The inquiry into what constitutes a feminist playwriting practice today necessarily involves the critic with the investigation of structures of realism and narrative, structures which are implicated in relation to patriarchal ideology. Concomitantly, the theatrical institution, with its accretions of cultural convention and inscription of a dominant system of representation, operates to inhibit radicality (e.g. feminism) in service of the ideology which supports and informs its tradition. However, theories concerning realism and narrative must be called to account for the specific reception of a play text, must address historical particularity and, in the terms of feminist criticism, political efficacy. Playwriting, in an intricate and complex interweave with site, history, representation, and audience as well as conventions of realism, narrative, and stage practice, emerges as a crucial arena of exploration for contemporary feminism, providing insights into the politics of writing and the possible basis for a feminist theory of reception.

Recent debate in feminist criticism regarding playwriting has focussed on the question of whether a realist play could not also be a feminist play—for reasons having to do with the relationship between text and reader within a context of ideology. That is, realism (or, to use Catherine Belsey's term, classic realism)¹ supports the dominant ideology by constructing the reader as a subject (or more correctly, an “individual”) within that ideology. It poses an apparently objective or distanced viewpoint from which both the narrator and the reader can assess the action and ultimate meaning of the text, a pose which makes the operations of ideology covert, since the illusion is created for the reader that he or she is the source of meaning or understanding, unfettered by structures of culture. Belsey's extended definition of classic realism clarifies this relationship:

Classic realism is characterized by “illusionism”, narrative which leads to “closure”, and a “hierarchy of discourses” which establishes the “truth” of the story. “Illusionism” is, I hope, self-explanatory. The other two defining characteristics of classic realism need some discussion. … Classic realist narrative, as Barthes demonstrates in S/Z, turns on the creation of enigma through the precipitation of disorder which throws into disarray the conventional cultural and signifying systems. Among the commonest sources of disorder at the level of plot … are murder, war, a journey or love. But the story moves inevitably towards closure which is also disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the re-establishment of order, recognizable as a reinstatement or a development of the order which is understood to have preceded the events of the story itself.²

In light of this definition, it becomes evident that classic realism, always a reinscription of the dominant order, could not be useful for feminists interested in the subversion of a patriarchal social structure. Such an understanding of realism coincides with contemporary analyses of narrative which have emerged primarily from feminist film criticism. Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” asserts that “[s]adism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.”³ Teresa de Lauretis points out the implied reversibility of terms in Mulvey's statement, that “story demands sadism,” sadism thus seen as the causative factor for the movement of narrative.⁴ Her argument demonstrates the connection between realist narrative and the oppression of women by revealing Oedipal desire as narrative's motivating force. As de Lauretis notes, narrative is governed by an Oedipal logic because it operates within the system of exchange instituted by the incest prohibition, where Woman functions both as a sign (representation) and a value (object) for that exchange—this system now common knowledge among post-structuralists, as derived from Levi-Strauss. De Lauretis further elaborates: woman's role constitutes the fulfillment of the narrative promise (made, in the Freudian model, to the little boy), the reward at the end of the Oedipal journey; a representation which supports the male status of the mythical, culturally-constructed subject. As the reader's subjectivity is constructed through positionalities within narrative, so women are necessarily interpellated as object/objective/obstacle by the Oedipal desire governing narrative: this is its sadism, that narrative repeatedly and necessarily positions women in the oppressed subjectivity (which is not Subject, but Object) of femininity.⁵

If we take as a given the ideological project, the self-perpetuation of the dominant system, then we can see the place of literature (narrative) in subtly reinforcing the discourse of ideology, and the way in which the apparent unity, coherence and seamlessness of the classic realist text covertly subjects (and positions, in terms of subjectivity) the reader within that ideology. However, if a writer (or let's say a text) aims to reveal and/or subvert the dominant ideology, as a feminist writer/text might, strategies must be found within the realm of discourse, particularly vis à vis narrative, which can operate to deconstruct the imbedded ideology: in other words, which might construct the reading subject differently. In writing practice, then, a refusal to perpetuate the conventions of realism/narrative would presumably not only thwart the illusion of “real” life, but also would function to threaten the patriarchal ideology imbedded in “story”. A subversive text would not provide the detached viewpoint, the illusion of seamlessness, the narrative closure, but instead would open up the negotiation of meaning to contradictions, circularity, multiple viewpoints; for feminists, this would relate particularly to gender, but also to issues of class, race, age, sexuality, and the insistence on an alternative articulation of female subjectivity. Whether or not this subversion would give rise to politicized action on the part of the newly constructed reader is another matter for debate, which will be discussed later.

Within the specific context of playwriting and the theories outlined above, let us consider the operations of a well-known realist text and its relationship to a feminist agenda. In Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother, thirty-seven-year-old Jessie informs her mother Thelma that she will kill herself that evening, after having organized the details of her mother's life and her own death. After much argument, during which time the mother attempts to change the daughter's mind, the suicide happens anyway; the mother is left alone on stage, and the audience leaves the theatre, some obviously in tears. Although touted by some critics as a feminist investigation of the hopelessness and degradation of women's lives in patriarchal society,⁶ the play ultimately reinscribes the dominant ideology in its realist form. It is indubitably a narrative built on enigmas and mysteries which are revealed gradually until the final scene of (dis)closure. It steadfastly maintains that illusion of reader-as-subject who shares with the absent narrator the position of knowingness and ultimate understanding; a coherent, unified text that renders up its pleasure in the satisfaction of catharsis, in the illusion of change without really changing anything. As Brecht noted, “The theatre as we know it [he calls it illusionism] shows the structure of society (represented on stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium).”⁷ Narrative closure reinstates the pre-existing order after instigating its temporary crisis. In what Roland Barthes would call a highly “readable” text,⁸ Jessie and her Mother are thus “known” fully; they are consumed characters, and the explanation for Jessie's suicide is perceived not within social relations (ideology) but in individual failure (or worse, as an heroic act, courageously ending a life that was indeed worthless).

In spite of the apparent inevitability of the ideological apparatus of classic realist narrative, can we identify a feminist writing practice that emulates realism but operates as a different discursive strategy, perhaps a pseudo-realism? One such play might be Terry Baum's and Carolyn Meyer's Dos Lesbos. Ostensibly dealing with the lives and struggles of two lesbians, Peg and Gracie, Dos Lesbos has realistic elements, but functions more like a revue, utilizing short sketches, parody, role-playing, songs and musical sound effects to present various aspects of American lesbian experience. Although on the surface it is very funny, there are also deadly serious moments, such as the scene when Peg describes having been spat on, or the scene after a disastrous dinner with Gracie's parents. In this fashion, Dos Lesbos acts as a consciousness-raising play—emulating a practice endemic to feminism in the seventies which emphasized the political implications of everything personal in women's experience. Its ribald humor also endears the audience to the characters, who are then able to communicate some of the not-so-humorous problems for lesbians to a sympathetic audience. More importantly for this discussion, the realistic elements serve to promote enough illusion of “real experience in the real world,” so that the audience can identify (in a manner to which it has been culturally conditioned) with Peg and Gracie as people who are just trying to achieve a measure of happiness—seeking decent jobs, loving relationships, family togetherness, etc. But there is also a sense in which the episodic structure, the songs and the transparency of the text conjure up what classic realism usually renders invisible, which is the society that isn't on stage—in this case, the dominant culture which has excluded lesbians from its texts, its stage practice. An audience is thus implicated, in a heightened consciousness, in Peg and Gracie's oppression, the play motivating the spectators to think about their culture's or their own heterosexism. The text apparently calls for a Brechtian sensibility, since it makes use of the very devices Brecht recommended for achieving critical distance, while simultaneously retaining sufficient “fable” for establishing a moment in history. However, I think there are other forces at play in the text which are crucial from a feminist standpoint, and which move the play beyond Brechtian considerations.

By transparency of the text, I mean that the apparent realist narrative has gaps or holes, both in between and even during individual scenes—the scenes free-float in a cultural condition, making visible the oppressive society in which Peg and Gracie must move when they are not in the scenes. Within the scenes, Gracie's ambivalence about her coming out and her feelings about sex, or Peg's refusal to “kill” her best friend Russell in a Utopian vision even though he is a man, give play to a multiplicity of discourses around and about lesbianism or being lesbian that refuse an authoritative position. Thus, in Barthesian terms, the text is more a “plural” text, wherein “no single discourse is privileged, and no consistent and coherent plot constrains the free play of the discourses.”⁹ Rather than distancing its readers (following Brecht), the text would draw us in, frustrating the kind of closure or catharsis experienced with 'night, Mother: the fabric of realistic elements have merely provided the framework for a different mode of perception.

In effect, the play masquerades as realism, which is wholly appropriate, since it is a play precisely about masquerade and rejecting masquerade—and, just as Gracie makes the decision to come out in the play, so the play itself begins to emerge from the patterns of classic realism and the ideology imbedded therein, pointing the way toward other discourses, other subjectivities. However, it's also important that it's an incomplete project, as if the text had one foot in and one foot out—Peg says at one point, “It's pretty tedious, this coming out business.” As Barthes notes, there is no such thing as a wholly plural text; but on a continuum of textual readability versus plurality, the terminology enables a crucial distinction between 'night, Mother and Dos Lesbos.

It is also significant that Gracie the writer is the one having difficulty coming out—as Peg notes several times, Gracie wants to turn everything into a story, wants to narrate it—for Gracie, it's painful that life will not bend into a coherent fiction. Similarly, she enjoys their sex best when she can turn it into a poem, and reveals that she still thinks of their relationship within a stereotypical heterosexual model—she can't stand to be possessed by a man, but she loves possessing women. But it is equally significant that the last scene of the play is in bed, the site of sexuality (as Peg says, culture defines homosexuals by who they sleep with), and that it ends with a kiss—Gracie finally physically declares her love relationship with Peg, and the play finally begins coming out, making the sexuality visceral, graphic.

In spite of its identifiable pseudo-realist strategies, it is undoubtedly true that many readers find Dos Lesbos somewhat palatable, even if the content disturbs them, precisely because of its relative readability, its quiescent realism. However, some critics argue that the play, rather than pointing the way out of classic realism, ends up falling backwards into it, thus nullifying its own attempts to demonstrate an authentically different practice, either in terms of sexuality or writing. If feminism is a struggle against oppression, then is it really possible for feminist playwrights to communicate the workings of oppressive ideology within realistic narrative from within? Is the structure so powerful and deeply ingrained that to allow virtually any realistic elements constitutes a capitulation to dominant ideology? If so, then realism must be abandoned altogether in the search for a subversive practice.

Adrienne Kennedy's plays of a Black American woman's struggle for identity in a hostile oppressive culture illustrate some of the problems as well as advantages of a totally non-realistic form. In The Owl Answers, the central character, a young Black woman named She Who Is Clara Passmore Who Is The Virgin Mary Who Is The Bastard Who Is The Owl, encounters other characters of multiple identities who include her Black mother, a Black stepfather Reverend and wife, her real white father who refuses to claim her as his child, Anne Boleyn, a Dead White Father, a White Bird, a Negro Man, Shakespeare, Chaucer and William the Conqueror. She Who Is (or Clara) travels ambiguously among scenes in a New York subway, the Tower of London, a Harlem hotel room, St. Peter's Cathedral, and her past, caught in a deadly struggle with herself and her culture. In this play of shifting subjectivities, a “terrain in flux,”¹⁰ there is no possibility of a fixed, stable identity, either for She or the reader; all the same, we follow the heroine (non-heroine, non-character) as she moves from place to place, person to person, in an effort to locate her identity. Note that the Owl traditionally asks “Who,” that is, a question of identity; and Clara is the Owl, seeking to discover who she is (She who is). The owl is also a solitary bird, a solo traveler, a lonely sound in the forest.¹¹

Clara's attempt to construct her subjectivity is made doubly difficult by the fact that she is both female and black; both gender and race conspiring against her in a culture dominated by her opposites. She is powerless to alter these parameters of her search, and doomed to feel estranged from a heritage that she has been taught to desire but that she is prevented from claiming. Heritage in patriarchy is determined by lines of paternity,¹² but Clara is only a bastard, just “the daughter of somebody who cooked for me.” The play conflates the death of her white father in Georgia with her dead father in London; to attend her white father's funeral would be to claim her white heritage, the one which she traces back to England in the literary and historical heritage of Shakespeare, Chaucer et al, but they know it is not her heritage and keep her from it, locking her up; ironically, they lock her up in the Tower of London, symbolically trapping her inside the very heritage which she desires but cannot have.

The Negro heritage described by the play also fails Clara in her search for subjectivity—inhabited as it is by frustrated and abused women who commit suicide, Negro men who are only interested in colonizing her body for their own desire, and a Reverend who is forever reading the Bible (symbol of another colonizing force—she identifies with the Virgin Mary who is indelibly white, her pleas to a white God are laughed at or ignored; religion cannot cure her, it rather enforces her bastard position). For Clara, the Negro world is the urban tawdriness and sub-ground hell of the subway, site of shameful seductions, where she is haunted by her desired white heritage, but from which there is no escape. As Herbert Blau notes, Kennedy's use of the term Negro is “archaic,” or “regressive,” as if the revolutions of the fifties and sixties (in language and ideology) never happened: “her experience is irredeemably Negro experience, the desire for assimilation.”¹³ The entire play takes place within the psychic realm of the subway car as a recurrent symbol of the failed Black American experience. There is no escape from her blackness, her Mary-ness (as the bastard-adopted daughter of the Reverend and as the retrograde Virgin), even though she sees herself as Clara, who would Pass-more (Clara's adoptive surname is Passmore). Her face is described as pale, but she repeatedly opens her dress to reveal a blacker body—that is, her essential blackness, which is also culturally determined.¹⁴ She screams at her Dead Father and Mother, “You must know how it is to be filled with yearning.” At which they laugh.

At another point, She Who Is says she wants “love or something,” but doesn't know where it is to come from. The Mother asks, “Is it to come from out there?” poignantly implying that it can't; that Clara must find it within, must construct her love of self herself, handicapped by her subject position. Any physical love constitutes rape, since none of it expresses her desire to be “loved by her father,” that is, to have a heritage. She has in effect been doubly raped, by the Negro male and the White male, both of whom subjugate her desire to their own.

In Clara's case, the Oedipal narrative is absolutely oppressive, in that she is locked outside of it and within it, by virtue of her race/gender double-bind. The play's ambiguity and near incomprehensibility articulate the impossibility of identification with a narrative position, least of all one which might provide closure, or the fiction of a coherent self. Clara—who is not one character, or person, or subjectivity—instead traverses narrative, zig-zagging across various systems of signification, seeking herself in the gaps, the spaces of unnarrated silence wherein her persistently elusive subjectivity might be found.

On the Barthesian continuum, Kennedy's work is as “plural” as it gets—and, on the basis of the narrative theories promulgated earlier, would qualify as the most political of the three texts used here for illustration, from a feminist standpoint. But the question remains whether or not such texts ultimately make the reader aware of the operations of ideology; in other words, does the text implicate classic realist structure in the workings of an oppressive culture, by frustrating the audience's expectations vis à vis narrative? And to the degree which it does that, is it then a political text? Or, approaching the question of political viability from another angle, is it sufficiently political to offer an alternative to the complicity of dominant ideology and text found in classic realism and its Oedipal narrative? Can we assume solely on the basis of an intra-textual reading that a realist text will never engender a political response on the part of some or any readers? These questions illustrate the urgent need for a feminist theory of reception; as Tania Modleski recently noted, to retain its “political edge,” feminist criticism cannot afford to lose sight of the “important stakes of a feminist theory of the reader.”¹⁵

Furthermore, the search for a feminist theory of reception is arguably more complicated for drama, because of the numerous factors contributing to the “realization” of the text in performance, the “collaborators” (e.g. director, designers, performers, etc.) in the performance's “conception”, and the precise socio-historical context in which any given performance takes place. Feminist critics may well deem it virtually impossible to generalize any hypothetical response to a text when faced with such overwhelming variations in potential and real specific performed renderings of that same text. In the search for a “theatre-specific” feminist criticism, Elin Diamond has recently put forth an admirable theory of what she has named “gestic criticism,” through a thorough and innovative examination of possible intersections between feminist and Brechtian theories.¹⁶ Among many strong points in the article is Diamond's useful elaboration of the Brechtian gest for the feminist performer, particularly in terms of the way that Gestus creates a specific relationship with the spectator. By retaining her own historical subject position separate from the character and using gest to ‘read’ the social attitudes encoded in the play text, the feminist performer enforces an awareness in the spectator of her own temporality.¹⁷ “Through a triangular structure of actor/subject—character—spectator,” then, each position is historicized, and, in a refusal of the Oedipal construction of subjectivity, “no one side signifies authority, knowledge, or the law.”¹⁸ Promising as this is, Diamond's example is a textual one which assumes a certain stage realization as a feminist gest, which in turn depends upon the (female) spectator's agreement or acknowledgement. As Diamond notes, she is interested in locating those gestic moments which allow for the female spectator's viewing position, rescuing it from the trap of male gaze and perpetual otherness; but the gest seems to depend on “women reading as women,” on a predetermined response between and among women that would either: one, address and affirm their feminist knowledge of societal inequity and oppression; or, two, suddenly in that gestic moment, rattle/disturb their sensibilities sufficiently to politicize their perception. It also depends on the female spectator's recognition of female authorship—as Diamond says, it “would contextualize and reclaim the author.”¹⁹ While hinting at a presumed connection between women as women, this perhaps is the strongest move in Diamond's paper, about which more later. But learning that female spectators are in fact in the audience, can we assume that feminism, or even a readiness for feminism, is a condition of their consciousness? And if not, what performative measures are necessary to awaken that consciousness in political terms, and how do we measure it?

Norman's text may not be feminist or political in terms of its writing strategies, or in its naive conception of the self/subjectivity—even in performance, the structure and design elements of 'night, Mother perpetuate narrative closure, and Oedipal constructions of identity. However, as Jill Dolan describes in detail, it has proved problematic for most male critics, apparently because of its thematic focus on Mother/Daughter rather than on the traditional Father/Son.²⁰ Especially on the occasion of its Pulitzer award, much debate was devoted to whether or not 'night, Mother met canonic measures of greatness, particularly that of “universality.” Jenny Spencer, while not claiming feminism for the play, observes that women audience members apparently experience 'night, Mother differently from men; that Norman's tragic vision of the problems of female identity proves cathartic for women, but not for men—men may sympathize, but not identify in the same way.²¹ While this observation bolsters the arguments that the play does not achieve “universality,” it also hints at another level of political function. As Modleski warns, feminist critics should not underestimate “the most crucial factor in men's traditional disregard and contempt for women's writings and women's modes of existence: the reality of male power.”²² This “fact of power” accounts for much of the lack of appreciation of women's texts—“until there is an appreciable change in the power structure, it is unlikely that women's fictional accounts of their lives in ‘the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry will have the force to induce masculine jouissance.”²³ In this regard, 'night, Mother may be perceived as a feminist text, in that it challenges on some material level the reality of male power. Quite apart from its critical reception in the theatrical press, now that its Pulitzer-Prize status guarantees inclusion in classroom anthologies, the text often becomes a basic rallying point for female students who want to argue for the right to discuss women and women's experiences, presumably in a way they have not found possible or allowed elsewhere. Its readability, which thus grants it a certain provisional status within the dramatic canon, which would presumably reinscribe dominant ideology, is thus implicated in another, political operation which serves to undermine the power structure in a material way. While no gestic moments present themselves,²⁴ the play (and the context of its reception) functions for many women as a kind of old Ms. “click,” an instant of immediate raised consciousness. Admittedly, not all female viewers of this play have the same response: I myself felt primarily anger at the play's limited and insular portrait of female (im)possibility, a perception shared by Dolan in her earlier, incisive review.²⁵ But to the extent that any women might conceive their experience of the play in political terms, and that so many men perceive it as a threat, a feminist theory of reception must re-evaluate the work's impact as a feminist text.

By comparison, Dos Lesbos may depend entirely upon the performance, considering its audience, place of performance, and the performers. The original production was performed by the playwrights for a predominantly lesbian, all-woman audience. The butch-femme relationship of the performers, informing the character portrayals in an inherently gestic mode, operated to parodize both heterosexual pairings of the dominant culture and lesbian stereotypes as well, becoming far less realistic than in the reading. (There is nothing in the text to suggest a butch-femme component of the performance.) When performed for a predominantly heterosexual audience with more “straight”-forward acting, the characters tend to be perceived more within the framework of classic realism, and the performance text must rely on content rather than form to promote a politicized reception. Whether or not it functions for the heterosexual audience as a political instrument, indelibly altering their perceptions of lesbians, is un-measurable; as Dolan notes, “selling a lesbian text to mainstream spectators seems incongruous, but in the best of all possible worlds those spectators will come away from the performance thinking differently about their sexuality and gender assumptions.”²⁶ In the case of Dos Lesbos, its incipient realism holds both promise and threat—the promise that it might indeed reach a more mainstream audience, but therein lies its threat of assimilation: Dolan says, “perhaps the context will prevail, and … obscure the meaning of what they see.”²⁷ However, this concern raises the question of the articulation of subjectivity—is it possible, in a culture structured by compulsory heterosexuality, for the lesbian subject to be thoroughly assimilated? Dolan so eloquently argues the lesbian's special position in relation to representation, which, in terms of identity, must produce a condition of self-consciousness: it is this process by which, de Lauretis says, “one begins to know that and how the personal is political, that and how the subject is specifically and materially en-gendered in its social conditions and possibilities of existence.”²⁸ The lesbian subject on stage in Dos Lesbos would therefore be radical in any venue—sustaining a tension between the personal and the political that refutes a coherent, unitary conception of identity and recasts it in a material, political context.

The crucial matter of authorship again presents itself—which seems regressive when trying to theorize reception, but not so … For feminism, the author can't be dead. Nancy Miller argues that the postmodernist obituary for the author “does not necessarily work for women and prematurely forecloses the question of identity for them.”²⁹ The female subject, already historically in a different relation to Self than men, “decentred, ‘disoriginated,’ deinstitutionalized, etc.,” stands in a qualitatively different relationship to authorship and questions of authority.³⁰ As Diamond notes, the “erasure from history” for women dramatists “has been so nearly complete,”³¹ that issues of authority in representation—who speaks about whom—may indeed figure largely in reception of a text. In the dialogue between spectator and performance text that feminism hopes to turn into a dialectic, the intensity of the relationship between writer and text—the personal connection, if you will—emerges as a crucial point of context. In the theatre, this would of necessity extend to the interpreters of the text, who must somehow share in the authentic exploration of female subjectivity. This is not to reinstate “author's intent” as a guiding principle of production; rather, it connotes for feminist theatre practice what I have been discussing for feminist theatre writing—an engagement with the issues and problems inherent in the commitment to a political agenda. As Bonnie Zimmerman notes in reference to an essay on images of the lesbian, “there is an important dialectic between how the lesbian articulates herself and how she is articulated and objectified by others.”³² Which is to say that context, or the specific terms of a performance and its reception, is the final arbiter of meaning, and its integrity is absolute.

Which brings us, finally, to Kennedy's text, the context of which is limited, under erasure, because it is almost never produced. As an unreadable text, it is only read, usually generating mass confusion and a loss-of-narrative despair among first-time readers. In this regard, it is a perfect teaching tool for discussing the problems of articulating subjectivity in relation to race and gender, as well as introducing contemporary notions of narrative from a feminist viewpoint. The reader is forced into an experience, albeit temporary, of Clara's confusion, and must attempt to negotiate, with her, an oppressive cultural terrain—in order to “make sense” of the play, she or he tries to construct a narrative, and the final glaring impossibility of that project foregrounds Clara's frustration—in fact, her “non-existence”.

But if the play is never performed, because of its difficulty, is it simply due to a repressive culture, hostile to Blacks and women as well as non-realist theatre? Or does the play, in its intense anti-realism, defeat its own, apparently subversive, agenda? Actually, I believe the play would become more “readable” in performance: Clara's embodiment and the realization of the production elements would lend signifying power to Kennedy's thoroughly visual images. Performance, operating in more than just the linguistic signifying system, would make Clara's plight felt viscerally, but would also provide visual connections for the images in a more comprehensible pattern. Reception of the performance text thus might outstrip the political impact of the dramatic text, allowing for a higher degree of visual readability. Unfortunately, Kennedy's text, like Clara, survives only marginally, in the gaps of Western theatre's master narrative.

I am not arguing that feminist playwrights should only write realism in order to be produced; rather, that the challenge for feminist dramatic criticism is one of empowerment, for women writers, performers and reader/spectators. This process must extend to all aspects of context within a cultural specificity. If we agree that the relationship to narrative in writing is a complex one of crucial political implications, then it is equally imperative to contextualize that relationship, to understand its questions for performance practice and observe its specific reception. Not an easy task, this imperative draws us again to a difficulty of long standing for feminism, that of defining (or not defining) the differentiated viewing subject, a definition whose nature, I feel, lies in the problematics of female subjectivity. Is it indeed premature (or better yet, wholly inappropriate) for feminists to assume a postmodernist version of subjectivity (and subsequently, the death of the author)? Modleski states that “feminists at this historical moment need to insist on the importance of real women as interpreters,”³³ which includes author—actor—spectator. We thus cannot rely on theories of narrative, or of literary structures such as classic realism, which are purely textual, but must comprehend subjectivity and practice (writing and performance) within material conditions of power.

Notes

1. Catherine Belsey, “Constructing the Subject, Deconstructing the Text,” Feminist Criticism & Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature & Culture, eds. Judith L. Newton and Deborah S. Rosenfelt (London, 1985).

2. Belsey, p. 53.

3. Screen, 16 (1975), 6-18: 14.

4. See Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, 1984).

5. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, pp. 103-157.

6. See, for example, Trudy Scott's review in Women & Performance, 1 (1983), 78.

7. Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York, 1964), p. 189.

8. Belsey, p. 55

9. Ibid.

10. See Herbert Blau, “The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy,” Modern Drama, 27 (1984), 520-539.

11. In an interesting sidenote, Lilith—the Great Mother, who was suppressed and supplanted by the Great Father by the Hebrew tribes—was edited out of the Old Testament except for a passing reference to her as a screech owl in Isaiah (34:14). With her elimination from inscribed religion, the creative power of the Mother was effectively erased from historical memory. It is thus deeply ironic that Clara's totem is the owl—the last trace of the lost mother, the vestigial possibility of a matrilineal heritage. I am indebted to Katharine C. Gentile, graduate student at the University of Oregon, for this information.

12. For a superb discussion of the justification of patrilineal heritage within the Oresteia, see Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York, 1988), Chapter One, “Traditional History: A Feminist Deconstruction.” Most pointedly, Athena exonerates Orestes from matricide with the explanation that the parent is “he who mounts,” thus relegating the mother to the position of nurse, a mere vehicle for birth. Athena is herself a motherless child, having been born from Zeus's forehead; as Case notes, how ironic indeed that she represents the birth of democracy.

13. Blau, 531-532.

14. The image of pale skin/black body also conjures the figure of the “buckra,” typically a mixed-blood person whose mother was Black and whose father was of European heritage. Clara is in one sense the original Buckra, the indelible evidence of cultural abandonment—she is the site of unassimilated difference; too light for one culture, too dark for the other, restrained from claiming her father's European heritage while her mother (uprooted from her own African heritage, divested of her past) represents no heritage at all. Hortense Spillers elaborates the significance of the buckra figure for Black American women's writing in a recent paper, “The Habit of Pathos,” delivered May, 1988, in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia.

15. Tania Modleski, “Feminism and the Power of Interpretation: Some Critical Readings,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington, 1986), p. 121.

16. Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” The Drama Review, 32 (1988), 82-94.

17. Diamond, 90.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, 1988), pp. 27-34.

21. Jenny S. Spencer, “Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity,” Modern Drama, 30 (1987), 364-375.

22. Modleski, p. 123.

23. Ibid.

24. Although arguably, the play might be rife with such moments if subjected to a “gestic” analysis and performance.

25. See Jill Dolan, “'night, Mother: Review,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 1 (1983), 78-79.

26. Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, p. 120.

27. Ibid.

28. Teresa de Lauretis, “Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms and Contexts,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, p. 9.

29. Nancy K. Miller, “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, pp. 102-120.

30. Miller, p. 106.

31. Diamond, p. 90.

32. Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism,” Feminist Studies, 7 (1981), 459-475: 464.

33. Modleski, p. 136.