Lives in Play by Claycomb Ryan;

Author:Claycomb, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Eliding Feminist Performances

The final tactic of many of these texts, besides recovery of feminist performances and a contextualization of the biographical act, is a performance of the processes of erasure that have made such recovery work necessary in the first place. At first glance, this may seem a curious and counterproductive endeavor for feminist biographies, to reproduce the processes by which their subjects are elided, but the presence of this element in many of these texts suggests that not only is this plot element not damaging to the entire recovery effort, it is essential to it. Joan Schenkar's Signs of Life, for example, makes explicit and frequent reference to Henry James's destruction of Alice's journals—but also to the subsequent role of Katherine Loring in their reconstruction. By representing the patriarchal elision of the historical subject (burning the journals) alongside the process of recovery, Schenkar seems to be justifying her own recovery work, and justifying the revisionist nature of that work by highlighting the tyranny with which the patriarchy asserts itself against female subjectivity. By giving body and voice to these historical figures, such discourse of elision and recovery serves to produce dialectical images that uncover the performances that feminist biographical plays are reclaiming even as they represent the historical process by which these women were hidden from history. Essentially, plays that use this tactic work to perform women's history by performing the elision of that history.

I recognize that there is a crucial difference between representing the silencing of these stories and actively participating in this silencing process. The matter of why the erasure of these stories must be enacted onstage in order to justify their writing recalls Griffin and Aston's claims in Herstory: first, that “women's theatre groups' work disappears as it appears…a perpetual silencing the result”; and second, that “Against this, the Herstory volumes [and, I would argue, feminist biographical drama] seek to work.”43 It seems that the work of recovering a tradition of transgressive performances is dependent on the very silencing processes against which such a project struggles. I do not wish to suggest that without the oppressive influence of masculinist discourse feminist theater could not exist. However, combating the silence is no longer just a political goal for the genre: it is its inspiration as well. That is, feminist theater has so invested itself in this archaeology of the past that the project has created its own aesthetic of polemic wrapped in history. The past that these plays unearth, then, must be one worth the dig. Therefore, in order to legitimate the very recovery work that they are doing, staged feminist biographies must represent the reasons why such recovery work is necessary. In doing so, these plays arm the audience members to whom they hope to pass on these models of feminist performance with a sense of the resistance they will face.

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