Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it” (30). The difference in subject matter is what makes poetry “a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (30). While Aristotle further differentiates narrative from other modes of discourse, he models his definition and analysis of narrative on the compositional elements of tragic drama. Among those elements, plot stands out as absolutely central to the successful achievement of both narrative and tragedy. Moreover, Aristotle is quite particular about what constitutes the perfect subject for a tragic plot: “[A] man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous, a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families” (33). The exclusion of women in Aristotle’s definition here is not incidental. In Book XV, he reveals why women should be excluded from the central role in a tragedy: “Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless.. . . There is a type of manly valour; but valour in a woman, or unscrupulous cleverness, is inappropriate” (36). Such profoundly masculinist assumptions nonetheless provide the foundation upon which the Western narrative tradition has been built, to the point that it can justifiably be written that “subordination and exclusion of women is endemic to narrative” (Diamond, “Refusing” 94), including the narratives that make up history.
While Ricoeur and White were not concerned with exploring or even questioning these masculinist assumptions about narrative, the reframing of history into historical narrative has opened a postmodern space where the ideological investments in history writing can be usefully questioned. The gaps that postmodern reframing make visible have encouraged the writing of “something different from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it: . . . [W]e now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much sung few, and I might add, of women as well as men” (Hutcheon 66). Linda Hutcheon’s inclusion of women’s history here as almost an afterthought represents one of the crucial distinctions between postmodernism, which largely ignores issues of gender in its dismantling of hegemonic representation and authority, and feminism, where the gender of representation and the representation of gender form central concerns. In a separate chapter, “Postmodernism and Feminisms,” Hutcheon summarizes the result of the intersection of these two cultural enterprises: “It radicalized the postmodern sense of difference and de-naturalized the traditional historiographic separation of the private and the public—and the personal and the political . . .” (142). If, as most feminists argue, the personal is indeed the political, then history can no longer afford to ignore the “private” sphere, the space into which women have traditionally been interpellated, the (no) place from whence our history has (not) happened.
Many feminist theoreticians have quickly taken advantage of this space (not incidentally, first opened and legitimized by men) to expose and de-naturalize the privileged position men have assumed in traditional narrative forms in general, and particularly in historical narratives. Sue-Ellen Case (“Classic” 318–20) examines the historical context that authorized the Aristotelian tradition as the separation of life into “public” and “private” spheres, where male citizens of the Greek city-states enjoyed commerce in the public marketplace, while women were confined to the domestic space, where their household and social transactions were not deemed the stuff of History. Entrenching women behind the walls of the home did not stem from a realization that women were “naturally” more suited to cooking and overseeing the quotidian monotony of household management than men. Both Case, writing about ancient Greece, and Phyllis Rackin, writing about Renaissance England, locate the need to control access to and by women in the same anxiety over patriarchal lineage that had real economic ramifications in both societies. In ancient Greece, the right of citizenship, with its attendant privileges of status, land ownership, and, especially, participation in the democratic process, was conferred primarily through patriarchal inheritance. Likewise in Renaissance England, the continuation of property and privilege depended on legitimate patrilineal heritage. Analyzing why women in Shakespeare’s history plays are often figured as attempting to subvert the legitimate authority of the patriarchal historical record, Rackin writes:
In every important sense, chronicle history was not simply written without women: it was also written against them. Patriarchal history is designed to construct a verbal substitute for the visible connection between a mother and her children, to authenticate the relationships between fathers and sons and to suppress and supplant the role of the mother.. . . In the world of history, women are inevitably alien representatives of the unarticulated residue that eludes the men’s historiographic texts and threatens their historical myths. (215, 221)
The maternal role of women must disappear from historical record, not because it is intrinsically superfluous, but because it represents an excess in the history of who begat whom, the site that must be repressed for fear that it cannot, ultimately, be unequivocally controlled.
The issue of control of women resurfaces in Judith Lowder Newton’s analysis of the rationalizations offered in nineteenth century texts—by female as well as male authors—for maintaining middle-class women’s place in the private sphere of the home. The literature she summarizes demarcates a distinction between the “political power” of men and the “immense influence” that women properly wield in the domestic sphere:
This valorization of women’s influence, it should be clear, was aimed at devaluing actions and capacities which we can only call other forms of power, and, in this way, the peddling of women’s influence, in a sort of ideological marketplace, functioned to sustain unequal power relations between middle-class women and middle-class men. Having influence, in fact, . . . meant doing without self-definition, achievement, and control, meant relinquishing power for effacement of the self in love and sacrifice.. . . (767)
Trading “active” power of achievement for the more “passive” power of influence is no bargain for these women. They paid the price for this interpellation on both contemporary and historical fronts: first, its cost in terms of their own autonomy and agency, and subsequently, by their effective removal from the History of great men and great deeds.
Julia Kristeva sets up a similar distinction between men and women in terms of subjectivity. Her description of “female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition” also offers an explanation for women’s effacement from History. According to Kristeva, the feminine subject is incompatible with “a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history” (446). From the diverse theoretical realms of materialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis (to summarize but a few here), the analyses of why women have not taken place in History have laid the foundation for the construction of the histories in which women can, and do, appear.
Central to the construction of these histories is a consideration of the terms of representation endemic to any type of historical narrative. The politics of representation impacts upon feminist histories both in terms of constructing and of authorizing or validating historical narratives. Any attempt to consider history must first acknowledge the unrecoverability of unmediated past experience, the inevitability that historical narrative can only represent the past: “We only have access to the past today through its traces—its documents, the testimony of witnesses, and other archival material. In other words, we only have representations of the past from which to construct our narratives or explanations” (Hutcheon 58). With the past available only through already constructed texts, the issue of who controls the construction of these representational texts becomes one of crucial importance. Moreover, the circulation of historical representations is far from neutral. Hutcheon, echoing Foucault, points out that “[w]e cannot avoid representation. We can try to avoid fixing our notion of it and assuming it to be transhistorical and transcultural. We can also study how representation legitimizes and privileges certain kinds of knowledge—including certain kinds of historical knowledge” (54). Previously, History privileged knowledge of “public” characters and events, while relegating women to the domain