Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett by Shepherd-Barr Kirsten E

Author:Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER011020, Performing Arts/Theater/History & Criticism, SCI027000, Science/Life Sciences/Evolution
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Contraception

Situating these plays within the cultural discourses on evolutionary theory that they both reflect and challenge complicates a progressivist narrative of women and theatre and allows a new perspective on the female body in performance in this period. Women taking control of their own bodies through contraception was a key issue in debates about reproduction throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and the stage becomes a prominent site of such debates, in an astonishingly wide range of theatrical modes. Evolution relies on unions that result in viable offspring, but humans have evolved ways of manipulating this reproductive function, and despite the challenges of handling such subject matter on stage, playwrights have taken an avid interest in depicting contraception and abortion, even in the face of censorship laws or box office pressures.

Guillaume Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias, begun in 1903 and completed in 1917) satirically reflects the prominent place that reproductive issues were taking in the discourse on the declining birth rate that was affecting not only France but also many other European countries around the turn of the century. The play also forms an important precedent for Beckett’s first play, Eleuthéria, as discussed in chapter 8. Apollinaire wrote it partly as a protest against realism, yet he chose as his theme a real social problem: “female emancipation, and its relation (which seems to have wholly charmed Apollinaire) to population decline.”118

There are three striking things about the play’s treatment of reproduction. First, he leaves the sexual act out of it, so that it is about “a man who makes children”; the emphasis is on manufacture, as if children are simply commodities. Second, there is a blurring of gender lines, a questioning of gender essentialism; Thérèse grows a beard and her breasts fly off her body (staged using balloons), and she refers to her husband as “less virile” than she is.119 Third, despite the presence of exaggerated, grotesque breasts, they do not seem linked to anything either sexual or nurturing. In fact, it is the opposite: Apollinaire rather sneeringly notes in his preface that one critic “finds a ridiculous connection” between the rubber of the fake breasts and “certain articles recommended by neo-Malthusianism,” and even provides a footnote to this comment on condoms “to clear myself of any reproach concerning the use of rubber breasts.”120

Thérèse sings “let us get rid of our breasts,” setting them on fire so that they explode, and her gender inversion becomes more pronounced as the play progresses (her husband does without testicles, she does without breasts; she trades clothes with him, puts on a mustache, and so on). In addition to destabilizing heterosexual norms and breaking down essentialist gender categories, the play satirizes feminism as incompatible with child rearing. Since the women of Zanzibar will not have children because they “want political rights,” it is up to the men. As in Allan Neave’s Woman and Superwoman, the play depicts women’s desire for political rights as supplanting their natural reproductive role, rather than compatible with it.

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