Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama ed. by June Schlueter (review)

Book Reviews JUNE SCHLUETER, ed. Feminist Rereadings of Modem American Drama. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1989. Pp. 249. $35.00 Thirteen ways of looking at the canonized text. From the paterfamilias of modem American drama to the'badboy cowboy of the contemporary stage, five male playwrights - O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Albee, and Shepard - are viewed from a wide range of what might loosely be called "feminist perspectives," The arrangement of the essays by playwright, rather than critical methodology, should please traditionalists but does little to disturb, let alone subvert, the canon. Canonicity in drama raises ideologically charged literary/theatrical questions beyond the scope of this collection, and indeed of any text-centered approach. since each theatrical perfonnance is itself a radical rereading of text, yet is based on and exists apart from text. Although Schlueter in her Introduction concedes that today feminist criticism is a pluralistic, intertextual discipline, few of the essays in this collection engage in these contemporary feminisms; instead, many toe the "images-of-women-inliterature " line. Further, ~any of the rereadings take as their starting point the most conservative readings of the plays, often ones authored by specific directors and perpetuated by the academy. If one mistakenly believes that one is rereading Williams 's A Streetcar Named Desire when one is in fact rereading Elia Kazan's (re)reading . then whose Blanche is it anyway? The rereadings are most valuable when they view characters not as decontextualized indices of each playwright's patriarchal views, but as inextricable elements of larger literary/dramatic structures. In ".A Monster of Perfection': O'Neill's 'Stella'," Anne Fleche explores Oedipal narrative in Long Day's Journey iuto Night and focuses on the motivating and yet unmotivated central significance of Mary Tyrone. Bette Mandl in '"Theatricality and Otherness in All God's Cllillwl Got Wi"gs" shows that because of his reliance on the very dualities - of race, gender, and class - that he supposedly critiqued, O'Neill was not able (0 create a progressive theatrical space to accommodate the ideas he wished to dramatize. Mandl's essay is an effective reminder that an artist's politics may be more radical than his aesthetics. In "The Exchange of Women Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 167 r68 Book Reviews and Male Homosocial Desire in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest," Gayle Austin, entering Miller through Marx, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and Lacan - via Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick shows that in Miller's play, but not in Hellman's, women are passive commodities exchanged among men to reinforce patriarchal capitalist structures and values. The issue of the "homosocial" and the "hommo-sexual" (as opposed to "homosexual") is again raised by Lynda Hart in "Sam Shepard's Spectacle of Impossible Heterosexuality " when she argues that in Fool/or Love hommo-sexuality parades as heterosexuality , erasing the female and precluding successful representation of female-male interaction. In "Authorizing History: Victimization in A Streetcar Named Desire," Anca Vlasopolos sees the playas dramatizing the clash of two competing histories, of two gender- and class-based levels of discourse, and shows that the audience, in spite of what it is witnessing, accepts Stanley as the voice of authority. Two critics, Kay Stanton and Mickey Pearlman, look at the (male) American Dream - in "Women and the American Dream of Death of a Salesman" and "What's New at the Zoo?: Rereading Edward Albee's American Dream(s) and Nightmares," respectively - to find a women's nightmare. Although most of the rereadings situate the plays in a patriarchal landscape. each segment also contains an essay that seems to argue that the particular playwright is more enlightened than one would think. For instance, according to Suzanne Burr, in "O'Neill's Ghostly Women," O'Neill possesses a "feminist consciousness." In a similar vein, Iska Alter, in "Betrayal and Blessedness: Exploration of Feminine Power in The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, and After the Fall," tries to defend Miller. John Timpane insists, in" 'Weak and Divided People': Tennessee Williams and the Written Woman," that the partisan critic is notequipped to deal with the ambiguity ofWilliams's characters. Naomi Conn Liebler looks...