Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
Performing Histories: Stage Two
To begin redressing this absence, feminists3 have begun to write the gaps in the stages of a History that has excluded women. These historical (re)visions must address the traditional separation between “public” and “private” spaces and render visible a female tradition in both drama and theatre that has been publicly erased. Tracy Davis articulates a mandate for feminist theatre historians that begins by problematizing the boundaries between public and private: “If feminist historians are going to rewrite history, the revisions must cut deeply. Not only lives have been left ‘blank.’ The importance of theatre as a medium of culture, the social context of performers and performance, and assumptions inherent in the ‘unrevised’ versions of history are all issues central to the study of public figures (particularly women) whose livelihoods depended on the observation and approval of private individuals (particularly men)” (64). In Feminism and Theatre, a major work of recuperative theatre historiography, Sue-Ellen Case points out that women have a tradition of playwrighting, that is to say, play “making,” dating back at least to the early Roman era. Women, who were denied access to traditional “public” theatrical venues, could nonetheless support themselves to some degree by becoming street mimes, a non-literary dramatic tradition that appears, in retrospect, profoundly feminist, a type of writing of the female body: “Their tradition was a silent one, consisting of physical dramatic invention. Their bodies were the sites of their texts” (29). Predictably, though, these early pioneers paid the price for their practice of fashioning an alternative to “legitimate” logocentric theatre in their exclusion from the structures necessary for surviving history: working in a mode that did not privilege words as the point of origin or the central focus of dramatic creation, they “were denied the permanency of the written text, along with its privileged association with theatre buildings, state revenues and pools of professional performers, all of which were available to men” (29). Without texts to represent them historiographically, these women could not take place within historical narrative, and their dramatic tradition disappeared into the silence of their bodies.
Even women playwrights with access to the materials of text and production still lacked the authority necessary to give their drama a place in historical narrative. Case enumerates a number of other early female playwrights such as tenth-century Benedictine canoness Hrotsvit von Gandersheim, the first woman playwright whose texts have survived the vagaries of history; early-eighteenth-century English strolling player and successful playwright Susannah Centlivre, whose characters in female drag “demonstrate the anger and desperation of a female character” (39); and Sor Juana, selfeducated seventeenth-century pioneer of an ethnic theatre that incorporated the sights and sounds of ethnic ritual into performance. Even though these women worked within a logocentric tradition, creating scripts for theatrical reproduction, those plays with women at their centre were devalued and uncirculated, and subsequently practically disappeared from the male-dominated tradition of theatre history. Even Aphra Behn, one of the most popular playwrights of her day, whose plays appeared on more stages than those of most of her male contemporaries, failed to gain a “legitimate” place in theatre history until recently because her playtexts were largely unpublished in popular reading editions. Again, without the texts, the plays could effectively be ignored when their production popularity petered out.
Another performance tradition pioneered by women that Case (re)presents locates itself, at least initially, in the “private” realm deemed most appropriate for women. The “salon” discussion group tradition, which Case traces back to the late eighteenth century, offered a space—usually the private home of a middle- or upperclass woman—which was in many ways more congenial for women than a public theatre space, but which very definitely offered them a “stage” on which they could generate ideas, engage in dialogues, and create a sense of character/self. By the late nineteenth century, Natalie Berney extended the salon tradition from the private into the public sphere. In an early form of feminist performance art, Berney collapsed the boundaries between public/private and performance/reality by staging her feminist and lesbian sensibilities both in public and in private. The result, as Case argues, is an attempt to project (inter)subjectivity, where the performers “totally break any sense of closure in performance by absorbing the performance into their daily lives.. . . This implies that for the spectator, who saw only a small part of it, the piece was fragmented, the performance only suggestive, partial and ultimately internal to the performers” (59). This early “private” theatrical tradition and its evolution into a type of performance art, based mainly in women’s places and women’s lives, does not take place in the traditional narratives of theatre history.
Like Sue-Ellen Case, Kerry Powell investigates the politics of production that colluded to keep women playwrights off the stages of theatres and history. In Women and Victorian Theatre, his own very significant revision to traditional Victorian theatre histories, Powell chronicles an impressive array of women playwrights, both those who wrote original plays as well as novelists who were almost forced into writing for the stage to maintain legal control of their novels’ theatrical representations.4 Powell’s analysis of why these women’s plays have disappeared from history replays a depressingly familiar scene: in an era where men alone had the power to define what constituted “good” drama, it was all too easy to overlook plays written by women, “many of which dealt with women in a sustained, reflective, and original fashion” (79), which almost certainly did not fit easily into the sorts of predefined representations of women that men could unequivocally endorse. Indeed, for most Victorian men, the very existence of the woman playwright was essentially a genetic impossibility, since the foremost authorities of the day tended to define playwriting in scientific and mathematical terms, qualities that were considered antithetical to the more emotional female character (79–80). This biological determinism allowed Victorians to deflect attention away from the material reality that saw male actor-managers almost exclusively in charge of the mainstream (i.e. important) theatres, validating and valuing only works that affirmed the patriarchal status quo. It also deflected attention away from the influence of the Club system, the “backstage” network that heavily influenced the politics of production. As Powell explains, “Victorian playwrights associated with one another in men’s clubs such as the Garrick or Savage where they would meet for a drink and dinner and enjoy the company of other men in predominantly masculine professions.. . . Their exclusion from these coteries helps explain why women were never prominent among Victorian managers and playwrights” (72, 73). Conveniently blinded to the implications of male power and control of access to the materials of production, “the Victorians made a conscious effort to persuade themselves that women by nature could not and did not write for the stage, barring a few exceptions which only proved the rule. Aspiring women playwrights, therefore, could have felt little or no sense of a women’s tradition where none was recognized” (Powell 127). It is time that theatre histories consider both the causes and the implications of women’s exclusion from their pages.
In addition to the very necessary work of enlarging the tradition of theatre historiography to include the previously ignored contributions of women, however, contemporary theatre practice has given rise to a number of plays written by women, about women, giving women the opportunity to stage their own representations. Not surprisingly, many of these representations engage head-on with the problems of history and tradition that have for so long served to devalue and disenfranchise women’s experiences: “It is revealing that so many feminist plays deal with historical settings and figures. Most of the playwrights begin with unravelling women’s past as a first step to understanding present day . . . women” (Hodkinson 14). Rewriting historical characters allows feminist theatre practitioners to “create historical identities for themselves and offer challenges to male hegemony that had so long controlled theatre history on and off the stage. Women theatre practitioners created theatre pieces about historical women . . . and about mythical women . . . to rewrite the received mythic heritage that women believed had been corrupted and distorted by patriarchal culture” (Canning 533). By presenting histories about women previously ignored or misrepresented by History, these productions comprise another important stage in women’s presence.
From a self-conscious feminist point of view, the thrust of this project is not simply to replace patriarchal representations with equally hegemonic identities authored