Once Were Lesbians ...: Re/Negotiating Re/Presentations in The Catherine Wheel and Difference of Latitude

Once Were Lesbians Re/Negotiating Re/presentations in The Catherine Wheel and Difference of Latitude ROSALIND KERR Two new Canadian plays set in "pre-lesbian" time periods,' The Catherine Wheel by Ingrid MacDonald and Difference ofLatitude by Lisa Walter, feature "women" who become "warriors" - one in the Prussian army in the I7IOS; the other in the British merchant navy in the war of 1812. Based respectively on the characters of veteran soldier Catherine Linck, an actual historical figure executed for sodomy in Prussia in 1721, and the apprentice sailor Frances, a creation modelled on several real seafaring women from the 1800s, both plays unfold by creating a series of situations that question the extremes to which these male imposters are driven in order to maintain their precarious gender disguises. Valuable as interrogations of past examples of the depth and range of persecution which awaited women who dared to transgress gender. class, occupation, and community lines, they draw upon historical frameworks that provide the necessary aesthetic distance to confront present-day assumptions about gender as it impinges on other social categories . Even self-identified lesbian spectators are likely to find themselves challenged by the shifting representations which result in producing the "crossed, intersected identities," as Jill Dolan proposes in "Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat ," that these "outlaw" characters move in and out Of.2 As unnamable, the "lesbian" protagonists of The Catherine Wheel and Difference of Latitude provide the "hallucinations within the Symbolic" that Peggy Phelan, in recounting Lynda Hart's argument, notes "necessarily exposes" the Symbolic as the "male Imaginary" which can only tolerate the presence of the lesbian as long as she remains unrealized.3 It is precisely this pretended lack of a lesbian presence within their texts that the plays exploit as their central dramatic device. My paper will concentrate on exploring the ways in which they dramatize key moments when their protagonists' successes in "passing" challenge male hegemonic structures to their breaking points.4 Ultimately, I hope to show that these plays can be regarded as Modem Drama, 39 (1996) 177 ROSALIND KERR lesbian,' in that they are primarily concerned with tracking the elusive moments where their protagonists find themselves at the margins of both gender and sexuality and are forced to "name" themselves or be "named" by their lovers as they move out of their heterosexual contracts.6 Ingrid MacDonald wrote The Catherine Wheel after her successful publication of a lesbian short story collectiori, Catherine, Catherine (Toronto: Women's Press, [99I) in which the central piece is a fictionalized account of the Catherine Linck story based on the detailed records of the sodomy trial of Catharina Margaretha Linck, who was condemned to death for her use of a leather instrument in her four-year marriage to Catharina MargarethaMuhlhahn '? A deliberate departure from the delicate lyricism of the prose version, MacDonald's sprawling epic attempts to recreate the harsh life and times of the peasantry in war-torn early eighteenth-century Prussia by using a quasicomic -book style made up of multiple short scenes, split-stage images, and everyday dialogue While focusing on the marriage and subsequent trial, it backs up to include other details from Linck's varied life as a soldier and evangelist who had changed her sex, name, and religion many times. Interested less in how she acquired her identity than in the power relations these bring into play in her marriage to Kathy, the play uses the transgressive main event of the marriage to examine gender oppression as it is enforced by such repressive institutions as the church and the army. . The most important character after the two Catherines is Mutti, the intrusive , narrow-minded mother of the bride, who functions as her "son-in-law's" nemesis. The multiple roles played by the two other female actors, ranging from the farmer's wife to the town whore/make-believe madonna, establish the typical ,occupations available to women at the time and provide the social framework within which Linck's daring actions,can be judged. By contrast, the single male actor who plays all the male roles from priest to Magistrate acts as a necessary marker to remind us where the real power...