In the previous chapter, I outlined the existence of what I term the Anxiety of Ontology, following on after theories of authorial anxieties, previously outlined by Harold Bloom and Gilbert & Gubar. I argued that the Anxiety of Ontology may be present in many female playwrights, given the precarious nature of their professional and creative ontology. In closing, I mentioned that this anxiety may become manifest in playwrights’ work through differentiated working strategies and in the recurrent theme of death. This chapter and the one that follows, then, set about delineating the first of those categories; the working strategies that playwrights may adopt in reaction to the Anxiety of Ontology. In approaching this subject, I will initially outline the strategies that Gilbert & Gubar proposed in relation to nineteenth-century female writers; these will then be updated and applied to contemporary female playwrights Emma Dante and Marina Carr. I will term “working strategies,” solutions, modes and methods of working that writers may deploy in the context of their professional and artistic lives in response to the Anxiety of Ontology. For ease of classification, the strategies are
grouped together under the headings of process, positioning and textual manipulation. This chapter will examine the categories of process and positioning in detail, while the next chapter will deal with strategies of textual manipulation. Both chapters will relate
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each strategy to contemporary playwrights, Dante and Carr, drawing a line that links the strategies to the Anxiety of Ontology.
As in the preceding chapter, this section of my thesis draws heavily on Gilbert & Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and particularly the chapter, “Infection in the
Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.” The working strategies outlined in The Madwoman in the Attic suggest a critical framework which could be used effectively as a point of departure from which I can investigate similar solutions utilised by female playwrights. However, Gilbert & Gubar’s framework is limited in its
application to my particular subject of study for three reasons: firstly, as noted in the previous chapter, it concerns itself primarily with poets and novelists; secondly, their period of study was primarily the nineteenth century - a historical period which
presents a marked difference in social and cultural practices, beliefs and attitudes when compared with contemporary society; and finally, their theory relates to a fear around the process of creation. This project deals specifically with contemporary playwrights, their fear relating to their precarious position, and an anxiety regarding the fate of their creations expressed in the Anxiety of Ontology. Thus Gilbert & Gubar’s framework is adapted and updated to reflect the shift in focus from the act of creation in the Anxiety of Authority to the unstable position of the artist in the Anxiety of Ontology.
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Before we continue, however, one clarification should be made in regard to Gilbert & Gubar’s framing of the problem of anxieties. In their presentation of the subject of the Anxiety of Authorship, the authors couch their argument in pathological terminology. The very title of the piece “Infection in the Sentence,” sets the tone, with the writers using the language of contagion and disease to describe the anxiety. Words such as “debilitating,” “disease” and “illness” abound within their analysis, framing the writers’ experience in distinctly negative terms. Undoubtedly, Gilbert & Gubar’s
analysis focuses on a period in which the outcomes and consequences for women writers were, for the most part negative. Though they convincingly make the point that patriarchy can make women physically and mentally ill, in a modern context, where outcomes are often less drastic for women it is unhelpful to apply this terminology and framework to the field of Western contemporary women’s creativity. I note this
tendency towards negative outcomes for women writers in the past, while asserting that today’s women writers can expect more positive results. The propagation of Gilbert & Gubar’s pathological discourse could potentially marginalize women writers even more, by marking them out as ill or diseased: thus “othering” them further. The medical terminology of disease therefore, has been rejected in a concerted move towards more positive language, which seeks to frame women writers’ experiences differently, and to introduce the possibility of transformation.
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Identifying Differentiated Working Strategies
Through a detailed and scrupulous analysis of a number of nineteenth-century writers’ texts,Gilbert and Gubar were in a position not only to outline the existence of the Anxiety of Authorship, but also to identify and explicate the manifestations of such a preoccupation. They argued that women writers adopted multiple strategies in
response to the anxiety, ranging from the search for female predecessors and revision of canonical texts, to strategies of concealment (such as the taking on of a male
pseudonym), and the recurrent employment of themes such as confinement, disease and escape. The female writer manifested the anxiety through a number of modi operandi
which, I will consider under the following headings; the process of writing, their positioning as artists in society and textual manipulations. This chapter will concern itself with issues of process and positioning, while the following chapter will address the problem of textual manipulation. Inevitably, some of the working strategies traced in Gilbert & Gubar’s project are now rarely adopted by contemporary writers(such as the use of a male pseudonym) and others simply do not suit the purposes of this study. The adapted critical framework now analyses the writers’ work under the same broad categories outlined in Gilbert & Gubar, but with revised subcategories.
Consequently, the updated working strategies I have identified are; 1) the search for female precursors, 2) collaboration, 3) negotiation of the “feminist” label, 4) revision
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of traditional genres in terms of form and content, and finally, 5) the employment of specific themes.126 The strategies I am about to outline are in no way exclusive to women playwrights. Any one of them may be used separately, or simultaneously, by male and female writers in reaction to differing circumstances. The presence of any one of these strategies in isolation should not be read as evidence of such an anxiety. Rather, it is in the intersection and combination a number of working strategies that we can find evidence emerges of the presence of the Anxiety of Ontology.
Process – Searching and Collaborating?
We will first turn our attentions to the strategies we can gather together under the heading of processes. “Process” relates to the alterations made by writers to the practice of writing in reaction to the anxiety. Gilbert & Gubar identified two main strategies, which pertain to this heading and they are; male mimicry, and the search for female models. From their point of view, the uncritical use of male genres, themes, plots and tropes by female writers can be interpreted as a form of male mimicry and they cite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1806 - 1861) An Essay on Mind (1826) and Charlotte
Brontë’s The Professor (1857) as examples of such “copy” works (70). In a modern
context, women playwrights are unlikely to utilise the features of genres in an uncritical fashion. They do not experience the extreme hostility that women such as Browning and Brontë had to endure as writers - an opposition so fierce that they felt they had no
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choice but to conceal their sex either through the use of a male penname or through the mimicking of literary style and content. It is my contention that modern women writers tend towards interrogating literary genres through a series of textual manipulations. This revisionary strategy will be investigated in detail in the next chapter. Given this change, for the purposes of this chapter I will disregard the idea of male mimicry and adapt the critical framework, considering only Gilbert & Gubar’s search for models.
Female Models: “There’s a longing in me for her that won’t quell the whole time”127
In their confrontation with the canon, Gilbert & Gubar argue that women writers experience an anxiety related to their inability to take the place of their predominantly male precursors. Later, they argue that women writers seek to temper this anxiety through a search for female precursors. This search is attributable to a desire to
“legitimize her own rebellious endeavors” (50). Feminist scholar Joanna Russ has also identified this strategy in women writers’ processes; the desire to seek out other women who have written to serve as a model to work which one can write towards or against. Gilbert & Gubar are cautious about this project, however, warning that when seeking female foremothers, “the woman writer may find only infection, debilitation” (52). They emphasize the negative potential of such a search for women writers and also suggest that the discovery of female precursors can never replicate the male writer’s experience of the canon. Nevertheless, they argue that women will continue to search for models,
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regardless of the potentially negative consequences. This search for models should be considered as distinct from a desire on the writer’s behalf to take part in or conform to a female literary aesthetic. Women writers may search for models of women before them who have managed to become writers as source of encouragement; they are proof that it is possible to be both a writer and a woman. This is not to say, however, that the later writer will necessarily be particularly inspired or influenced by their predecessor’s literary output. Furthermore, this search for female predecessors does not indicate a negation on the female playwright’s behalf of male theatrical and literary precursors. As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Three, both Carr and Dante have drawn on the work of historical male playwrights, poets and novelists in their artistic processes. Notably, both playwrights seem to have been heavily influenced by the playwrights of Greek Tragedy, with Dante producing her own nuanced version of Euripides’ Medea, and Carr who used the structure of the same play as the base of her By the Bog of Cats…. Emma Dante has also been influenced by writers such as Tommaso Landolfi and
Gabriel García Márquez, while Carr draws inspiration from poets like John Keats.
Even today, playwrights look to the past to find examples of women who wrote, and they produce work in the hope of emulating them, or perhaps rivalling them. We will now turn our attention to the motivations behind, the mechanisms and the results of this search. As the quest for models and precedents is inextricably linked with the canon(s) and discourses surrounding them, it would be pertinent to return to a
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consideration of the very notion of the canon. The canon is, as Lillian S. Robinson states, something that “we are hardly aware of […] until we come into conflict with it” (83). The masculine and ethnocentric nature of the traditional canon was established in Chapter One, along with its insistence on the presence of universals within the works. In theory, a collection of written works, critically analysed, and then held up as
exemplary texts that we could all learn from, is a worthy idea. The concept of a text containing “universal truths” and a sense of unity in humanity is, however, much more problematic. The very existence of universals has been undermined by
deconstructionist criticism, which observes that much of what has historically been held to signify “universal” expresses simply the experience of only a small, elite group. This group has historically excluded, for the most part, women writers and other groups who lie outside the bounds of dominant culture. Following on the Second Wave of feminist activities, feminists began to tackle the canon in various ways. Gayle Austin in her chapter “Paying Attention to Women” outlines three stances feminists adopt when dealing with the canon. An early approach, according to Austin, was “working within the canon: examining images of women” (17) thus, rereading canonical material in an alternative way;128 a second approach was that of “expanding the canon: focussing on women writers” (17). 129 The third approach outlined by Austin is “exploding the canon: questioning underlying assumptions of an entire field of study, including canon
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cannot not be underestimated, because without it, our work in examining and reformulating the canon, runs the risk of simply reifying a new, revised, gender- balanced canon that continues nevertheless to exclude alternative experiences, groups and points of view.
The canon is transmitted, in great part, by curricula and anthologies. That older anthologies excluded marginalised groups is well established, 131 but even modern anthologies have been criticised for their failure to include and consider the work of female writers. The Irish canon is poor in models of canonical female writers and even poorer when it comes to female playwrights132. Writers that are generally considered canonical in Irish theatre are William Butler Yeats,133 Augusta Gregory,134 John
Millington Synge,135 Seán O’Casey, 136 Samuel Beckett,137 Brian Friel,138 Tom Murphy139 and Frank McGuinness.140The Field Day Anthology, published in three volumes in 1991, has been roundly criticised for its neglect of women authors. Kim McMullan’s article, “Decolonizing Rosaleen: Some Feminist, Nationalist, and Post-colonialist Discourses in Irish Studies,” considers the under-representation of women in the Field Day Anthology
(1991). McMullan underlines how the failure of the compilers of the anthology to “take adequate account of gender as a constitutive element of cultural construction” (33), mirrors the tendency of the culturally dominant group, historically, to exclude narratives that were not considered as representative of the nation. She further
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repository for Irish identity: “Ireland-as-woman, silent object of patriotic desire” (36). Drawing on an idea of Eavan Boland’s, Cathy Leeney echoes this sentiment, stating that traditionally “woman has been the icon, and not the iconmaker” (“Ireland’s ‘Exiled’ Women Playwrights” 162). On foot of clamorous objections to the underrepresentation in the original anthology, another two volumes were later published in 2002, dedicated exclusively to women’s writing, with the aim of correcting the previous neglect of women writers. Brecken Rose Hancock, nevertheless, interprets the “gendered
segregation” of the anthology as a demonstration that “the struggles for women writers are ongoing” (20). The entire controversy marked a turning point in Irish literary
history, laying down a marker that women’s roles in Irish literature were no longer to be overlooked.
The Italian canon displays a more severe gender imbalance.141 Canonical theatrical practitioners include Ludovico Ariosto,142 Niccolò Machiavelli,143 Ruzante,144 Carlo Goldoni,145 Giovanni Verga,146 Luigi Pirandello147 and Dario Fo.148 The only female theatre practitioner who may, at a stretch, be considered canonical is Franca Rame, although her contribution to Fo’s work continues to be overshadowed, with many of their collaborations listed as exclusively her husband’s work. In Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa’s A History of Italian Theatre (2006), we find two final chapters
summarizing the contemporary theatrical scene in Italy. Sharon Wood writes a chapter on contemporary women’s theatre, dealing only with female practitioners, while Puppa
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in his contribution “The Contemporary Scene,” writes about principally male
practitioners, with a little over a page dedicated to female dramatists. These choices are equivocal and somewhat puzzling, as they communicate conflicting messages about the importance (or otherwise) of women playwrights and theatre practitioners. The
decision to include Wood’s chapter seems a positive attempt to include women’s
experience in the history of theatre in Italy, while Puppa’s brief consideration of women writers separately to male writers is suggestive of tokenism, replicating on a smaller scale the gendered segregation of the Field Day Anthology referred to above.
Unfortunately, it is also a choice that reflects the confused nature of the debate in Italy at the present time. In the edition Dentro/Fuori, Sopra/Sotto: Critica femminista e canone
letterario negli studi di italianistica (2007), a number of authors tackle the question of the
broader Italian literary canon from a feminist point of view. The editors note in their Introduction, that Italy lags behind the English speaking academic world in its attempts to review the canon, stating that “le letterate che lavorano in Italia fanno di solito più fatica ad esercitare un’azione incisiva all’interno di quei luoghi «ufficiali» di produzione culturale rispetto a molte loro colleghe europee e americane” (“female scholars working in Italy generally experience more difficulty than their European and American
colleagues exercising influence within ‘official’ cultural institutions” 6).149 Feminist scholar Maria Serena Sapegno defines the Italian canon as it is currently taught in the universities, as still bearing the “impronta risorgimentale” (“imprint of the
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Risorgimento”),150 meaning it is still heavily influenced by ideas that originated in the 1860s (16). She highlights the lack of impact that theory has had on literary studies in Italian universities and notes how feminist thought on the canon has been marginalised from discursive and academic study. Rebecca West, in her piece, “Who’s in, Who’s Out?” discusses the treatment of female poets in the Italian Lyric Poetry tradition, noting that “the way in which gender plays a role in the choices of poets, schools and kinds of poetry that received validation by being included” in anthologies is rarely acknowledged (25-39).151 This argument seems to be particularly relevant when we consider the continuing absence of women from the contemporary Italian theatrical canon.
Neither the Italian or Irish national canon offers a wealth of female models. Joanna Russ highlights a secondary consequence of the exclusion or non-inclusion of female writers in the canon, and the resulting lack of female models, which leads each generation of women writers to believe that they must attempt the task for the first time (93). This notion seems to be confirmed by the experiences of modern women writers. Adrienne Rich describes the frustration of the female author who, in searching for her own image and presence in the writing of men, finds all the expected tropes but “precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzling, sometimes inspiring creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together” (“When We Dead”21).
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We could think of these absent female models as “foremothers,” in the same way that we talk of literary “forefathers.” The Anxiety of Authorship theory tells us that the