Post-war British Drama: Looking Back in Gender

Michelene Wandor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134773114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Recitazione e provini

In this extensively revised and updated edition of her classic work, Look Back in Gender, Michelene Wandor confirms the symbiotic relationship between drama and gender in a provocative look at key, representative British plays from the last fifty years.
Repositioning the text at the heart of hteatre studies, Wandor surveys plays by Ayckbourn, Beckett, Churchill, Daniels, Friel, Hare, Kane, Osborne, Pinter, Ravenhill, Wertenbaker, Wesker and others. Her nuanced argument, central to any analysis of contemporary drama, discusses:
*the imperative of gender in the playwright's imagination
*the function of gender as a major determinant of the text's structural and narrative drives
*the impact of socialism and feminism on post-war British drama, and the relevance of feminist dynamics in drama
*differences in the representation of the fmaily, sexuality and the mother, before and after 1968
*the impact of the slogan that the 'personal is political' on contemporary form and content.

Part I

Chapter 1
The imperative of gender

Orlando’s tea-party

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.

Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same… Many people … holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove 1) that Orlando had always been a woman, 2) that Orlando is at this moment a man.

(Orlando by Virginia Woolf, 1928)

The story of Orlando is the tale of a person who spends the first half of his life as a man. With the godlike sleight of hand of the novelist, Virginia Woolf waves her magic words and Orlando becomes a woman for the second half of her life. This new life (Orlando is not a transsexual in our modern sense) would remain mere fairy-tale fantasy were it not for the claim that despite the ‘change of sex’, ‘Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity’.

Here we have the classic nature-versus-nurture nexus in a nutshell; and a pretty big nutshell at that. A pretty big nexus as well. Woolf’s contention is that whether Orlando is labelled ‘male’ or ‘female’ according to mere biological characteristics, his or her social character, feelings, desires and actions remain almost the same. For her, biology is by no means everything, and indeed, as far as intellectual and creative capacities go, irrelevant. Woolf’s imagination has often been collapsed into the notion of ‘androgyny’, the idea that somewhere there is a kind of being which transcends gender, or a person who is made up of a mixture of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics (not a totally original idea, since philosophies of yin and yang, and even Jungian ideas, embody the same desire to come to terms with the vexedness of such gendered and apparently oppositional categories). It seems to me that one can just as well use Orlando as the starting point for a very different kind of understanding of the nature of gender-based difference. It is possible to be both biologically gendered (indeed, impossible not to be!), and to explore and interrogate the interface between biological givens and the social constructs of gender within which we all live (differently in different cultures).

Such an approach is provocative and inspiring. It implies that in principle (as well as in reality) there need be virtually no limits to the imaginative capacities of men and women. Whatever the biological differences, social and cultural being admits of a variety of possibilities, uninhibited by biological determinism. In social and political terms, however, this is still a revolutionary thought. To take one crucial example: women give birth, women breast-feed. Although men are fathers, their physiological investment is relatively minor; but this does not mean (and never has exclusively meant) that women are incapable of a variety of work occupations alongside motherhood, nor that men are emotionally or practically incapable of loving and nurturing a child. We can talk of visions of a world in which alongside biological differences of various kinds (procreation, strength, health), systematic and oppressive exploitation and oppression on grounds of gender alone are eliminated.

Somehow, however, this visionary possibility must be balanced with the knowledge that, like it or not, we are each contextualised in our lives, and are necessarily (among other things) socially male or female. This is one of the fundamental starting points in how we experience the world, how we are part of it, and how we imagine with and away from it. In terms of drama, some of the burning questions relate to how possible it is to ‘imagine’ being, feeling, what it is to function, as a member of the opposite sex. Out of this come issues such as whether men can ‘write’ women, or women ‘write’ men. In principle, of course, no writer needs to have lived every experience about which he or she writes, but in practice the point of departure is not quite so apocalyptic, as we shall see from this analysis of post-war British drama.

The imagination is – to stretch a point from Karl Marx – both everywhere in chains (to its material roots), and everywhere free. Social customs – censorship, self-limitation – both compound the challenge and difficulty of re-imagining what is, and imagining or suggesting what might be. To even begin to think about this is to acknowledge that large changes need to be made in our social and gendered division of labour. Within our current social structures an equalising participation in the world of work and family are made as difficult as possible. Maternity and paternity leave are still largely minimal, and childcare facilities and encouragement of the division of labour within families is negligible. It costs money, it implies a fundamental shift not just in the mind-set of working life, but also in notions about the family and the social and sexual division of labour, both emotionally and practically.

We know that in all cultures, at all times, being born male or female implies the possibility of certain social roles, and carries with it assumptions about feelings and identity. The division of labour based on gender shifts across cultures and across time, but it is fundamentally and historically rooted in (but not necessarily ultimately determined by) differences about which we still argue. Are men and women different and equal? Are men and women different and unequal? Or a bit of both? Is it all genetic? Is it all social? Is it a bit of both? Where does the power lie? Do men and women become custodians of different kinds of social and emotional power? Do we like it as it is? Do we want to change it? If so, how much? And how?

We can see from this how profoundly political Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is by implication. To enter fully into her imaginative world and allow it to influence ours, we must take on board these very basic questions about gender and the way gender (aspects of maleness and femaleness) is represented in art. By doing so, we acknowledge that gender roles are as much about power relations as are those of class, race and social position, and with this acknowledgement comes the exciting prospect of investigating and understanding how the gender dynamic works in the imagination. Here the world of the imagination means the world of drama.

To be or nor to be (gendered)

… there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

(Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)

Imagine that Hamlet is a woman. I don’t mean imagine an actress playing the part of Hamlet, á la Sarah Bernhardt, and adequately filling both breeches and the character’s tragic emotional range. I mean, imagine what would happen if Shakespeare’s play was called Hamlette, Princess of Denmark, where the central character does an Orlando and becomes a woman. The text remains the same, except that where relevant, pronouns are changed from ‘he’ to ‘she’, from ‘him’ to ‘her’. This is a relatively simple matter, since English is not a gendered language, but if we do this, what happens to our understanding of the play, our assumptions and its meanings?

In Act 1, Scene 1, the ghost of Hamlette’s father appears with an important message. Here the change of sex nudges the beginnings of a question about historical relationships between men and women. Hamlette is obviously on very comfortable terms with the soldiers. Let us assume that she has always been a tomboy, that she has grown up with them. They know each other well, and she is the only person – indeed, the most relevant person – with whom they can communicate about the ghost.

In Act 1, Scene 2, Hamlette is asked by her mother and uncle/stepfather not to return to her studies in Wittenberg. It is clear that Hamlette is upset at the way her mother has remarried so quickly, thus betraying the memory of her father. When the line ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ comes, its impact is modified by the fact that a woman is generalising about her own sex. When spoken by a man, it could read as an accusation (ironic, perhaps, in view of the male Hamlet’s later vacillations); when spoken by a woman, it might add a tinge of fearful anticipation – i.e. if all women are frail, and her mother is frail, might Hamlette not fear such frailty in herself as well? Social assumptions about frailty being a female characteristic are tapped in different ways, depending on whether they are about a man or a woman, spoken by a man or a woman, to a man or a woman.

Social assumptions about gender are further highlighted when Hamlette confers with fellow students Marcello and Horatio. Further vital questions about historical accuracy arise. First of all, there was no ‘real’ historical figure called Hamlette, unless we can discover a lost Holinshed chronicle which has the alternative story. Second, at the time when the play is set, only men studied at universities. If royal women were educated, they were tutored in private, and then largely according to a code which prepared them for regal wifehood, not combat, courtiership and politics. The friendship, loyalty and camaraderie between Hamlette and Horatio is absolutely central to the story, and we have to ask why Shakespeare is flouting social convention, and showing a woman whose relationship to the world conforms more to male than female social behaviour.

After all, one would expect Hamlette to have been brought up more like Ophelia – reading, singing and embroidering, rather than studying and sword-fighting. Thus we have a play in which a woman is being groomed for the throne, whose intellect is formally trained, and who, if she partakes in ‘manly’ activities, has to dress like a man. Unlike figures in other Shakespeare plays, Hamlette does not cross-dress as a disguise, but simply in order to do the job. We do not know, of course, whether during her time off she reverts to wearing women’s clothes. Does all this mean that the play leans towards satire, allegory, political subversion? Or, if it is dealing in cross-dressing, is it then one of the comedies?

In Act 1, Scene 3, the issue of gender takes on explicit – and daring – sexual implications. Laertes and Ophelia discuss Hamlette and her supposedly fickle affections for Ophelia. Clearly, when Hamlet is a man, heterosexual marriage and the question of a successor to the throne become vital. However, if it is Hamlette who has a relationship with Ophelia, we have (1) an actual or potential lesbian relationship, and (2) a society in which this is seen as the norm, since no one objects to the relationship on these grounds. There is thus a problem about a successor to the throne of Denmark. If, however, ‘love’ between Hamlette and Ophelia is that of a same-sex intense and non-sexual friendship (along Hamlet/Horatio lines), then the tensions which follow are not involved with matters of marriage and succession, but of friendship and some kind of real or imagined betrayal. Or, to follow the ‘frailty’ theme, and take a psychoanalytic tack, Hamlette is displacing on to Ophelia her own ambivalence at being a woman.

In Act 1, Scene 4, the ghost urges Hamlette to avenge the murder of her father by her uncle. A woman is entrusted with the honourable and onerous task of setting a corrupt state to rights, and exacting justice for personal moral transgression. Hamlette is that unusual female heroine, a woman in line for political power, entrusted with consequent moral and ethical dilemmas. She stands out as female in a historical line-up which is overwhelmingly male. As a tragic heroine she is very different from, say, Sophocles’ Antigone. The latter’s dilemmas and actions are conceived as personal; she chooses to avenge the injustice meted out to her brother. Antigone is defending personal honour, not purging the state of a political corruption which has led to instability. She is a member of the ruling class, but she does not rule and does not want to rule. She is a custodian of moral conscience (a common use of women in plays both ancient and modern), not of realpolitik. Hamlette, on the other hand, carries the dimension of personal moral conscience (how to avenge her father), but she does so as a potential king (queen), and her actions therefore have greater overall portent, straddling both the personal and the political, the private and the public.

One could continue through the play and analyse the gender reversals at every moment (which would have to happen if these ideas were applied to a real production), but the main point has been made. Keep the text exactly as it is, change the gender of the main figure and therefore the occasional pronoun, and we have altered the meanings created on the basis of assumptions about history, society and gender contained in the text. We are challenging not only the knowledges and ideologies from which Shakespeare wrote the play, but also those of our own time. It goes – almost – without saying that staging the play on the basis of the above modifications would have to produce relevant performative interpretations.

There are, however, certain limits to these imaginative parameters. If the text remains the same, the attributes of gender (expansive and confining at the same time) are likely to strain at the edges. At the very least, Hamlette is a woman in a man’s world, involved in an ambiguous and anguished relationship with another woman, destined for queenship since there is no visible male successor, and challenged to prove her validity for the job by avenging her father’s murder. It is fortunate that the other characters are not aware she is a man, or she might have been punished for seeking to step outside her given social role. Of course. That’s it. Hamlette is really a woman who has always resented her oppression, and since her mother brought her up as a boy, and therefore a more valid heir to the throne, she is a cross-dressing heroine whose anguish is always private and inner, since no one else must know that she is really a woman. Only Gertrude knows the real truth – hence the painful scene between mother and daughter.

At this point the playwright in me has already taken over from the critic. How does the play end now? With reconciliation between the two women? Telling the court the truth, whereupon they cheer the prospect of having such an honourable queen, who then forges an alliance with Fortinbras? Perhaps she even marries Fortinbras, thus linking nations and families in a right royal tradition. To do this, of course, Hamlette would have to remain alive at the end of the play – and here the imaginative exercise of transformation reaches beyond the outer limits of the given text.

But these very limits illustrate that comprehension based on gender, testing that comprehension by reversal, quickly leads one to realise that we have to imagine a different world, with different conventions and different points of view, and therefore possibly a different text. The task in this exercise is not to rewrite Shakespeare. It is to show that, in its turn, our newly imagined world based on a reconception of gender, highlights the nature of the originally imagined world – Shakespeare’s play called Hamlet, which, like any other play, is dependent for its creation as much on the imperative of gender as on other kinds of social and historical determinant.

The imperative of gender

Poets must be

Either men or women, more’s the pity.

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh)

Gender is one of the primary imaginative imperatives. The forms of representation of the human self are influenced/determined by what we know about our lived social realities, as well as imagined possibilities. ‘Characters’ will be – by and large – male or female. In my playwriting classes, the issue of gender-based decisions is always fascinating and stimulating. In drama in particular, we try out different gender options in the early stages of writing. This always provokes insights for the writers: at the very least, they become usefully self-conscious about how and why they make their decisions. Inevitably, playing around with gender ascription produces different relational possibilities, different plot lines, different stresses on themes and issues, whatever the form of the play.

In prose fiction it dovetails with questions about narrative and point of view. In prose you can play around with avoiding gendered pronouns, of creating a being who could be either male or female, but the immediacy of theatre, with the presence of the body and the voice, means that the signs of gender are always more transparent: body shape, the tessitura of the voice, movement, even before the stuff of the play proper comes into it.

Cross-dressing plays with these ambiguities palpably, physically and immediately. Even if one were able to create an onstage figure whose voice and body gave no explicit clues, the look and sound would still inevitably relate to social images of male and femaleness; if you create a body with no bumps, are you simply aping the straight male shape? If you project a voice which hovers in the alto range, there will still be associations in the spectator’s aural compass to relate it to a high male voice or a low male voice. We can never be free of these imperatives on either side of the footlights.

Gender attribution is hooked into the way the imagination represents social, emotional and material reality. A critical response to that reality attempts to question or subvert it, and still refer to gender. It is one of the major determinants of meaning, giving the lie to the notion that great drama, by having simply ‘universal’ meanings, transcends gender (and other social determinants, such as race and class).

It is certainly true that powerful drama, rooted in specific time, place and social experience, exploiting the excitement and immediacy of the theatre, can communicate to people who come from very different and varied backgrounds, but this does not mean that the supposed accolade of ‘universal’ should be used to deny the specificity of the imaginative. After all, just as a playwright does not need to have experienced everything about which he or she writes, neither does the spectator’s life have to be a mirror image of any character. Our imaginations...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Fulltitle Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII
• Epilogue
• Select bibliography
• Index