[In this essay, Austin examines Fornes' "use of the madwoman figure and the image of confinement on stage. "]

The madness of women has been a major concern in the work of feminist theorists such as Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Héène Cixous, and Catherine Clément. Female madness is also a rather common image in drama and has been used by male playwrights for centuries. As Showalter points out, Ophelia was the major image of female madness in Victorian England.¹ The madwoman's use by female playwrights has been far less frequent, however, reflecting their much smaller numbers. But in the last decade, Maria Irene Fornes has used the image to great advantage in three of her plays.

Fornes, a Cuban native who has been writing plays in New York City since the early 1960s, is a major figure in the off-off-Broadway scene and the winner of several Obie awards. Her work is notable for many reasons, one of which is its portrayal on stage of complex female characters and of the female unconscious. Three of her plays, Fefu and Her Friends (1977), Sarita (1984), and The Conduct of Life (1985), contain madwomen figures who are speaking, acting subjects. Examining these plays through a feminist lens focused on the madwoman figure shows Fornes to be a playwriting exemplar in both form and content.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic² develops work on a female tradition and traits of women's writing using nineteenth-century fiction and poetry only. In applying to women writers Harold Bloom's theory about the male writer's "anxiety of influence," they find that the woman writer experiences an "anxiety of authorship" or "a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her" (49). She seeks a precursor who "proves by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible" (49). Contemporary women writers of fiction and poetry may feel less of this anxiety than women of earlier centuries because they have female precursors, but women playwrights are still in need of more such models than they presently have. Wider dissemination of criticism and production of Fornes's work would be one step in lessening some "anxiety of authorship." But for the nineteenth-century woman writer, this anxiety left a mark on her writing.

Women writers coped by "revising male genres, using them to record their own dreams and their own stories in disguise." Gilbert and Gubar call these works palimpsestic: "works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning" (73). Very often the madwoman appeared in these palimpsestic works, "not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine," but as "the author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage" (78). The irony, of course, is that by "creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines, women writers are both identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal culture has imposed on them" (79).

One of the best examples of the use of the mad double is that of Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). In their detailed analysis of that novel, Gilbert and Gubar point out the many ways in which Bertha does what Jane wishes she might do, "is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress" (360), and "not only acts for Jane, she also acts like Jane" (361). They conclude that "the literal and symbolic death of Bertha frees her [Jane] from the furies that torment her and makes possible … wholeness within herself (362).

Another device used in these palimpsestic works is that of confinement (and sometimes escape). Very often female characters felt space anxiety in houses or rooms, and sometimes it was the madwoman who was so confined. (Bertha was not only mad but confined to the attic of her husband's house.) One paradigm of such imagery is "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1890) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a recent mother is confined to a garret room and forbidden to write as treatment for a nervous disorder. The woman worsens and eventually sees, locked behind the wallpaper of the room, a woman whom she helps escape by tearing off much of the wallpaper. Madness and confinement meet again in this story and together tell a powerful tale of female experience. This paradigm, however, is not one confined to the nineteenth century, or to women writers of prose.

Fornes's 1977 play Fefu and Her Friends³ has a cast of eight women, has very little conventional plot, and takes place in five separate audience/stage spaces. The setting is described as follows:

The house is Fefu's and the other characters are women who gather there to discuss a fundraising program for a vaguely defined cause related to education. The action of the play is the interactions of the women over the course of one afternoon and evening. It demonstrates the synapses between women when they are not with men. As Fefu says early in the play:

Women are restless with each other. They are like live wires … either chattering to keep themselves from making contact, or else, if they don't chatter, they avert their eyes … like Orpheus … as if a god once said"and if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart." They are always eager for the men to arrive. When they do, they can put themselves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. With the men they feel safe. The danger is gone. That's the closest they can be to feeling wholesome. Men are the muscle that cover the raw nerve. They are the insulators. The danger is gone, but the price is the mind and the spirit… . High price [author's ellipses].

(p. 13)

The play itself proceeds to dramatize a bit of that "danger" that occurs when female raw nerves are not insulated by men.

Part of the play's effect has to do with the close proximity of the audience to the performers in the smaller, enclosed spaces of the scenes in Part II. Audience members on two of the four sides of each room seem to "eavesdrop" on the conversations that take place there, more intimate than in the other two parts. The audience is split up, has to move around physically, must become active in order to see the entire performance. This unusual use of space has been remarked upon in criticism of the play, but has not seemed to have an influence on many other plays. It is one of many ideas this play presents that might profitably be explored by other writers, as well as critics. It is a play that must be experienced to be fully comprehended. Part of its effect comes from confining the audience in the same limited space the characters inhabit. The play also exhibits a feminist use of the madwoman.

The character of Julia enters Part I in a wheelchair and another character describes how Julia fell down at the same moment a hunter shot a deer, and from that moment has not been able to walk. While delirious, Julia said "That she was persecuted.—That they tortured her… . That they had tried her and that the shot was her execution. That she recanted because she wanted to live… ." (15). Fefu recalls that years ago Julia "was afraid of nothing," and that "she knew so much."

In Part II in the bedroom, as the stage direction says, "Julia hallucinates. However, her behavior should not be the usual behavior attributed to a mad person" (23). In her monologue, Julia relates persecution such as that which had been described in Part I. She was beaten, but never stopped smiling. She recites: "I'm not smart. I never was. Neither is Fefu smart. They are after her too. Well she's still walking!" She guards herself from a blow. Later she says, "Why do you have to kill Fefu, for she's only a joker? 'Not kill, cure. Cure her.' Will it hurt? (She whimpers.) Oh, dear, dear, my dear, they want your light" (24-25). She then recites a prayer that gives many of the reasons man has considered woman evil. Julia finally says, "They say when I believe the prayer I will forget the judges. And when I forget the judges I will believe the prayer. They say both happen at once. And all women have done it. Why can't I?" (25).

In Part III, after a rehearsal of the fundraising "show," Julia has a long speech in which she says, "Something rescues us from death every moment of our lives," and that she has been rescued by "guardians." However, she is afraid one day they will fail and "I will die … for no apparent reason" (35). Later on, Fefu, alone on stage, sees Julia walk, and seconds later she reenters in her wheelchair. Near the end, Fefu and Julia struggle, Fefu telling her to try to walk and to fight. Julia says she is afraid her madness is contagious and tries to keep away from Fefu. Fefu wants to put her own mind to rest and loses courage when Julia looks at her. She finally asks Julia to "Forgive me if you can," and Julia says, "I forgive you" (40). Fefu gets a shotgun used earlier in the play, goes out, a shot is heard, Julia's hand goes to her forehead and as it drops, blood is seen, and Julia's head drops. Fefu enters with a dead rabbit and all the women surround the dead Julia.

This series of scenes, interspersed among others, establishes the "madwoman" Julia as Fefu's double. The play itself, taking place less man ninety years after Jane Eyre, has a certain "feel" of the nineteenth century and there are striking similarities between Fefu/Julia and Jane/Bertha. Julia acts out the repressed, angry side of Fefu by struggling with the "guardians," and perhaps her death frees Fefu at the end of the play. But Fornes is a twentieth-century woman and the differences are also striking. The play is as if written by Jane and Bertha, with Rochester pushed offstage, his control lessened by his absence. Julia is not in the attic, but in the spotlight, speaking the truth for herself as subject alternately with speaking the text of male conventional attitudes about women in her "prayer." Fefu and Julia together, overtly bonded and overtly in conflict, make an open statement of women's predicament in the public forum of the theatre.

In the end, Fefu does what Julia cannot—acts. The madwoman is "killed" by her double. This action has many possible interpretations. For Helene Keyssar, "… Julia chooses not to fight but to yield. Fefu, however, will not let Julia go. Unable to reinvigorate her friend verbally, Fefu moves to Julia's symbolic terrain and shoots a rabbit." The meaning of this act for Keyssar is that, "Symbolically at least, and on stage where all things are possible, the woman-as-victim must be killed in her own terms in order to ignite the explosion of a community of women.⁴For Beverley Byers Pevitts. "if we recognize ourselves as women, 'the world will be blown apart.' When this does happen, the reflection that was made by others will be destroyed and we will be able to rebuild ourselves in our own image, created by woman." Julia, then, "is the one who is symbolically killed in the end of the play so that the new image of herself can emerge."⁵

In an interview with this writer in April, 1987, Fornes answered questions about the madwomen in her plays:

Julia is really not mad at all. She's telling the truth. The only madness is, instead of saying her experience was "as if" there was a court that condemned her, she says that they did. I guess that's what makes her mad rather than just a person who is a visionary. The elements of her fantasy are visionary—they are completely within the range of clear thinking. Her fantasies are very organized.

The use of confinement in Fefu is also both like and unlike its use in nineteenth-century fiction. On the stage confinement is a visual, visceral reality. In Part II of Fefu the audience is confined, along with the actors, in the separate spaces of a woman's house. In the bedroom there is a particular sense of confinement because it is, "A plain unpainted room. Perhaps a room that was used for storage and was set up as a sleeping place for Julia. There is a mattress on the floor" (23). In its original production, this was the smallest space in the play and with the same number of audience members in the space as had been in larger spaces, there was a greater sense of confinement associated with Julia than with the other characters. As has been mentioned, there is a contrasting sense of escape or release for Julia at the end of the play, which is underlined by the audience's memory of her in that cramped bedroom. By making the audience experience crowding, the play shows the metaphor to be "social and actual," as Gilbert and Gubar say of women's use of the image, as opposed to men's "metaphysical and metaphorical" use of it. Julia does not possess the ability to leave the room. This fact is reinforced by the presence of Julia's wheelchair in the small bedroom, helping to further crowd the audience and to visually remind them that Julia possesses no means to leave this confinement.

Two other plays by Fornes, both included in a volume of her plays published in 1986,⁶ also make good use of the madwoman figure and the image of confinement on stage. Sarita (1984) tells the story of a Hispanic girl of thirteen from the South Bronx, who passionately loves a boy who is habitually unfaithful to her. Over the course of the eight years of the play (1939-47) Sarita is loved by a young soldier, but is drawn back to her obsessive former love until she is driven to kill him and goes mad. The play takes place in twenty short scenes over two acts, with the inclusion of many songs whose lyrics are written by Fornes. While the story itself may seem familiar in outline, it becomes fresh because it is told from the point of view of the young woman involved. Rather than, as in so many plays in the standard canon, seeing how the madwoman affects the lives of those around her, we see how events and emotions make a lovely young woman go mad. Sarita is her own subject, speaking and acting for herself.

Fornes sees Sarita's madness as quite different from Julia's in Fefu:

I think Sarita goes mad because when you are pushed to such a state of emotional upheaval as to murder the person that you loved, I think going mad is normal. If you don't go mad it's a coldness, callous. It's like having a fever. It's normal to have a fever when you have a bug in your system—it's part of the system protecting itself and I think to break down is inevitable.

Fornes's description of Sarita's "fever" echoes in many ways Catherine Clement's discussion of the hysteric in her book written with Héène Cixous. In southern Italy women dance a tarantella to rid themselves of spider bites, though, as she states, "because tarantulas do not exist in this region, we have to conclude that these are psychiical phenomena."⁷ The hysteric speaks with her body and performs socially unacceptable acts because she has a "bug" in her system. Sarita also breaks her "fever" in this manner.

The scenes between Sarita and her lover take place in a narrow, box-like kitchen area above and behind the main stage area. The kitchen is the space in which Sarita is confined, waiting for the return of her lover, and suffering the pangs of sexual longing. She does not enter or leave this space in view of the audience, but is simply there when lights come up and go down. Her "social and actual" confinement is keenly portrayed.

The Conduct of Life (1985) also portrays the confinement of a young Hispanic woman, played in the original production by the same actress, Sheila Dabney, who won an Obie award for her performance as the original Sarita. Conduct concerns a trio of women who are in subservient positions in the house of a Latin American army officer, Orlando. The most confined of the trio is Nena, a young street girl Orlando picked up and brought first to a warehouse, then to his cellar, to sexually abuse and sometimes feed. The other two women are Olimpia, a servant in the house who sometimes works or plays with Nena, and Leticia, Orlando's wife, who thinks she is a mother figure to Orlando. Over the course of nineteen scenes, with no intermission, set in the present but visually presented as anytime from the 1940s onward, the audience sees Orlando brutalize Nena in the name of love and sexuality, and drive his wife to shoot him at the end. Again, Nena is confined in a box-like space above and behind the main stage area, and men is brought down into me cellar area. Again, her confinement is actual and cannot be escaped. But in this play the similarities among Nena, Leticia, and Olimpia present a view of women as subjects under subjugation mat echoes Cixous and Clément in their discussion of Freud's patient, Dora.

From the beginning of the play, madness is discussed. In her first speech, to Orlando and his male friend, Alejo, Leticia says she would throw herself in front of a deer to prevent its being killed by "mad hunters," and Orlando responds wim, "You don't think mat is madness? She's mad. Tell her that—she'll mink it's you who's mad." When Orlando leaves, Leticia confesses to Alejo:

He told me that he didn't love me, and that his sole relationship to me was simply a marital one. What he means is that I am to keep this house, and he is to provide for it. That's what he said. That explains why he treats me the way he treats me. I never understood why he did, but now it's clear. He doesn't love me.

(p. 69)

In the next scene Orlando brings Nena into the warehouse room. The scene is brief—a few words and men:

(He grabs her and pushes her against the wall. He pushes his pelvis against her. He moves to the chair dragging her with him. She crawls to the left, pushes the table aside and stands behind it. He walks around the table. She goes under it. He grabs her foot and pulls her out toward the downstage side. He opens his fly and pushes his pelvis against her. Lights fade to black.)

(p. 70)

In the next scene Olimpia is introduced through a long monologue in which she tells Leticia, in detail, what she does in order to prepare breakfast for me family in the morning. The accumulation of detail is comical, but the link between the two women is established clearly, as bom women must "keep this house," while Orlando is oblivious to what either is doing or thinking. The two women bicker over what is to be served for lunch and dinner, Olimpia asserting her will point for point with Leticia. Though Olimpia is me servant, Leticia's only action as the "boss's wife" is to hand money to Olimpia to go shopping at the end of me scene.

Orlando forces sex on Nena two more times, me second time reaching orgasm, and men giving her food and milk. The Unes of similarity among the three women become clearer as the scenes progress. When Leticia goes away on a trip, Orlando slips Nena into the house and down to me cellar. Orlando and Alejo talk about a man Orlando interrogated and who is dead. Orlando insists he just stopped him from screaming and men the man died. He does not see himself as being the cause. The connection between political torture and subjugation of women is made by the juxtaposed, rapidly intercut scenes.

Leticia senses there is a woman in the house to whom Orlando is making love, and she feels mere is nothing she can do. Orlando tells Nena mat "What I do to you is out of love. Out of want. It's not what you think. I wish you didn't have to be hurt" (82). Leticia pleads with Orlando, "Don't make her scream," and Orlando responds, "You're crazy" (82). Then he says, "She's going to be a servant here," and in me next scene Nena is cleaning beans with Olimpia and speaking, for me first time at length, about her grandfather and how Orlando found her and "did things" to her (83-84). Nena sounds like Julia in Fefu when she says he beats her "Because I'm dirty," and "The dirt won't go away from inside me" (84). Leticia feels he is becoming more violent because of his job. She does not appear to perceive the fact that his violence at work and home come from a common root. The three women finally sit together at a table as the lights come down on scene seventeen.

In the final scene, Orlando forces Leticia to say she has a lover and to make up details of their meeting. When Orlando physically hurts Leticia, she screams and men, "She goes to the telephone table, opens the drawer, takes a gun and shoots Orlando. Orlando falls dead… . Leticia … puts the revolver in Nena's hand and steps away from her." Leticia asks, "Please …" and Nena "looks at the gun. Then, up. The lights fade" (88).

The play is over. The doubled madwomen figures have come together, one acting for the other as well as herself, then (possibly) asking help of her double in ending her own torment. The release here is different from that at the end of Fefu. The killing of the intolerable lover is more complex than that in Sarita. Women are linked by their subjugated roles. The actions of the man make them mad, but they manage both to act and to connect despite their madness and confinement. And me man's self-deception about what he is doing to the women around him is linked to me wider political realm.

When asked to comment on me madwoman in Conduct compared to Sarita, Fornes explained:

Certainly, if you think of Leticia after the murder she would probably go through something similar, but I think Leticia would be able to cope a little better. She would have to go through a period of understanding everything. But I thought you meant the person who goes mad in The Conduct of Life was Nena…. … Nena is much more vulnerable; Leticia is a strong person. She's older and more in possession of herself. But Nena is ill, she's been battered, she's abused. I think she's closer to madness than Leticia.

Fornes touches on a central point here; both Leticia and Nena are different aspects of the "madwomen" figure. Nena in her near-mute state when in the presence of a male and Leticia in "speaking" with a gun are similar to Hélène Cixous's description of Freud's patient, Dora: "like all hysterics, deprived of the possibility of saying directly what she perceived … still had the strength to make it known." And the role of love in the women characters'"conduct of life" is echoed in Cixous's statement: "The source of Dora's strength is, in spite of everything, her desire."⁸

Clément, in disagreeing with Cixous, finds that the hysteric's eccentricity is tolerated because she is not really threatening to the basic social structure. Fornes makes her hysterics have a clear effect and balances them with a third figure, the "maid." Unlike the "maid" in Freud's writing, Olimpia is not a seductress. She represents housework, the nonsexual side of the wife's duties, while Nena is the merely sexual, though the husband does bring her into the house and make her play the role of a "maid." As Cixous quotes Freud, "'the servant-girl is the boss's wife repressed,' but in Dora's case, Dora is in the place of the boss's wife: the mother is set aside."⁹ But in Fornes's case not too far aside, for the mother appears in the form of the wife, Leticia. The play illuminates both Cixous's ideas about the hysteric and Clément's social concerns: "The family does not exist in isolation, rather it truly supports and reflects the class struggle running through it. The servant-girl, the prostitute, the mother, the boss's wife, the woman: that is all an ideological scene."¹⁰

Taken together, these three plays give a broad picture of the effects of confinement and madness on women in the twentieth century. In both Fefu and Conduct Fornes shows us a multiple female character, composed of individuals but, as seen on the stage, a whole that is more than its parts. She shows us what Showalter considers "the best hope for the future. … In the 1970s, for the first time, women came together," to challenge the dominant ideology and propose their own alternative, including political activism.¹¹

By taking an audience into the attic the madwoman there can no longer be seen as a mere "metaphorical" disturbance. By letting the madwoman speak for herself, Fornes has performed a radical act. On the stage we see her, and other women, escape confinement in various ways. And by placing her women in the spotlight, Fornes helps the audience, as well as future women playwrights, escape restriction by form, society, and themselves.

Notes

¹Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985; reprint ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 10-11.

²(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Subsequent page numbers in parentheses.

³In Wordplays (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980). Subsequent page numbers in parentheses.

⁴Feminist Theatre (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 125.

⁵"Fefu and Her Friends," in Women in American Theatre: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Chinoy and Jenkins (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 316.

⁶Maria Irene Fornes: Plays (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986). Subsequent page numbers in parentheses.

⁷Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 19.

⁸Ibid., 154.

⁹Ibid., 151.

¹⁰Ibid., 152.

¹¹Showalter, 249-50.