Women and Violence in A Mouthful of Birds

Soon after Caryl Churchill and David Lan's collaborative work A Mouthful of Birds (1986) was published, scholars of feminist theatre recognized the play's significance—most particularly for its bold stagings of transgressive, gender-bending bodies. Elin Diamond and Janelle Reinelt wrote important essays in 1988 and 1989 respectively, which examined the way the play broke out of the representational apparatus of realism to stage bodies and desires that refuse stable, binary constructions of gender and sexuality. ¹ Reinelt hailed the play as representative of a third stage of feminist drama, one which goes beyond deconstructing the dominant discourse to stage "the subject-in-process practicing resistance, exploding the strait jacket of gender through doing the 'work' of self-inscription on stage" (52). Reinelt's interest in representation, gender, and the body leads her to analyze two striking episodes in A Mouthful of Birds that involve the staging of an ambiguous, androgynous body. While Diamond examines a number of Churchill plays in the course of her essay and considers several characters in A Mouthful of Birds, she also focuses on the same two episodes: "Dan Dancing" and "Herculine Barbin." At the center of both episodes is an androgynous, shifting body that represents a transgressive sexuality that defies clear-cut boundaries of heterosexuality or homosexuality. As Diamond observes in discussing Derek's possession by Herculine Barbin in the episode named for the nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite, "This body ruins representation. It undermines a patriarchy that disciplines the body into gender opposition . . ." (277).

I too have admired A Mouthful of Birds for its experiments with gender and representation, concerns that are certainly at the heart of feminist inquiry. But as I reread the play, I am struck by the fact that Reinelt and Diamond have focused their discussions on two male characters, Dan and Derek. Admittedly, these men leave their masculine identities behind them in the course of their possession and become androgynous: Dan is possessed by Dionysos, and Derek is possessed by Herculine Barbin. Nevertheless, they are still referred to by the text and by scholars as "Dan" and "Derek." While Dan, Derek, and the third man, Paul—who falls in love with a pig—chart the play's disruption of dominant constructions of sex, gender, and desire, the four women in the play experience none of this transcendence from the gendered body. What their experience tells us, what their encounter with possession teaches us as feminists has to do with the relationship between women and violence.

While recent critical responses to the play have focused on the female characters, ² they have sometimes romanticized the possibilities afforded the women by their experience with violence, possession, and madness. Thus, Allison Hersh, in her article, "'How Sweet the Kill': Orgiastic Female Violence in Contemporary Re-visions of Euripides' The Bacchae," argues: "The possessions which permeate the text of the play each function as 'acts of resistance' which extend the conventional boundaries of gender roles and empower women." ³ And yet, in making such a statement, she loses sight of the real differences between the women. It is true that two of the women—Lena and Yvonne—are able to jettison their old lives and forge new, more fulfilling ones after their possession scenes. However, the end of the play finds Marcia and Doreen still very much shaped by the same violent forces that affected them in their pre-possession scenes at the beginning of the play. What is more, Hersh's statement overlooks the fact that the possession scenes find the women inflicting pain upon themselves, upon their daughters, upon their mothers, and upon other women. Indeed, violence is used against the women more than it is used to empower them. Marcia, the Trinidadian medium and switchboard operator, is possessed by Sibyl, a white woman who represents the dominant British culture. Sibyl takes over Marcia's home, profession, and voice, reducing her to a silent, writhing form. Lena's possession frees her from...