No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Revisioning the Woman's Part: Paula Vogel's ‘Desdemona’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
In Desdemona, Paula Vogel's revision of Shakespeare's Othello, we have a Desdemona who is Othello's worst nightmare, the transformation of lago's fiction into reality. Why has Paula Vogel created a Desdemona who, though ostensibly inside out, still appears to be Othello's projection? Sharon Friedman argues that although Paula Vogel's raucous Desdemona draws on many of the conventions of feminist revisioning, it marks an important shift in the feminist critical perspective in drama – as characterized by Lynda Hart, ‘from discovering and creating positive images of women … to analyzing and disrupting the ideological codes embedded in the inherited structures of dramatic representation’. In a deconstructive parody, Vogel dislodges the convention of the intimate scene between women in Shakespeare's theatre and expands it into an entire play. Decentering the tragic hero, she foregrounds and enacts the threat of female desire that incites the tragic action, and disrupts the familiar categories of virgin, whore, and faithful handmaiden by forging links with gender ideology and class status. The author, Sharon Friedman, is an Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of New York University, and the author of several articles on American women dramatists, including Susan Glaspell and Lorraine Hansberry.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999
References
Notes and References
1. Kernan, Alvin, ‘Introduction’, Othello, by Shakespeare, William (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. xxiii–ivGoogle Scholar. All subsequent references to this edition of Othello are in parentheses.
2. Desdemona was first produced in association with Circle Repertory Company by the Bay Street Theatre Festival, Sag Harbor, New York, in July 1993, then by the Circle Repertory Company, New York in Fall 1993, and was published by Dramatists Play Service, 1994. All subsequent references to Desdemona appear as page numbers in parentheses.
For a discussion of the ‘multiple implications’ of the phrase ‘the woman's part’, see the ‘Introduction’ to Lenz, Carolyn Ruth Swift, Greene, Gayle, Neely, Carol Thomas, eds., The Woman's Part (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 12Google Scholar. The reference to ‘part’ in the title plays upon five different senses in which the term may be understood. It assumes (1) that women play a ‘distinct, gender-determined part’ in the world of the plays as well as outside them; (2) the bawdy meaning of ‘part’, as used by Shakespeare to indicate women's sexuality; (3) that the parts women play are social as well as sexual, and in the plays may be false – ‘roles adopted to deceive or inflicted by the dominant patriarchal culture’ – and constitute only part ‘of a whole’: that is, the complex identity of any character and of the men and women in relation to each other; (4) that feminine and masculine characteristics are changing cultural constructs and thus not restricted to females or males; and (5) that feminist criticism, in confronting these limiting constructs within texts, is ‘avowedly partisan’, and so taking the ‘woman's part’.
3. For example, Peter Erickson's readings of the representations of Shakespeare by twentieth-century women writers (Angelou, Maya, Naylor, Gloria, Rich, Adrienne) in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; the numerous films of recent years such as Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, Al Pacino's Looking for Richard; or Kristin Linklater's all-woman cast in the Company of Women's production of Henry V at Smith College, in September, 1994.
4. Howard, Jean, ‘Scholarship, Theory, and More New Readings: Shakespeare for the 1990s’, in Shakespeare Study Today, ed. Ziegler, Georgianna (New York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 129, 138Google Scholar.
5. Erickson, p. 2, 7.
6. Erickson, p. 163–4.
7. Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘Epilogue: Remembering Shakespeare, Revising Ourselves’, in Women's Revisions of Shakespeare, 1664–1988, ed. Novy, Marianne (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 243–4Google Scholar.
8. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 6.
9. Neely, ‘Epilogue’, p. 243.
10. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 5.
11. Hart, Lynda, ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12. Hart, p. 13.
13. Koppen, Randi S., ‘“The Furtive Event”: Theorizing Feminist Spectatorship’, Modern Drama, XXXV, No. 3 (09 1992), p. 379Google Scholar.
14. See Callaghan, Dympna, Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1989), p. 56–9Google Scholar, where she argues for ‘deconstructing certain crucial terms of canonical criticism’ in order to examine women's status in tragic drama and its reproduction in traditional criticism by ‘juxtaposing the concept of tragic transcendence with that of female transgression’.
15. Forte, Jeanie, ‘Women's Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Case, Sue Ellen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 254Google Scholar.
16. Nancy Reinhardt, cited by Hart, p. 8. Reinhardt notes that the ‘sides, background, niches, and balconies function as the inner domestic space where women are usually kept’. Helms, Lorraine, in ‘Acts of Resistance: the Feminist Player’, in The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, eds. Callaghan, Dympna, Helms, Lorraine, Singh, Jyotsna (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 111Google Scholar, examines the effects of theatrical production in relation to performance choices for those who play ‘the woman's part’ in contemporary performance. She claims that ‘with some exceptions, Shakespeare's female characters play their roles in the illusionistic scenes of the locus. They enjoy few opportunities to express the interiority of the reflexive soliloquy and even fewer to address the audience from the interactive platea.’
17. Carole McKewin, ‘“Counsels of Gall and Grace”: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays’, in The Woman's Part, eds. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 118–19. McKewin cites Juliet Dusinberre's observation that Shakespeare's theatre offers a ‘consistent probing of the reactions of women to isolation in a society which has never allowed them independence from men either physically or spiritually’ (p. 117).
18. McKewin, p. 128–9.
19. Callaghan, p. 75, 65.
20. Jyotsna Singh, ‘The Interventions of History: Narratives of Sexuality’, in The Weyward Sisters, eds. Callaghan, Helms, and Singh, p. 46.
21. Callaghan, p. 53, 63–4.
22. Singh, p. 12.
23. See Dympna Callaghan's survey of the relationship between family, church, state and cosmos, and the significance of the category ‘woman’ in political and theological discourse (p. 14–27).
24. Kahn, Coppelia, Man's Estate (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981), p. 12Google Scholar. According to Madeline Gohlke Sprengnether, male fantasies of betrayal stem from fears of being weak or ‘feminine’ in relation to a powerful woman. ‘The feminine posture for a male character is that of the betrayed, and it is the man in this position who portrays women as whores’. See ‘“I Wooed Thee with My Sword”: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms’, in Othello, ed. Alvin Keman, p. 250.
25. Singh, p. 48.
26. Singh (p. 7) draws on a phrase employed by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn in their reading of Isak Dinesen's story ‘The Blank Page’ as a ‘paradigm for a feminist historiography’. See ‘Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman’, in Making a Difference, eds. Greene, Gayle, Kahn, Coppelia (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 13Google Scholar.
27. Lorraine Helms (p. 106–7) cites varying critical responses to women playing female roles originally written by men for male performers. For example, Elaine Showalter argues positively that ‘when Shakespeare's heroines began to be played by women instead of boys, the presence of the female body and the female voice, quite apart from interpretation, created new meanings and subversive tensions in these roles’. On the other hand, Sue Ellen Case argues that these roles are ‘caricatures’, and that they should again be played by men to underscore that classic roles are ‘classic drag’. Helms argues for a ‘partial, problematic, and paradoxical’ freedom at the same time that one acknowledges these constraints.
28. Case, Sue Ellen, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29. Bamber, Linda, Comic Women, Tragic Men (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 4Google Scholar.
30. Case, p. 26.
31. Singh, p. 20.
32. According to Carol Thomas Neely, the handkerchief also functions symbolically to represent ‘sexuality controlled by chastity’. Passed from female sibyl to female charmer to Othello's mother to Desdemona, its purpose has been to make women ‘amiable’, and prevent men from hunting ‘after new fancies’. (See her extended discussion in ‘Women and Men in Othello’, in The Woman's Part, eds. Lenz, Greene and Nealy, p. 228–30.) Karen Newman discusses the handkerchief's historical as well as psychological significance: in her view, it ‘figures not simply [the mother's] missing penis’ but the ‘lack around which the play's dramatic action is structured, a desiring femininity … an aberrant and monstrous sexuality’. ‘“And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello’, Shakespeare Reproduced, eds. Howard, Jean E., O'Connor, Marion (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 156Google Scholar.
33. Karen Newman observes that Desdemona's responses to Othello's tales are ‘perceived as voracious… conflating the oral and aural’. Othello's language ‘betrays a masculine fear of a cultural femininity… envisioned as a greedy mouth never satisfied, always seeking increase, a point of view which Desdemona's response to their reunion at Cyprus reinforces.… Othello fears Desdemona's desire because it invokes his monstrous difference from the sex/race code he has adopted, or alternatively allies her imagined monstrous sexual appetite with his own’ (p. 152).
34. Newman (p. 157) further argues that although Shakespeare was subject to racist, sexist, and colonial discourses of his time, by making Othello a hero and Desdemona's love for him sympathetic, the play stands in a contestatory relationship to the hegemonic ideologies of race and gender in early modern England.
35. Greenblatt, quoted in Newman, p. 150.
36. Desdemona is, after all, willing to accompany Othello to Cyprus, which Alvin Kernan sees as a society ‘less secure’ than the idealized city represented by Venice – the image of government, ‘of reason, of law, and of social concord’. The island of Cyprus is more exposed to the Turks, emblematic of the forces of barbarism, the ‘geographical form of an action that occurs on the social and psychological levels as well’ (xxvi–vii).
37. See Jyotsna Singh's discourse on such facts as unemployment and population displacements that led to the prosperity of brothels in early modern England (p. 28–33).
38. Roland Barthes, quoted in Greene and Kahn, p. 4.
39. See Brecht, Bertolt on the alienation effect in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. Willett, John (New York: Methuen, 1964), p. 192Google Scholar.
40. Reinhelt, Janelle, ‘Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama’, in Feminist Theatre and Theory, ed. Keyssar, Helene (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 35–6, 42Google Scholar.
41. Brecht, p. 198.