’, both as the acting out and as the gradual working through of Molly’s traumatisation and of the gender norms which she considers causally related to her abuse experiences. Easy Access (for the Boys) likewise employs video technique as a means of gaining distance from the onstage action, which in many scenes entails the protagonist’s acting out of the traumatic past. By means of a video diary, which
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220 Conclusion
allows for the diegesis rather than mimesis of the past, Michael begins to work through his traumatisation, and, as a consequence, his gender performances, particularly concerning his sexuality. Unlike the Drama of Hysteria, whose metatheatrical devices of the playwithin-the-play uncover the deliberate playacting that can be involved in hysteric performances, Trauma Drama focuses on the moments in which the protagonists are performed by their traumatisation beyond their will and control, when they unconsciously act out traumatic memories. On the extra- fictional level, however, actors enact acting out and deliberately fabricate allegedly unconscious symptoms. Understood as a metatheatrical comment, acting out proposes a complex notion of performance. Like the traumatic repetition compulsion, which actualises a past scene that is linked to the strictly speaking non-existent, belatedly constructed ‘traumatic event’, the theatrical performances themselves actualise (and inevitably modify) the non-existent ‘original’ that has been established only belatedly through the rehearsal process. Theatre practitioners have described this paradoxical notion of a non-existent original that all performances nonetheless imitate as “the secret ‘real’ of rehearsal” and the “moment of epiphany that we dream happened in rehearsal” (Baraitser and Bayly 2001: 70, 71). Like traumatic acting out, theatrical performance “implies no first time, no origin, but only recurrence and reproduction” (Blau 1987: 171). And like acting out, it is the result of an interaction between scriptedness and acting, between predetermination and actualisation. Consequently, critics have phrased the ambivalence of theatrical performance in ways that resemble the concept of acting out: “An act of memory and an act of creation, performance recalls and transforms the past in the form of the present” (Worthen 1998: 1101). Moreover, the enactment of the script also becomes a means of working it through; a process of diegetic comprehension through mimetic repetition: “it becomes an act [ ] in which an understanding of the text emerges not as the cause but as a consequence of performance” (ibid.). Therefore, the notions of acting out and working through are not only central to both trauma and gender performativity: they can also be read as specific metatheatrical comments that capture and illuminate crucial characteristics of theatrical performance. In the Drama of Melancholia, I have argued, melancholia, or more precisely melancholic incorporation, serves as a metonymy for the generally ‘embodied’ quality of gender (including sex). Centring on women’s reactions to the loss of a man, the plays stage processes of melancholic incorporation that effect the crossing of gender categories and, especially in Kane’s play, also the change of sex. I have read the plays’ metonymic substitution of gender for melancholia, on the one hand, with regard to Butler’s theory of gender melancholia, which proposes that not only such cases of genderchange, but also gendering in general happen through melancholic incorporation. On the other hand, I have drawn on accounts of the gendering
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of melancholia to investigate how the usurpation of the traditionally ‘male malady’ melancholia by female protagonists, in particular by Catherine in Auburn’s Proof, clashes with gender expectations and thus, likewise, effects a gender transgression. Because the melancholic protagonists incorporate a male figure and thus undergo a discernible change, the plays put on display the usually imperceptible processes of identification and embodiment through which, according to Butler, the effect of a stable sex/gender identity is created. While Proof focuses on the intellectual transformation of its protagonist, in Portia Coughlan and Cleansed, the identification transgresses the border of intellectual identification and psychic incorporation and begins to materialise in the form of a melancholic ‘incarnation’. Thus, the performative malady also pertains to the anatomical aspect of gender, sex. The protagonist’s incorporation of the lost father or brother offers a mise en abyme of theatrical embodiment, since her assumption of features of the dead self-referentially reflects on the actor’s activity of impersonation. Thus, the synchronic body language of Gabriel and Portia in Carr’s play exposes the actor’s skill of imitation and timing, and the mirror exercise in Kane’s play exhibits how a female actor comes to embody a male figure. When the stage directions in Cleansed’s final scene demand that Grace has fully transformed into Graham, the limit of embodiment through theatrical means is being tested. These rehearsals-within-the-performances highlight the rehearsed character of the theatrical embodiment of sex and gender. Reminding audiences that “gender is an act which has been rehearsed” (Butler 1988: 277), they distort the possibility of regarding the body onstage as ‘the thing itself’, the referent rather than sign (Hart 1993: 5). Thus, on the one hand, they call audiences’ attention to the difference between the ‘semiotic body’ of the character and the ‘phenomenal body’ of the performer (Fischer-Lichte 2004: 132). On the other hand, however, this exposure of an ostensibly real body as semiotic body can potentially make audiences expand their double consciousness to the performer’s body and to their own bodies. This “exercise of consciousness” (Blau 1987: 179), this transfer from the performative construction of gendered bodies onstage to the world offstage, could dramatically change audiences’ perception of corporeality, since it suggests the degree to which every phenomenal body is always already a semiotic body. The plays further question the notion of ‘real’ or ‘phenomenal’ bodies by making visible the ethereal bodies of the dead and emphasising that they matter more to the melancholic protagonists than the ‘real’ characters on stage. Since the plays have the ghost bodies of the lost brothers and the increasingly ‘ghostified’ bodies of the protagonists metonymically stand in for bodies that do not matter in terms of sexuality and gender, they explore the shades of cultural intelligibility and legitimacy that govern the materialisation of bodies. Staging theatrical counter-fantasies of the body,
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Cleansed and Portia Coughlan do not, from the perspective of Butler’s theory, oppose the reality of the body but a culturally instituted fantasy of the body that poses as reality (1990: 90). The plays thus make use of theatre’s status as heterotopia, as a protected space which offers a chance for critical reflection on society and for the trial of alternative perspectives on ‘reality’. By throwing into relief the fantasmatic, embodied quality of sex and gender, the Drama of Melancholia denaturalises these notions. While such a rearticulation might have subversive potential on the level of the extrafictional communication between the stage and audiences, on the level of the plays’ action, only Auburn’s protagonist Catherine is (possibly) able to appropriate her melancholia as a means of empowerment. Although Portia Coughlan and Cleansed set up the melancholic fusion with the lost brother as a way out of the pain, anxiety, and violence inherent in normative gender formations, this fusion eventually results in regression and even selfannihilation. Melancholia in the plays thus tends to be a malady, and in Portia’s case, even a fatal malady. This oscillation of the performative malady between damaging impairment and empowering strategy applies to all of the proposed genres. Employing hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as tropes for the performative constitution of gender, the plays highlight the volatile status of subversion and denaturalisation. While the dismantling of gender norms and the exposure of the performative maintenance of gender identity can have a liberating and empowering impact on the protagonist (such as, to different degrees, in Augustine, Dora, Hysteria, Beside Herself, Easy Access, and Proof ), subversion can also lead to self-harm and even self-destruction, as particularly Sleeping Nightie, Butterfly Kiss, Portia Coughlan and Cleansed emphasise. On the level of the extrafictional communication with audiences, the self-referential devices of the plays in particular highlight the subversive potential of the depicted maladies, which can be appropriated as strategies – be it through deliberate playacting, parodic recontextualisation, and hyperbole as in the Drama of Hysteria, through the performative working through/resignification of gender norms as in Trauma Drama, or through an altered perception of corporeality that is aware of the degree to which every phenomenal body is always already a semiotic body as in the Drama of Melancholia. Whether audiences will perceive this subversive potential as liberating or as troubling will depend not only on each particular staging of the plays, but also on the perception of every individual spectator.
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10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
Introduction: Theatrical performance, gender performativity, and the Drama of Performative Malady 1. See Leys 2000 for a genealogy of trauma theories since the nineteenth century. 2. See Kilby 2002 for an account of recent developments and the rivalling trends in the field. 3. In addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organisation edits the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), which has a section on mental disorder. The codes and terms used by the American manual and the international classification are fully compatible. 4. Adhering to a participation model of genre theory that is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family-likeness (cf. Ryan 1981, Fowler 1982: 37–43 and 54–9, Suerbaum 1998: 93–4), this study proceeds from an understanding of genres as constructed, open, and intersecting systems rather than fixed entities. 5. For an account of the contested relationship of drama to theatre and the related struggle between the disciplines of literary and theatre/performance studies as well as the problems inherent in regarding the theatrical performance as a ‘text’, see for example Höfele 1991, Worthen 1998, and Fischer-Lichte 2004: 42–57. Given that drama is written for performance, that it is “a linguistic transcription of a stage potentiality which is the motive force of the written text” (Gullì Pugliatti 1976: 18, trans. in Elam 1980: 209), a clear-cut differentiation between the literary and the theatrical approach to drama is anyway hardly tenable. Keir Elam characterises the relationship between the written text and the performance text as “a complex of reciprocal constraints constituting a powerful intertextuality” (ibid.). Taking into account the writing and production process, the notion of ‘writing-for-performance’ needs to be rethought for some of the plays I will discuss. In the cases of Augustine and Easy Access, the playwrights also directed the original performance. The published play texts that document the staged original performances are therefore rather instances of ‘writing-the-performance’. 6. The reconstruction of the performances is based on archive material such as recorded performances, photographs, contact sheets, sound recordings, programme notes, and reviews as well as on personal interviews with authors and the directors of the productions. 7. Joanna Townsend calls hysteria a “performative disease” in an article on the British actress Elizabeth Robins (2000: 103). However, I use the term ‘performative malady’ with a different meaning than Townsend, who wishes to reinforce the theatrical nature of hysteria, which involved “the public staging of a private trauma” (ibid.: 103), but does not employ concepts of gender performativity. 8. On contemporary history plays, cf. for example Harben 1988, Broich 1993, Krieger 1998: 145–54, Kramer 2000: 15–28. 9. My investigation of how the plays at issue employ traumatic modes as dramatic modes to some extent has parallels to existing alignments of trauma and drama in different contexts, such as in articles by Hubert Zapf (1998), Peter Buse (2000), and Clare Wallace (2004) and the study Drama Trauma by Timothy Murray (1997), 225
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Notes
10.
11.
12.
13.
14. 15.
which investigates the traumatic underside of race and sexuality in performance, video, and art. Cf. Tönnies 2002 on the “sensationalist theatre of cruelty”. Michelene Wandor characterises Cleansed as an example of “new brutalism” (2001: 232). Defending his own term “in-yer-face theatre”, Aleks Sierz sums up the “name game” for the new writing in the 1990s, which additionally produced labels such as “New Jacobeanism”, “Blood and Sperm Generation”, “Theatre of Urban Ennui”, and “Cool Drama” (2004: 51–2). In performance studies, Clifford Geertz’s anthropologist readings of culture as text have been most influential (cf. Geertz 1973, Conquergood 1991, and Worthen 1998: 1098). In his 1991 essay, Conquergood demands a performative turn in ethnography. In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Steven Connor dates this – only belatedly recognised – performative turn back to the 1970s and characterises it as the onset of postmodernism. Connor draws on Michael Benamou’s introduction to the collection Performance in Postmodern Culture (1977), which already suggested seeing performance as “the unifying mode of the postmodern” (1). Connor argues that “the emergence of postmodern ‘performance’ allows a delayed recognition of the origin of postmodernism in the apprehension that ‘everything performs’; that, rather than simply resting serenely in being, arts, politics, identity, all act themselves out” (2004: 14). Fischer-Lichte dates the ‘performative turn’ to the 1960s (cf. for example 2004: 166). Cf. for example Schechner 1985 on performance and anthropology, Turner 1982 on performance and ritual, Goffman 1955 and 1959 on performance and social roles. Auslander defines performance studies as taking performance “in the expanded sense that subsumes aesthetic performance, ritual and religious observance, secular ceremonies, carnival, games, plays, sports, and many other cultural forms as its object of inquiry and unites the tradition of theatre studies with techniques and approaches from anthropology, sociology, critical theory, cultural studies, art history, and other disciplines” (2004: 100). In the following, I use the term performance studies equally broadly, but I am aware that various struggles to differentiate the fields of research have been undertaken in the past decades and remain relevant today, particularly between performance studies and theatre studies. See for example Dolan 1993, Phelan 1998, Jackson 2003 and 2004, and Carlson 2004 for accounts of these struggles, which concern both theoretical supremacy and issues of institutional power. In the following, all quotes are taken from the revised edition that was first published in 1975. Butler abandons the differentiation between sex and gender, arguing that “this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender [ ], with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (1990: 10–11). By ‘constructed’, Butler does not mean that bodies are invented, but rather ‘configured’ according to prevailing social norms (Villa 2003: 88). Butler discusses her attitude towards different forms of constructivism, among them linguistic constructivism, in the opening chapter of Bodies that Matter, where she describes her form of social constructivism, which acknowledges materiality as a reality that is different from but interlocked with and configured by language (1993a: 1–23, esp. 7). I will discuss
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226 Notes
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
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Butler’s notion of materiality in more detail in the context of the Drama of Melancholia. Henceforward, I will use ‘gender’ as the broader term which includes the cultural notion of ‘biological sex’. When I need to highlight that I am speaking about the bodily, anatomic dimension of gender, I will resort to the term ‘sex’ or ‘anatomy’, without always pointing out again that these are culturally configured notions. In a similar vein, I interchangeably use the terms ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ as well as ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, which tend to designate biological notions of sex and cultural notions of gender respectively: I always imply the culturally configured notion of sex/gender when using them. At the outset of her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, Butler refers to Searle’s speech acts but she does not explicitly utilise his theory in this early article and the follow-up monograph Gender Trouble. In her introduction to the anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler retrospectively comments on this combination: “my theory sometimes waffles between understanding performativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to think that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so” (1999: xxv). Coleridge coined the term in the fourteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria, speaking of his and Wordsworth’s shared plan of writing lyrical ballads, “in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (1817: 6). In “Progress of Drama”, he speaks of the concept with reference to traditional illusionistic theatre, which requires “a sort of temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is” (1818: 587). For Butler, agency resides in the citationality of every performance: “ ‘Agency’ would then be the double movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where ‘to be constituted’ means ‘to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime’ the signifier itself” (1993a: 220). As there is no escape from citationality and repetition, agency consists in the small variations that occur in repetitions; these variations need not necessarily be intentional. Butler’s concept of agency attempts to connect the Foucauldian theory of power formations that form the subject and the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. Her project is motivated “by the inadequacy of the Foucauldian theory of the subject to the extent that it relies upon either a behaviourist notion of mechanically reproduced behaviour or a sociological notion of ‘internalization’ which does not appreciate the instabilities that inhere in identificatory practices” (2000a: 151). Freud’s notion of the unconscious offers Butler a way of accounting for these instabilities: “The unconscious is also an ongoing psychic condition in which norms are registered in both normalizing and non-normalizing ways, the postulated site of the fortification, their undoing and their perversion, the unpredictable trajectory of their appropriation in identifications and disavowals that are not always consciously or deliberately performed” (ibid.: 153). See also McNay 1999 and Barvosa-Carter 2005 for a discussion of agency in Butler’s work. In her conceptualisation of the ‘law’ that is to be recited, Butler connects the Lacanian law of the father and Foucault’s investigations of the way in which juridical discourses generate and shape the subject. Connecting the symbolic to
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Notes
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
legal/social laws, Butler dismantles the former’s a-historic, principal validity. See Butler’s and Slavoj Žižek’s debate on the priority of the law of the father in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000), where Butler agrees that “every subject emerges on the condition of foreclosure” (2000a: 141) but reaffirms that she does “not share the conviction that these foreclosures are prior to the social, or explicable through recourse to anachronistic structuralist accounts of kinship” (ibid.: 140). She challenges Lacan’s assumption that the entry into the symbolic relies on the notion of castration and the incest taboo. She sees the triangular father-mother-child constellation of the Oedipus complex as one particular, late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century constellation of kinship which cannot be universalised (ibid.: 136–81). The assessment of whether or not drag is subversive depends on the perspective and occasion. Although drag performances can foreground the performative character of gender identity if they are compared to mundane gender performances, they are not transgressive if they are seen within the conventions of drag, which require hyperbolically female impersonation. Moreover, drag performances can reinforce rather than denaturalise gender conventions if they emphasise the ridiculousness and inappropriateness of men in women’s clothes, such as in comedies like Some Like It Hot or Tootsie. Butler herself emphasises that there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion: “drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms” (1993a: 125). Cf. Butler’s comment: “If drag is performative, that does not mean that all performativity is to be understood as drag. The publication of Gender Trouble coincided with a number of publications that did assert that ‘clothes make the woman’, but I never did think that gender was like clothes, or that clothes make the woman” (1993a: 230–1). In an interview in 2000, Butler again evokes a definition of theatrical performance as an intentional and controlled act that is “a crucial part of performativity, but there’s also something else going on: the performance of gender is also compelled by norms that I do not choose” (2000b: 345), but then goes on to describe the relationship between performance and performativity as such a typetoken relationship: “Gender performativity is not just drawing on the norms that constitute, limit, and condition me; it’s also delivering a performance within a context of reception, and I cannot fully anticipate what will happen” (ibid.). Cf. Butler: “The incalculable effects of actions are as much part of their subversive promise as those that we plan in advance. [ ] The effects of performatives [ ] cannot be controlled by the one who utters or writes, since such productions are not owned by the one who utters them. They continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most precious intentions” (1993a: 241). Butler criticises Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation – which argues that the interpellation by the symbolic order, such as the reprimand by a policeman, constitutes the subject – because he “conjectures this ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellation’ as a unilateral act, as the power and force of the law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense” (1993a: 121). Butler calls for a rupture of the law which undermines the unilateral operation and allows for resignification. Moreover, she highlights that the movement of turning around when being called, the acceptance of an interpellation, is as important as the interpellation itself in the process of subjection, that is, both subjugation and
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228 Notes
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
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subject formation (1997: 168); in this regard, ‘turning’ can also mean ‘changing’: “The inaugurative scene of interpellation is one in which a certain failure to be constituted becomes the condition of possibility for constituting oneself. Social discourse wields the power to form and regulate a subject through the imposition of its own terms. Those terms, however, are not simply accepted or internalized; they become psychic only through the movement by which they are dissimulated and ‘turned’ ” (ibid.: 197). This assessment is diametrically opposed to Butler’s earlier employment of the body on stage for a constructivist argument: “By dramatic I mean [ ] that the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body” (1988: 273). Jackson therefore places Butler’s revision of theatrical performance in a larger process of theoretical and institutional change constructed as “progress”, in which the “anti-essentialist dimensions of the ‘first’ term (feminism, theatre) are backgrounded by the discourse surrounding the ‘next’ term (queer, performativity) in order to prop up the latter’s claims to radical anti-essentialism. In this relational process, feminism and theatre are caricatured retroactively as bastions of political and formal essentialism” (2003: 209). Cf. Aston’s similar argument, which proposes the notion of ‘performing performingness’. Speaking of Butler’s abandonment of the theatrical metaphor, she argues that “[t]o reject performance, however, is to close down the possibility of a field of theory which, in a feminist domain, can at least show us partial gender ‘truths’. Performing ‘performing-ness’ can show the ways in which gender is played out through a ‘reiteration of norms’, thereby allowing us to contest it” (1999: 16). See Fischer-Lichte 2004 for an account of four theatrical strategies that foreground the phenomenal body of the performer and thus distort the inner-fictional illusion, namely the reversal of the relationship between performer and character, the exposure of and emphasis on the performer’s body, the highlighting of the vulnerability of the performer’s body, and cross-casting (139–51). Cf. also Auslander’s comment that although performance artists have been understood as ‘antirepresentational’ and authentic, their personae on stage can hardly be understood as their ‘real’ selves: “Even though the performers do not represent fictional characters, the way their actions are framed by the performance context means that the audience does not perceive them directly as real people either. What the audience sees is a performance persona that may resemble the performer’s ‘real self’ but is not actually identical to that self. The resulting ‘undecidable argument between presentation and representation’ [ ] is itself a postmodern argument, as Benamou suggests” (2004: 110; cf. also Benamou 1977: 3). When I speak at this point and later in the text of possible audience reactions, I construct one possible reaction to the plurality of meanings that every theatrical performance delivers. The results of reader response criticism, which has shown that while the text can presuppose an immanent and an ideal reader, the real reader’s reaction will always depend on his or her world-view, can be applied to theatrical reception. The communal experience of theatre audiences, however, is an important influence on reception that differs from the usually solitary activity of reading.
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Notes
230 Notes
1. For an overview of literary and cultural appropriations of hysteria, see Micale’s seminal study Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, esp. 179–220. 2. Consequently, the proposed cure for hysterics is marriage, which has remained among the standard prescriptions for more than two thousand years (Veith 1965: 13). 3. Sydenham does not clearly distinguish between melancholia and hysteria but proposes a melancholic aetiology of hysteria and argues that hysterics/melancholics are “persons of prudent judgement [ ], who in the profundity of their meditations and the wisdom of their speech far surpass those whose minds have never been excited by such stimula” (1681–2: 89). Such a positive and sympathetic evaluation of the disease was usually reserved for melancholic men, as Schiesari (1992) points out. 4. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]) Foucault argues that the hystericisation of women’s bodies is one of the four great strategies in the production of discourses on sexuality that emerged before the end of the eighteenth century and set up specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centring on sex (in addition to the hysterical woman, Foucault identifies the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult as strategic focuses). For a critique of Foucault’s sexual reading of hysteria, see Bronfen 1998a: 439–40. 5. On the history of the Salpêtrière, see Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982], Katz 1999. 6. Charcot arrives at the Salpêtrière in 1862 and by 1870 has transformed the asylum into Europe’s most famous psychiatry. While Charcot treats a number of diseases at the Salpêtrière, he declares hysteria to be his favourite neurosis and becomes renowned for his work in that field (Bronfen 1998a: 176). Although Charcot allows men into the Salpêtrière as well, the clinic remains most famous for its female patients and keeps both the sexual connotation of a prostitutes’ home and the connotation of confinement that the woman’s prison had: “In the last few decades of the 19th century, the Salpêtrière was what it has always been: a kind of feminine inferno, a città dolorosa confining four thousand incurable or mad women. It was a nightmare in the midst of Paris’ belle epoque” (DidiHuberman 2003 [1982]: ix). The Salpêtrière recently again attracted the interest of the European public, when “by some ironic twist of fate, [ ] [Britain’s] most luminous hysteric-bulimic icon, Princess Diana, died” (Furse 2000: 74) at the Parisian clinic in August 1997. 7. Furthermore, Charcot’s positivist assumptions and methods are a challenge to previously held religious and mystical ideas about demonic possession and witchcraft. Charcot’s redefinition of demonic possession as hysteric suffering is a politicised statement that supports the republican politics of anticlericalism (Goldstein 1987: 204). 8. Some of Charcot’s contemporaries criticise his theories, such as the ‘Nancy Group’, consisting of the physicians Ambroise Liébeault and Hyppolite Bernheim, the lawyer Jules Liégeois, and the forensic expert Etienne Beaunis. They focus on hypnotism and the power of suggestion as a treatment of hysteria (Borossa 2001: 22–5). Bernheim sees Charcot’s ‘classic circle’ of Grande Hystérie as a construction rather than a discovery (Gorsen 2000: 46), an estimation that many of Charcot’s contemporaries and later critics share and that Charcot constantly argues against. 9. In 1888, the first volume of the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière is published by Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Richer, and Londe, and is continued until 1918.
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10. The Salpêtrière opens the new Service des hommes as a twenty-bed ward in 1882. Before this, male patients were shipped to the Bicêtre clinic outside the city (Micale 1991: 203). 11. While the sixty-one published case histories of male hysterics almost match in number the seventy-three case histories of female patients, Charcot leaves notes for thirty more case histories of male hysterics but for more than two hundred cases of female hysterics (Micale 1991: 204). This imbalance mirrors the by far higher number of female hysterics treated at the Salpêtrière. 12. However, Charcot readmits sexuality in the realm of descriptive symptomatology, such as in the legends of the photographs depicting the attitudes passionelles. 13. Micale in his seminal essay “Hysteria Male/Hysteria Female” quotes Charcot: “They are in the majority robust men presenting all the attributes of the male sex, soldiers or artisans, married and the fathers of families, men, in other words, in whom one would be surprised, unless forewarned, to meet with an illness considered by most people as exclusive to women” (1991: 207). 14. Although Charcot assumes a fundamental sameness of male and female hysteria, he traces a number of differences, which concern not only the disease’s quality but also a gendered quantification: Following Pierre Briquet, Charcot believes that hysteria occurs between the sexes in a ratio of one to twenty (Micale 1991: 208). Furthermore, he argues that female hysterics more easily than male hysterics transmit the hereditary disease to their children (ibid.: 208). The causes for the disease differ as well: while overpowering emotional experiences cause hysteria in women, male hysteria is most often precipitated by physical traumata occurring in the public workplace (ibid.: 208–9). The symptom formation in hysterical men according to Charcot is more stable but more severe than the capricious and polysymptomatic female hysteria (ibid.: 211). 15. The first photos of hysterical men appear by 1888 in the Nouvelle Iconographie (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 80). See Holschbach 2002, esp. 138–40, for a discussion of the iconography of male hysteria apparent in these images. 16. According to Foucault, the category of homosexuality was established at that time in medical discourse (1990 [1976]: 43). 17. In contrast to Goldstein and others, Micale estimates the impact of Charcot’s innovations more positively: “his work contributed to a process of ‘genderrelativization’ whereby the highly polarized sex/gender system of the midVictorian period came under criticism and was replaced increasingly by a closer and more flexible set of gender definitions” (1991: 213). 18. See Felicia McCarren’s study Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998), especially the third chapter, for an investigation of the relationship between Charcot’s Grande Hystérie and dance art. 19. Freud even names his son, Jean-Martin, after Charcot (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 80). 20. Breuer’s patient Anna O., who in particular phases lost her capacity to use her native language and only spoke English, stated the therapeutic effect of verbalising her anxieties and memories and christened the method “talking cure”, jokingly also calling it “chimney-sweeping” (Freud 1910: 7, 1910E: 13). 21. Lisa Cartwright traces the impact of Freud and Breuer’s shift from diagnosis on visual to auditory grounds: “By the mid-20th century, sight and the body’s surface appearance would no longer be regarded as reliable indicators of mental pathology; speech and audition would overtake them in the sensory hierarchy of psychoanalysis” (1995: 50).
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Notes
22. The euphemism ‘seduction theory’ implies mutuality and therefore already points towards Freud’s revision of this theory. At the time when Freud develops his theory, he uses the words ‘abuse’, ‘rape’, ‘attack’, and ‘fright’ in addition to ‘seduction’ (Hunter 1992: 399). 23. Similarly, Max Nordau, who studied with Charcot, is so preoccupied with the dramatic representations of hysteria that he comes to use ‘Ibsenism’ as a synonym for hysteria (Showalter 1998: 101–2). 24. When Freud abandons the original traumatic aetiology of hysteria, he names his crucial new discovery, the Oedipus complex, after the ancient dramatic hero of the Sophoclean tragedy rather than after alternative sources of the myth (Döring 1996: 35). 25. Today, the psychoanalytic state of the art concerning hysteria ranges from the negation of the disorder to the declaration of a new rise of hysteria, not so much as a distinct disease but as an almost universal way of dealing with conflicts, for example in the work of Mentzos and Lucien Israël (Mentzos 1991: 13, Israël 1976). Recently, two new psychoanalytic studies on hysteria have been published. Christopher Bollas’s Hysteria (2000) argues that hysteria is a reaction to the child’s emerging sexual awareness and thus will never disappear, whereas Juliet Mitchell in Mad Men and Medusas (2000) maintains that the hysteric has acknowledged his or her expendability. Mitchell stresses the importance of sibling relations for hysteria, as they are often the first rupture of the narcissism of the infant. Whilst the British psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon in 1984 still assumes that all women go through a hysterical stage in their psychosexual development when transferring their desires from mother to father and argues that a “woman always at heart remains a hysteric” (1984: 73), both Bollas and Mitchell conceptualise hysteria as a phenomenon that is not gender-specific. 26. Coined by Derrida, the concept of ‘phallogocentrism’ highlights the complicity between logocentrism and phallocentrism. Criticising Lacan, Derrida declares, “It is one and the same system: the erection of a paternal logos [ ] and of the phallus as ‘privileged signifier’ (Lacan)” (trans. in Culler 1982: 172). 27. Cf. Whitford 1991, esp. 123–6 on the contested issue of whether Irigaray proposes a hysterocentric discourse that reverses phallocentrism. 28. Showalter explicitly names only two scholars, Micale and Roy Porter, but certainly, among many others, all the editors of Hysteria Beyond Freud – in addition to Porter and Showalter, also Sander L. Gilman, Helen King and G.S. Rousseau – the French art historian Didi-Huberman, author of The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (2003 [1982]), and the literary critics Beizer and Bronfen belong to this group. 29. Apart from the plays I will discuss, examples of the anglophone Drama of Hysteria are Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life (1979), Dianne Hunter, Lenora Champagne, and Judy Dworin’s Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows (1989), Wilson’s Sabina (1998), and Hampton’s The Talking Cure (2002). The popularity of hysterical prototypes in contemporary theatre becomes apparent in the name of the British feminist performance company Anna O, which is derived from the pseudonym of Breuer’s famous hysterical patient Bertha Pappenheim. The company Anna O has devised several performances that explore the relationship between psychoanalytic case study and performance, “between self/body/writing” (Anna O in Goodman 1996: 248), such as Dora (1987) and The Howl in the Afternoon (1990), which drew on Lacan’s study of Aimée (Goodman 1996: 245–50). The musical Lady in the Dark by Moss Hart, which presents the psychoanalytic cure of the
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232 Notes
30.
31.
32.
33. 34.
35.
233
traumatised hysteric Liza Elliot, was originally produced in 1941, but revived at the National Theatre in London in 1997, thus participating in the contemporary dramatic trend of dealing with hysteria (Döring 2000). Besides those plays of the Drama of Hysteria which explicitly rewrite hysterical case studies, another trend in contemporary drama alludes to (Freudian) hysterics without marking this rewriting. Among the most prominent examples of this technique is Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, which had its London premiere in 1994. Miller’s play, set in New York in 1938, presents the Jewish protagonist Sylvia, who is never diagnosed as a hysteric in the play but whose psychosomatic paralysis is strongly reminiscent of the Freudian case history of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. with her “talking legs” (Zapf 1998: 222, Döring 2000: 160). In addition, a number of contemporary plays share the Drama of Hysteria’s technique of exploring the analyst’s mind, such Nicholas Wright’s Mrs Klein (1988), which stages the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s own psychic problems, and Gideon Koppel’s radio play The Importance of Being Jones (BBC Wales 1995), which dramatises the life of Ernest Jones, Britain’s most famous psychoanalyst and acknowledged biographer of Freud. Augustine (Big Hysteria) was first performed in April 1991 at The Drum Theatre, Plymouth Theatre Royal, in co-production with Paines Plough, whose artistic director at the time was Furse. The production toured the UK (including a run at the Lyric Studio in London) and Russia; since its original production, the play has been performed in North America and Europe. Furse was awarded the Time Out Award for Writing and Direction for Augustine. Charcot’s emphasis on a visual exploration and classification is part of an overall trend from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Anatomic dissection puts on view the interior of the human body, the police start to collect photographs of perpetrators and suspects, and in mental institutions, photographs of the insane are collected to create a visual grammar of madness through the interpretation of physiognomy (Gilman 1982, Stingelin 1988, Bronfen 1998b). This project resembles Cixous’s description of Portrait de Dora: “it was a step that badly needed to be taken, so that a woman’s voice could be heard for the first time, so that she could cry out, ‘I’m not the one who is dumb. I am silenced by your inability to hear’ ” (1984 [1977]: 547). Of course, Augustine’s authentic voice remains lost and she can be represented “always [ ] only quasi: quasi-face, quasi-body, quasi-story” (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 87). Augustine (Big Hysteria) is henceforward abbreviated as ‘A’ when indicated after quotations. Furse has adapted this statement from Freud’s description of Charcot (“He would ask why it was that in medicine people only see what they have learnt to see. He would say that it was wonderful how one was suddenly able to see new things – new states of an illness – which are likely as old as the human race” [Freud 1893E: 12; cf. 1893: 23]) and from documents of the real Charcot’s words, which are similarly ambiguous; for example, Charcot stated, “I am nothing more than a photographer. I inscribe what I see” (Charcot 1887–88, trans. in DidiHuberman 2003 [1982]: 29). In his paradoxical phrasing, Charcot uses “inscribe” in the sense of ‘record’, but makes apparent that he inscribes the bodies with his theories. See Didi-Huberman’s Invention of Hysteria for a reinforcement of this thesis, which is for example supported by the fact that Charcot’s model occurred only at the Salpêtrière, and even there only during Charcot’s days (von Braun 1985: 58–9).
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Notes
36.
37. 38.
39.
40.
41.
42. 43.
44.
Blanche Wittman, Charcot’s “pet hysteric” (Gilman 1993: 345), who is portrayed in Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, completely recovered from her hysterical attacks after Charcot’s death (Fogle 1996: 245). Hence there are reasons to believe that Charcot’s assistants conditioned the patients in such a way that their attacks came as close to Charcot’s paradigm as possible (cf. also Bernheimer 1990: 7 and Showalter 1985: 150). Bernd Stiegler notes that photography since the 1880s has been regarded as an opportunity to explore realms of visibility which the human eye was not able to penetrate; in addition to photography, electromagnetic waves, X-rays, cathodic rays, and radioactivity were discovered (2001: 97). The absurdity of regarding photography as a means of neutral documentation and to invest it with evidential power became obvious when the spiritualists claimed to have photographed the phantoms and ghosts they had raised, while their enemies argued that “chemicals have no fancies, plates don’t get nervous, and lenses tell no lies!” (Glendinning 1894: 74–5). Didi-Huberman therefore calls Grande Hystérie “a chapter in the history of art” (2003 [1982]: 4). As Showalter has demonstrated, the gender difference depicted by Robert-Fleury is historically inadequate. When Phillipe Pinel unchained the lunatics at the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière in 1793, he first released male inmates, liberating the female patients, or rather prisoners, only some weeks later (1985: 1–2). Charcot himself suggests in his writings that the first patients treated for Grande Hystérie reproduce the fits of the epileptics who became their ward-mates when the Salpêtrière restructured its ward in the 1870s and put hysterical and epileptic patients together (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 76). This particular co-habitance of hysterics and epileptics at the Salpêtrière might explain why Charcot’s Grande Hystérie is exceptional in its involvement of epileptic fits. Doris Ruhe examines the gendered iconography apparent in Les Démoniaques, which presents only very few images of male, supposedly hysteric, possessed figures (2002: 153). The blurred boundary between art and science, between aesthetic iconography and realistic mimesis apparent in the depiction and classification of hysteria at the Salpêtrière, can be interpreted as part of a general attitude in the nineteenth century. In his extensive article “The Image of the Hysteric”, Gilman quotes Oscar Wilde, who argues that we learn about nature from the work of art: “External nature [ ] imitates Art. The only effects she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry or in paintings” (1993: 346). Only the invention of the moment photography in 1887 reduces the exposure time to less than a tenth of a second (Stiegler 2001: 99–100). Moreover, photography developed genres such as the portrait but also the medical photography of pathology, something which runs counter to its claim of exactitude (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 62). The legends which came to accompany the photographs taken at the Salpêtrière secured the maintenance of the genre, as they served as explanations which guaranteed the reading of a particular pose as hysterical symptom. Didi-Huberman notes that the fabrication of images at the Salpêtrière became canonical, as other clinics imitated their typographical arrangement of images (ibid.: 44). See also Holschbach 2002 for a discussion of the ways in which the photographers’ composition formed the iconography of hysteria. Holschbach argues that the photographs taken at the Salpêtrière imitate the contemporary theatre
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234 Notes
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50. 51.
52.
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photography and the models of religious painting rather than follow scientific and documentary standards (2002: 132–4). The devices I describe in the following were all realised in Furse’s original production and are included as stage directions in the play text, which was published only six years after the production. The audience “enters to a subtle, almost subliminal soundtrack; a mix of violin, laughter and chatter, pepperings of applause, the sound of a woman crying, rainfall. The whole soundscape should enter and leave the audience’s consciousness like sounds brought on a wind, ghostly gusts” (A 16). Furse slightly alters the text of the German song that actually speaks of the male name “Augustin”. This gendercrossing foreshadows Augustine’s cross-gender performance that I explore below. Taking into account the arguments developed in Baer’s Spectral Evidence, these images are doubly unknown to Augustine, because she is unaware not only of her (re-enactments of) trauma, but also of the photographed moment itself. Baer argues that flash photography itself is based on a traumatic experience, because the flash, being a sixteenth of a second ahead of human perception, escapes cognition. Like trauma, the flash cannot be integrated into sensory experience but only be registered belatedly and incompletely. Baer shows that Charcot attempted to exploit this traumatic quality of flash photography, as he hoped that the photographs, taken in a moment of shock, would stall the hysterics’ efforts to manipulate and deceive those around them and would thus reinforce his claim that the photographs were ‘objective’ images that mimetically represent the ‘reality’ of hysteria. However, the flash not merely makes visible but modifies the photographed object, as Baer points out: “Flash photographs cannot offer proof but are only testimony: ‘before, this – after, that.’ [ ] Flash-induced catalepsy means precisely that cause and effect, lived reality and staged representation, appear to coincide” (2002: 39; 42). Furse adopts the fact of Carnot’s visits from the records of the Salpêtrière; frightened and enraged by his presence, the real Augustine underwent more than one hundred and fifty attacks at the day when her abuser visited the Salpêtrière (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 256). During her first appearances, the violinist wears a nurse’s costume, thus representing a female figure of support in the Salpêtrière rather than Augustine’s double. Presenting Augustine as Freud’s first hysterical patient to abandon the psychoanalyst’s treatment, the play likens her to Freud’s patient Dora, the eponymous heroine of Cixous’s play, which is one of the intertexts and models for Augustine (Big Hysteria) (Furse 2000: 77). Cf. Artaud’s second post-scriptum to his radio play “To Have Done with the Judgement of God” (1947), which Susan Sontag and Don Eric Levine describe as a “farewell”, since it concludes Artaud’s published work (in Artaud 1976 [1913– 48]: 659): “I say it / as I know how to say it / immediately / you will see my present body / fly into pieces / and under ten thousand / notorious aspects / a new body / will be assembled / in which you will never again / be able / to forget me” (French original in Artaud 1976 [1913–48]: 659). Furse does not mention the intertextual reference to Artaud in this particular passage but she starts the play with a quote from Artaud’s “Seraphin’s Theatre”, which also evinces the focus on gender hyperbole and the play with gender categories: “I want to attempt a terrific feminine [ ]. Neuter. FEMININE. Masculine” (A 15).
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Notes
53. Differentiating between the propositional content of a text and its rhetorics, Paul de Man has coined the formula that “the text does not practice what it preaches” (1979: 15). 54. “it is not for noting that I call it as I do – usteria, as it is said in Greek, hysteria, namely, to play the part of the man (faire l’homme), as I have said, being thus hommosexual or beyondsex themselves” (Lacan 1968, 2000 [1972–73]: 85). 55. According to Lacan, hysteria is by no means restricted to a particular group of (female) patients but affects any speaking, desiring subject. The hysteric embodies “the quintessence of the human subject because she speaks, as agent, from the lack and gaps in knowledge, language and being” (Ragland-Sullivan 1992: 164). Lacanian psychoanalysts as Žižek, Bruce Fink, and Gérard Wajeman have elaborated Lacan’s reformulation of hysteria as one of the four crucial discourses at work in psychoanalysis (the other three being the master-slave-discourse, the academic discourse, and the discourse of the analyst). Following Lacan, they conceptualise the hysteric’s discourse as simultaneously supporting and rebelling against the interpellation by a figure of paternal authority (Wajeman 1982, Žižek 1996: 164). Understanding the hysteric as someone who poses an inherently insoluble riddle, Wajeman offers an explanation for the historical abundance of theories of hysteria: “The history of hysteria presents three salient aspects: (1) requesting an answer, hysteria generates knowledge; (2) responding to the symptom, knowledge states what the hysteric is (a witch, a saint, a patient, a subject); (3) no answer settles the hysteric’s question; all answers fail to master their object, none can silence the hysteric” (1982: n. pag.). 56. A first version of Dora was staged at Regina’s Wheatland Theatre in the Canadian province Saskatchewan in 1987, directed by Steven Gregg. Morrissey rewrote and shortened Dora as a radio play, which was produced by BBC Radio Three and broadcast in 1991. The author again revised the script for Dora’s London premiere in 1993 by the Operating Theatre Company at the Hen and Chicken’s Theatre, directed by Christine Hoodith. Morrissey has also dealt with issues of abuse and seduction in Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita (1992), in which she gives Nabokov’s Lolita an alternative voice that portrays Lolita’s liaison with Humbert Humbert as abusive. 57. Freud names Ida Bauer after a maid called Dora in his parents’ house, whose original name was Rosa; to avoid confusion with Freud’s sister Rosa, she is renamed Dora by the Freuds (Freud 1901: 268–9/1901E: 240–1). 58. Freud’s case study contains all the crucial elements of the feminist theorising of the ‘traffic in women’ or ‘traffic between men’, in which the exchanged women function as sexual goods and as communicators that preserve and consolidate homosocial bonding between men (Levi-Strauss 1969, Rubin 1975, Sedgwick 1985, see also Gallop 1982: 201). 59. Ida Bauer kept in touch with Frau Zellenka and in the 1930s, the women teamed up as bridge instructors in Vienna (Borossa 2001: 50, Weissberg 2002). 60. While writers such as Cixous – in both her academic writing and her play on Dora –, Jane Gallop (1982), and Silvia Eiblmayr (2000) acknowledge and celebrate Dora’s homosexual desire, none of the early feminist critics accept that Dora herself had heterosexual interests in the case. Instead, they argue that she was a passive and helpless victim of the male desires surrounding her. Toril Moi characterises Dora as “pawn in the game between Herr K. and her father” and as “victim of male dominance” (1985: 191), while Porter perceives both Dora and Frau K. as “objects of barter amongst the men” (1987: 113). Similarly, Nancy Chodorow
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61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
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describes Dora as “sacrificed and bartered by her father like Iphigenia” (1991: 231). By contrast, recent scholars have begun to explore Dora’s involvement as an active one driven by her own desire. For example, Stephanie Nagy conceptualises Dora as “a perplexedly sexed subject investigating femininity” (1997: 23) rather than as an essentially victimised object of the desires of others. The positive portrayal of Dora in feminist criticism and drama contests psychoanalytic interpretations that describe her as “one of the most repulsive hysterics” (Deutsch 1957: 43). Issues of class are important in this respect, as “[u]nlike the impoverished working-class women at the Salpêtrière, who had to give Charcot what he wanted, Dora had the financial and social resources to resist her therapist” (Showalter 1998: 43). In 1902, Dora returned to Freud, asking for a resumption of the treatment, which Freud declined. After her marriage to a composer, the birth of her son, and a recommencement of psychological treatment by Felix Deutsch, Dora left Vienna, moved to France, and eventually to the United States. She died in 1945 of colonic cancer. Critics have highlighted the literary quality of the case study, which Freud started to write down only after the termination of the analysis and worked on for over four years (Freud 1905a: 166–7/1905aE: 9–10). Steven Marcus points out the resemblances of Freud’s text to a modern experimental novel and to an Ibsenite play, in which Freud himself is one of the characters and at the same time a self-referential and unreliable narrator: “Freud’s case histories are a new form of literature; they are creative narratives that include their own analysis and interpretation” (1990 [1974]: 90). This address is a direct quote from Freud’s “Aetiology of Hysteria”, a speech he delivered at the Viennese Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in April 1896 (Döring 1996: 36). While Freud starts some of his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis with the more general address “Meine Damen und Herren”, during the lectures he addresses the men in the audience only (cf. for example “Gesichtspunkte der Entwicklung und Regression. Ätiologie” / “Some Thoughts on Development and Regression – Aetiology” [1917c: 351, 355, 357, 360, 363; 1917cE: 339, 343, 344, 347, and 351]). Dora: A Case of Hysteria is henceforward indicated as ‘D’ after quotations. “I give the name of symptomatic acts to those aspects which people perform, as we say, automatically, unconsciously, without attending to them, or as if in a moment of distraction. They are actions to which people would like to deny any significance [ ]. Closer observation, however, will show that these actions, about which consciousness knows nothing or wishes to know nothing, in fact give expression to unconscious thoughts and impulses, and are therefore most valuable and instructive as being manifestations of the unconscious which have come to the surface” (Freud 1905aE: 76; cf. 1905a: 239). In the play, Freud later doubts the authenticity of Dora’s report (D 23), whereas Freud in the case study believes in the events but interprets Dora’s defensive reaction as stemming from repressed desire and disappointed love rather than from genuine disgust. “the behaviour of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical. I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable” (1905aE: 28). Freud meets Dora at different ages in Morrissey’s play. He first encounters her as a fourteen-year-old, and then every two years until she is twenty (D 2, 4, 5,
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Notes
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
36). Dora thus agrees with Freud’s case study concerning Dora’s age. However, Ida Bauer was born on 1 November 1882, and hence was one year younger than Freud presents her in the case study, as has been brought to attention in recent criticism (cf. Decker 1991: xi, Weissberg 2002: 273, Nagy 1997). Freud possibly took the ‘poetic licence’ of changing Dora’s age in order to make his theory of repressed sexual desire more convincing to his readers. In a letter to Fliess in May 1897, Freud describes a similar dream: “I dreamed I was going up a staircase with very few clothes on. [ ] Suddenly I noticed, however, that a woman was coming after me, and thereupon set in the sensation, so common in dreams, of being glued to the spot, of being paralyzed. The accompanying feeling was not anxiety but erotic excitement” (1887–1904E: 249; cf. 1887–1904: 266). Freud in the very same letter tells Fliess about a dream in which he felt desire for his daughter Mathilde, aged eleven in 1897. Freud remembers being rebuffed by a surgeon: “how can you talk such nonsense? Hysteron [sic] means the womb. So how can a man be hysterical?” (Gilman 1993: 402). Charcot’s and Freud’s insights are even less accepted in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain than in the more liberal metropolises of Paris and Vienna, as they run counter to Victorian codes of manliness and dominant medical models of masculinity: “perhaps most disturbing, it suggested the possibility of exploring the feminine component in the male character itself” (Micale 1991: 223). Hence, the Anglo-American medical world displays a “cultivated neglect of male hysteria” (ibid.: 222), which is terminated by the devastating consequences of the First World War for the male psyche. Otto Bauer became one of the principal leaders of the Austrian Socialist party between 1918 and 1934 and its leading doctrinaire and ideological advocate. For further information on Otto’s career, see Rogow 1979. Despite the mother’s marginalised position in the case history, the play makes her a prominent figure of Dora’s departure at the end of the play. Although the mother never appears on stage, she keeps knocking at the door with increasing urgency, thus competing with Freud for her daughter’s attention and finally managing to separate Dora from Freud. Although the mother unlike Dora’s father does not enter, the play presents her as a more significant and more positive figure than the case study. Dora often expresses concern for her mother’s plight and sympathises with her mother, sometimes taking sides against the reckless conduct of her father. After her dream about the group abuse, she cries out for her mother (D 32), which resembles Augustine’s initial cry for her absent mother in Furse’s play. Moreover, Dora’s remark about having told her mother that she would only bear the therapy until the end of the year (D 34) indicates the women’s closeness. In the case study, Freud does not comment on the fact that Dora recounted the lake trauma only to her mother (Mahoney 1996: 44) and hence appears to have trusted her mother more than anyone else. Instead, Freud suggests that a ‘normal’ girl would have been able to deal with the situation without the support of any adult (1905a: 257/1905aE: 95). It remains up to the audience to decide of what importance the mother was not only for Morrissey’s Dora’s but also for Ida Bauer’s decision to abandon Freud’s therapy, and how intimate the women, whom Freud presents as enemies in the case study, might have been. Cf. Cixous: “It is Freud who was the servant-girl, and that is what is intolerable for Freud in the Dora case – that he was treated as one treats maids, having been fired the way you fire a servant-girl. There is no failure worse than that” (1986: 152).
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74. D 26. 75. Lena Lindhoff points out that in the feminist work on the coupling of Nora and Dora, Dora has almost replaced Nora as a feminist icon (1995: 148, 178). 76. Jelinek’s play was first produced in Graz in 1979, a hundred years after the premiere of A Doll’s House. An English translation has been published in Plays by Women: Ten, edited by Annie Castledine, who also directed a rehearsed reading of the play at the Goethe-Institute in London in 1992 (Castledine 1994). 77. Johnson had worked for seven years on Hysteria, which won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy and the Writers Award for Best West End Play in 1994. The successful production by Phyllida Lloyd was revived in 1995 at the Royal Court Classic Season at Duke of York’s Theatre. The play has been performed all over Europe and in the USA. 78. Johnson combines two historical figures in his Yahuda character: Freud’s actual physician, Maximilian Schur and the Orientalist Abraham Shalom Ezekiel Yahuda (Peter 1993: 966, Paul 1997/1998: 20), who also lived in London and met Freud in 1938, pressing him to withdraw “Moses and Monotheism”. The figure of Yahuda might also allude to Freud’s pious friend Oskar Pfister, who made Freud hesitate to publish his criticism of religion (Lohmann 1986: 85). The ancient Jewish name Abraham Yahuda emphasises the doctor’s function as a representative of Freud’s Jewish heritage; accordingly, Dalí eventually identifies Yahuda as standing for “many Jews” (H 89). 79. Dalí recounts his meeting with Freud in his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. The conception and a number of the lines of Johnson’s Freud figure are inspired by Dalí’s autobiography (as well as documentaries on Dalí that Johnson saw, cf. Johnson 1996). Meanwhile, Dalí has been dedicated a play of his own: Similarly to Hysteria, The Secret Death of Salvador Dalí by the Australian playwright Stephen Sewell stages the final hours of Dalí, whose life is recalled through flashbacks. The Secret Death of Salvador Dalí was originally co-produced in 2000 by Strut & Fret Production House and La Boite Theatre as part of the 2000 Brisbane Festival. The play had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002 and was revived at the Old Red Lion in July 2004. Robert Shore’s review calls Stephen Billington’s performance of Dalí “marvellously hysterical” (2004: 888). 80. Hysteria is henceforward abbreviated as ‘H’ after quotations. 81. Frau Emmy von N., whose case is presented in Studies on Hysteria, and an unnamed young patient in “Ein Fall von hypnotischer Heilung” (“A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnosis”, 1892–93) both suffer from hysterical anorexia. The case of Miss Lucy R., also described in the Studies, displays hysterical agoraphobia. The images of a flame and of fire that Johnson employs also appear in Freud’s work, although never in relation with hysteria. Rebecca’s fear of the dark might be taken from Freud’s “Hemmung, Symptom und Angst” (“Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety”, 1926: 179/1926E: 136). 82. Hitchcock might have been a second source for Johnson’s name choice, since the identity confusion of Rebecca and the initially nameless heroine, Jessica, resembles his film Rebecca, which likewise “is all about a woman’s problems of ‘overidentification’ with another woman” (Modleski 1989: 44). Hitchcock’s film from 1940 is based on Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca written in 1938, in the same year that Hysteria is set. 83. In his earlier work “Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen” (“Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices”, 1907a), Freud had already aligned religion and
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Notes
84.
85.
86.
87. 88.
89.
90.
91.
obsessional neurosis. Pretending that Freud’s heretic theses presented in “Moses and Monotheism” were unthought of before, Johnson heightens the dramatic conflict. Cf. also von Braun’s chapter on male hysteria (1985: 324–66), in which she argues that male hysteria, like female hysteria, means a rebellion against the opposition of body and mind and the repression of sexuality. By the end of the Second World War, eighty thousand men with symptoms stemming from war traumata had sought medical help (Showalter 1998: 72), and their numbers even increased after the war. Freud wrote a letter to Fliess in May 1897, in which he reported a dream in which he felt “over-affectionately” (“überzärtlich”) towards his eleven-year-old daughter Mathilde. Rather than identifying incestuous desire in himself, however, Freud interprets the dream as evidence of his “wish to catch a Pater as the originator of neurosis and thus put[ ] an end to my ever-recurring doubts” about his seduction theory (1887–1904E: 249; cf. 1887–1904: 266). For example, Jessica hides half-naked in Freud’s cupboard while Yahuda reflects on “the scantily clad secrets in [ ] [Freud’s] closet” (H 22). Cf. Gross 1993: 965, de Jongh 1993: 966, Smith 1993: 967, Edwards 1993: 968, and Rutherford 1993: 969. One critic emphasised that the topicality of child abuse made the reception of Hysteria even more disturbing: “Recent revelations about the frequency of child abuse makes this an uneasy subject for laughter” (Hoyle 1993: 966). Both Freud and Dalí mention Ben Travers’s paradigmatic farce Rookery Nook, which they saw at London’s West End, and Dalí compares their situation as well as the stage scenery with its doors and large French windows to Travers’s comedy: “So Dalí chase you through french [sic] windows, round the garden, back through front door, yes?” (H 45). Moreover, Hysteria and Travers’s farce share plot elements such as the beginning at night and the fact that the main conflicts are brought about by the arrival of a young, unknown, and waif-like woman who needs the protagonist’s help. Additionally, both plays feature a stereotypic comic foreigner who chases the female protagonist. While Johnson utilises the insights posited in Jokes to ridicule Freud, the treatise in turn contains a paragraph which debases theatrical comedy. Towards the end of his essay, Freud notes that the laughter of the audience watching a farce might derive less from the quality of the jokes onstage than from the audience’s determination to find that which is labelled ‘comedy’ funny: “Anyone who [ ] goes to the theatre to see a farce owes to this intention his ability to laugh at things which would scarcely have provided him with a case of the comic in his ordinary life. In the last resort it is the recollection of having laughed and in the expectation of laughing that he laughs when he sees the comic actor come on stage, before the later can have made any attempt at making him laugh” (1905bE: 219; cf. 1905b: 250). Emphasising the conventional character of comedy, Freud laconically concludes that “[o]ne admits feeling ashamed afterwards over what one has been able to laugh at the play” (1905bE: 219; cf. 1905b: 250). Johnson takes up Freud’s latent contempt for theatrical comedy when his Freud figure complains about the performance of Ben Travers’s Rookery Nook (H 12), which made him laugh four times at most. For typological suggestions on the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel and film on hysteria see Showalter’s chapter “Hysterical Narratives” in Hystories (1998: 81–99).
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92. This form of reversal is common in feminist criticism and feminist art. See Schlichter 1995 for a critical assessment of such a retroactive “Normalitätsbeweis” (proof of normality) (16).
1. Mark Seltzer discerns for the decade a “collective gathering around sites of wounding, trauma and pathology” and argues that “sociality and the wound have become inseparable” (1997: 24). 2. While hysteric patients most often had only one alter ego, today sixteen personalities are the norm (Hacking 1995: 21). Nonetheless, the diseases share their gendering; nine out of ten patients diagnosed as multiple personalities are women (Ross, Norton, and Wozney 1989). 3. It is important to note, however, that not all forms of incest are depicted as traumatic. As von Hoff shows, particular forms, such as brother-sister-incest, are on the contrary used as expressions of love and tenderness set against a cruel and loveless world (cf. for example 2003: 24). Carr’s Portia Coughlan and Kane’s Cleansed, which I will analyse in the subsequent chapter on melancholia, exemplify this trend. 4. Since trauma forecloses narrative memory, a crisis of truth proceeds from trauma. Taking the traumatic experience of the Holocaust into consideration, this ‘crisis’ or even ‘collapse of witnessing’ (Laub 1992, 1995) also concerns historiography, because trauma not only makes accurate narrative recollection difficult but also distorts chronology and refuses historical boundaries through its deferred action. From the wealth of literature on trauma and the Holocaust, see for example Langer 1991 and Krystal 1995. 5. Cf. also Caruth’s article “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival” (2001) for an attempt to integrate the fort-da game as a creative reaction to trauma into her trauma theory. 6. Showalter notes that the term ‘unstory’ was first used by Lawrence Langer in Holocaust Testimonies (1998: 225). 7. Whereas Genette generally distinguishes between dramatic fiction and narrative fiction (1993: 33) and hence defines drama as a non-narrative medium, Seymour Chatman understands movies, cartoons, and plays as “mimetic narratives” (1990: 115): “Plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and a setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. The fact that one story is told (diegesis) and the other shown (mimesis) is of secondary importance. By ‘secondary’ I do not mean that the difference is inconsequential” (ibid.: 117). As Manfred Jahn notes, the narrative quality of drama is accepted by many post-Genettian critics (2001: 670). Jahn suggests differentiating between “written” and “performed” narratives rather than between “diegetic” and “mimetic” narratives as proposed by Chatman, as both scripted and performed genres contain diegetic and mimetic elements (ibid.: 675). See also Nünning and Sommer 2002 for the role of narrative in drama. 8. Jenny Kitzinger cites an analysis of The Times that demonstrates that the media coverage of sexual abuse in Britain increased by three hundred per cent between 1985 and 1987 and that attention shifted toward abuse in the family. She also demonstrates the ubiquity of the issue in TV programmes. Documentary programmes such as Brass Tacks (BBC 2, July 1987), Everyman (BBC 1, 1988), Antenna (BBC 2, 1989) and Horizon (BBC 2, 1989) first dealt with sexual child
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2. Trauma Drama
9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
abuse. By the early 1990s, the issue began to appear in regular police, hospital, and legal dramas as well as in soap operas (2001: 92). Tal assesses the intense media coverage, which was also achieved through women’s testimonial books, less positively: “while making incest a topic of public discourse has not reduced the number of children who are incestuously abused, it has resulted in the ‘medicalization’ of incest and the ‘creation of an incest industry’ ” (1996: 195). In a similar vein, Louise Armstrong argues that “incestas-illness had overwhelmed and swallowed feminism. The result was the mass infantilisation of women” (1996: 207). Moreover, experts note that notwithstanding the immense media attention on sexual child abuse, the research on treatment of post-traumatic disorders in children remained poorly funded and underdeveloped in the 1990s (van der Kolk and McFarlane 1996b: 568). The expansive body of texts of Trauma Drama on sexual child abuse additionally encompasses the following plays: Anna Reading’s Kiss Punch Goodnight (1988), Alan Bennett’s TV dramas A Lady of Letters and Soldiering On (both 1988), David Spencer’s Killing the Cat (1990), Sarah Daniels’s Head-Rot Holiday (1992) and The Madness of Esme and Shaz (1994), Kay Trainor’s Bad Girl (1992), Spin/Stir’s show Naming (1994), Scarlet Theatre Company’s Paper Walls (1994), Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal (1994), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), Dennis Lumborg’s One Fine Day (1995), Mike Cullen’s Anna Weiss (1997), Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (1997), Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997), Alan Bennett’s TV drama Playing Sandwiches (1998), Jessica Townsend’s Terms of Abuse (1998), Clare McIntyre’s The Maths Tutor (2003), Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome (2003), Debbie Tucker Green’s Born Bad (2003), David Hines’s Nymphs and Shepherds (2004), Helen Cooper’s Three Women and a Piano Tuner (2004), Clare Pollard’s The Weather (2004), and Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s Fresh Kills (2004). While Dowie called attention to the experience of abused boys in the Trauma Drama of the 1990s, Michael Wilcox’s play Massage from 1986 not only preempted the ‘trend’ of dealing with sexual child abuse, but also already presented male victims of sexual child abuse at this early stage of Trauma Drama. When the issue of child abuse became more prominent in the public debate and the theatre after the Cleveland affair in 1987, most plays focused on female victims of abuse. Whereas plays like Dowie’s (and Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking) have subverted the gendering of the victim of sexual child abuse, Trauma Drama has very rarely, for example in Clare Pollard’s recent The Weather (2004), presented a female perpetrator of abuse. The ignorance of female sex offending in Trauma Drama corresponds to the neglect of the issue on a larger scale. Myriam S. Denov’s Perspectives on Female Sex Offending: A Culture of Denial (2004) is among the first studies who attempt to fill this void. Sleeping Nightie is henceforward indicated as ‘SN’ after quotations. According to Florence Rush (1980), eighty to ninety per cent of all perpetrators in the USA are male. Howard N. Snyder (2000) even gives the figure of ninety-six per cent. Tal indicates that ninety per cent of sexually abused children in the USA are female (1996: 189). See Segal for similar statistical numbers about sexual child abuse in the UK (1999: 75–7). Cf. also the statistics published by the British organisation Rape Crisis, according to which ninety per cent of reported offenders are male (www.rapecrisis.co.uk). Statistics concerning sexual child abuse are problematic, as they rely on reported cases of abuse and can only estimate the number of unknown cases. In addition, the definition of what actually counts as sexual child abuse remains shifting. Although the absolute numbers of the statistics
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242 Notes
14.
15.
16.
17. 18. 19.
20. 21. 22.
23.
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need to be used with caution, all statistics indicate a decisive gender imbalance concerning the perpetrators and the victims of sexual child abuse. The sisters display the central dilemma of abuse victims as identified by therapists such as Herman, namely “the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud” (1992: 1). As in the case of Johnson’s Hysteria, the reviewers found the play’s combination of realistic and non-realistic plot elements as well as its blending of serious topics with comic dialogue and action either remarkable or problematic. While some praised Hardie for her unusual combination (for example Jim Hiley, who commended Hardie’s “juggling of sexual politics, bedroom farce and domestic melodrama” 1989: 1554), others criticised the play for its implausibility (Arnott 1989) and for its straightforward feminist politics. Thus, Milton Shulman called Sleeping Nightie “another of those plays indicating that nothing gives women more satisfaction than hating men” (1989: 1554) and added that “Miss Hardie certainly displays in this uneven work enough imaginative and witty talent to prove that when she shakes off her man-hating obsession, she will write a very good play” (ibid.: 1555). Daniels declares herself a feminist playwright but posits that her straightforward feminist attitude has come to be seen as antiquated in the ‘post-feminist’ period of the 1990s and endangers the success of her plays (Daniels 1991: ix, Goodman 1996: 99). The other two plays are Head-Rot Holiday and The Madness of Esme and Shaz, which are published together with Beside Herself in Sarah Daniels: Plays 2. For a sociological study of this tendency, see Lees 1997. Again, a number of reviewers found this mixture problematic. For example, Charles Osborne criticised Daniels’s Beside Herself for its oscillation “between a number of styles and genres, among them fantasy, documentary, Ortonesque black comedy and farce”, adding that the play “finally comes to rest as adult soap opera” (1990: 469). Other critics acknowledged and praised the combination of humour and trauma, such as Lyn Gardner, who stated that “Daniels triumphantly picks her way through the rocky territory of low humour and high emotion to create a delicately balanced drama fuelled by rage and suffused in humanity” (1990: 468). See also the chapter “Laughing Matter” on Daniels’s use of humour in her dramatic work in Julia Rösler’s unpublished PhD thesis Acting the Part: Gender and Performance in Contemporary Plays by Women (2000: 222–68) and Starck’s consideration of comedy in British women’s plays of the 1980s and 1990s (2005: esp. 252–4). Beside Herself is henceforward indicated as ‘BH’ after quotations. Eve’s words (BH 106). Freud and Breuer adopted Janet’s concept of dissociation in their Studies on Hysteria. In his later writings, Freud distanced himself from the concept and assumed that repression rather than trauma-induced dissociation was fundamental to hysteria. Van der Kolk and van der Hart point out that repression presupposes a vertically layered model of the mind, as that which is repressed is pushed downward. In contrast, dissociation assumes a horizontally layered model, according to which the traumatic memory is contained in an alternative stream of consciousness (1995: 168). A number of psychiatrists argue that multiple personality disorder is an “expectancy-guided display” (Spanos 1994: 160), in which the patient simulates
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24.
25.
26.
27.
his or her multiple personalities. The disease thus raised the same suspicions of malingering as hysteria did about a century earlier. Hacking illustrates that the interrelation of disease and culture is as important in the case of multiple personality disorder as it was in the case of hysteria: The “alters nowadays tend to be stock television characters, often assuming even names from sitcoms or crime serials [ ]. Indeed the rapid changes of character remind one of nothing else than ‘zapping’ ” (1992a: 11). Thus, the patients not only imitate the content of the medium (the characters), but also its idiosyncratic form (the possibility of ‘zapping’) – like Augustine, who not only copies the postures of the earlier hysterics as shown on photographs, but incorporates the black-and-white materiality of the pictures when she loses her ability to see colours. Like hysteria and like post-traumatic stress disorder, multiple personality disorder is not only a nosological category of contemporary psychiatry and psychology, but is also used by cultural theory as a trope. See Glass 1993 for a critical assessment of postmodern theory’s employment of multiple personality disorder as a metaphor, which, according to Glass, “misses entirely the terrible psychological costs of a fragmented existence” (59) and excludes “the victims’ voices in the nihilistic critiques of such theorists as Deleuze and Guattari and, more broadly, postmodernists such as Baudrillard and Lyotard” (158). See also von Braun and Dietze 1999 for an account of multiple personality disorder as disease and cultural trope. ‘Eve’ is the pseudonym for a patient called Chris Costner Sizemore. Her psychiatrists, Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, published her case in a best-selling book entitled The Three Faces of Eve in 1957, which also became a movie. Using a pseudonym, Sizemore published her own account of her past in The Final Faces of Eve (Lancaster 1958) and later criticised her doctors in I’m Eve (1977); in 1989, she published yet another ‘multobiography’ called A Mind of My Own (Hacking 1995: 40–1). The reviews reflect the fact that the double invites a wealth of interpretations: The critics characterised Eve as “hysterical” (Armistad 1990: 469), as a “mad woman” (Osborne 1990: 469), as “the tormented child still within her” (Morley 1990: 468), and as Evelyn’s “tense and asexually waiflike [ ] shadow self” (Taylor 1990: 470) as well as her “lachrymose younger self” (Hiley 1990: 470). Although critics such as Osborne considered the double an “unnecessary and confusing frill” (1990: 469), other reviewers who criticised Daniels’s play for its negative portrayal of men acknowledged the protagonist’s doubling as “a powerful central image: as she went through the motions of her middle-class, do-gooding existence, the fiftysomething heroine was orbited and monitored by an anorexic young waif. This was her repressed, vengeful, sexually abused self, who repeatedly mocked the older woman for her emollience” (Taylor 1999: n. pag.). “Bertha [ ] is Jane’s truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress” (Gilbert and Gubar 1999 [1979]: 360). As Heinrich Lausberg explains, the border between metaphor and metonymy is permeable, since a clear-cut differentiation between the deferral of the nomination as typical of metonymy and the leap typical of metaphor is untenable (1990 [1963]: 77). Roman Jakobson’s structuralist theory identifies the metaphoric and metonymic poles as the two principal modes of thought in general human behaviour and in language: “A competition between both devices, metonymic and
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28.
29.
30. 31. 32.
33.
34. 35. 36.
37.
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metaphoric, is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social” (2003 [1956]: 46). Drawing on her work with victims of child abuse, Kitzinger argues that the stereotypical and destructive representation of victims of child abuse in the media can be devastating for actual victims (2001: 98) and points out that “[s]urvivors of abuse emphasize the need for positive and realistic media representations” (ibid.: 102). Cf. Hacking’s statement: “our whole value system has been affected by the trajectory of child abuse [ ], with a compelling new constellation of absolute moral evil: child abuse” (1991: 259–60, see also Hacking 1992b: 194). Butterfly Kiss is henceforward abbreviated as ‘BK’ after quotations. Nagy has been permanently living in London since 1992 and now holds British citizenship (Sierz 2001: 49, Aston 2003: 110). The butterfly metaphor recurs throughout the play; for example, Sloan in a lecture describes the fragility of the lepidoptera and their defensive reaction to injury. His account is reminiscent of the child’s dissociative reaction to the trauma of child abuse: “The Lepidoptera are not able to resist attack with the strong jaws or hard shells of other insect orders. Instead, they make cases in which they live during critical periods” (BK 76). Nabokov similarly plays with intertextual allusions in Lolita, in which Humbert’s first teenage love is called ‘Annabel Lee’, in reference to Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘Annabel Leigh’. Sally’s and Jenny’s words (BK 51). On the memory play, see Szondi 1963: 22–31, Brunkhorst 1980, Glomb 1997: esp. 29–32, and Krieger 1998: 153. David Scanlan (1988: Chapter VII, especially 39–41) differentiates between linear and mosaic plots. In contrast to the linear plot, the mosaic plot is used to show “that human purpose is indefinable or inconsistent, that people may be unaware of the obstacles in their lives, and that showdowns settle nothing” (ibid.: 3); “The word mosaic, used in this context, is intended to express a process whereby a series of seemingly random images of action accumulate, by the final curtain, into a finely detailed composite impression” (ibid.: 40). Reflecting the lack of affection and gentleness in the Ross family, the cover of the first publication by Nick Hern Books shows a lonely, narcissistic, and faked butterfly kiss – a woman with artificial eyelashes caresses her mirror image. Lacan uses the notion of rétrovisée to describe the subject as a “retroversion effect by which the subject, at each stage, becomes what he was (to be) [était] before that, and he ‘will have been’ is only announced in the future perfect tense. [ ] [I]n this ‘rear-view’, all that the subject can be sure of is the anticipated image – which he had caught of himself in his mirror – coming to meet him” (2002b [1960]: 306). Dowie started her theatrical career as a dancer, and worked as a stand-up comedian before writing plays. Easy Access (for the Boys) was written with an Arts Council bursary that Dowie was awarded in 1995. The original production, directed by Dowie, was very successful, even with ‘insiders’: Dowie was invited by the Samaritans to perform the piece at their annual conference and asked by the family Support Unit in Bradford whether they could use the play in their group-work with abused teenagers (Taylor 1999: n. pag.). Easy Access (for the Boys) is the second play by Dowie that deals with childhood trauma. Her performance piece Adult Child/Dead Child presents a mentally disturbed person (whose
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40. 41. 42. 43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
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49. 50. 51.
gender remains undeclared) who suffers from his/her childhood experiences of emotional neglect and physical abuse. Dowie was awarded the Time Out Theatre Award and the London Fringe Award for her ‘stand-up-theatre plays’. For Dowie’s ambivalent relationship to ‘institutionalised’ feminism, see Dowie in Langridge and Stephenson (1997: 160–1). Easy Access is henceforward abbreviated as ‘EA’ after quotations. The solo version, directed by Colin Watkeys, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1999 and was afterwards shown at the New End Theatre in Hampstead. For an assessment of female stand-up comedy, see Gray (1994: 115–85). See Auslander 1993 for a discussion of female stand-up comedy in the US context. Character configuration means the combination of characters that are on stage together at a particular point of the play (Pfister 1997 [1977]: 235–40). Because all characters were constantly on stage in the original production of Easy Access (for the Boys) and retreated to the back of the stage when they were not part of a particular situation, the term in this context means the combination of characters involved in the front-stage action. Cf. also Starck 2005, who compares Beside Herself and Easy Access and suggests seeing Gary as Michael’s alter ego: “Although Michael does not suffer from a split personality, his friend Gary can be seen as his alter-ego [ ]. Gary embodies the hurt and angry child in Michael, which he does not allow to surface” (184). Cf. Janice Haaken, who shows that typecasting the survivor as an innocent victim whose troubles derive entirely from her abuse is a “political construction of the victim [that] works against complex truths and honest self-exploration” (1994: 123). The legal debates about sexual child abuse in the 1990s have often been linked to the question of whether trauma is to be understood as an external event that comes to an already existing ego to shatter its autonomy. In order to prosecute the perpetrators of child abuse, it is necessary not only that traumatic memories can be trusted and thus used as evidence against the abuser, but also that there is a direct link between the traumatic symptoms and their origin (Leys 2000: 263). Bennett Simon has argued that by the mid-1990s, “any work that points to earlier life traumatic experiences [on the victim’s side] runs the risk of being denounced as ‘blaming the victim’ ” (1995: xv). Wilcox’s Massage, which was written twenty years before The Sugar Syndrome, also depicts the perpetrator of abuse in an almost sympathetic way. However, the play presents the victim’s perspective with equal emphasis. Steven Fechter’s stage play The Woodsman, which was staged in New York and released as a movie starring Kevin Bacon in 2005, also belongs to this trend in Trauma Drama. The History Boys (2005) is an exception, as the abuser figure is sentimentalised and remains uncharged. Cf. Middeke 2006. On the flimsiness of the evidence supporting the widespread axiom of the ‘inheritance’ of child abuse, see Hacking (1995: 60–1). Other dramatists of Trauma Drama employ the model of ‘abuse breeding abuse’ in a more straightforward way. In The Madness of Esme and Shaz, Daniels traces the sexually abusive behaviour of Shaz’s father back to his childhood, when his own father sexually molested him. In contrast, Shaz’s aunt Esme, who herself had been sexually abused, does not imitate this exploitative behaviour. Lavery’s Frozen also suggests a cycle of familial abuse, however in a more problematic way. In her play, the serial killer of several children was himself abused as a child (Aston 2003: 55).
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52. In the psychological and psychiatric study of trauma, the issue of delayed traumatic memories remains a contested issue. Whereas psychiatrists like van der Kolk insist on the possibility that traumatic experiences are fully forgotten for certain periods of time (cf. for example 1996b: 567), Elizabeth Loftus’s The Myth of Repressed Memory (1994) argues against the notion of recovered memory and Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (1994) by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters highlights the dangers of recovered memory therapy. 53. Abraham, a practicing psychoanalyst and literary scholar, and Torok, a clinical psychoanalyst, argue that traumatic material is stored in an impenetrable and inarticulable space, a crypt, in the psyche. For Abraham and Torok, the question of whether this encrypted material is realistic or fantasmatic is irrelevant: “What if the ‘crime’, the secret content we choose to call Reality, were nothing but fantasy? Or, at the very least, a case of faulty recognition after the fact of an innocent past? [ ] We shall not linger over the discussion of the fantasmatic or realistic origins of the tomb and of its unnameable content. In either case, the tomb’s content is unique in that it cannot appear in the light of day as speech” (1994a [1971]: 159) and affects the subject’s psyche. Thus, Abraham and Torok argue that both events and stories can be encrypted. 54. Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill is an exception to this rule. 55. Kubiak notes that the imprint of traumatic memories onto the body is common to both trauma and Stanislavskian approaches to acting, which operate through the activation of an emotional memory (2002: 174). This raises the question of whether the theatrical enactment of traumatic flashbacks can create similar neurobiological processes to when they are acted out. The analysis of questions like these might offer an approach which brings together acting theory and neurobiology in a mutually enlightening way. 56. The suspension of a clear-cut opposition of reality and fiction is characteristic of postmodern drama in general; although not all of the plays discussed can be considered typically postmodern plays, postmodern drama and Trauma Drama share a number of characteristics. For an account of postmodern drama, see Simard 1984. For a conceptualisation of the role of trauma in post-postmodern, neorealistical American drama, see Zapf 1998. The plays’ distortion of realism is also connected to the playwrights’ feminist agenda. Feminist playwrights tend to subvert dramatic realism, which they regard as a mode which supports the patriarchal conception of ‘reality’. The narrative strategies of realism, such as linearity, closure, and the exclusively male agent, have also been criticised by feminist theatre theoreticians such as Case and Lynda Hart: “The heterosexist ideology linked with its stage partner, realism, is directed against women [ ] Cast the realism aside – its consequences for women are deadly” (Case 1989: 297); “Within the psychosemiotics of theatrical realism, the ‘death-space’, space of absence, negativity, unrepresentability, is where femininity most often takes place” (Hart 1993: 5; cf. also Hart 1989, Diamond 1990–91, Aston 1995b, esp. 35–44, Aston 1999: 6–8, Brown 1999, Hurley 2003). 57. Peter Buse connects Kane’s Blasted to contemporary trauma theory and suggests a relationship between the Russian Formalist argument that art should estrange things as well as to Felman and Laub’s similar request that historic accounts of trauma should contest any automatism of perception (Buse 2000: n. pag.): “we underscore the question of the witness, and of witnessing, as nonhabitual, estranged conceptual prisms through which we attempt to
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apprehend – and to make tangible to the imagination – the ways in which our cultural frames of reference and our preexisting categories which delimit and determine our perception of reality have failed, essentially, both to contain, and to account for, the scale of what has happened in contemporary history” (Felman and Laub 1992: xv). 58. While Fuchs calls the avant-garde theatre which she considers ‘postmodern’, Hans-Thies Lehmann suggests the term ‘post-dramatic’, which focuses on the play’s aesthetics rather than the period they were created in or the philosophy that informs them (1999: 27–32).
3. The Drama of Melancholia 1. The contemporary Drama of Melancholia includes plays such as Alan Ayckbourn’s Haunting Julia (1994), Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water (1996), Sebastian Barry’s Steward of Christendom (1995) and Our Lady of Sligo (1998), Kate Atkinson’s Abandonment (2000), Dermot Bolger’s The Passion of Jerome (1999), Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy (2001), David Farr’s Night of the Soul (2002), Ioanna Anderson’s Words of Advice for Young People (2004), and Connor McPherson’s Shining City (2004). In most of these plays, a dead relative or beloved partner returns as a ghost figure, in a manner similar to the staging of the ghost in the plays I discuss. For example, Jones’s play, a rewriting of the paradigmatic Renaissance play on melancholia, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, stages the impact of the father’s death on the son, while The Memory of Water shows the effects a mother’s death has on her three daughters. In a few of these plays, the ghost figure at first seems unrelated to the protagonists and sometimes is even a figure from a different historical epoch. These figures, however, stand for a particular loss that the protagonist has experienced and repressed, such as the loss of an infant daughter in The Passion of Jerome or the loss of the lover in Abandonment. 2. The history of melancholia has been examined in detail in Stanley W. Jackson’s seminal study Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (1986). Jennifer Radden’s anthology The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (2000) assembles extracts from the most prominent medical, artistic, psychoanalytic, and sociocultural theoretical accounts of melancholia up to Kristeva and offers introductions to these extracts. See also Walther 1999 for a similar collection. 3. As various scholars developed differing and often contradictory models of humour theory, the theory explained above is a belated construction of a unified theory, which synthesises varied approaches and models (Wagner-Egelhaaf 1997: 19). 4. There is a tendency to use the term ‘melancholy’ for the healthy disposition and ‘melancholia’ for the pathological state (Parker 2002: 1444), but this terminological differentiation is not consistent. For example, Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy describes pathological conditions with the term ‘melancholy’, whilst Freud’s theory of ‘melancholia’ begins with the examination of a pathological form of mourning but eventually considers melancholia as a general human mechanism of identification. Throughout my study, I use the term ‘melancholia’, except in citations and allusions to citations, where I speak of ‘melancholy’. 5. The exhibition ranges from ancient bronzes to Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Goya, and Edward Hopper in a show that conceives of melancholia as
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7.
8.
9. 10.
11.
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the ‘universal point of reference’ of European art ever since antiquity (cf. http://www.neue-nationalgalerie.de/, 12.02.2006). As Jackson points out, Freud was not the first to assume a causal relationship between bereavement and melancholia, but he was the first to attempt to specify the difference between mourning and melancholia (1986: 321). Cf. Jackson 1986: 311–24 on the relationships between grief, mourning, and melancholia. Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman states that women are incapable of melancholia, because melancholia presupposes access to cultural production and expression, through which loss can be represented. Irigaray argues that women are denied such access (1985 [1974]: 71). In contrast, Silverman considers women constitutively melancholic. Her chapter “Disembodying the Female Voice” in The Acoustic Mirror argues for the existence of feminine melancholia, not as a pathology but as a psychic condition which is inherent in the female version of the positive Oedipus complex (1988: 152). In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989 [1987]), Kristeva states that psychical ‘matricide’ is the only remedy for melancholia, which derives from an unsuccessful separation from the mother. See also Schiesari (1992: 63–95), who traces the gendering of melancholia in the work of female psychoanalytically informed scholars. Rather than assuming a renewed interest in melancholia, however, Schiesari argues that the major eras of melancholia, the Renaissance and the present, are the historical boundaries of a great age of melancholia whose edges are coterminous with “the historic rise and demise of ‘the subject’ as the organizing principle of power and knowledge” (1992: 2). Cf. also Heidbrink 1994 and 1997 on the relationship between modernism and melancholia and Derveaux 2002 on melancholia in the context of postmodernism. For a recent account of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia and its relationship to mourning, see Strasser 2003. Cf. Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 255–7 and 337–8 for Freud’s shifting theory of narcissism. From 1921 onwards, Freud comes to consider the narcissism that is part of the ego’s identification with an object as ‘secondary narcissism’, and assumes a stage of ‘primary narcissism’ in the child’s development, which as yet lacks relationships to and cathexes of objects and in which the child consequently cathects its own self with its entire libido. Cf. the attempt of Laplanche and Pontalis to differentiate between ‘identification’ and the related terms ‘introjection’ and ‘incorporation’: “Incorporation and introjection are prototypes of identification – or at any rate of certain modes of identification where the mental process is experienced and symbolised as a bodily one (ingesting, devouring, keeping something inside oneself, etc.)” (1973 [1967]: 207). As Laplanche and Pontalis point out, Freud’s notion of primary identification is logically inconsistent, because “strictly speaking, it is difficult to ascribe primary identification to an absolutely undifferentiated and objectless state” (1973 [1967]: 336). Freud in his later writings such as “Über die weibliche Sexualität” (“Female Sexuality”, 1931) revised his theory and claimed that “[i]t is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred of the other as a rival” (1931E: 229; cf. 1931: 521). Cf. the substantial feminist literature on the topic, which criticises the patriarchal conceptualisation of the complex. Following the critique of Freud by Melanie Klein, feminist theory has revised the role of the mother, such as in Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is
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14.
15.
16. 17. 18.
19.
Not One, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978), and Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Butler draws on feminist critiques of identification but challenges their “hegemonic position within the emerging canon of feminist theory”, which tends “to reinforce precisely the binary, heterosexist framework that carves up genders into masculine and feminine” (1990: 84). The relationship between biological bisexuality and Freud’s theory of psychological bisexuality is contested both in Freud’s own œuvre and in writings on Freud’s theory; cf. Bowie 1992 for an overview. In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997: 132–98), Butler expands the theory of melancholy which she already developed in Gender Trouble (1990: 73–91) and Bodies that Matter (1993a: 93–120). Freud himself in 1930 acknowledged that he had not yet fully elucidated his theory of bisexuality (1930: 465–6, n2/1930E: 106, n3). Butler adopts the term foreclosure/Verwerfung from Lacanian vocabulary to designate a disavowal which constitutes the subject. In contrast, the identification with the parent of the opposite sex that takes place during the Oedipus complex triggers mourning, which allows for the libidinal detachment from the parent and reattachment to a fresh object (Butler 1990: 88– 9). Butler does not explain in which phase of the child’s development she would place this loss of the same-sex parent, “that preheterosexual history” (ibid.: 91), but suggests that it takes place before the Oedipal incest taboo and thus seems to ascribe the prohibition of homosexuality to a pre-oedipal phase. As Kirsten Campbell points out, Butler’s argument at this point lacks coherence (like Freud’s notion of primary identification, cf. note 12 above). Within the psychoanalytic logic, the homosexual prohibition cannot be pre-oedipal because it would then be prior to sexual difference and, in consequence, before the differentiation between homosexuality and heterosexuality (2005: 89). It is, moreover, important to note that Butler’s rewriting of Freud’s narrative only applies to the formation of gender identity in the heterosexual hegemony (Butler 1997: 140). Campbell argues that Butler does not provide a theory of the formation of homosexual gender identity: “Butler does not explain how it is possible to become anything other than a normative heterosexual subject [ ]. Ironically, Butler fails to provide an account of the constitution of homosexual desire within heterosexist norms because she does not properly engage with the insistence of psychoanalysis that such norms always fail, that normative identity is never fully established, and that the subject is not coherent” (2005: 89). A passage from Butler’s Undoing Gender shows, however, why Butler has not utilised the inherent failure of normative subjectivity: “The problem with this response is that the form of the norm, however uninhabitable, remains unchanged, and though this formulation would have us all be equally deviant, it does not break through the conceptual structure that posits a singular and unchanging norm and its deviant departures” (2004: 159). In the chapter “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification” in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler theorises homosexual gender melancholia as the acting out of unresolved grief for the heterosexual object. Moreover, she acknowledges that there may be alternative accounts of both homo- and heterosexual genders which are not founded on repudiation. Abraham and Torok’s theory, which I have explained briefly in the previous chapter on trauma, argues that traumatic material is stored in an impenetrable
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20. 21.
22. 23.
24.
25.
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and inarticulable space, a crypt, in the body or the psyche. Concerning melancholia, Abraham and Torok propose that the melancholic incorporates loss into an “intrapsychic crypt” which is sealed off within the unconscious (1994b [1972]: 130). They argue that incorporation, like castration and the primal scene, is a “privileged fantasy” which “merely simulates” dealing with loss: “in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost, as if it were some kind of thing. Two interrelated procedures constitute the magic of incorporation: demetaphorization (taking literally what is meant figuratively) and objectification (pretending that the suffering is not an injury to the subject but instead a loss sustained by the love object)” (ibid.: 126–7). In the context of Butler’s argument, Abraham and Torok’s thought – which Butler does not elaborate on – serves to reinforce Butler’s claim that our cultural notion of the body might be the product of such a ‘demetaphorization’, of taking literally a culturally enforced ‘fantasy’. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Freud 1923E: 26; cf. 1923: 253). Proof was first produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 and had a successful and critically acclaimed run on the Broadway. The play, directed by Daniel Sullivan, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards (for the best play, the best actress, Marie-Louise Parker, and the best director), the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Drama Desk Award. The first British production in 2002 at the Donmar Warehouse was directed by film director John Madden, who had not worked in the theatre since 1986. After its London run, Madden adapted Proof for film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow, who also played the role of Catherine at the Donmar. The film version of Proof was released in autumn 2005. Proof is henceforward indicated as ‘P’ after quotations. Cf. Porter 1995: 416–19 on melancholia and the genius as well as Porter 1987: 60–81 and Lange-Eichbaum and Kurth 1985 more broadly on madness and genius. Misogynist scholars like Otto Weininger explicitly argued that genius is a form of heightened masculinity, from which women are excluded (1903: 144). Cf. Sigrid Nieberle’s “Beautiful Minds – Psychopathologie im Narrativ des Künstlerfilms” (2002) on these and other films which negotiate the interface of artistic genius and ‘madness’. Some English translations write ‘those’ instead of ‘men’, but (Pseudo-)Aristotle explicitly speaks of ‘êndre˚’: “Diå t¤ pãnte˚ ˜soi peritto‹ gegÒnasin êndre˚ μ katå filosof¤an μ politikØn μ po¤hsin ¥ t°xna˚ fa¤nontai melagxoliko‹ ˆnte˚, ka‹ oÑi m¢n oÏtv˚ Àste ka‹lambãnesyai to›˚ épÚ mela¤nh˚ xol˚ érrvstÆmasin” (1965 [ca. 350 B.C.]: 154, 953a, ll. 10–12). There is widespread doubt whether Aristotle is the author of this passage; it is usually ascribed to Theophrast (Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl 1964: 32, Wagner-Egelhaaf 1997: 19). In the Middle Ages, melancholia lost its status as an ennobled disease. The Christian church used the term ‘acedia’ to designate feelings and behaviours that are considered unusual, undesirable, and indicative of a need for remedial attention. Acedia was associated with tristitia, desperation, and melancholia, and came to be referred to as the cardinal sin of sloth in the late Middle Ages (Jackson 1986: 65–6).
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27. However, Burton did not consider melancholia as an exclusively male disease. His recommendations for therapy contain gender-specific treatment for women as well; cf. for example Burton 1621c: 95. 28. According to Schiesari, the alliance of extraordinary talent, masculinity, and melancholia can still be detected in Freud’s psychoanalytic account of melancholia. Schiesari argues that “Mourning and Melancholia” displays “more than a casual complicity” (1992: 5) with the Renaissance discourse, as Freud tacitly admires the described melancholics and likewise genders the disorder: “Melancholy today seems an archaism in Freud’s text, one that hearkens back to those great male avatars of Renaissance humanism: Ficino, Dürer, Tasso, Hamlet, Burton” (ibid.: 61). As Freud argues that “he [the melancholic] has a keener eye for the truth than other people” (1917aE: 246; cf. 1917a: 432), Freud not only affirms the notion of melancholia as an inscription of heightened insight but also latently defines the affliction as a male disease through his use of the male pronoun. Schiesari’s assumption that melancholia as an ‘elite illness’ was culturally coded as male implies that melancholia was no longer estimated a ‘male’ disease or temperament when it was not culturally valued. Joanna Piciotto points out that this was for example the case in the early eighteenth century, when “melancholy became less the sign of the thinking man than the feeling woman or feminized ‘man of feeling’ ” (2001: n. pag.). Similarly, Showalter 1985, Shorter 1992, and Porter 1995 argue that since the eighteenth century, melancholia has become culturally connoted as feminine. 29. Cf. the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the diagnostic criteria for paranoid schizophrenia: “The essential feature of the Paranoid Type of Schizophrenia is the presence of prominent delusions or auditory hallucinations in the context of a relative preservation of cognitive functioning and affect” (American Psychiatric Association 2003: 312–14, here 313). For the medical as well as social histories of schizophrenia, see the respective chapters by J. Hoenig and Trevor Turner in Berrios and Porter 1995: 336–59. Emil Kraeplin first introduced the diagnostic entity as ‘dementia praecox’ in 1893, but Kraeplin’s concept was met with resistance rather than acceptance in the medical world. Egon Bleuler in 1911 introduced the term ‘schizophrenia’ for the disease (Hoenig 1995: 336 and 342), which subsequently came to be accepted as a diagnostic category throughout Europe and North America. Hoenig also traces the relationship of schizophrenia to mania and melancholia, which were the most firmly established diagnostic categories in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries (cf. for example 338, 341). 30. Many reviews of the Donmar production compared the play to the movie directed by Ron Howard. For example, Taylor noted Robert’s “marked resemblance to John Nash, the schizophrenic hero of the movie A Beautiful Mind” (2002: 619) and Coveney described Proof as “a sort of inside-out A Beautiful Mind, with the Russell Crowe character [that is, John Nash] pushed to the edge of a younger person’s attempt to live in the wake of unruly, genetically transmitted, genius” (2002: 620). Cf. also Spencer 2002: 622, Woddis 2002: 625, and Morley 2002: 625. 31. The association of madness and genius is the most prominent feature of the cultural negotiation of schizophrenia in films like A Beautiful Mind and Auburn’s play. Nonetheless, schizophrenia has had and still does have versatile different cultural meanings, among which the notion of a ‘split personality’, which is
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32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
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closest to the etymology of the term, has maybe been most influential. As Turner point out, “different attributions and changing aetiologies have constantly obscured its [schizophrenia’s] meaning and its social role” (1995: 349). Cf. Oskar Diethelm and Thomas F. Heffernan, who suggest that cases considered as melancholia in the Renaissance today would be diagnosed as schizophrenia (1965: 19). Cf. also Lange-Eichbaum and Kurth 1985: 209 on medical research that regarded schizophrenia as a sub-form of melancholia and Jackson 1986: 157 on the similarities of nineteenth-century melancholia and twentieth-century schizophrenia. Jackson concludes, “In early centuries, clearly a wider rage of conditions was included within those boundaries than has been the case since the early nineteenth century. By modern standards, a portion of those earlier cases would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenia” (1986: 399). He points out that Kraeplin in the late nineteenth century divided melancholic symptoms into affective disorders (grouped together as manic-depressive disease) and thought disorders (grouped together as dementia praecox and later as schizophrenia) and that this differentiation still moulds the clinical understanding of these diseases (ibid.: 400). Studies such as Schiesari’s have argued for the general gendering of depression in cultural and medical discourse. Schiesari emphasises that the lexical shift from ‘melancholia’ to ‘depression’ in medical history meant the development from a culturally valued, male affliction to a culturally devalued, debilitating female disease (1992: 16). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, major depressive disorders are twice as common in adolescent and adult women than in men of the same age groups and adult women are twice or three times as likely to develop dysthymic disorders as men (2003: 372 and 378). Clinical research does not, however, support the cultural gendering of schizophrenia as male; the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders confirms only “a slightly higher incidence of schizophrenia in men” (ibid.: 308). This vagueness has been criticised unequivocally and unanimously by British reviewers, who compared Auburn’s evasiveness to Frayn’s and Stoppard’s successful attempts to make difficult theorems plausible for audiences. Cf. Billington 2002: 619, de Jongh 2002: 621, Gross 2002: 620, Brown 2002: 620, Macaulay 2002: 621, Clapp 2002: 621, Bassett 2002: 622, Spencer 2002: 622, Nightingale 2002: 624, and Edwards 2002: 624. Although Catherine develops in the course of the play from the altruistic caretaker to the self-confident mathematical genius, both Catherine’s nursing and the writing of the proof have taken place before the play’s action sets in. Catherine’s transformation is therefore foremost a question of how and when the play distributes information that allows audiences to detect and believe in Catherine’s mathematical genius. Cf. for example Michael Coveney’s review for the Daily Mail: “Grungie Gwynnie has been seen slopping around during the rehearsal period for this riveting play about maths and madness in sandals, windcheaters and dungarees. She was probably just getting in the mood for the first scene” (2002: 619). Carr, whom critics assess as “one of the most powerful, haunting voices on the contemporary Irish stage” (Leeney and McMullan 2003a: xv), was awarded the Susan Blackburn Award for Portia Coughlan in 1997. Carr’s plays are performed all over Europe, in the United States and in Canada (Sihra 2003: 20). In 2004, Portia Coughlan was revived at the Abbey Theatre as part of celebrations for the
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38.
39. 40. 41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
Abbey’s hundredth birthday. This production of Portia Coughlan was directed by Brian Brady. Cf. Ludwig Haesler 1985 for an account of anniversary reactions, which mean reactions to the anniversary of a particular experience, commonly the death of a beloved person. All subsequent references to the play text in brackets will be indicated by ‘PC’. They refer to the revised play text in Marina Carr: Plays One (Carr 1996a). The off-stage character Mahon is said to have heard Gabriel sing as well, but, as Portia remarks, he perceives every dead person (PC 235). Portia’s vision is reminiscent of Aristophanes’s explanation of the power of Eros in Plato’s Symposium, in which he tells the myth of original physical oneness of all lovers (1961 [360 B.C.b]: 543–4, 189d–191d). In contrast to Aristophanes’s story, however, which offers a universal explanation of the power of love, Portia creates a private myth of such original oneness in the womb, which she considers exclusive for her bond with Gabriel. Incest is common in Portia’s family. Towards the end of the play, the audience learns that Portia’s parents are half-siblings and that Portia’s grandmother was the daughter of her ostensible brother. The deconstruction of the figure of the natural mother can be read as a critique of Ireland because the romanticised mother figure in Irish theatre has traditionally been viewed as a personification of the nation. Therefore, Portia can be understood as “Yeats’ Cathleen Ní Houlihan re-imagined” (Sihra 2000: 260). The gendercrossing of Portia and Gabriel is reflected in the comic relationship of the stock characters Maggie May Doorley, Portia’s aunt, “an old prostitute” in “[b]lack mini skirt, black tights, white high heels, sexy blouse, loads of costume jewellery, fag in her mouth” (PC 195), and her husband Senchil Doorley, “half the size of her, skinny, fuzzy, lovely” (PC 195). Senchil is characterised as sensitive and exaggeratedly concerned and caring; and Maggie claims that “Senchil wasn’t born, he was knitted on a wet Sunday afternoon” (PC 240). In contrast, Maggie’s toughness and (sexual) straightforwardness appear so unfeminine to her environment that the barman Fintan considers her male (PC 243). This reflection of the tragic gendercrossing in the relationship of Senchil and Maggie May is an example of Carr’s general mixture of comic and tragic elements. As Carr emphasises in an interview, she sees humour as an indispensable feature of her tragic writing (in Stephenson 1997: 153). Tom MacIntyre’s description of her writing likewise argues that “Carr’s music of shameless comedy counterpoint[s] Gothic despair [ ]. Unquestionably, the comedy is what makes the dark of the piece bearable. It’s a comedy which has a wide range, varying from the domestic zany to the blackest of black, and finding many tints in between” (2003: 80). For detailed assessments of Carr’s tragic writing, see Wallace 2000 and 2001. Stefan Busch highlights the connection between black humour and melancholia, as the notion of ‘black humour’ is connected not only terminologically to the black bile of humour theory, but also in medical theory, which considered laughing and exhilaration as symptoms of melancholia (2004: 54). Matt O’Brien argues that a figure of the absent, fantasy male such as Gabriel recurs throughout Carr’s œuvre, in which female protagonists despise the male characters for not being able to live up to their idealised visions of masculinity: “the women in Carr’s plays often have ‘perfect’ men in their pasts (imaginary pasts, quite possibly), leaving the men depicted at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to negotiating successful relationships with the women” (2003: 203).
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46. For example, Portia sits in a transparent chair that has the shape of a bowl in Klaus Weise’s production at the Theater Oberhausen. Assuming – to the sound of Gabriel’s singing – bizarre poses in this chair, her larger-than-life shadow in the transparent bowl resembles an embryo and thus visualises Portia’s regressive desire of fusion with Gabriel. 47. Kane started writing Cleansed before the staging of her debut Blasted; the writing process took her three and a half years (Stratton 1998: 27). Cleansed’s director Macdonald also directed the original productions of Blasted and Psychosis 4.48. In view of the intense debate Kane’s plays have caused in the media as well as the substantial body of academic work on Kane, Ken Urban characterises her “the most talked-about, least seen British playwright” (2001: 36). Cf. Urban 2001 also for an assessment of the British, European, and North American reception of Kane. In contrast to Furse, Morrissey, Daniels, and Dowie, Kane did not consider herself a feminist playwright: “I’m not writing about sexual politics. The problems I’m addressing are the ones we have as human beings. An over-emphasis on sexual politics (or racial or class politics) is a diversion from our main problem. Class, race and gender are symptomatic for societies based on violence or the threat of violence, not the cause” (Kane in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 134). 48. While Tinker’s name on the one hand is an allusion to the Daily Mirror critic Jack Tinker, who had condemned Kane’s debut Blasted in his notorious review entitled “This Disgusting Feast of Filth” (Tinker 1995), it at the same time is a telling name, as Tinker is the meddler in the fates of the “patients” (Saunders 2002: 96); by no means reliable, he is a highly ambivalent figure who oscillates between torturer and saviour, between drug dealer, doctor, and voyeur. Attempting to clarify Tinker’s status, the production team of the original staging by the Royal Court Theatre in 1998 decided that Tinker is himself an intern of the institution, who was made an executive of its anonymous rulers. Stuart MacQuarrie, the actor playing Tinker in the original production, reports that “we came to the idea that he was also incarcerated but was given certain powers within the institution” (in ibid.: 184). 49. All subsequent references to the play text in brackets will be indicated by ‘C’. 50. Cf. Foucault: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (1995 [1975]: 201). 51. Like Carr, Kane has acknowledged the influence of Shakespearean imagery on her play and affirmed in an interview that Grace’s appropriation of the brother’s identity through clothing is modelled on Viola’s disguise in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Tabert 1998: 18–19): “I my brother know / Yet living in my glass. Even such and so / In favour was my brother, and he went / Still in this fashion, colour, ornament, / For him I imitate” (3.4.344–8). Through the recurrent references to Shakespeare’s plays, Trauma Drama and the Drama of Melancholia allude to a time when mental disorders were of similarly great cultural significance as today. As Neely 1991, Schiesari 1992, and Neumeier 1992 show, the theatre played a particularly important role in the early modern cultural process of differentiating and gendering mental disorders. 52. For example, Rod quotes Carl’s earlier vow “I will always love you. I will never lie to you. I will never betray you. On my life” (C 4 and C 35) and
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Woman repeats Graham’s “I think about you when I / And I wish it was you when I ” (C 41). In addition, the figures use repetitive speech in their most anguished moments. When Tinker tortures Carl, he screams “Not me please not me don’t kill me Rod not me don’t kill me ROD NOT ME ROD NOT ME” (C 11). The voices that comment on Grace’s torture assert that Graham cannot save her by repeating “never” eleven times, interrupted by the cracks of Grace being hit (C 25). Likewise, Robin reiterates “Grace” six times before his suicide. 53. For Butler, the subversive potential of melancholia resides not only in the realisation that we live in “a culture of gender melancholy” (1997: 140), but that the disavowed melancholic incorporation is part of contingent regulatory power operations. The exclusion of homosexuality is neither obligatory nor natural, but is the result of a social ideal which inscribes the subject with the ideal of reproductive heterosexuality through the Oedipus complex (Grosz 1992: 130): “If melancholia appears at first to be a form of containment, a way of internalizing an attachment that is barred from the world, it also establishes the psychic conditions for regarding ‘the world’ itself as contingently organized through certain kinds of foreclosures” (Butler 1997: 143). Butler’s theory thus robs psychoanalytic theory of its claim to universality and a-historicity. Throughout her writing, and perhaps most explicitly in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Butler challenges the psychoanalytic assumption that the entry into the symbolic relies on the menace of castration. She argues that this notion derives from one particular, late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century “anachronistic structuralist account of kinship” (2000a: 140) which cannot be universalised (see particularly ibid.: 136–81). According to Butler, theories such as Freud’s and Lacan’s are wrongly based on “fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans” (ibid.: 142). 54. In view of the massive physical violence depicted in Cleansed, Aston argues that “Kane offers a new perspective to the Butler style of 1990s gender philosophising, one that contests the ‘normalising’ forces through which the sexes are kept in place, by making us feel the violence of the symbolic masculine” (2003: 80–1). 55. The original production of Cleansed achieved the simulation of pain by staging the violence exerted by Tinker in a stylised way that highlighted the theatrical fabrication of violence and never strived for the imitation of real physical violence. For instance, when Tinker cuts off Carl’s tongue, Tinker put a film spool into Carl’s mouth, pulled out an elastic red rubber band, and then cut it with “the large pair of scissors” demanded by the stage directions (C 12). Likewise, instead of having Rod fall from a great height, as the stage directions require (C 11), audiences were startled by a punching bag that fell from the ceiling. Notwithstanding the foregrounding of their unharmed bodies, the actors in the original production reacted to these devices with the enactment of pain. For example, the actor playing Carl, James Cunningham, enacted the pain caused by the tongue amputation and the actor playing Rod, Danny Cerqueira, entered the stage, lay down on the punching bag, and enacted the pain of having fallen from such a height. The intensity with which the actors of the original production achieved the enactment of the pain of the figures is not to be confused, however, with an attempt at simulating the performer’s ‘authentic’ pain, with the “ ‘rawness’ in acting style that simulates real emotional pain from the performer”, which has, according to Saunders, already “produced a cliché regarding Kane’s work” (2003: 101).
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56. For example, Buse argues that Kane’s plays do not work through traumata but have themselves a traumatising impact (2000: n. pag.). Likewise, von Hoff argues that in Kane’s play, text and onstage action have a traumatic effect on audiences (2003: 351–2; cf. also Wallace 2004 and Opel 2002: 164–5 on the traumatic effect of Kane’s plays on audiences). In an interview with the Guardian, Kane describes the importance of theatre almost in terms of a traumatic impact: “Theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts. No doubt that is why I keep coming back, in the hope that someone in a dark room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind, leaving a mark more permanent than the moment itself” (1999: 12). Whether or not Kane’s theatre can be considered ‘traumatic’ depends of course on the respective definition of trauma. While a traumatising impact in the clinical sense – that is, the causation of post-traumatic stress disorders in audiences – can hardly be generally claimed for her plays, the argument that they can possibly appeal to primary traumata of the spectators seems more convincing to me. 57. According to Kane, her dramatic work has been strongly influenced by her reception of Jeremy Weller’s Mad, in which several actors who had experienced mental illness acted out their psychic scenarios (Saunders 2003: 99); Weller’s production hence came close to the mimetic form of Trauma Drama suggested in Chapter 2. Saunders claims that the “legacy from Mad, namely a ‘rawness’ in acting style that simulates real emotional pain from the performer, has already produced a cliché regarding Kane’s work” (2003: 101). As I elaborate above, I think that there is an important difference between “rawness in acting style” and the simulation of “real emotional pain from the performer”. 58. Cf. Opel’s description of Zadek’s production at the Hamburger Kammerspiele in 1998 (2002: 175). Because Kane explicitly required the violence in Cleansed to be staged in a stylised way (Kane in Tabert 1998: 20), she was dissatisfied with Zadek’s staging, which attempted to portray the violence as realistically as possible (Merschmeier 1999: 108). 59. While Lacan defines castration as a reduction of the phallic function and understands the phallus symbolically and not as equivalent to the penis, Cleansed takes this psychoanalytical ‘figure of castration’ literally, as Tinker amputates Carl’s penis, thus punishing him for his inability to assume heterosexual masculinity. Cf. Lacan: “We know that the unconscious castration complex has the function in a knot: [ ] the instating in the subject of an unconscious position without which he could not identify with the ideal type of his sex” (2002a [1958]: 271). 60. If, as according to Aston, Cleansed makes palpable the violence inherent in the assumption of gendered identity by literalizing and visualizing the abstract workings of psychic subject formation and by depicting discursive heteronormative compulsions as physical aggression (2003: 89–93), the visualisation undertaken in the final scenes might render the psychoanalytic fantasms grotesque. The use of a fake penis in productions of Cleansed might appear ridiculous rather than as a severe form of punishment and/or the fulfilment of Grace’s melancholic incorporation. Depending on its theatrical realisation, Cleansed could become a macabre satire on psychoanalysis and heteronormativity and thus evoke the audience’s ‘horrid laughter’ (see Brooke 1979 for a conceptualisation of the audience’s ‘horrid laughter’ that nonetheless acknowledges the pain and violence) rather than having the shocking, nightmarish, and possibly even traumatic atmosphere of the original production and the 2005 revival by the Oxford Stage Company,
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to which the reviews testified: “Cleansed is a nightmare of a play, it unreels somewhere between the back of your eyes and the centre of your brain with an unpredictable but remorseless logic. As with a nightmare, you cannot shut it out because nightmares are experienced with your whole body” (Peter 1998: 564); “It is hard to conceive of a nightmare quite so nightmarish as this one” (Tyrell 2005: 1482).
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Primary literature Auburn, David. 2001. Proof. New York and London: Faber and Faber. Carr, Marina. 1996a. “Portia Coughlan”. In Marina Carr: Plays One. London: Faber and Faber, 1999, 187–255. ——. 1996b. Portia Coughlan. London: Faber and Faber. Daniels, Sarah. 1990. “Beside Herself”. In Sarah Daniels: Plays Two. London: Methuen, 1994, 95–188. Dowie, Claire. 1998. “Easy Access (for the Boys)”. In Easy Access (for the Boys) & All Over Lovely. London: Methuen, 1–59. ——. 1999. “Easy Access (Solo Remix)”. In Plays International 14(9), 36–45. Furse, Anna. 1997. Augustine (Big Hysteria). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Hardie, Victoria. 1990. “Sleeping Nightie”. In First Run 2: New Plays by New Writers. Selected and introduced by Kate Harwood. London: Nick Hern Books, 97–161. Johnson, Terry. 1994 [1993]. Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis. London: Methuen. Kane, Sarah. 1999. Cleansed. London: Methuen. Morrissey, Kim. 1994. Dora: A Case of Hysteria. London: Nick Hern Books. Nagy, Phyllis. 1994. “Butterfly Kiss”. In Phyllis Nagy: Plays One. London: Methuen, 1998, 47–102. Shakespeare, William. 1596. “The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice”. In The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: Norton, 1997, 1090–145.
Secondary literature Abraham, Karl. 1912. “Ansätze zur psychoanalytischen Erforschung und Behandlung des manisch-depressiven Irreseins und verwandter Zustände”. In Abraham. Psychoanalytische Studien. Vol. II. Ed. Johannes Cremerius. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1971, 146–62. Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. 1994a. “The Topography of Reality: Sketching a Metapsychology of Secrets”. In Abraham and Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. I. Ed. and Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 157–61. [originally published in 1971 as “La Topique réalitaire: Notations sur une métapsychologie du secret”. Revue française de psychanalyse 35(5–6), 277–82]. ——. 1994b. “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation”. In Abraham and Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. I. Ed. and Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 125–38. [originally published in 1972 as “Deuil ou mélancolie, introjecter-incorporer”. Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 6, 11–113]. American Psychiatric Association. 2003. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Fourth Edition. Text Revision. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association. 259
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Reviews Reviews of Augustine (Big Hysteria) Kingston, Jeremy. The Times, 13.06.1991. In Theatre Record XI(12), 702.
Reviews of Beside Herself Armistad, Claire. Financial Times, 06.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 469. Coveney, Michael. Observer, 08.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 469. Gardner, Lyn. City Limits, 12.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 468. Hiley, Jim. Listener, 19.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 470. Kingston, Jeremy. The Times, 05.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 469–70. Morley, Sheridan. Herald Tribune, 18.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 468. Osborne, Charles. Daily Telegraph, 06.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 469. Taylor, Paul. Independent, 06.04.1990. In Theatre Record X(7), 470.
Review of Blasted Tinker, Jack. Daily Mail, 19.01.1995. In Theatre Record XV(1/2), 42–3.
Reviews of Butterfly Kiss Billington, Michael. Guardian, 18.04.1994. In Theatre Record XIV(8), 448. Hagerty, Bill. Today, 14.04.1994. In Theatre Record XIV(8), 445–6. Kingston, Jeremy. The Times, 15.04.1994. In Theatre Record XIV(8), 447–8. Peter, John. Sunday Times, 17.04.1994. In Theatre Record XIV(8), 446. Tinker, Jack. Daily Mail, 14.04.1994. In Theatre Record XIV(8), 445.
Reviews of Cleansed Peter, John. Sunday Times, 10.05.1998. In Theatre Record XVIII(9), 564. Tyrell, Rebecca. Sunday Telegraph, 13.11.2005. In Theatre Record, XXV(23), 1482.
Reviews of Easy Access (for the Boys) Edwards, Jane. Time Out, 11.02.1998. In Theatre Record XVIII(3), 121. Taylor, Paul. The Independent, 07.04.1999. The Wednesday Review.
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Works Cited 281
Review of Forty Winks Evans, Lloyd. Spectator, 13.11.2004. In Theatre Record XXIV(23), 1426.
de Jongh, Nicholas. Evening Standard, 06.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 966. Edwards, Jane. Time Out, 08.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 968. Gross, John. Sunday Telegraph, 05.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 965. Hoyle, Martin. Mail on Sunday, 05.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 966. Nightingale, Benedict. The Times, 04.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 968. Peter, John. Sunday Times, 12.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 966–7. Rutherford, Malcolm. Financial Times, 06.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 969. Smith, Neil. What’s On, 08.09.1993. In Theatre Record XIII(18), 967.
Reviews of Portia Coughlan Billington, Michael. Guardian, 18.05.1996. In Theatre Record XVI(10), 609–10. O’Toole, Fintan. “Figures on a Dark Landscape”. The Irish Times 02.04.1996. Spencer, Charles. Daily Telegraph, 16.05.1996. In Theatre Record XVI(10), 610.
Reviews of Proof Bassett, Kate. Independent on Sunday, 19.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 622. Billington, Michael. The Guardian, 16.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 623–4. Brown, Georgina. Mail on Sunday, 19.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 620. Clapp, Susannah. Observer, 19.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 621–2. Coveney, Michael. Daily Mail, 16.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 619–20. de Jongh, Nicholas. Evening Standard, 16.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 620–1. Edwards, Jane. Time Out, 22.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 624. Gore-Langton, Robert. Express, 17.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 619. Gross, John. Sunday Telegraph, 19.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 620. Macaulay, Alastair. Financial Times, 17.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 621. Morley, Sheridan. International Heralds Tribune, 29.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 625. Nightingale, Benedict. The Times, 16.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 624. Shenton, Mark. Sunday Express, 19.5.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 620. Spencer, Charles. Daily Telegraph, 16.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 622. Taylor, Paul. The Independent, 16.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 619. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Proof Positive”. The Observer, 12.05.2002. Woddis, Carole. 17.05.2002. In Theatre Record XXV(10), 625.
Review of The Secret Death of Salvador Dali Shore, Robert. Time Out London, 14.07.2004. In Theatre Record XXIV(14), 888.
Reviews of Sleeping Nightie Arnott, Paul. Time Out, 25.10.1989. In Theatre Record IX(23), 1555. Brown, Georgina. Independent, 25.10.1989. In Theatre Record IX(23), 1555. Hiley, Jim. Listener, 16.11.1989. In Theatre Record IX(23), 1554. Shulman, Milton. Evening Standard, 20.11.1989. In Theatre Record IX(23), 1554–5.
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Reviews of Hysteria
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Page references in brackets refer to the notes. Abraham, Karl, 166 Abraham, Nicolas, 156, 169 acting out, 20, 24, 50–1, 221 and enactment, 24, 156, 217, 221 see also hysteria; melancholia; trauma Althusser, Louis, 19, (228) Amis, Martin, 83 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 29, 177, (248) Anderson, Laurie, 107–8 Andrews, Benedict, 204 Anna O., 73, (231) Anna O., 41, (232) Aragon, Louis, 85 Artaud, Antonin, 58, (235) Assmann, Aleida, 97 Aston, Elaine, 7, 8, 16, 17, 43, 59, 90, 114, 115, 127, 134, 140, 207, 210–11, (229, 245, 246, 247, 256, 257) Auburn, David Proof, 5, 161, 163, 164, 170, 171–84, 186, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 212, 214, 219, 222–3, (251, 252, 253) Augustine, 29–31, 42–60, 218, (235, 244) Austin, John L., 11–12 Baer, Ulrich, 2, 32, 46, 48, 51, 132, (235) Bailey, Marion, 118 Baraitser, Lisa, 19, 221 Barry, Sebastian, 161, (248) Batault, Émile, 32 Baudrillard, Jean, 13, (244) Bauer, Ida, see Dora (alias Ida Bauer) Bauman, Richard, 18 Bayly, Simon, 19, 221
Beautiful Mind, A, 172, 176, 177, (251, 252) Beizer, Janet, 40, (232) belatedness, see trauma Benmussa, Simone, 41 Bennett, Alan, (242) History Boys, The, 100, 153, (246) Playing Sandwiches, 153–4, (242) Bentham, Jeremy, 199 Bernhardt, Sarah, 33, 38, 54 Berressem, Hanjo, 3, 94, 97, 131, 137, 139 Berridge, Elizabeth, 130 Binet, Alfred, 93 Blackmore, Richard, 29 Blau, Herbert, 18–19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 221, 222 Bolger, Dermot, 161, (248) Bourneville, Désiré-Magloire, 30, 42, 48, 53 Braun, Christina von, 2, 6, 32, 40, 56, 60, 217, 219, (233, 240, 244) Breton, André, 85 Breuer, Josef, 34–5, 37, 42, 73, 93, 99, 110, (231, 232, 243) Studies in Hysteria, 34–5, 73, 110, (239, 243) Bronfen, Elisabeth, 3, 6, 27, 29, 30, 36, 41, 47, 50, 61, 62, 68, 83, (230, 232, 233) Brontë, Charlotte, 122 Brouillet, André, 32, 46–7, (234) Buñuel, Luis, 87 Burton, Robert, 29, 177, (248, 252) Butler, Judith, 4–24, 44, 56, 59, 72, 91, 108, 109, 121, 123, 124, 139, 141, 159, 160, 162–70, 181, 197–8, 203, 205–15, 217, 218, 220, 221–3, (226–9, 250, 251, 256) 283
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Index
Butler, Judith – continued Bodies that Matter, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 108, 109, 121, 169, 210–11, (226, 227, 228, 250) Gender Trouble, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 59, 72, 121, 124, 167–8, 223, (227, 228, 250) “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, 11, 13–15, 21–4, 123, (227, 229) Psychic Life of Power, The, 21, 121, 167–8, 205, 214, (229, 250, 256) Undoing Gender, 141, 206, (250) Campbell, Beatrix And All the Children Cried, 100 Carlson, Marvin, 4, 10, 12, 17, 18, 33, (226) Carr, Marina Portia Coughlan, 8–9, 70, 161, 170, 171, 184–98, 199, 200, 201, 203, 205, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 214, 222, 223, (241, 253–4) On Raftery’s Hill, 100, (247) Caruth, Cathy, 93, 95, 96, 97, 105, (241) Case, Sue-Ellen, 13, 22, (247) Chambers, Ross, 11 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 2, 29–34, 40, 41, 42–60, 63, 64, 68, 77, 82, 85, 89, 145, 218, (230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238) Charlton, Jud, 143 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 4, 162, 213 Cheyne, George, 29 Churchill, Caryl, 101 Cixous, Hélène, 2, 6, 40, 41, 42, 43, 56, 58, 61, 73, 217, 219, (238) Portrait de Dora, 41, 42, 58, (231, 235) Clément, Catherine, 2, 40, 73 Coen, Ethan and Joel Man Who Wasn’t There, The, 83 Cooper, Helen Three Women and a Piano Tuner, 157, (242) Crews, Frederick, 36, 155, 157 Crimp, Martin, 101 cross-dressing, see drag Cullen, Mike Anna Weiss, 155, (242)
Dalí, Salvador, 76–89, 90, (239, 240) Daniels, Sarah, (242, 243, 246) Beside Herself, 8, 100, 101, 114–28, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140, 142, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 206, 216, 219, 220, 223, (243, 244) depression, see melancholia Derrida, Jacques, 11, (232) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 2, 39, 93, 100, 162, (225, 252, 253) Diamond, Elin, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 34, 37–9, 56, 118, (247) Didi-Huberman, Georges, 2, 31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, (230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235) dissociation, 2, 38, 39, (243) see also trauma doppelgänger / double, 38, 43, 49, 52, 58, 90, 95, 117–20, 121, 122–4, 125, 127, 147, 156, 180, 213, 215, 216, 220, (235, 241, 244, 246) Dora (alias Ida Bauer), 36, 40, 60–75, 128–30, 168, (236, 237, 238, 239) Döring, Tobias, 7, 38, 43, 62, 72, 75, 79, 88, (232, 233, 237) Dowie, Claire Easy Access, 8, 100, 101, 125, 139–56, 157, 160, 216, 219, 220, 223, (225, 242, 245, 246) drag, 16, 24, 57, 59, 91, 190, 200, 214, (228) Eco, Umberto, 11 Edgar, David Jekyll and Hyde, 118 Edwards, Jane, 139, (240, 253) Elyot, Kevin Forty Winks, 101, 153 Emin, Tracey, 94 Eng, David L., 163 Ensler, Eve Vagina Monologues, 158, (242) Enterline, Lynn, 3 Erdle, Birgit R., 3 Etchells, Tim, 112 Export, Valie, 107–8 false memories, 68, 90, 155, 157–8, (247) Farrell, Kirby, 1, 3
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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284 Index
Ficino, Marsilio, 176, (252) Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 5, 11, 17, 21, 222, (225, 226, 229) Flanagan, Bob, 24 Fliess, Wilhelm, 35, 66, 68, 84, (238, 240) Foucault, Michel, 22, 199, (227, 230, 231, 255) Freedman, Barbara, 13, 252, 256 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 7, 31, 34–8, 40, 41, 42–90, 91, 93, 95–6, 97, 98–9, 106, 109, 110, 119, 128–9, 132, 135, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164–71, 181, 185, 189, 192–3, 194, 196, 198, 216, 218, 219, (227, 231–40, 243, 248, 249, 250, 251) “Delusions and Dreams”, 80 “Ego and the Id, The”, 164–7, 192, 193, (251) “Essays on Sexuality”, 165–6, 189 “Fragment”, 34, 36, 60–75, (237, 238) “Hysterical Fantasies”, 59 Jokes, 88–9, (240) “Moses and Monotheism”, 81, 84, 119, (239, 240) “Mourning and Melancholia, 164, 166, 185, 194, 196, (252) “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”, 98 “Sense of Symptoms, The”, 81 “Some Character-Types”, 37–8, 77 Studies in Hysteria, 34–5, 73, 110, (239, 243) “Totem and Taboo”, 87 Fuchs, Elinor, 158, (248) Furse, Anna Augustine, 6–7, 28, 31, 36, 38, 41, 42–60, 63, 64, 66, 70, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 89, 90–1, 117, 118, 136, 145, 215, 218, 219, 223, (225, 230, 233, 235, 238) Galen of Pergamon, 28 Garner, Michael, 113 gender gender identity, 4, 5, 9, 15, 16, 24, 59–60, 163, 170, 205, 212, 213, 222, 223, (228, 250) gender melancholia, see melancholia
285
gender norm, 9, 14, 15–16, 18, 22, 23, 29, 40, 45, 56, 59, 60, 70, 72, 82–3, 91, 102–3, 106, 108, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120–5, 127, 129, 133, 136, 137, 138, 142, 159, 160, 167–70, 182, 185, 189, 191, 197–8, 199, 204–6, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 219, 220, 223, (226, 227, 228, 229, 238, 250, 257) gender parody, 10, 40, 66, 69–73, 123–4, 219, 223 gender performativity, see performativity gendercrossing, 170, 179–84, 189–92, 199–205, 209–12, (235, 254) Gilbert, Sandra, 122, (244) Gilroy, Paul, 4, 162 Goldberg, Whoopi, 24 Goldin, Nan, 94 Goldstein, Jan, 30, 32–3, (230, 231) Goodman, Henry, 88 Goodman, Lizbeth, 6, 8, 62, 70, 73, 114, (232, 243) Gould, Timothy, 11 Green, Debbie Tucker Born Bad, 158, (242) Gubar, Susanne, 122, (244) Hacking, Ian, 3, 94, 99, 100, (241, 244, 245, 246) Hampton, Christopher, 41, (232) Hardie, Victoria Sleeping Nightie, 5, 100, 101, 102–14, 120, 125, 128, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 149, 150, 155, 159, 160, 219, 220, 223, (242, 243) Harrower, David Blackbird, 100 Harrower, Natalie, 185 Herbert, Jeremy, 199, 207 Herman, Judith Lewis, 7, 36, 96, 97, 100, 111, 123, 126, 127, 150, (243) Hines, David Nymphs and Shepherds, 153, (242) Hippocrates, 28, 161–2 Hoff, Dagmar von, 87, 94, 201, (241, 257) Hoodith, Christine, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, (236) Hunter, Dianne, 36, (232)
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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Index
286 Index
Ibsen, Henrik, 37–9, 61, 118, (232, 237) A Doll’s House, 52, 61, 73–5 Rosmersholm, 37–8, 76–7
Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 31–2, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 83 Irigaray, Luce, 2, 6, 39–40, 43, 217, (232, 249) Jackson, Shannon, 22–3, 56, (226, 229) Jackson, Stanley W., 3, 161, 177, (248, 249, 251, 253) Jameson, Louise, 104 Janet, Pierre, 93, 97, (243) Jelinek, Elfriede What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband, 74, 239 Johnson, Terry Hitchcock Blonde, 6 Hysteria, 6, 28, 36, 38, 41, 75–89, 90, 91, 102, 111, 113, 117, 216, 218, 219, 223, (239, 240) Insignificance, 6 Jones, Ernest, 35, (233) Jones, Henry Arthur, 37, 38 Jones, Judith And All the Children Cried, 100 Kane, Sarah Blasted, 101, (242) Cleansed, 8, 161, 170, 171, 175, 184, 188, 198–212, 213–14, 221, 222–3, (226, 241, 255, 256, 257, 258) Katz, Stephen, 44, 47, 51, 230 Kazanjian, David, 163 Kear, Adrian, 112 Kingston, Jeremy, 43, 115, 138 Kitzinger, Jenny, 100, 127, 139, (241, 245) Kobayashi, Toshiaki, 175, 183, 187, 195 Kofman, Sarah, 40 Kolk, Bessel van der, 96, 97, 111, 118, 147, (242, 243, 247) Kristeva, Julia, 4, 13, 40, 162, 202, (248, 249) Kubiak, Anthony, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, (247) Lacan, Jacques, 39, 41, 59, 66, 137, 139, (227, 228, 232, 236, 245, 250, 256, 257) Laub, Dori, 111–12, (241, 247, 248) Lavery, Bryony Frozen, 100, 153, (246)
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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Hynes, Garry, 184, 186 hysteria and acting out, 50–6, 69, 81, 89, 91, 127, 218 as empowerment, 40, 58, 59, 60, 70–3, 75–6, 89–91, 217, 218–19, 223 and farce, 75–6, 87–9, 91, (240) as female malady, 6, 27–9, 31–2, 47, 56–8, 61, 89–90, 103, 114, 164 and feminism, 2, 6, 7, 31, 39–41, 42–3, 56, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 73, 74, 75, 130, 217, 219, (232, 236, 237, 239, 241) and (gender) performativity, 4–7, 20–1, 24, 44, 45, 49, 56–60, 69–70, 72, 75, 77, 80, 88–91, 216–19 and gender instability (hysteric as hors-sexe), 59–60 Grande Hystérie, 2, 28, 29–34, 37, 38, 42–60, 77, 82, 85, 91, 217, 218, (230, 231, 234) history of, 2, 6, 27–42, 73 hystericised realism, 49–50, 52, 67–8, 85–7, 90, 215–16 and Ibsenite realism, 37–8, 61–2, 73–5, (232, 237) as ‘image-ination’, 6, 44–50, 51, 56, 91, 217–18 and imitation, 6, 10, 34, 47, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 60, 69–73, 74, 76–81, 82, 88, 90, 91, 219, (234) male hysteria, 2, 28, 31, 32–3, 47, 68–9, 74, 76, 81–7, 89, 90 and melodrama, 33–4, 37, 38, 52, 218 as mode of genuine female expression, 6, 7, 39–40, 43, 44, 56–60, 217, 218, 219 New Hysterians, 2, 41, 44, 82 Petite Hystérie, 34–8, 61, 68, 73–5, 217–18 and sexual child abuse, 35–6, 43, 50–5, 64–6, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84–5, 86, 88, 90, (232, 235, 240) and surrealism, 44, 76, 82, 85–7, 90, 216 and transference, 63–8, 72, 91
leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, Une, 32, 46, (234) Leeney, Catherine, 9, 190, 191, (253) Lepenies, Wolf, 4 Lew, Mike, 142 Leys, Ruth, 93, 97, 99, 139, (225, 246) Luckhurst, Roger, 2, 93, 94–5, 100, 156 Lumborg, Dennis One Fine Day, 155, (242) Lyotard, Jean-François, 13, (244) Macdonald, Jame, 198, 199, 201, 203, 207, 211, (255) McFarlane, Alexander C., 97, 118, 147, (242) McInnis, Jo, 69, 70 McIntyre, Clare Maths Tutor, The, 155, (242) McKenzie, Jon, 12, 13, 16, 23 McMullan, Anna, 9, (253) Madden, John, 172, (251) Mandeville, Bernard de, 29 Marquez, Martin, 211 Masson, Jeremy Moussaieff, 36, 77 melancholia, 208–12, 213–14, 221–3 and acting out, 167, 169–70, 181, 183–4, (250) androgynous anatomy of, 189, 197, 199–205, 209–12, 214 and culture, 1–2, 3–4, 161–4 and and feminism, 163, 165, 182, (249–50) as ego formation, 164–6, 168–9, 194, 196–7 as excess of black bile, 3, 161–2, 163, 176–7 gendering of, 9, 163–4, 171, 176–83, 221–2 gendering through, 4–5, 9, 20–1, 24, 163, 167–70, 179–84, 185, 189–92, 197–8, 201–12, 213–14, 216–17, 221–3 and genius, 162, 164, 170, 171, 176–83, 212, (251, 252) and hallucination of ghost figures, 161, 164, 166, 171–6, 178–9, 183, 184, 185, 186–9, 192, 194, 196–7, 199–200, 201–3, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 214, 216, 222–3 history of, 9, 161–71, 176–7
287
and homosexuality, 167–70, 205–9, 210–11, (250, 256) melancholic ambivalence, 166, 192–4, 196–7 melancholic incorporation, 9, 21, 162 as physical incarnation, 164, 168–70, 189–90, 197–8, 198, 201, 203–5 as psychic introjection, 164–70, 171, 172, 180–1, 184, 186–9, 192–4, 198, 200, 201, 203, 205, 209, 212. 213, 217, 221–2 melancholic realism, 171–6, 183, 186–9, 194, 200, 202, 210–13, 215, 216 and repetition, 24, 169, 173, 176, 183, 193–4, 195, 202–3, 209 and schizophrenia, 3, 173, 177–9, (252–3) and temporality, 174–5, 183–4, 185, 186, 187, 189, 193, 194, 195–6, 197, 210, 212, 216 as traumatic formation, 3, 162, 183 and working through 183–4, 214 Micale, Mark S., 2, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 41, 82, (230, 231, 232, 238) Moffat, Tracey, 94 Mollon, Phillip, 36, 155 Morris, Shona, 49 Morrissey, Kim Dora, 6, 28, 36, 38, 41, 60–75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 89, 90, 91, 117, 129, 215, 218, 219, 223, (236, 237, 238, 255) Munro, Rona, 101 Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita, 128, 130–1, 135, (236, 245) Nagy, Phyllis Butterfly Kiss, 8, 100, 101, 128–39, 142, 150, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 216, 219, 223, (237, 238, 245) Nasar, Sylvia, 177–8 Nash, John, 177–8, (252) Neilson, Anthony, 101 Nichols, Peter Passion Play, 118 Nightingale, Benedict, 85, 88, 182, (253) Nolan, Christopher Memento, 83
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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Index
O’Mealy, Joseph H., 153–4 Ono, Yoko, 107, 108 Opel, Anna, 8, 199, 202, (257) Orlan, 24 Others, The, 172
Ridley, Phillip, 101 Robert-Fleury, Tony, 47, (234) Robinson, Nicholas, 29 Roth, Philip, 83 Rubik, Margarete, 7, 43, 60
Paltrow, Gwyneth, 182, (251) Pascal, Julia, 101 performance and the body, 19–20, 21, 91, 156, 186, 203–4, 211, 213, 222–3 and double consciousness, 12, 14, 17, 18, 21–5, 123, 187–8, 201, 213, 220, 222 and feminism, 21, 56, (229, 247) and rehearsal, 12, 17–19, 20, 24, 44, 45–6, 49, 79, 221–2 relationship to performativity, see performativity and repetition, 12, 15, 17–21, 221 performativity and relationship to theatrical performance, 5–6, 9–25, 44, 112, 156, 218, 221 and speech act theory, 11–12, 14, (227) see also hysteria; melancholia, gendering through; trauma Pimlott, Steven, 128 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 37, 38 Pinnock, Winsome, 101 Pinter, Harold, 101 Plato, 28, (254) Podell, Daniel, 111–12 Porter, Roy, 176, 177, (232, 236, 251, 252) Prebble, Lucy Sugar Syndrome, The, 153, (242) presence (as opposite of representation), 10, 13, 17, 21–3, 24, 58, 91, 127, 218 Price, Morton, 93
Samuels, Diane, 101 Saunders, Graham, 8, 203, (255, 256) Schechner, Richard, 10, 12, (226) Schiesari, Juliana, 3, 9, 162, 163, 164, 176, 177, (230, 249, 252, 253, 255) schizophrenia, see melancholia Schor, Naomi, 3, 163, 189, 201 Searle, John R., 11, (227) seduction theory, 35–6, 42, 77, 81, 84, 86, 89, (232, 240) Segal, Lynne, 100, (242) sexual child abuse, see hysteria; trauma Shakespeare, William, (248, 255) Merchant of Venice, The, 184, 185, 190 Shange, Ntozake For Colored Girls, 158 Shine, 176 Showalter, Elaine, 1, 2, 6, 28, 30, 32, 33, 38, 41, 46, 61, 73, 83, 90, 155, (232, 234, 237, 240, 241, 252) Sierz, Aleks, 8, 136, (226, 245) Sihra, Melissa, 9, 189, 191, 194, 197, (253, 254) Silverman, Kaja, 4, 162, (249) Sixth Sense, The, 172 Smith, Anna Deavere, 24 Smith, Leslie, 87–8 Solomon, Alisa, 11, 17, 22 Spiegel, Josef, 142 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 37, (247) Starck, Kathleen, 8, 127, (243, 246) Stelarc, 24 Stephenson, Shelagh, 161, (248) Five Kinds of Silence, 100 Sydenham, Thomas, 29, (230) Sylvester, Suzan, 207, 211
Ravenhill, Mark Shopping and Fucking, 100, (242) repetition compulsion / Wiederholungszwang, 24, 53, 76, 80, 98, 104, 105, 106, 108–9, 130, 144, 145, 148–9, 154, 173, 219 repetition, see performance resignification, 18, 23, 59, 72, 102, 108–9, 113, 159–60, 220, 223, (228)
Tal, Kalí, 101, 157–8, (242) Torok, Maria, 156, 169, (246, 250, 251) Townsend, Jessica Terms of Abuse, 157, (242) trauma and acting out, 98–9, 101–2, 103–5, 106, 108, 109, 122, 131, 138, 144–6, 148–9, 156–60, 217, 220–1
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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288 Index
art of, 103–14, 159, 220 and belatedness, 95–6, 98, 105, 130, 137, 147, 156, 159, 219–20, 221, (235) and dissociation, 92, 94, 102, 117–20, 123, 156–7, 202, 216, (245) and false memories, 155, 157–8, (247) and feminism, 7–8, 36, 99, 103, 109, 114, 127, (242, 243) and gender (performativity), 4–6, 7, 20–1, 24, 92, 101–3, 106–10, 113, 114, 120–5, 127, 133–6, 138, 142, 156–60, 216, 219–21 history of, 2–3, 93–101 narration as detraumatisation, 34–5, 54–5, 110–12, 125–7, 147–51, 157 impossibility of, 84–5, 97, 132–3, 136–9, 152–3, 154–5, 157 post-traumatic stress disorder, 2, 39, 83, 93–4, 95, 100, (242, 257) and sexual child abuse, 7–8, 94, 96, 99–101, 102–7, 109, 110–12, 114–20, 122, 123–35, 137, 138, 139–58, 219, 220, (241–3, 244, 245, 246) border to seduction, 101, 128–31 of boys, 139–42 paternal love, 126, 139–42, 145, 146, 147, 149–51 sympathetic portrayal of perpetrator, 128, 140, 153–4 see also seduction theory trauma culture, 1–3, 93–5
289
traumatic flashback, 56, 94, 96–8, 102, 106, 130, 132, 156–7, (247) traumatic memory, 36, 91, 96–8, 105, 110, 138, 142, 155, 157, 221, (243, 246, 247) traumatised realism, 112–14, 116, 117–20, 125, 131–3, 136–7, 142–7, 154, 158, 215, 216 unstory of, 99, 125, 136, 138, 157, (241) and working through, 98–9, 105–10, 144–5, 148, 151, 159–60, 217, 220–1, 223 Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, 3, (243, 251) Weigel, Sigrid, 3 Weise, Klaus, 186 Wesker, Arnold Denial, 100, 155–6 Whytt, Robert, 29 Wilcox, Michael Massage, 100, (242, 246) Wilder, Elyzabeth Gregory Fresh Kills, 153, (242) Williams, Roy, 101 Williams, Thomas, 29 Wilson, Snoo, 41, (242) Wittman, Blanche, 46, (232) working through, see hysteria; melancholia; trauma Wright, Jules, 114, 115, 118, 123 Zadek, Peter, 207, (232)
10.1057/9780230288614 - Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, Christina Wald
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Index
