SOURCE: O'Malley, Lurana Donnels. “Pressing Clothes/Snapping Beans/Reading Books: Maria Irene Fornes's Women's Work.” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 4 (1989): 103-17.

Barbara Walker, in her autobiographical The Skeptical Feminist, explores women's predetermined roles in a patriarchal society. She writes that the slotting of women into the traditional modes of mother/homemaker/wife is an insidious form of enslavement by the male wishing to assert a false dominance. This enslavement includes a steady schedule of repetitive and unrewarding tasks or jobs, commonly called “women's work.” Walker states that although men have traditionally regarded such duties as natural pleasures of the woman,

the real reason women undertake the demanding and demeaning tasks in a violent, nightmarish household is hardly that they find it natural, but rather that they feel trapped. The average woman's socialization in patriarchal society points her toward wifehood as the only job she is fit to do.

(167)

In the more recent work of playwright Maria Irene Fornes, we find a somewhat contrary, though not antifeminist, representation of the female attitude toward this lifestyle. Maria Irene Fornes's women do not necessarily want to be women—Fefu, the heroine of Fefu and Her Friends (1977), envies men for their strength and ease (13)—but, nonetheless, Fornes's women are women, constantly asserting their spiritual and physical separateness from men. Although they seem trapped in a comforting but deadening cycle of repetitive “women's work,” they transform this work into a holy rite, related to their senses of self. As Walker stated, such pleasure in meniality is not natural, but is undoubtedly the adaptation of these women to oppressive situations, a survival tactic. Fornés's depiction of women's work, however, is unashamedly positive. Although her style and characters have varied greatly over the years, one can find evidence of this affirmation of women's actions, their “doing,” in several of Fornés's more recent realistically oriented plays: Fefu, Mud (1983), and The Conduct of Life (1985).

This article explores the notion of Fornés's women's work in several ways: through an analysis of ritual action in the above plays, a discussion of Fornés's own perspective on ritual, a comparison to women's work in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping, and analogy between “doing” and the actions of learning. Although Fornés is not always perceived as a feminist playwright, her plays are grounded in a deep understanding of what Elizabeth A. Meese calls the state of feminist existence: “never to be discovered except in the self as it becomes the self” (96).

As feminist critics begin to revise our perceptions of the ways in which female identity is constructed, new attention is devoted to assessing the significance of even the most ordinary of woman's experiences. Although housekeeping may seem too closely woven into the fabric of our daily lives to yield revelations, critics such as Katherine Rabuzzi (author of The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward a Theology of Housework) have come to see in housework a powerful image of the ways in which a woman creates herself, as she creates order.

It is commonplace to refer to housekeeping as a ritual experience, but the fuller implications of this term must be addressed. A ritual can be defined as the careful repetition of a series of detailed actions, as a preventive measure against the intrusions of the natural world. What, then, are polishing silver or folding dishtowels but ritualized ceremonies which are stopgaps against decay? Yet true rituals also require devotion, an authentic commitment of the will. Only through such wholehearted application of the self can the rituals of “doing” become truly life-giving.

The constant “doing” we see on Fornés's stages is performed by women. Men are unemployed like Lloyd in Mud; outdoors working, like the men in Fefu; or off advancing in a seedy militarized world, as is the sadistic Orlando in Conduct. Fornés's setting is the house, the domain of the woman. Fefu describes the difference between men and women in relation to houses:

Look at them [the men]. They are checking the new grass mower. … Out in the fresh air and the sun, while we sit here in the dark …

(13)

In her domain, woman has a certain unstated control and power. Orlando sees his wife Leticia solely as someone to keep house, and even though Olimpia does the actual physical work associated with this function, Leticia is the force behind this household. When she leaves on a trip, the house is literally turned inside out—Nena the waif from the cellar comes up into the living room.

Significantly, the association of women with household tasks did not formulate itself until Fornés's later plays, mirroring a growing realism in characterization. The 1965 The Successful Life of 3, for instance, can be read as a comic outline of the later Mud, and displays an ambivalence about gender's relation to menial work. The stage directions reveal a randomness in this relation. At the top of scene three, the three main characters (He, She and 3) are in a comfortable domestic situation: “He dozes, She peels potatoes, 3 sews” (53). But in scene four, She has left (much as Mae will attempt to do in Mud). We see a prophetic vision of Mud's Lloyd and Henry at home: “He peels potatoes, 3 sews” (56). The ease of this transformation is prevented in Mud by the murder of Mae; the more fully drawn-out characters of the later play cannot accept this upset of traditional male/female relations. The Conduct of Life, set in an unspecified, machismo-dominated Latin American country, maintains an even harsher division of men's and women's work.

The women of these later plays do fall into fairly traditional behavior patterns. Nancy Chodorow describes the conventional perception of women's work:

Women's activities in the home involve continuous connections to and concern about children and attunement to adult masculine needs. … The work of maintenance and reproduction is characterized by its repetitive and routine continuity.

(179)

In Mud, Mae is a typical woman/nurturer. She spends three scenes at the ironing board, a symbol of oppression familiar from plays such as Osborne's Look Back in Anger. But in Fornés's work such actions take on a ritualistic quality which is not completely unappealing, especially in contrast with the actions of other characters. Mae is fiercely proud to distinguish herself from Lloyd:

She continues ironing. I work. See, I work. I'm working. I learned to work. I wake up and I work. Open my eyes and I work. I work. What do you do! … I work, jerk.

(19)

Mae also snaps beans, and packs and unpacks boxes; she is surrounded by two nonbeings, two deformed men who cannot do for themselves. In such a world, the woman is the life force. When Lloyd murders her, he kills himself and Henry as well.

In Conduct, both Olimpia and Nena speak of the ritual of simple everyday tasks. Olimpia's speech in scene 4 is fascinating in its detail, but is not merely a list—it is both a cry for attention and a proud boast. Her existence, like that of many women and working class people, is made up of tasks which go unnoticed:

I put the pan on the stove, light the stove. I put the coffee in the thing. I know how much. I light the oven and put bread in it. I come here, get the tablecloth and I lay it on the table. I shout “Breakfast.”

(71)

Olimpia and Nena have a natural affinity for each other, perhaps related to their pride in menial tasks. As they sit separating stones from beans, Nena tells Olimpia of her love for ironing.

… they showed me how to press. I like to press because my mind wanders and I find satisfaction. I can iron all day. I like the way the wrinkles come out and things look nice. It's a miracle, isn't it?

(83)

The plea for recognition of not only the work involved in housekeeping, but its aesthetic value, signals a ritual action which is deeply meaningful, even life-giving, for its participants.

Not only Nena and Mae, but Fornés herself finds satisfaction in ironing. In a delightfully eccentric interview with Robb Creese in The Drama Review (1977), Fornés speaks of pressing clothes as a way to avoid her writing.

And then there is starching my clothes. That is something I started this summer. It is a very lovely thing. I make my own starch. I have to wash my clothes. I have to let them dry, then starch them. They are hard to iron. … But now that I am writing, all my jeans are starched and pressed and all my shirts are starched and pressed. Anything is better than writing.

(40)

Although menial tasks are usually seen as actions which obliterate thought, Fornés's words suggest that they are perhaps meditational, related to her own processes of creation and inspiration. Twelve years later, Fornés has incorporated a meditational ritual into her writing process. She tells David Savran of the playwriting classes she teaches at INTAR:

First thing, we do half an hour of yoga. Then I give them a writing exercise. I have invented exercises that are very effective and very profound. They take you to the place where creativity is, where personal experience and personal knowledge are used.

(58)

Her INTAR workshops, Fornés says, are all about “inducing inspiration” (Betsko 156). Rather than teaching by criticism, Fornés instead turns her classes into periods of intense inner concentration and connection. She stresses the importance of writing every day.

If you write every day, it's like another kind of existence. There's something in you that changes. You're in a different state.

(Savran, 59)

The writing process is, like the housework Fornés depicts onstage, comforting in its repetition and uplifting in its transcendence of the ordinary state of consciousness.

Such transcendence elevates household tasks to a quasi-religious status in Fornés's plays. When Mae reads aloud in scene 6, she speaks in a reverent way of the animal called the starfish: “They keep the water clean” (27). Her words raise her own quotidian tasks to the level of the actions of a high priestess, purifying her house and those in it of mud and dirt. To keep something clean is to keep it alive. But as technology advances and starched clothes are replaced by permanent press, the woman begins to lose her tasks and her identity. Henry in Mud speaks of the machine-like ease of life in a such a world, which will use things only once.

We will need to do that as our time will be of value and it will not be feasible to spend it caring for things: washing them, mending them, repairing them.

(24)

When Mae says that she will not be wanted in such a world, we see how intrinsic the starfish part of her is to her sense of self. In order to adapt to a new high-tech world, Mae must go beyond the things she does best, and learn to make herself valuable in a different way; as I will show later, she sees reading as the means to this end.

The earlier Fefu and Her Friends poses a special problem for this conception of women's work. In Fefu, the rituals of doing are less central to these characters' lives; they are learned and sophisticated, and do not occupy themselves by snapping beans or ironing. Yet Fefu's love of plumbing seems to stem from the same sort of desire—the desire to make things run smoothly—that dominates Olimpia's and Mae's existences. Her wish to “make sure it all works” (11) indicates that she is also a starfish, keeping her domain clean and perfect.

Although not many physical tasks are accomplished onstage in Fefu (instead characters lounge, play croquet, and talk), several actions involve a kind of liquid nourishment, such as “In the Kitchen” where Sue pours soup and water, or Part I when Cindy mixes drinks. One of the more charming “tasks” in the play occurs offstage: Fefu makes a tray of ice cubes with sticks in it, so that her new friend Christina can have popsicles to dip in bourbon. Such a frivolous task does not have much to do with daily survival (as do ironing or cooking in the later plays); nevertheless putting sticks in ice cubes displays Fefu's high degree of caring. Although the use of nonnutritional liquids problematizes the model of woman as nurturer, the common element of all these actions is the sense of self invested in them and the motive of caring and love behind them.

In a Plays and Players review of Fefu, Ross Wetzsteon attempts to link the most fascinating structural feature of the play (the four-time repetition of the four scenes in Part II) to the idea of repetitive tasks:

The meaning here, of course, and the action and its meaning interrelate appropriately, is that women's lives in a chauvinist society are to a large degree random and repetitive and can be seen in any sequence. A familiar image came to mind—‘women's work’ is like washing dishes, for they're only washed in order to be used and then washed again, an endless stultifying cycle.

(37)

In his view, the dramatic structure of the play duplicates the patriarchal system of values. But by concentrating, as does Barbara Walker, on the deadness of this cycle, Wetzsteon ignores the implications of it as a rejuvenating and creative experience, as it seems to be for Fornés. Fefu and her friends are not oppressed by their invisible male counterparts. Their logic is merely different; cyclical and not linear, born from patience, not the obsessive drive to move forward that is characteristic of most dramatic structures.

In 1981 Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, stunned the literary world with the extraordinary lyricism of its prose and with its unorthodox cast of characters. Like Fefu and Her Friends, Housekeeping concerns an array of women only; the men are merely “offstage” reference points, themselves marginalized characters with little effect on the interrelationships of the main (female) characters. Because the novel sets aside issues of male/female sexuality and power dynamics, Robinson is free to “[strip] things to the reality of a female essence—to matters of caregiving and ‘housekeeping’” (Meese 58). The novel, much-discussed in feminist criticism, has served to redefine and reexamine standard notions of women's work, and as such provides a useful comparison to the representation of women in Fornés. In particular, Robinson's notion of the woman in relation to the structure of the house is relevant to the study of Fefu in the context of housekeeping.

The novel's primary concern is loss; housekeeping, in all its forms, serves to stem that loss. The older generation in the book, represented by the narrator's grandmother Sylvia Foster, maintains a meticulous household; her scrubbing and cleaning take on religious signification. Hanging out sheets to dry in her black widow's garment, she is described as “performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith” (16). Later in the novel, after her three daughters have left her, her house work becomes more obsessive.

She whited shoes and braided hair and fried chicken and turned back bedclothes, and then suddenly feared and remembered that the children had somehow disappeared, every one. How had it happened? How might she have known? And she whited shoes and braided hair and turned back bedclothes as if re-enacting the commonplace would make it merely commonplace again …

(25)

This structure of repetition, as a struggle against loss, is mirrored in Part II of Fefu. The actresses must set and reset their props, enacting and re-enacting the everyday events of making soup or reading, but never advancing to a further understanding, a further confrontation. Cecilia and Paula spend their 10 minutes in the kitchen four times in a row, but the gap of their longing never closes.

Sylvie Fisher, the narrator's aunt, is the primary focus of Housekeeping's attention, and through her character, housekeeping is redefined. Roberta Rubenstein writes that

… while “housekeeping” is for most people the effort of resisting dust, disorder, and deterioration, for [Sylvie] housekeeping is the opportunity to commune with the absolute, to merge boundaries, to meld the human and the natural world by accumulation rather than resistance to nature's encroachments.

(211)

Thus, her house becomes not a structure of resistance, but a membrane through which nature flows in and out, easily, as in this passage about leaves:

… leaves began to gather in the corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them. … Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise.

(85)

A similar image is presented in the bedroom scene of Fefu. Fornés's stage directions indicate a plain, unpainted room, perhaps used for storage. She writes that

There is a mattress on the floor. … There is a sink on the wall. There are dry leaves on the floor though the time is not fall.

(23)

The poetic simplicity of this description (note the rhyme pattern) reveals the underlying rules of Fefu's housekeeping. Like Sylvie, Fefu invites the outside element (leaves, friends, strangers) into her house, and permits them to stay “here and not elsewhere” until they must go. Although the house and interiority are foregrounded in any production. Fefu consistently serves as a link to the natural world outside. In Part I, she shoots from inside the house at her husband who is outdoors with the lawnmower. In Part II, after her own game of croquet, she makes the rounds to invite women in the kitchen and the study to play on the lawn with her: “Come,” she says to the tense former lovers Paula and Cecilia (28). In my own production of this play in 1988, performed in an actual house in Austin, Texas, the lawn scene did indeed take place outside. Thus, spectators, in small groups of seven or eight people, also indirectly accepted Fefu's invitation as they left the house for their new positions on the grass.

In Part III, which takes place in the living room, Fefu leaves during Paula's breakdown; when she returns she is a messenger from the natural world: “Have you been out? The sky is full of stars” (30). Fornés, like Robinson, has disassociated housekeeping from its mundane connotations, elevating the woman who keeps house to the status of priestess/magician, who works to keep the proper balance of inner and outer in the framework of her house.

The act of learning can be seen as a subset of the repetitive tasks which constitute housekeeping, and is as equally self-affirmative. Learning about one's own freedom (symbolized by written and spoken language) is another religious action for Fornés's women. In Mud and Conduct, the characters operate on an elemental level of action, as if Fornés were deliberately moving from the articulate social interactions of the earlier Fefu to a more passionate and primitive emotional state. Action and language transform accordingly: Fefu's behavior and speech are those of the privileged being: Mae, Leticia and Olimpia must struggle harder to assert themselves in language. But a basic pattern emerges from these three plays: whereas the repetitive tasks are the expression of a particularly feminine brand of creativity, learning is perceived as “men's work,” and is therefore a forbidden means of self-discovery.

In Fefu, all of the women are well educated, and moreover, appear to be educators themselves. Emma's speech is an inspirational urging to enlist one's own life forces in order to “awaken life dormant” (32). Even in this play, however, there is the sense that getting smarter is man's work, that to improve one's mind is to reject the cycle of female work. Julia, the hallucinating cripple, speaks of imaginary judges who hurt her if she does not cooperate with their demands: to smile, to repent, and to recite a prayer about women's evil essence. As mysterious as these judges are, their message is clearly antiwoman—they wish to deny the beauty and intelligence in Julia. Once, after they try to hit her, she tells why:

He said that I had to be punished because I was getting too smart. I'm not smart. I never was. Neither is Fefu smart. They are after her too.

(24)

Christina also links knowledge with danger, speaking of Fefu's nonconformity:

Her mind is adventurous. … But in adventure there is taking chances and risks, and then one has to somehow, have less regard or respect for things as they are.

(22)

Somehow Fefu's questing mind, symbolic of that of a new woman, upsets the status quo—it even leads to Julia's death. Thus, despite the apparent freedom of these elegant women, they, like the less fortunate Mae and Olimpia, must gain knowledge at their own risk.

Learning is central to the character of Mae in Mud, but is also extremely difficult for her. She is fiercely devoted to her studies as a means of escaping the confines of her situation. But learning does not come as easily as do the more repetitive chores of her day, perhaps because it involves a more masculine and linear approach.

It's hard for me to do the work at school. I can work on my feet all day at the ironing board. I can make myself do it, even if I am tired. But I cannot make myself retain what I learn.

(26)

The ability to read is similarly desirable and unattainable for Olimpia in Conduct. She can only pretend, mumbling imaginary words for her employer Leticia. Leticia also seems to have difficulty, as her recitation of memorized economic jibberish reveals. But, like Mae, she has dreams of a new and better life. Her goal is to prove her own value, not just as a keeper of houses, but as a force in the world outside the house. She tells Alejo,

I want you to educate me. I want to study. I want to study so that I am not an ignorant person. … I would like to be a woman who speaks in a group and have others listen.

(70)

In essence, she desires to be Fefu and her entourage, self-assured women who speak in a group and have others listen.

In another Fornés play, Sarita (1984), the heroine is a girl, who in scene 3 is 14 years old and pregnant. She refuses to accept an arranged marriage because she is going to law school. In Sarita's case, learning is a dream which is too far off to reach for; the pleasures of her lover's body engulf her. As we see in several scenes in which Sarita composes ineffectual farewell letters to Julio, the flesh is stronger than the written word for Sarita. But to Mae and Olimpia, reading and writing are another type of holy rite. Mae sees knowledge as only a starfish can—as the means to a kind of ultimate cleanness, knowledge as purification:

I'm going to die clean. I'm going to school and I'm learning things. You're stupid. I'm not. When I finish school I'm leaving. … You can stay in the mud.

(19)

Fefu, perhaps because she does not come from a background of domestic tasks like cleaning, conceives of knowledge in radically different terms, but with the same type of religious fervor. In Part I, she describes her fascination with an overturned stone.

You see, that which is exposed to the exterior … is smooth and dry and clean. That which is not … underneath, is slimy and filled with fungus and crawling with worms. It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest. … If you don't recognize it … (Whispering.) It eats you.

(9)

Knowledge means vastly different things to these women—to Mae, it is reading and writing and escape, to Fefu a dangerous look at life's underside. But for each woman it is the only path to the self. Bonnie Marranca writes of Mud, “Mae through her desire to read and acquire knowledge realizes that knowledge is the beginning of will and power and personal freedom” (“Real Life” 30).

Before moving to a conclusion about Fornés's statements on the subject of women and their work, it is important to address her connection to feminist criticism. Fornés's plays have consistently stood in a problematic relationship to feminist theory. Her woman-centered plays are routinely associated with the feminist movement—Bonnie Marranca called her work “deeply feminist” in 1981 (“Maria Irene Fornés” 61). Yet Fornés has never joined the ranks of the more mainstream female playwrights such as Marsha Norman or Pam Gems, whose plays are regularly appropriated for the feminist cause. In Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and the Theatre, for example, Fornés and her plays are not even indexed. Fornés herself may be partly responsible for this exclusion, due to a certain reluctance to categorize her own work as feminist. In a 1978 interview, Fornés answered Marranca's question about Fefu “Is it a feminist play?” with her own question: “Is it a feminist play? …” In a 1988 interview with David Savran, on the question of Mud's shocking conclusion, Fornés says that

I think usually the people who have expressed to me their dismay at Mae's being killed are feminist women who are having a hard time in their life. They hang onto feminism because they feel oppressed and believe it will save them. They see me as a feminist and when they see Mae die, they feel betrayed.

(57)

Fornés's response to such criticism is that although Mud is “not a feminist message play” (Betsko 165), Mae's position as subjective center of the play, as the mind of the play, is a stronger feminist statement than showing her as the victor over her oppressors (Betsko 166).

But the search for a feminist aesthetic in Fornés's work is not without foundation or value. In 1983 she wrote that “it is natural for a woman to write a play where the protagonist is a woman” (“‘Woman’ Playwright” 91). So we must take Fornés at her word that she writes about women because of her strong sense of commonality and identification with them. Her ambivalence about her plays' ideological stances should not lessen their impact as deeply meaningful statements.

At the heart of Fornés's work is a heartfelt respect and caring for her characters; because of this caring, she seems unable to force her characters to serve larger ideological statements. And along with respect for her characters comes respect for her spectators, a belief that they can learn from her plays and change their own situations, without taking her narratives as definitive statements of the female condition. Fornés tells Savran

I don't believe in role models because I don't believe in that expression. I've never played a role in my life. … You have to be yourself and you have to find enlightenment within yourself.

(57)

The repetitive tasks in Fornés's plays may be seen as meditational, as much paths to self-knowledge as are reading and writing. The reason these tasks seem valuable, and this search for knowledge honorable, is related to the great amount of personal care invested by the characters into their actions, their “doing,” their learning. Susan Sontag writes of Fornés that “the plays have always been about wisdom: what it means to be wise” (9). The actions performed by the women of Fornés's plays are women's work because they are actions of self-knowledge and love—for the self.

Works Cited

Betsko, Kathleen and Rachel Koenig. “Interview with Maria Irene Fornés.” Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. 154-67.

Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen, 1988.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho-analysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, CA: U of California Press, 1978.

Fornés, Maria Irene. The Conduct of Life. Plays. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1986. 65-88.

———. Fefu and Her Friends. Word Plays. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1980.

———. “I Write These Messages That Come.” Interview with Robb Creese. Drama Review 21 (1977): 25-40.

———. Mud. Plays 13-40.

———. Plays. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1986.

———. Sarita. Plays 89-145.

———. The Successful Life of 3. Promenade and Other Plays. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1987.

———. “The ‘Woman’ Playwright Issue.” Ed. Gayle Austin. Performing Arts Journal 7 (1983): 90-91.

Marranca, Bonnie. “Interview: Maria Irene Fornés.” Performing Arts Journal 2 (1978): 106-11.

———. “Maria Irene Fornés.” American Playwrights: A Critical Survey. Ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981 1:53-63.

———. “The Real Life of Maria Irene Fornés.” Performing Arts Journal 8 (1984): 29-34.

Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Rabuzzi, Kathryn Allen. The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward a Theology of Housework. New York: Seabury Press, 1982.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980.

Rubenstein, Roberta. Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1987.

Savran, David. “Maria Irene Fornés.” In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: TCG, 1988. 51-69.

Sontag, Susan. Preface. Plays 7-10.

Walker, Barbara G. The Skeptical Feminist. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.

Wetzsteon, Ross. Fefu and Her Friends, by Maria Irene Fornés. New York. Plays and Players 24 (1977): 36-37.