Explore the extent to which a longing for utopia leads to female awakening in Naturalist plays
Our aim was to explore the extent to which a longing for utopia leads to female awakening situated within the fin de siècle discourse on the “new woman” (Ledge and Luckhurst 75). We invested substantial rehearsal time and I think we arrived at a flowing and well-timed session of rehearsed scenes with critical commentary and two practicals. I was instrumental in inspiring and facilitating all the way from finding a research question to the final form.
We had no time to look at recent revivals of these plays and there was noone from the directing pathway in our group. To enact our scenes but also to physically lead my proposed practical I employed Anton Chekhov’s (2002) concept of “psychological gesture” (68), an archetypal simple yet clear gesture in order to substantiate the characters in our imagination. The use of “atmosphere” (60) in Chekhov’s technique allowed us to explore the “objective feelings” (60) of each scene vis-a-vis our character’s individual feelings since in all three plays materiality and corporeality are emphasised against the contradicting loyalties of verisimilitude and illusion. This psychophysical approach informed not only our own acting but allowed the participants of the practical to grasp better the character’s desire and facilitated our critical understanding. We visualised the female characters physically relating, inhabiting even reacting to their material objects and space, driven by a phenomenological longing for a yet unrealised life. It is this longing we argued that catalyses their female awakening.
“The great naturalistic evolution has entirely to do with the gradual substitution of physiological man for metaphysical man” (Zola in Garner 102). Chekhov too acknowledges: “My holy of holies is the human body,...” (Innes 128). I, therefore, looked at the theory of phenomenology, an early 20th century philosophical school led by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Pontry and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deriving from the Greek verb φαίνομαι, ‘to seem’, it studies how the world appears as phenomena to the human perception. Unlike language-based theories such as semiotics and deconstruction, phenomenology added strength to our exploration redirecting attention to theatre’s corporeality. “[T]theatrical space is phenomenal space, governed by the body and its spatial concerns” (Garner 1994). Judith Butler (1990) using phenomenology from a feminist perspective ascribes Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion “one is not born, but becomes a woman” (Frontier 45) to Merleau-Ponty’s “the body in its sexual being [is] a historical idea [not] a natural species” (1990).
I focussed on the embodiment of the heroines’ longing in relationship to female awakening. Observing the ways in which these women inhabit their present “ghosted”
by their past and negotiating their future we see the awakening of female consciousness concretised as it were within the frame of the bourgeois family, spatialised within the phenomenal world of objects and also physicalised, especially in the dancing scenes. Prior to Nora’s talk with Torvald there is the highly symbolic tarantella dance; this folk dance, performed in Italy to shake off the tarantula’s spider poison, becomes a powerful metaphor of a new life in the doll’s house; embodying Nora’s awakening, in a Baktinian sense of the carnavalesque (Frontier 161) preempts the ensuing undermining of the established male hegemony. Insofar as dance is metamorphic it allows Nora to recover her body’s native language and in this “gestus” (Frontier 36) of the body to find the beginnings of a more truthful inner voice. Her body just as Miss Julie’s comes first, before the word and transcends it eventually. Already from the opening of the play we see how the stage directions signify middle-class and gender structures: Helmer’s study excludes the feminine Nora-identified aspects of the household. Ibsen, just like in the case of Hedda Gabler, would not be able to draw Nora out without a successive parade of objects which constituted her moorings in the given world. In her breaking free one can see the interplay of the objectival and the corporeal “I shall take with me nothing but what is mine. I don’t want anything from you, now or ever.” (Megson ed. 84). She, the “most treasured valuable possession” (72) of her husband’s asserts her independence by starting to perceive herself beyond the male-female binarity as “first and foremost a human being” (85) entitled to her own distinct perceptual encounters with the wider world. The climax of this rupture occurs at the point where Nora leaves the chair, this locus operandi of the chat! This marks the end of her as an objectified commodified dollwife. The moment she stands up she is ready to depart, to strip herself off all the prerogatives of a travesty of marriage so as to plunge into carving the visceral womanhood she so longs for. Her journey would not be possible without Torvald’s trigger but was initiated long ago; she was conscious she was playing the fool for him just as in her paternal home she used to withhold her opinions so as not to upset the patriarchal order. Phenomenologically speaking before she shuts the door behind her she had repeatedly asked Torvald to sit down. “to sit is to be, to exist suddenly and plentifully in the material world” i.e. to have a body (States 45). “If we reduce the realistic theatre to its single most important property, we arrive at the chair. Chairs, in some form, have probably been a stable property of the theatre since Aristophanes; but we must make a distinction between the chair as an occasional necessity of stage action and the chair as a collaborator in a new relationship between character and milieu.” (States 44) In her siting and talking she is moving away from the infantilized register of her psyche into a “truth-seeking encounter between [her] consciousness and reality” (Frontier 63) which would potentially enable her becoming a woman in De Beauvoir’s sense. And it is in this sense that in her case the word utopia from the Greek οὐ-τόπος ‘no place’ could be said to become the meaning of the English homophone eutopia, derived from εὖ (“well”) and τόπος ‘good place’. The concept of Utopia needed further fleshing out so that the causal link with awakening could be elucidated. It is first found in ‘Republic’ reflecting Plato’s own disillusionment with the politics of his era. Dee, who undertook to look into it synchronically, maintained that she did not find any current literature and, therefore, it remained theoretically underexplored in our workshop.
In an opposite trajectory to Nora’s, Miss Julie after also dancing like mad she falls on the bench head between her hands in a semi-embryonic position from which she is eventually longing -following her dream- to “burry her way deep into the earth...” (102). In her case her strong physical life and eros instincts are to be only appeased in death. “Space is destiny” said Strindberg (States 69). Nora beginning to find herself exits the doll’s house and its synecdochic confinement to the hypocrisy of its single locale. Ghosted by past parental heritage and guilt, torn apart between her mother’s body-feel and her father’s mind-think Miss Julie also transcends the confinements of her bourgeois living room in search of a utopian otherness ending however in the no self of death.
Miss Julie: ... - I’d like to see all your sex swimming in a lake of blood - I think I could drink from your skull, I’d like to bathe my feet in your guts, I could eat your heart, roasted! You think I’m weak - [...] My father will come home...- and I shall tell everything. Everything. Oh, it’ll be good to end it all...And then he’ll have a stroke and die. Then we shall all be finished, and there’ll be peace - peace - eternal rest! (128).
This is strongly reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s image of a corps sans organes
, an undifferentiated body of total Barthes’ jouissance (Barthes 167), a utopian body without pleasure in the Freudian sense, where no difference means no longer subject hence no longer language. In Lakanian terms her desire for the other to make good for her Self’s primal primordial lack becomes a denial of desire, and as such it opens up a field of absence, it becomes a search for death where a closure, a finality can be achieved in the eternalized movement of desire and in the ultimate pleasure involved in the death instinct. To deny the other is to search for death.
As Miss Julie is unresolvedly ghosted by her past so too the Chekhovian sisters are telling a ghost story, i.e. a story of a Doppelgänger, of phantomatic subjectivity which cannot be made flesh or laid to rest either. All three are haunted by the impossible dream of homecoming to the infinitely regressing utopia of Moscow, a utopian space enshrined within their psyche as the endpoint of the tyranny of desire. Unlike Nora’s exodus to the outer world and unlike Miss Julie’s suicidal drive, they are driven by a longing filled with unlived unacted life “in a state of Heideggerian ‘standing reserve’ (Frontier 52) [...] with a power of a weak truth and the presence only of a deferral” (Frontier 54). The curtain opens and falls in stasis (preempting the Beckettian cyclical universe of existential impasse or “a movement of metonymic endlessness of desire” (Watson 76). In this “epic of claustrophobia” (States 71), the three sisters remain confined to their living room, conferred the status of a prison, where the desire for escape is perpetually awakening to be narrativized almost as a means of passing the time. The silence of the Chekhovian curtain fall is not the action-packed silence following Nora’s slammed door or Miss Julie’s deadly silence, the silence here embodies an utter emptiness, the emptiness of a past sense continuous within which we saw “the characters sitting right from the opening of the play...Time gives itself away in Chekhov as space gives itself away in Ibsen...Time is an old condition, like rheumatism or arthritis, that one tolerates....” (States 72) In this shared domain of Chekhovian living room where visitors co-exist with the inhabitants “what happens ... is that the tactile world...this history of objects, quietly encroaches on the human, like the creeping vegetation in Sartre’s Bouville. Suddenly, you can hear the ticking of the objects and the ceaseless flow of future into past: the world is no longer covered by conversation.” (States 73) Chekhov said of the famous pauses in the Moscow Art Theatre’s productions that “are nothing other than a holiday of pure tactile sensation. Everything grows quiet, and only a silent tactile sensation remains” (States 73), no Ibsenite expectation in this silence, hence this irony, “a fusion of comic detachment and tragic objectivity” (States 74); it’s through this irony that the language’s capacity to grasp the meaning of things in either metaphor, metonymy or synecdoche is questioned. White says that irony is “metatropological” (37). Following States (ibid) “Kierkegaard would add that irony is a ‘hovering’ trope infusing these ‘naive’ tropes with self-skepticism.” White (38) would also call irony “transideological” because “as the basis of a world view, tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political action”. Hence the sisters’ longing for fulfillment leads to no action, it is as if the cyclical narrative of this longing becoming the primary dramatic source, compulsively reenacting the drama of unrealized life in thrall to an impossible yet inevitable desire. With Chekhov the drama of the interior of not only the female but of the human awakening is emerging: despair -to paraphrase existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom- is the price to be paid for self-awareness.
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